Category Archives: Art

Art

It’s a Stage of Mind

Panic room, 2010Panic room, 2010

The art world continues to surprise. Just as creativity fades into a morass of commercial, “artotainment” drivel, along comes an artist with a thoroughly refreshing perspective. JeeYoung Lee creates breathtaking human-scale dioramas completely filling her 10 x 20 square foot studio with a parallel universe.

While it would be a delight to inhabit these spaces in Lee’s studio, it is unfortunately and understandably off-limits. However, the photographs are on display at the Opiom Gallery in Opio, France from 7 February to 7 March 2014.

Black birds, 2009Black birds, 2009

Nightscape, 2012Nightscape, 2012

From the Guardian:

From a giant honeycomb to a land of Lego and the last supper with mice, Korean artist JeeYoung Lee creates mystical universes in the confines of her 3×6 metre studio – then captures them on camera. Her first European exhibition, Stage of Mind, is at Opiom Gallery in Opio, France from 7 February to 7 March 2014.

See more images here.

Images courtesy of JeeYoung Lee/OPIOM Gallery.

Art, Idea Soup, tD

Colorizing History

Historical events happened in full color. Yet, many of the photographs that captured most of our important collective, cultural moments were, and still are, in black and white. So, is right to have them colorized? An iconic image of a mushroom cloud over Bikini Atoll from 1946 shows the effect of colorization.

We would argue that while the process of colorization adds a degree of realism and fidelity to an image that would otherwise not exist as black and white in nature. However, it is no more true than the original photograph itself. A color version is merely another rendition of a scene through the subjective eyes of a colorist, however skilled. In the case of a black and white image it is perhaps truer to a historical period in the sense that it is captured and rendered by the medium of expression at the time. The act of recording an event, including how it is done, cannot be divorced from the event itself.

Original: A nuclear weapon test by the United States military at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, on 25 July 1946. Photograph: Library Of Congress.

Colorized: Colorization of the Bikini Atoll nuclear explosion by Sanna Dullaway.

From the Guardian:

Do historic photographs look better in colour? The colorizers think so. Skilled digital artists such as Sanna Dullaway and Jordan J Lloyd are keen to remind us that the past was as colourful as the present – and their message is spreading though Reddit and Facebook.

See more images and read the entire article here.

Images courtesy of the Library of Congress and respective copyright holders.

Art

Graffiti Gets Good

Modern graffiti has come a long way since the days of “Kilroy Was Here” during the Second World War. Nowadays its a fully fledged alternative art form having been fully assimilated into pop culture and, for a lucky few, into contemporary art establishment. And, like Banksy, some graffiti artists are making a name as well as innovative and engaging street art.

See more graffiti here.

Image: Woman’s face in Collingwood, Melbourne by Rone. Courtesy of Guardian.

Art

Propaganda Art From Pyongyang

While the North Korean regime is clearly bonkers (“crazy” for our U.S. readers), it does still turn out some fascinating art.

From the Guardian:

A jovial group of Red Guards bask in the golden glow of cornfields, waving their flags at the magnificent harvest, while a rustic farming couple look on, carrying an overflowing basket of perfectly plump red apples. It could be one of the many thousands of posters issued by the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department in the 1950s, of rosy-cheeked comrades brimming with vim and vigour. But something’s not quite right.

In the centre of this vision of optimism, where once might have beamed the cheerful face of Mao, stands the twisted loop of the China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters, radiating a lilac sheen. Framed by the vapour trail of a trio of jet-planes performing a victory flypast into the sunset, the building stands like a triumphal gateway to some promised land of Socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The image could well be the mischievous work of its own architects, the Rotterdam-based practice OMA, which has made its own collage of the building alongside Kim Jong-il, George W Bush, Saddam Hussein and Jesus for a book cover, as well as an image of it bursting into flames behind a spread-legged porn-star. But it is in fact the product of artists from a North Korean painting unit – the very same that used to produce such propaganda images for the Kim regime, but now find themselves designing food packaging in Pyongyang.

The Beautiful Future, which comprises six such paintings to date, is the brainchild of British ex-pat duo Nick Bonner and Dominic Johnson-Hill, who both arrived in the Chinese capital 20 years ago and caught the Beijing bug. Bonner runs Koryo Tours, a travel company specialising in trips to the DPRK, while Johnson-Hill presides over a street-wear empire, Plastered, producing T-shirts emblazoned with Maoist kitsch. The paintings, on show earlier this month as part of Beijing Design Week, are the inevitable result of their mutual obsessions.

“North Korean artists are the best people at delivering a message without slogans,” says Bonner, who collects North Korean art and has produced documentaries exploring life in the DPRK – as well as what he describes as “North Korea’s first feature-length rom-com” last year, Comrade Kim Goes Flying. “We wanted to show contemporary China as it could have been, if it had continued with Maoist ideology.”

One painting shows a line of excited comrades, obediently dressed in Mao suits, filing towards Herzog and de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest stadium. The skyline is proudly choked with glassy skyscrapers on one side and a thicket of cooling towers on the other, belching smoke productively into the pink skies. An elderly tourist and his granddaughter look on in awe at the spirited scene.

See more propaganda art here.

Image: “KTV Gives Us a Voice” Image: The Beautiful Future. Courtesy of Guardian.

Art

A Home for Art or A Home for Artists

Most art is made in a location that is very different and often far removed from the location in which it is displayed and/or purchased. In this time, it is highly unlikely that any new or emerging professional artist will make and sell art in the same place. This is particularly evident in a place like New York city where starving artists and wealthy patrons co-exist side by side.

From the New York Times:

Last week The Guardian published an essay by the singer-songwriter David Byrne, which received a fair amount of attention online, arriving under the headline “If the 1% Stifles New York’s Creative Talent, I’m Out of Here.”

What followed was considerably more nuanced than the kind of diatribe, now familiar, often delivered by artists and others who came of age in the city during the 1970s and yearn for the seductions of a vanished danger. In this view, the start of the last quarter of the 20th century left New York populated entirely by addicts and hustlers, painters and drug pushers, and the city was a better, more enlivening place for the anxieties it bred.

“I don’t romanticize the bad old days,” Mr. Byrne said in his piece. “I have no illusions that there was a connection between that city on its knees and a flourishing of creativity.” What he laments instead is that our cultural capital now languishes completely in the hands of a brash upper class.

On one level it seems difficult to argue with him. Current market realities make it inconceivable that anyone could arrive today in New York at 23 with a knapsack and a handful of Luna bars and become David Byrne.

We also famously live in an era of diminishing support for the arts. According to a report released last month, government arts financing reached a record low in 2011 at the same time the proportion of American households giving money to the arts dwindled to 8.6 percent. But perhaps the problem is one of paradox, not exclusion, which is to say that while New York has become an increasingly inhospitable place to incubate a career as an artist, it has become an ever easier place to experience and consume the arts. The evolution of Downtown Brooklyn’s cultural district is emblematic of this new democracy. Last week saw the official opening of BRIC House, a 66,000-square-foot building with a gallery space and another space for film screenings, readings, lectures and so on, all with no admission charges.

BRIC House, which is under the direction of Leslie Greisbach Schultz and occupies an old vaudeville theater into which the city has poured $41 million, also contains a flexible performance space where it will be possible to see dance and music from emerging and established artists largely for under $20. The ticket price of plays, offered as works in progress, is $10.

The upper floors are host to something called Urban Glass, a monument to the art of glass blowing. “There are people in this city who get as excited about glass blowing as I get about Junior’s,” the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, marveled to me.

