doych

Social Polski

A few days ago I sat in on a lecture by Susanne Altmann, an Art Historian and Independent Curator. Based out of Dresden, she presented many exhibits she curated - mostly dealing with contemporary art and issues of society.

A name of an art group she worked with drew my attention simply because they were Polish and their works all boldly displayed their URL. I committed the name to memory and looked it up the following day. (If I wrote it down, I'd feel confident I had the information and would then proceed to lose the paper.)

twożywo.

Easy enough. With the aid of Google I landed at http://www.twozywo.art.pl - a site representing artists who seem to master the use of public space as a field of social communication. Beautiful typography, thoughtful phrases (if you look at the English version or use Systran) and a wonderful project on a character called Kapitana Europy.

After I spent quite some time on their site, I saw a little piece on Kapitana Europy that made me laugh and say WTF? I soon realized that I was watching what I thought to be a twożywo billboard chasing after me in my dreams.

Look for yourself - Turn on your sound, take a brain break and go directly to SZYBCIE — spieszmy się kochać ludzi bo czas to pieniądz.

These brilliant designers make me proud to be a Polock Pollok Pollack Polak.
 

Greeks and great abs

If you read a few posts here, you'll learn I have a way of sneaking in topics about 6-pack abs. With or without a great gluteus maximus to go along with it, I'd still point out this well done mini site on the Metropolitan Museum.

The Met's new Greek and Roman galleries will now allow the gallery to exhibit 95% of its collection. The reconstruction pays homage to the original architects and is beautifully depicted at nytimes.com with panoramas and 360's. 

An amazing site for art and literary snobs

I'll admit I'm one, too... or at least I try to be at cocktail parties.

How else can I describe a site with Samuel Beckett as the home page masthead? And more importantly, one that throws around the term "concrete poetry" and offers such material as DJ Food's Raiding the 20th Century: Words and Music Expansion and Marshall McLuhan's 1970 Dick Cavett appearance. Also, for all you concrete poets out there, there's Derek Beaulieu's an afterword after words: notes towards a concrete poetic.

This site was on a list of resources from my MFA professor. After a bit of Googling, I resolved it has nothing to do with Gary David Goldberg's Ubu Productions. (You remember - "Sit, Ubu, sit. Good dog!")

Founded in 1996 as a repository for avant-garde visual, concrete, and sound poetry and the response to its marginal distribution of that style of material, it has expanded to become a formidable online collection. It is freely available for noncommercial, educational use. It operates strictly by donation.

UbuWeb ensures open access to out-of-print works that find a second life through digital reprint while representing the work of contemporaries. It addresses problems in the distribution of and access to intellectual materials. UbuWeb does not distribute commercially viable works but rather resurrects sound, video and textual works through their translation into a digital environment.

In other words, if an LP is out of print, they RIP it to an MP3. They scan as many old books as they can get their hands on; they post essays as fast as they can OCR them. Should something return to print, they will remove it from their site immediately.

The site encompasses hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos.

If you've cared to read this far into my post, you MUST take a long look at the Film and Video section.

UbuWeb embodies an unstable community, neither vertical nor horizontal but rather a Deleuzian nomadic model: a 4-dimensional space simultaneously expanding and contracting in every direction, growing "rhizomatically" with ever-increasing unpredictability and uncanniness.

Kiki Smith, an aritst in our time

I'll kick off my own tribute to Women's History Month with a summary I wrote on Kiki Smith. Primarily known as a scupltor and printmaker, Kiki is a significant artist of this generation...

As I look at figures and images that are suspended, animated, sometimes playful, I feel a most prominent sense of grounding while viewing Kiki Smith’s work.

Mt first impression however is how fabulous her dark sculptures look on The Whitney’s black stone floor. Truly beautiful. 

Her art is about essential things. In an interview, she has said that in the 1980s she deliberately played with and pushed forward certain unmentionables in American culture: personal mortality, bodily decay, the brutality of dissolution. And now she wants to play with an art-world unmentionable: sentimentality.

Her attitudes and expressions are clinically precise and abstractly metaphorical. She has a remarkable simplicity and directness.

In making work that's about the body, she’s playing with the indestructibility of life, yet at the same time, it's also about how you can just pierce it and it collapse, or dies – demonstrated in her use of paper mache, beeswax, and other fragile forms of media.

