Why Med Schools Are Requiring Students to Take Art Classes, and How It Makes Med Students Better Doctors

in Art, Health, Psychology, Science | July 11th, 2018

I have fol­lowed sev­er­al debates recent­ly about the lack of arts and human­i­ties edu­ca­tion in STEM pro­grams. One argu­ment runs thus: sci­en­tists, engi­neers, and pro­gram­mers often move into careers design­ing prod­ucts for human use, with­out hav­ing spent much time learn­ing about oth­er humans. With­out required cours­es, say, in psy­chol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, soci­ol­o­gy, lit­er­a­ture, etc., stu­dents can end up unthink­ing­ly repro­duc­ing harm­ful bias­es or over­look­ing seri­ous eth­i­cal prob­lems and social inequities.

Tech­no­log­i­cal mal­prac­tice is bad enough. Med­ical mal­prac­tice can have even more imme­di­ate­ly harm­ful, or fatal, effects. We might take for grant­ed that a doctor’s “bed­side man­ner” is pure­ly a mat­ter of per­son­al­i­ty, but many med­icals schools have decid­ed they need to be more proac­tive when it comes to train­ing future doc­tors in com­pas­sion­ate lis­ten­ing. And some have begun using the arts to fos­ter cre­ative think­ing and empa­thy and to improve doc­tor-patient com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The ver­bal­ly-abu­sive Dr. House aside, the best diag­nos­ti­cians actu­al­ly have sym­pa­thet­ic ears.

As Dr. Michael Flana­gan of Penn State’s Col­lege of Med­i­cine puts it, “Our job is to elic­it infor­ma­tion from our patients. By com­mu­ni­cat­ing more effec­tive­ly and estab­lish­ing rap­port with patients so they are more com­fort­able telling you about their symp­toms, you are more like­ly to make the diag­no­sis and have high­er patient sat­is­fac­tion.” From the patient side of things, an accu­rate diag­no­sis can mean more than “sat­is­fac­tion”; it can mean the dif­fer­ence between life and death, long-term suf­fer­ing or rapid recov­ery.

Can impres­sion­ist paint­ing make that dif­fer­ence? Dr. Flana­gan thinks it’s a start. His sem­i­nar “Impres­sion­ism and the Art of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion” asks fourth-year med­ical stu­dents to engage with the work of Vin­cent van Gogh and Claude Mon­et, in exer­cis­es “rang­ing from obser­va­tion and writ­ing activ­i­ties to paint­ing in the style of said artists,” notes Art­sy. “Through the process, they learn to bet­ter com­mu­ni­cate with patients by devel­op­ing insights on sub­jects like men­tal ill­ness and cog­ni­tive bias.” Why not just study these sub­jects in psy­chol­o­gy cours­es?

One answer comes from Penn State asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of art his­to­ry Nan­cy Locke, who presents to Flanagan’s class­es. “Art can make peo­ple see their lives dif­fer­ent­ly,” she says, “Doc­tors will see peo­ple reg­u­lar­ly with cer­tain prob­lems.” And they can begin to schema­tize their patients the way they schema­tize dis­eases and dis­or­ders. “But a paint­ing can con­tin­ue to be chal­leng­ing, and there are always new ques­tions to ask.” Impres­sion­ist paint­ing rep­re­sents only one road, among many oth­ers, to the ambi­gu­i­ties of the human mind.

Anoth­er Penn State pro­fes­sor, Dr. Paul Haidet, direc­tor of med­ical edu­ca­tion research, offered a sem­i­nar on jazz and med­ical com­mu­ni­ca­tions to fourth-year stu­dents in 2014 and 2015. As he men­tions in the video above, Flana­gan him­self took the course. “Just as one jazz musi­cian pro­vides space to anoth­er to impro­vise,” he tells Penn State News, “as physi­cians we need to pro­vide space to our patients to com­mu­ni­cate in their own style. It was a trans­for­ma­tion­al expe­ri­ence, unlike any­thing I ever had in med­ical school myself.” He was inspired there­after to intro­duce his paint­ing course.

One could imag­ine class­es on the Vic­to­ri­an nov­el, mod­ernist poet­ry, or impro­vi­sa­tion­al dance hav­ing sim­i­lar effects. Oth­er med­ical schools have cer­tain­ly agreed. Dr. Del­phine Tay­lor, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty Med­ical Cen­ter, “empha­sizes that arts-focused activ­i­ties are impor­tant in train­ing future doc­tors to be present and aware,” Art­sy writes, “which is more and more dif­fi­cult today giv­en the per­va­sive­ness of tech­nol­o­gy and media.” Arts pro­grams have also been adopt­ed in the med­ical schools at Yale, Har­vard, and UT Austin.

