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“It is the materialistic corruption of present-day anthropology that has tried to make men believe that original man fashioned pottery before he made sculpture. Pottery is the product of civilization. The artistic act is man’s personal birthright.”
- Barnett Newman, “The First Man was an Artist” (http://bit.ly/dOZ13L)
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Idris Khan, Caravaggio… The Final Years, 2006.
Idris Khan is a contemporary artist who superimposes photographs of various objects, from every page of the Qur’an (2004), to J.M.W Turner’s postcards at the Tate Britain (2005), to paintings produced by Caravaggio in the last four years of his life (2006), as seen here.
While Walter Benjamin has asserted that the proliferations of reproductions stripped the “aura of the work of art,” as well as the idea of authorship itself. However, Khan’s doubly mechanically reproduced reproductions may be seen to re-invest the aura—these reproductions are turned original, with the invisible aura made visible. In this work, Khan’s transforms the Italian painter’s formal elements into a violent collision of lines. When considered in the context of the title, it may allude to Caravaggio’s final years that were marked by brawls, a murder charge, and psychological turbulence.
Long-case clock on pedestal
1904
Adolf Loos
Vienna
This is probably my favorite object at the Neue Galerie in New York. This clock by Adolf Loos conveys his idea of modernity. Loos believed that modernity arose from content rather than form, and that it would serve the wheel of democratic society rather than overt grandeur and prestige. The clock is both ephemeral and transcendental as well as anchored and structured. The glass surface allows for endless transmutations and the lack of decorative detail draws the gaze to the function of the object—that is, the telling of time. Suspended upon the glass surface, time itself may even be seen as timeless.
Notice the base—the clock is perched on geometric forms, both stable yet unstable at the same time—the paradoxical paradigm of modernity itself.
Probably last Beauty and the Beast related thing for a while (because I am sick of it for now- just wrote a 30 + page paper on it)
Left: Peter Hall, Gaston, watercolor
Right: Dann Jippes, Early sketch of Gaston, ink, watercolor
Early on in the film they imagined “Marquis Gaston,” as a “foppish aristocrat.” These early character sketches of Gaston display clear quotations of eighteenth-century culture and fashion such as the powered wig, breeches, and small-heeled shoes. His outfit is a stark contrast to the comparatively modern hunting boots and the collared shirt that the 1991 Gaston wears in the film. His outfit was later changed to better “appeal” to an American audience.
More with Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Left: Peter Hall’s design for Belle’s music box and jewelry case, watercolor, Disney.
Right: Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing 1767, Oil on Canvas
Originally the film was meant to have a music box as Belle’s confidant. You can see the clear quotations from Fragonard’s Swing, 1767.
All right— one more before I crawl into the art library.
Left: Screen cap taken from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) during the “Bourjour” sequence. This is the very book that Belle is reading to the sheep by the fountain. Notice how the girl in the illustration is wearing the same type of blue dress that Belle also wears—a truly intertexual inscription by the Disney animators.
However, ‘the suitor climbing over the ledge/fence’ paradigm is widely found in genre paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, as seen on the right: The Meeting, 1771 (at the Frick Collection.) After all, the first known literary version of the Beauty and the Beast tale was published mid-eighteenth century by Villeneuve in 1740.
Animators/producers of this film have cited eighteenth century painters such as Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard as their primary inspirations when designing the Disney film, and I think we can see such high-rococo tropes lingering in the final product.
Since everyone seemed to really like my previous post on Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earrings in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, here is another Easter Egg I found.
Left: Close-up Screen cap from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991)
Right: Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier, 1624
I’m thinking the Beast had a thing for Dutch paintings..?
RODARTE- Dresses inspired by Van Gogh, Starry Night on the left and the ever iconic sunflowers on the right.
Fine art + haute couture done right. I really think the dresses capture the vibrancy and the expressive energy of the original paintings.
Spring-Summer 2012 collection, available for purchase via Colette
Dominican church (Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen in Maastricht) re-purposed into a bookstore— a spiritual place for bibliophiles across the world?
An abandoned theater in Hamilton Heights, Manhattan.
