A more literal (har) expression of the aforementioned text/space interrelationship …

Artist Brian Dettmer excavates vintage books and gives dimension to their interior viscera.

Posts from BoingBoing and Centripetal Notion. And links to gallery exhibitions here, here and here.

In the sheer number of typologies (architecture, narrative, film/video, music, and interactivity) rolled up within it, HBO’s recent Voyeur project is truly, and spectacularly, ‘multimedic.’

Derived as a promotional campaign for HBO by its ad agency, BBDO, Voyeur integrates eight unfolding stories within the conceit of a single New York apartment complex, which, with its walls laid transparent, privies us to an omniscient, dollhouse view of the proceedings. The eight stories interweave and points of intersection occur throughout, both spatially and chronologically. Part of the delight in experiencing Voyeur is the intricacy of this orchestration (director Jake Scott does an impressive job knitting the pieces together); the other pleasure is purely sensual. The textures, colors, and the archetypical purity of the stories themselves (a murder in one apartment, comic hijinks in another, and two apartments linked by opposite sides of an imploding romantic affair) are intoxicating.

The multithreaded film has been done before, with Mike Figgis’ Timecode, in which the viewing screen is divided into quadrants, each one engaged in separate but realtime exposition. Set in L.A., scenes from one quadrant occasionally lazily drift into one another, but all storylines immediately synchronize and respond in unison to ‘global’ events, i.e. random earthquakes ripple through the city of L.A.; when these quakes take place, all the characters in all four quadrants hit the deck together. It’s clever, but the summary effect of the movie is baroque and distancing. Longform cinema is a commitment, and in lacking a narrative hold on the viewer, Timecode’s conceit quickly wears out its welcome. It comes off as a precious exercise in form.

The scenarios in Voyeur, on the other hand, are iconic; they are narrative shorthands that don’t require elaborate exposition, nor even dialogue. They are told, elegantly and efficiently, in broad but communicative gestures by the actors. They are hard not to watch … These vignettes are then deposited within the framework of the apartment building (the flash/video site was handsomely put together by the indefatigable Brooklyn-based boutique agency Big Spaceship), and given a new axis over which to unfold — the spatial. The filmmaker Chris Marker made a similar move with his CD-ROM project Immemory, evolving his traditionally medium of film into the interactive. He wrote in its preface:

In our moments of megalomaniacal reverie, we tend to see our memory as a kind of history book: we have won and lost battles, discovered empires and abandoned them. At the very lease we are the characters of an epic novel (“Quel roman que ma vie!” said Napoleon). A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach might be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. We could draw on the map of such a memory and extract images from it with greater ease (and truthfulness) than from tales and legends.

The little stories and tiny figures in Voyeur, bound together in the geography of the apt building, yet freed from typology and linearity, gain even more power.

The works of these two painters (first linked to via the prolific Neatorama), remind me of M.C. Escher (and a handful of other artists and visual tricksters), in a sort of user-friendly, low-calorie way.

 

Goofy, playful, graphics-laden 3D isometrics and sections permeate the work of Josh Keyes.

And the pop surrealism of Robert Gonsalvez reminds me of a cross between René Magritte, Norman Rockwell, with a dash of Maxfield Parrish.

[via Neatorama here and here]

 

I had come across this animation before, but infosthetics recently posted on it so it got foregrounded for me again. It’s a charming Maya visualization of John Coltrane’s short jazz sketch, Giant Steps, rendered and animated using an appropriate architecture metaphor. Writes the author of the piece, Michal Levy:

Coltrane made a major break through with his album “Giant Steps” in the year 1959. It was the first time in the history of Jazz music that someone based his music on symmetrical patterns, which stemmed from a mathematical division of the musical scale.

The structural approach of John Coltrane to music is associated with architectural thinking. The musical theme defines a space and the musical improvisation is like someone drifting in that imaginary space.

Hi-res flash version can be view on Levy’s site here.

