Patti Smith’s Polaroids of Artifacts from Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Roberto Bolaño & More

in Art, Literature, Photography | May 28th, 2015

Polaroid photography has seen a new wave of interest over the past decade, in large part from young photographers looking to do something different from what they can with the digital technology on which they grew up.

The other modern practitioners include no less a creator than Patti Smith, who have personally witnessed the format’s appearance, fade, and return. A few years ago, her Polaroid photography reached the galleries, becoming shows and installations in Connecticut and Paris.

These “black-and-white silver gelatin prints made from Polaroid negatives, small and square and in soft focus,” writes the New York Times’ A.O. Scott, “are culled from a collection that documents hundreds of encounters with worldly effects transformed into sacred relics. A fork and a spoon that belonged to Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet who has been one of Smith’s touchstones forever. [Robert] Mapplethorpe’s bedroom slippers and the tambourine he made for Smith. A chair that belonged to the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. William S. Burroughs’s bandanna. A replica of a life mask cast from the features of William Blake.”

Smith’s “gorgeous, misty photographs are inspired by artifacts from some of Smith’s favorite artists, from museums she has visited around the world, and many are from her personal life,” writes Flavorwire’s Emily Temple on “Camera Solo,” the Hartford exhibition which introduced these Polaroids to America in 2011. If you didn’t make it to the Wadsworth Atheneum for that show, you can still experience it through Patti Smith: Camera Solo, its companion book. Or have a look at her work on display at the BBC’s site, the gallery that offers the photos of Virginia Woolf’s bed, writing desk, and gravestone just above.

You can see even more at this post from Lens Culture on “Land 250,” the exhibition of Smith’s Polaroid photography at Paris’ Fondation Cartier.“I first took Polaroids in the early 1970s as components for collages,” it quotes Smith as saying. “In 1995, after the death of my husband, I was unable to center on the complex process of drawing, recording or writing a poem. The need for immediacy drew me again to the Polaroid. I chose a vintage Land 100.” In 2002, she settled on the Land 250, the venerable instant camera that gave the Paris show and its associated monograph their titles. It surely counts as one of the most important artifacts of Smith’s artistic life — and one with which she has captured the artifacts of so many other artistic lives important to her.

Patti Smith Reads Her Final Words to Robert Mapplethorpe

Patti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rimbaud to Susan Sontag

Andy Warhol’s 85 Polaroid Portraits: Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, O.J. Simpson & Many Others (1970–1987)

The Masterful Polaroid Pictures Taken by Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Robert De Niro Tells Graduating NYU Arts Grads, “You Made It… And You’re F*cked”

in Art, Creativity, Education, Graduation Speech, Life | May 25th, 2015

I’ve attended my share of graduations and hence my share of graduation speeches—from politicians more interested in stumping than inspiring their audience; to local TV personalities assuring graduates they too could become local TV personalities; to the real Patch Adams, who wasn’t nearly as funny as Robin Williams in his less-than-funny turn as Patch Adams. My experience has taught me that graduation speeches generally suck.

But not for the most recent batch of graduates of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, who got both bracing honesty and career validation from a speaker most likely to give it to you straight. With his trademark foul-mouth gruffness, De Niro told the graduating class what every aspiring artist needs to know: “You made it,” he said, “and you’re f*cked.” The world, De Niro told his audience, is not opening its arms to embrace art school grads. For all our pop cultural celebration of creativity, the so-called “creative class”—as we’re told again and again—is mostly in decline.

Of course it’s never been an easy road for artists. De Niro knows this full well not only through his own early experiences before superstardom but from his upbringing: both his mother and father were bohemian painters with turbulent, fascinating lives. And so he also knows of what he speaks when he tells the NYU grads that they “didn’t have a choice.” Where pragmatic accounting grads may be “passionate about accounting,” De Niro says, “it’s more likely that they used reason and logic and common sense to reach for a career that could give them the expectation of success and stability.”

Not the arts grads, the famous actor says: “You discovered a talent, developed an ambition and recognized your passion.” Their path, he suggests, is one of self-actualization:

When it comes to the arts, passion should always trump common sense. You aren’t just following dreams, you’re reaching for your destiny. You’re a dancer, a singer, a choreographer, a musician, a filmmaker, a writer, a photographer, a director, a producer, an actor, an artist. Yeah, you’re f***ed. The good news is that that’s not a bad place to start.

