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Archives for March 2008

“Mock-Ups in Close-Up,” an 80-minute video on 80 different architectural mock-ups used in films. Now playing at The Storefront for Art and Architecture (via)

Really Freehand: Comics Going Digital

BitStrips debuted at SXSW, and it’s pretty much the only thing I remember from the trade show. Attendees immediately used it to illustrate conference shenanigans like the after parties and Sarah Lacy’s infamous “interview” with Mark Zuckerberg.

It is a little tricky to figure out at first, but as your avatars are saved and can be shared with friends, it gets quicker with frequent use. I hate to say that Bitstrips is this year’s ___, but it’s definitely a breakthrough app that you’re going to see illustrating blog posts all over the place from now on.

Bitstrips (like ZingFu and Toolet) is new to bloggers, but cartoonists have been using software for years to sidestep tedious, repetitive tasks. This is a debate among cartoonists over software as selling out. Last years, Stuart Immonen wrote a strong dissenting article for Comic Book Resources, admitting he uses tools like Google SketchUp, Photoshop, and the Creative Commons photo library:

Face it, deadlines are murder, especially when they come around every thirty days or so. The sheer volume is astonishing; even with a lowball mean estimate of four panels per page, the typical monthly superhero comic boasts nearly 90 separate drawings each issue– that’s over a thousand a year! I don’t think there’s another job in the commercial arts field which is similarly demanding. The comic artist’s motto might very well be “by any means necessary.”

It’s no wonder artists condescend to using various tricks in order to try keep up. Some have an arsenal of stock poses and expressions from which to choose; other use assistants to contribute to background drawings; others fill empty space with incoherent linework, or lots of silhouetted figures; still others use that dirtiest of dirty tricks– photo reference.

Recently, drawing the human figure from life has come under heavy fire, and indeed it seems like there have always been macho artists who have dismissed the practice, claiming some superiority through their intimate and intricate knowledge of human and animal anatomy; through their natural ability to “work it out with a pencil.” However, not all of us are so gifted, and when the editor starts to call for more pages, one is often forced to resort to the methods closest at hand.

Photoreferencing has suffered under the pejorative euphemisms of “copying”, “swiping”, “stealing” (not to be confused with “aping”, implying a (possibly still unsavoury) talent for mimicry) or that most damning of epithets, “cheating”, and without temperance, the otherwise competent artist can easily lapse into outright plagiarism. Whether or not the harangued artist intends to appropriate someone else’s work or to merely quote it– what Thomas Mann ennobled as “higher cribbing”– is irrelevant; of late, the artist who uses reference material is a pariah…

Despite my bristling reaction all those years ago, I shamelessly admit that the computer has radically altered how I draw, and how I think about drawing. It’s improved my speed, and I think, my creativity. I still use a pencil, but it’s not the only tool in the shed.

I know it’s cooler to call them “comics,” but I only really read them graphic novel-length. I like to sit down with a full book of a series and read it all in an evening — sort of like my preference for literature over poetry (although that is such a pretentious analogy anyone who is already annoyed I legitamized the term graphic novel likely hates me now.) Unfortunately, novel-length comics could take a lifetime to make. I saw Charles Burns speak at Brookline Booksmith a few months ago and someone in the audience told him it was so frustrating to wait as long as he did for the next in the series. Burns explained he’d been working as hard has he could.

There really aren’t any obscure graphic novelists, because so few ever finish their attempts. Very few people have the almost counterintuitive skills required to make one: awesome imagination and preternatural patience.

While a cartoonist might be able to get away with Photoshop and other “cheats” in storytelling, there is a limit to which software can be employed. A graphic novel composed with Bitcomics would be like Ernest Hemingway translating Mrs. Dalloway (another pretentious analogy, sorry!) The appeal is in the organic form of the images and the great detailing that computers just cannot do. (By the way, I have no idea if Charles Burns uses anything other than pen and paper. I just mentioned him earlier, because I saw him speak recently.)

I just got finished reading Rob Walker’s “Buying In,” (also, at SXSW.) Toward the end, he discusses Etsy and trends toward homemade goods. The women (90% of sellers are female) seem to agree that outside some infuriating instances of mass marketers like Urban Outfitters ripping off Etsy designs; the pseudo-homemade stuff you might find at Target is actually good for their business. People get used to the idea of “homemade” and start to value the difference between something an individual took time to create by hand, and an items that only appears that way.

