In the 17th century, the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens painted “The Massacre of the Innocents” (see below), an artistic depiction of a very brief Biblical passage in The Gospel of Matthew. The passage recounts the story of how Herod the Great, a Roman client king of Judea, ordered the execution of young male children in Bethlehem, hoping to avoid losing his throne to a newly-born King of the Jews. And it reads like this:
Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying:
“A voice was heard in Ramah,
Lamentation, weeping, and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children,
Refusing to be comforted,
Because they are no more.”
In the 21st century, Sebastian Burdon and Mat Collishaw have now come along and created “All Things Fall,” a 3d zoetrope that brings the “Massacre of the Innocents” to life. Using a 19th century optical technique that produces the illusion of motion, the zoetrope virtually animates the gruesome Biblical scene. You can watch it play out, eerily, above.
According to Burdon, it took “6 months to do all the 3d modeling and animations” and involved “creating over 350 character figures, environment elements and architecture. A pretty stunning effort.
Salvador Dalí had a thing for anteaters. They made for good schtick, especially in Europe, and Dalí never saw schtick that he didn’t like.
And yet maybe there’s something a little more to this picture taken in Paris, in 1969. Maybe there’s some kind of symbolism, or even a playful tribute, taking place in the photo above.
Surrealism officially came into being in 1924, when André Breton wrote Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (read an English translation here). First a literary movement, Surrealism later embraced painters, including figures like Dalí.
In 1930, Dalí created a bookplate for Breton called, “André Breton le tamanoir.” That translates to “André Breton the Anteater,” the nickname given to Breton by his fellow surrealists. Now consider the fact that the 1969 photo was taken three short years after Breton’s death, and perhaps we can read an homage into it.
What nickname did Breton give to Dalí, you might ask? “Avida Dollars.” An anagram for “Salvador Dalí,” “Avida Dollars” translates to “eager for dollars.” Pretty apt.
Chris Burden got shot with a rifle, closed up in a locker for five days, made to crawl across fifty feet of broken glass, crucified on a Volkswagen Beetle, and wedged for an extended period under a large piece of non-broken glass. But he did it all voluntarily, surviving these and other threats to life and limb, all undertaken in the name of art, only dying this past Sunday. That concluded a long and astonishingly varied career in which Burden produced work not just of the grim trapped-in-a-box and bullet-in-the-arm variety, but elaborate, even whimsical sculptures, models, and machines that captivate their viewers to this day.
Burden also, between the years of 1973 and 1977 (a period after the shooting and the locker entrapment), worked in the medium of television commercials, producing work that, aired late at night, surely captivated their own viewers (who, given the era, may have already entered their own states of altered consciousness). At the top of the post, you can watch all of them in a row, a program accompanied by textual commentary from Burden himself which details the nature of his self-assigned mission “to break the omnipotent stranglehold of the airwaves that broadcast television held.”
The 2013 video from the Museum of Contemporary Art just above features Burden remembering this daring project of buying and artistically repurposing Los Angeles commercial airtime. But Burden’s interest in television didn’t stop, or indeed start, with these commercials. At East of Borneo, Nick Stillman has an essay putting all the artist’s TV-related work in context. “By situating the television set and by using the commercial form as implicit vessels of authority,” Stillman writes, “Burden’s work about how television influences behavior asked the most penetrating and ethical question of any artist I can think of who used the medium: Do you believe in television?”
Though Burden’s commercials haven’t seen regular broadcast in nearly forty years, his spirit nevertheless enjoys strong prospects of living on through his later work, which reflects and inhabits not the mediated world around us, but the concrete one. In 2011, we featured his Metropolis II, a kinetic sculpture modeling the city of the future in swooping ramps, architecturally fantastical towers, and countless toy cars on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
And if you so much as pass by the museum on Wilshire Boulevard, you’ll see his installation of vintage lampposts known as Urban Light. Odds are you’ll also take a picture with it; from what I’ve seen, it has to rank has the most photographed place in the city. “Heat is life,” Burden blankly intoned in his 1975 commercial Poem for L.A. — but light seems to have a pretty fair claim as well.
Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting, “The Night Cafe,” now hangs at the Yale University Art Gallery, accompanied by this description:
In a letter to his brother written from Arles in the south of France, van Gogh described the Café de l’Alcazar, where he took his meals, as “blood red and dull yellow with a green billiard table in the center, four lemon yellow lamps with an orange and green glow. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most disparate reds and greens.” The clashing colors were also meant to express the “terrible passions of humanity” found in this all-night haunt, populated by vagrants and prostitutes. Van Gogh also felt that colors took on an intriguing quality at night, especially by gaslight: in this painting, he wanted to show how “the white clothing of the café owner, keeping watch in a corner of this furnace, becomes lemon yellow, pale and luminous green.”
