Artist Xia Xiaowan uses layers of glass to make 3-D paintings. A picture's worth a thousand words of explanation in this case:
Xia Xiaowan surpasses the boundaries of painting and establishes a new way of "looking" at paintings. He draws his inspiration and method from X-ray photographs, giving two-dimensional painting a three-dimensional effect. He combines material, technology and painting, thus maintaining the hand-made qualities of painting while adding elements of installation and sculptural art and displaying the cold, absurd and strange qualities of realism.
More work by Xia Xiaowan here.
Update: Marilène Oliver does similar work. (thx, emmett)
Photographer Clifford Ross shared his list of the necessary ingredients for invention and art at PopTech:
1. curiousity
2. persistence
3. ready to embrace the unexpected
4. ability and willingness to collaborate
Ross showed some rough results from his new pano-camera. I love Ross' Hurricane series:
The Brian Eno/Will Wright session kicked things off quite well at PopTech. Lots of interesting stuff to say about this one, but I quickly wanted to highlight two things that Eno and Wright said independently in their presentations. Eno:
Art is created by artists so that the viewer has the opportunity to create something.
Later, Wright said in relation to games:
The real game is constructed in the player's head.
Eno started his presentation by wondering about a overall system for describing culture, from high to low. He and Wright may be onto something here in that respect.
Onstage at PopTech just now, Brian Eno said that a musical piece by Steven Reich had a huge influence on how he thought about art. He said that Reich's piece showed him that:
1. You don't need much.
2. The composer's role is to set up a system and then let it go.
3. The true composer is actually in the listener's brain.
I'd never heard of Reich, but the name sounded familiar when Eno mentioned it. I realized I'd seen it yesterday when reading about Cory Arcangel's show at Team Gallery in reference to his piece, Sweet 16:
Cory applied American avant-garde composer Steven Reich's concept of phasing to the guitar intro of Guns and Roses' track Sweet Child O'Mine. Rather than use instruments, Cory took the same two clips from the song's music video and shortened one clip by a single note. As the videos loop, the two intros grow farther apart until they are back in sync.
He's veered away from video games, but Cory's new work is looking really interesting these days.
The web site for the Marianne Boesky Gallery is a bit behind the times, so it doesn't yet have the information for Barnaby Furnas' upcoming show of his work from September 15 to October 14. The show will include his recent "flood" paintings; here's a representative piece from the Saatchi Gallery:
Furnas' huge flood paintings are created using a technique called "the pour", detailed in a New Yorker article from earlier this year:
Furnas started at the high end of the canvas, not pouring but slathering on water-based Mars Black with sweeps of a wide brush. He switched to a dark red, laying it down quickly, and sometimes flinging it out in Pollock-like arcs. Sarah and Jared went into action with plastic spritz bottles, spraying water on the paint to make it spread and flow down the inclined plane. Boesky, equipped with a bottle of her own, followed their lead. The canvas began to look like a river of blood, dark and murky at the bottom, shading to a brighter and more lurid red in the middle. It was happening very fast, and changing from one second to the next-streaks of different red combining and separating, and running down to the lower end, where they dripped off the canvas into pails and other receptacles. After fifteen minutes, the whole midsection of the canvas was covered.
His Hamburger Hill piece at the 2004 Whitney Biennial was one of my favorites there, so I'll definitely be checking out this new show.
Tom Coates recently checked out the Royal College of Art Summer Show in London and ran across this project by Tim Simpson:
...three plants compete to reach the light that feeds and nourishes them. The first one to succeed survives. The other two are automatically cut down in their prime.
First plant to grow close to the proximity sensors wins. A simple and elegant idea.
The work of Canadian artist Rob Gonsalves is part Salvador Dali, part Rene Magritte, and part M.C. Escher. This is one of my favorite images of his, called Tributaries:
I also quite like Community Portrait. Here's some of his other stuff and a book of his images.
Pruned has collected some lovely petri dish scenes full of fractal patterns.
