Recently in art Category

The slides from my talk the other week are now online. You can see them here: A Practical Introduction to Art for the Absolute Beginner (slides). Will have video and audio as soon as Mikey is done processing it.

Beginning to emerge from my blogging siesta these past few months so there should be lots more coming soon on diverse topics such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Logrotate, and Grabb.it...

I'll be speaking this Thursday at the first ever UrHo Talks event (we're still working on the name). My talk is titled "A Practical Introduction to Art for the Absolute Beginner". It's a whirlwind tour through art history, theory, and historiography meant to make you better at looking at and reading about art. It was inspired by Mikey's post contemplating whether or not he's an artist.

It'll be a night of high culture: Claire will be showing a selection of films by Charles and Ray Eames, Matthew Stadler will be giving a lecture, and Veneer Magazine editor, Aaron Flint Jamison will be doing something as well. Each of the presentations will be about 20-30 minutes and it should be informal and fun.

Here are the details:

Thursday, May 10
Mississppi Ballroom (833 N. Shaver Street)
7 pm

I'll post the slides here after the talk. Also, we're hoping to record the event in some way, so I may have audio or video to post as well at some point.

"Untitled (Table & Chairs)," 1999, oil and wax on paper, 469.9 by 350.5 inches

Thought:

I've had Toba Khedoori sitting in my inbox of interesting artists for more than a year now, ever since I first saw her work in Vitamin P. I've often thought about writing something up about her for this blog and she was high on my list of candidates as soon as I started this current art-writing sprint. Trouble is pretty soon after I discovered Khedoori, I found Jerry Saltz's essay about her work, "Immense Miniatures," from the Village Voice. And since Saltz just totally nailed all of things I'd thought of to say about Khedoori's work, I was left without anything further of value to add.

So, in the spirit of this lots-of-artists project I'm doing here, I thought I quote some of Saltz's essay here and simply point you towards the rest of it. Enjoy:

Three facts of biography seem pertinent to Toba Khedoori's giant, space-filled drawings. First, she lives in Los Angeles, although she was born and raised in Australia. Second, she is an identical twin (her sister is Rachel Khedoori, an artist who also lives and works in Los Angeles). A distant but fascinating third (and -- like the other two -- one the artist might find objectionable) is that her family is originally from Iraq. Her cultural heritage includes the Persian miniature, fine of line and exquisite of detail.

[...]

Khedoori is a visionary minimalist -- an artist who depicts minimalism's three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. She draws on enormous sheets of paper that have the effect of immense miniatures, or mirages, shimmering in and out of sight: you do a lot of blinking and eye rubbing around her work. Her subjects are man-made places and things: doors, rooms, furniture and buildings; all of them strikingly devoid of any sign of life. Although her pared-down images can be likened to the big, empty space of Ed Ruscha (without the irony), or the uninflected expanses of Vija Celmins, she is emerging as something like her generation's Agnes Martin: an artist of metaphysical refinement and restraint.

"Untitled (doors)", 1996, oil paint and wax on paper, 11 by 19.5 feet

Links:

• Wikipedia page
• exhibit at David Wirner
• Khedoori on the-artists.org
• exhibit at Regen Projects
• exhibit at Whitechapel
• "Immense Miniatures," essay by Jerry Saltz
• appearance in Vitamin P

"Untitled (doors)" detail

"Help", 2005, watercolor on paper, 31.5 by 44.5 inches.

Thought:

Hankang Huang's paintings are about humor, which is not to say that they're particularly funny, or meant to be. Instead of aiming for laughs themselves, Huang's delicately drawn and deliberately textured watercolors explore the logic of diverse kinds of jokes.

The first and most obvious kind is the pun. In speech or text, a pun is "the humorous use of a word or phrase so as to emphasize or suggest its different meanings or applications, or the use of words that are alike or nearly alike in sound but different in meaning; a play on words."¹ Translated into the visual realm, then, puns can be found in images used in humorously inappropriate contexts or the replacement of one image with another that shares a similar shape.

Huang's "Help" (pictured above) is a virtual illustration of that definition.

Nowadays, puns are associated with an antiquarian comedic aesthetic. They bring to mind the Borsht Belt and early television variety shows. Two other, more contemporary, Humor Strategies also find their way into Huang's work: the anarchic surrealism of characteristic of 60s comedy typified by Monty Python and the dry, detached, raised-eyebrow irony of the recent concluded Seinfeldian era.

"Run into" is a great example of Huang's take on 60s anarchy:

"Run into", 2005, watercolor on paper, 31.5 by 44.5 inches.

