Raymond Pettibon

Jessica Chen

Damien Hirst

THE DIY HAIRCUT

It's summer. Between work, play and the travel between the two, finding time for a trip to the barber can be tricky. Why not take things into your own hands (while saving a little cash on the side) and cut it yourself? Of course, we're not advocating replacing professional haircuts altogether. The idea is to keep a good cut looking fresh and keep your hair from weighing you down and heating you up when the weather's oppressive. Besides, there's something freeing about cutting your own hair. It only takes a few minutes and because the result is never a dramatic change, you always look clean and kempt. All you need is a steady hand, the right tools and some basic tips. 

GET
BUZZED

Begin by shaving the sides and back of your head with some electric clippers. Michael Gilman, founder of the Grooming Lounge, suggests doing this on dry hair so you can see the results in realtime. Use the guards to maintain length and start out with a longer guard setting. Then go down a guard (or two) to get a little closer at the bottom around your sideburns, ears and neckline to create a slight taper. Remove the guard and clean up the nape and any errant hairs on your neck.

DIVIDE
& CONQUER

Make like a barber and slightly wet your hair. Then make two parts, one at the outer edge of each eyebrow, combing the hair above the part into the center of your head. This will keep you from cutting the top too short. Then comb the hair at the sides forward towards your temples and trim any excess hairs sticking out from the natural hairline. Finish by snipping any rogue hairs around your sideburns or over your ears.

TACKLE
THE TOP

Comb the hair straight up and start cutting into it perpendicular to the comb. This will prevent any blunt, straight cuts and also give your hair a nice texture. It also alleviates a lot of the risk of chopping off too much in one snip. Like with the clippers, start off conservatively and take more off if needed. As a rule, you want to keep the front a touch longer than the hair in the back toward the crown of your head.

THE AT-HOME CUT KIT

Clippers

Gilman suggests Wahl Professional clippers. This comes with a set of guards and even some barber combs.

$25, by Wahl

Small Scissors

Big scissors can leave some big cuts. These are more manageable for small, subtle snips.

$12, by Tweezerman

Hand Mirror

Don't have a hand mirror? Use your phone's front-facing camera.

$9, by Goody

Comb

Even if you don't style your hair with a comb, it comes in handy when you're cutting.

$18, by Baxter of California

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Get involved, Internet: Help fund a documentary about Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

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Everyone who grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s falls into one of three categories: Those who think the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books are the most terrifying collection of words and pictures ever put to paper, those who have never suffered through Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, and those who are filthy liars. John August, the writer behind Big Fish, is currently working on some sort of big-screen adaptation of the books, but it’s still not clear what—if anything—it will really have to do with them. Luckily, a filmmaker named Cody Meirick—a fan of the books who somehow survived reading them—is putting together a movie that will tell the actual story of Scary Stories.

Well, sort of. It’s more like the story behind Scary Stories, as Meirick’s project will be a documentary about the books, gothic children’s folklore (as in folklore for children that is gothic, not folklore for the kids with their nails painted black), and the history of censoring literature for children. See, as we’ve mentioned several times, these books are so scary that you might literally die if you read them (it’s a very small possibility, but you never know), so parents used to try as hard as they could to stop kids from experiencing how awesome they are.

Meirick has set up an Indiegogo campaign to pay for the documentary, and he’s looking to raise $28,000 by the end of April. It has the standard array of crowdfunding incentives, like a free copy of the film, access to behind-the-scenes information, and “a hearty THANKS,” but you could probably convince Meirick to take the rewards a little further if give him the full $28,000. Maybe he’ll even sneak into your house and inject spider eggs into your cheek, and then you can actually live through one of the stories from the books! Well, not “live,” because you’ll instantly die of fright, but you get it. 

Plop art

New York City Police Departmentheadquarters at 1 Police Plaza, with plop art sculpture

Plop art (or Plonk art) is a pejorative slang term for public art (usually large, abstract, modernist or contemporary sculpture) made for government or corporate plazas, spaces in front of office buildings, skyscraper atriums, parks, and other public venues. The term connotes that the work is unattractive or inappropriate to its surroundings - that is, it has been thoughtlessly "plopped" where it lies. Plop art is a play on the term pop art. According to artnet.com, plop art was coined by architect James Wines in 1969. The derisive term was eagerly taken up both by progressives (like Wines) and by conservatives. Progressives were critical of the failure of much public art to take an environmentally-oriented approach to the relationship between public art and architecture. Conservatives liked the term because it suggested something ugly, formless, and meaningless, produced without any real skill or care. The very word "plop" suggested something falling wetly and heavily in the manner of excrement — extruded, as it were, from the fundament of the art world, and often at public expense.

"Right now architecture and sculpture are calling to each other, and calling for response that's intelligent, not for more ghastly lumps of sculpture . . . which have no sense of scale and are just plonked down in public places." Anthony Caro (1924-), English sculptor. From an interview with Tim Marlowe for Tate: The Art Magazine, 1994.

