If you’re near Pasadena, California, stop by the Flower Pepper Gallery and see Facade, the new exhibition featuring the work of visual artist Randy Hage. For decades now, Hage has been fascinated by the beauty of aging structures in New York City. This led him, beginning in the late 1990s, to start photographing aging storefronts in the city, “with their hand painted signs, layers of architecture, wonderful patinas and intriguing history.” Later, he decided to preserve their memory in miniaturized, hyper-realistic sculptures (like the ones now on display in Pasadena through November 18th). In the video above, see just how perfectly Hage manages to recreate New York storefronts in miniature. Here’s another famous-but-now-defunct facade you might recognize:
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It’s not surprising. Vonnegut’s humor and concision make him one of the most quotable authors of all time, perfectly suited to the task.
Repetition is the price Vonnegut tattoo enthusiasts must pay for such enduring popularity.
The phrase “so it goes” occurs 106 times in Slaughterhouse-Five, a figure dwarfed many times over by the number of hides upon which it is permanently inked. Recurrence is so frequent that the literary tattoo blog, Contrariwise, recently hosted a round of So It Goes Saturdays. So it goes.
The second runner up, also from Slaughterhouse-Five, is the painfully ironic “Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt.”
Those who’d rather put a bird on it than present an accessible sentiment to the uninitiated can opt for “poo-tee-weet,” the catchphrase of a bird who’s a witness to war. Certain to confound the folks staring at your triceps in the grocery line.
Slaughterhouse Five is not Vonnegut’s only tattoo-friendly novel, of course.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this month. Follow her @AyunHalliday
In 1919, German architect Walter Gropius founded Bauhaus, the most influential art school of the 20th century. Bauhaus defined modernist design and radically changed our relationship with everyday objects. Gropius wrote in his manifesto Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar that “There is no essential difference between the artist and the artisan.” His new school, which featured faculty that included the likes of Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky, did indeed erase the centuries-old line between applied arts and fine arts.
Bauhaus architecture sandblasted away the ornate flourishes common with early 20th century buildings, favoring instead the clean, sleek lines of industrial factories. Designer Marcel Breuer reimagined the common chair by stripping it down to its most elemental form. Herbert Bayer reinvented and modernized graphic design by focusing on visual clarity. Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt and Christian Dell radically remade such diverse objects as fabrics and tea kettles.
13. Albert Gleizes, Kubismus, Munich: Albert Langen, 1928.
14. László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zur Architektur, Munich: Albert Langen, 1929, 241 pp; facsimile repr., Mainz and Berlin: Florian Kupferberg, 1968.
The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, trans. Daphne M. Hoffman, New York: Breuer Warren and Putnam, 1930; exp.rev.ed. as The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, New York: George Wittenborn, 1947, 92 pp. (in English)
And here are some key Bauhaus journals:
bauhaus 1 (1926). 5 pages, 42 cm. Download (23 MB).
bauhaus: zeitschrift für bau und gestaltung 2:1 (Feb 1928). Download (17 MB).
bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung 3:1 (Jan 1929). Download (17 MB).
bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung 3:2 (Apr-Jun 1929). Download (15 MB).
bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung 3:3 (Jul-Sep 1929). Download (16 MB).
bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung 2 (Jul 1931). Download (15 MB).
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
A rousing sentiment, and one rarely expressed by those running for the nation’s highest office.
Once a candidate has been safely elected, he may feel comfortable betraying a deeper affinity, or ceding to the tastes of an arts-inclined First Lady. Sanders isn’t waiting, pledging in the video above, that he will be an Arts President.
He recorded a 1987 folk album with the help of 30 Vermont musicians, stoutly pronouncing the lyrics to “This Land is Your Land” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” a la Rex Harrison.
As Sanders fans wait to see whether Fairey will perform a similar service for his 2016 pick, Stencils for Bernie is taking up the slack with downloadable images for the DIY-inclined.
I presume that it’s only a matter of time before some young animator puts him or herself at Sanders’ disposal, though I kind of hope not. The candidate’s short video is reassuringly devoid of the snappy visuals that have become a staple of the form, thanks to such popular series as Crash Course, CGP Grey, The School of Life, and TED Ed.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this month. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Appreciators of the finest works in cinema history often liken their images to paintings. In the case of Akira Kurosawa, maker of quite a few entries on that grand list of the finest works in cinema history, that makes professional sense: he began as a painter, only later turning filmmaker. “When I changed careers,” he writes, “I burnt all the pictures that I had painted up until then. I intended to forget painting once and for all. As a well-known Japanese proverb says, ‘If you chase two rabbits, you may not catch even one.’ I did no art work at all once I began to work in cinema. But since becoming a film director, I have found that drawing rough sketches was often a useful means of explaining ideas to my staff.”
That comes quoted on “Akira Kurosawa: From Art to Film,” a roundup of such paintings by the Emperor (a nickname Kurosawa earned through his on-set manner), set beside the resulting frames from his movies. “As a painter and filmmaker, Kurosawa stuck to his own style,” writes Popmatters’ Ian Chant in an examination of this facet of his career, “informed heavily by traditional Japanese painting as well as European impressionists and expressionists, another arena of art where he answered to both eastern and western influences. These painstakingly crafted paintings formed the visual backbone of some of Kurosawa’s most lasting achievements.”