Kiki visualizes the use of skin (or lack thereof) as a sensitive surface, a pierce-able surface, a cloaking surface and an impenetrable surface. Some of these surfaces act as open shells, perhaps for spirituality. Her wall and floor positioning adds a strong mystical sense – what is perceived visually as a heavy physical frame is positioned in a way that often defies gravity.

Perhaps her body of work is really a personal survey in visual ideology. What each person sees and feels from her weighted or un-weighted objects is exactly that – a reflection of their own experience and perceptions.

I found a great quote of hers: “A friend of mine once said to me that nobody was going to take the things that I or the girls I knew did, seriously because we all worked in cardboard and stuff like that. I think, for about five years after that I said, "Okay, fuck you, I'm going to make everything really indestructible and you can't take it away from me. You can say it's shit, but at least you can't say it's shit because it's going to self-destruct."

 

Real Superheroes

Meet Sergio Garcia from Mexico. He  works as a waiter in New York.
He sends $350 a week to his family in Mexico.

Photographer Dulce Pinzón pays homage to Sergio and other Mexican immigrants in her project "The Real Stories of Superheros."

She puts a powerful cover onto brave and determined men and women that somehow manage, without the help of any supernatural power, to withstand extreme conditions of labor in order to help their families and communities survive and prosper.

Interactive Fine Art

...was created way earlier than you realize.

I swear I don't know these people. But thanks for the laugh, gentlemen.

One-day-only catalog phone sales hit $491 million

Better than Macy's customer appreciation day.

My two favorite materials exchanged hands at Christie's two nights ago - modern art and money. It was a record auction, earning almost a half billion dollars. The winner was of course a painting by Klimt - "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II"

Four telephone bidders went crazy for the portrait as the bids increased in only $500,000 increments.

The winning bid was for $87.9 milion by an anonymous phone bidder who joined the game after the painting hit $74 million. I wonder if he/she were wearing a baggy sweatshirt and comfy fleece pants like I am right now.

Little girl, that painting hurt my feelings

Last week a 14 year old aspiring activist artist was interrogated by two U.S. Secret Service agents.

At age 13, young Julia Wilson made a painting of George Bush. It had a photograph of him, a red circle over his face, a few scattered bullet holes drawn, a bloody knife in Bush's hand, and the words "Kill Bush."  Julia  posted the image on MySpace.

Uh oh.

The government somehow had time to find it. Secret Service agents felt the painting was extremely threatening to the life of the President of the United States. Agents interrupted Julia, now 14, at school after visiting her confused mother at home, telling her that since the art included the words, "Kill Bush," and since it was accessible to anyone on the Internet, there was a very strong likelihood that someone-possibly a terrorist from a foreign country-might see the image and be inspired to act upon it.

I'm sure the school visit and interrogation helped scare the Elmer's glue, crayons and 1st Amendment rights out of the school children's fingertips, but Julia is now more determined than ever to organize a student anti-war group, and she is convinced that George W. Bush is the worst president ever.

Note to agents: I didn't say that... really... I'm just quoting the full article.

Sell a painting, buy a newspaper

$143.5 million.

Concerning fine art, that number doesn't phase me. Although it's a good thing David Geffen held out for that extra .5 mill, since there's speculation he's raising cash to buy The Los Angeles Times - so every little million counts.

Geffen sold Jasper Johns’s “False Start,” for $80 million (thankfully it wasn't a target for that much money), and Willem de Kooning’s “Police Gazette,” an abstract 1955 landscape, for $63.5 million. The buyers are both hedge fund billionaires. I guess you'd have to be.

The works of Gustav Klimt have been a hot item on the market lately. In fact, if any of you hedge fund billionaires or music moguls reading this feel like buying me a nice early Christmas present, there's 4 Klimt paintings up for auction on November 8 at Christie's. I'll take any, I'm not picky. And I'll thank you with a nice little blog post.

Jan Švankmajer's Otesánek

Say that 5 times fast.

I watched 2 films by Luis Buñuel last week - Un Chien Andalou and Las Hurdes (Land without bread). Some would consider Buñuel the father of cinematic Surrealism, so with his films on my mind while surfing the independent channels on digital cable, I stumbled across a Czech surrealist film, Otesánek (Little Otik), by Jan Švankmajer.

