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Archives for the 'Art' Category

Urban Safaris: Graffiti Sites Considered for Heritage Protection

Simon at Ballardian says Melbourne is not quite as lovely as the Treehugger article I linked to suggests:

[The] Treehugger article only explores Melbourne’s inner city. The suburbs are a different matter. Perhaps the overseas versions might weed out the worrying strain of Mad Max style behaviour that sees cyclists as game to be hunted.

But then again, such behaviour inspired Mad Max itself, one of the finest films ever made.

Well, it may not be a “pedestrian paradise,” but Melbourne is in the middle of a debate that could lead to some curious developments in urban landscapes around the world. Australia’s National Trust and Heritage Victoria is considering graffiti for heritage protection (via.)

Scott Hilditch, chief executive of Graffiti Hurts Australia, says that protecting graffiti would effectively condone acts of vandalism and cost the Australian government over $260 million (U.S. $250 million) a year to clean up.

Some artists oppose the idea as well, protesting that it is contrary to the spirit of the art form itself. Melbourne curator and artist Andrew Mac says it would interfere with the natural process of street art: “The work is ephemeral. It’s not meant to last. It lasts purely as long as the weather and other graffiti artists allow it to last.” Mac also feels that the councils backing protection may have real estate motives in mind, such as promoting graffiti sites to fuel tourism.

The Banksy House

A London suburban Victorian terrace house tagged by Banksy famously went for bid at four hundred thousand dollars, “a buyer would receive the mural—with the house thrown in ‘for free.’” The house was later destroyed by “vandals” — nevertheless — maybe therein lies the answer to our national housing crisis.

We could send Swoon and Elbow-Toe to the poorest neighborhoods in Cleveland, Washington Dc, Detroit, and elsewhere. Why stop at the cities? We could tag barns in North Dakota too. I’d pay a lot to live in a Swoon-tagged house. And I’d certainly move in a neighborhood I’d never otherwise consider in order to do so. But bidding would be fierce. We could see these properties turning into hipster summer homes, for when the trust fund PBR drinkers want to rough it in the “Common People” sense.

Anyone can see street art, not just the people willing to step in a gallery. And that adds value. The more eyes on a work of art, (usually) the more valuable it becomes (although diminishing marginal returns plays here too.) This is why artists will often reduce the price of their work to display it in a museum rather than sell it to someone for his personal collection.

If art economics is difficult to understand, the economics of street art is unprecedented in its confusion. In England, Banksy is as famous as Damon Alburn and earl grey tea. His prints sell for millions. But this month, one of his pieces was whitewashed in Northern London.

Art critics know that street art and graffiti refer to very different things. As Hrag Vartanian put it, “What appears to differentiate street art from its graffiti predecessor are two things: the self-consciousness in its conversation with the city and its lack of the aggression and violence.” But city workers can’t be bothered to appreciate the difference, and maybe there is aesthetic merit to be gleaned from its aggressive older cousin.

I think the Australian preservationists are on to something, and one day we all will be thinking bigger. Maybe downtown Detroit will be heralded as an architecture splendor — an UNESCO site, the modern day Cesky Krumlov. Tourists in fannypacks and shorts will motorbus out to see it, and marvel at the public artwork as they would walking through Florence, Italy.

Already tourists enjoy the spectacle of poverty. When I was in South Africa a few years ago, i was shocked at the opportunities to visit the shantytowns (”Townships”) by bus tours. Brazil is notorious for its “Favela tours.” Here’s a good post on poverty tourism by Vagabondish, explaining how to minimize the exploitation of the people who live in these areas:

I think that if it’s managed by real, interested professionals, and sensible ground rules are set – don’t take photographs, don’t give money or candy away (donate through a suitable charity or organization instead), stay in small groups, and so on – then perhaps poverty tourism really does provide some benefits for the locals. And at this stage in its development, when it’s mostly undertaken by fairly seasoned travelers who are genuinely interested in understanding more about a country and its people, it seems that such tours can truly be managed in this way. My fear is that poverty tourism could become a more mainstream activity, and money-hungry travel agents will start sending in large air-conditioned buses full of ignorant tourists snapping hundreds of pictures, and then the rot will really set in.

Still, I can’t feel comfortable with the idea of the New Orleans disaster tours. Something about busing out to see a someone’s personal possessions strewn about, reduced to trash and chaos, bothers me more than seeing human faces of a tragedy.