The prece­dents for incor­po­rat­ing the arts into a sci­ence edu­ca­tion abound—many a famous sci­en­tist has also had a pas­sion for lit­er­a­ture, pho­tog­ra­phy, paint­ing, or music. (Ein­stein, for exam­ple, wouldn’t be part­ed from his vio­lin.) As the arts and sci­ences grew fur­ther apart, for rea­sons hav­ing to do with the struc­ture of high­er edu­ca­tion and the dic­tates of mar­ket economies, it became far less com­mon for sci­en­tists and doc­tors to receive a lib­er­al arts edu­ca­tion. On the oth­er hand, todays lib­er­al arts stu­dents might ben­e­fit from more required STEM cours­es, but that’s a sto­ry for anoth­er day.

via Art­sy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Byrne & Neil deGrasse Tyson Explain the Impor­tance of an Arts Edu­ca­tion (and How It Strength­ens Sci­ence & Civ­i­liza­tion)

Your Brain on Art: The Emerg­ing Sci­ence of Neu­roaes­thet­ics Probes What Art Does to Our Brains

The Musi­cal Mind of Albert Ein­stein: Great Physi­cist, Ama­teur Vio­lin­ist and Devo­tee of Mozart

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Frank Lloyd Wright Creates a List of the 10 Traits Every Aspiring Artist Needs

in Architecture, Art, History | July 11th, 2018


No fig­ure looms larg­er over Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture than Frank Lloyd Wright. From the ear­ly 1890s to the ear­ly 1920s he estab­lished him­self as the builder of dozens of strik­ing, styl­is­ti­cal­ly inno­v­a­tive pri­vate homes as well as pub­lic works like Chicago’s Mid­way Gar­dens and Toky­o’s Impe­r­i­al Hotel. But by the end of that peri­od his per­son­al life had already turned chaot­ic and even trag­ic, and in his pro­fes­sion­al life he saw his com­mis­sions dry up. Just when it looked like he might not leave much of a lega­cy at all, an idea came to him: why not start a school?

“Wright found­ed what he called the Tal­iesin Fel­low­ship in 1932, when his own finan­cial prospects were dis­mal, as they had been through­out much of the 1920s,” writes archi­tec­ture crit­ic Michael Kim­mel­man in the New York Review of Books. “Hav­ing seen the great Chica­go archi­tect Louis Sul­li­van, his for­mer boss, die in pover­ty not many years ear­li­er, Wright was fore­stalling his own prospec­tive obliv­ion.” Charg­ing a tuition of $675 (“raised to $1,100 in 1933, more than at Yale or Har­vard”), Wright designed a pro­gram “to indoc­tri­nate aspir­ing archi­tects in his gospel of organ­ic archi­tec­ture, for which they would do hours of dai­ly chores, plant crops, wash Wright’s laun­dry, and enter­tain him and his guests as well as one anoth­er in the evenings with musi­cals and ama­teur the­atri­cals.”

There at Tal­iesin, his epony­mous home-stu­dio, locat­ed in the appro­pri­ate­ly rur­al set­ting of Spring Green, Wis­con­sin, Wright sought to forge not just com­plete archi­tects, and not just com­plete artists, but com­plete human beings. He pro­posed, in Kim­mel­man’s words, “the cre­ation of a small, inde­pen­dent soci­ety made bet­ter through his archi­tec­ture.” He also drew up a list, lat­er includ­ed in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, of the qual­i­ties the builders of that soci­ety should pos­sess:

I. An hon­est ego in a healthy body – good cor­re­la­tion
II. Love of truth and nature
III. Sin­cer­i­ty and courage
IV. Abil­i­ty for action
V. The esthet­ic sense
VI. Appre­ci­a­tion of work as idea and idea as work
VII. Fer­til­i­ty of imag­i­na­tion
VIII. Capac­i­ty for faith and rebel­lion
IX. Dis­re­gard for com­mon­place (inor­gan­ic) ele­gance
X. Instinc­tive coop­er­a­tion

This list reflects the kind of qual­i­ties Wright seemed to spend his life cul­ti­vat­ing in him­self, not to men­tion dis­play­ing to the pub­lic. Not that he showed much regard for the truth when it con­flict­ed with his own myth­mak­ing, nor an instinct for coop­er­a­tion with those he con­sid­ered less than his equals — and archi­tec­tural­ly speak­ing, he did­n’t con­sid­er any­one his equal. As well as Wright’s ego may have served him, not every artist needs one quite so colos­sal, but per­haps, per his list, they do need an hon­est one. “Ear­ly in life I had to choose between hon­est arro­gance and hyp­o­crit­i­cal humil­i­ty,” he once said. “I chose the for­mer and have seen no rea­son to change.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take 360° Vir­tu­al Tours of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Archi­tec­tur­al Mas­ter­pieces, Tal­iesin & Tal­iesin West

