Cherise emailed me a link to this artist.
This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
Here's an example:
Cans Seurat, 2007
Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.
Click on these images for the close-ups.
more after the jump
Desiree Palmen recreates in urban settings what some animals, like chameleons and cuttlefish, can do in the wild - blend into their surroundings. She's a 44-year old Dutch artist who must spend hours perfecting every detail before taking the photograph. Here are the results:
Click on the photo for an even bigger version, it's amazing.
More after the jump.
Too cool - from a book published in 1475.
This is the book's world map - - - places are represented by hills and circled by an ocean sea. I spoke to a cartographer historian once and she told me fascinating stories about how representational early maps were - how they weren't used to navigate or find places and they didn't use scale, but instead were symbolic of religious and political hierarchy.
More after the jump
Visualizations of mathematical formulas:
"Coral Star" shows the motion brought about by one particular dynamical system.
This "Fathauer crystal" is built from 13 iterations of a fractal pattern, placing cubes on cubes on cubes.
A few years ago Sugar, Jack and I went to a theater performance of Struwwelpeter - Shockheaded Peter. It's a musical puppet show with the musicians also performing onstage. The sets are child-sized and the musicians are The Tiger Lillies, an eclectic band featuring Martyn Jacques, an accordionist with a magnifent falsetto voice.
Struwwelpeter is a German children's book written by Dr. Heinrich Hoffman in 1845. The stories in it are a series of macabre tales of disastrous consequences for mischievous children.
Among the stories are The Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches about a girl who burns herself to death because she can't stop playing with fire. The Story of Flying Robert who flies his kite in a rainstorm and gets carried off by the wind. Snip Snip is a tale of Conrad who won't stop sucking his thumbs and as a result he gets them cut off.
We walked out of the theater and Jack turned and said, "This is the Germany that gave us Hitler. Why were we surprised?"
I'm giving you a sample of two of the songs from the play. I say, Bloody Brilliant.
(the lyrics are below each video)
Art is what it makes you feel and think. Art is what it does to change the world in the tiniest of increments. This art project is both drama and a statement of our time on multiple levels. It's Improv Everywhere and I can't describe it any better than this video. If you haven't seen it elsewhere, please watch it now.
Not only did it work, but it received appreciation from those who witnessed the act. I wouldn't have expected the level of understanding to overcome their annoyance.
Here's the video of their feature on Night Line.
I love it
- rick, art lover
I recently found out about this artist, Eric Staller. He does the most amazing Light Drawings:
more after the jump
This is entirely made of polished metal junk, including drill bits, machine parts, and others. The whole piece looks like a futuristic cityscape and has a diameter of 15 feet and stands 11 feet tall. Amazing, beautiful.
The artist is Chu Enoki. More after the jump.
This is the story of Lui and Xu who were in love. In China fifty years ago it was improper for Lui, a 19 year old young man to marry Xu, a 20 year old widowed mother. So they eloped and went to live in a cave on top of a mountain. Knowing that it was difficult for Xu to climb up and down the mountain, Lui started carving steps into the mountain, by hand. Over the next fifty years he created a staircase from the top to the bottom of the mountain for his wife. Over 6000 steps.
He recently died.
From the article:
The couple had lived in peace for over 50 years until last week. Liu, now 72 years-old, returned from his daily farm work and collapsed. Xu sat and prayed with her husband as he passed away in her arms.
So in love with Xu, was Liu, that no one was able to release the grip he had on his wife’s hand even after he had passed away.
“You promised me you’ll take care of me, you’ll always be with me until the day I died, now you left before me, how am I going to live without you?” … …
Xu spent days softly repeating this sentence and touching her husband’s black coffin with tears rolling down her cheeks.
In 2006, their story had became one of the top 10 love stories from China, collected by the Chinese Women Weekly. The local government has decided to preserve the “love ladder” and the place they lived as a museum, so this love story can live forever.
Follow the Link for more of the story, and the video in Chinese.
rick, a fellow obsessive, impressed.
Rose inspired me to write about Buffy St. Marie.