More recently, defenders of public art funding have tried to reclaim the term. The book Plop: Recent Projects of the Public Art Fund, celebrates the success of the Public Art Fund in financing many publicly placed works of art over the last few decades, many of which are now beloved, though they may at first have been derided as "ploppings". Several currents or movements in contemporary art, such as environmental sculpture, site-specific art, and land art, counterpose themselves philosophically to "plop art," as well as to traditional public monumental sculpture.

See also[edit]

• James Wines
• Public art
• Public Art Fund
• Environmental sculpture
• Environmental art

Site-specific art

Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork. The actual term was promoted and refined by Californian artist Robert Irwin, but it was actually first used in the mid-1970s by young sculptors, such as Patricia Johanson, Dennis Oppenheim, and Athena Tacha, who had started executing public commissions for large urban sites (see Peter Frank, “Site Sculpture”, Art News, Oct. 1975). Site specific environmental art was first described as a movement by architectural critic Catherine Howett (“New Directions in Environmental Art,” Landscape Architecture, Jan. 1977) and art critic Lucy Lippard (“Art Outdoors, In and Out of the Public Domain,” Studio International, March–April 1977).

Dan Flavin, Site-specific installation, 1996, Menil Collection

Nef pour quatorze reines by Rose-Marie Goulet, a memorial to the École Polytechnique Massacre, featuring sculptural elements integrated into a specially landscaped site

History

Site-specific art emerged after the modernist objects as a reaction of artists to the situation in the world. Modernist art objects were transportable, nomadic, could only exist in the museum space and were the objects of the market and co modification. Since 1960 the artists were trying to find a way out of this situation, and thus drew attention to the site and the context around this site . The work of art was created in the site and could only exist and in such circumstances - it can not be moved or changed. Site is a current location, which comprises a unique combination of physical elements: depth, length, weight, height, shape, walls, temperature.^[1] Works of art began to emerge from the walls of the museum and galleries (Daniel Buren, Within and Beyond the Frame, John Weber Gallery, New York, 1973), were created specifically for the museum and galleries (Michael Asher, untitled installation at Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angeles, 1974, Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube, 1963-65, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Hartford Wash: Washing Tracks, Maintenance Outside, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, 1973), thus criticizing the museum as an institution that sets the rules for artists and viewers.^[1]

Examples

Outdoor site-specific artworks often include landscaping combined with permanently sited sculptural elements (Site-specific art can be linked with Environmental art). Outdoor site-specific artworks can also include dance performances created especially for the site. More broadly, the term is sometimes used for any work that is (more or less) permanently attached to a particular location. In this sense, a building with interesting architecture could also be considered a piece of site-specific art.

Artists producing site-specific works include Michele Oka Doner, Sir Jacob Epstein, Henry Moore, David Smith, Isaac Witkin, Anthony Caro, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Richard Haas, Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Louise Nevelson, Leonard Baskin, George Segal, Tom Otterness, Roy Lichtenstein, Olafur Eliasson, PINK de Thierry, Sol LeWitt, Dennis Oppenheim, Max Neuhaus, Robert Smithson, Andy Goldsworthy, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Dan Flavin, Archie Rand, Richard Serra, Olga Kisseleva, Michael Heizer, Patricia Johanson, James Turrell, Paul Kuniholm Pauper, Ana Mendieta, Athena Tacha, Alice Adams, Nancy Holt, Rowan Gillespie, Scott Burton, Robert Irwin, Marian Zazeela, Guillaume Bijl, Betty Beaumont, Albert Vrana, Sally Jacques, and younger artists like Eberhard Bosslet, Mark Divo, Leonard van Munster, Luna Nera,^[2] Simparch, Sarah Sze, Stefano Cagol, NatHalie Braun Barends, and Seth Wulsin. In Geneva, Switzerland, the two Contemporary Art Funds of the City and the Canton (FMAC and FCAC) are looking forward to integrate art into the architecture and in the public space since 1980 . The Neons Parrallax was conceived specifically for the Plaine de Plainpalais whose perimeter, located at the heart of the City, the challenge of the artists invited was to transpose the advertising stakes of the commercial signs of the harbour in artistic messages.^[3]

Site-specific performance art, site-specific visual art and interventions are commissioned for the annual Infecting the City Festival in Cape Town, South Africa. The site-specific nature of the works allows artists to interrogate the contemporary and historic reality of the Central Business District and create work that allows the city's users to engage and interact with public spaces in new and memorable ways.

Gallery

• 

  Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty from atop Rozel Point, in mid-April 2005
 
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  George Segal, Street Crossing, 1992, permanent installation at Montclair State University
 
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  Eberhard Bosslet, side effect X, Tias, Lanzarote, (2008)
 
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  Map of the artworks on the roofs around the plaine of Plainpalais
 
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  Character freeing itself by cutting its chain with a bolt cutter. Chained without permission in front of the Museum of Danish Resistance During WW2. Site-specific sculpture by TEJN.
 
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  "Axis of Silence" Sislej Xhafaand "Expodrome" Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
 
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  Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls under the Brooklyn Bridge
 
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  Site specific dance by Blue Lapis Light at the Texas State History Museum in Austin, Texas