Stone Cold Pimpin'

I don't really know where to start getting my head around this one.

One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened.

Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat...That thing was never alive before it was grown.”

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A tres cool Flickr set.

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Who was the photographer, Marcus Keef? I'd like to know, but the Internet is rather quiet. What I do know is that his album cover art for the Vertigo, Neon, and Nepentha labels of the early '70s is very distinctive. Often gatefold, widescreen works, Keef's photos usually manipulate color, obsess about old British households, creepy interiors, dusty attics, and occasional shots of the band members sitting around looking lost and/or freaked out. I'm sure a lot of kids were weirded out by their older sibling's/family member's copy of the first Black Sabbath album, with that witch/old hag/meth head/Ozzy in drag on the cover, waiting outside her dilapidated old country barnhouse, waiting for you to come in for tea.

To me, it's like the dark flipside of the late '60s interest in nostalgia, all 1920s funfairs and post-WWI memorabilia. No, those people didn't come back from the war, and we shuttered up the attic with a dead man's things. Going to look for the past, these people found that it's, well, past. And dead. And eldritch, which is a perfect word for this.

Of course, not all of Keef's works were like this, like the awful bloody clown cover for Jimmy Campbell's "Half Baked" or the studio shot for Raw Material's "Time Is...". But for the most part, these two galleries show a definite style that evoke a certain period in British rock. You can almost feel the album covers with their matte finish, their musty, unplayed smell, and tiny detritus of hand rolled tobacco/weed that's fallen in the inner sleeve.

No album dates past 1976, and the best work is 1970-1973, so I wonder what became of him. Is he still alive?

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This horse fetus thingamydooder is the cutest, most angelic thing I've seen in a long time. All together now: awwwwwwwwwwwww.
However, it turns out that photographer Tim Flach, who took this and other amazing horse-themed photos, has an amazing eye for more than just the awwwwwww-some.

The method I used was to ask people who have spent their lives with this subject: what is it that really touched you about the horse? What is it that you remember? And as you ask people, they'll recount stories or things they experienced about a particular breed or how when they were a child they rode a Shetland pony, and what it meant to them. Shetlands are very intelligent and they also have the tendency to be very challenging. Most people who become quite good riders often start out with that kind of pony. If you ask them which pony has significance to them, they'll often cite the Shetland pony over all other ponies. So then what I did was I went to Shetland and spent a week literally within the Shetland islands to find the origin of each horse, and where it came from. So that you could be a child in an arena in Moscow and see a picture of where your pony had really come from and the environment that created it.

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South Carolina-based artist Hollis Brown Thornton uses a convoluted technique to transfer photos (into a moleskine!) and then work the image, removing the human and leaving something like a trail of milky smoke. Groovy.
His website and his Flickr stream.

By way of Moleskinerie.

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Scott Teplin draws/watercolors intricate Escher-like rooms devoid of people, but containing intriguing domestic goods and hidden vaults, all visibile through his Ukiyoe-meets-video game isometric view. I think, also, his style reminds me a bit of the artist on the HBJ editions of Stanislaw Lem books.

Here's a page at the Adam Baumgold Gallery, which is showing his works, including the latest, Alphaville. Here's his blog.

By way of Boing Boing.

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Fascinating and grisly.

The Kaibo Zonshinzu anatomy scrolls, painted in 1819 by Kyoto-area physician Yasukazu Minagaki (1784-1825), consist of beautifully realistic, if not gruesome, depictions of scientific human dissection.
Unlike European anatomical drawings of the time, which tended to depict the corpse as a living thing devoid of pain (and often in some sort of Greek pose), these realistic illustrations show blood and other fluids leaking from subjects with ghastly facial expressions.
The fact that the bodies used in scientific autopsies in Edo-period Japan generally belonged to heinous criminals executed by decapitation adds to the grisly nature of the illustrations.

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I don't know the artist, but these are cool. More here.