 

Infosthetics also linked to a more diagrammatic illustration of the Giant Step’s tonal structure here.

From illustrator Thomas Fuchs’ collection “GOP100 - Deconstructing Dumbo,” produced around the time the Republican Convention invaded our fair city of New York in that depressing summer of 2004.

It’s now part of a self-published book; get your copy at New York Imposter.

[via Neatorama]

When I came across this link to the NASA site that contains an archive of 70s space colony paintings (via Core77) the other day, I practically lost my shit. From the fourth through sixth grades, I devoured this stuff. These very images appeared in the junky, yellowing old issues of Popular Science that dad kept around in the basement. I remember poring over these reverently. [I also remember how in the back of these mags were ads for space mural wallpapers -- which I desperately wanted to get for my bedroom -- and the mail-order listings of Chesley Bonestell (who was the space-age equivalent of the anodyne Norman Rockwell or Maxfield Parrish) prints, and, oh yes, DiY Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome housing kits you could build for your own backyard. Yes, Popular Science in those days was certifiable sci-fi porn for me ...]

I don’t know if anyone in the 70s truly ever thought that these kinds of space colonies were possible, but the intricacy and care with which these images were rendered were persuasive enough for my 10-year-old eyes. Even more so, it was the audacity of the idea itself – curvature of the world made visible! rivers going uphill! groovy bachelor pads on the Riviera — in space! (I can only imagine William Gibson had come across these same images and later incorporated them into his conception of the decadent and malignant Straylight, in Neuromancer) – that pushed these images into the realm of alluring tangibility. They struck chords too deep to be ratiocinated and doubted.

I mean, what kid who grew up with Star Wars in the Reaganite 80s didn’t look up towards space with a sense of hope and wonderment?

***

It would strike me much later, in 12th grade english class in high school, that the image that came to my mind as we read Samuel Coleridge’s trippy Kubla Khan was the very image of these verdant, paradisical space stations — aka, pleasure domes. (’toroids’ or ‘donuts,’ really, if you must insist)

From the first stanza (more of the poem can be found here):

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
        Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

 

Strange and amazing art direction by a clever fellow named Christopher Gilbert. His images are clear, saturated and high contrast — photorealistic, one might say — but there is also a playfully subversive and disturbing sensibility about them, as though you crossed David LaChappelle with David Cronenberg … Or if Matt Mahurin decided to forgo his trademark tilt-shift / blur effect and went for literalism instead.

Link here.

[via Newstoday]

 

I don’t know if its due to the way art is taught in school these days, or the elimination of lead-based paint, but artists nowadays are so damn articulate. Gone is van Gogh-style torment. No more Pollockian infantile rage. Warholian inscrutability has evaporated like morning mist … Star artists know how to sell shit, smooth-talk and sound good in art magazine interviews. Anything less polished and operatic toes the line of faggy pretension.

The last time Matthew Barney was in the news was in 2003, when his retrospective (along with the premiere of Cremaster 3) arrived at the Guggenheim. While I had run across the Cremaster series in various settings in the past (usually at random exhibitions, playing in the background, perplexing passers by with scenes of — omg is that funky satyr sex??) I had never, before the Guggenheim, sat down and watched any of the films end to end. Following these close viewings I became convinced Barney was from outer space. And if he was not extra-terrestrial, then he was certainly extra-temporal — i.e., from another time, some halcyon era, when there was no such thing as self-consciousness and no one knew how to play ironic, under-the-table shinkicking games. Before arty became farty … Creations of such anti-semantic insanity such as Cremaster — the name of the muscle which controls scrotal contraction, for chrissake – defied explication; in fact, explication would be so dreary and unseductive. Better to be a Believer.

Barney is back in the news with the release of Drawing Restraint, his new film starring himself and his odder-half Björk. I was looking forward to tumbling into Barney’s super-viscous exegesis. But then I came across an interview he gave with New York Magazine in which he actually sounded sensical, and I have to admit a measurable quotient of the Barney mythology seeped out of my balloon.