Both BRIC, which offers classes in digital photography and video production for nothing or next to nothing, and the nearby Mark Morris Dance Center involve residents of Brooklyn public housing in free dance instruction. At Mark Morris it costs less to enroll a 3-year-old in a dance class with a teacher who is studying for a doctorate in philosophy than it does to enroll a child in Super Soccer Stars.

Further challenging claims about the end of culture in the city is that the number of public art exhibits grew under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s tenure. Additionally, through his private philanthropic efforts, Mr. Bloomberg has donated more than $230 million since 2002 to arts and social service organizations across the city. Over the summer, his foundation announced an additional contribution of $15 million to a handful of cultural institutions to help them enhance visitors’ experiences through mobile technology.

At BRIC — “the epicenter of the center of the artistic universe,” Mr. Markowitz calls it — as with other Brooklyn cultural institutions, a good deal of the progress has come about with the help of a quiet philanthropic community that exists far from the world of hedge-fund vanity. A handful of wealthy residents support the borough’s institutions, their names not the kind to appear in Women’s Wear Daily.

Read the entire article here.

Art, Idea Soup

The Golden Age of Travel

Travel to far flung destinations was once a luxurious — some would say elitist — affair. Now that much of the process, and to some extent the end result, has been commoditized, we are left to dream of an age that once seemed glamorous and out of reach for most. And, what better way to market these dreams than through colorful, engaging travel posters. A collection of wonderful marketing posters from that “golden age” is up for auction.

Many of these beautiful works of art were published as commercial pieces so the artists often worked under the covers of their advertising or design agencies. While a few, such as Willy Burger, Maurice Logan, went on to be recognized by the art establishment, most worked in anonymity. However, the travel poster art they produced beginning at the turn of the previous century formed at key part of the Art Nouveau and later the Art Deco movements. Luckily this continues to influence art and design and still makes us dream of the romance of travel and exotic destinations to this day.

See a sample of the collection here.

Image: Roger Broders, Sports D’Hiver, c 1929. Courtesy: Swann Auction Galleries

Art

Painting the Night

Photographer Noel Kerns turns abandoned roadside attractions into luminous nightscapes using a combination of moonlight and artificial lighting. His book of stunning and eerie images of quintessential, nocturnal Americana — motels, truck stops, classic cars and drive-ins — is titled Nightwatch.

See more of Kerns images here.

Image: Chevys in Bowie, Texas. April 2009. Courtesy of Noel Kerns.

Art

Ode to Gasoline (Petrol)

Photography writer David Campany has collected some extraordinary photographs of American gas stations in a new book, Gasoline, which tells the story of our foremost liquid addiction — alcoholism pales in comparison.

From the Guardian:

“Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Springer Motors display room watching the traffic go by on Route 111, traffic somehow thin and scared compared to what it used to be. The fucking world is running out of gas.” So begins John Updike’s novel Rabbit Is Rich, which is set in the 1970s, when it seemed like the world was indeed running out of gasoline.

Set against a backdrop of American unease heightened by petrol rationing and long fractious queues at gas pumps, Updike’s story illustrates how important oil is to the smooth running of things, both automotive and sociopolitical. America runs on gasoline. So does the American dream, as shown in so many stories, songs and films that hymn the open road and the fast car as the ultimate symbol of freedom.

This is one of the subtexts of Gasoline, a book of photographs of American gas stations rescued from various newspaper archives and edited into a visual meta-narrrative by the British photography writer David Campany. It’s an intriguing book, not least because its publication chimes with the 50th anniversary of one of the most iconic photobooks of all time: Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Ruscha commercially printed his book of wilfully anonymous photographs as an antidote to the overly precious, limited-edition, collectable artist’s book, producing a first print run of 400 and selling it for $3 a copy. As Campany notes in an interview included in Gasoline, the very “stylelessness” of Ruscha’s images has become their defining aspect. “The problem is that photographs don’t remain unspecial and styleless for long. In unforeseen ways, the passing of time renders them significant.”

So it is with these found images of gasoline stations. They are, Campany notes, “a good measure of what is going on in society”, whether that is austerity or growth, changes in car manufacture or the decline of industrial cities and the freeways that link them. The cover image is one of the most striking: a young woman slumped on the steering wheel of her car, her head resting on her forearm as if exhausted or exasperated. This is the image from which the entire project sprang. Her name is Pat Sullivan and she was photographed while waiting in line at a gasoline station in Baltimore in 1979. A press cutting on the back of the original image, also included in the book, reads: “Pat Sullivan lowers her head in despair while waiting for gas in a long line yesterday at Lafayette and Charles. The lines were long again this morning …”

Campany was struck by the beauty of the image, which like most of these photographs has been marked by the grease pen of a newspaper’s art director. “The hair and the car have been retouched almost as if the newspaper wanted her to look her best even at this low point … But that image was so evocative that I felt I wanted to place it in a story of the second half of the 20th century.” Which is just what Gasoline does. There are images of gas station attendants and customers, iconic signage from a time before global corporations became tarnished – Gulf, Shell, Esso, BP – as well as local roadside stations in all their vernacular splendour, and sites where gasoline stations are about to be built or have just been demolished. There is black humour – a neon sign that reads We Wash Foreign Cars With Imported Water – and characteristic American stoicism – another reads No Gas Happy Holidays. There are images of gas stations that have just been robbed, destroyed by hurricanes, flooded and hit by cars.

Gasoline is an observational history of post-war America that is as richly suggestive as Twentysix Gasoline Stations is blank and detached. It shows how central gasoline is to the American way of life but, as Campany notes, it could also be read as “an allegory about news photography. Or a minor history of car design, or vernacular architecture, or street graphics, or outfits worn by pump attendants. All of the above.”

Read the entire article here.

Image: Gasoline Shortage Baltimore & Maryland. 15 June 1979. Pat Sullivan, Frustrated. Photograph: Richard Childress. David Campany / Guardian.

Art

When the Gold Rush is Over

Bryan Schutmaat chronicles the slow death of communities in decline.

His images are stark and eerily beautiful.

From the Guardian:

Weatherbeaten male faces stare out from the land they struggle to make a living from. The landscapes seem both elemental and despoiled; the men at once stoic and sad. Around them, the houses are rundown, while abandoned cars and trucks rust in wintry sunlight.

Photographer Bryan Schutmaat’s series Grays the Mountain Sends shows rural working-class mining communities in decline across the Amerian midwest. Inspired by the fiction of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford as well as the poetry of Richard Hugo, from whom he borrowed the title, Schutmaat’s images are tough yet lyrical. “The stories of some of these men run parallel to those of the towns they live in, or even of the nation at large,” Schutmaat told the critic Aaron Schuman. “Once young and full of promise, now their great expectations have been shed somewhere during the course of history.”

Here and there, photographs of fresh-faced young men interrupt the narrative of fading hope, but the inference is that their destiny is linked to their land and to a mining industry now struggling to survive. Schutmaat’s interior landscapes are more poignant: a battered armchair sits on a messy carpet beneath a fading print of an idealised rural landscape. Beside it, a hunting trophy stands under a cluttered tabletop. There is a sense throughout of things fading into history.

See more images and read the entire article here.

Image: Pinos Altos, New Mexico, 2012. Courtesy of Bryan Schutmaat / Guardian.

Art

Graffiti and Women

Merits or not aside, graffiti is usually associated with men, and until recently those men would have been disaffected, urban youth, and graffiti would have been looked down upon as a fringe anti-establishment pseudo-art form.

