Beauty, Art and Fantasy

Posted on February 9, 2007 by cicada

bressane.jpg

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon posted yesterday about a photography firm that offers photo retouching. Their portfolio is yet another reminder that nothing you see in a fashion magazine is real – even beautiful, waif-thin models get the airbrush treatment. Lord knows what they’d do to the rest of us.

Are these photos more attractive after the retouching? If so, are they more attractive in an aesthetic way, or in a sexual way? Why is there a difference between these two questions?

I think the example above was definitely more interesting, and had more personality, before retouching. But that doesn’t mean stylized glamour shots can’t be striking works of art. Many iconic fashion photographs portray completely unrealistic ideals of female beauty. If I object to a photo because it promotes such an unrealistic ideal, must I also reject it as art? Or should art be judged without regard for its social impact? I’m honestly not sure about this one. All I know is, excessive airbrushing creeps me out. And makes me want to eat Cheetos.

Posted in Frivolity, Photography, Science in culture & policy | Comments Off

Greetings, Birders

Posted on February 8, 2007 by cicada

Hello to all new visitors meandering over from I and the Bird #42, hosted by Neurophilosophy. Isn’t Vladimir Gvozdev amazing?

I can’t claim to be an ornithologist, but I do have a weakness for bird art. I find a bird print so much more emotionally engaging than a botanical print or a landscape. There’s something magical about the way the best artists catch a bird, especially a small and nervous bird, and hold it still long enough for you to truly examine it, while still preserving the illusion of life.

My grandmother left me two wonderful J. Gould prints, which do much to brighten a grey winter day. Here’s my favorite:

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Suthora fulvifrons
lithograph
Richter after Gould, from Birds of Asia (I think – it’s a loose leaf)

And here it is in my house (never in direct sunlight, I promise – but unfortunately for this photo, in some reflected glare). It’s so strange that such a small thing can be so disproportionately pleasing to me; but then, that’s art. And birds.

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Posted in Artists & Art, Biology, Science | 3 Comments

Pollocks, Bollocks

Posted on February 7, 2007 by cicada

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One: No. 31, 1950
Jackson Pollock, 1950
MoMA, NYC

A piece from Sunday’s New York Times announced a break in the ongoing controversy over 32 disputed Jackson Pollock paintings. The paintings were reportedly found in a storage unit in 2002 by Alex Matter, the son of Pollock’s friend, Herbert Matter. The putative Pollocks looked like Pollocks to experts (including Case Western art professor Ellen Landau), but a team of conservation scientists from Harvard University Art Museums concluded a week ago that they were probably not authentic. The analysis (conducted pro bono at Matter’s request) found pigments in three of the paintings which were not patented or available in the US until after Pollock’s death (the paintings were dated 1946-49; Pollock died in 1956). But is this really the verdict of “Science”?
Continue reading →

Posted in Artists & Art, Science | 1 Comment

Jessica Joslin

Posted on February 6, 2007 by cicada

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Enzo & Donato
Brass, bone, fur, cast/painted plastic, glass eyes
Jessica Joslin, 2004

Jessica Joslin’s work is exactly what this blog is about: straddling the awkward rift between biological specimen and art object, and doing so with grace and charm. Her sculptures are chimeras of real and simulated bone, metal, found objects, and wistful glass eyes.

Joslin just finished a winter show at the Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona. From the Lisa Sette Gallery newsletter:

While each piece she employs in her eerie animal reliquary is delicately beautiful, it is also the detritus of human engineering and design: old brass buttons and gold braid, glass beads, clockwork cogs and velvet ribbon. Such items are reminiscent of the whimsical technology of a century past, one’s grandparents’ house, the dark interiors of old fashioned movie theatres – and as such they have an intriguing, wistful quality. In other words, Joslin collects the things that all of us secretly want to, the shiny pieces that we might comb through, handle and admire, but ultimately force ourselves to put down; what would we do with such things?

I love that in Joslin’s pieces, bone – the most enduring part of an animal – seems like the ephemeral, fragile component, snugly caged in traceries of metal. It’s as if, in some steampunk future, the souvenirs of our biological heritage have been lovingly preserved and gradually repaired Tin Man-style, until the metal patches become the bulk of the beast.

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Perrin
Antique hardware, brass, bone, leather, glass eyes
Jessica Joslin, 2005

View more pieces from Joslin’s four collections (Brass Menagerie, Flights of Fancy, Aves & Mammalia, and Cabinet of Curiosities) at her website.