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Film Portrait (Incision) I
2005

John Stezaker collects postcards, movie portraits, stills and lobby cards with an archivist’s zeal. But the way in which they are re-functioned as art is not at all congruent with such an approach. One of the things that makes Stezaker’s practice so intriguing is the extent to which the works more or less follow Conceptual art orthodoxy up to when he makes his ‘cut’, bringing the two images together, after which all other decisions are intuited. The ‘idea’ of the works is straightforward and consistent, and Stezaker has constructed them in much the same way for more than 20 years: two different images are brought together, each destroyed in some important way in order to birth a new one. Yet the logic, or meaning, of the new images remains mysterious.

Through his signature use of photographic collage John Stezaker identifies mankind’s desire to portray an enhanced self and explores our acceptance or our suspicion of others' personas and the denial of our own.

John Stezaker is fascinated by the power of images and questions the authority of pictures found in books, magazines, postcards and encyclopaedias by directly intervening into their ordinary status.

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This photo by Ruth Bernhard is currently on display at the Portland Art Museum. In it's original print size, it's very compelling, sensuous, and yet surreal. As I thought about it, I began to wonder...surely I've seen this image before. Where??

Oh that's right, it was stolen for the not-very-good Boxing Helena movie.
Ruth Bernhard had a fascinating life. She was born in Berlin, studied art there too, moved to NYC, got involved with photography, had both female and male lovers, focused a lot of her work on the female nude, and died in San Francisco at 101. That's a long life.

"If I have chosen the female form in particular, it is because beauty has been debased and exploited in our sensual 20th century,” she told Margaretta K. Mitchell, author of “Ruth Bernhard: Between Art and Life” (2000). “Woman has been the subject of much that is sordid and cheap, especially in photography. To raise, to elevate, to endorse with timeless reverence the image of woman has been my mission."

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Found over at the always groovy World of Kane blog.

Belgian advertising illustrator Guy Peellaert was one of the first cartoonists to embrace Pop Art and incorporate Andy Warhol's appropriation of mass market iconography into his work. His first comic, Les aventures de Jodelle, (Jodelle's likeness modelled after yé-yé chanteuse Sylvie Vartan) appeared in 1966, swiftly followed by 'Pravda la Survireuse' (her likeness based on Françoise Hardy) for the magazine 'Hara-Kiri' in 1967.

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Now this is going to be cool.

In the next few entries, I’ll describe some of the things I’ve been doing instead of posting and journaling but let me begin by telling you about my newest book. It’s called “An Illustrated Life: Drawing inspiration from the private sketchbooks of artists, illustrators and designers” and it’s been so exciting to work on it. I contacted every person whose work I’ve admired over the years and asked them if they would be willing in sharing pages form their illustrated journals and allowing me to interview them about their process, their tools, how they use their books, and what impact it has on their lives. To my delight everyone I asked said they would be happy to be part of the project. I accumulated an embarrassment of riches: dozens of pages from more than fifty amazing people and now the book is overstuffed to bursting.

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Shintaro Kago is a very odd manga-ka, and his 16-page Abstraction is a bit like porno meets Chris Ware meets Art Spiegelman. NSFW but excellent.

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This has to be some of the freakiest stuff I've seen in some time. On the other hand, it's 2 a.m. in the morning. Help.

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A very odd Chinese painter. Although the artbabble go on about propaganda posters and such, isn't the manga influence obvious?

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Simple yet effective collage work. Reminds me of Russell Mills' work for the early Eno albums.

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So this morning I had a very odd dream that I removed all my skin and stood in front of the bathroom mirror checking myself out, looking like the Visible Man. I could see the exact reason why my neck was aching. I wondered whether my skin would snap back when I put it back on. (Don't worry, it did, quite nicely).

Much later in the day I wandered into a flowerchildgathering at the park near my house and met a girl there who painted my face. She had brought an art book to look out while picnicking and it was by Alex Grey. And there was the image from my dream (minus the spiritual aura stuff that he does.

So there you go! A very odd day. Paging Dr. Jung...