Billions and billions of bacterial landscape architects pruning -- no less in environments poisoned with antibiotics -- other bacterial landscape architects, dead or alive, to form dazzling arabesque parterres. The self-organizing embroidery of organisms in constant Darwinian mode.
More here. See also ferrofluid.
I can't remember where I first ran across Edward Burtynsky's photography, but I've been developing into a full-fledged fan of work over the past few months. From a Washington Post article on Burtynsky:
Burtynsky calls his images "a second look at the scale of what we call progress," and hopes that at minimum, the images acquaint viewers with the ramifications -- he avoids the word price -- of our lifestyle. But what if viewers just see, you know, some dudes and a ship?
"Another photographer might focus on the loss of life or pollution," acknowledges Kennel of the National Gallery. "He uses beauty as a way to draw attention to something. It's a very particular strategy."
The Brooklyn Museum of Art is displaying an exhibition of Burtynsky's photos until January 15. Well worth the effort to try and check it out. The scale of modernity, particularly in his recent photos of China, is astounding. In Three Gorges Dam Project, Dam #4, this huge dam seems to stretch on forever and you don't know whether to goggle in wonder or shrink in horror from looking at it.
MoMA just opened their show about Pixar last week and on Friday, we went to a presentation by John Lasseter, head creative guy at the company. Interesting talk, although I'd heard some of it in various places before, most notably in this interview with him on WNYC. Two quick highlights:
- Lasseter showed colorscripts from Pixar's films (which can be viewed in the exhibition). A colorscript is a storyboarding technique that Pixar developed to "visually describe the emotional content of an entire story through color and lighting". They are compact enough that the entire story fits on a single sheet and if you're familar enough with the films, you can follow along with the story pretty well. But mostly it's just for illustrating the mood of the film. Very cool technique (that could certainly be adopted for web design and branding projects).
- Near the end of the talk he showed a 2-3 minute clip of Cars, prefacing it with an announcement that it had never before been shown outside of Pixar.[1] Some of the CGI wasn't completely finished, but it was certainly enough to get the gist. When the first preview trailer for Cars was released, I was skeptical; it just didn't look like it was going to be that good. Based on the clip Lasseter showed and some of his other comments, I'm happy to report that I was wrong to be so skeptical and am very much looking forward to its release in 2006.
At 15 minutes long, the Q&A session at the end of his talk was too short. The MoMA audience is sufficiently interesting and Lasseter was so quick on his feet and willing to share his views that 30 to 40 minutes of Q&A would have been great.
[1] For you Pixar completists and AICN folks out there, the clip showed Lightning McQueen leaving a race track on the back of a flat-bed truck, bound for a big race in California. As the truck drives across the US, you see the criss-crossing expressways of the city stretch out into the long straight freeways of the American west, the roads literally cutting into the beautiful scenery. A cover of Tom Cochran's Life is a Highway plays as the truck drives. The world of the movie features only cars, no humans...the cars are driving themselves.
A quick note about the Van Gogh show at the Met that's closing at the end of the month: if you're in NYC, go see it. Admittedly, I'm a fan of Van Gogh, but I thought this was one of the best museum exhibitions I've ever seen. The exhibition features drawings (as well as a few paintings) from his short 10-year career as an artist, and you can really see how much he progressed during that time and how much his drawings and paintings were related. I can't wait to go back over to the MoMA and look at Starry Night and The Postman and view them not as paintings, but more as drawings done with paint.