More recently, pop culture embraced it, and even the staid art establishment yielded and finally welcomed graffiti as an official vehicle for serious artistic self-expression. Of course, this was mostly driven by money — witness the pilfering and subsequent auctioning of works by Banksy and some of his lesser-known peers. Thus, it is now big business.

But now come the women, and not a moment too soon. Perhaps, they will help rescue it from the money-obsessed establishment and return it to its expressive, contra-cultural roots.

From the Telegraph:

When Aiko Nakagawa speaks, she looks down at her paint-spattered hands. Her nails are varnished a shiny silver, each is adorned with a tiny black crucifix. They’re a little chipped. “It’s hard being a girl and a graffiti artist”, she sighs.As one of the world’s leading practitioners of street art, 38-year-old Nakagawa – who was born in Japan but now lives in Brooklyn, New York – is something of a rarity. The leading figures of international street art may work almost exclusively under aliases (Nakagawa goes by the moniker Lady Aiko or, simply, Aiko) but it is no secret that the overwhelming majority of them are men.

Over the past few decades, street art has gone from a niche, underground artform to a multi-million dollar industry; at the top of the market, original works by Bristolian Banksy are sold in major auction houses for five and six-figure sums. Martha Cooper, an American photojournalist who began documenting graffiti on subway trains and in the Lower East Side of New York in the Seventies and Eighties, was instrumental in bringing street art into the mainstream consciousness. When her book, Subway Art, was published in 1984 it became known as the Bible of Street Art.

Having witnessed the scene from its infancy, Cooper still laments its gender inequality. “I wish there were more female artists and I have no idea why the number of women is so tiny,” she tells me. “because the one thing you can say about the movement is that it is democratic. It is open to anyone who wants to take the time and energy and effort.

Women have been painting the street since the beginning, although there are few contemporary photographs of them and Cooper admits she regrets “not making more of an effort to track them down at the time”. To make up for lost time, Cooper, now 70, has thrown herself into the promotion of women in street art, arranging events and publishing books on the subject. “I want to celebrate the women who have, on their own, gotten into it, with the hope that they would be role models for younger generations of girls that might be contemplating doing some of these things but feeling that the doors are closed,” she says.I meet both Cooper and Nakagawa in the Norwegian town of Stavenger which is hosting Nuart, an international street art festival held annually since 2001.

Cooper is exhibiting a selection of her photography while Nakagawa is creating a new mural in her signature style: joyfully, subversively feminine and heavily inspired by 18th century Japanese woodblock printing, which she sees as a precursor to street art, in the sense that it was a practice adopted by the untrained working classes.

Nakagawa’s intricate stencil work dominates two walls of one of the five tunnels underneath TouScene, and depicts a dozen strong, scantily-clad women, silhouettes and angels surrounded by a rabbit holding a spray can, butterflies, Mount Fuji and flowers. “I think I represent female energy through my work,” she explains, “while at the beginning it was tough, I like the fact I am a woman in a boy’s world. I might need an extra step on the ladder [Aiko stands at 152cm] but I can still do it.” In 2012, she became the first woman to paint on the Bowery Wall, Manhattan’s legendary street art spot, with a piece entitled Here’s Fun For Everyone.

Among the 11 artists taking part in Nuart this year, three are women. In addition to Cooper and Nakagawa, there is Faith47, a South African artist who prefers not to disclose her real name and whose murals have been displayed around the world for 15 years. When I ask her about the role gender plays in her work, she will say only that she “doesn’t let [herself] get distracted by that.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Alko Bunny, part of Aiko Nakagawa’s wall at Nuart. Courtesy of Andy Phipps / Telegraph.

Art

Creative Apocalypse

Following our story last week about artist Thomas Doyle’s miniature dystopian diaramas, we take a step further into nightmarish artistic visions, and of course, still small ones.

From Wired:

How will the world end? Will it be an asteroid, extreme climate conditions, a viral pandemic? No one really knows, which is why apocalypse scenarios are such rich territory for imaginative artists like Lori  Nix. The Brooklyn-based photographer creates and then documents detailed miniature dioramas of the end times — visions of what might be left behind once humans are gone.

Constructing the dioramas is a painstaking process, and Nix completes only three in a given year. As such, she makes very conscious decisions about what scenes she conjures. Crumbling institutions of science and learning turn up often in the work and are depicted with a gratifying realism.

“I think these are incredibly important places to learn about ourselves, learn what it means to be human,” says Nix. “These institutions are telling us about our pasts so that we may avoid the same mistakes in the future. Unfortunately, we’re not listening very well.”

The Kansas-born artist gravitates to destruction in part because she is no stranger to natural disasters.

“I have been in floods, tornadoes, blizzards; and when you are a kid, your parents are there to deal with the stress, but for me it was such an adventure. My boring life became suddenly exciting,” Nix says.

One time a tornado came through her neighborhood in Topeka and destroyed the houses right next door.

“A couple of days later, I was playing in the woods, seeing all of the scattered debris. And I came upon a stove, and when I opened the oven door, there was a perfect golden ham. The tornado hit right at dinner time,” she says.

Nix started working in photography at a newspaper, but soon realized the world of breaking news was not for her. She found herself moving towards darkroom work and constructed images.

She begins her sets by first drawing the floor plan of the building, creating the color scheme, and considering mood and lighting. Then Nix and her assistant build the entire set, including trees, books, and furniture using hot glue, foam, wood, and cardboard. Finishing each tiny piece means sanding, painting, and detailing.

Finally, it’s time to light and then shoot the scene with her 8×10 camera — Nix makes the sets to be seen by the camera from one viewpoint. When Nix showed the actual dioramas to the curator at the Museum of Art and Design in New York, she had to explain that she never intends to make models viewable from any angle. The edges remain unfinished.

“You could see the pink foam and the hot glue, but that is how we work,” she says.

Nix does not use Photoshop, and instead proofs her images as contacts and then as mural prints to look for any flaws. Once she is satisfied, she shoots an extra sheet of film and then takes apart the diorama and throws it away.

See more of Lori Nix’s apocalyptic constructions here.

Image: Circulation Desk, Lori Nix. Courtesy of Lori Nix / Wired.

Art

Honey, I Shrank the House!

The (American) dream of home ownership comes under the microscopic, and somewhat surreal, analysis of sculptor Thomas Doyle. The result is a spectacular exhibit — albeit on a small scale — of miniature homes and landscapes sealed under glass domes, and all with a peculiar, dystopian twist.

From the Guardian:

Built in miniature, these dioramas reveal scenes of destruction, mayhem and hyperreality. An exhibition of the scaled-down worlds of New York-based artists Adrien Broom, Thomas Doyle and Patrick Jacobs opens at Ronchini Gallery in London on 6 September

See more images of Doyle’s miniature masterpieces here. And, visit the exhibit here.

Image: Torsten Roman/Palazzo Strozzi, Guardian.

Art

Art and Aliens Collide in Nevada

Not far from the alien conspiracy theories of Area 51, artists and revelers gather for the annual pilgrimage to burn the man in the Nevada desert. With attendees now numbering in the 50-80,000 range the annual, week-long Burning Man festival has become a mainstream media event.

It was originally a more humble affair — concocted by Larry Harvey and Jerry James as a bonfire ritual on the summer solstice or as they called it an act of “radical self-expression”. They held the first event in 1986 on a San Francisco beach, where they burned a wooden effigy of a man and his dog. The event has since grown and moved to the Nevada desert; the Burning Man moniker has stuck ever since and the (radical) self-expression lives on.

