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Archive: ART >please note: some links may no longer be active.
An Unsentimental Journey
Robert Frank, the photographic master, the last human being it’s been said to discover anything new behind a viewfinder, collapsed in a filthy Chinese soup shop and no one had thought to bring along a camera. He looked like something from a Kandinsky painting—slumped between a wall and stool—sea green, limp, limbs akimbo. It would have made a good, unsentimental picture: a dead man and a bowl of soup. Frank would have liked it. The lighting was right. The shop was hidden away in the shadow of a Confucian temple in the ancient walled city of Pingyao, China, about 450 miles southwest of Beijing, where Frank had come as an honored guest of a photography festival. The city is a photographic dream, a 2,700-year-old dollhouse of clay brick, camels, coal embers, and carved cornices. So many photographers had descended upon the place that a picture of a man taking a picture of a man taking a picture of a man taking a picture of a picture was considered interesting enough and yet nobody at the dead man’s table had so much as a sketching tablet. Read the rest of Charlie LeDuff's interesting piece in Vanity Fair (via 3 Quarks Daily)
Lot No: 165, Sale 16221 at Bonham's on April 10; A rare Samanid slip-painted pottery Bowl Persia or East Transoxiana, 10th Century Estimate: £4,000 - 6,000
Entitled "I think nobody will find us." (via Hunto's Flickr photostream )
More interesting images from Benoit P. at Flickr
A Dewy red veined darter
Enjoy more of Martin Amm's spectacular images (via kottke.org)
'Snowy Owl
View more superb bird images captured by David Hemmings
Whoosh!
Mercurial, a beautiful, aptly named bronze by Jean Verschneider, circa 1905. Bonham's sale no. 16337; estimate: €22,000 - 28,000
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. – Susan Sontag
In the Istanbul Detention House Yard Nazim Hikmet was a Turkish activist who spent many years in prison, during which he wrote many poems. Here is the beginning of Istanbul'da, Tevkifane avlusunda, which, translated, is also the title of this post. In the Istanbul Detention House yard Read the rest of Hikmet's moving work at verbalprivilege (via Amitava Kumar)
Political Art With Impact
The phone rings; the number is withheld. It's Banksy. He wants to know whether I can go to Bethlehem over Christmas. He is putting on an exhibition, bringing together like-minded artists from all over the world to raise awareness of the situation in Palestine. Like the annual guerrilla art shows that have taken place in London for the past six years, it will be called "Santa's Ghetto". Two weeks later, I find myself involved in an experience that transforms my ideas about what artists can do in the face of oppression. We are living through an exciting time for political art. I have been an artist for 40 years, and my work has always focused on political and social issues. In the 1970s, I started making photo montage work, drawing on imagery from the Vietnam War and the row over nuclear armaments (a retrospective opens at the Pump House Gallery this month). Since the build-up to the Iraq War in 2002, I have been collaborating with a younger artist, Cat Picton Phillipps, developing new techniques and using digital technology to expose the lies that led to the invasion and the subsequent humanitarian disaster. Over this period, our work has become linked to a group of young artists who work outside the official art world. Most of them started out painting graffiti on walls. The central figure in this group is Banksy, but although he attracts most of the press coverage, he is surrounded by a growing band of talented, politically committed artists. Our associates come from Spain and Italy, the US, Britain and Palestine. Since the era of the Bush/Blair war in Iraq, this movement has become increasingly politicised, just as my generation was politicised by the war in Vietnam. These are artists who want to connect with the real world, rather than work for the market, which has more of a stranglehold on art than ever. They combine creativity with protest, insisting that art should be more than the icing on the cake for the super-rich. More from Peter Kennard in the New Statesman
By Jenny Holzer, and a recent acquisition of MOMA
If you haven't visited the gallery recently, it has been revamped, and is (slowly) being stocked with images that I have captured using a Leica M8 rangefinder. The above image was taken using a legendary high-speed Leica lens called a Noctilux. When used wide-open (f/1), the Noctilux produces an extremely shallow depth of field, coupled with a uniquely beautiful rendering of the out of focus areas (also known as 'bokeh', derived from the Japanese 'boke', meaning unsharp). The Noctilux is my favorite lens, and I will undoubtedly be adding many more examples in the coming weeks and months.
POIRES ET COUTEAU PAUL CÉZANNE 2,000,000—3,000,000 GBP (Est.)