Posted by Ted Mills at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Going through some old files I came across an art postcard for an exhibition of Andrew Schoultz. I meant to blog about him at the time (2005), but forgot. The large scale of his art and the fine linework don't get fairly represented on the 'net, so seek him out if you have a chance. He has a thing for wood, elephants, and battles.

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This is very cool. The only bad thing is that it's not an actual deck. The graphic is available on Cafe Press as cards, T-shirts, and posters.

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That's all you really need to know, right?

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When I was staying with Phil near the Barbican, I picked up a pamphlet for the center's Tropicalia festival, a schedule that unfolds into a super cool poster by the artist Assume Vivid Astro Focus, a Brazil-born graphic artist who makes these wonderful pop art explosions, like PunchPin with a cup of mushroom tea. Of course, I missed the LAMOCA show.

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at Datajunkie (which doesn't have anything to do with technology, but is a blog about pulp novels and old comic books), they've unearthed these unpublished pages from datajunkie: a Prisoner comic book adaptation drawn by Jack Kirby! He only got a few pages into it, but it's good stuff, seeing one iconic program drawn in Kirby's blocky style. Check out this panorama of the Village. If only Kirby could have gotten the go-ahead. Who knows what his own Prisoner scripts would have been like.

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Using a specially modded camera and taken from a helicopter, Olivo Barbieri's photos render out the world we know into what looks like plastic models. These photos make me feel all weird and wonderful. Here's a short article on Barbieri along with a photo gallery. Awesome.

Update: BoingBoing posted this link a few days later (ha ha, beat ya!) and their users passed on two other links: A Japanese photographer doing the same thing and a tip on how to mod your own tilt-shift lens.

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Very cool Push Pin Studio-influenced art from Tadanori Yokoo found in this Mazda 110S L10A brochure from however many years ago. Found on Boing Boing, of course.

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Artist Dave Devries takes children's drawings of monsters and superheroes and replicates them as fine art. The results are brilliant and slightly frightening.

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There's so many good artist websites out there I can't blog 'em all. Barry's sketchblog is from an illustrator of children's books. I like his whimsical style and his attempt to post a sketch a day.

Posted by Ted Mills at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Vietnamese-American artistDuat Vu draws strange, Escher-like landscape and cannibalistic objects in a stark black 'n' white (and sometimes red) style. This was featured in the latest issue of Direct Art magazine, which I was too lazy to pick up.

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Creative Generalist posts this assortment of links covering an amazing public marionette performance in the city of Nantes, France. A little girl pops out of a space pod, rides a mechanical elephant, takes a nap, and much more. It's like a very bizarre Metal Hurlant strip come to life. And it wasn't done to promote a movie...imagine that.

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Another overlooked artform gets a boost with this very particular museum of ExLibris Bookplates. The site is Japanese, but the guy seems to collect Eastern European artists. There's some pretty strange stuff here. There's also a section of classic Art Deco plates. Groovy!

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NPR just had a report on rock poster artist Leia Bell Of course, being radio, I could only imagine what it looked like. I wasn't disappointed.

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This person's Flicker photos are all old matchbooks.

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Too cool. Apparently this has been going on for some time (so I suck, la la la). Best designs get printed on a limited run of t-shirts, all very affordable. This month is their Christmas blow-out sale, with shirts going for $10 each!

Threadless is an online, ongoing tee shirt design competition. Threadless receives over 200 tee shirt design submissions per week of which 4-6 of the highest scoring designs are printed and made available for purchase on our website each month. This system guarantees public interest in all of our product and has resulted in the discovery of some very amazing work over the years.

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The strange art of Frank Lobdell. Kooky, jazzy stuff, like relatives of that Dave Brubeck album cover. You know the one...who's the painter of that?

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In a recent Jim Woodring interview, the artist names two art books that changed his life. One, unsurprisingly, was on Surrealsim. The other was a book called As I See by Boris Artzybasheff. Before you could even say "Google", I found a page on him. Not only did he do 200+ covers for Time Magazine in the '50s, but his style is similar to Basil Wolverton and others. In fact, his range is very wide, from cartoony to realistic, from oils to woodcuts.