The canvas, though dry and mostly flat, does a perfectly good job of capturing the life force that ran through that 19th century French café. That’s an understatement, of course. But I suppose there’s no harm in animating the already animated scene with some new-fangled technology. Above, you can see Mac Cauley’s “immersive virtual reality” tribute to Van Gogh, which he created for Oculus’ Mobile VR Jam 2015. On a page dedicated to the project, Cauley writes:
My main goal with this project was to see what kinds of stylized 3D rendering could be experienced through VR. I have always been drawn to the paintings of Van Gogh and I imagined it would be amazing to be inside one of these colorful worlds. While the GearVR offered certain challenges with its technical limitations compared with a PC, it forced me to prioritize and really define what makes a Van Gogh painting unique.
While creating the environments of these paintings in 3D space I’ve had to expand on areas that can’t be seen; rooms behind doors, objects hidden from view, people turned away from the viewer. It’s been an interesting process in using reference material from Van Gogh and other expressionist painters but also imagining what might have been there, just off the edges of the canvas.
The winners of the Oculus Mobile VR Jam will be announced in June. More creative takes on famous paintings can be found below.
A decade ago, I voluntarily watched a Powerpoint presentation. That may sound unremarkable, but under normal circumstances I go to almost any length to avoid Powerpoint presentations. I throw my lot in with The Visual Display of Quantitative Informationauthor Edward Tufte, known for his indictment of the “Powerpoint cognitive style” that “routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content.” But this particular Powerpoint presentation didn’t happen under normal circumstances: it came from none other than artist, writer, and former Talking Head David Byrne.
Byrne may have done a number of such presentations under the banner of “I Love Powerpoint,” but he and Tufte regard that omnipresent Microsoft slideshow application more similarly than you might think. “Having never used the program before, I found it limiting, inflexible, and biased, like most software,” Byrne wrote of his user experience in Wired. “On top of that, PowerPoint makes hilariously bad-looking visuals.” And yet, “although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and use it as an artistic agent.”
The fruits of Byrne’s experimentation, apart from those talks in the 2000s, include the book Envisioning Epistemological Emotional Information, a collection of his Powerpoint “pieces that were moving, despite the limitations of the ‘medium.’ ” You can find more information on davidbyrne.com’s art page, which documents the host of non-musical projects Byrne has pulled off in his post-Heads career, including whimsical urban bike racks installed in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The short Wall Street Journal video at the top of the post documents the project, which fits right in the wheelhouse of a such a design-minded, New York-based, bicycle-loving kind of guy.
Byrne, as his musical output might have you expect, tends to stray from too-established forms whenever possible. Just above, we have one example of his works in the form of the corporate sign, each image of which shows the name of a big, bland company when viewed from one angle, and a world like “TRUST,” “GRACE,” or “COURAGE” when viewed from another. “Multinational tombstones nestled in the (landscaped) pastoral glade,” Byrne’s site calls these enhanced photographs taken in North Carolina’s office park-intensive Research Triangle. “A utopian vision in the American countryside.”
However witty, amusing, and even frivolous it may look on its face, Byrne’s infrastructural, corporate, and Powerpoint-ified art also accomplishes what all the best art must: making us see things differently. He may not have made me love Powerpoint, but I’ve never quite looked at any slideshow created in the program in quite the same way since — not that anyone else has since created one that I could sit through wholly without objection. Still, all the best art also gives us something to aspire to.
From Oscar Boyson comes “A Short History of the World’s Most Important Art Exhibition,” the first of a series of films that will take us inside the Venice Biennale, the prestigious art exhibition that dates back to 1895.
Produced by Artsy and UBS, the short film “pulls back the curtain on the event’s reach, extending beyond art and into politics and history at large,” and helps “us navigate the cultural influence of this somewhat enigmatic, 120-year-old tradition. For a longer look at Italy’s most important art fair, you can watch The Vice Guide to the Venice Biennale.
Maurice Sendak—like some few other exceptional children’s authors—also did work for adults, and in at least one case, did adult work, in his illustrations for a controversial 1995 edition of Herman Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. The drawings are erotic, as well as homoerotic, illustrating the gay subtext in the novel. Sendak may seem like an unlikely illustrator for the Moby Dick author’s work; he was already an unlikely American children’s literary icon—“Jewish, gay, poor,” he nonetheless became “a major cultural influence,” writes blog BLT. As Sendak declared in an interview with Bill Moyers, he learned to “find a separate peace” from his own anxiety not through religious faith but through a “total faith in art.” “My gods,” Sendak told Moyers, “are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart,” among others. The author of Pierre figured highly in that divine hierarchy.