Frank Lloyd Wright Reflects on Cre­ativ­i­ty, Nature and Reli­gion in Rare 1957 Audio

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Lists the Three Essen­tial Qual­i­ties For All Seri­ous Nov­el­ists (And Run­ners)

Pat­ti Smith, Umber­to Eco & Richard Ford Give Advice to Young Artists in a Rol­lick­ing Short Ani­ma­tion

John Cleese’s Advice to Young Artists: “Steal Any­thing You Think Is Real­ly Good”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Nearly 1,000 Paintings & Drawings by Vincent van Gogh Now Digitized and Put Online: View/Download the Collection

in Art | July 9th, 2018

Every artist explores dimen­sions of space and place, ori­ent­ing them­selves and their works in the world, and ori­ent­ing their audi­ences. Then there are artists like Vin­cent van Gogh, who make space and place a pri­ma­ry sub­ject. In his ear­ly paint­ings of peas­ant homes and fields, his fig­ures’ mus­cu­lar shoul­ders and hands inter­act with stur­dy walls and gnarled trees. Lat­er coun­try scenes—whether curl­ing and del­i­cate, like Wheat­field with a Reaper, or heavy and omi­nous, like Wheat­field with Crows (both below)—give us the sense of the land­scape as a sin­gle liv­ing enti­ty, pul­sat­ing, writhing, blaz­ing in bril­liant yel­lows, reds, greens, and blues.

Van Gogh paint­ed inte­ri­or scenes, such as his famous The Bed­room, at the top (the first of three ver­sions), with an eye toward using col­or as the means of mak­ing space pur­pose­ful: “It’s just sim­ply my bed­room,” he wrote to Paul Gau­guin of the 1888 paint­ing, “only here col­or is to do every­thing… to be sug­ges­tive here of rest or of sleep in gen­er­al. In a word, look­ing at the pic­ture ought to rest the brain, or rather the imag­i­na­tion.”

So tak­en was the painter with the con­cept of using col­or to induce “rest or sleep” in his view­ers’ imag­i­na­tions that when water dam­age threat­ed the “sta­bil­i­ty” of the first paint­ing, Chicago’s Art Insti­tute notes, “he became deter­mined to pre­serve the com­po­si­tion by paint­ing a sec­ond ver­sion while at an asy­lum in Saint-Rémy in 1889,” then demon­strat­ed the deep emo­tion­al res­o­nance this scene had for him by paint­ing a third, small­er ver­sion for his moth­er and sis­ter.

The oppor­tu­ni­ty to see all of Van Gogh’s bed­room paint­ings in one place may have passed us by for now—an exhib­it in Chica­go brought them togeth­er in 2016. But we can see the orig­i­nal bed­room at the yel­low house in Arles in a vir­tu­al space, along with almost 1,000 more Van Gogh paint­ings and draw­ings, at the Van Gogh Muse­um in Ams­ter­dam’s site. The dig­i­tized col­lec­tion show­cas­es a vast amount of Van Gogh’s work—including not only land­scapes, but also his many por­traits, self-por­traits, draw­ings, city scenes, and still-lifes.

One way to approach these works is through the uni­fy­ing themes above: how does van Gogh use col­or to com­mu­ni­cate space and place, and to what effect? Even in por­traits and still-lifes, his fig­ures com­pete with the ground. The scored and scal­loped paint­ings of walls, floors, and wall­pa­per force our atten­tion past the star­ing eyes of the painter or the fine­ly-ren­dered fruits and shoes, and into the depths and tex­tures of shad­ow and light. We begin to see peo­ple and objects as insep­a­ra­ble from their sur­round­ings.

“Paint­ing is a faith,” Van Gogh once wrote, and it is as if his paint­ings ask us to con­tem­plate the spir­i­tu­al uni­ty of all things; the same ani­mat­ing flame brings every object in his blaz­ing worlds to life. The Van Gogh Muse­um hous­es the largest col­lec­tion of the artist’s work in the world. On their web­site you can read essays about his life and work, plan a vis­it, or shop at the online store. But most impor­tant­ly, you can expe­ri­ence the stun­ning breadth of his art through your screen—no replace­ment for the phys­i­cal spaces of gal­leries, but a wor­thy means nonethe­less of com­muning with Van Gogh’s vision.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

2,000+ Impres­sion­ist, Post-impres­sion­ist & Ear­ly Mod­ern Paint­ings Now Free Online, Thanks to the Barnes Foun­da­tion

Simon Schama Presents Van Gogh and the Begin­ning of Mod­ern Art

New Ani­mat­ed Film About Vin­cent Van Gogh Will Be Made Out of 65,000 Van Gogh-Style Paint­ings: Watch the Trail­er and Mak­ing-Of Video

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Behold the Art-o-Mat: Vintage Cigarette Vending Machines Get Repurposed & Dispense Works of Art

in Art, Creativity, Design, Technology | July 6th, 2018

It’s a well known fact that any­one who’s quit­ting smok­ing will need to find some­thing to occu­py their hands.