The most vivid examples of canvas-turned-celluloid come from Kurosawa’s later works, such as 1980’s Kagemusha, 1985’s Ran, 1990’s Dreams, and 1993’s Madadayo, selections from each of which you see in this post. “I cannot help but be fascinated by the fact that when I tried to paint well, I could only produce mediocre pictures,” continues the Emperor himself. “But when I concentrated on delineating the ideas for my films, I unconsciously produced works that people find interesting.” Holding the painted work up against his film work, only the strictest cinema purist could deny that, ultimately, Kurosawa caught both rabbits.
If you were to ask me in my callow years as a young art student to name my favorite painter, I would have answered without a moment’s hesitation: Wassily Kandinsky. His theoretical bent, his mysticism, his seemingly near total creative independence…. There were times when Kandinsky the thinker, writer, and teacher appealed to me even more than Kandinsky the painter. This may go a ways toward explaining why I left art school after my first year to pursue writing and teaching. But nowadays, having seen a tiny bit more of the world and its bountiful artistic treasures, I might pause for just a moment if asked about my favorite painter… then I’d answer: Wassily Kandinsky.
If you want to see the pioneering abstract expressionist’s art in the United States, your best bet is to get yourself to New York’s famed Guggenheim, which has a veritable treasure chest of Kandinsky’s work that documents his transition from paintings and woodcuts inspired by Russian folk art and French fauvism to completely non-representational canvases made entirely of intersecting lines, shapes, and colors—his own private symbology.
But if you can’t make it to New York, then just head on over to the Guggenheim’s online collection, where the museum has digitized “nearly 1600 artworks by more than 575 artists.” This is the most sweeping move toward greater accessibility since the private collection went public in 1937. You’ll find early representational Kandinskys; transitional Kandinskys like Sketch for Composition II from 1909-10 (top)—with still recognizable favorite motifs of his, like the horse and rider embedded in them; and you’ll find much more abstract Kandinskys like 1913’s Light Picture, above, showing his move even farther away from Matisse and Russian folks and closer to an inimitable individual aesthetic like that of Joan Miró or Paul Klee.
Speaking of Klee, another of my favorites, you’ll also find the sketch above, from 1895, before he began his formal training in Munich. It’s a far cry from his mature style—a primitive minimalism that drew inspiration from children’s art. If you know anyone who looks at abstract art and says, “I could do that,” show them the drawing above and ask if they could do this. Painters like Kandinsky and Klee, who worked and exhibited together, first learned to render in more rigorously formal styles before they broke every rule and made their own. It’s a necessary part of the discipline of art.
Of the three artists I’ve mentioned thus far, it is perhaps Miró who moved farthest away from any semblance of classical training. In works like Personage (above), the Spanish surrealist achieved his “assassination of painting” and the realist bourgeois values he detested in European art. Piet Mondrian, another artist who completely radicalized painting, did so by moving in the opposite direction, towards a formalism so exacting as to be almost chilling. But like all modern artists, Mondrian learned the classical rules before he tore them up for good, as evidenced by his drawing below, Chrysanthemum, from 1908-09.
Of course you won’t only find artists from the early twentieth century in the Guggenheim’s online collection. This just happens to be one of my favorite periods, and the Guggenheim is most famous for its modernist collection. But you’ll also find work from more contemporary provocateurs like Marina Abramović and Ai Weiwei, as well as from early nineteenth century proto-impressionists like Camille Pissarro. (See Pissarro’s 1867 The Hermitage at Pontoise below.) And if you find yourself wanting more context, the Guggenheim has made it easy to give yourself a thorough education in modern art. As we’ve noted before, between 2012 and 2014, the museum placed over 100 art catalogues online, including a collection called “The Syllabus,” featuring books by the museum’s first curator. Looking for a way of understanding that weird phenomenon known as modern art? Look no further, the Guggenheim’s got you covered.
How does “non-musician” musician, former Roxy Music member, Talking Heads, U2, and Coldplay producer, and visual artist Brian Eno define art itself? “Everything that you don’t have to do.” He has expanded eloquently on that simple but highly clarifying notion in speech and writing many times over the past couple of decades, and this past Sunday he made it the intellectual centerpiece of the fifth annual John Peel Lecture, a series named for the influential BBC DJ and whose past speakers have included Pete Townshend, Billy Bragg, Charlotte Church, and Iggy Pop.
You can hear Eno’s introduction to his talk at the top of the post, stream the talk itself within the next 25 days at the BBC’s site, and read a transcript here. All of the John Peel Lecturers so far have discussed the relationship between music and wider human culture, and Eno has plenty of stories to tell about his own career in both music and the wider cultural realm: the importance of his time in art school, how he fell into performing with Roxy Music, how a relaxation of the band’s “strict non-drug” policy resulted in one “hilariously chaotic” performance, and how John Peel himself premiered his first album with Robert Fripp on the radio — by accidentally playing it backward.
All this will inspire even the most Eno-familiar fan to revisit the man’s catalog of recorded works, which you can easily do with the Spotify playlist “Touched by the Hand of Eno,” featuring “150 tracks handpicked from 150 albums/EPs/singles that credit Eno as composer, instrumentalist, vocalist, mixing engineer, or producer, sorted in chronological order.” (If you need to download Spotify’s free software, you’ll find it here.) The playlist includes cuts from Eno’s own albums, of course, but also those of Roxy Music, Genesis, Ultravox, David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2, Depeche Mode, Laurie Anderson, Coldplay, and many more. And after you’ve virtually flipped through these selections from Eno’s body of work, you can watch Eno flip through physical selections from Peel’s library of records just above. Sure, you don’t have to do any of this — if anyone can explain to you why you should, Eno can.
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