But Melville, at the time of Pierre’s publication, was not loved as a god. Shunned by critics and the reading public after the devastating reception accorded Moby Dick, his self-professed greatest work, Melville felt further humiliated when his publisher demanded he accept 20 cents on the dollar instead of 50 for the next novel, Pierre. Crushed, he signed the new contract. Then, though he had been satisfied with Pierre, considering the novel finished at the end of 1851, he added 150 pages, much of it a scathing, sardonic indictment of the literary establishment, including a non-too-subtle chapter titled “Young Literature in America.”
Whether the expansion was, as Maria Popova suggests at Brain Pickings, an eloquent riposte to his critics, or, as Library Journal suggests, made at the behest of his publishers (unlikely) is unclear. University of Delaware professor Herschel Parker, the Melville scholar who edited the Sendak edition of Pierre,admits, “we had NOT known when the expansion started and had not known just why.” Sendak himself describes Pierre as “a great and ingenious work of art.” Of the notion that Melville’s additions were “a vindictive diatribe against all his critics” Sendak speculates, “he might have been mad and hurt—He must have been mad and hurt. But he wouldn’t have spent that much time on a book being just mad and hurt.”
Sendak, a lifelong amateur Melville scholar, knows what he’s talking about. His familiarity with the author is such that his opinion was cited approvingly in the acknowledgments of a scholarly edition of Moby Dick. Despite Sendak’s comments in defense of Melville’s later additions, his and Parker’s version of Pierre attempts to strip them out and restore the novel to its earlier form, one Melville called his “Kraken book.” Sendak apparently initiated the project in order to publish the drawings. In them, writes John Bryan in a review for College English, “Pierre is a full-blown adolescent: muscular, ecstatic, desperate, devoted, and lonely; he is the man-child invincible.” The novel’s hero spends much of his time a blue Superman outfit, “red cape and all,” so tight “that it is skin itself, concealing nothing.”
Bibliokept compares the illustrations to William Blake. They also contain references to Goya and other artists who explored the grotesque, as well as the morbid, transgressive sexuality of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. “Nowhere else in the history of Melville illustration,” writes John Bryan, “do we find such openings into the latent sexuality of Melville’s prose.” Brain Pickings describes the drawings as “the most sexually expressive of any of his work, featuring 27 discernible nipples and 11 male ‘packages’…. Bold, unapologetic, and incredibly sensual, the illustrations are also subtly subversive in their treatment of gender identity and stereotypes.”
Add to this list of acid acolytes Robert Crumb, the most influential cartoonist of his generation. His strange, frequently obscene, often hilarious stream-of-consciousness cartoons defined a certain subset of hippydom as much as the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey. And his style emerged almost immediately after his first trip.
It all started in 1964, when the drug was still legal. Crumb was stuck in a dead end job drawing greeting cards in Cleveland. “I took this very weird drug. Supposedly it was LSD, but it had a really weird effect where it made my brain all fuzzy,” he said while hunched over a drawing pad in Terry Twigoff’s 1994 documentary Crumb. (You can watch the full clip above. ) “And this effect lasted for a couple months.”
The effect of that first encounter proved to be hugely influential, a “road-to-Damascus experience” as he told the Paris Review:
It knocked you off your horse, taking LSD. I remember going to work that Monday, after taking LSD on Saturday, and it just seemed like a cardboard reality. It didn’t seem real to me anymore. Seemed completely fake, only a paper-moon kind of world. My coworkers, they were like, Crumb, what’s the matter with you, what happened to you? Because I was just staring at everything like I had never seen it before. And then it changed the whole direction of my artwork. […] I got flung back into this cruder forties style, that suddenly became very powerful to me. It was a kind of grotesque interpretation of this forties thing, Popeye kind of stuff. I started drawing like that again. It was bizarre to people who had known my work before. Even [Mad Magazine Editor Harvey] Kurtzman said, What the hell are you doing? You’re regressing!
A couple of years later, Crumb ditched Cleveland (and his first wife) and headed for San Francisco, which was just starting to become the Mecca of the counterculture. Soon issues of his Zap Comix would be blowing minds. All of his most famous characters from those cartoons– from Mr. Natural to Fritz the Cat to the Snoid – were first produced in the months immediately following that first trip.
But remember, drugs are bad. And we don’t recommend them. And if you’re wondering about LSD’s downsides, tune into what Louis CK has to say.
You can see hear Crumb expound more about LSD, San Francisco and the whole Haight-Ashbury scene below.
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 badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
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