Some web-magic to rub your belly late into the night …

1. Justin Swindle’s Soulwire is possibly one of my favorite portfolio sites of all-time, with a few qualifications. Some aspects of the interface sacrifice usability in favor of slickness — for example, the text-cycling gets a little old, and mousing over constantly scrolling, 10-pixel high buttons (you are essentially chasing small, moving targets) requires a little too much dexterity and coordination when it really needs to be about a buttery-smooth browsing process – but there are simply too many flourishes here that endear my own stylistic predilections, such as the creamy motion design, the sweet, crispy rollover sounds, and ahh, that wallpaper background (ooo, that changes color!).

If anything, a good incentive to get my shit together and update diametrik, now approaching 1.5 years of age, which is practically geriatric in web years …

2. I get the Schoolhouse Rock reference (I think …), but that’s really where my understanding begins and ends. In terms of its WTF?-bonafides, Kid America Club might properly belong in the webzen category per the previous post, but it’s too heavy on art direction and production to qualify as ‘zen.’ Prepare to be befuddled.

3. So dry, it’s parched; Lifelong Friendship Society, where commercial motion graphics meets Dada.

A bewitching list of anti-blogs, from chaoskitty, via BoingBoing.

Of course, who could forget rrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnhhhh.

And yet another favorite Saturday night headtrip: hell dot com.

 

I came across a post to this London-based photographer’s flickr collection and his work is brilliant. His portfolio primarily consists of photographs taken in London’s streets and subways; no studio or posed shots here. They are rich with clever visual puns and they even achieve, at times, a kind of pathos.

I have always found a maddening tension at the point where the experience of city-living and the practice of photography meet. The city is such a profound spectacle, a ceaselessly unfolding performance written in razor-thin moments of time, but its tiny dramatic intervals are only seen and marveled by those who are really looking, and are more often than not missed entirely by a poorly-timed blink, by some distraction coming from another direction, or by the general dullness of spirit and sensation brought on, paradoxically, by excessive and overpowering urban stimuli (see Georg Simmel’s 1903 essay The Metropolis and Mental Life for more on this timelessly Modern idea). In Baudelaire’s era, the poet meandered through the city, gathered experiences and distilled them into essences post-facto, through a process of creative synthesis. What the advent of photography (and more specifically, the invention of the portable camera) introduced was a much more discursive approach to capturing the evanescent moments in the city. Memory and interpretation and ‘poetic fudging’ became extra-dimensional, error-prone, re-gurgitated facets of experience when squared against a mechanical shutter which was capable, within a 1/400th of second, of indelibly etching reality into photographic emulsion. Those charming, but fleeting moments which, except to the most vigilant or sensitive souls, were hidden beneath the rushing torrent of time, found a tool of authentic record that could freeze invisible moments, and open up their private experience into a shared one.

But the technological capability of capturing those moments didn’t mean that those moments, once captured, retained their ineffable qualities. The critical but slippery distinction between photography as a technique and photography as an artform would hinge on the image’s ability to transcend its documentary nature and embody, as Baudelaire would have seen fit, an aesthetic, a poetry, a story. On any specific basis of qualification those are really hard to pin down, and I won’t try to get at it here (Art History was my minor degree, after all, ha! For further reading though, Susan Sontag’s extraordinary book On Photography is worthy of a gander). Cop-out aside, that question seems more and more relevant (or irrelevant at the same time too, I suppose) given our hyper-prolific tendency towards, as well as our appetite for, the production, manipulation, storage, and exhibition of photographic images, in our age of the digital camera, Photoshop, and the internet (as evidenced by photo-archive websites such as flickr).