Ok, here's where I admit I'm studying Surrealism for my MFA class this semester, so it's not always the norm for me to catch 1 silent and 2 subtitled movies with 48 hours... but I have to admit, I love this shit. And it keeps my roommates off the first floor. If they can't hear Joe Buck or John Madden, they stay away.   

Milos Forman once said "Disney + Buñuel = Švankmajer." That's pretty dead-on. Švankmajer's trademarks include very exaggerated sounds, often creating a very strange effect in all eating scenes. He often uses very sped-up sequences when people walk and interact. His movies often involve inanimate objects coming alive and being brought to life through his stop-motion technique.

Surrealism. Stop-motion with live action. Czech artist. An infertile couple in a poor apartment building who decide to raise a tree stump in the shape of a baby. Tree stump comes to life and eats people.

Who wouldn't give that at least a 5 minute chance?

Of course I was hooked. It's believable and yet totally outrageous. It's delightful. It's disturbing. 

Two stumps way up for this fairytale come true.

Not just another film.

Sean Penn said once that film was too important a medium to waste. And if you were going to just use it to have fun, then why not get a hooker and an eight ball and find a hotel room. Now, while I don’t share Sean’s proclivity for the latter, I do agree with his statement to the former. It’s really hard to believe in film when you see so much of what passes for it these days.

Until now.

Ashes and Snow by Gregory Colbert reinforces his point. If you’re an art director, an artist, musician, actor, filmmaker, poet, whoever you are, whatever you do, this film is not to be missed.

Stunning photography and composition, sparse soundtrack with a compelling narrative by Laurence Fishburne make this worth seeking out. (Fishburne’s read of the narrative is so good, I’d pay to hear him read the phone book.)

Maybe this movie stunned me because of the steady diet of Hollywood and so-called “independent’ films I’ve been on for so long. That by default, I couldn’t help but be amazed because this film elevates the genre to a new level when compared to the Pulp Cinema phase we seem to be in now.

Or perhaps, it just shakes off the many layers of crap the industry has built-up over the years and gets back to what filmmakers wanted film to be, but lost sight.

Film is a director’s medium. You can’t help but notice how much Colbert’s photographic experience informs this film and his decisions as a director, to the point the photography is the performance. This film feels so intimate, yet looks so epic.

Epic.

A word I hardly use anymore. How can I? I see no films designed to be that these days. Maybe some great shots are thrown in here and there, but for the most part, the genre seems lost. Hero may be the closest film I can remember of recent times that you’d have to have in the same discussion. Even still, seems like membership in the David Lean fan club is nil.

Still, no description does this work justice. Because it is epic, even on a small scale. Snow was filmed in slow-motion and finished entirely in cepia tones. It is a portrait of humans living alongside the animal kingdom. Director Gregory Colbert based this film on the international exhibitions of his large-scale prints of animals he documented over the years, told through fictionalized letters from a man on a journey.

Is it a documentary? Commentary? Work of fiction? Yes. No. Maybe. It could be all of these things, yet, it doesn’t really matter. From a cinematic POV, the opening scene rivals anything I’ve ever seen on film and lets you know that it could be all of that.

A world-class photographer, Colbert took a decade off to travel around the world to shoot. (You can also read more on his and the film’s background here.) Even the design of the main menu screen is gorgeous. Problem is, like anything this great, it’s also hard to find.

Ironic the film is about a journey, because that’s what will be required to seek it out anywhere. Hollywood Video or Blockbuster don’t list it online, not that I’d expect they would, so the only option appears to be to buy it via the film’s website here.

Just be cautioned, it’s expensive. Although it may also be the only film I’d pay $50 to own, and is certainly at home in any film collection. A nice design touch is that the DVD is also wrapped in a handmade bound cover made from a unique Nepalese paper finished with Beeswax. Once you open that, you know you’re about to experience something special.

Indeed.

When the need to destroy precedes the need to create

On his 80th birthday, photographic artist Brett Weston fed sixty years worth of his negatives into the large fireplace in his home in Hawaii. Some of the negatives  didn't burn immediately. So Weston doused them with kerosene.

Surrealist author Franz Kafka requested his writings be destroyed upon his death. Were it not for Kafka's close friend and editor Max Brod, no one would know anything about Kafka's writings, which have come to symbolize modern man's anxiety-ridden and grotesque alienation in an unintelligible, hostile, or indifferent world. That would be a shame to have missed. I digress.