Many experts sug­gest hold­ing a pen­cil or anoth­er vague­ly-cig­a­rette-shaped object.

Oth­ers pre­scribe busy work—cracking nuts and peel­ing oranges.

Hard­core cas­es are advised to keep those paws busy with a hob­by such as paint­ing or wood­work­ing.

But from where we sit, the most spir­i­tu­al­ly reward­ing, sym­bol­ic activ­i­ty for some­one in this ten­der sit­u­a­tion would be cre­at­ing a tiny art­work pro­to­type to sell in an Art-o-Mat®, one of over 100 vin­tage cig­a­rette vend­ing machines specif­i­cal­ly repur­posed to dis­pense art.

Locat­ed pri­mar­i­ly in the US, the machines are the brain­child of artist Clark Whit­ting­ton, who loaded the first one with black & white, block-mount­ed pho­tos for a 1997 solo show in a Win­ston-Salem cafe.

These days, there are a hun­dred or so Art-o-Mats, stocked with the work of artists both pro­fes­sion­al and ama­teur, who have suc­cess­ful­ly nav­i­gat­ed the sub­mis­sion process.

A vari­ety of medi­ums is represented—painting, sculp­ture, fine art prints, jew­el­ry, assem­blages, cut paper, and tiny bound books.

Wor­thing­ton encour­ages would-be par­tic­i­pants to avoid the ease of mass pro­duc­tion in favor of unique items that bear evi­dence of the human hand:

The vend­ing process is only the begin­ning of your Art-o-Mat® art. Once pur­chased and two steps away from the machine, your work is sole­ly a reflec­tion of you and your art. Many pieces have been car­ried around the globe. So, think of approach­es that do not con­vey “a Sun­day after­noon at the copy shop” and con­sid­er ways that your art will be appre­ci­at­ed for years to come.

The guide­lines are under­stand­ably strict with regard to dimen­sions. Wouldn’t want to kill the blind box thrill by jam­ming a vin­tage vend­ing machine’s inner work­ings.

Edi­bles, mag­nets, bal­loons, glit­ter, con­fet­ti, and any­thing processed along­side peanuts are ver­boten mate­ri­als.

A cer­tain pop­u­lar decoupage medi­um is anoth­er no-no, as it adheres to the man­dat­ed pro­tec­tive wrap.

And just as cig­a­rettes car­ry stern­ly word­ed warn­ings from the Sur­geon Gen­er­al, artists are advised to include a label if their sub­mis­sion could be con­sid­ered unsuit­able for under­age col­lec­tors.

If you need a hand to walk you through the process, have a look at crafter Shan­non Greene’s video, above.

Greene became enthralled with the Art-o-Mat expe­ri­ence on a heav­i­ly doc­u­ment­ed trip to Las Vegas, when she put $5 in the Cos­mopoli­tan Hotel’s machine, and received a box of string and paint­ed can­vas scrap book­marks cre­at­ed by Kelsey Huck­a­by.

(Wit­ness artist Huck­a­by treat­ing her­self to one of her own cre­ations from an Austin, Texas Art-o-Mat on her birth­day, below, to see a machine in action. Par­tic­u­lar­ly rec­om­mend­ed for those who came of age after these once-stan­dard fix­tures were banned from the lob­bies of bars and din­ers.)

Oth­er repur­posed machines in the Art-o-Mat sta­ble include the zip­py red num­ber in Ocala, Florida’s Apple­ton Muse­um of Art, a cool blue cus­tomer resid­ing in Stan­ford University’s Lan­tana House, and a 6‑knob mod­el that peri­od­i­cal­ly pops up in var­i­ous arts-friend­ly New York City venues.

As the jol­ly and self-dep­re­cat­ing crafter Greene observes, at $5 a “yank,” no one is get­ting rich off this project, though the artists get 50% of the pro­ceeds.

It’s also worth not­ing that these orig­i­nal art­works cost less than a pack of cig­a­rettes in all but six states.

We agree with Greene that the expe­ri­ence more than jus­ti­fies the price. What­ev­er art one winds up with is but added val­ue.