Art by Elbow-Toe

Open Source Art: Will There Ever Be Another Lily Chou-Chou?

All About Lily Chou-Chou is one of my favorites, and thanks to Youtube you can spend all day watching these dizzyingly beautiful clips. Shunji Iwai’s 2001 film somehow makes the activity on a message board about the fictional musician, just fascinating to watch.

It began as an online novel about two friends entering high school. Readers were allowed to post to the BBS alongside Iwai’s fictional characters. Before long there was a screenplay — one that’s uniquely nonlinear due to its unconventional creative direction. Some of the content in the film was taken straight out of their posts.

Fast Company’s Kevin Ohannessian, remarking on the film, once asked whether transparency could help creative writers:

Shouldn’t creative writing be as transparent as other steps in the process? Designers show mock-ups and various versions of projects to other team members; and we are always pushing transparency in leadership here at the magazine. Except for the editor, how many others see a story’s evolution? This is another place for innovation, letting team-members contribute to the copy writing in a project.

Yes in theory, but no in practice. Show me a confident writer and I’ll show you a bad one. While Lily Chou-Chou’s success owes to its collaboration, it is a rare case.
Indiana University cognitive scientist Robert Goldstone might know why, “It turns out not to be effective if different inventors and labs see exactly what everyone else is doing because of the human tendency to glom onto the current ‘best’ solution.”

This study used a virtual environment in which study participants worked in specifically designed groups to solve a problem. Participants guessed numbers between 1 and 100, with each number having a hidden value. The goal was for individuals to accumulate the highest score through several rounds of guessing. Across different conditions, the relationship between guesses and scores could either be simple or complex. The participants saw the results of their own guesses and some or all of the guesses of the others in their group.

In the “fully connected” group, everyone’s work was completely accessible to everyone else — much like a tight-knit family or small town. In the “locally connected” group, participants primarily were aware of what their neighbors, or the people on either side, were doing. In the “small world” group, participants also were primarily aware of what their neighbors were doing, but they also had a few distant connections that let them send or retrieve good ideas from outside of their neighborhood.

Goldstone found that the fully connected groups performed the best when solving simple problems. Small world groups, however, performed better on more difficult problems. For these problems, the truism “The more information, the better” is not valid.

“The small world network preserves diversity,” Goldstone said. “One clique could be coming up with one answer, another clique could be coming up with another. As a result, the group as a whole is searching the problem space more effectively. For hard problems, connecting people by small world networks offers a good compromise between having members explore a variety of innovations, while still quickly disseminating promising innovations throughout the group.

I tend to skip over co-authored books, even match-ups of my favorite writers. That is why I’m inclined to think A Million Penguins, the just completed wiki-novel, is more of an accomplishment in coordination rather than great literature. Is it, as James M. Larkin writes in The Crimson, “A Mere Novelty?” He finds the novel itself is terrible, but the accompanying research report makes for better reading:

First, it supports to some extent previous attempts to label the Web the angriest medium ever, also shored up by the majority of comments below this paper’s editorials. Take the example of ‘Pabruce,’ the most active contributor to the novel and its ready diva. Among other things, Pabruce introduced a non-lethal drug called strychnine that would become a “code word for global warming”. When another user wrote his theatrical voice into the novel, however, this Ms. Ross figure deleted all his edits, nearly scuttling the nascent work. Days later, he returned, chastened, as ‘Lewis Oswald.’

This degree of anonymous strife and petulance would certainly threaten any great novel’s composition: Imagine if Melville and Hawthorne had been sniping at one another out in antebellum Western Massachusetts, instead of spending spring days together. There might be no Moby Dick, no Scarlet Letter. High-school reading lists would, frankly, become much more tolerable.

No, the old folks never had to deal with spiteful “trolls,” the progeny of a device that allows the dispatch of hateful, threatening messages to others without any spoken or visual contact—risk-free. But they also lived in an age bereft of the neurotic self-awareness of our own; this is drawn into stark relief by “A Million Penguins.” It’s not long before things become hopelessly meta, as in George’s mid-narrative musing: to Jim’s question, “So a community can write a novel?” he answers, “Yes, but only a humorous one…It is humor that is shared by a community.”

I am open to the possibility of another All About Lily Chou-Chou. But in almost ten years, I’ve yet to see anything that comes close. On the other hand, I’m excited to see how A Swarm of Angels progresses. This project isn’t just internet-created, it’s internet funded. Another successful project is Jesse Reklaw’s webcomic Slow Wave (via,) “a collective dream diary authored by different people from around the world.”