Poetics aside, there are also issues of praxis. Photographing someone, as a concrete set of actions, goes far beyond mere observation. For example, I know several photographers (my amateur self included) who have never felt comfortable whipping our cameras out and directly shooting a stranger on the bus or on the street. Is that reflexive sense of politeness or anxiety a hindrance to our ability to commit the images we see to film? If so, then doesn’t that represent a compromise, a triangulation between the artistic temperament and will of the photographer, and the not-necessarily-passive receptivity of the subject? Photography is not a purely aesthetic or technical artform, but it is also an act that is often a clandestine and intrusive, and my own hangups over its ‘operational necessities’ dictate the extents of what I can and/or am willing to do with a camera. In my own case, I can only stick to landscapes and still-lifes, while appreciating from afar what photojournalists (but not necessarily paparazzi, say) do everyday.

However nebulously great urban photography is made and defined, like they say about porn, you know it when you see it, and you see it in Henri Cartier-Bresson, you see it in Robert Frank, you see it in Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and you see it, I think, in Nils Jorgensen.

 

I spent my Friday off roaming the streets of the city and the hallways of the Met and the Museum of Natural History.

The Met is currently showcasing a collection of Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines,’ the name for his mixed media, half-painted, half-sculptural works. I was already enamored with Rauschenberg’s messy, layered, collage sensibility (I throw Tapies, DeKoonig, and Basquiat into this camp as well, but Rauschenberg was probably there first), but to see physical objects — furniture, window frames, clothing, ladders, electrical fixtures, and stuffed animals, including an alpaca goat with a tire hooped around it! — extend out of the picture frame into your physical viewing space was very satisfying in a real, visceral way.

There is also something satisfying by their utter lack of pretension, too. If Marcel Duchamp’s dull, ordinary, mass-produced ‘found objects’ were meant to puncture the sanctimony of High Art, they still did so by taking on themselves the articulation of that polemic — the urinal, the bicycle wheel, the wine rack, provide a semiotic purpose, and are therefore still slaves to a concept; they are still ideas. Rauschenberg’s found objects, on the other hand, are much humbler. They are comfortable amidst the paint smudges and their own ugly, scattered imperfections. They lack any sense of self-consciousness, they don’t raise their voices …

In a distant room in the museum, much smaller in size and more compact in presentation, was a small exhibit of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava’s sculptural and architectural projects, its emphasis on the relationship between the two.

Ok, I begrudge Calatrava (trained as both an architect and an engineer) the precision and elegance of his sculptures; every piece is a system of tension (wires) and mass / compression (solid material, usually ebony or bronze) held static in an equipoise of competing forces. His buildings and his bridges also share that kind of structural rigor, and they too are beautiful to behold. But when extrapolated to the scale of architectural, the beauty of Calatrava’s formalism turns tyrannical. We can all tiptoe around his sculptures and admire them at a distance in the controlled space of a museum (no cameras please!), but architecture is a larger, more complex, messier, interactive affair — it contains a vitality and dynamism that fights against Calatrava’s rigidity. This conflict is especially apparent given the fact that several of his recent commissions seem to be massive transportation hubs (including the World Trade Center Transportation Hub under construction in Lower Manhattan), whose urbanity and bustle seem completely at odds with their stately, quasi-religious designs. Now if he were designing cathedrals or libraries or something of the like, then perhaps I would be onboard …

I can no longer remember which professor/architect said this at one of our undergraduate studio reviews, but the critique, over a student’s spartan, hyper-symmetrical, super-minimalist, ultimately prison-like design, went something like, ‘Now tell me. What about the Coke machine? If you have to put one in here, and you will, where would you put it? Where can you put it?’

The final, and as it turned out, the longest, leg of my day was across the park at the Museum of Natural History, which was mounting an exhibit on Charles Darwin, founder of Evolution. I went primarily as a show of support and solidarity for fellow reason-based, humanist souls, in light of the shitstorm brewing these days over the teaching of Intelligent Design in American public schools. My $20 was meant mainly to say, ‘Thank you for putting on this show at this particular point in time, and fighting the good fight against the forces of ignorance,’ but it ended up paying for much more than mere lip-service.