Greene does not regret the con­sid­er­able labor that went into the 100 tiny jour­nals cov­ered in retired bill­board vinyl she was required to crank out after her pro­to­types were green­lit.

To deter­mine whether or not you’re pre­pared to do the time, have a peek at Katharine Miele’s labor-inten­sive process, below. Even though the artist’s con­tact infor­ma­tion is includ­ed along with every Art-o-Mat sur­prise, there’s no guar­an­tee that she’ll hear back from any­one who wound up with one of the geo­met­ric chair linocuts she spent a week mak­ing.

Oth­er Art-o-Mat artists, like Susan Rossiter, have fig­ured out how to play by the rules while also real­iz­ing a bit of return beyond the Pip­pi Long­stock­ing-like sat­is­fac­tion of cre­at­ing a nifty expe­ri­ence for ran­dom strangers. The machines are stocked with orig­i­nals of her tiny mul­ti-media chick­en por­traits, and she sells prints on her web­site.

Or per­haps, you, like monony­mous physi­cist Colleen, find a med­i­ta­tive plea­sure in the act of cre­ation. To date, she’s paint­ed 1150 cig­a­rette-pack-sized blocks for inclu­sion in the machines.

Still game? Get start­ed with an Art-o-Mat pro­to­type kit for $19.99 here.

(As Greene joy­ful­ly points out, it comes with such good­ies as a lit­tle jour­nal, a pen­cil, and an offi­cial Art-o-Mat eras­er.)

Take inspi­ra­tion — or dream about what $5 might get you — in the collector’s show and tell, above.

Feel­ing flush and far from the near­est Art-o-Mat loca­tion?  Sup­port the project by drop­ping a Ben­jamin on an Art-o-Car­ton con­tain­ing 10 tiny art­works, cus­tom select­ed in response to a short, per­son­al­i­ty-based ques­tion­naire.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Vend­ing Machine Now Dis­trib­utes Free Short Sto­ries at Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Café Zoetrope

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Nov­els Sold in Pol­ish Vend­ing Machines

Sup­port “Green Reads,” a Pro­gram That Finances Libraries by Dis­trib­ut­ing Used Books in Eco-Friend­ly Vend­ing Machines

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Nick Offerman Explains the Psychological Benefits of Woodworking–and How It Can Help You Achieve Zen in Other Parts of Your Life

in Art, Comedy | July 6th, 2018

The world may know him as an actor and come­di­an, but Nick Offer­man also loves wood­work­ing. And he does­n’t just love it in the evenings-and-week­ends, some­thing-to-do-with-my-hands-while-I-lis­ten-to-pod­casts way: he’s actu­al­ly devot­ed a seri­ous chunk of his life, per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al, to mak­ing things out of trees. As neat­ly as it may dove­tail with the musky, tra­di­tion­al­ly (and some­times buf­foon­ish­ly) mas­cu­line char­ac­ters he plays, the wood­work­ing aspect of Offer­man’s life exists inde­pen­dent­ly of his oth­er craft — not to say, of course, that you’ll find the web site of the Offer­man Wood­shop com­plete­ly devoid of humor.

Though pride in phys­i­cal work well done is its own reward, Offer­man believes that his wood­work­ing also made it pos­si­ble for him to suc­ceed as an enter­tain­er. “Peo­ple often ask me, how can I get my kid involved in show busi­ness?” he says in the Big Think clip above. “And I always say, I would advise that you take up wood­work­ing, because it’s addic­tive,” a “craft that is so sat­is­fy­ing, that doesn’t require the input of any cor­po­rate enti­ties.” This in con­trast to the Hol­ly­wood audi­tions where he always found him­self per­form­ing for “a room full of bankers” and leav­ing bewil­dered, think­ing, “ ‘I have no idea how I did,’ which gives you a lot of stress and a lot of agi­ta.”

This stress and agi­ta sent him straight to his wood­shop, where he would “just start sand­ing a wal­nut table.” Before long, “I would see the tan­gi­ble result of this work that I had done. The thing is, there’s no way to describe the sen­sa­tion. There’s mag­ic in it, whether you’re work­ing with glass or met­als or food or knit­ting or wood.” He cred­its that pow­er­ful and empow­er­ing sen­sa­tion, which he describes, in a per­haps unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly Cal­i­forn­ian man­ner, as hav­ing “an incred­i­ble med­i­ta­tive or Zen qual­i­ty,” with giv­ing him “a mel­low demeanor to the point that I no longer cared as much about the TV shows.” And by car­ing less, he found that he could han­dle all of the per­for­mances show busi­ness demand­ed of him that much bet­ter.

