Messages from the Ether

Subversive lite-brite

So, I read the news of the Mooninite reenactments in Boston yesterday, and wondered again with embarrassment in what type of country lite-brites could be considered subversive. Then I simply enjoyed the dada phrase "subversive lite-brite," hoping that I had come up with something original but finding that, alas, I'll be only the third site who came up with that phrase.

Art lies, by Leni

The New Yorker, in Judith Thurman's piece on Leni Riefenstahl, addresses the issue of seductive art caught in a lie:

Riefenstahl’s “genius” has rarely been questioned, even by critics who despise the service to which she lent it. ... Yet one has finally to ask if a creative product counts as a work of art, much less a great one, if it excludes the overwhelming fact of human weakness. That fact is the source of soulfulness and dramatic tension in every enduring narrative that one can think of. A seductively exciting surface, such as the morbid spectacle of a mass delusion, may distract from, but cannot insure against, a slack core, and in Riefenstahl’s case a handful of sequences singled out for their formal beauty and a quality that Sontag calls “vertigo before power” have achieved an influence disproportionate to their depth or originality.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson has had similar questions on his mind lately.

Yoshimi!

Found on my way to Krog Bar on Friday:

Madame X

Always stunning. Here, Sargent the virtuoso matches Whistler the impressionist in abstraction. A narrow range of colors throughout just punches you in the jaw. Look at the layers of scumbling in the background with the lightest in a diagonal from the upper left to the lower right. The weight of the bright contrast in the lower left corner and her heavy right arm resting against the table is offset, simply, by her gaze to the right. And that big nose. Abstract design principals can be balanced by representation aware of its placement in a composition. The chiaroscuro and the gold tones also suggest Rembrandt who, like Sargent, was a master of the concise and precise brush stroke.

Easy art

There's a photo of a sculpture in the 31 July 2006 New Yorker:

The scupltor is Gaston Lachaise; here's a better photo of the work.

Certain subject matter in art is difficult to execute successfully because of its strong primary connotations. Religious subjects are probably the most perilous. For the spiritual person, icons in themselves have potency and therefore little is expected of the artist. Another difficult subject is nudes. The human form can so often lend itself to such a simple and balanced image that any skillfully executed composition need not necessarily have any artful expressiveness. Consider Manet's Olympia next to a Rowena:

To get past the prurience, the artist has to make some additional effort that, say, a landscape or group portrait (think Rembrandt's Night Watch) doesn't. All art involves the difficulty of being artful, but some subjects cary more subjective baggage. Look at Rouault's image and a standard airbrushed Christ:

I don't think I'm being too unfair to call the second one crap--skillfully executed but compositionally inept and expressively void.

The Lachaise sculpture had stuck in my head since the magazine arrived. The stout proportions are matched with oddly muscular arms, and the weight of the component forms--exaggerated at the hips and thighs--seem to force the mass as a whole upwards. There's also a greater dynamism than normal from the contrapposto. Look especially at the space between the arms and legs to get a suggestion of how the figure occupies its space. Lachaise has created a sly manipulation of mass that I don't quite understand but that presents a compelling question to be answered.

Google v. Miro

I should be pro-artist in this dispute, but that Google logo was the coolest yet so I'm siding with them...

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Wyeth

Throughout college (and after), I mooned over Andrew Wyeth's work. Although somewhat New England and austere, he's a model of the technically skilled and emotionally expressive artist. And he too is a watercolorist, so that ain't too bad. I put him in the same school as the composer Walter Piston: a clean, very American mid-century realism but not without expressive depth. And they lived in that unfashionable world of realism and tonality while many (rightfully) praised modern schools were flourishing. Their work is somewhat anachronistic but very much valid.

I saw my first "live" Wyeth in an art museum in the old Roswell Square [?] several years back with Lisa. I had some interest in going, but didn't expect to be as stunned by the works as I was. Seeing paintings up close is always a completely different experience than seeing the glossy Art History textbook version, but I never really anticipate the impact. They were captivating for their size and detail. Much larger than I had expected, and his hand was so physically present in the brushstrokes and washes.

So anyway, the High is having a Wyeth exhibit when they reopen on the 12th (earlier for us members who will be going to the member preview to avoid the unwashed rabble!). I'm looking forward to it.

On the Internet, no one knows you're a blog

A day in the life

When I was on the cusp of unemployment, I stocked up on the things that I refuse to pay for while unemployed. One of those is magazine subscriptions. One of those magazines is The New Yorker.

All these years of getting it, I never realized that those little b&w ink drawings that ran throughout were depicting a contiguous drama. Stupid, huh? Here's a recent one:

Outside

Going to see the movie In the Realms of the Unreal tonight. The film's about Henry Darger [Wikipedia], one of the more fascinating characters from the outsider art [Wikipedia] movement. People are generally familiar with the movement through the work of Georgia's own Howard Finster [Wikipedia] (via the rock bands who put his stuff on their album covers). Outsider art brings up interesting questions about elitism (these are untrained artists creating work, but we're seeing that work only because it is accepted as art by the establishment) and intent (much of this art was never intended to be displayed as art or even viewed by others). Similar to performance or conceptual art, outsider art is interesting in part from examining the process of the artists themselves.

Darger's process, his life, definitely sounds interesting. Whereas Finster's artistic eccentricities are religion-based which are, let's face it, a dime a dozen, Darger spent most of his life creating a unique, disturbing, and epic fantasy story in 15 volumes. My only concern about the movie, going in, is that they have taken some of his illustrations and minimally animated them. That seems completely unnecessary.