The show is incredibly well-executed. The displays (which contain a lot of text — those who don’t like to stand and read be warned) are arranged chronologically, with a strong sense of pacing and narrative. The story begins with Darwin’s curious, insect-collecting boyhood, and progresses through his college days; his 5 years traveling the world and collecting exotic specimens (and eating them! ha!) aboard the HMS Beagle; his return to London and his subsequent entry into its scientific intelligentsia; his move, with his new family, to his manor in the English countryside, where the germination and methodical development of his Evolutionary theory began in earnest; and up through, finally, the publication of The Origin of Species, and the subsequent storm of controversy that it generated — and eventually triumped over. As any well told story does, it envelopes you so completely. And it is also successful because it not only presents the scientific history intelligently and rigorously, but situates the ideas in the rich, emotional life of Darwin the man.

The rebuke of Creationism (and its insidious proxy, Intelligent Design) comes at the very end, but the argument is made persuasively, not angrily. Which meant the show has a good political sense, too, by making politics invisible. This is was perhaps the only museum exhibition I’ve ever left with the urge to applaud outloud.

Now my question is: could anybody over at the Discovery Institute mount something as smart and coherent as this without some kind of divine intervention?

I saw these two at AIGANY’s MOVE Conference last spring, and they are clowns. Whereas most of the designers on hand (which included Golan Levin and MK12) sat, presented, and actually discussed their work, Friends With You appeared on stage in Gumby-like costumes, ran and jumped around in circles, threw t-shirts into the audience, shouted into voxcoders (annoying after the third — no, first – time), lit firecrackers (which almost got them kicked out by security for obvious fire hazard reasons), and generally behaved like total freaks. I think they were going for a psychedelic, neo-hippie, groovy, ’Happening’-ish vibe, but their presentation/performance came off instead as a bad caffeine buzz.

It’s hard, and probably irrelevant, to describe what it is they do, but based on their MOVE spectacle my guess is it’s somewhere inside the fuzzy locus described by sculpture, graphic/web/motion design, toy-making, and performance art.

For me the jury may be out on whether the loudness and insanity translate to brilliance, but they certainly get marks for effort. In any case, this goofy video, from their recent Cloud City exhibit in Miami, is pretty charming, and it gets at their whacked out M.O. well enough.

[via Newstoday]

 

The Guardian has a terrific, rather literary piece from 2002 about Mark Rothko’s presitigious late-career commission for murals in the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. It was a commission he himself scotched, giving his paintings instead to the Tate in London.

There is much psychobabble here about Rothko’s vengeful artistic temperament, and the elite social and cultural scene of late 50s New York — centered in the Four Seasons, in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building – on which he wanted to inflict it, as well as some discussion of Michelangelo’s vestibule to the Laurentian Library in Florence, whose spatial derangement served as Rothko’s muse.

[from BoingBoing via Things Magazine]

 

I checked out the Cut & Paste! event last weekend, a live Painting/DJ event at the Supper Club near Times Square. Tristan Eaton, Travis Millard and Patrick Rocha did the painting, and Spinna, Rich Medina, and Tyler Askew provided the beats (which was mostly funk and hip hop). Both of these aspects were great, but it was the crowd that was lacking, a mostly rasian mish-mash representin’ the NYU Future I-Bankers of America. Ugh. Reinforced my general reticence about going out in NYC on Saturday Night anymore. And why, when it comes down to it, if you have to stand in line and pay cover (we did — it was 15 bones. Ouch!), it will be mostly suckers who will bite.