At the beginning of the conference, sketchbooks were distributed to every attendee. We were urged to sketch our thoughts during the sessions & panels in our books and then tape the results onto the Sketch Wall in the Design Fair. As I was too busy typing into my virtual sketchbook (plus, I can't draw), I left the drawing to others, but I did head down to the Design Fair to see what other attendees had done. Here's a couple I found interesting:
In addition to the sketches, the wall was also being utilized more generally for graffiti, both written (with marker and paint) and created with the tape used to fasten the sketches to the wall. Here's a favorite bit of tape graffiti (tapeffiti?):
![I [heart] undo](http://www.kottke.org/plus/misc/images/aiga-sk-undo.jpg)
That would make a great tshirt.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently purchased a painting called Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna. The Met paid $50 million for the early Renaissance piece, more than they've paid for any single acquisition to date. The New Yorker has the story of how they came to own the last Duccio in private hands. In the article, Calvin Tomkins explains the reason for the painting's importance:
Small as it is, the painting has a powerful presence. It captures the eye from a distance, and commands, up close, something like complete attention. Holding the Christ child in her left arm, the Virgin looks beyond him with melancholy tenderness, while the child reaches out a tiny hand to brush aside her veil. Centuries of Byzantine rigidity and impersonal, hieratic forms are also brushed aside in this intimate gesture. We are at the beginning of what we think of as Western art; elements of the Byzantine style still linger--in the gold background, the Virgin's boneless and elongated fingers, and the child's unchildlike features--but the colors of their clothing are so miraculously preserved, and the sense of human interaction is so convincing, that the two figures seem to exist in a real space, and in real time. Candle burn marks on the frame, which is original, testify to the picture's use as a private devotional image. It is dated circa 1300.
I had the good fortune to stumble across the Duccio at the Met a few weeks ago (I was there for the Diane Arbus exhibition and passed it by accident on the way to another part of the musuem). What struck me at the time was a certain oddity of the piece...almost like it wasn't what they'd said it was but magical all the same. I know Jack about art[1], but after reading more about Madonna and Child, it probably seemed odd to me because it's a transitional piece, not quite Renaissance but not quite Byzantine either. The piece is a thin slice of a phase transition that had barely begun, a moment frozen from when the artists of the day were collectively working out how a Renaissance painting would eventually differ from earlier European styles and represent the wider cultural changes then occurring. Marco Grassi writes in The New Criteron:
More importantly, the artist places the Virgin at a slight angle to the viewer, behind a fictive parapet. She gazes away from the Child into the distance while He playfully grasps at Her veil. One must realize that every aspect of this composition represents a departure from pre-existing convention. With these subtle changes, Duccio consciously developed an image of sublime tenderness and poignant humanity, almost a visual echo of the spiritual renewal that St. Francis of Assisi had wrought only a few decades earlier.
More more on Duccio, check out his biography on Wikipedia and some collections of his work (1, 2, 3), including other Duccio representations of the Virgin and Child),
[1] I wish I'd taken an art history class in college, but my 18-yo self wasn't that interested.
Some friends and I recently went and checked out the Little Boy exhibit at the Japan Society.
Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture explores the culture of postwar Japan through its arts and popular visual media, from the perspective of one of Japan's most celebrated artists. Focusing on the phenomenally influential subcultures of otaku (roughly translated as "pop cult fanaticism") and its relationships to Japan's artistic vanguard, Takashi Murakami explores the historical influences that shape Japanese contemporary art and its distinct graphic idioms.
It's a good exhibit, but I'm not sure it's worth the $12 entry fee. My favorite pieces were the paintings of Hideaki Kawashima, particularly Fire (depicted at left) and Smile.
The exhibition is open through July 24 at the Japan Society at 333 East 47th Street in Manhattan.
At Gel, Bruce Shapiro, artist in residence at the Science Museum of Minnesota, talked about his notion of "motion control" as an "emerging medium for artistic expression". As his website explains, motion control is a "term used to describe a variety of techniques for orchestrating the movement of machinery and objects".
One of the machines he brought to demonstrate its artistic expression was Ribbon Dancer. The willowy one-armed robot performed a routine for us for a couple minutes to a classical piece of music. Near the end of the piece, the ribbon got hung up on the lower part of the apparatus while the arm kept going with the routine, tugging obliviously on the caught fabric. The crowd gasped. For a second there, we thought the arm was going to pull the whole thing over -- not unlike the robot-like AT-AT that got tripped up by a Rebel harpoon on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back -- but Bruce stepped in to stop the machine and free the ribbon. Despite the mistake, the crowd's emotional reaction to the dancer's potentially hazardous misstep demonstrated the potential for the acceptance of artistic expression by machines.