For more images from this year’s event jump here or visit Burning Man online.

Image: Burning Man 2013, art installation. Courtesy of the Guardian.

Art

Marina Abramovic is Not a Vampire

Pioneering performance artist Marina Abramovic admits to not being a vampire, when asked about her eternally youthful looks. Self-described as the “grandmother of performance art” she is constantly examining the relationship between artist and audience, body and mind. And, while the artist may not be a vampire, the Artist is Present.

From the Guardian:

Marina Abramovic abolishes all boundaries between art and life. In the 1970s she pioneered “performance art”, but the reason I have put that well-worn term into inverted commas is that it is too narrow a description of her, even if it’s one she chooses. The exciting thing about Abramovic is that she makes art into life and life into art. This was made very apparent when she went on Reddit this week to converse with her fans in an “Ask me anything” session.

Her love life, her money life, her age (and whether she comes from a long line of vampires from Montenegro) – the questions covered all these, and Abramovic gave disarming answers.

In the 1970s she collaborated with the artist Ulay who was also her lover. Their personal and working relationship ended with a performance on the Great Wall of China that culminated in a last hug. So one Reddit question was: how did that last hug feel? Here is her answer:

“One of the most painful moments of my life. I knew this is over, I knew it was the end of a very important period of my life. I just remember I could not stop crying.”

It’s an answer that says more about Abramovic than a pile of textbooks on contemporary art might express. This is what she does. She makes art that is directly emotional, in which her entire being is at risk: her work with Ulay was a massive part of her career, so when their relationship ended they risked shattering their artistic legacy as well as their lives. She tells another questioner why artists should never fall in love with artists: “I have done this three times, and each time I had the heart broke …”

And another still on why she doesn’t have children:

“I never wanted to … I never had the biological clock running like other women. I always wanted to be an artist and I knew that I could not divide this energy into anything else. Looking back, I think it was the right decision.”

This is more like an audience with a famous soap opera star (or character?) than a conventional art seminar. Abramovic is asked how she appears never to have aged (she was born in 1946) – is she a vampire? She replies that her grandmother and great-grandmother both lived to more than 100 and kept their youthful looks.

Like a crazy soap opera, this has an impossibly dramatic climax. Abramovic is asked what it felt like when Ulay came to her 2010 performance The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City: “Entire life of our 12 years together went like a fast forward film …”

You can see this moment on video. In her MoMA performance, Abramovic simply sat there for 700 hours and people were invited to sit opposite her, looking into her eyes. Most of them ended up crying. But she was caught in a drama of her own on the day Ulay arrived and sat with her. It’s an amazing thing to see – a soap opera of MoMA’s own.

Read the entire article here.

Art, Idea Soup

MondayMap: Human History

How does one condense four thousand years of human history into a single view? Well, John Sparks did just that with his histomap in 1931.

From Slate:

This “Histomap,” created by John B. Sparks, was first printed by Rand McNally in 1931. (The David Rumsey Map Collection hosts a fully zoomable version here.) (Update: Click on the image below to arrive at a bigger version.)

This giant, ambitious chart fit neatly with a trend in nonfiction book publishing of the 1920s and 1930s: the “outline,” in which large subjects (the history of the world! every school of philosophy! all of modern physics!) were distilled into a form comprehensible to the most uneducated layman.

The 5-foot-long Histomap was sold for $1 and folded into a green cover, which featured endorsements from historians and reviewers. The chart was advertised as “clear, vivid, and shorn of elaboration,” while at the same time capable of “holding you enthralled” by presenting:

the actual picture of the march of civilization, from the mud huts of the ancients thru the monarchistic glamour of the middle ages to the living panorama of life in present day America.

The chart emphasizes domination, using color to show how the power of various “peoples” (a quasi-racial understanding of the nature of human groups, quite popular at the time) evolved throughout history.

It’s unclear what the width of the colored streams is meant to indicate. In other words, if the Y axis of the chart clearly represents time, what does the X axis represent? Did Sparks see history as a zero-sum game, in which peoples and nations would vie for shares of finite resources? Given the timing of his enterprise—he made this chart between two world wars and at the beginning of a major depression—this might well have been his thinking.

Sparks followed up on the success of this Histomap by publishing at least two more: the Histomap of religion (which I’ve been unable to find online) and the Histomap of evolution.

Read the entire article a check out the zoomable histomap here.

Art, Idea Soup

Growing Pains

The majority of us can identify with the awkward and self-conscious years of adolescence. And, interestingly enough many of us emerge to the other side.

From Telegraph:

Photographer Merilee Allred tries to show us that teenage insecurities don’t have to hold us back as an adult in her project ‘Awkward Years’. Bullied as a child, the 35-year-old embarked on the project after a friend didn’t believe Merilee was a self-described ‘queen of the nerds’ as a child. She asked people to pose with unflattering pictures of themselves when they were young to highlight how things can turn out alright.

Check out more pictures from the awkward years here.

Image: Project photographer Merilee Allred. Then: 11 years old, 5th grade, in Billings, Montana. Now: 35 years old, UX Designer residing in Salt Lake City, Utah. Courtesy of Merilee Allred / Telegraph.

Art, Environs, Idea Soup, Technica

En Vie: Bio-Fabrication Expo

En Vie, french for “alive” is an exposition like no other. It’s a fantastical place defined through a rich collaboration of material scientists, biologists, architects, designers and engineers. The premise of En Vie is quite elegant — put these disparate minds together and ask them to imagine what the future will look like. And, it’s a quite magical world; a world where biological fabrication replaces traditional mechanical and chemical fabrication. Here shoes grow from plants, furniture from fungi and bees construct vases. The En Vie exhibit is open at the Space Foundation EDF in Paris, France until September 1.

From ars technica:

The natural world has, over millions of years, evolved countless ways to ensure its survival. The industrial revolution, in contrast, has given us just a couple hundred years to play catch-up using technology. And while we’ve been busily degrading the Earth since that revolution, nature continues to outdo us in the engineering of materials that are stronger, tougher, and multipurpose.

Take steel for example. According to the World Steel Association, for every ton produced, 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere. In total in 2010, the iron and steel industries, combined, were responsible for 6.7 percent of total global CO2 emissions. Then there’s the humble spider, which produces silk that is—weight for weight—stronger than steel. Webs spun by Darwin’s bark spider in Madagascar, meanwhile, are 10 times tougher than steel and more durable than Kevlar, the synthetic fiber used in bulletproof vests. Material scientists savvy to this have ensured biomimicry is now high on the agenda at research institutions, and an exhibit currently on at the Space Foundation EDF in Paris is doing its best to popularize the notion that we should not just be salvaging the natural world but also learning from it.

En Vie (Alive), curated by Reader and Deputy Director of the Textile Futures Research Center at Central Saint Martins College Carole Collet, is an exposition for what happens when material scientists, architects, biologists, and engineers come together with designers to ask what the future will look like. According to them, it will be a world where plants grow our products, biological fabrication replaces traditional manufacturing, and genetically reprogrammed bacteria build new materials, energy, or even medicine.

It’s a fantastical place where plants are magnetic, a vase is built by 60,000 bees, furniture is made from funghi, and shoes from cellulose. You can print algae onto rice paper, then eat it or encourage gourds to grow in the shape of plastic components found in things like torches or radios (you’ll have to wait a few months for the finished product, though). These are not fanciful designs but real products, grown or fashioned with nature’s direct help.

In other parts of the exhibit, biology is the inspiration and shows what might be. Eskin, for instance, provides visitors with a simulation of how a building’s exterior could mimic and learn from the human body in keeping it warm and cool.

