What did Banksy’s month-long show, “Better Out than In,” bring today? Why nothing other than a miniature version of The Great Sphinx of Giza. According to the street artist’s web site, the 22nd installment in the exhibition is a “1/36 scale replica of the great Sphinx of Giza made from smashed cinderblocks.” And it comes with the warning, “You’re advised not to drink the replica Arab spring water.”
As daddies go, Darwin was quite evolved himself, displaying a 21st-century level of devotion to and involvement with his young. He even went so far as to let one of his kids draw on the original manuscript for On the Origin of Species.Saving paper was as good for the environment in the mid-1800s as it is today, but his willingness to let his precious pages do double duty may explain why the seminal document survives as mere piecemeal today.
Maybe Charles and Emma read some article that suggested their household would run more smoothly if it were better organized, and lacking such modern solutions as colorful Ikea storage bins and scanners, simply pitched all but the absolute best of their children’s artwork. (Or maybe their youngest was a scruncher, destroying pages by the fistful.)
Ayun Halliday remembers her grandmother was very impressed by her ability to draw Huckleberry Finn with his legs crossed. Follow her @AyunHalliday
“Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean, which, we are told, covers more than two thirds of the globe, but of which a man who lives a few miles inland may never see any trace…I have spent, in all, about three weeks on the Cape; walked from Eastham to Provincetown twice on the Atlantic side, and once on the Bay side also…but having come so fresh to the sea, I have got but little salted.”
You can click the image above to see it in a larger format. For many other maps made by Thoreau, visit the “Thoreau Lands and Property Survey” collection at the Concord Free Public Library. Also find works by Thoreau in our collection of Free eBooksand Free Audio Books.
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Flavorwire titles their post on album covers designed by artist Andy Warhol—auteur of that special brand of late-midcentury, impassive yet rocking-and-rolling, New York-rooted American cool—“Beyond the Banana.” They refer, of course, to the fruit emblazoned uponThe Velvet Underground & Nico, the 1967 debut album from the avant-rock band formed right there in Warhol’s own “Factory.” It would, of course, insult your cultural awareness to post an image of that particular cover and ask if you knew Andy Warhol designed it. But how about that of Count Basie’s self-titled 1955 album above? Warhol, not a figure most of us associate immediately with jazz and its traditions, designed it, too.
We now regard Blue Note highly for its taste in not only the aesthetics of the music itself but also the packaging that surrounds it, and thus we might assume the label had a natural inclination to work with a visionary like Warhol. But in the late fifties, Blue Lights stretched Blue Note’s graphical sensibilities as well as Warhol’s own; with it, he “finally broke away from simply drawing close-ups of musicians and their instruments and delivered a piece of art as evocative as the music inside,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle’s Aidin Vaziri.
Given Warhol’s interest in the United States and its icons, it stands to reason that he would take on design jobs for Basie, Monk, and Burrell just as readily as he would for the Velvet Underground, or for those Englishmen who could out-American the Americans, the Rolling Stones. He even did an album cover for a representative of a whole other slice of American culture: playwright Tennesee Williams, author of plays like The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
In 1952, Caedmon put out a record called Tennessee Williams Reading from The Glass Menagerie, The Yellow Bird and Five Poems, and its 1960 printing bears the Warhol artwork you see just above. Warhol in all these shows an impressive willingness to adapt to the persona of the musician and the feel of their music; a casual Warhol enthusiast may own one of these albums for years without ever realizing who did the cover art. He didn’t even cleave exclusively toward American forms, or to styles that mainstream America might once have considered artistically edgy. You could hardly get further from the position of the Velvet Underground than easy-listening vocals, let alone the easy-listening vocals of the Canadian-born Paul Anka, but when the singer’s 1976 The Painter needed a cover, Warhol delivered — and with a recognizably Warholian look, no less.
Attention David Bowie fans: If you’re going to be in Toronto between now and November 27th, you’re in for quite a treat. AGO, the Art Gallery of Ontario, just opened the exhibit “David Bowie Is,” a hugely comprehensive multimedia show “Spanning five decades and featuring more than 300 objects from Bowie’s personal archive,” including handwritten lyrics, instruments, photos like that of Bowie and William Burroughs below, and lots and lots of costumes like the bodysuit at the bottom. Originating at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, this is the first international exhibit solely devoted to Bowie.
If you can’t make it to the show, you can see a brief preview here and at AGO’s own site. In the short video at the top, Curator Victoria Broackes describes the title of the exhibit as “both an unfinished sentence and a statement.” The exhibit, she says, illustrates “Bowie’s own belief that we all have within us so many different personalities, and we should work hard to figure out what they are and bring them out.” It’s difficult to imagine anyone but Bowie bringing out so many uniquely fascinating personalities as he has in one lifetime. As Broackes’ fellow curator Geoffrey Marsh comments, Bowie is “an astonishingly hard worker” who “performed on average once every 11 nights” for 32 years, all while recording album after album and becoming an international movie star. Bowie may inspire, but he also blows most performers away with his seemingly endless supplies of creative energy and single-minded focus.