These artists are among the many whose self accomplishment is attained through the act of creating... producing... building... filming. Weston proved his strong belief that photographic prints should only be made by the hands of the person who created the negative. He was disgusted at his brother's greed in regards to his famous father's negative collection, as his brother would reprint works of the late Edward Weston and sell them for thousands of dollars each.

So when does the need to create get superseded by the need to destroy? There's many situations, one which I sadly witnessed last week in North Caldwell, NJ. The greed to build. My creative working space includes a large 40 inch window that, at times, shows imagery better than anything available on television. It's a view to 300 acres of woodland open space. Well, as of last week, there's now maybe 280. The other morning I wondered what 2 men with medium sized chain saws could possibly do to my view. Four hours later I knew they could completely alter it. Trees were killed. Rabbits ran scared. Fox and groundhog holes got sealed by trucks with four foot wheels. Birds nests came crashing down. Cicadas flew off in fear. The deer do not understand where their grazing land went. The elegant, long-winged hawk no longer glides above it all.

But I'll soon get to gaze out upon 27 luxury estates. And within a few years, beyond that I can  walk my dog up to a group of 140 age restricted town homes. I won't have to worry about deer ticks. I'll just have a few more cars at each new stoplight to help all the new traffic, which may help slow down the cars which kill the deer crossing the roads looking for a new home.

In his mind, the builder will have created an awesome masterpiece. And he'll keep going as long as he finds more hawks soaring in slow motion.

Bye bye fireflies...

When many chefs are better than one

As an art director, I can safely say that a big pet peeve of creatives is to have "design by committee" (our term of endearment for  "too many cooks in the kitchen") or simply and non-metaphorically put, too many opinions and managers in on a project. To my surprise and delight, I found a project where too many chefs can only make this work stronger...

Artist Antoni Miralda and his collaborators are almost halfway through a progressive dinner entitled "Tastes & Tongues / Sabores y Lenguas." Tastes/Sabores is an evolving art work, with photographic, culinary portraits of each city. It's been shown in museums in Caracas and Bogotá, and has been invited to important international art festivals in Latin America, including the Havana Biennial in June. The next festival stop: the Sao Paulo Biennial in October. Other culinary captures include Miami,  Lima,  Mexico City and Havana. Soon it will go to Managua, Santo Domingo, San Juan, Montevideo, Buenos Aires and Barcelona.

In each city, Tastes/Sabores becomes part festival, part imaginary dinner party, with giant tongue-shaped photo collages, a video, and dozens of unique objects created by inhabitants of that city. They document daily examples of how food and creativity mesh.

When asked to explain the art of the exhibit, Miralda sighs: ''It's always difficult, because there is not a product that people can take home as a piece of art. So they take home more a memory, and an image, or an experience.''

Fireflies as approach to reality

It's now my favorite dog-walking time of year when fireflies are screaming in their loudest illumination. What is usually a dark, rock-tripping stutter through an empty field late at night with my greyhound is temporarily lit by what looks to be millions of little light bulbs known as fireflies, lightning bugs, and even glow worms. (They're actually beetles.)

I have to admit my captivation. I'm lucky to live in a very private wooded area where these bad boys can go nuts blinking their little butts on and off. Literally. I mean, literally they're bad boys - one theory is the males are blinking the brightest in the taller trees while the girls stay low, setting off a more seductive blink. If human interest were only so obvious. I digress.

I think even my dog is hypnotized by the spectacle. But then again the light show has me so mesmerized that Rocky now has all the time in the world to do his business. There's no rush on these evenings - I've forgotten any late night fear of wild dogs, rabid raccoons or foot-stomping deer. This is Soprano land in North NJ so there's also suspect cars slowing down once in a while.

No fears on firefly nights. Their massive cluster of lights is beyond any more desciptive words. I thought about trying to capture it on camera but I know I can not do the visual any justice. I tried Googling some firefly images and found no photographic evidence close to what I witness, but I did find this pictured installation from the 2004 Whitney Biennial. "Fireflies on the Water" is an installation with 150 lights, mirrors and water, by Yayoi Kusama.

Finally, I found a close approach to reality, but I doubt anyone sauntering through the Whitney is looking down and whispering "Go poo."