The painting's imagery combines with its title to imply an action: a lion running running between the legs of a woman and up into her body. This little surrealist haiku of a picture incorporates many of the most used parts of the Python vocabulary: violation of the body, hyper-sexualization, gender ambiguity, etc.

By contrast, "The final utilization of Tank," is very 90s:

"The final utilization of Tank", 2005, 31.5 by 44.5 inches, watercolor on paper.

At first glance, this picture looks like a simple visual pun: the tank's turret standing in for a clothesline. But there's something in the particulars of tone here that makes the situation more complex. Handled differently, a picture of (children's?) laundry hung out to dry at the end of a tank's gun could be overtly political. It could be played as agitprop. Huang's take, however, is totally detached. The Tank looks like a crumpled paper toy. The colors are all equally faded and the brushy, liquid texture of the watercoloring is even across all the objects. The completely flat white background denies us any clues that could even suggest a political context.

These strategies echo the mundane, deflating comedy of Seinfeld and its 90s brethren. Potentially 'heavy' issues like race and discrimination aren't distinguished from trivia like looking for your car in a parking lot or waiting in line at a chinese restaurant. No part of the world seems to touch the characters much and the biggest response a situation can gleam is a knowing chuckle (with an eye towards the studio audience).

Just as critical academic writing about comedy tends towards the jargonic and highly conceptual, Huang's pictures have an abstract self-referential quality to them. Whereas successful humor pulls us immediately past the artistry of its means and into the physically uncontrollable act of laughing, Huang's paintings keep us stuck doing the serious and difficult work of examining its mechanism.

Press Release:

With his masterful handling of the medium of watercolor and his unconventional view of the world, Hankang Huang has created a body of work typified by the use of unexpected and compelling subject matter inspired by his experience of daily life in Paris. He gathers and transforms visual information from advertisements, the internet, television, magazines, newspapers and street life itself. Huang combines these elements in surprising juxtapositions that employ the use of metaphor and personal narrative. They include both social and political commentary, poignantly and often ironically rendered. For example, Final Utilization of the Tank suggests a peaceful alternative to warfare by using the tank’s elongated gun barrel to hang drying laundry. Run Into portrays a roaring male lion and a recumbent woman with legs spread in a carnal and unambiguously erotic moment. In an entirely different vein, On Evolution is a powerful image of a post-Darwinian, vaguely prehistoric skeleton, combining a human head and the body of a beast. While a Chinese influence is not immediately apparent in Huang’s choice of imagery, there is a pervasive, poetic stillness and a delicacy of touch in his use of watercolor that is reminiscent of the spiritual and philosophical qualities often associated with Asian art. Hankang Huang was born in 1977 in Suzhou in the Jiangsu province of China, and emigrated to Paris in 2001 where he currently lives and works. He attended the Art College of Suzhou University in China and the École National Supérieure d’ARTS, Paris-Cergy.

Links:

• Exhibition at Danese Gallery

"stampographic panorama (detail)", 2003, collaged stamps, ink on paper, 60 by 16 inches.

Thought:

Jonathan Herder collages together thousands of US postal stamps to produce large scale landscapes that playfully tweak the traditional image of the iconic American west. Treating each stamp as a single unit of color, Herder makes of himself a kind of physical pointillist or, better, a DIY digital photo-mosaicist. He even emphasizes this transmutation of stamp into pixel by leaving large ragged holes throughout his pictures and giving many of them irregular frayed-looking edges, both of which qualities recall the 'stair-stepping' and dropouts of lossy image compression.

The coloration of the source stamps serves Herder's western imagery perfectly. Most of these stamps are washed-out, translucent shades of brown, pink, and green and their combination perfectly evokes the plains and desserts of the American west. This color combo also happens to look a lot like the recently introduced forgery-proof color currency, pointing out a visual resonance between two major pieces of Americana that is hard to shake once you've noticed it.

Herder's compositions -- low slung, flat, and sparse -- also serve to place his work clearly in relationship to a particular tradition of American landscape painting. Whereas Thomas Cole and the other well-known romantics of the Hudson River School glorified the lush and dramatic landscape of the Northeastern seaboard, painters who traveled out west, such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran (who made the first paintings of Yosemite), trafficked in a harsher and more restrained vision of the American sublime: nearly featureless yellow plains interrupted by craggy outcroppings of rock.

This version of the American landscape evoked in Herder's work is home, not to Emerson's pantheistic Nature, which "always speaks of spirit," but to the rancher's homestead and the frontiersman's log cabin. This is the American mythical landscape where purification comes from pitched struggle with ungenerous climates and success scratched out by hard labor on poor land.