You can get a tour of Offer­man’s Los Ange­les wood­shop in the sec­ond video from the top, a clip from This Old House. Begin­ning with his impres­sive wood stock, it con­tin­ues on to his even more for­mi­da­ble set of inde­struc­tible-look­ing vin­tage tools. “The less elec­tric­i­ty you can use,” he tells the host, “the more plea­sur­able your wood­work­ing will be.” He shares more wood­work­ing advice in the video just above, answer­ing ques­tions from the would-be wood­work­ers of Twit­ter: Is an apron real­ly nec­es­sary? Yes. Does oak require a pre-stain con­di­tion­er? Don’t stain oak at all. When one fel­low request­ing help iden­ti­fy­ing a joint type address­es Offer­man as “Mas­ter Crafter Wood,” Offer­man cor­rects him: “I’m a stu­dent of the form, but I appre­ci­ate your opti­mism.” That sums up what wood­work­ing offers: a con­di­tion of eter­nal stu­dent­hood, and if not opti­mism then at least a help­ful equa­nim­i­ty. “Zen” may be the right word after all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Watch the Mak­ing of a Hand-Craft­ed Vio­lin, from Start to Fin­ish, in a Beau­ti­ful­ly-Shot Doc­u­men­tary

Watch “The Woodswim­mer,” a Stop Motion Film Made Entire­ly with Wood, and “Bru­tal­ly Tedious” Tech­niques

Just 45 Straight Min­utes of Nick Offer­man Qui­et­ly Drink­ing Sin­gle Malt Scotch by the Fire

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Iconic Urinal & Work of Art, “Fountain,” Wasn’t Created by Marcel Duchamp But by the Pioneering Dada Artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

in Art, Gender, History | July 5th, 2018

In the intro­duc­tion to her book Broad Strokes, writer and art his­to­ry schol­ar Brid­get Quinn describes her dis­cov­ery of Lee Kras­ner, accom­plished abstract expres­sion­ist painter who just hap­pened to have been mar­ried to Jack­son Pol­lock. That bio­graph­i­cal detail war­rant­ed Kras­ner a foot­note, but lit­tle more, in the art books Quinn stud­ied in col­lege. Learn­ing of Kras­ner sent Quinn on a quest to find oth­er women left behind by art his­to­ry. “My fix­a­tion with these artists went beyond fem­i­nism,” she writes, “if it had any­thing to do with it at all. I iden­ti­fied with these painters and sculp­tors the way my friends iden­ti­fied with Joy Divi­sion or The Clash or Hüsker Dü.”

Much has changed since 1987, when Quinn’s fan­dom began, but Kras­ner is still one of the few female artists to have ever had a ret­ro­spec­tive show at New York’s Muse­um of Mod­ern Art. And one artist every stu­dent of art his­to­ry should know, Baroness Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven, remains almost com­plete­ly obscure. What’s so impor­tant about von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven? She was a pio­neer­ing Dada artist and poet—well-known in the 1910s and 20s. “Her work was cham­pi­oned by Ernest Hem­ing­way and Ezra Pound,” writes John Hig­gs at the Inde­pen­dent (she appears in Pound’s Can­to XCV). She “is now rec­og­nized as the first Amer­i­can Dada artist, but it might be equal­ly true to say she was the first New York punk, 60 years too ear­ly.”

Von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven also deserves the cred­it, it seems, for one of the most ground­break­ing art objects to ever appear in a gallery: Foun­tain, the uri­nal signed “R. Mutt” that Mar­cel Duchamp claimed as his own and which has made him a leg­end in the his­to­ry of art. The sto­ry, I imag­ine, might seem depress­ing­ly famil­iar to every woman who has ever had a male boss pub­lish her work with his name on it. Even more frus­trat­ing­ly, the “glar­ing truth has been known for some time in the art world,” accord­ing to the blog of art mag­a­zine See All This. Yet, “each time it has to be acknowl­edged, it is met with indif­fer­ence and silence.”

The truth first emerged in a let­ter from Duchamp to his sister—discovered in 1982 and dat­ed April 11th, 1917, a few days before the exhib­it in which Foun­tain first appeared—in which he “wrote that a female friend using a male alias had sent it in for the New York exhi­bi­tion.” The name, “Richard Mutt,” was a pseu­do­nym cho­sen by Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven, who was liv­ing in Philadel­phia at the time and whom Duchamp knew well, once pro­nounc­ing that “she is not a Futur­ist. She is the future.” (See her Por­trait of Mar­cel Duchamp, above, in a 1920 pho­to­graph by Charles Sheel­er.)

Why did she nev­er claim Foun­tain as her own? “She nev­er had the chance,” notes See All This. The uri­nal was reject­ed by the exhi­bi­tion orga­niz­ers (Duchamp resigned from their board in protest), and it was prob­a­bly, sub­se­quent­ly thrown away; noth­ing remained but a pho­to­graph by Alfred Stieglitz. Von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven died ten years lat­er in 1927.