Steve Martin's Alternative Route In a college psychology class, I had read a treatise on comedy explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it. ... What bothered me about this formula was the nature of the laugh it inspired, a vocal acknowledgement that a joke had been told, like automatic applause at the end of a song. ... These notions stayed with me for months, until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comedic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told when to laugh. To test my ideas, at my next appearance at the Ice House, I went onstage and began: 'I'd like to open up with sort of a 'funny comedy bit.' This has really been a big one for me ... it's the one that put me where I am today. I'm sure most of you will recognize the title when I mention it; it's the Nose on Microphone routine [pause for imagined applause]. And it's always funny, no matter how many times you see it.' I leaned in and placed my nose on the mike for a few long seconds. Then I stopped and took several bows, saying, 'Thank you very much.' 'That's it?' they thought. Yes, that was it. The laugh came not then, but only after they realized I had already moved on to the next bit. Now that I had assigned myself to an act without jokes, I gave myself a rule. Never let them know I was bombing: This is funny, you just haven't gotten it yet. If I wasn't offering punch lines, I'd never be standing there with egg on my face. It was essential that I never show doubt about what I was doing. ... Eventually, I thought, the laughs would be playing catch-up to what I was doing. Everything would be either delivered in passing, or the opposite, an elaborate presentation that climaxed in pointlessness. Another rule was to make the audience believe that I thought I was fantastic, that my confidence could not be shattered. They had to believe that I didn't care if they laughed at all, and that this act was going on with or without them. ... My goal was to make the audience laugh but leave them unable to describe what it was that had made them laugh. The above was excerpted from Martin's book Born Standing Up (via Delancy Place)
Unicef Award Winners
Young boys are are required to hang on a bar for five minutes as part of a training session at the Gymnastics Hall of the Shanghai University of Sports. Nir Elias took this photo, and more of his work, as well as that of many other superb photographers, can be found on the UNICEF website
Herzog In Hollywood
Rescue Dawn, Werner Herzog’s first Hollywood feature film, is a powerful and compelling movie by every standard except that set by Herzog himself in earlier films. The great German auteur has been making films since 1962, including several of the most original and unforgettable works in modern cinema. Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), both filmed in the Amazon jungle with the actor Klaus Kinski, are now widely regarded as epic masterpieces. Herzog’s cinematography is awe-inspiring, and while both films initially struck audiences and critics as weird and confusing, they are now understood as convention-shattering depictions of the madness of colonialism and vindications of Herzog’s artistic genius. The opening scene of Aguirre, The Wrath of God, one of the most compelling moments in modern film, almost failed because of Herzog’s colossal ambition. He had assembled a huge cast of actors and local Amazon Indians, and planned to film them—as conquistadors with their enslaved Indians—clambering down the Andean mountainside to a tributary of the Amazon where they would embark on rafts in search of El Dorado. But Herzog’s resources were stretched to the breaking point as he waited out the fog shrouding the Andes. In a miracle of good fortune, the fog parted and the sun hit the side of the mountain Herzog had chosen. The result was a monumental long distance shot of the seemingly pristine wilderness. The camera moves in slowly on the one sunlit mountainside, and picks out the members of the expedition moving through the foliage. Herzog’s conquistadores swelter in their armor, absurdly out of place in the landscape, and their Indian slaves in loincloths bend under the Europeans’ baggage. This opening procession, capturing the insanity and oppression of colonial imperialism, is a triumph of cinematic exposition. It is also a testimonial to Herzog’s filmmaking credo of authenticity, which, throughout his career, has demanded that he, his crew, and his cast be death-defying adventurers. It was not part of the credo that his lead actor, Klaus Kinski, willingly accepted. Alan A. Stone's full review can be read in the Boston Review
Risk Taking
In 1959, Miles Davis recorded his sixth album for Columbia Records, a small group session that would eventually be titled Kind of Blue. More than forty years after its release, it is still one of the most-sought-after recordings in the country; in fact, as late as 1998 it was the best-selling jazz album of the year. In both Rolling Stone and Amazon.com end-of- the-century polls, it was voted one of the ten best albums of all time--in any genre--and it is the only jazz album ever to reach double-platinum status. Yet its popularity is not the only extraordinary thing about Kind of Blue. In addition to being an uncontestable masterpiece, it is also a watershed in the history of jazz, a signpost pointing to the tumultuous changes that would dominate this music and society itself in the decade ahead. March 2, 1959 ... was the first of two dates on which Kind of Blue was recorded. Miles had worked on the tunes right up until the morning of the session. He had been thinking about this album for a while and had specific goals in mind. On was to steer a new course for jazz, away from Western musical theory [to ward the idea of using modes, or scales, instead of chord progressions]; another goal, even more important, was to record an album on which musicians were forced to play their solos with complete spontaneity. ... Musicians have often brought new compositions to a recording studio, but the Kind of Blue sessions went far beyond that. Not only had the the musicians (with the exception of [pianist Bill] Evans) not seen the tunes in advance, they had never before played music with the very structure of these tunes. ... Miles' commitment to spontaneity was in itself a key innovation of Kind of Blue. ... This is how Miles put it: 'If you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that--but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He has to use his imagination, be more creative, more innovative; he's got to take more risks.' Eric Nisenson, The Making of Kind of Blue, St. Martin's Griffin, 2000, pp. ix, 134-136. via the excellent Delancy Place blog
My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. – David Simon, creator of the HBO series The Wire
Memento Mori Even if you wouldn't ordinarily think of reading an art review, read this one. Really good, thoughtful writers (like Morgan Meis) can make any topic come alive.