I can’t help but think that mass-produced comics might create a similar respect for the more detailed and labored work that can only be done with a pen and paper. After drawing the cover of the Believer for years, in January Charles Burns was finally the subject (it was also the 50th issue.) Maybe the comic is this year’s ____.

Fantasies Embodied

For an artist, the quest to find the ideal woman is conflated with the capacity to create her — and that depends on one’s true talent. Botticelli, Modigliani, any painter of portraits is defining his idea of beauty. Curiously, some artists chose wives they believe resemble the women in their art work. Is it a sixth sense or just rationale?

It was love at first sight for Hans Bellmer when he met Unica Zurn. He said she resembled the perverse dolls he sculpted and painted. Some critics mistake his work as violent toward women, but his violence is directed at the Aryan ideal of women (He began his doll series in Berlin in 1933, becoming more prolific after moving to Paris in 1938, while befriending the Surrealists.)

If Zurn did not really resemble the dolls in physical likeness, she resembled their brokeness, figuratively. “One can see me as the type of man with antennae that can pick up a potential woman-victim … It remains to be seen if I immediately, from the first time we met, “sensed” that Unica was a victim. If Unica seriously asked herself this question, which she may have done, she would, I think, reply YES!” Hans Bellmer wrote a letter to his psychiatrist friend in 1964.

dolls of Hans Belmer.jpg artnet.com Magazine Reviews - The Chimeras of Unica Zurn.jpg

Artnet describes her life as reading “a bit like a Freudian case study.” Zurn, whose artistic talent matches Bellmer’s, and was also a gifted fiction writer, was plagued with deep depression and schizophrenia. She threw herself out to window to her death in 1970, (Bellmer died of old age shortly after.) It looks like I’m not the only one who thought the underrated film Love Object was a tribute to them.

In a recent profile in the New Yorker, (accompanied by this amazing portrait by Elinor Carucci,) John Currin says he was encouraged by a friend to check out a performance, because one of the artists looked like the girls he was obsessively painting. Soon they were married. But Rachel Feinstein Currin, like Zurn, is no blank canvas one might project any fantasy upon. What likely happened is her vitality brought Currin’s images to life.

Michael Guzzaniga, author of “The Mind’s Past” likes to play a somewhat cruel party trick. He will tell someone he’s thinking of four numbers that are in a pattern. After answering “no” to a several suggestions, he will then answer “yes,” to four in a row at random. After the experiment, he asks the participant what was his method for finding the answer. Rationale: everyone has one.So once love is discovered, simulacra of it begins to resemble one’s adored.

Even if Unica Zurn were Asian or forty years older, Ballmer would have found traces of her in his dolls. And Currin’s ladies are so exaggerated and parodied that plenty of wide-eyed voluptuous women could be said to resemble them.

So maybe the question is what is compels a person to draw people they’ve never seen.
Radiolab interviewed writer and painter Joe Andoe last spring. At one point in his life he was obsessively painting canvases of seemingly random images: horses, pastures, and the face of a young woman. As he let go to his obsessions a story began to emerge from the series, it was in fact a memory he’d suppressed for thirty years. I’m not going to reveal what happened as the piece is so well edited, and says so much about the interplay of the subconscious and the creative process, it’s a must-listen.

With Speed Graphic Cameras, Art is a Crime [Scene]

In a great city such as New York there are collections of artifacts and boneyards of information everywhere. Among these are dissertations that will never be read, codes that will never be deciphered, objects whose particular import will never be understood, and the traces of innumerable human beings lost to history once and for all, without monuments or descendants or living memory, just a name somewhere in an official record consulted rarely if at all. - Luc Sante

“Evidence: NYPD Crime Scene Photographs: 1914- 1918″, by Luc Sante

Detection and the police Luc Sante is to nonfiction literature what Jim Jarmusch is to film or Anthony Boudain is to food: a cool New Yorker that inexplicably gets cooler as he gets older.

“Low Life“, his account of turn-of-the-century prostitutes, thieves, and toughs in Alphabet City is on the bookshelf of every literate five boroughs resident, but “Evidence,” his collection of progressive era NYPD crime scene photos, is what I like to look at on a stormy night.

Researching “Low Life,” an archivist asked if he’d be interested in inspecting the police department photo collection. “Nothing in the reams of photographic documentation I’d sorted through — countless inert pictures of buildings, posed ranks of functionaries, fuzzy views of empty streets devoid of detail — had prepared me for this. Here was a true record of the texture and grain of lost New York, laid bare by the circumstances of murder. Lives stopped by razor or bullet were frozen by a flash of powder, the lens according these lives lives their properties — their petticoats and button shoes and calenders and cuspidors and beer bottles and wallpaper. The paintings were not just detailed documents, either, but astonishing works in their medium. I thought I had come accross the traces of a forgotten master, who seemed to prefigure the pitiless flashlit realism of Weegee while having affinities to Eugene Atget’s passionate documentary lyricism. A style seemed to announce itself, deliberate and inimitable.”