It was only in 1935 that sur­re­al­ist André Bre­ton brought atten­tion back to Foun­tain, attribut­ing it to Duchamp, who accept­ed author­ship and began to com­mis­sion repli­cas. The 1917 piece “was des­tined to become one of the most icon­ic works of mod­ern art. In 2004, some five hun­dred artists and art experts her­ald­ed Foun­tain as the most influ­en­tial piece of mod­ern art, even leav­ing Picasso’s Les Demoi­selles d’Avignon behind.”

Duchamp’s let­ter is not the only rea­son his­to­ri­ans have for think­ing of Foun­tain as von Freytag-Loringhoven’s work. “Baroness Elsa had been find­ing objects in the street and declar­ing them to be works of art since before Duchamp hit upon the idea of ‘ready­mades,’” writes Hig­gs. One such work, a “cast-iron plumber’s trap attached to a wood­en box, which she called God” (above), was also mis­at­trib­uted, “assumed to be the work of an artist called Mor­ton Liv­ingston Schaum­berg, although it is now accept­ed that his role in the sculp­ture was lim­it­ed to fix­ing the plumber’s trap to its wood­en base.”

“Foun­tain is base, crude, con­fronta­tion­al and fun­ny,” writes Hig­gs, “Those are not typ­i­cal aspects of Duchamp’s work, but they sum­ma­rize the Baroness and her art per­fect­ly.” Duchamp lat­er claimed to have bought the uri­nal him­self, but lat­er research has shown this to be unlike­ly. Hig­gs’ book Stranger Than We Can Imag­ine explores the issues in more depth, as does an arti­cle in Dutch pub­lished in the See All This sum­mer issue. What would it mean for the art estab­lish­ment to acknowl­edge von Freytag-Loringhoven’s author­ship? “To attribute Foun­tain to a woman and not a man,” the mag­a­zine writes, “has obvi­ous, far-reach­ing con­se­quences: the his­to­ry of mod­ern art has to be rewrit­ten. Mod­ern art did not start with a patri­arch, but with a matri­arch.”

Learn more about Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven at The Art Sto­ry.

via See All This

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Mar­cel Duchamp Read “The Cre­ative Act,” A Short Lec­ture on What Makes Great Art, Great

The Female Pio­neers of the Bauhaus Art Move­ment: Dis­cov­er Gertrud Arndt, Mar­i­anne Brandt, Anni Albers & Oth­er For­got­ten Inno­va­tors

1933 Arti­cle on Fri­da Kahlo: “Wife of the Mas­ter Mur­al Painter Glee­ful­ly Dab­bles in Works of Art”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Brief, Visual Introduction to Surrealism: A Primer by Doctor Who Star Peter Capaldi

in Art, History | June 22nd, 2018

Sur­re­al­ism, accord­ing to this short Unlock Art video from the Tate, began in Paris, at the cafe Les Deux Magots, in 1924. You can still go there, but among its habitués you won’t find the fel­low on whom the cam­era zooms in: André Bre­ton, author of the Sur­re­al­ist Man­i­festo. That influ­en­tial text drew inspi­ra­tion from the work of Sig­mund Freud, father of psy­cho­analy­sis, specif­i­cal­ly his book The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams.

“Bre­ton believed art and lit­er­a­ture could rep­re­sent the uncon­scious mind,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor Peter Capal­di, well known as one of the Doc­tors of Doc­tor Who. He then names some artists who agreed with Bre­ton on this point, such as Sal­vador Dalí, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Rene Magritte — just a few of the Sur­re­al­ists. “Sur­re­al,” as an adjec­tive, has per­haps fall­en vic­tim to debase­ment by overuse in the past 84 years. But Bre­ton had spe­cif­ic ideas about Sur­re­al­is­m’s poten­tial effects, its sources of pow­er, and its meth­ods.

Desire, for instance, “was cen­tral to the Sur­re­al­ist vision of love, poet­ry, and lib­er­ty. It was the key to under­stand­ing human beings.” Sur­re­al­ist artis­tic prac­tices includ­ed putting objects “that were not nor­mal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with one anoth­er togeth­er, to make some­thing that was play­ful and dis­turb­ing at the same time in order to stim­u­late the uncon­scious mind.” Think of Dalí’s 1936 Lob­ster Tele­phone, made out of those very objects. “It’s about food and sex,” Capal­di pro­nounces. The Sur­re­al­ist vision also extend­ed to more com­pli­cat­ed endeav­ors, such as elab­o­rate paint­ings and films that still fas­ci­nate today.