This is a strange and strident legacy to find sitting around on a simple postage stamp -- especially one that is vector drawn, digitally printed, widely retailed, and marketed through tie-ins with trendy electronic pop music.

Artist's Statement:

My current work is born of a fascination with the postage stamp and the desire to liberate its graphic potency from the mundane confines of bureaucratic purpose, so as to allow a less gravitational flirtation with the seductive states of certainty, the sublime and the heroic.

Links:

• Stampology at Pierogi 2000
• Eyebeam Reblog on show at The Drawing Center

"Night Desert", 2003, Postage stamps collaged on paper, 14 by 17 inches.

"Mall of America", 2004, gouache on paper, 38 by 50 inches.

Thought:

Amy Chan paints the universe you might find in the imagination of an especially nervous video game designer -- as if Philip Guston had somehow been made to serve as art director for Super Mario Bros. 2. In her work, the familiar surroundings of suburban America fracture into isolated islands separated by oceans of neutral space. With a running start you might be able to leap from one strip mall franchise to the next, but you'd probably need to be playing as Princess.

While her vertiginous way with architecture and landscape may also recall Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki (particularly 1986's air-faring fantasy, Castle in the Sky), Chan's heights imply falling much more clearly than flying. Buildings and land masses both threaten to slump down around us at any moment in a fit of Gustonian shlubbiness.

Chan also has a sharp eye for the portion of the color palette shared between Mario backgrounds and suburban surroundings; her paintings are mostly flat greens, muted browns, and dull grays punctuated by the occasional rich red and golden yellow. She applies this palette with a thin scrubby facture that is a far cry from the shiny perfection or physical insubstantiality that are the hallmarks of so much video game inspired art¹.

This is an interesting little friction point Chan's found between the most abstract concerns of mid-century High Modern painting and the aesthetic of an ascendant form of adolescent pop culture.

Artist's Statement:

My paintings use humor and appropriated imagery to convey the loneliness of the modern American landscape. My painting style is influenced by cartoon backdrops and decorative pattern, which gives the work an orderly yet fantastical quality. The combining of disparate imagery relates directly to my experience growing up in Connecticut, where nature, suburban development and historical remains closely crowd each other, but seldom mix.

Links:

• Chan on Artists' Space
• Chan on artcodex

"Lullaby Land", 2004, gouache on paper, 30 by 44 inches.

1. The upcoming documentary 8 Bit looks like it might provide a nice overview of this kind of work.[↩]

Note: This post inaugurates an experiment I'm trying with the hope of assuaging the growing group of readers and friends I've heard from in horror lately as the proportion of technical content around here has grown. On each weekday, I'm going to attempt to write briefly about one artist whose work I find interesting. I'll provide relevant reproductions and links and hopefully just enough of my own take on the work to prevent the posts from deteriorating into mere pointing. If they're what you're here for, Ruby/Rails tutorials and longer essays will continue apace simultaneously. Enjoy!

"Passing Shadows (chairs)" 2006, 20 x 24 inches, c-print.

Thought:

Millet's work resembles the series of dollhouses constructed by millionaire heiress and master criminal investigator Frances Glessner Lee to resemble actual real life crime scenes only stripped of their narrative encrustations to reveal a gothic essence.¹ There's something that miniature subjects do to the depth of field of photographs that gets me almost every time. The closeness of the camera exaggerates the distance between fore- and background so miniature interiors often seem even more immersive than would equivalent pictures of real-sized spaces. (The effect is especially noticeable with low or direct lighting.) This kind of exaggeration of space is a mainstay of the gothic aesthetic (think of The Shining and Disneyland's Haunted House) and it is a welcome relief in a photographic idiom dominated by the pseudo-narrative approach of a thousand junior Crewdsons.

Links:

• AdiaMillet.com
• NY Times
• portfolio on Mixed Greens
• artist's statement

1. Lee's work is excellently documented in photographer Corinne May Botz's book The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.[↩]

Note: This post, while long and somewhat rambling, was once longer and even more rambling. I excised a sizable intro, which, I hope, helps with readability. Unfortunately, the intro also added some useful context and was, if I do say so myself, snappily written and packed with insight. Typically, I came up with a half measure. I separated the intro out into a separate document. You can read it here. Read it if you're interested or if you just plain old have too much time on your hands.