Alive shows that, speculative or otherwise, design has a real role to play in bringing different research fields together, which will be essential if there’s any hope of propelling the field into mass commercialization.

“More than any other point in history, advances in science and engineering are making it feasible to mimic natural processes in the laboratory, which makes it a very exciting time,” Craig Vierra, Professor and Assistant Chair, Biological Sciences at University of the Pacific, tells Wired.co.uk. In his California lab, Vierra has for the past few years been growing spider silk proteins from bacteria in order to engineer fibers that are close, if not quite ready, to give steel a run for its money. The technique involves purifying the spider silk proteins away from the bacteria proteins before concentrating these using a freeze-dryer in order to render them into powder form. A solvent is then added, and the material is spun into fiber using wet spinning techniques and stretched to three times its original length.

“Although the mechanical properties of the synthetic spider fibers haven’t quite reached those of natural fibers, research scientists are rapidly approaching this level of performance. Our laboratory has been working on improving the composition of the spinning dope and spinning parameters of the fibers to enhance their performance.”

Vierra is a firm believer that nature will save us.

“Mother Nature has provided us with some of the most outstanding biomaterials that can be used for a plethora of applications in the textile industry. In addition to these, modern technological advances will also allow us to create new biocomposite materials that rely on the fundamentals of natural processes, elevating the numbers and types of materials that are available. But, more importantly, we can generate eco-friendly materials.

“As the population size increases, the availability of natural resources will become more scarce and limiting for humans. It will force society to develop new methods and strategies to produce larger quantities of materials at a faster pace to meet the demands of the world. We simply must find more cost-efficient methods to manufacture materials that are non-toxic for the environment. Many of the materials being synthesized today are very dangerous after they degrade and enter the environment, which is severely impacting the wildlife and disrupting the ecology of the animals on the planet.”

According to Vierra, the fact that funding in the field has become extremely competitive over the past ten years is proof of the quality of research today. “The majority of scientists are expected to justify how their research has a direct, immediate tie to applications in society in order to receive funding.”

We really have no alternative but to continue down this route, he argues. Without advances in material science, we will continue to produce “inferior materials” and damage the environment. “Ultimately, this will affect the way humans live and operate in society.”

We’re agreed that the field is a vital and rapidly growing one. But what value, if any, can a design-led project bring to the table, aside from highlighting the related issues. Vierra has assessed a handful of the incredible designs on display at Alive for us to see which he thinks could become a future biomanufacturing reality.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Radiant Soil, En Vie Exposition. Courtesy of Philip Beesley, En Vie / Wired.

Art, Environs

CSA

No, it’s not another network cop show. CSA began life as community supported agriculture — neighbors buying fresh produce from collectives of local growers and farmers. Now, CSA has grown itself to include art — community supported art — exposing neighbors to local color and creativity.

From the New York Times:

For years, Barbara Johnstone, a professor of linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University here, bought shares in a C.S.A. — a community-supported agriculture program — and picked up her occasional bags of tubers or tomatoes or whatever the member farms were harvesting.

Her farm shares eventually lapsed. (“Too much kale,” she said.) But on a recent summer evening, she showed up at a C.S.A. pickup location downtown and walked out carrying a brown paper bag filled with a completely different kind of produce. It was no good for eating, but it was just as homegrown and sustainable as what she used to get: contemporary art, fresh out of local studios.

“It’s kind of like Christmas in the middle of July,” said Ms. Johnstone, who had just gone through her bag to see what her $350 share had bought. The answer was a Surrealistic aluminum sculpture (of a pig’s jawbone, by William Kofmehl III), a print (a deadpan image appropriated from a lawn-care book, by Kim Beck) and a ceramic piece (partly about slavery, by Alexi Morrissey).

Without even having to change the abbreviation, the C.S.A. idea has fully made the leap from agriculture to art. After the first program started four years ago in Minnesota, demonstrating that the concept worked just as well for art lovers as for locavores, community-supported art programs are popping up all over the country: in Pittsburgh, now in its first year; Miami; Brooklyn; Lincoln, Neb.; Fargo, N.D.

The goal, borrowed from the world of small farms, is a deeper-than-commerce connection between people who make things and people who buy them. The art programs are designed to be self-supporting: Money from shares is used to pay the artists, who are usually chosen by a jury, to produce a small work in an edition of 50 or however many shares have been sold. The shareholders are often taking a leap of faith. They don’t know in advance what the artists will make and find out only at the pickup events, which are as much about getting to know the artists as collecting the fruits of their shares.

The C.S.A.’s have flourished in larger cities as a kind of organic alternative to the dominance of the commercial gallery system and in smaller places as a way to make up for the dearth of galleries, as a means of helping emerging artists and attracting people who are interested in art but feel they have neither the means nor the connections to collect it.

“A lot of our people who bought shares have virtually no real experience with contemporary art,” said Dayna Del Val, executive director of the Arts Partnership in Fargo, which began a C.S.A. last year, selling 50 shares at $300 each for pieces from nine local artists. “They’re going to a big-box store and buying prints of Monet’s ‘Water Lilies,’ if they have anything.”

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of Daily Camera.

Art

Portrait of a Royal Baby

Royal-watchers from all corners of the globe, especially the British one, have been agog over the arrival of the latest royal earlier this week. The overblown media circus got us thinking about baby pictures. Will the Prince of Cambridge be the first heir to the throne to have his portrait enshrined via Instagram? Or, as is more likely, will his royal essence be captured in oil on canvas, as with the 35 or more generations that preceded him?

From Jonathan Jones over at the Guardian:

Royal children have been portrayed by some of the greatest artists down the ages, preserving images of childhood that are still touching today. Will this royal baby fare better than its mother in the portraits that are sure to come? Are there any artists out there who can go head to head with the greats of royal child portraiture?

Agnolo Bronzino has to be first among those greats, because he painted small children in a way that set the tone for many royal images to come. Some might say the Medici rulers of Florence, for whom he worked, were not properly royal – but they definitely acted like a royal family, and the artists who worked for them set the tone of court art all over Europe. In Giovanni de’ Medici As a Child, Bronzino expresses the joy of children and the pleasure of parents in a way that was revolutionary in the 16th century. Chubby-cheeked and jolly, Giovanni clutches a pet goldfinch. In paintings of the Holy Family you know that if Jesus has a pet bird it probably has some dire symbolic meaning. But this pet is just a pet. Giovanni is just a happy kid. Actually, a happy baby: he was about 18 months old.

Hans Holbein took more care to clarify the regal uniqueness of his subject when he portrayed Edward, only son of King Henry VIII of England, in about 1538. Holbein, too, captures the face of early childhood brilliantly. But how old is Edward meant to be? In fact, he was two. Holbein expresses his infancy – his baby face, his baby hands – while having him stand holding out a majestic hand, dressed like his father, next to an inscription that praises the paternal glory of Henry. Who knows, perhaps he really stood like that for a second or two, long enough for Holbein to take a mental photograph.

Diego Velázquez recorded a more nuanced, even anxious, view of royal childhood in his paintings of the royal princesses of 17th-century Spain. In the greatest of them, Las Meninas, the five-year-old Infanta Margarita Teresa stands looking at us, accompanied by her ladies in waiting (meninas) and two dwarves, while Velázquez works on a portrait of her parents, the king and queen. The infanta is beautiful and confident, attended by her own micro-court – but as she looks out of the painting at her parents (who are standing where the spectator of the painting stands) she is performing. And she is under pressure to look and act like a little princess.