You can catch up on Sur­re­al­ist film here on Open Cul­ture, begin­ning with Luis Buñuel & Sal­vador Dalí’s night­mar­ish 1929 short Un Chien Andalou, con­tin­u­ing on to the Sur­re­al­ist fea­ture Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy (a col­lab­o­ra­tion by the likes of Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger and Hans Richter), and the his­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist cin­e­ma as pre­sent­ed by David Lynch, a film­mak­er wide­ly con­sid­ered one of the move­men­t’s mod­ern heirs. Whether Bre­ton would rec­og­nize the Sur­re­al­ist sen­si­bil­i­ty in its cur­rent man­i­fes­ta­tions will remain a mat­ter of debate, but who could watch this Unlock Art primer and fail to sense the fas­ci­na­tion its basic ideas — or basic com­pul­sions, per­haps — still hold today?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

Restored Ver­sion of Un Chien Andalou: Luis Buñuel & Sal­vador Dalí’s Sur­re­al Film (1929)

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

When The Sur­re­al­ists Expelled Sal­vador Dalí for “the Glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Hit­ler­ian Fas­cism” (1934)

30 Hours of Doc­tor Who Audio Dra­mas Now Free to Stream Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Meditative Look at a Japanese Artisan’s Quest to Save the Brilliant, Forgotten Colors of Japan’s Past

in Art, History | June 19th, 2018

We might assume that 21st-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy enables us to pro­duce fab­ric in all imag­in­able col­ors, most of them total­ly unknown to our ances­tors. Yet none of it has ever quite repli­cat­ed the strik­ing hues achieved by dyers of cen­turies and cen­turies ago. That premise under­lies the slow and painstak­ing work of Sachio Yosh­io­ka, whose fam­i­ly’s fab­ric-dye­ing her­itage goes back to Japan’s Edo peri­od of the 17th to the mid-19th cen­tu­ry. Hav­ing tak­en over his father’s work­shop Tex­tiles Yosh­io­ka in 1988, he has spent the past thir­ty years work­ing only with tra­di­tion­al plant dyes, the kind that once, in a time long before his fam­i­ly even got into the dye­ing busi­ness, made his home­land so col­or­ful.

The Japan­ese dye­ing tra­di­tion, in this read­ing of its his­to­ry, reached its long apex of bril­liance in the Nara and Heian peri­ods, which togeth­er last­ed from the years 710 to 1185. Most of the world admires Japan­ese aes­thet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties, but often with ref­er­ence to inter­na­tion­al­ly well-known con­cepts like wabi-sabi that ide­al­ize the rus­tic, the imper­fect, and the sub­dued. Unlike in the Edo peri­od, when the strict Tokyu­gawa Shogu­nate man­dat­ed that com­mon peo­ple stick to grays and browns, Nara and Heian cities would have been rich with vivid reds, blues, yel­lows, oranges, and even pur­ples, all in vari­eties one sel­dom sees even today, in Japan or any­where else.

Hence Yosh­ioka’s mis­sion to prac­tice and even refine the same labor-inten­sive dye­ing meth­ods used back then. For­mer­ly a stu­dent of phi­los­o­phy as well as a pub­lish­er of books on the his­to­ry of col­or and fab­ric arts, he now seems devot­ed to what goes on in his Kyoto work­shop. You can watch what he and his assis­tants do there in the video from the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um above. Com­posed of four short films, it includes a seg­ment on Yosh­ioka’s pro­duc­tion of paper flow­ers for the Omizu­tori fes­ti­val at the Tōdai-ji Bud­dhist tem­ple in Nara, the his­tor­i­cal cap­i­tal out­side Kyoto, that cul­mi­nates in an evening fire cer­e­mo­ny.

That fire cer­e­mo­ny, called Otaimat­su, remains as com­pelling a spec­ta­cle today as it must have been more than a mil­len­ni­um ago, just as sure­ly as the col­ors Yosh­io­ka has redis­cov­ered have lost none of their allure since then. His ded­i­ca­tion to the work of tra­di­tion­al dye­ing — work his daugh­ter Sarasa will take into its sixth gen­er­a­tion — comes not out of a desire to pay trib­ute to Japan­ese his­to­ry, nor even out of fil­ial piety, but some­thing much sim­pler: “The col­ors you can obtain from plants are so beau­ti­ful,” he says. “This is the one and only rea­son I do what I do.” 

via Kot­tke/Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Japan­ese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bam­boo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

The Art of the Japan­ese Teapot: Watch a Mas­ter Crafts­man at Work, from the Begin­ning Until the Star­tling End

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Japan­ese Crafts­man Spends His Life Try­ing to Recre­ate a Thou­sand-Year-Old Sword

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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