Robert Reich met Bill Clinton when they were both Rhodes Scholars during the 1960s. In the 70s, Reich attended Yale Law School with Hill and Bill. And then, decades later, he served in the Clinton administration as Secretary of Labor. Somewhere along the line, the political economist picked up some drawing skills (putting him in good company with Winston Churchill and George Bush) that work nicely in our age of whiteboard animated videos. Now a professor at UC Berkeley, Reich visually debunks three economic mythologies in two minutes. This clip follows a rapidfire 2012 video, again featuring his cartooning skills, called The Truth About the Economy.
As the world becomes increasingly dependent on virtual communication, the potential for misunderstanding is ever present. I resisted the use of emoticons and stickers at first. They struck me as the pictorial equivalent of LOL. If that’s the best you can manage, why try at all?
I’ve since reversed my position. Several things contributed to this change in attitude:
The peace of mind that comes from any kind of confirmation that one’s message has indeed been received.
The unsupportably terse communication style of a colleague. Whether intentional or not, his monosyllabic replies to my flurry of texts and emails seemed to indicate disdain… for me! Hey Buster, I’m busy too…
If the purpose of an emoticon is to convey a certain feeling or attitude on the part of the respondent, the chameleonic Sherman is well suited to carry the burden. The photographer has served as her own model for four decades worth of portraits. She has embodied such archetypes as housewife, prostitute, dancer, actress, damsel in distress, and socialite. Her pursuit of certain truths often leads her to embrace the grotesque. Her willingness to look like hell in the service of her art continues to shock and sometimes offend. (Let’s just say my late mother-in-law was not a fan.)
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and performer whose next mission is portraying a decidedly Cindy Shermanesque business woman in a free reading of Lunchtime, Greg Kotis’ play of office romance in the time of the New York Deli Wars. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Last week, we featured three terminally ill art-lovers’ journey to the Rijksmuseum to see their Rembrandts for one last time. They saw those paintings far more vividly, no doubt, than would those of us lucky enough to have longer on this Earth. Though nothing can convey the experience of seeing anything, artwork or otherwise, for the last time, these animations will at least give you the experience of seeing Rembrandt’s work in an entirely new way.
The videos (see them all here) bring to life six of the twelve canvases from The Late Rembrandt Exhibition, the very same one to which Stichting Ambulance Wens Nederland took the three patients nearing their ends. Even if you’ve never considered yourself particularly up on the Dutch Masters, you’ll more than likely recognize most of these paintings. Just above we have, for instance, 1642’s The Night Watch(or, more properly, Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq,or The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch), perhaps Rembrandt’s best-known work, and one you may remember Peter Greenaway bringing to his own brand of life in Nightwatching.
If all this strikes you as an exercise in high-tech desecration, give the animations a watch and you’ll find them more subtly and tastefully executed than you might have imagined. You can see all six at the Youtube page of CS Digital Media, who produced them for Dutch telecommunications KPN, the Rijksmuseum’s main sponsor — art having its patrons as much now as it did in Rembrandt’s day.
As an artist, William S. Burroughs was undoubtedly his own man, beholden to no particular aesthetic, movement, or school, always independent even as a frequent collaborator with many other notable writers and artists. It didn’t hurt that he came from money—Burroughs’ grandfather invented the adding machine, and the writer’s inheritance, writes the Daily Beast, “left the young scion free to pursue education and drugs at his leisure.” Yet, although he pursued the latter without reservation, he also worked harder than most of his contemporaries, constantly innovating and pursuing new paths. Burroughs’ “entire creative project,” writes blogger Dan Shelalevy, “encompassed art, graphics, calligraphy, type, photography, film, assemblage, poetry, spoken word, and music…. Culture itself was his medium.”
He may be associated primarily with the Beats, but Burroughs himself rejected the label, saying, “We’re not doing at all the same thing, either in writing or in outlook.” As a visual artist, London’s October Gallery informs us, he “collaborated with Keith Haring, George Condo, Robert Rauschenberg, and others.” As in his writing, Burroughs experimented throughout his art career with collage, incorporating photographs and pop culture ephemera like comic strips and advertising into paintings richly textured—as in the thick impasto surrounding the portrait of Samuel Beckett above—and often violent, as below.
The notorious gun enthusiast often blasted holes through his canvasses and even experimented with shotgun painting. (See him with his shotgun below, on the front page of a Times article covering a 2005 exhibit of his work.) Burroughs also incorporated gun imagery into his paintings—often made on slabs of plywood—and used pop art techniques like stencils and spray paint, as below.
Burroughs even designed his own book covers, as you can see at the top of the post in the relatively austere paperback covers for Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, both featuring repeating patterns of symbols. His visual art reflects the same obsessions we find in all of his work. These recurring motifs are what Paul Pieroni, co-organizer of the 2005 gallery show at The Riflemaker gallery in London, describes as a “hetero-ontology of forces at work,” including the “central themes” of “vice, violence and passion.”
The same imagery that recurs in hallucinatory novels like Junky, Naked Lunch, and The Western Lands appears in the writer’s artwork: “thus, as in his literature,” says Pieroni, “we find war, cocks, violence, dirt, parasites, guns—junk.” In Burroughs’ hands the detritus of American culture—the contents of advertisements, foreign policy briefs, and seedy motel rooms—takes on an ominous, mythic significance that shows us as much about ourselves as it does about the artist.