Another weird point about the movie: Dakota Fanning is the narrator. Besides the fact that she seems to be appearing everywhere lately, it's an odd decision to have a young female narrator for this movie. Darger's pictures contained thousands of images of nude young girls. It's maybe not a bad decision. Just weird.

Comic Page of the Week

Flaming Carrot, No. 25, back cover. Flaming Carrot challenges Death to a game of Jarts a la The Seventh Seal [IMDB].

Painting: K.C. and Sunny (2005)

Here's the painting I did of my friends' dogs (not playing poker).

Painting: Untitled (2002)

Here's a watercolor I did in 2002. My notes unfortunately don't say where the idea came from. I think I was trying to express a careless, giddy optimism paired with deep responsibility. Kindof abstract, but I know it's in there somewhere.

I don't have a good set up, so please forgive the poor photography.

Today's reading list

• The Rise and Fall of Rock and Roll Graphic Design
• This Is Why Your Game Magazine Sucks (part one)
• Skulls may be oldest known human remains

Today's reading list

• Wil Wheaton: So, ASCAP to *license* podcasts? Readers respond.
• Composing at the keyboard
• Groupware
• Color Rules of Thumb

Today's reading list

• ALAN MOORE "CHAIN REACTION" INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
• Wake up and smell the fascism
• Whither Apple, Google, Blogs, and DVRs
• Reinventing Physics: the Search for the Real Frontier
• Interface Culture

monochrom

Remember the heady days of early 20th century art movements? Bauhaus [Wikipedia] and the Futurists [Wikipedia]? Or those wacky kids from the middle of the century with their Fluxus [Wikipedia] happenings or Warhol's influential factory [Wikipedia]. They all seem less a movement than a club.

The Viennese art group, monochrom (with the unfortunately over-played use of all-lowercase in their name), has a similar and similarly zany feel. From the monochrom [Wikipedia] statement:

monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group of basket weaving enthusiasts and theory do-it-yourselfers having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is the super-affirmation of the globalization trap. monochrom has existed in this (and every other) form since 1993.

And from the main page of their blog:

Dig.

[ via BoingBoing -> monochrom ]

Top 10, issue 8, page 25

Top 10, issue 8, page 25. Peregrine (Cathy Colby) watches as two victims fused together in a teleporter accident expire. One, Mr. Nebula, was returning from a vacation with his wife who was killed instantly. The other, a "gamer" named Kapela, provides a dry philosophy of life as a game between the black of space and the white of the stars.

Maximalism

Maximalism [Wikipedia]. A term I've heard frequently but have only now looked it up. Art with a rich density of style and content.

Works from this genre are generally bright, sensual, and visually rich. ... Maximalism is used to describe the very extended post-modern novels, such as those by David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, where digression, reference and elaboration of detail occupy a greater and greater fraction of the text.

I finally understand the label and then Salon says it's dead!

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, 'Fortunately...'

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, "Fortunately...". James Reed Corrigan, the grandfather of the title character, plays hide-and-seek with neighborhood children during the viewing of his recently deceased grandmother. An older red-headed girl catches his attention.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II, page 6

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II, page 6. John Carter [Wikipedia] and Gulliver Jones meet in preparation for their battle against the Martians who will eventually invade Earth a la The War of the Worlds [Wikipedia].

Why I Hate Saturn, page 107

Why I Hate Saturn, page 107. Rick and Anne jokingly attempt to decipher an apparently innocuous letter from Anne's insane sister Laura.

Ghost World, page 25

Ghost World, page 25. Enid mocks an ex-punk who's gone corporate and tries to defend her new look.

Stray Toasters, issue 1, page 40

Stray Toasters, issue 1, page 40. Abby, a psychiatrist, sits with Todd who had appeared at her front door and is apparently autistic. Prior to this scene, she recalled the child she had lost in an accident and now avoids deciding whether to report this abandoned child.

Letter from Dave Sim

Sure, it's a form letter, but he still signed it. Cool. And he sent me issue 168, Mothers & Daughters 18.

Following Cerebus

Yearning to read good, new comics again, I went to Oxford Comics a week or so ago.

Watchmen, issue 1, page 1

Watchmen, issue 1, page 1. Rorschach's journal is a voice-over for the criminal investigation of the apparent-suicide of his aquaintance, fellow super-hero The Comedian.

Cerebus, issue 93, page 8

I frequently dig through my collection of comics--you always "dig through" collections--and thought it'd be good to put up a page every week. Or so. There may be more or fewer eventually. The selections won't be Earth-shattering or definitive; just whatever pages strike me as interesting at the time.

Cerebus, issue 98, page 8. Cerebus, as Pope, and Lord Julius (Groucho Marx) travelling to interrogate Astoria, Julius' ex-wife, who is being held in a cell because she assassinated the western pontiff.

Arte Bagge

Peter Bagge (of independent comics fame) has the most irrational screed against the fine arts, art museums, modern art, and experimentation I've ever seen. Ever. He's like a caricature of ignorance: angry at the apparent arrogance of people who create something he doesn't understand. As if any expression more difficult than a representational landscape is flawed over-intellectualizing. I need to walk through this line by line (begin angry rant now):

Cerebus

Got a call at 12:30 today from 678-904-1418 ... ? Aha! They left a message ... it was Oxford Comics and the final book of Cerebus was in! Got it, read it, and here we go.

Cerebus was a comic begun in 1977 and by 1979 the creator, Dave Sim, announced that it would be a single story ending at issue 300. That brought him to May of this year. Although Sim became quite un-loved, the accomplishment was noted in the comic community, and he was a strong influence on me in my art school college days.