James Elkins of the University of Chicago is a leader in the type of art history I studied in school. He's written a series of accessible and extraordinarily insightful books on the often overlooked practical influences on art, art history, and art education including What Painting Is, an examination of painters' physical relationship with paint itself; Why Art Cannot Be Taught, a scathing dissection of college and graduate level art education, with a particular emphasis on the irrationality of critiques; and What Happened To Art Criticism, a look at the vast body of non-academic writing produced about art nowadays and why it is almost totally irrelevant to the creation and appreciation of art.

I just finished another book of his called Stories of Art in which he examines the diversity of different available histories of art from the classic western narrative of the triumph of perspective (like the one most people study in school) through a massive Russian anthology called "Universal History of Art" which includes, in its volume on the 20th century alone, chapters on, amongst others, Indonesian, Icelandic, Burmese, Scandinavian, and Ethiopian art.

Elkins starts, however, with personal histories of art. He proceeds through a series of exercises meant to make himself conscious of his own perspective and he invites the reader to follow along. The first stage is relatively open-ended brainstorming. He draws his own favorite art and artists arranged as a constellation of stars around the central moon (in Elkin's case, "natural images"):

(click here for the full-size version)

The things that cluster around the center are more important to him and those around the edges are the eccentrics and outliers.

The goal here is self-representation:

To most people this constellation would be fairly meaningless or just quirky; but for me, it conjures the pattern of history that preoccupied me at the time [when it was drawn -- ed.], and it does so surprisingly strongly: as I look at it, I find myself being pulled back into that mind-set.

In other words, the exercise helps with externalizing your own patterns of thought so you can, in turn, think about them, make connections amongst them, and find the gaps between them. Elkins also says that it could help you "loosen the grip of your education and start looking for the pattern that history has for you."

I decided to try it. I didn't go quite so far as to make a pretty little picture with stars and clouds. But I did manage to write down a bunch of the things and people that make up my visual aesthetic, the art I've studied or seen that's made an impact on me:

(click here for the full-size version)

And do you know what? It worked. When I look at this list, I see something in common where maybe no one else would. At least in my head, all of these things match like the furnishings of a well-decorated house. I can see how new art that I come across (like Jochem Hendricks who I wrote about recently) fits into this pattern, which gives me a starting context for thinking about it. Also, I can see gaps in the pattern -- areas that I know only by their general outline (like 19th Century commercial illustration and early-Renaissance painting) and should investigate further as well as artists or styles closely-related to those appearing here but with which I am unfamiliar.

The success of this exercise got me thinking about other areas in which I could apply it. In the last few years, my interest in technology has gone from near nothing to beginning to rival my absorption in art. I thought I might get a clearer picture of the shape of this interest, and especially of its gaps, by undertaking Elkins' exercise again.

Instead of using my Moleskine for this one, I thought OmniOutliner might be more appropriate:

(click here for the full-size version)

Just like in the last case, this picture seems surprisingly coherent to me. Well, it's a little more anal retentive, obviously. Like any good productivity nerd, I just couldn't stop myself from dicking around in OmniOutliner for much longer than necessary, organizing the technical areas into a kind of map of my interests and connecting related ones with arrows.

What else can I say about this picture? For one, I can explain some of the connections that might not be obvious. For example, the line connecting "big games" and "municipal wifi" is Pac Manhattan, a class project of NYU ITP that used cell phones to play a giant round of human Pac Man in downtown New York. Which is also why Processing is nearby; it was invented at ITP. "Social networks" are connected to "big games" and "metaverse" through Massively Multiplayer Online Games like Second Life, as well as "frameworks (Ruby on Rails)" partially because of my experience in the social network of Rails developers but also because of how easy Rails makes it to create social networking sites on any subject (take, as a case study, Cuppin' created by my office mate Peat for RailsDay 2006). Beyond the obvious technical relationships, there are personal experiences and ideas like these connecting all of the rectangles in my diagram.

I wonder a bit about what would go in the lower left corner of this picture where there is now nothing, what whole area I might be missing. And I wonder about the two unconnected rectangles ("lifehacks" and "nanotech (K. Eric Drexler)"). I put them near the areas to which I thought they were related, but I didn't draw connecting arrows; I didn't feel the links were strong enough. Interestingly, since I drew this diagram, I found out that K. Eric Drexler invented the term social software, so maybe that box should be at the top of the chart, or maybe the edges of the diagram are connected like those of a real Pac Man game.

Anyway, if you have an area of expertise that you're looking to improve, if you want to figure out what direction to look for new and original ideas, making an Elkins Map might just point you right in the right direction. And, if it doesn't do the trick, Elkins has two more exercises waiting for you: The history of art imagined as a map and The history of art imagined as a coastline.

During college, I worked for a summer at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, an eccentric, and poignantly beautiful, victorian-style domestic museum housed in a storefront on Venice in Culver City, California.