Interview with Jessica Joslin from Art&Design.

Posted in Artists & Art, Biology, Wonder Cabinets | 2 Comments

Just Science, Just Access

Posted on February 5, 2007 by cicada

Many science bloggers are responding to the call for a “Just Science Week” by posting only on scientific topics. I’m not joining them, since this blog is about the intersection of science with other things, and posting only on science would rather defeat my niche. However, it occurred to me that since I started this blog, I haven’t included enough pure science in the mix. The reason is simple: when you are not affiliated with an academic institution, you have no access to most journals. It’s hard for me to keep up on the trendiest science right now, except through my fellow bloggers, and it would be redundant to recap what they’ve already effectively blogged.

Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Education, Science | 1 Comment

Gregory Colbert: ashes and snow codex

Posted on February 3, 2007 by cicada

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from ashes and snow, 2002
Gregory Colbert

Photographer Gregory Colbert’s striking images of animals interacting with people have appeared in various venues since 2002; up next is a Tokyo exhibition, starting in March 2007. Colbert’s work is not collaged or altered, which makes these graceful convergences of human and animal form more remarkable than they may first appear.

Continue reading →

Posted in Artists & Art, Biology, Photography | 5 Comments

Whatever you do, don’t get your nano wet

Posted on February 3, 2007 by cicada

This post has nothing to do with science or art. I just want to toss some information out there for my fellow iPod users. When a friend recently bought an ipod nano, I realized I’d better warn him about a few things, and if I was going to do that, I might as well write a post for any one else who cares.

In a nutshell: do not let your nano get wet! This may seem fairly obvious, but in addition to not immersing your nano in the toilet, or the swimming pool, or the river (which I almost did once), you should avoid exposing it to rain or sweat. Don’t let it get even the slightest little isty-bitsy tiny bit damp. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

In case you don’t remember God doing that thing. . .

Posted on February 3, 2007 by cicada

I thought I’d check before reading any further in Blogging the Bible to see how much I really had forgotten. Unfortunately, this quiz is so silly, I think 86% is a rather poor showing. Oh well. Although I may not remember which book follows Colossians, I can spell Strom Thurmond’s name.

You know the Bible 86%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses – you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

via Pharyngula (of all places!)

Posted in Frivolity, Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Poem of the Week: Magnitudes

Posted on February 2, 2007 by cicada

In honor of a resounding consensus on global warming which is finally drowning out the anti-science, wishful-thinking faction: a poem which appeared eighteen years ago but is even more relevant today. I still have my original copy of this poem somewhere, on the foreboding black page that I ripped out of Time Magazine’s 1989 “Planet of the Year” issue. During my idealistic teenage environmentalist years, it was stuck up in my locker with some Greenpeace logos.

Howard Nemerov was the Poet Laureate of the United States in 1989. He died two years later, in 1991.

Magnitudes
Howard Nemerov
Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991

Earth’s wrath at our assaults is slow to come
But relentless when it does. It has to do
With catastrophic change, and with the limit
At which one order more of magnitude
Will bring us to a qualitative change
And disasters drastically different
From those we daily have to know about.

As with the speed of light, where speed itself
Becomes a limit and an absolute;
As with the splitting of the atom
And a little later of the nucleus;
As with the millions rising into billions —
The piker’s kind in terms of money, yes,
But a million square in terms of time and space
As the universe grew vast while the earth
Our habitat diminished to the size
Of a billiard ball, both relative
To the cosmos and to the numbers of ourselves,
The doubling numbers, the earth could accommodate.

We stand now in the place and limit of time
Where hardest knowledge is turning into dream,
And nightmares still confined in sleeping dark
Seem on the point of bringing into day
The sweating panic that starts the sleeper up.
One or another nightmare may come true,
And what to do then? What in the world to do?

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Ronald Kurniawan at Roq la Rue

Posted on February 1, 2007 by cicada

logarithms1.jpg
chasing logarithms
Ronald Kurniawan, 2005

Ronald Kurniawan is one of three artists in a show opening February 9 at Roq la Rue in Seattle. You can also see some of his work for sale, including the graphite version of the piece above, at Nucleus. I don’t know what it is about the surreal naturescapes full of giant numbers, but I really, really like this guy’s work!

Posted in Artists & Art, Cephalopodmania | Comments Off