Miniscule Art

A quick round-up of Borrowed Icons, Matchbox Constructivism, 'Babies' and Byt which I shall not write of at length:

Kiri points out that current major (and frankly somewhat majestic) Fostrosity Wembley stadium plagiarised designs by Oscar Niemeyer for a stadium in Rio: which, in turn, rather resembled Le Corbusier's Palace of the Soviets: this is surely the best we can ask for from Market Stalinism, that it build constructivist monuments that were considered unbuildable by Stalinism proper - after all, they're a veritable repository of the oh-so-sought-after 'iconic'.



I am currently obsessed with Maraid's flickr page of East European matchboxes: these things are just achingly beautiful, designs evoking Deineka, Karel Teige and M Sasek (whose This is London, which I flicked through yesterday, features a lovely pic of Fleet Street's finest building) put to use in the tiniest, most mundane level of the everyday. And what do we get? Artist-designined Becks labels.



Simon Sellars informs of a brutalist-ballardian exhibition in Birmingham, which looks potentially very interesting, especially now that the ex-future is getting another one of its ritual bashings.

And any London crew should head for the basement of the Festival Hall, which is showing 'Jarvis Cocker's Subconscious', a programme of free films, seemingly focused on the intersection of the fantastical and the mundane - comfortingly, the free events at Jarvis' Meltdown seem to be far more interesting than the paying stuff. The films span The London Nobody Knows, non-diegetic sound comedy Girl Chewing Gum, a compilation of spectacularly lurid early 60s pop videos, and his own student films, which I haven't seen yet. The videos he did for Pulp are of course little masterpieces of mundane montage by themselves - such as the two videos to 'Babies', which I once showed to explain 'imagery' or somesuch when at 6th form.