Over the years since, I've kept in touch with David Wilson, The Museum's founder and auteur, visiting whenever I'm in LA. One of the many perks of maintaining this relationship (beyond Wilson's constantly surprising depths of personal warmth and technical knowledge) has been exposure to the international network of 'outsider' institutions to which The Museum belongs: from its neighbor, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, to St. Petersburg's Freud Dream Museum.

Today, I made my first pilgrimage to The Museum in more than a year and wasn't nearly disappointed on this count. While taking me on a tour of the now nearly complete exhibit of Innuit and 19th century folk string art for which I helped The Museum acquire some funding, David showed me the materials for an attached temporary display of puzzles and toys for children on loan from the Institute for Figuring.

So, what, exactly, is the Institute for Figuring? David described it as "great" and "having to do with math". Knowing the exquisite caliber of David's taste in museums, I found this vague description tantalizing and committed to find out more.

According to their website:

The Institute For Figuring is an educational organization dedicated to enhancing the public understanding of figures and figuring techniques.

The Institute’s interests are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring.

I don't know how clear this makes things, but, linguistically at least, we are definitely in MJT territory -- elusive as to specifics, but clearly contained within that fascinating zone where the cold-eyed scientific swoons into the arms of the personal and poetic.

The relationship only seems closer when you realize that The Institute is itinerant (as The Museum was in its beginnings) and features, on its website, exhibits with titles such as Lithium Legs and Apocalyptic Photons, Philosophical Toys (the show making an appearance at the MJT), and, my personal favorite, Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane. Further, the website features a graphic (pictured at the top of this post) depicting "the location of the Institute for Figuring on the Mandelbrot Set", which is highly reminiscent of the famous allegorically crashed microscope in The Museum's front hall.

If you are at all interested in math, its history, and/or museological whimsy and/or nineteenth century science and live in New York or LA (seemingly the only places The Institute's work is currently available for viewing), I would love to hear some firsthand reports from its existing events and exhibitions. To facilitate, here are The Institute's calendar of events and its schedule of exhibitions.

Although it may be hard to tell from the above picture, contemporary artist Jochem Hendricks practices a drawing technique originally advanced by New York Art Students' League instructor Kimon Nicolaides in the 1920s.

Near the beginning of his posthumously-published philosophy-summarizing work, The Natural Way to Draw, Nicolaides introduces the practice of contour drawing this way:

Sit close to the model or object which you intend to draw and lean forward in your chair. Focus your eyes on some point -- any point will do -- along the contour of the model. (The contour approximates what is usually spoken of as the outline or edge.) Place the point of your pencil on the paper. Imagine that your pencil point is touching the model instead of the paper. Without taking your eyes off the model, wait until you are convinced that the pencil is touching that point on the model upon which your eyes are fastened.

Then move your eye slowly along the contour of the model and move the pencil slowly along the paper. As you do this, keep the conviction that the pencil point is actually touching the contour. Be guided more by the sense of touch than by sight. This means that you must draw without looking at the paper, continuously looking at the model.

Contour drawing is about touch. Nicolaides directs the student to make his eye into the vehicle by which his pencil comes into contact with the object, to convince himself that his "pencil point is touching the model instead of the paper". The classical goal of keeping the proportions of the drawing 'correct', of ensuring that it corresponds to the appearance of the model, is forgotten. In fact, the student is explicitly prohibited from looking at the developing drawing in order to ensure these proportions. The goal here is a different kind of accuracy, tactile, physical, and direct rather than graphical or illustrative. And these are exactly the qualities towards which Hendriks' works strives.

Hendricks makes digitally-aided contour drawings. He uses a head-mounted scanner to track the movements of his eyes while he looks at his subjects. His final drawings constitute printouts, reports of the history of these movements. Through this system, Hendricks achieves a kind of bionic version of Nicolaides' proposed unity of pencil and eye. Rather than mediating his vision via classical draughtsmanly craft, he uses the contemporary sources of objectivity: digital sensors, computer-aided image processing, and high-resolution laser printing.

The results are similar in meaning and general appearance to Nicolaides' examples and those of his students (look here for a typical example), though they diverge in texture and breadth of subject matter. They have a kind of visible digital 'grain', or roughness and their groping-quality, which they share with traditional contour drawings, is sharper, more angular.

Finally, because of the nature of his drawing tools, Hendriks is able to make contour drawings of 'internal' subjects not traditionally visible.

Light:

and its after-image:

(I first found Hendriks' work via David Ross's 010101: Art in Technological Times)