(And in a somewhat more disturbing demonstration of the dancer's representation of life, when Bruce stopped it at the end of the routine and began to walk off the stage, it began to twitch awkwardly from some stray electrical signals, a death rattle of sorts. Bruce leapt back on stage and pulled the plug; the twitching abruptly stopped and the arm fell slack atop the metal shaft, like he'd killed it.)
Two people got standing ovations for their presentations at GEL. The first was Barry Schwartz for his talk on The Paradox of Choice. The second person, who gave the most fascinating presentation I've seen at a conference in a long time, was inventor/artist/mad scientist Theo Jansen. For the past fifteen years, Jansen has been creating (growing?) "beach animals" made from commonly available tools like plastic tubing, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, hose, tape, and all sorts of other stuff. Wired News did a pretty good article on Jansen earlier this year:
Jansen is evolving an entirely new line of animals: immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind. Over the years, successive generations of his creatures have evolved into increasingly complex animals that walk by flapping wings in response to the wind, discerning obstacles in their path through feelers and even hammering themselves into the sand on sensing an approaching storm.
It's hard to know where to begin in talking about what's so cool about Jansen's beach animals. They're evolved for one thing; he worked out the optimal 11-piece leg using evolutionary algorithms on a computer but now prefers to race his animals on the beach and "breed" the most successful ones together, taking the best bits from each to make their offspring better. His animals have legs, muscles (pneumatic pistons within the plastic tubing), stomachs (plastic bottles for storing air), and nerves (collections of on/off values that work pretty much like logic gates).
And watching the videos that Jansen showed...his animals were so organic and lifelike as they moved under their own power across the beach. He's got a few of the videos on his site, but for some reason, the best ones he showed at GEL are not among them. To see evolution happening like this, a clumsy, imprecise process of trial and error that nonetheless produces beautiful and organic results, it was a real treat.
This is the best thing I've seen on the web in the last few weeks. An artist from the UK named Banksy went into four of NYC's most prominent museums -- the Met, the Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Museum, and the MoMA -- and installed four of his own pieces of art:
Dressed as a British pensioner, over the last few days Banksy entered each of the galleries and attached one of his own works, complete with authorative name plaque and explanation.
He says - "This historic occasion has less to do with finally being embraced by the fine art establishment and is more about the judicious use of a fake beard and some high strength glue." Banksy continues -"They're good enough to be in there, so I don't see why I should wait"
Staff at the New York Met discovered and removed their new aquisition early Sunday morning while Banksy's discount soup can print took pride of place in the MoMA for over three days before being torn down.
As of now, the other two pieces currently remain firmly in place.
Be sure to click through to see the photos. As far as I'm concerned, this is probably more interesting than most of whatever else is happening in the art world right now and instead of tearing it down, the MoMA should move it into their contemporary art collection. Thanks to cityrag for the link.
Some friends and I checked out the Ashes and Snow a couple of weeks ago here in NYC. The exhibition features the photography and films of Gregory Colbert, who documents "the wonderous interactions between human beings and animals". Colbert spent ten years traveling the world collecting the moments for this show, which will be displayed around the world in a "nomadic museum". The museum, constructed out of shipping containers, is currently placed on Pier 54 on the west side of Manhattan, just below 14th Street, but will continue to travel around the world after it leaves NYC on June 6.
As much as I liked the photography, the building designed by Shigeru Ban was the star of the exhibit for me. The simple wooden path surrounded by rocks, over which the photographs were displayed and beautifully lit, the industrial feel of the shipping container walls, and the way the sunlight reflected off the Hudson River and danced through the cracks in the walls and across the ceiling...all the elements came together to create a wonderful environment for viewing Colbert's work.
I don't want to completely turn the site into a discussion of the micropatronage initiative (more info) for the next three weeks, but I will be talking about it somewhat. For one thing, contributors have been asking for an update on how it's going. Also, I've been planning this since May of last year but haven't talked about it much on the site, so I've got a few pent-up posts to get out there.