Other examples here, here, and here.

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You won't be surprised that I'm looking forward to this book, which may already be out.Last Gasp Online Catalog - POP SURREALISM: THE RISE OF UNDERGROUND ART. I'm curious at how much is "surrealism" and how much is wanting a better label. Artists include Anthony Ausgang, Glenn Barr, Tim Biskup, Kalynn Campbel, The Clayton Brothers, Joe Coleman, Camille Rose Garcia, Alex Gross, Don Ed Hardy, Charles Krafft, Liz McGrath, Scott Musgrove, Niagara, Marion Peck, The Pizz, Lisa Petrucci, Mark Ryden, Isabel Samaras, Todd Schorr, Shag, Robert Williams, Eric White, and XNO.
I don't know if Shag is exactly "surreal" so we'll see.
Anyway, here's an interview with the author Kirsten Anderson, who runs the Roq la Rue gallery in Seattle, which done started it all.

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The Cartoonist posted this link over the weekend to this online database of OZ magazine, a hippie/psychedelic zine from the U.K. that lasted five years. Check out the variety in the cover design. Never the same thing twice, graphically adventurous, bold (not too many words). And their readers were stoned out of their heads too! Yet they found the issue each time, how is that?

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More wonderful printwork, this time from Sapporo-based Yumiko Kayukawa. I dig this stuff, man, we need something like this up in S.B. By the way, I found this at a gallery site based in Palm Springs. On my one trip to the city I never managed to see anything like this, just "rich people art". I wish I had known this place existed!

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Once again, Danny Gregory points out another artist to take note of. Julie Dermansky does damn near everything, from photography to metalwork to "events" to paintings. The latter are in the neo-outsider style that is pretty common these days, and I quite like her series of Bishop Paintings.

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I have no idea who The Royal Art Lodge are, but it's some sort of Winnipeg-based collective. The work has a Shrigley-like feel to it, but more deadpan.
By way of The Cartoonist.

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Fans of surrealism, fantasy, and late '70s European illustration should find much to groove on in Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, a 400-page imaginary encyclopedia of a world similar to ours populated by bizarre creatures. The above site features a little background on the mysterious work, and links to illustrations. Totally out of print, used copies cost boogaloo bucks. (Or do they?) At least the Amazon link suggests other strange books, even if there's not a Codex in stock.
Serafini has a site, but it's under construction. There is, however, a site devoted to the Codex. And apparently Serafini is just updating the original "mysterious" work, the Voynich Manuscript.

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday was a day of lasts. It was last day at the S.B. Museum of Art to catch the Bo Bartlett exhibition, which I wanted to see again after a brief viewing a month ago. Bartlett is one of the latest in the new traditionalist (I'm sure there's some better name) school of American painting. He paints in oil, on big canvases, and depicts modern Americans in sometimes surreal settings that reference religious paintings of the old masters. He's modern, but the activities in his paintings seem timeless (there are no city scenes, no televisions, no consumer culture). His painting "Homecoming" (see above) shows a post-game bonfire at some high school stadium, but the activity seems like ancient ritual. A coach and a parent stand nearby, pointing off into the distance, discussing...what? The horizon is fields and water. Where are we? There are echoes of Hopper here, as well as Eakins. All his work has a great enigmatic quality to it, and they are very open texts. You bring what you want to them. His use of color is also astonishing, but the computer screen doesn't do it justice.
Also in its last day was Contemporary Arts Forum's "Videodrome" show, a daily program of recent video art. I hadn't been too lucky the days that I went in over the last month. Some video art is just atrocious--after patriotism, it is the last refuge of scoundrels. Only these scoundrels have DV cams and a few AfterEffects filters. Holly Mackay, whose title at CAF I've forgotten, but high on the ladder, invited me over for a final "best of" screening. Apart from a groovy short from Marco Brambilla called "Wall of Death" (various angles on a centrifugal stunt motorbike rider, looking like an old kinetoscope), I loved the collaborative shorts by Christoph Giradet and Matthias Muller (most recently known for their Hitchcock cutups). "Manual" cut together all these cutaway shots of scientific equipment, speakers, tape machines, and so on, from various 1950's Technicolor films and created an alienating universe of control, while a disembodied female voice tries to communicate something about memory and time. I also liked "Scratch," a similar set-up, this time using cutaway shots of record players from Hollywood films, looped like a runout groove. Both films were also good at fetishizing old technology. Holly and I agreed that we've definitely lost something when all machines lost dials and switches. Everything is run by a computer and a mouse these days.
Strangely enough, Muller's own solo video work was dull, yet you could see what he brought to their collaboration (ideas of isolation and alienation).

