Businessweek has this little slideshow of a LEGO factory. Neat. Apparently the system is so precise, only 18 in a million LEGO bricks are defective. Which sounds about right; I’ve never found an irregular LEGO, and I’ve handled thousands.
Still, a LEGO-making factory is just not as impressive as a factory made from LEGO. Someone with apparently infinite patience built a car factory out of Mindstorms LEGOs and posted it to YouTube. There’s no narration, and it’s kind of hard to see what’s happening, so you just have to have faith until the end; but the machinery itself is hypnotic.
A New Year’s tradition: some truly yummy words I learned in the past twelve months. I love adding to my vocabulary, though odds are I’ll never use a single one of these in conversation.
The Babylonian Marriage Market
Edwin Longsden Long
Damien Hirst is, as usual, hot hot hot. Even hotter than July in the era of global warming. But in Prospect Magazine’s article Doubting Damien, Ben Lewis compares Damien Hirst with the Victorian artist Edwin Longsden Long (above). Long’s work “seemed original and urgent” and sold for sensational prices in his own time, but is now ignored. Will the same thing happen to Hirst? Lewis isn’t sure:
The real difficulty with coming to a judgment on Hirst is that contemporary art theory does not permit one to assess whether an artist’s work is superficial or deep, because it’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between a banal work of art and one that takes banality as its theme, or between a simple work of art and a simplistic one. A critic could spend hours trying to decide if something is superficially superficial or deeply superficial—and never come up with an answer.
“Superficially superficial, or deeply superficial?” The same excellent, yet nearly meaningless question could apply to Jeffrey Vallance’s show Relics and Reliquaries.
Landing back in the Valley and surveying a lifetime of accumulated bric-a-brac freshly liberated from storage lockers, Vallance hit upon the idea of the reliquaries as a medium to communicate the meaning with which he felt these leftover trinkets to be imbued. While artists, by definition, tend toward narcissism, Vallance’s quirky, candid, self-deprecating humor and unfailing irony diffuse the hubris to the point where the reliquaries can be read as an encyclopedic parody of artists’ (and our entire culture’s) materialist self-absorption. (LA Weekly)
Surprisingly, this actually sounds worth seeing: the “relics” are less bombastic than Hirst’s, more quirky and individual, such as Vallance’s “very early piece of complex political intervention, when he painted the shells of backyard snails with crude American flags in order to thwart his patriotic stepfather’s gastropodicidal wrath.” It’s the hallowed-yet-disturbing-American-childhood context that makes A Christmas Story a sacred text.
Over in The New Criterion, we have a rant by Roger Kimball: “why the art world is a disaster.” I tried to get into it, but was immediately derailed by the author’s gratuitous slam of Bard College, a small liberal arts college that is ranked about the same as my own much-beloved alma mater:
Bard is one of those small educational institutions whose ambient wealth has allowed them to substitute avant-garde pretense for scholarly or artistic accomplishment. If your bank account is healthy (tuition and fees for first-year students: $47,730) and young Heather or Dylan is “creative,” i.e., not likely to get into a Harvard or Yale or Williams, then Bard is a place you can send them and still look your neighbor in the eye.
Angry much? He goes on, more to the point,
When it comes to art, Ms. Hessel is neither a risk taker nor a risk giver. Like Bard itself, she simply mirrors the established taste of the moment. Far from “challenging” or “subverting” the status quo, the 1,700 objects she has accumulated are the status quo. And far from “struggling” with questions about gender or feminism or anything else, she has simply issued a rubber stamp endorsing the dominant clichés of today’s academic art world. “Academic,” in fact, is the mot juste: not in the sense of “scholarly,” but rather in the sense that we speak of “academic art,” stale, conventional, aesthetically nugatory.
I might agree with Kimball if he weren’t so condescending, but my hackles are up, so you’ll have to read it and judge for yourself. Unless you, too, went to a small liberal arts college, in which case you may take a pass.
Finally, I was crushed to learn that the manufacturer of the technological lights of my life, my MacBook Pro and my iPod nano, is blatantly ripping off artists in its advertising. Now, we know other companies steal from Apple all the time (a la the iGasm), and Apple products have shifted the entire design market over the past decade, but that’s all the more reason Apple should really be above this kind of derivation. Naughty Apple. (I forgive you, of course, darling.)
If you’ve not yet done so, pop on over to new blog Morbid Anatomy for a tour of some beautiful vintage medical illustrations. My favorite recent post was this collection of links to the work of anatomical artist Jacques Gautier d’Agoty.
Gautier d’Agoty’s “Flayed Angel” is the inspiration for this poem, by Leslie Adrienne Miller, from her new collection, The Resurrection Trade. I am really excited to get this book in the mail. It’s inspired by depictions of anatomy, especially female anatomy - by Gautier d’Agoty, van Rymsdyk, da Vinci, Vesalius. If the following poem is any indication, it’s good stuff.
“The Flayed Angel” Gautier D’Agoty’s mezzotint of the muscles of the back
Because her back is turned on us
and peeled outward from the ribs,
her namesake wings of skin surprise us
into thinking Fra Angelico—who taught
us all what textures wings might take
in two dimensions, an undulating
series of overlapping lines, a borrowing
from feathers, waves in sand, nothing
like the surface epidermis marked
with random blots or breathing glands
seeking after air any way they can.
If she were photograph or simple lines,
less art or more science, what we’d miss
is the man who had to be there
in the flesh with tray of graving tools
and pair of living eyes, who had
to read her with a knife and scrape
the burr from every rib, who had to know
the permanence of every cut. D’Agoty’s
flaps of flesh are scored with etching’s
textures, places where he meant the acid bath
to eat a weave of shadows into copper plates—
after which the inks pushed out their wells
of dark on water, thighs or fields, anywhere
the light is kept from falling, places
where the eye is urged to go but never see.