Day one of the "fund drive" (I hate that term for it, more on vocabulary below) went pretty well. In the rough chart I conjured in my head last night, the revenue line and the "I don't need to sell my blood plasma" line are converging nicely and I'm hopeful that my goal will be achieved within the three week period. You'll hear this so many times on the site in the next few weeks that you're going to get tired of it, but a sincere thank you to everyone who has contributed so far. I'm not going to be able to respond individually to each one, but I've read all your emails and PayPal notes and I appreciate you taking the time to write.
And now, the vocabulary part of the post you've all been waiting for! The term I've most commonly heard associated with all this is "donation"; that people are donating to a cause. When I was writing yesterday's announcement post and the supporting materials, I had to make a choice in how I described this to you...otherwise that post would have been at least twice as long as it was. In the end, I opted to explain it in terms of patronage...using words like "support" and "contribute". I specifically did not use the word "donation" because there's a connotation there of someone giving something and receiving nothing tangible in return (and somehow, there's less of that connotation with "contribution", although maybe that's just me). Patrons don't donate in the sense that people donate to the Red Cross...they typically get something directly in return (e.g. a piece of art) for their patronage.
Another way to look at the money that people are giving me is that it's like a subscription fee for a daily magazine. There's a transaction here; you're paying me in return for a (hopefully) interesting, engaging, timely site that's full of information and creative projects and updated on a daily basis. So while I think the micropatronage idea fits the best with what I'm doing, there are also elements of the subscription idea in there as well. It's hard to tell you exactly what I mean (either English is failing me here or I'm failing English), but I hope you get the gist of it.
As far as the rest of the site goes, I'm planning on updating as regularly as I can for the next three weeks. I may be a little slow here and there because of the "fund drive" overhead (the amount of email in and out of my mail client over the past week is staggering)...which is one of the reasons I wanted to limit this to three weeks. You don't have to deal with me bugging you all year about it and I only need to focus on these administrative duties for a short time and can spend the rest of the year doing more creative things for the site.
Last thing...a couple of press mentions of this little experiment:
$2.50 for your thoughts (Red Herring)
Quit Your Job to Blog, Blog, Blog (Wired News)
I dragged my ass out of bed at 6:45 this morning so that I could be in Central Park when they unfurled The Gates, the 16-day public art project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. I was not disappointed. The whole art question notwithstanding, The Gates are an amazing and moving spectacle, and it was great seeing so many people in the park this morning, sharing the experience. Here are some photos I took:
There's so much in the news these days about our differences, conflict, and fear...The Gates are a perfect antidote for all that and for New Yorkers, a chance to come together and celebrate the city without terrorism or a power loss being involved. If you're in New York anytime before February 27th, I urge you to head to Central Park to check it out.
I've followed Antony Hare's adventures in illustration on his site for several years now and always liked them for their simplicity, but he's kicked it up a notch recently.
His more recent work -- particularly his illustrations of Johnny Depp, George Plimpton, and Franz Kafka -- contains more depth and presence while remaining simple and clean. The Plimpton is fantastic, the way his eyes peer out from beneath his eyebrows. If you're in Toronto in September, you should check out his inaugural show at the Brassaii Bistro & Lounge.
On my way to lunch the other day, I noticed a new exhibit at the Annex of the NY Transit Museum in Grand Central: New York: The Ride, Subway Cartoon and Cover Art from The New Yorker. That's two of my favorite NY things together, so I swung by for a look today. It's a tiny exhibit and takes only 5-10 minutes of your time, but if you're in the vicinity, it's worth the effort. Here's my favorite piece, Hell: The Fifth Avenue Entrance by Mick Stevens:
Here's the description of the exhibit:
Throughout the years, cartoons and cover art from The New Yorker have brilliantly captured this city, its hopes and aspirations, its people and their foibles, and their daily routines. Subway humor has been a staple of The New Yorker since the magazine's 1925 inaugural issue.