Ok, I’m a hater about bad crowds. But I could have stayed all night to watch the painting … An in-progress video is here. And you can find the final outcome below …

 

I picked up The Book of Probes from the always excellent Reed Space while wandering the LES a couple of weekends ago. The book could easily be one of those vaguely pretentious, eyecandy / Big Idea books that stimulates your impulse-buy nerve, and then gets put on the shelf or on the coffee table once you get home, never to be opened again. Those art books that disappointingly turn out more farty than arty … 

It’s the sad fact that the über-hotshot designer David Carson, who put together the visuals for the book, for me represents the worst of that pretentious, pseudo-artistic/literary tendency due to his work for the erstwhile late ’90s magazine Raygun (a magazine whose graphic anarchy pushed itself to the very edge of legibility). Yes, Carson’s art direction was certainly eye-popping and unprecedented (upside-down, backwards copy, articles that begin on the cover, articles written in some kind of since-clichéd ’broken typewriter’ typeface, etc), but it was in service to writing that was utterly disposable, even shoddy. Nothing transcendent came out of the relationship. Raygun was in the end all skin and no brains …

But in support of the evocative, epigrammatic writing of late Canadian media mystic Marshall McLuhan (of ‘Global Village’ and ‘the medium is the message’ fame), Carson’s aggressive design sensibility is given a second life, and the two elements on the page (MM’s words and DC’s visuals) find a clear and powerful synthesis.

Another recent impulse purchase that escaped coffee table purgatory was the fabulous book Hidden Track: How Visual Culture is Going Places, a survey book of primarily graphic artists (such as Ryan McGuiness and Pleix’s Genevieve Gauckler) who are moving their flat media into the volumetric.

From the book description:

‘From surface and into space is the overlying design trend these days. Graphic designers and urban artists are creating objects and interiors, moving into art galleries and museums worldwide. Designs, artworks and illustrations are emerging into the third-dimension increasingly featuring ornamental and sculptural objects. Hidden Track documents this movement introducing protagonists and their spaces that are taking current visual culture out of the underground to the the level of high culture.’

 

I went to see a lovely little exhibition at the Japan Society last week which the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto curated, called History of History.

I first came across Sugimoto’s photographs at the ICA in London almost 10 years ago. What really struck me then was his work’s conceptual elegance; for one series, Sugimoto took his camera into old school movie theater palaces and in a single, super-long exposure, photographed the entire run of a movie in one frame. The glowing screen in his shots became a palimpsest; a static distillation of a much larger span of time and vision. In another series, Sugimoto traveled to coastlines all over the world and photographed the horizon line at each one. Every image in the series is compositionally identical — the sky and the water are evenly split across the middle of each frame — but the aesthetic variation between them is unexpectedly wide. Light, humidity levels, wind conditions, temperature, sea composition affected the images, blurring the horizon line, changing the color and texture of the water, opening up a range of emotional responses in the viewer, from a foreboding to pleasant excitement to a sense of deep calm. There is some sort of inversion is taking place here, a blending of the romantic sublime with eastern minimalism. But whereas both had reductive aims — the sublime was about capturing the terrifying grandeur of nature on a canvas, and minimalism was concerned with rendering formal and material essences — Sugimoto’s sea photographs begin with a given, seemingly plain proposition — the simple meeting of the atmosphere with a large body of water — and expands on the variational infinitude of that encounter.

The exhibit only had a few of his photographs, and was comprised instead mainly of curated ‘objects’ — scrolls, textiles, masks, but also fossils and ancient tools — Sugimoto’s intention is probably intentionally slippery, but what I understood was that he juxtaposes natural and man-made (and occasionally ‘art-historical’) objects in order to illustrate parallel evolutions of matter through time. And to show how ultimately he is agnostic to the question of whether it’s the timeless or the artificial that exerts a greater influence on his work.

As a side-note, I picked up this monograph of Sugimoto’s work (which I believe the Hirshorn in D.C. printed) at the MoMA Bookstore a few months ago. It is more expensive but the quality of the reproductions is superior to that of many photography monographs which MoMA puts out, which, imho, are generally cruddy, dotty garbage.