The 19th-century painter Stephen Poyntz Denning may not be in the league of these masters. In fact, let’s be blunt: he definitely isn’t. But his painting Queen Victoria, Aged 4 is a fascinating curiosity. Like the Infanta, this royal princess is not allowed to be childlike. She is dressed in an oppressively formal way, in dark clothes that anticipate her mature image – a childhood lost to royal destiny.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Princess Victoria aged Four, Denning, Stephen Poyntz (c. 1787 – 1864). Courtesy of Wikimedia.

Art, Arts and Letters, Literature

Highbrow or Lowbrow?

Do you prefer the Beatles to Beethoven? Do you prefer Rembrandt over the Sunday comics or the latest Marvel? Do you read Patterson or Proust? Gary Gutting professor of philosophy argues that the distinguishing value of aesthetics must drive us to appreciate fine art over popular work. So, you had better dust off those volumes of Shakespeare.

From the New York Times:

Our democratic society is uneasy with the idea that traditional “high culture” (symphonies, Shakespeare, Picasso) is superior to popular culture (rap music, TV dramas, Norman Rockwell). Our media often make a point of blurring the distinction: newspapers and magazines review rock concerts alongside the Met’s operas and “Batman” sequels next to Chekhov plays. Sophisticated academic critics apply the same methods of analysis and appreciation to Proust and to comic books. And at all levels, claims of objective artistic superiority are likely to be met with smug assertions that all such claims are merely relative to subjective individual preferences.

Our democratic unease is understandable, since the alleged superiority of high culture has often supported the pretensions of an aristocratic class claiming to have privileged access to it. For example, Virginia Woolf’s classic essay — arch, snobbish, and very funny — reserved the appreciation of great art to “highbrows”: those “thoroughbreds of the mind” who combine innate taste with sufficient inherited wealth to sustain a life entirely dedicated to art. Lowbrows were working-class people who had neither the taste nor the time for the artistic life. Woolf claimed to admire lowbrows, who did the work highbrows like herself could not and accepted their cultural inferiority. But she expresses only disdain for a third class — the “middlebrows”— who have earned (probably through trade) enough money to purchase the marks of a high culture that they could never properly appreciate. Middlebrows pursue “no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.”

There is, however, no need to tie a defense of high art to Woolf’s “snobocracy.” We can define the high/popular distinction directly in terms of aesthetic quality, without tendentious connections to social status or wealth. Moreover, we can appropriate Woolf’s term “middlebrow,” using it to refer to those, not “to the manner born,” who, admirably, employ the opportunities of a democratic society to reach a level of culture they were not born into.

At this point, however, we can no longer avoid the hovering relativist objection: How do we know that there are any objective criteria that authorize claims that one kind of art is better than another?

Centuries of unresolved philosophical debate show that there is, in fact, little hope of refuting someone who insists on a thoroughly relativist view of art. We should not expect, for example, to provide a definition of beauty (or some other criterion of artistic excellence) that we can use to prove to all doubters that, say, Mozart’s 40th Symphony is objectively superior as art to “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” But in practice there is no need for such a proof, since hardly anyone really holds the relativist view. We may say, “You can’t argue about taste,” but when it comes to art we care about, we almost always do.

For example, fans of popular music may respond to the elitist claims of classical music with a facile relativism. But they abandon this relativism when arguing, say, the comparative merits of the early Beatles and the Rolling Stones. You may, for example, maintain that the Stones were superior to the Beatles (or vice versa) because their music is more complex, less derivative, and has greater emotional range and deeper intellectual content. Here you are putting forward objective standards from which you argue for a band’s superiority. Arguing from such criteria implicitly rejects the view that artistic evaluations are simply matters of personal taste. You are giving reasons for your view that you think others ought to accept.

Further, given the standards fans use to show that their favorites are superior, we can typically show by those same standards that works of high art are overall superior to works of popular art. If the Beatles are better than the Stones in complexity, originality, emotional impact, and intellectual content, then Mozart’s operas are, by those standards, superior to the Beatles’ songs. Similarly, a case for the superiority of one blockbuster movie over another would most likely invoke standards of dramatic power, penetration into character, and quality of dialogue by which almost all blockbuster movies would pale in comparison to Sophocles or Shakespeare.

On reflection, it’s not hard to see why — keeping to the example of music —classical works are in general capable of much higher levels of aesthetic value than popular ones. Compared to a classical composer, someone writing a popular song can utilize only a very small range of musical possibilities: a shorter time span, fewer kinds of instruments, a lower level of virtuosity and a greatly restricted range of compositional techniques. Correspondingly, classical performers are able to supply whatever the composers need for a given piece; popular performers seriously restrict what composers can ask for. Of course, there are sublime works that make minimal performance demands. But constant restriction of resources reduces the opportunities for greater achievement.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Detail of the face of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Cropped version of the painting where Mozart is seen with Anna Maria (Mozart’s sister) and father, Leopold, on the wall a portrait of his deceased mother, Anna Maria. By Johann Nepomuk della Croce (1736-1819). Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Art, Idea Soup

Fifty Years After Gettysburg

In 1913 some 50,000 veterans from both sides of the U.S. Civil War gathered at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania to commemorate. Photographers of the time were on hand to capture some fascinating and moving images, which are now preserved in the U.S. Library of Congress.

See more images here.

Image: The Blue and the Gray at Gettysburg: a Union veteran and a Confederate veteran shake hands at the Assembly Tent. Courtesy of U.S. Library of Congress.

Art

Cos Things Break, Don’t They

Most things, natural or manufactured, break after a while. And, most photographers spend an inordinate amount of time ensuring that their subject — usually an object — is represented in the best possible wholesome light, literally and metaphorically. However, for one enterprising photographer it’s all about things in their broken form, albeit displayed exquisitely in a collage of their constituent pieces.

From the Guardian:

Canadian photographer Todd McLellan makes visible the inner workings of everyday products by dismantling, carefully arranging the components and photographing them. His book, Things Come Apart, presents a unique view of items such as chainsaws and iPods, transforming ordinary objects into works of art.

See the entire galley here.

Image: Raleigh bicycle from the 80s. Number of parts: 893. Courtesy of Todd McLellan/Thames & Hudson / Guardian.

Art

Ai Weiwei – China’s Warhol

Artist Ai Weiwei has suffered at the hands of the Chinese authorities much more so than Andy Warhol’s brushes with surveillance from the FBI. Yet the two are remarkably similar: brash and polarizing views, distinctive art and creative processes, masterful self-promotion, savvy media manipulation and global ubiquity. This is all the more astounding given Ai Weiwei’s arrest, detentions and prohibition on travel outside of Beijing. He’s even made it to the Venice Biennale this year — only his art of course.

From the= Guardian:

To some, he is verging on a saint and martyr, singlehandedly standing against the forces of Chinese political repression. For others he is a canny manipulator, utterly in control of his reputation and place in the art world and market. For others still, he is all these things: an artist who outdoes even Andy Warhol in his ubiquity, his nimbleness at self-promotion and his use of every medium at his disposal to promulgate his work and his activism.

Whatever your views on the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, one thing is clear: he is everywhere, from the Hampstead theatre in London, where Howard Brenton’s play about the 81 days Ai spent in detention in 2011 is underway, to the web, where his the video for his heavy metal song Dumbass is circulating, to the Venice Biennale, where not one but three of his large-scale works are on display – perhaps the most exposure for any single artist at the international festival.