This theater was commissioned by Benjamin S. Moss and Solomon Brill and designed by the architect Thomas W. Lamb. This Renaissance Revival style theater opened in January 1913. It was turned into a motion picture theater from 1928-58 and was used subsequently as a sports arena, a disco, and even a warehouse for a beer and liquor wholesaler. Currently it is abandoned—a perfect place for rising Broadway babies to practice their singing or a great place to test out your street art.
It is a little sad to see history in such ruins…
(Source: afterthefinalcurtain.net)
THE Rosalind Krauss (aka one of the most important and prolific art historians of our time) signed my copy of her book, Under Blue Cup.
It’s a philosophically rigorous book borne from her own experiences, her aneurysm that wiped away her short-term memory, that develops seamlessly into a book on contemporary art theory. In the text, she anoints several contemporary artists( William Kentridge, Sophie Calle, Ed Ruscha, Christian Marclay…) as her Knights— artists whose works are founded on structural-supports that allows them to recover the medium from modernism’s hegemonic eschewals.
Highly recommended—especially for contemporary art historians.
Click here to read her conversation with another prolific art historian, Yve-Alain Bois in the Brooklyn Rail.
Animals created out of Louis Vuitton leather goods to celebrate their 100th anniversary—by British artist, Billie Achilleos.
Statement by Achilleos: “Each animal highlights an element in the design of the products. The Armadillo was to highlight the soft yet durable quality of the leather. The Chameleon displays the variety of colour. The Grasshopper is constructed from products with zips and poppers that make satisfying noises like that of the musically gifted insect. And finally my favorite, the Beaver, who’s functionality chops wood, builds dams…and provides cleaver ways of organising ones life in men’s bags and wallets.”
There is something about this that I find tragic as well—by using LV’s leather goods to create such sculptures, I am reminded of the animal sources of the leather goods. Achilleos’ playful sculptures may thus be seen to reconstruct the unsightly origins of such fashion products and literally bring to life the living animals effaced in the logo-branded consumer goods—they are doubly artificial, doubly un-natural creatures.
Click the photo-link for more LV animals.
Proust Geometrica chair, originally created in 1978 for the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, and reinvigorated by the designer Alessandro Mendini in 2009.
It’s no secret that I’m a dix-huitièmiste down to the core and I do love historicism in contemporary design. It really is no surprise that I absolutely love this chair—rococo meets modernism with the very union of the two creating a postmodernist chair. The vibrant colors are suggestive of pop-art/kitsch heightened by the elitist undertones of the rococo motif. Perhaps it is the ultimate expression of the banality and the kitschiness of our contemporary era, an assertion highlighted by the appearance of this chair in Duck Sauce’s “Barbra Streisand,” video (with Kanye West shown sitting in this chair).
(Source: hivemodern.com)
Currently writing a term paper on eighteenth century costumes in Disney’s The Beauty and the Beast (1991) when I noticed this little Easter Egg.
On left: close-up screen cap from The Beauty and the Beast (1991)
On right: Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1667, Oil on Canvas!!!
Floating Cinema in Thailand by Ole Scheeren, the German-born and Beijing-based architect. Archipelago cinema is seen to be based on the techniques used by local fishermen to construct floating lobster farms.
Ole Scheeren states: ” the thought of watching films here seemed surprising…a screen, nestled somewhere between the rocks. and the audience… floating… hovering above the sea, somewhere in the middle of this incredible space of the lagoon, focused on the moving images across the water: a sense of temporality, randomness, almost like driftwood. or maybe something more architectural: modular pieces, loosely assembled, like a group of little islands that congregate to form an auditorium.’
A union between narratives of nature, architecture, and cinema-unconventional but nonetheless, the end-result appears as harmonious with nature as the surrounding elements in the lagoon.
Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects (Designers of the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center at Wellesley College, MA, 2004-5) are the winners of Cooper-Hewitt’s 13th annual National Design Awards in the architecture category.
Although opinions vastly differ on this building, it is a beautifully sculptural work that balances the tension between weightlessness (heightened by the Le Corbusier-esque lofting seen on the left) and stability (indicated by the solid base on the right). The glass facades of the building reflects the bucolic landscape of the New England campus while the red brick facade blends with the rest of the campus architecture. All in all, I think they are well-deserving of the award, if this building is any indication of their architectural portfolio
(Source: cooperhewitt.org)