Are you one of the millions of sighted visitors who’ll visit a world class institution this year only to find yourself suffering from museum fatigue a couple of hours in? You know, that moment when all the paintings start to look alike, still lifes, crucifixions, and teenage noblewomen swimming before your eyes?
If so, may we recommend closing your eyes and limiting yourself to an in-depth study of a half dozen paintings? That’s the number of works on display in Hoy toca el Prado, Madrid’s Museo del Prado’s landmark exhibition aimed at people with visual disabilities.
The Louvre, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and London’s National Gallery all have touch-friendly programming that allows blind visitors to experience sculptural works with their hands. The Prado’s initiative is unique in that it applies 3D printing techniques to reproductions of painted—i.e. flat—work.
Certain aspects of each painting, including textures, were selected for showcasing in the 3D reproductions. A chemical process involving ultraviolet light and special ink resulted in a few millimeters of added volume. The reproductions retained the originals’ color, for visually impaired visitors with the ability to perceive it.
Image courtesy of The Prado
Sighted patrons can try their hands at experiencing such works as The Parasol by Goya and Velazquez’s Vulcan’s Forge in a non-visual way by donning opaque glasses. Texts are in braille. Audioguides are accessible to all.
According to the original’s record in the museum’s catalog, El Greco’s The Nobleman with His Hand on His Chestis notable for the “expressive gaze its sitter directs at the viewer.” The exhibit’s curator reported that one of the first blind visitors to come through wanted to know the subject’s eye color. He found that he could not confidently respond without double checking.
Akira Kurosawa, “the Emperor” of Japanese film, made movies — and in some sense, he never wasn’t making movies. Even when he lacked the resources to actually shoot them, he prepared to make movies in the future, thinking through their every detail. Critic and historian of Japanese cinema Donald Richie’s remembrance of the director who did more than anyone to define the Japanese film emphasizes Kurosawa’s “concern for perfecting the product” — to put it mildly. “Though many film companies would have been delighted by such directorial devotion,” Richie writes, “Japanese studios are commonly more impressed by cooperation than by innovation.”
Kurosawa thus found it more and more difficult, as his career went on, to raise money for his ambitious projects. Richie recalls a time in the 1970s when, “convinced that Kagemusha would never get made, Kurosawa spent his time painting pictures of every scene — this collection would have to take the place of the unrealized film. He had, like many other directors, long used storyboards. These now blossomed into whole galleries — screening rooms for unmade masterpieces.” When he couldn’t shoot movies, he wrote them. If he’d written all he could, he painted them.
At Flavorwire, you can see a comparison between Kurosawa’s paintings and the frames of his movies. “He hand-crafted these images in order to convey his enthusiasm for the project,” writes Alison Nastasi, going on to quote the director’s own autobiography: “My purpose was not to paint well. I made free use of various materials that happened to be at hand.”
But as you can see, the Emperor knew what he wanted; the actual shots clearly represent a realization of what he’d devoted so much time and energy to visualizing beforehand. Occasionally, Kurosawa’s own artwork even made it to his movies’ official posters, especially lesser-known (whatever “lesser-known” means in the context of the Kurosawa canon) personal works like 1970’s Dodes’ka-den and 1993’s Madadayo.
We might chalk up the filmmaker’s interest in painting — and perhaps in filmmaking — in large part to his older brother Heigo, with whom he gazed upon the aftermath of Tokyo’s 1923 Kantō earthquake. A live silent film narrator and aspiring painter in the Proletarian Artists’ League, Heigo committed suicide in 1933 after his political disillusionment and the career-killing introduction of sound film. Young Akira would make his directorial debut a decade later and, in the 55 years that followed, presumably do Heigo proud on every possible level.
New York-based artist Brian Dettmer cuts into old books with X‑ACTO knives and turns them into remixed works of art. Speaking at TED Youth last November, he told the audience, “I think of my work as sort of a remix .… because I’m working with somebody else’s material in the same way that a D.J. might be working with somebody else’s music.” “I carve into the surface of the book,and I’m not moving or adding anything.I’m just carving around whatever I find interesting.So everything you see within the finished pieceis exactly where it was in the book before I began.”
Dettmer puts on display his pretty fantastic creations, all while explaining how he sees the book — as a body, a technology, a tool, a machine, a landscape, a case study in archaeology. The talk runs six minutes and delivers more than the average TED Talk does in 17.
On Monday, the Dutch volunteer organization called Stichting Ambulance Wens Nederland (roughly translated as Ambulance Wish Foundation Netherlands) took three terminally ill patients to see The Late Rembrandt Exhibition currently being held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The exhibit features over 100 paintings, drawings and prints that Rembrandt produced during the final phase of his life. And the patients, nearing the end of their lives, wanted to see the exhibit and experience the artistry of the great Dutch painter one last time.
Staffed by 200 medically-trained volunteers, the organization has fulfilled thousands of wishes since its creation in 2007, and they didn’t disappoint this time. As visually documented on its Twitter account, the nonprofit took the guests to the exhibit, each in an ambulance. The museum-goers were then treated to a one-hour private tour of the collection. Some poignant pictures capture the bittersweet moment.
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