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I was surprised to hear, apparently several months late, that collage artist extraordinaire Jess Collins (later just known as Jess) had died this year. Jess is not very well known but his Max Ernst-meets-Lichtenstein cut-up of Dick Tracy comics, entitled "Tricky Cad" was a major influence on me as a teenager. You can find very small reproductions of the work in Pop Art books, but I've never the seen the thing close-up or in a decent reproduction. Surely these pieces are worth a reissue or a Taschen book of some kind. The one retrospective he had in 1993 produced a book that is now going for something like $75. Yikes.
Last month I traveled to San Francisco (I'm still working on the photo diary where you can see my journey) and in SFMOMA there were several large-scale works by him. At the time, however, I didn't know that Jess and Jess Collins were the same. One work was something close to 4x5 feet and was a collage of black and white engravings that he had then drawn as a whole, organic work. It was "everything but the kitchen sink" collage of the first order.
Read 2Blowhard's own blog entry on Jess, which is where I found the news.
I later wrote LACMA, where a number of Tricky Cad pieces are part of the collection, but the curator says that due to the fragile, all paper and glue nature of the work, they are not on display. I was happy, though, with the speed in which the curator got back to me (two hours).

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Talking about trompe l'oeil, I came across this site of oil paintings by Ron Francis, an Australian artist of trompe l'oeil. I prefer his oil work, as the hyper realism he uses in his murals translates into a Magritte-like dream state. This one and this one are particularly good, especially the early morning light seen in the latter.

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Here's a collaboration between Andrew Dunbar (photographer) and Anthony Chiappin (painter), a strange collection of grotesque bodypainting and trompe l'oeil. I wish the pics were a little bigger as it takes some looking to fully see all the figures and their poses.
By way of Everlasting Blort

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Most film geeks know Saul Bass as the master of the opening credit sequence. "Vertigo" and the original "Ocean's 11" both start off with famous Bass sequences. But what I wasn't aware of was that Bass designed many famous corporate logos, most of which will be immediately recognizable (Exxon, Girl Scouts, United Airlines).

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The Web is awash with starry-eyed reviews of Koolhaas' new Seattle Public Library building, and how oh-so-high tech it looks. Bringing it all down a few notches is my favorite curmudgeon, James Howard Kunstler:

Eyesore of the Month: "Koolhaas has named this top floor salon 'the living room,' an interesing confusion of typology. Guess what? This is not your home. This is a place of public assembly. But guess what also? There's only enough furniture for five people to sit down. It's not a reading room (no chairs and tables). It's not a lecture room (slanted atrium ceiling can't be darkened.) What the fuck is it?"

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For years David Barsalou painstakingly hunted down the original comic panels that formed the basis of Roy Lichtenstein's pop art. The full site is no longer up but all the comparison panels are. What did Lichtenstein add and what did he take away? And is this sampling? And can anybody sue?

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What a strange man, that Mark Ryden.

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Illustrator and "journaler" (I 'spose) Danny Gregory takes us on a trip through his 25 favorite books of the year. Only Danny likes diaries found in garage sales, sketchbooks, and all sorts of cool ephemera. (Note: If you roll over the photos, they will enlarge).

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I don't know how often Joe Sacco draws for Washington Monthly, but this one is pretty good.
"Meanwhile in America" by Joe Sacco

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