It was another time, another place, a moment when criminals were invited to pose for the camera. The mugshot as an art form.
Above we have one of 2500 “special photographs” taken by photographers from the New South Wales Police Department between 1910 and 1930. The four men (Hampton Hirscham, Cornellius Joseph Keevil, William Thomas O’Brien and James O’Brien) were arrested on charges of burglarizing the home of a bookie — one Reginald Catton — in April 1921. O’Brien was let off the hook, but the other three dapper ones weren’t so lucky.
Arkansas-born artist Shea Hembrey kicks off his TED talk by confessing to a hick childhood in which he and his sister “would compete to see who could eat the most squirrel brains.” That modest joke sets the stage for his introduction of Seek, a project Hembrey conceived in response to his disappointment with several exhibits of contemporary art in Europe, including the Venice Biennale. Finding much of the work he encountered too obtuse and inaccessible, Hembrey decided to create an international biennial of his own, featuring the 100 most inspiring artists he could find.
The twist, of course, is that all 100 artists (and artworks) were created by Hembrey himself, in strict accordance with two personal criteria: First, the work must be something he could explain to his grandma in less than five minutes; next, its process must engage the three “H’s” of head, heart, and hand.
All 100 pieces feature distinct materials, character and craft, and taken together they provide an impressive showcase for Hembrey’s humor and virtuosity. But that grandma of his had better be hiding a degree in semiotics, or at least an old copy of the The Postmodern Condition, because the success of Seek’s joke is largely dependent on our knowledge of the world it lampoons. And for all the determined folksiness of his manifesto, the position Hembrey stakes out — somewhere between parody and homage — would not be unfamiliar to the curators of the Venice Biennale.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
The New York Times has posted A.O. Scott’s 3‑minute look back at the 1929 short film Un Chien Andalou. Scott describes the surrealist classic, a collaboration between painter Salvador Dalí and a very young first-time filmmaker Luis Buñuel, as an “old dog with an endless supply of new tricks.” The short’s procession of seemingly absurd, unconnected images, he adds, does not follow the logic of narrative but rather the “logic of dreams.”
Even though its most famous (or infamous) images — a severed hand, a hand covered with ants, and most finally a hand slicing into a woman’s eyeball with a razor blade — seem less shocking now than they did 80 years ago, Un Chien Andalou is still a pleasure. Our reality has changed since the 20s. Our dreams, less so.
You can watch Un Chien Andalou in its entirety, along with L’Âge d’Or, another Buñuel/Dalí production, in our collection of Free Online Movies. But proceed with caution: About 25 years ago, I slipped a copy into the family VCR, expecting a cute cartoon about an Andalusian dog. I’m still recovering.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Samuel Beckett’s haunting short story “The Lost Ones,” which tells of a group of people doomed to wander forever inside a narrow cylindrical prison, makes Waiting for Godot seem like Little Miss Sunshine. It is also nearly unadaptable since a story driven by the certainty of damnation leaves little room for dramatic tension … until now, perhaps.
This month’s New Scientist has a nice piece up about Unmakeablelove, a 3‑D interactive simulation based on “The Lost Ones” in which virtual bodies (created with motion capture, the same technique James Cameron used in Avatar) beat themselves, collide into each other, and slouch eternally towards nowhere, all driven by a force even more implacable than fate: the computer algorithms with which the piece was programmed.
And as with any good work of Existentialist Despair That Dooms All of Humanity to A Future Without Meaning or Hope, this one implicates the audience — spectators can only see inside the exhibit if they station themselves by one of six torches surrounding the 30-foot space. And when they do so, infrared video cameras project their own likenesses into the cylinder. There are no spectators.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Last month, Terje Sorgjerd gave us a jaw-dropping video of El Teide, Spain’s highest mountain, and home to one of the world’s best observatories. This month, he returns to his native land and films the Lofoten archipelago, situated at the 68th and 69th parallels of the Arctic Circle in northern Norway. Filmed between April 29 and May 10, Sorgjerd captures what he calls “The Arctic Light,” a profusion of color that naturally occurs two to four weeks before you see The Midnight Sun. Yes, it’s yet another time lapse video, but oh is it pretty …
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Photographer Darren Samuelson spent a good year researching his big camera. Then it was time to build it. The bellows came first, crafted over two hard weeks on his living room floor. Next came the rear portion of the camera, and eventually the front, the rails, and the rest. All told, seven months of loving labor went into making Darren’s big DIY camera, capable of producing 14×36-inch negatives. (By the way, it also used x‑ray film.) At long last, it was time to give things a try at San Francisco’s Lands End. The short documentary above shows you the rest. Don’t miss the images at the 2:20 mark…
No light, no civilization. It’s pretty much that simple. And it’s this simple idea that m ss ng p eces, a Brooklyn-based creative company, explores ever so artfully in The Story of Light. Here’s how they introduce the video:
We have used light for survival, to learn by, to entertain and express ourselves, mold experiences, and illuminate our imaginations. Inspired by such a singular story we set out to create a handmade storybook fantasy illustrating milestones in the history of light. Each chapter invites us through the annals of history, leading to present day where a new set of possibilities are yet to be realized in the light of tomorrow.
When you reach the end of the video, you’ll realize that the clip also doubles as a commercial for GE’s new led light bulb. Lending an air of coolness to a dowdy conglomerate (GE) is no easy feat. But it’s probably not so tough when you’ve already made GE Capital, a huge recipient of 2008 bailout money, look ever so hip. GE Capital + Taylor Guitars = I think I will buy a Martin, thank you very much.
You can learn more about the making of The Story of Light with this video …
The title says it all. The artwork is pretty mind-blowing. The soundtrack? Not so much. But you can’t have it all. Thanks to anonymous user for sending…
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It was another time, another place, a moment when criminals were invited to pose for the camera. The mugshot as an art form.