While offering an entertaining survey of subway satire from the 1920s to the present, the exhibition also explores changing perceptions of the subway over the course of nine decades. Original artwork, reproductions of The New Yorker covers and cartoons, and original magazines, whose subject matter is the subway system and the people who ride it, are on view.
The exhibit continues through July 18.
Yesterday was a wonderful day to be in New York City. After a warm, sunny walk through Central Park (you can rent small remote control sailboats at the Conservatory Water!), we went over to the Whitney to take in the 2004 Biennial. While I didn't like many of the individual pieces, the show as a whole was worth seeing, if only to check the pulse of the contemporary art world.
I'd love to point you at some of the pieces I enjoyed, but of course the Biennial Web site is in Flash, rendering individual artist biographies and artworks unlinkable. I know artists have a fear of functionality, but you'd think they could make an exception in this case. Anyway, I dug up a link to one of my favorite pieces from the show, Hamburger Hill by Barnaby Furnas. The bullets tear his Civil War-inspired paintings apart in straight lines -- looks just a bit cubist to me -- flattening several minutes of action into one still frame. Wonderfully active, vibrant, and visceral.
Some random notes from my three days at the Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine:
- The substrate of complexity is irrelevant, whether it's carbon or silicon. That is, a computer is a computer is a computer, be it a Powerbook or a human being. The level of complexity is the important part.
- Patent clerks spend an average of 4-6 hours per patent on a prior art search. Yikes.
- Lessig imagines an 18th century DMCA: the (D)aguerre (M)achine (C)ontrol (A)ct. I've seen Larry speak three times now; it's interesting to see how he's refined his argument.
- URLs cribbed from Golan's presentation: Danny Rozin's Wooden Mirror and Kelly Heaton's Furby wall.
- Audience member on the Jewish perspective on stem cell research: "A fetus is a fetus is a fetus until it becomes a lawyer."
- Cloning + embryonic stem cells is a powerful combination. Cloning takes "old cells" back in time, creating identical young cells. Embryonic stem cells can then be harvested from the cloned embryo and used to create new cells and organs for the original organism. Wild stuff.
- The Methuselah Mouse Prize is encouraging work on anti-aging, giving out prizes for the longest-lived lab mouse.
- Q from the audience about humans possessing indefinite life spans: "But doesn't this mean there won't be any children?" Answer from Aubrey de Grey in a most straight-forward tone: "Yes, it would mean a world without children." At that point, a chill went up my spine.
- A population pyramid for the US from the US Census Bureau's IDB Population Pyramid page.
- The shortest summary of the past 100 years I've ever heard: "the 20th century had its ups and downs." - Clay Shirky
- James Kunstler: "We are creating places we don't care about [living in]"
- Overheard about Virginia Postrel's talk on the Age of Aesthetics: "for someone who thinks aesthetics is so important, you'd think she would have used something better for her slides than Comic Sans on light purple." That and her increasing shrillness toward the end of her talk turned much of the audience off her argument I think.
- David Martin raised a question I've been preoccupied with for a couple of years now: "How much of the global economy is just an hallucination?"
- Geoffrey Ballard on the future: 12% of the population is currently ruining the planet. What happens when the other 88% get involved?
- Here are the goals that the 191 United Nations Member States have committed to meet in the next 12 years.
- An audience member asked space architect Constance Adams about sex is space (within the context of designing habitats for procreation), and she indicated that erections in space are difficult to achieve because in zero gravity, blood tends to collect in the head and feet.
- Robert Wright, author of the excellent Nonzero, is tall, handsome, witty, so very smart, and possesses impeccable timing. I think I am in love.
Acting on a tip from 'crans, Meg, Lance, and I hit the American Folk Art Museum last weekend. Henry Darger's young girls with penises opus was good, but the three-floor exhibit of Adolf Wölfli's work absolutely blew me away. Wölfli was a Swiss artist who wound up in a mental institution around the turn of the last century (child molestation got him there, schizophrenia kept him there), cranking out art like his life depended on it until he died in 1930.