Important twentieth-century painters, as every student of art history learns, didn’t tend to sail smoothly through existence. Those even a little interested in famed Mexican self-portraitist Frida Kahlo have heard much about the travails both romantic and physical she endured in her short life. But in this lesser-known instance, another artist suffered, and Kahlo offered the solace. Available to view from Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, we have here a letter Kahlo sent to Georgia O’Keeffe, painter of blossoms and southwest American landscapes (and more besides), on March 1st, 1933. At that time, O’Keeffe, who the year before had struggled and failed to complete a mural project for Radio City Music Hall on time, lived through the aftermath of a nervous breakdown which had hospitalized her (diagnosis: “psychoneurosis”), sent her to no less remote a locale than Bermuda to recuperate, and prevented her from painting again until 1934.
Was wonderful to hear your voice again. Every day since I called you and many times before months ago I wanted to write you a letter. I wrote you many, but every one seemed more stupid and empty and I torn them up. I can’t write in English all that I would like to tell, especially to you. I am sending this one because I promised it to you. I felt terrible when Sybil Brown told me that you were sick but I still don’t know what is the matter with you. Please Georgia dear if you can’t write, ask Stieglitz to do it for you and let me know how are you feeling will you ? I’ll be in Detroit two more weeks. I would like to tell you every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn’t know sad things now. After all I shouldn’t complain because I have been happy in many ways though. Diego is good to me, and you can’t imagine how happy he has been working on the frescoes here. I have been painting a little too and that helped. I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes. I will see you soon. I am sure that in New York I will be much happier. If you still in the hospital when I come back I will bring you flowers, but it is so difficult to find the ones I would like for you. I would be so happy if you could write me even two words. I like you very much Georgia.
Frieda
“Clearly Kahlo hoped for a deeper friendship, or perhaps more, with O’Keeffe, when she and Diego went to New York a few weeks later,” writes Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall in Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own. “From there, she wrote to a friend on 11 April (by which time O’Keeffe had gone to Bermuda to convalesce) that because of O’Keeffe’s illness there had been no lovemaking between them that time. A boastful exaggeration of their closeness? Knowing Kahlo’s predilection for sexual hyperbole, this seems likely.”
The Tumblr called Philosophers at Work has gathered together a fun series of drawings by 10th graders from Madison WI, who were asked by their teacher to — you guessed it — “draw a philosopher at work.” I will leave it to you to peruse the gallery of drawings. But I’ll just say this: Whatever their virtues, the drawings don’t look anything like real philosophers. (For some pictures of real philosophers, see, of course, the Looks Philosophical tumblr.) Nor do tenth graders, no disrespect to them, depict philosophers nearly as artistically as Renée Jorgensen Bolinger, whose paintings of Wittgenstein, Frege and Russell we showed you a few weeks back. If you missed her paintings, I’d encourage you to see Philosopher Portraits: Famous Philosophers Painted in the Style of Influential Artists. Enjoy your weekend.
Note: if you click on the images above and below, you can see each in an expanded format.
The interview clip above, from the 1991 documentary Commissioner of Sewers, puts a two-part question to Naked Lunch author, “cut-up writing” master, and counterculture eminence William S. Burroughs: “What is the original feel of the writer? What mechanisms should he consider, work on?” That may sound like a slightly odd line of inquiry — the interviewer, bear in mind, doesn’t speak English natively — but Burroughs responds with an important point, clearly made. “The word should should never arise,” he first insists, though perhaps self-contradictorily. “There is no such concept as should in regard to art — or anything — unless you specify. If you’re trying to build a bridge, then you can say we should do this and we should do that, with respect to getting a bridge built, but it doesn’t float in a vacuum.” All well and good for engineering. But what can art do, if not build a bridge?
“One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and what they don’t know that they know,” Burroughs says. “This applies to all creative thinking. For example, people on the sea coast in the middle ages knew the Earth was round. They believed the Earth was flat because the church said so. Galileo tells them the Earth was round, and nearly was burned at the stake for saying so.”
Burroughs summons as examples Cézanne, whose studies of what “objects look like seen from a certain angle and in a certain light” at first made viewers think “he’d thrown paint on canvas,” and Joyce, who “made people aware of their stream of consciousness, at least on a verbal level,” but “was first accused of being unintelligible.” Yet Burroughs found he lived in a world where, this art already having expanded humanity’s consciousness, “no child would have any difficulty in seeing a Cézanne” and few “would have any difficulty with Ulysses. The artist, then, expands awareness. Once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness.” Such insight makes Burroughs, as one Youtube commenter puts it, “so down-to-earth that he’s far-out.”
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