One of the works, Bang, a forest of hundreds of tangled wooden stools, is the most prominent piece in the German national pavilion. Then, in the Zuecca Project Space on the island of Giudecca, is his installation Straight: 150 tons of crushed rebar from schools flattened in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, recovered by the artist and his team, who bought the crumpled steel rods as scrap before painstakingly straightening them and piling them up in a wave-like sculptural arrangement.

By far the most revealing about Ai’s own experience, though, is the third piece, SACRED. Situated in the church of Sant’Antonin, it consists of six large iron boxes, into which visitors can peek to see sculptures recreating scenes from the artist’s detention. Here is a miniature Ai being interrogated; here a miniature Ai showers or sits on the lavatory while two uniformed guards stand over him. Other scenes show him sleeping and eating – always in the same tiny space, always under double guard. (The music video refers to some of these scenes with a lightly satirical tone that is absent from the sculpture.)

According to Greg Hilty of London’s Lisson Gallery, under whose auspices SACRED is being shown, and who saw Ai in China a week ago, the work is a form of “therapy or exorcism – it was something he had to get out. It is an experience that we might see as newsworthy, but for him, he was the one in it.”

Read the entire article here.

Image: Waking nightmare … Ai Weiwei’s Entropy (Sleep), from SACRED (2013). Courtesy of David Levene / Guardian.

Art

YBAs Twenty-Five Years On

That a small group of Young British Artists (YBA) made an impact on the art scene in the UK and across the globe over the last 25 years is without question. Though, whether the public at large will, 10, 25 or 50 years from now (and beyond), recognize a Damien Hirst spin painting or Tracy Emin’s “My Bed” or a Sarah Lucas self-portrait — “The Artist Eating a Banana” springs to mind — remains an open question.

The group first came to prominence in the late 1980s, mostly through works and events designed to shock the sensibilities of the then dreadfully boring and insular British art scene. With that aim in mind they certainly succeeded, and some, notably Hirst, have since become art superstars. So, while the majority of artists never experience fame within their own lifetimes, many YBAs have managed to buck convention. Though, whether their art will live long and prosper is debatable.

Jonathan Jones over at the On Art blog, chimes in with a different and altogether kinder opinion.

From the Guardian:

It’s 25 years since an ambitious unknown called Damien Hirst curated an exhibition of his friends and contemporaries called Freeze. This is generally taken as the foundation of the art movement that by the 1990s got the label “YBA”. Promoted by exhibitions such as Brilliant!, launched into public debate by the Turner prize and eventually set in stone at the Royal Academy with Sensation, Young British Art still shapes our cultural scene. A Damien Hirst spin painting closed the Olympics.

Even where artists are obviously resisting the showmanship and saleability of the Hirst generation (and such resistance has been the key to fashionable esteem for at least a decade), that generation’s ideas – that art should be young and part of popular culture – remain dominant. Artists on this year’s Turner shortlist may hate the thought that they are YBAs but they really are, in their high valuation of youth and pop. If we are all Thatcherites now, our artists are definitely all YBAs. Except for David Hockney.

From “classic” YBAs like Sarah Lucas and Marc Quinn to this year’s art school graduates, the drive to be new, modern, young and brave that Freeze announced in 1988 still shapes British art. And where has that left us? Where is British art, after 25 years of being young?

Let’s start with the best – and the worst. None of the artists who exploded on to the scene back then were as exciting and promising as Damien Hirst. He orchestrated the whole idea of a movement, and really it was a backdrop for his own daring imagination. Hirst’s animals in formaldehyde were provocations and surrealist dreams. He spun pop art in a new, visceral direction.

Today he is a national shame – our most famous artist has become a hack painter and kitsch sculptor who goes to inordinate lengths to demonstrate his lack of talent. Never has promise been more spectacularly misleading.

And what of the mood he created? Some of the artists who appeared in Freeze, such as Mat Collishaw, still make excellent work. But as for enduring masterpieces that will stand the test of time – how many of those has British art produced since 1988?

Well – the art of Sarah Lucas is acridly memorable. That of Rachel Whiteread is profound. The works of Jake and Dinos Chapman will keep scholars chortling in the library a century or two from now.

What is an artistic masterpiece anyway? Britain has never been good at creating sublime works in marble. But consider the collection of Georgian satirical prints in the Prints and Drawings room at the British Museum. Artists such as Gillray and Rowlandson are our heritage: rude, crude and subversive. Think about Hogarth too – an edgy artist critics snootily dismiss as a so-so painter.

Face it, all ye who rail at modern British art: YBA art and its living aftermath, from pickled fish to David Shrigley, fits beautifully into the Great British tradition of Hogarthian hilarity.

The difference is that while Hogarth had a chip on his shoulder about European art lording it over local talent, the YBA revolution made London world-famous as an art city, with Glasgow coming up in the side lane.

Warts and all, this has been the best 25 years in the history of British art. It never mattered more.

Read the entire article after the jump.

Image: My Bed by Tracey Emin. Courtesy of Tracey Emin / The Saatchi Gallery.

Art

Old Masters or Dirty Old Men?

A recent proposal to ban all pornography across Europe has raised some interesting questions. Not least of which is the issue of how to classify the numerous canvases featuring nudes — mostly women, of course — and sexual fantasies hanging prominently in most of Europe’s museums and galleries. Are Europe’s old masters, such as Titian, Botticelli, Rubens, Rousseau and Manet, pornographers?

From the Guardian:

A proposal to ban all pornography in Europe, recently unearthed by freedom of information campaigners in an EU report, raises an intriguing question. Would this only apply to photography and video, or do reformers also plan to rid Europe of all those lewd paintings by Titian and his contemporaries that joyously celebrate sex in the continent’s most civilised art galleries?

Europe’s great artists were making pornography long before the invention of the camera, let alone the internet. In my new book The Loves of the Artists, I argue that sexual gratification – of both the viewers of art, and artists themselves – was a fundamental drive of high European culture in the age of the old masters. Paintings were used as sexual stimuli, as visual lovers’ guides, as aids to fantasy. This was considered one of the most serious uses of art by no less a thinker than Leonardo da Vinci, who claimed images are better than words because pictures can directly arouse the senses. He was proud that he once painted a Madonna so sexy the owner asked for all its religious trappings to be removed, out of shame for the inappropriate lust it inspired. His painting of St John the Baptist is similarly ambiguous.

This was not a new attitude to art in the Renaissance. As the upcoming exhibition of ancient Pompeii at the British Museum will doubtless show, the ancient Romans also delighted in pornography. Some pornographic paintings now kept in the famous “Secret Museum” of ancient erotica in Naples came from Pompeii’s brothel’s – which makes their function very clear. In the Renaissance, which revered everything classical, ancient Roman sexual imagery was well known to collectors and artists. A notorious classical erotic statue owned by the plutocrat Agostino Chigi caused the 16th-century writer Pietro Aretino to remark, “why should the eyes be denied what delights them most?”

Aretino was a libertarian campaigner long before today’s ethical and political conflicts over pornography. He helped get the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi released from prison after the artist was jailed for publishing a series of erotic prints called The Positions – they depict various sexual positions – then wrote a set of obscene verses to accompany a new edition of what became a European bestseller. Aretino was a close friend of Titian, whose paintings share his licentious delight in sexuality.

Read the entire article following the jump.

Image: Venus of Urbino (Venere di Urbino), 1538 by Titian, Courtesy of Uffizi, Florence / Wikipedia.