It has been a long time since Andy Warhol started being Andy Warhol. Yet we still fail to appreciate the fact that art is happening largely on his terms. For anyone who was paying attention, Andy Warhol changed the rules for art and ushered in new times. The simplest way to put it is that he made it possible — with the soup cans and the Brillo boxes and the silkscreens of famous movie stars — to make art from the world of consumer goods, the world that we've all actually been living in for a few generations now. Some people still don't want to forgive him for that. But, in the end, all he was doing was telling the truth. His best work is great because of how deeply Warhol was willing to accept that we live in the world that we do. The degree to which he allowed himself to accept this world made him weird, often creepy, and entirely fascinating. He made a kind of freakish experiment with himself, to become so utterly “what we are” that he was more like us than any of us could actually be. That made him uncanny and it is why his art is about truth, even as it glories in the purity of surface and appearance. There are two artists who best represent the legacy of Andy Warhol and have best exploited the possibilities opened up by what he was doing. One is Jeff Koons. The other is Damien Hirst. People love to despise Koons and Hirst just as much as they loved to despise Warhol. And like Warhol, the two keep making work that asks to be despised. They haven't any other choice. That is the task before them. Damien Hirst's latest outrage against the sanctity of art and the dignity of human beings is his diamond-encrusted skull. It was designed to be the most expensive work of contemporary art in the world, and it just sold for $100 million. Like everything Hirst does, the piece doesn't shy away from what it is. It revels in it. It is meant to be expensive and it is meant to be a piece of art that is also about the fact that it is the most expensive work of art. And it is that little wink and nudge about its own expensiveness, contained within the very concept of the piece, that is so annoying, even downright intolerable to many, if not most, right-thinking people. And yet it does so happen that there is also something else happening with the skull. continue reading Meis' review in The Smart Set Meis is also a regular contributor to the always excellent 3 Quarks Daily
Another remarkable image taken by Igor Siwanowicz
Saratoga Backstretch Detail
Saratoga Morning Glint
First Lines “My father came toward me with the rifle.” Why he wrote the last line: This last line is in fact the first line of the novel I’m working on, The Wilding. Every time I boot up my computer and hunch over the keyboard for a long, bloody stretch of writing, I review what I wrote the day prior to buff away any scuff marks and plug in to the voice’s current. It’s my way of getting warmed up, the equivalent of cracking my knuckles. Almost inevitably, my eyes wander to the most important line, the first line. I am obsessed with first lines. I rewrite them over and over. I collect them and carry them around in a pocket of my mind to withdraw every now and then and look at, like precious stones, a lucky feather, a Polaroid of my ex-girlfriend naked and straddling a motorcycle. More from author Benjamin Percy in Esquire
Wide Angle
view a much larger version here
Fire and Water
Saskia Reeves, who plays opposite Amanda Plummer in Michael Winterbottom's off-beat film Butterfly Kiss, is the actress seen delivering the superb above monologue. Winterbottom's films tend to be gritty, and certainly not to everyone's taste. But his work is interesting at the very least, and in my view, generally excellent. You can peruse his films at Netflix
Ball–Saal
The above image was captured by Siegfried Hansen, one of many talented photographers whose work can be viewed at the excellent, and easy to navigate Ball–Saal.com
Colorful Soho
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