Maybe not. And maybe, for those driven to sing, dance, paint, write, etc., it’s the only place to start. Granted, NYU students are already a pretty select and privileged bunch, who certainly have a leg up compared to a great many other struggling artists. Nevertheless, given current economic realities and the U.S.’s depressing aversion to arts education and funding, these grads have a particularly difficult road ahead, De Niro says. And who better to deliver that hard truth with such conviction and good humor?

h/t @sheerly

Jim Carrey Commencement Speech: It’s Better to Fail at What You Love Than Fail at What You Don’t

‘This Is Water’: Complete Audio of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Graduation Speech (2005)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Mœbius Illustrates Paulo Coelho’s Inspirational Novel The Alchemist (1998)

in Art, Books | May 25th, 2015

When Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist came out in English, the level of popularity it eventually attained seriously impressed me. Then I went to Latin America, where the Spanish version seemed to have won a vaster readership still. I haven’t yet gone to Brazil to gauge the book’s popularity on the streets of Coelho’s homeland since its first publication to relatively little interest, but it surely hasn’t gone unknown there. As many fans as The Alchemist has, though, the inspiration-and-destiny-inflected appeal of the text entirely escapes some readers, in whichever language they read it. Perhaps they’d prefer an edition illustrated by Mœbius?

Born Jean Giraud, Mœbius’ career guarantees him a permanent place as one of the most influential comic artists ever to live. Even apart from the achievements in the medium in which he became famous — his founding work on Heavy Metal, his creation of nontraditional western outlaw Blueberry — he did a good deal of work that brought his singularly imaginative aesthetic into other creative realms, such as concept art from Alejandro Jodorowky’s Dune and illustrations for Dante’s Paradiso. In some sense, it might have seemed natural for him to lend his hand to Coelho’s fantasy tale of an Andalusian shepherd boy on a treasure-hunting journey to Egypt.

The Illustrated Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream came out in 1998, and it included 35 Mœbius illustrations, four of which you see here. The artist’s signature style, which he usually used in the service of dark, complex fusions of past and present, might at first sound ill-suited for Coelho’s simple fable, but Mœbius adapts well to the material. Even if you put down the book unconvinced by Coelho’s arguments about following your dream, you might consider looking to Mœbius instead with our post on his tips for aspiring artists. Either way, The Illustrated Alchemist itself showcases a collaboration between two well-known creators who most definitely paid their dues.

Paulo Coelho on the Fear of Failure

The Inscrutable Imagination of the Late Comic Artist Mœbius

Mœbius’ Storyboards & Concept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

Mœbius Illustrates Dante’s Paradiso

Moebius Gives 18 Wisdom-Filled Tips to Aspiring Artists (1996)

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Norman Rockwell Illustrates Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn (1936–1940)

in Art, Books, Literature | May 22nd, 2015

There’s no getting around it: Norman Rockwell was a square. There’s also no getting around the fact that his career helped define the way mainstream Americans saw themselves for decades. And while an artist like Rockwell—so steeped in nostalgia, so lacking in irony and a taste for transgression—might have faded into complete irrelevance amidst the tumult of the sixties, the opposite in fact occurred. Instead of pale, freckle-faced scamps and neighborly civil servants, Rockwell painted likenesses of world leaders like Nehru and Nasser, as well as a now iconic symbol of the Civil Rights struggle on a 1964 Look magazine cover.

The sixties Rockwell, though still very much a purveyor of small town Americana, became a somewhat weightier figure, even if he never gained (or sought) acceptance in the art world. But we might think of Rockwell as working on two registers throughout his career—as the PG-rated painter of mischievous, childish niceness, and the earnest commentator on mores and values in adult society. In a way, these two sides of America’s most popular illustrator mirror those of the nation’s most popular writer, Mark Twain. Though separated by a generation, the two, writes the Mark Twain House & Museum’s website, are “twinned in many ways in the public consciousness.”

In part, this is because Rockwell illustrated for Heritage Press two of Twain’s most famous books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1936 and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1940. Above, see three of Rockwell’s illustrations from Tom Sawyer and, below, one from his Huck Finn. The differences between the two books (so hilariously contrasted by Louis CK), could stand for the two sides of both Twain and Rockwell. As the Mark Twain House puts it, “some critics have dismissed [Twain and Rockwell’s] work as lightweight, blithely ignoring the important statements they made on race.” Tom Sawyer is a lightweight book, the work of Twain the popular humorist. (Twain himself would say, “my books are water: those of the great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.”) Huck Finn on the other hand is a serious adult novel with serious adult themes. For all of its flaws, it makes an admirable attempt to identify with and faithfully render the plight of enslaved people.

Twain’s great strength as a serious writer was his wealth of empathy, a quality Rockwell manifested as well. In fact, in order to best represent Twain’s books, the illustrator traveled to their setting, Hannibal, Missouri, where he “acquired a new respect for the characters,” writes the Norman Rockwell Museum. “The longer I worked at the task,” Rockwell wrote, “the more in love with the different personalities I became.” Illustration and design blog Today’s Inspiration points out that Rockwell purchased old clothes from the Hannibal locals to “soak up the atmosphere”: “Of all the illustrators (and there were quite a few) that illustrated these novels in the past, Rockwell was the first to visit Mark Twain’s home town. In typical Rockwell fashion, no amount of detail or research was ignored, faked or quickly glossed over.”

