Mouth painting artist Alison Lapper says: 'You can do anything' - BBC

Television has rerun the Stanford prison experiment before, most notably in 2002 when the BBC aired The Experiment, which advertised itself as a more rigorous version of the stunt where volunteers role-play as prison guards and prisoners. The creator of the original 1971 experiment, Philip Zimbardo, would probably have criticised the new versions to preserve his own status, but the main point he made was valid. These people all know they’re on TV, he said. They’re playing to the cameras. Whether the participants in a behavioural study forget they’re part of a study is an eternal debate point. One of the strengths of the other notorious American people-are-awful research project, the Milgram experiment, was that it made the artifice part of the process, telling the volunteers that they’d spoil the science if they didn’t keep giving strangers electric shocks: “The experiment requires that you continue.” Without that, the stooges may never act naturally; if they know the experiment is also a TV show, they definitely won’t.

The growing visibility of Rosana Paulino’s work reaches a new chapter with the opening this week of her first solo exhibition in Paris, at Mendes Wood DM’s outpost in the French capital. Titled “Bloom in the Sunlight, Dream in the Moonlight,” the exhibition introduces new plant goddesses into the Afro-botanical pantheon Paulino has been building since 2019 as part of her ongoing series “Senhora das Plantas” (Lady of the Plants), which elevates Black women to the status of goddesses in communion with nature, without implying a romanticized view. The 16 paintings—five on paper and 12 on canvas—take on renewed vitality on a larger scale and via a deeper exploration of color and increasingly ingenious bodily poses.

Plus, a Patti Smith photo show, an massive Anselm Kiefer finds a home, and other art world matters. The post Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning Meet Again appeared first on Artnet News .

TEMPORARY PLEASURE AND THE EPHEMERAL NIGHTCLUBFor most of its history, the nightclub was built on a simple premise: you had to be there. John Leo Gillen was born and raised in a nightclub in the west of Ireland, and came of age just as the nightclub began to disappear. Outside the family business he threw illegal raves, then learned architecture to build temporary club spaces. Temporary Pleasure, the practice he founded, combines the two — the architecture of a club with the emotion of a rave — into a single idea: the ephemeral nightclub. His projects include Choreomania at Horst Arts & Music, Joyride at the Barbican and The Superclub at WeCanDance, and he is the author of Temporary Pleasure: Nightclub Architecture, Design & Culture 1960–Today (Prestel, 2023). designboom speaks with Gillen about time as a design material, the crowd as the show, and why the moments that matter most can’t be captured.‘The nightclub once offered something radical: a moment suspended in time that could only be experienced by those who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time,’ Gillen tells designboom.

There are no atheists in foxholes, goes the saying, and indeed social scientists and evolutionary biologists have argued that the experience of war or conflict drives religious belief; in 2019, Joseph Henrich and others surveyed almost 2,000 people in three post-conflict societies – Uganda, Sierra Leone and Tajikistan – and concluded that their experience of conflict had prompted them to participate in Christian and Muslim rituals and groups. Atheism, it seems, may be as fragile as faith. “No matter how attached you are to your own rational worldview, your rationality won’t survive long under the threat of imminent death,” writes the former Dutch poet laureate Lieke Marsman in her book On Another Planet They Can Save Me. Part scream, part song, it charts the gradual dissolution of her own rational assumptions, which govern everything from her views on God to extra­terrestrial life. It is a brilliant, playful, layered and humane plea for openness and hope in the face of her own foxhole of intolerable suffering. Marsman was not a soldier, but she knew a thing or two about living with constant reminders of her own mortality.

What on earth is happening at Button House? Kitty has tasered a police officer. Fanny is pulling down her capacious Victorian drawers to show off her bottom. Robin the caveman has fallen in love with a crusty eco activist (to be fair she looks quite a bit like him). If you’ve never watched the BBC’s haunted house comedy Ghosts – one of the finest family television shows in recent memory – none of the above will make the slightest bit of sense. Neither perhaps will this glorious new film, which picks up with the ghosts not long after the events of the final episode in 2023. Often when British sitcoms get a spin-off what happens is the gag-to-runtime ratio dips. But breaking out of the 30-minute episode structure seems to have freed up the writers to unleash new levels of giddiness with added spoonfuls of silliness. The jokes keep coming, and it’s every bit as warm and comforting as on TV. It’s been a few months since Alison and Mike (Charlotte Ritchie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe) left Button House, selling the crumbling stately pile to a hotel chain. But work on the refurb has stalled, and the ghosts are pining after Alison, the only living person who can see them (long story).