She exploded upon the American Scene in the early sixties. She was before the hippies, they wanted to be like her. She was the voice of Native America, she sang the anthem of the anti-war movement, she was one of the first artists blacklisted by the Johnson administration and her albums disappeared from the United States. Undeterred, she became an international phenomena and still attracts enormous crowds wherever she performs.
She's Buffy St. Marie and she's one of my all-time favorites. Most people here in the states know her as the protest singer, notable for Universal Soldier. But she's so much more than one song:
She's an educator with degrees in Oriental Studies and teaching as well as a PhD in Fine Arts. She's an accomplished artist, and she appeared for five years with her son on Sesame Street to let kids know that Indians still exist. She's a composer - look who's recorded her music: Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamon, Arthur Fiedler, Boston Pops Orchestra, Roberta Flack, Cher, Bobby Darin, Bobby Bare, Donovan, Joe Cocker, and Anne Murray.
She founded educational partnerships between Native American students and non-Native classes. She produced a multimedia curriculum CD, Science: Through Native American Eyes.
My all time favorite Buffy St. Marie song is after the jump.
Artists bring us the view of the world that they see and when that reveals something unique, new, that's the first step toward great art. Of course art is in the eye of the person who views it and sometimes art speaks to me, instead of showing me a new way to look at the world it surprises me by being the unique view that I thought only I held. Eric Feng is making art that I feel I could make if I had the talent . . . it's the view that I sometimes see when looking at people or animals. It's like he re envisions them as machines, their joints as mechanical pivots or gears. Sometimes I daydream these views as reality. Here's his website, and here's a book of his work. Now, enjoy these sketches:
Some people are just unbelievable. I've seen some awful "art" in the homes of my clients,
In fact, if I went into a home where the homeowner had hung his Lamborghini on the wall instead of just having it repaired properly, I'd have to say, "I'm sorry, but my services aren't going to be appreciated by someone as stupid as you."
It's a typical example of someone having more money than they can properly be expected to care for. I'm not saying we should go vigilante and take money away from wealthy people, but I think there should be a competency examination in order to determine if someone is able to exist in society at any income level.
Either that, or he should hire a crew to put that Lamborghini somewhere else . . . the crew would have to include a licensed proctologist.
- rick on a bad art rant.
I'll get in trouble if I call this great art, because it's not really in the manner of innovative style or statement of political or social significance. It's not daring and it's commercial, for commercial intent I believe. All that said, it's cooler than shit.
Who would have thought that there is a contest for tiny sculptures - I mean tiny as in electron microscope tiny. Well there is, it's called the Nanofabrication Bizarre/Beautiful Micrograph Contest.
Here are some of my favorites:
Artificial Nano “T4 Bacteriophage”
that one is magnified 25,000 times.
He envisioned an installation of light and together with the assistance of ENEL (Italy's largest power company) he installed it at the Circus Maximus. This was the largest chariot racing stadium ever built. At it's height of popularity the stadium would hold 250,000 fans for all day racing events.
The installation is called Massimo Silenzio and it's evolution of creativity is shown in this photo essay. At night the whole dusty arena floor is transformed into an undulating display of color, with each bulb cycling through multiple color changes.
Here's what it looks like completed:
And how they did it is after the jump.
Have you watched The Labyrinth? Those puppets and props were amazing. Ron Mueck did all that work and I recently found out that he's doing fine art now. (thanks, Cherise). He's reproducing to the minute detail humans in extraordinary scale. His work is featured in galleries across the world and here's a sample.
Did you know that there is only a single piece of art on the moon? It's an aluminum sculpture of an astronaut in a space suit.
The Plaque that accompanies the sculpture is pretty amazing. At the height of the Cold War, during the space race, the plaque contains fourteen names - 8 American and 6 Soviet - of astronauts who died during missions or training up to 1971. The following is copied from the wiki entry:
I know I've heard about this sculpture and plaque before, but it took until now for the significance to sink in.
- rick, a bit slow
After the jump is an interesting image of water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. Take a look and tell me if you see in this image that which I see in the image.
Martin Klimas destroys a lot of clay to make his art. Klimas breaks recognizable objects so they become something else, and stops us just at the moment of transformation.
It's amazing, I'm sure you'll agree . . . the whole gallery is here.
More After the Jump