Posts Tagged ‘modern art’
Everyday heroes…
Over the years (R)D has considered action figures of all types, from the political (e.g., Barak Obama) to the cultural (e.g., Shakespeare and Jane Austin). But heroism isn’t always an epic proposition; and it doesn’t always accrue to recognition, much less fame. In the end, these smaller and more anonymous acts of leadership, courage, and sacrifice are the lifts that elevate life-at-large.
Jesse Weiss, an assistant professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of the Ozarks, has pioneered a way to redress the bobble-head balance:
A pop culture enthusiast and inveterate collector of kitsch, Weiss saw that the head had come off one of his collectible action figures: the professional wrestler, Rhino. “I guess it was kind of serendipitous,” said Weiss. “One of the heads popped off and I realized you could take them apart and put them back together”…
He has created more than 100 action figures modeled on fellow professors, administrators, students, community members and even the college’s president… Sean Coleman, an associate professor of biology who teaches interdisciplinary courses with Weiss, said he keeps his action figure next to the nameplate on his desk…
… [Coleman] praised the evident attention to detail, down to the mole on his figure’s lip and the color of his belt. “We’re academics, but we’re quirky a little bit,” he said. “Everyone I know would like one of those things. It’s definitely part of the campus culture.”
Find the full story– and more pix– at Inside Higher Ed.
As we strike heroic poses, we might might wish an animated Happy Birthday to sculptor Alexander Calder; he was born in Pennsylvania on this date in 1898. The son of a sculptor and a painter, Alexander studied engineering before following in his parents’ footsteps. While he painted and drew, he is best remembered for his wire and his motor-driven sculpture– dubbed “mobiles.”
Alexander Calder (source)
Calder mobile (source)
A puppet on a string…
The latest performance by Royal de Luxe— the French mechanical marionette street theater company– took place last month in Guadalajara, Mexico as part of the Celebrando el Centenario de la Revolución Mexicana, and featured The Mexican Giant, the dog Xolo and the Little Indian Girl (more photos and video here). Extraordinaire!
Via the wonderful Laughing Squid.
As look carefully around us for the strings, we might recall that it was on this date in 1962 that Pravda excoriated Western art as degenerate and bourgeois. Days before, at an exhibiton at the Manege in Moscow, Premier Nikita Khrushchev had attacked the Modernist paintings of Pavel Kuznetsov and Robert Falk, pronouncing them “dog sh*t.” Khrushchev was so revolted by an Ernst Neizvestny sculpture– an Expressionist female nude– that he called the artist a “fag” to his face, then added, “We give ten years for that.” Undaunted, Neizvetny insisted that the gallery bring him a girl so he could set the dictator straight.
Eliott Erwitt’s famous photo of Nixon “correcting” Khrushchev’s views on Pollack (source)
“A screaming comes across the sky”…
Long time readers know of your correspondent’s abiding affection for the works of Thomas Pynchon. So readers can imagine his delight at discovering The Thomas Pynchon Fake Book, an online collaboration among 37 people (and three animals) that yielded 29 songs, all with lyrics appearing in Gravity’s Rainbow (a positively ditty-packed volume).
Readers can listen to streaming renditions of “Loonies on Leave,” “Byron the Bulb,” “The Penis He Thought Was His Own,” “Herman the German,” and over a score more.
Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength.
– Thomas Pynchon
UPDATE to yesterday’s XXL: MK reminds your correspondent that all readers might enjoy the exhibit, a collaboration between London’s Serpentine Gallery and EDGE, in which Kai Krause’s “Africa to Scale” features. It can be found here or here.
As we stay alert to Inherent Vice, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened in New York. Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned and designed the building in 1937; but construction was delayed until 1957. The resulting gallery, which features a spiraling six-story ramp encircling an open center space lit by a glass dome, is home to a powerful contemporary art collection, strong in Klee, Kandinsky, Calder, Chagall, and Brancusi.
The Guggenheim (source)
Bedroom Secrets…
One of the best-loved works in Vincent van Gogh’s oeuvre is The Bedroom. It was painted in October 1888, when the artist was living in the Yellow House in Arles. To give his brother Theo an impression of the painting he was working on, Van Gogh sent him a letter with a detailed sketch. A day later he also sent a sketch to his friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin.
He put a great deal of thought into the composition and the colours, and we know from his letters that he was very pleased with the result. ‘But the colour has to do the job here,’ he wrote, ‘and through its being simplified by giving a grander style to things, to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general.’
Vincent van Gogh considered The bedroom an important painting. In early 1889, Van Gogh returned home from the hospital in Arles. He had been admitted there after his psychological crisis and the injury to his ear. As he wrote to Theo, ‘When I saw my canvases again after my illness, what seemed to me the best was The Bedroom.
From Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, “Bedroom Secrets,” a blog chronicling the restoration of “The Bedroom.”
As we gingerly touch our ears, we might wish a brisk Happy Birthday to Frederick Winslow Taylor, an engineer and inventor (42 patents) who’s best remembered as the father of “Scientific Management,” the discipline rooted in efficiency studies and standardization. Quoth Peter Drucker:
Frederick W. Taylor was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study. On Taylor’s ‘scientific management’ rests, above all, the tremendous surge of affluence in the last seventy-five years which has lifted the working masses in the developed countries well above any level recorded before, even for the well-to-do. Taylor, though the Isaac Newton (or perhaps the Archimedes) of the science of work, laid only first foundations, however. Not much has been added to them since – even though he has been dead all of sixty years.
Taylor’s work encouraged many followers (e.g. Frank “Cheaper by the Dozen” Gilbreth) and effectively spawned the field of management consulting. But Taylor practiced what he preached, and found time to become a champion tennis player as well: he won the first doubles tournament (1881) in U.S. National Championships, the precursor of the U.S. Open (with partner Clarence Clark).
Going once, going twice…
In the grand tradition of Boggs (i.e., J.S.G. Boggs, whom pre-blog readers will recall), artist Caleb Larsen has created “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter– Perpetual online auction, internet connection, custom programming and hardware, acrylic cube.”
Combining Robert Morris’ “Box With the Sound of Its Own Making” with Baudrillard’s writing on the art auction this sculpture exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is perpetually attempting to auction itself on eBay.
Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.
If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.
This work is discussed in the catalogue for The Value of Nothing, a 2009 exhibition.
Buy or download it.Follow the current auction here.
TotH to GMSV.
As we wistfully imagine being able to recycle our Hirsts or our Koons, we might turn to our neighbors and and urge them to “Sock it to me!”, as it was on this date in 1968 that Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In premiered on NBC. The series had been spawned by a successful special– in effect, R&M’s homage to Olsen and Johnson (especially Hellzapoppin)– that had aired nine months earlier; in a bittersweet irony, it replaced The Man from U.N.C.L.E. on Monday’s at 8:00p in the Peacock’s schedule.
source: rowanandmartinslaughin.com
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