He presents these photos as rare glimpses into people’s daily lives. No one straightened up their house for company or put on a fresh tie for the camera. But the old-timeyness of the victims creates a distance. “These pictures taken so long ago that the people in them would not be dead even if they had enjoyed long and untroubled lives, exist in an eternal present that preserves their subjects between extinction and decay. The ones without bodies in them–nearly all of these are uncaptioned–are just as ominous, even viewed separately. Taken together, they become stills from a film, a nightmare ride from room to room in the small hours: the working day of a professional witness or fingerprinter of corpses, perhaps, but without the protective cynicism of such a trade…There is a mystery here which is only partly accounted for by the period clothes and the wide-angle lens and the flash powder. If photographs are supposed to freeze time, these crystalize what is already frozen, the aftermath of violence, like a voice-print of a scream. If photographs extend life, in memory and imagination, these extend death, not as a permanent condition the way tombstones do, but as a stage, an active moment of inactivity.”

But, as Roland Barthes has said, every photograph is about death. What makes Luc Sante’s book standout from an entire genre of early crime scene photography books is not just his insightful analysis, but the years in which these photographs take place. In 1914, Speed graphic cameras (or press cameras, what Weegee used in the 30s and 40s) were in use for only two years, and most police departments couldn’t afford them. Sante writes about thinking all the photographs were the work of a “single artist,” but it was “not so much the style as the method” that made them seem cohesive. The actual equipment is believe to be a Bird’s Eye, with a high caliber wide-angle lens (just under a fish eye lens.) There was likely only one camera for the department, shared among several photographers, and the labor of pulling a coat over one’s head for outdoor shots, changing plates, and other cumbersome tasks related to early camera equipment created. Ironically the limits to one’s creativity is what gives these photographs such a striking point-of-view. “Their ’style’ is only the result of conditions combined to cram the maximum amount of information into the frame: the most inclusive lens short of hallucinatory distortion, the most intense lighting, the most comprehensive framing and coverage of the subject.”

But the appeal of vintage crime photography books reflect just as much on contemporary aesthetics. There is Ashley Hope, who paints imaginary crime scenes. Fashion spreads routinely use it as a gimmick, Melanie Pullen has made a name for herself doing just that and a particularly ridiculous episode of America’s Next Top Model, proved that feminists are indeed humorless or the fashion industry is vacuous or both things at once. There’s even a trendy Lower East Side bar with yellow police tape on the ground.

But I don’t believe the “crime scene” as Hitchcockian camp dilutes the power of the raw images. One of my favorite photographs is by Enrique Metinides, an untitled work of a woman hiding her face in her elbow with the body of a dead young man beside her. They are both dressed in colorful, youthful clothes. He took thousands of photos of gruesome scenes in Mexico City, and while one is tempted to contemn them as exploitative without looking at them, it is impossible not to grasp the humanity and sensitivity of his vision when staring at the photography. Remarking on a show in London, Adrian Searle explains:

In effect, he shows us the city and its people, not just the random and cataclysmic event, but also its effect. He shows us, too, the inexplicable.Which is not to say in any way that Metinides’s photographs are lacking in humanity. Quite the opposite. They are overflowing with humanity. In fact, that is the real trouble with them - they show us too much humanity. In Metinides’s images, we don’t just see the body dragged out of the water after the drowning, we see the drowned man underwater, the grey corpse hovering at the bottom of the swimming pool. Or a body being dragged to the bank of a river, like some awful bait trawled at the end of a rope, the spectators on the far bank an inverted frieze reflected in the muddy water.We see things we feel we shouldn’t be looking at, but it is hard to drag our eyes away.

Last year a Dutch photography gallery had an exhibit of police photography, explaining that during the years 1965 - 1986, real art photographers were employed by the forensics department. A debate over the merit of the show went exactly as one might expect. And interestingly, if slightly off topic, The Frick Collection opens its doors for NYPD for “visual observation training” — to teach them how to observe all of their surroundings when investigating a crime scene.

Archives for March 2008

Really Freehand: Comics Going Digital

Fantasies Embodied

With Speed Graphic Cameras, Art is a Crime [Scene]

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