Posted by Joanne on May 9, 2008 | Link

Collection or Clutter: Do You Toss or Save Grampa’s Old Paintings?

“Future Tennis Stars” from the PSB Thrift Store Painting Gallery

Last month, I finally threw out a dozen paintings I made in high school, but not without photographing them first. The paintings are angry, amateurish, and hasty — some I spent little more than several minutes on — but they are a part of me. I may never look at these files again, but the thought of losing these pictures entirely to my unreliable memory filled me with anxiety for many years until I finally got them out.

Everyone has an aunt or grandparent that paints, but there is limited bathroom wall space for fruit bowl still lifes. We like to think there is value in a painting just for being a painting, but there isn’t. If you, as the descendent of a deceased “artist” cannot bother to store their collection in your attic, than it costs more than it is worth. I wonder how Salvation Army deals with the glut of artistic donations. Do they burn them? A lot of thrift store goods are bought in bulk by Haitian and African immigrants to bring back to their home countries, or are simply donated (this is detailed in a wonderful short documentary called Secondhand Pepe.) But few if anyone in the third world overseas is hankering for an 11×25 seascape.

Childhood mementos are just as sacred. How many of your old dresses and toys are in your mother’s attic? At a book reading last fall, William Gibson explained the predicament of wanting to see an old toy from childhood, but not caring enough to actually buy it. His solution was to save a search on eBay for it, and when the toy was finally listed, he saved the images to his desktop. If you grew up in the 80s you might recall the Sylvanian families. Here is every reason to dump (or sell) that old box of them somewhere.

Obviously the experience of an object as an image is different than as a shape. And the sentimental impulse just might not be there without it. Says Art Fag City on this subject:

People experience sculpture differently than painting for example, because there is a different physical and spatial relationship to the object. In many ways these concepts remain the same when viewing art on a computer even if the variables change. So for example, unlike a photograph or a sculpture, a net artist has less control over a viewers interaction with its framing mechanisms. The size of screen or the color of the browser a user choses to view their work in, vary from household to household, and there’s very little an artist can do to customize that experience. Other aspects remain constant — viewers will experience work on a flat screen, images will be always seen at 72 dpi, they will always be framed by a browser, in all likelihood the smallest screen size will be 800 pixels which informs how an artist works.

All of this of course is old hat to designers and net artists, who have been working with this set of problems for a while. However, for those who don’t think about these concerns all that often, it’s worth remarking that a large part of an artist’s web practice — whether they think too much about it or not — is implicitly concerned with image file management and display. In other words, decisions about the size and placement of a jpg or video file are always being made. In this way, I see a lot of aesthetic similarities between net art to collage and photography, because frame, composition, and layering, are always a concern.

The tactile experience is often what makes objects meaningful to us. Other things, like books and moleskines, are too time consuming to transfer. Somethings aren’t even worth the disk space when you really think about it. But you never know when it comes to photos. Unclutterer recommended the snap-and-save method in recent post. One of the commenters says:

About 25 years ago, while in college, I took a picture of three people that I have not seen since. They were good friends at the time, but school ended, we all moved on. Although I often came across that picture and had fond memories of those people, I would also think, “Why do I have these piles of pictures of things, or in this case, people, who I will never see again?” So, about six months ago, I started sorting, and tossing old pictures, trying to unclutter– including that picture.

Flash forward to two months ago. I was visiting a hospital as part of my clinicals as a student nurse. I recognized one of the nurses, but couldn’t place her. It was driving me crazy. We started talking, and one of the first things out of her mouth was, “You used to live in the dorm right across from us, 25 years ago.” You guessed it. She was in the picture that I threw out. I should have scanned it. I still have it on my todo list to look through my negatives and see if I can resurrect it (I think that day of uncluttered was spent in front of a shredder). To make matters worse, her old boyfriend, that she never fully got over, was in the picture as well, and she wanted to see the picture.

But these things happen. I find the less I save, the more I value what I do save. It isn’t worth it to feel sentimental for a garage full of what might be garbage, when you can really cherish a few select things.

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.

Archives for the 'Art' Category

Urban Safaris: Graffiti Sites Considered for Heritage Protection

Open Source Art: Will There Ever Be Another Lily Chou-Chou?

Collection or Clutter: Do You Toss or Save Grampa’s Old Paintings?

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