Art

Jim’ll Paint It

Art can make you think; art can make you smile. Falling more towards the latter category is “Jim’ll Paint It“. Microsoft’s arcane Paint progra seems positively antiquated compared with more recent and powerful drawing apps. However, in the hands of an accomplished artist Paint still shines. In the hands of Jim it radiates. At his Jim’ll Paint It tumblr account Jim takes requests — however crazy — and renders them beautifully and with humor. In his own words:

I am here to make your wildest dreams a reality using nothing but Microsoft Paint (no tablets, no touch ups). Ask me to paint anything you wish and I will try no matter how specific or surreal your demands. While there aren’t enough hours in the day to physically paint every suggestion I will consider them all. Bonus points for originality and humour. Use your imagination!

From the Guardian:

Is all art nostalgic? Is it only when something is in the past, however recent, that it becomes interesting artistically?

I say this after perusing Jim’ll Paint It, where a guy called Jim offers to depict peoples’ craziest suggestions using Microsoft Paint, the graphics software included with all versions of Windows that now looks limited and “old-fashioned” compared with iPad art.

For anyone who is really trapped in the past, daddy-o, I am talking here about “painting” on a computer screen, not making a mess with gooey colours and real brushes. Using his archaically primitive Paint software, Jim has recently created scenes that include Jesus riding a motorbike into Hitler’s bunker, Nigella Lawson eating a plate of processors and Brian Blessed riding a vacuum cleaner.

His style is like a South Park storyboard, which I suppose tells us about how South Park is drawn. In fact, Jim reveals how familiar the visual lexicon of Microsoft Paint actually is in contemporary culture. By being simplified and unrealistic, it is arguably wittier, more imaginative and therefore more arty than paintings made on a tablet computer or smart phone that look like … well, like paintings.

Digital culture is as saturated in nostalgia as any previous form of culture. In a world where gadgets and software packages are constantly being reinvented, earlier phases of modernity are relegated to a sentimental past. MS Paint is still current but one day it will be as archaic as Pong.

Read the entire article following the jump.

Image: One of our favorites from Jim’ll Paint It — “Please paint me Jimi Hendrix explaining to an owl on his shoulder what a stick of chalk is, near a forest”. Courtesy of Jim’ll Paint It.

Art

Video Game. But is it Art?

Only yesterday we posted a linguist’s claim that text-speak is an emerging language. You know, text-speak is that cryptic communication process that most teenagers engage in with their smartphones. Leaving aside the merits of including text-speak in the catalog of around 6,600 formal human languages, one thing is clear — text-speak is not Shakespearean English. So, don’t expect to see a novel written in it win the Nobel Prize for Literature, yet.

Strangely though, the same cannot be said for another recent phenomenon, the video game. Increasingly, some video games are being described in the same language that critics would normally reserve for a contemporary painting on canvas. Yes, welcome to the world of video game as art. If you have ever played the immersive game Myst, or its sequel Riven (the original games came on CDROM), you will see why many classify the beautifully designed and rendered aesthetics as art. MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York thinks so too.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

New York’s Museum of Modern Art will be home to something more often associated with pasty teens and bar scenes when it opens an exhibit on video games on Friday.

Tetris, Pac-Man and the Sims are just a few of the classic games that will be housed inside a building that also displays works by Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet and Frida Kahlo. And though some may question whether video games are even art, the museum is incorporating the games into its Applied Design installation.

MoMA consulted scholars, digital experts, historians and critics to select games for the gallery based on their aesthetic quality – including the programming language used to create them. MoMA’s senior curator for architecture and design, Paola Antonelli, said the material used to create games is important in the same way the wood used to create a stool is.

With that as the focus, games are presented in their original formats, absent the consoles that often define them. Some will be playable with controllers, and more complex, long-running games like SimCity 2000 are presented as specially designed walkthroughs and demos.

MoMA’s curatorial team tailored controls especially for each of the playable games, including a customized joystick created for the Tetris game.

Some of the older games, which might have fragile or rare cartridges, will be displayed as “interactive emulation”, with a programmer translating the game code to something that will work on a newer computer system.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Myst, Cyan Inc. Courtesy of Cyan, Inc / Wikipedia.[end-div]

Art

A Peek inside Lichtenstein’s Head

Residents and visitors to London are fortunate — they are bombarded by the rich sights, sounds and smells of one of the world’s great cities. One such sight is Tate Modern, ex-power station, now iconic home to some really good art. In fact, they’re hosting what promises to be a great exhibit soon — a retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein from February 21 to May 27.

[div class=attrib]From the Telegraph:[end-div]

Black paintwork, white brickwork, in tree-lined Greenwich Village. We’re spitting distance from Bleecker, whose elongated vowels once made music for Simon and Garfunkel and Steely Dan. When the floodwaters of the nearby Hudson inched upward and east during Hurricane Sandy, they ceased their creep yards from the steps outside.

Inside are the wood floors and fireplace of the area’s typical brownstone, but the cosy effect ends when an alcove ‘bookcase’ turns revolving door, stairway leading downwards. It’s straight from the pages of Agatha Christie, even Indiana Jones.

This is one of two entries (the other far less thrilling) to the cavernous room beneath that was once Roy Lichtenstein’s studio. The house above was used as a bolthole for visiting friends and family, ensuring he could work undisturbed, day in, day out. His watch was rigorous: 10 to 6, with 90 minutes for lunch.

The building is now home to the Lichtenstein Foundation, where every reference to his work, even wrapping paper, is assiduously filed away alongside the artist’s sketchbooks, scrapbooks and working materials. The studio is set up as it was when he was alive. Charts by the sink show dots and lines in every size, colour and combination. The walls have wooden racks designed to tip forward, preventing paint drip. One of his vast murals still hangs there – an incongruous combination of Etruscan meets Henry Moore meets a slice of Swiss cheese.

Aside a scalpel-scored table worktable stands the paint-splattered stool at which the artist whilst drafting and redrafting his compositions. And this is the thing about Lichtenstein. His finished works look so effortless, so without their maker’s mark that we rarely think of the hours, methods and materials that went into their producing. He sought to erase all trace of the selective artist engaged in difficult work. He is as apt to slip through our pressing fingers, as one observer put it, as drops of liquid mercury.

Roy Fox Lichtenstein had a long, uncommonly successful career, even if he did spend most of it in his studio rather than out basking in its rewards. With a retrospective of his work – the first since his death from pneumonia in 1997 aged 73 – opening at the Tate this month, comes the chance to assess the painterly approach behind the Pop inspired sheen, and it isn’t so hands-off after all.

Lichtenstein, born and raised in 1930s Manhattan, began his creative career at a time when Abstract Expressionism reigned supreme, emotional work predicated on a belief that each work is impossible to repeat. Artists sought to impress upon their public a unique signature that would reveal their inner sensibility. Brushwork, the hand-drawn line – these were the lauded aim.

Now, exiting the woodwork, were artists like Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, using banal subjects to skewer such bloated clichés. The Pop crew drew plugs, step-on trash cans, dollar bills and Don Draper’s fizzy saviour, Alka Seltzer. But while most still used a grainy, obviously hand-drawn hatching or line to convey realism, Lichtenstein went a step further.

“I’d always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn’t” he said, “so l chose among the crudest types of illustration – product packaging, mail order catalogues.” It provided the type of drawing that was most opposite individual expression and its lack of nuance appealed greatly. “I don’t care what a cup of coffee looks like” he said. “I only care about how it’s drawn.”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Ohhh…Alright… by Roy Lichtenstein, 1964. Courtesy of Roy Lichtenstein Foundation / Wikipedia.[end-div]