Today’s Inspiration zooms in on details from several of the Tom Sawyer paintings to show the fine, almost Vermeer-like attention Rockwell lavished on each illustration. The extensive examination of these early Rockwell classics makes a good case for the folksy illustrator as a “storytelling genius with pallet and brush.” Rockwell may be dismissed as a creator of kitsch, and in some cases the charge is justified, but—like Twain—even his lighter work depended on a fine attention to details of setting and characterization that make his work memorable and moving, in its corniest and its weightiest moments.

Bill Murray Gives a Delightful Dramatic Reading of Twain’sHuckleberry Finn (1996)

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties

Mark Twain Writes a Rapturous Letter to Walt Whitman on the Poet’s 70th Birthday (1889)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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

in Art, History, Technology, Travel | May 22nd, 2015

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time at the Indianapolis Star, where my mother worked in what was then referred to as the “women’s pages.” She kept me busy returning the photos that accompanied marriage and engagement announcements, using the SASEs the young brides had supplied. After that, I’d hit the printing floor, where veteran workers sported square caps folded from the previous day’s edition, as that day’s issue clacked on tracks overhead. If I was lucky, someone would make me a gift of my name, set in hot type.

The Star still publishes — I shudder to report that its website seems to have renamed it IndyStar… — but cultural and digital advances have relegated all of the particulars mentioned above to the scrap pile.

They came rushing back with wild, Proustian urgency when Osamu Yamamoto, a master printer at Benrido Collotype Atelier in Kyoto, mentions the smell of the ink, in the short documentary above, how over the years, it has seeped into his skin, and become a part of his being.

Collotype, defined by the Getty Conservation Institute as “a screenless photomechanical process that allows high-quality prints from continuous-tone photographic negatives,” has been on the way out since the 70s. As master printer Yamamoto notes, it’s a low-efficiency, small batch operation, involving messy matrixes, hand-operated presses, and heavy iron machines that give off a sort of animal warmth when working.

Rather than pressmen’s caps, Benrido’s shirtless printers wear hachimaki, rubber aprons, and purple disposable gloves.

Filmmaker Fritz Schumann (whose film on the oldest hotel in Japan we previously featured before) evokes the workplace — one of two remaining collotype companies in the world — through small details like the plastic-wrapped digital Hamtaro clock and also by drawing viewers’ attention to the number of years logged by each employee. The art of collotype takes a long time to master and novices appear to be in short supply.

Should we conceive of this operation as a quaint relic, creeping along thanks to the whimsy of a few nostalgia buffs?

Surprisingly, no. The laborious collotype process remains the best way to duplicate precious artworks and historic documents. The way the ink interacts with reticulations in the gelatin surface atop results in subtleties that pixellated digital images cannot hope to achieve.

Visitors to the studio may support the enterprise by picking up a handful of collotype-printed postcards in the gift shop, but the office of the Japanese Emperor is the one who’s really keeping them in business, with orders to copy hundreds of delicate, centuries old scrolls, paintings and letters.

Like a circle in a circle…cultural preservation via cultural preservation! Perhaps the smell of the ink will prevail.

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

3D Printed Zoetrope Animates Rubens’ Famous Painting, “The Massacre of the Innocents”

in Animation, Art, Religion | May 22nd, 2015

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.

Watch Art on Ancient Greek Vases Come to Life with 21st Century Animation

5‑Minute Animation Maps 2,600 Years of Western Cultural History

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Salvador Dalí Takes His Anteater for a Stroll in Paris, 1969

in Art | May 14th, 2015

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.

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Salvador Dalí Sketches Five Spanish Immortals: Cervantes, Don Quixote, El Cid, El Greco & Velázquez

Salvador Dalí’s Haunting 1975 Illustrations for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Salvador Dalí Illustrates Shakespeare’s Macbeth

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Chris Burden (R.I.P.) Turns Late-Night TV Commercials Into Conceptual Art

in Art, Television | May 14th, 2015

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.

Salvador Dalí Goes Commercial: Three Strange Television Ads

Fellini’s Fantastic TV Commercials

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Patti Smith’s Polaroids of Artifacts from Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Roberto Bolaño & More

Robert De Niro Tells Graduating NYU Arts Grads, “You Made It… And You’re F*cked”

Mœbius Illustrates Paulo Coelho’s Inspirational Novel The Alchemist (1998)

Norman Rockwell Illustrates Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn (1936–1940)

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

3D Printed Zoetrope Animates Rubens’ Famous Painting, “The Massacre of the Innocents”

Salvador Dalí Takes His Anteater for a Stroll in Paris, 1969

Chris Burden (R.I.P.) Turns Late-Night TV Commercials Into Conceptual Art

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