This morning I woke up and thought, Coquitlam. And there's just no reason for that.
...unless it's some sort of wordplay involving salmon & CoQ10...
Woke up this morning with this word in my head:
agGLOMmerator
... as in, "one who agglomerates".
But it can't be a real word, my sleepy head mused, I must have meant agGLOMeratrix, as in "she who agglomerates".*
As it turns out...
... an agglomerator is in fact a device.
And glom is a word all on its own.
The etymologies of glom and agglomerate together... pretty interesting.
Somewhere in an alternate universe, perhaps in the other half of this hourglass, there must be the opposites of the Fates; they are unravelling tapestries, and there is one of them, the converse of Clotho, who is winding up all those bits of string into little balls.*
And she would be the Agglomeratrix.
Truth is, though, Agglomeratrix is probably my Id summing up my day yesterday, which was spent baking bread & tidying. So it must mean something like, "she who makes balls of dough & stares at snatches of stuff".
Less poetic, but accurate.
~ ~ ~
* Supposedly a true story: There was this guy whose grandmother had grown up during the Depression, and she was a notoriously thrifty pack rat; when she passed away, he had to clean out the house. He thought he'd seen it all until he came across a shoebox labelled, and full of, "Bits of String Not Worth Keeping".
Attack of the 90ft Feminine Ideal
Another woman in effigy: BioWoman
I'd like to see her with a smaller bosom, a wider waist, a little back fat and some cellulite ~ just so she looks a little more realistic.
Otherwise, what you're really doing is erecting a huge fertility figure.*
Or a symbol for the women's bathroom.**
~ ~ ~
* I'm not saying that's evil, but ... *yawn* it has so been done. (And such a cliche from an art school too, for shame!)
** Which would be kind of cool, actually... especially if there was a bathroom nearby.
This is my body which shall be given up for the birds
A rather unusual self-portrait:
A statue of a woman made out of bread is proving popular with pigeons in a park in Santiago.
That must be disturbing to watch... a flock of pigeons descending upon and consuming a woman in effigy.
Even so, I can't help but like it; in my opinion, it's a very clever integration of media and environment. Here, the artist has taken advantage of existing dynamics of interaction to create something that, though inert, interacts with life around it.
It is interesting on several levels; and though it touches on two old metaphors/cliches (bread as flesh, birds as spirit) it's not overwhelmed by them. This idea of transubstantiation is self-referential here in a nifty sort of way; art ought to strive to effect a sort of transubstantiation, a transcendance of both its own substance and that of the viewer.
And somehow, there's something very humanizing about making it out of something as vulnerable as bread; it brings to my mind creation myths, and stories like Pygmalion & Pinnochio. And it reminds me I have a short shelf life. :)
Unfortunately, thanks to this artwork, the song I now have stuck in my head is Tom Lehrer's Poisoning Pigeons in the Park. Also the Monty Python sketch, 'Eere, pidgy pidgy pidgy *thunk*.
Y'know, now that I think about it, a flock of pigeons descending upon and consuming a woman in effigy is pretty darn Pythonesque...