During that period, he produced over 25,000 pages of drawings, illustrations, and illustrated narrative. Wölfli's drawings are incredibly dense, almost fractal in nature, requiring viewing from multiple distances to begin to see the whole. The American Folk Art Museum provides a good setting for seeing the exhibit, which consists of an impressive sampling of Wölfli's work, from his earliest surviving drawings to the commercial "bread art" he produced to keep himself in pencils and tobacco. If you find yourself in NYC before the exhibit ends on May 19, I'd *highly* recommend checking it out.
More on the Wölfli exhibit at the American Folk Art Museum:
The Far Side (New Yorker)
Primal Time (Village Voice)
The Autobiography of St. Adolf II (artnet)
I'm not sure if the exhibition of his drawings at the Met were worth the 1.5 hour wait in the longest line I've even been in, but Leonardo da Vinci is a freaky super genius. The exhibition ends this weekend though, so if you're in NYC and haven't seen it (and don't mind waiting in giant lines), now's the time.
We explored near our apartment in the Marais a couple of days ago. After lunch, we wandered a block to the Picasso Museé in the Hôtel Salé. My favorite piece in the museum (by a considerable margin) was femme assise dans un fauteuil rouge (woman sitting in a red armchair) from 1932. This choice says almost nothing about Picasso's art and a great deal about my own artistic preferences. In general, I enjoyed the pieces from Picasso's classical and blue periods, his earlier, less self-indulgent works, this self portrait in particular.
Pointillist Charles Angrand's couple dans la rue stood out for me during our trip to the Museé d'Orsay. From about 8 feet away, it looks amazingly like a B&W photograph taken with a shallow depth of field and something over the lens to soften the image.
Turns out I'm not much of a Monet fan (beyond his Waterlilies at the MoMA in NYC), but I do like some of the other Impressionist stuff, especially the neo-Impressionists like Angrand. I've always liked Van Gogh (Starry Skies is one of my favorite pieces of art) and the small collection of his at the d'Orsay was very nice (esp. his self-portrait).
Caterina has compiled a nice list of sketchbooks. Feels a bit odd looking through them, this private art not intended for public consumption but ultimately offered up for anyone to view. A search turns up links to more sketchbooks (image search), including one to Angela Martini's sketchbook.
I used to read Angela's Spacegirl site religiously back in the day. Sites like hers, the diaries on ChickClick, the Swanky journals, Suck, and Stating the Obvious were the primordial goo out of which kottke.org grew, much more so than the often-cited sources of weblog inspiration laid down in the gospel.
An excerpt from Joe Maller's artlist:
Art is a luminous neon sign.
Art is obvious.
Art is everywhere.
Art is whatever art does.
Art is only what you believe it to be.
Art is an atheist.
Art is an aestheticist.
Art needs to feel abandoned.
Please don't neglect your art.
You can't run from art.
Christian Marclay's Video Quartet was the most interesting thing I saw at the SFMOMA yesterday. Video Quartet is a movie featuring four simultaneous clips from other movies shown side-by-side, each one contributing some sort of music, sound effect, or vocal to a 13-minute visual mix tape. The result is as if Mike Figgis had directed an Avalanches music video...but way better. "Richly layered" doesn't begin to describe the experience.
In Artist's Freeway Prank, Form Followed Function. L.A. artist Richard Ankrom made his own highway sign and attached it to an existing sign to help aid motorists at a confusing freeway exit. State officials didn't notice for nine months until an item showed up in a local paper. Excepts from Ankrom's video show how he made and hung the sign. Brilliant. (thx nicole)
More impromptu Internet art exhibits: temp.jpg, image1.jpg (via Luke), webcam.jpg, and DSCN*.jpg. Put together your own exhibit and share it with us.
Genomic Art: "Visualists and Artists Interpreting the Human Genome".
Artists Komar & Melamid present The Most Wanted Paintings. They polled people in several different countries about their likes and dislikes with regard to art and then painted the results. Highly humorous. Even better is The People's Choice Music, two songs based upon a similar poll for music. The composer notes are great. Something to think about the next time you are designing a Web site by committee.