So this angel’s wings have corrugations
like boxes, cups, or woven fabric,
a tidiness of purpose that belies the tease
of bundled curls caught above the collar
of her open spine in its red spindles
of gristle. The artist must have thought
the coif a kindness. Perhaps he even knew
that women in the countryside made ready
for a birth with combs and ribbons,
believed first pains meant time for curls.
So were these wings D’Agoty’s kindness too,
his offer of a way she might escape
the grave? Or should we read these artful
cuts as consequence of process,
a simple accident of God.
Hear more poems from The Resurrection Trade via Minnesota Public Radio.
Alice (film, 1988)Jan SvankmajerIn the Boston Review, celebrated fantasy author John Crowley (Little, Big) reviews the photography/art of Rosamond Purcell (I blogged about Purcell’s photography for National Geographic and her 2006 book, Bookworm, last fall). Crowley says:
Rosamond Purcell’s photographs—all still lifes—are of things, and they are usually things we recognize, whether we have encountered them before or not; but our recognition is undermined because we don’t know how they got that way. We are asked to examine her recording with the same wonder, salted with revulsion, that she has brought to her examination of the object.
I love Purcell, so Crowley was preaching to an enthusiastic choir. But in his last paragraph he introduced me to another artist I can’t believe I’ve never heard of: surrealist filmmaker Jan Svankmajer.
I recently re-saw (why is there no visual equivalent of the word “reread”?) the 1988 film Alice, by Jan Svankmajer, the great Czech stop-motion animator. His version of Alice in Wonderland is so full of connections to the work and spirit of Purcell as to seem nearly a collaboration. Svankmajer’s Alice, a dark fearless girl, becomes a chipped antique doll when she drinks the inky potion that makes her small; the White Rabbit is a decaying stuffed specimen who tears himself from the box he is kept in, pulling out the nail that pins his foot, and thereafter leaks stuffing loathsomely. Alice falls through a world of things bottled in dark fluid that may be animal parts but also include buttons, keys, and other things; she makes her way through piles of soiled junk, drinks from stained, cracked porcelain.
Crowley’s quite right - this is like Purcell’s stuff come alive. I was hooked as soon as the frantic, glass-eyed White Rabbit pulled his pocketwatch out of his own sawdust viscera! The first six minutes are pure wonder cabinet. In the end, says Crowley,
Things transmute, as she observes or takes hold of them, from animate to inanimate and back (a scene of ancient socks that become wriggly snakes or caterpillars who bore sawdusty holes in a wooden floor, then crawl in and out of them). In all of this Alice is unafraid; more, she is curious (“curiouser and curiouser”) and attracted to the things offered, even the bugs that pour from opened cans and the rotted fabrics and papers—avid for strangeness, selective and judgmental, but willing, always, to go farther.
Curiouser and curiouser. In such avid, fearless pursuit of wonder, the child, scientist, historian, artist and author are all the same, aren’t they? Go get ‘em, Alice!PS. I go thirty years without ever hearing of Svankmajer, but it turns out Table of Malcontents posted about him (with a link to the sock-caterpillar scene) just two weeks ago! How did I miss that? It seems I was destined to discover him anyway. Curiouser and curiouser. . .Update: dude, what the heck? Shortly after I posted this, the Guardian released a review of Svankmajer! He’s everywhere!More: Brigid Cherry on Alice: “Dark Wonders and the Gothic Sensibility” (2002)
detail of “The Gift”
Ceramic tile
Richard Notkin, 1999
Last Friday I visited the Portland Art Museum. It was eerily quiet, so I was able to linger over individual pieces without feeling pressured to move along. Lingering is good; on the other hand, there was no “flow of traffic” to guide me. In empty galleries, I tend to wander inefficiently around, and inadvertently approach pieces from the least effective direction - I’m the kind of haphazard visitor that curators dread. And when I rounded a corner and encountered Richard Notkin’s 1999 sculpture, “The Gift,” sideways and from an arm’s length away, at first I didn’t register what I was seeing.
“The Gift” is a large grid of individually cast ceramic tiles depicting stylized skulls, heart tissue, ears, bricks, what looks like brain tissue, and dice. This is what an individual skull tile looks like:
The overall effect of hundreds of these tiles together was completely memento mori: flesh, time, death, randomness, fate: it doesn’t get more obvious than that. The skulls, in particular, reminded me powerfully of Mayan architectural motifs - the tzompantli at Chichen Itza, or more generally the square grids of glyphs on Mayan stelae, which frequently include portraits of gods or rulers. This association with a dead culture, especially one with some rather bloody sacrificial rituals, made “The Gift” even more clearly about the human capacity for self-destruction. The title, I thought, was tragically ironic.
Overall, the piece was sinister enough to prompt me to make a note of it, intending to look the artist up later on the internet. I happily wandered away, without ever stepping back to get the big picture.
Today, I looked “The Gift” up. Apparently this is how the complete installation of over a thousand tiles looks, when seen properly from the front, as I didn’t bother to do:
Oh.
A more recent work by Notkin, “All Nations Have Their Moment of Foolishness” (2006), also uses individual tiles as “pixels” in a larger image - an image less sinister than Hiroshima, but definitely disturbing.
More:
Notkin’s artist commentary on “All Nations Have Their Moment of Foolishness”
. I am really excited to get this book in the mail. It’s inspired by depictions of anatomy, especially female anatomy - by Gautier d’Agoty, van Rymsdyk, da Vinci, Vesalius. If the following poem is any indication, it’s good stuff.
last fall). Crowley says:
