Peter Paul Rubens’ zaftig beauties and plump little angels burst with health. His “powerful and exuberant style,” notes one analysis of his technique, “came to characterize the Baroque art of northern Europe.” Rubens’ name became synonymous with figures who were “realistic, fleshy and indeed corpulent… set in dynamic compositions that echo the grand organizations of the Renaissance masters.”
An excellent example of such a composition is The Feast of Venus (1636), painted in the “ecstatic intensity” of Rubens’ own style, writes the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, after a “description in antiquity of a Greek painting in which a cult image of Aphrodite is decorated by nymphs, with winged cupids dancing around it.” Venus may be at the center of the huge piece, but the cupids’ roly-poly arms and legs upstage her.
Rubens’ cupids already look like they’re going to pop off the canvas. In the video at the top, one of them does—breaks right through the frame, scampers across the top and takes flight around the gallery over the heads of awed onlookers. Cupid retrieves a bow and arrows and begins firing love darts around the room. The scene is Brussels Airport, where a selection of Rubens’ paintings recently hung in an art-themed lounge.
The spectators are passengers waiting for their flights, and the escaped cupid is a trick of projection mapping, created by the Belgian company SkullMapping and commissioned by the tourist agency VisitFlanders. The cupid flew until April of last year, when the paintings were replaced by work from Brueghel as part of a larger project to promote Flemish art and culture in places where people are most likely to encounter it.
Would such small-scale projection maps, “mini-mapping,” as it’s called, ever be employed in an actual gallery, to the work of revered old masters? Might this be something of an art world heresy? Or might we see in the near future huge, detailed canvases of painters like Rubens and his role model, Titian, suddenly burst into three dimensions, their subjects given life, of some kind, and invited to walk or fly around the halls?
Do these gimmicks trivialize great art or renew appreciation for it? I’d wager that, if he were alive, Rubens might thrill to see his well-fed cupids and angels in motion, and he might just take to building projection maps himself. We have some small idea, at least, of what they might look like, above.
It’s not unusual for an institution to recognize a major benefactor’s generosity by naming something in their honor — a wing, an atrium, a library, a gymnasium, a concert hall…
But bathrooms?
It’s a fitting tribute for the Pope of Trash, filmmaker John Waters.
So fitting that he himself suggested it when donating 372 prints, paintings, and photographs from his personal collection to the Baltimore Museum Of Art.
But he is surely the most famous, thanks to a career that spans six decades, includes numerous books and exhibitions of his photography and sculptures, in addition to his infamous cult films.
Waters got his start as an art collector at the age of 12: he spent $2 on a Joan Miró poster in the Baltimore Museum’s gift shop:
After taking it home and hanging it on my bedroom wall at my parents’ house, I realized from the hostile reaction of my neighborhood playmates that art could provoke, shock, and cause trouble. I became a collector for life. It’s only fitting that the fruits of my 60-year search for new art that could startle, antagonize, and infuriate even me, ends up where it all began—in my hometown museum.
Museum director Christopher Bedford calls Waters a “man of extraordinary refinement” as well as “a local treasure.”
Curator Asma Naeem adds that Waters’ donation, in addition to being one of the largest gifts of art in recent history, is also one of the “most personal and individualized, showing the true stamp of the donor’s taste, eye, and predilections.”
Among the 125 artists represented are Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, Roy Lichtenstein, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and Waters himself. (The museum hosted a retrospective of his visual art two years ago.)
Waters is personally acquainted with many of the artists in his collection, and has a strong preference for early work. “They were never blue-chip artists,” he told The New York Times. “They became that later.”
In an interview with the CBC’s Carol Off, Waters reflected that he loves art that inspires outrage:
…because I’m in on it. You finally learn to see differently if you like art. And it’s a secret club. It’s like a biker gang where you learn a special language, you have to dress a certain way. I love all the ridiculous elitism about the art world. I think it’s hilarious.
In addition to the two bathrooms in the East Lobby, a rotunda in the European art galleries will also bear Waters’ name.
The museum has pledged to never deaccession the works in the collection, and Waters speculates that it’s only a matter of time until a gender-neutral bathroom bearing his name will also be made available to patrons.
Bob Ross is as renowned for the gentle encouragement of his voice as for his speedy technique: indeed, these very qualities are synonymous with the name “Bob Ross.” His revival in recent years has as much to do with the de-stressing effects of his permed onscreen persona as with our awe, ironic or otherwise, at his kitschy picture-perfect landscapes in under an hour. He’s become as much a saint of public television as Mr. Rogers and even more of an internet icon.
But unlike most other fandoms, the devoted lovers of Bob Ross have had no place to call their own. They might show up in Bob Ross cosplay at comic con. Yet no Bob Ross Con has made the scene. Leave it to Ross’s original Joy of Painting studio to fill the gap with a museum dedicated to the painting instructor. The Bob Ross Experience is part of a larger campus of buildings called Minnetrista in Muncie, Indiana, founded by the Ball family of Ball mason jars. It’s an “immersive exhibit,” featuring “original paintings and artifacts” and “inspiring visitors with Bob’s message of fearless creativity.”
What more could you want from a Bob Ross museum? Well, maybe a fully-online experience these days. For now, you’ll have to make the trip to Muncie, where locals pay $8 a ticket (kids $6, 3 & under are free) and non-residents shell out $15 ($12 per kid, etc). There may be nowhere else you can see Ross’s happy little trees in person. As Ayun Halliday wrote here recently, “sales of his work hover around zero.” Almost all of his paintings, save a few owned by the Smithsonian and a few private individuals, reside in storage in Northern Virginia, where an exhibit came and went last year.
Ross himself, who honed his method during short breaks in the Air Force, hardly ever exhibited in his lifetime; he was a made-for-TV painter with a small merchandising empire to match. Now, fans can make the pilgrimage to his creative TV home at the Lucius L. Ball house. Swoon over personal relics like his keys and hair pick and, of course, “the artist’s palette knife, easel, and brushes,” writes Colossal. “Many of the artifacts are free to touch.” A current exhibition at the Experience, “Bob Ross at Home” through August 15, 2021, showcases “a few dozen of the artist’s canvases, many on loan from Muncieans who got the works directly from Ross.”
Not only can you hang out on set and view Ross’s paintings and personal effects, but you can also, Artnet reports, “sign up for $70 master classes with certified Bob Ross instructors.” That’s $70 more than it costs to watch the master himself on YouTube, but if you’ve already made the trip…. One only hopes the instructors can channel what George Buss, vice president of the Experience, calls Ross’s best quality, his gentle fearlessness: “He takes what looks like a mistake and turns it into something beautiful.” And that, friends, is the true joy of the Bob Ross experience.
There are a few names anyone interested in Japanese woodblock printing today can’t help but hear sooner or later: Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai, Kitagawa Utamaro, David Bull. That last, you may have guessed, is not the name of an 18th-century Japanese man. In fact, David Bull still walks among us today, especially if we happen to live in the old Asakusa section of Tokyo, where he keeps his woodblock-print studio Mokuhankan.
Born in England and raised in Canada, Bull discovered the world of ukiyo‑e, those Japanese “pictures of the floating world,” in his late twenties. Just a few years after first trying his hand, without formal training, at making his own prints, he moved to the Japanese capital to dedicate himself to the form. Today, on his personal site and Youtube channel, he offers a wealth of English-language resources on the art and craft of the Japanese woodblock print.
In the video up top, he provides expert commentary on the making of one particular print by a young Mokuhankan printer named Natsuki Suga. The work is broken into ten stages, beginning with the application of the basic orange background color, moving on through the addition of sky blues and tea-field greens (not to mention shadows, shadows, and “more shadows”), all the way through to the final embossing of the title and artist’s name. The result, revealed at the end in a stage-by-stage time lapse, is a vivid and idyllic scene aesthetically balanced between ukiyo‑e tradition and the present-day art styles.
In the video just above, you can see Bull himself provide commentary as he makes a woodblock print of his own — in real time, from start to finish, with no cuts. Originally shot as a live Twitch stream, it shows Bull’s entire process from blank block to completed print, which takes nearly three and a half hours. That may actually seem like a surprisingly short time in which to create a work of art, but then, Bull has been at this for nearly 40 years.
Bull’s experience also comes through in his ability to explain his techniques and tell stories about the Japanese woodblock’s artistic development as well as his own. What may seem like a video of interest only to ukiyo‑e specialists has in fact racked up, as of this writing, more than 1.2 million views on Youtube alone. But then, it isn’t entirely unknown for a soft-spoken artist dedicated to a highly specific form to win a wide audience with his educational productions. “I’m completely certain that Bob Ross hasn’t died,” as one commenter puts it. “He just got a new haircut.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
And The Plastic Bag Store, a pop-up installation that was preparing to open in Times Square.
The theaters remain dark, but the ban is back on, as of October 19th. The 7‑month pause was hastened by the pandemic, but also by an unsuccessful lawsuit brought by flexible packing manufacturer Poly-Pak Industries.
The Plastic Bag Store was allowed to open, too, albeit in an altered format from the hybrid art installation-adult puppet show creator Robin Frohardt has been working on for several years.
She has long intended for the project’s New York premiere to coincide with the ban.
Not because she hoped to get rich selling bags to citizens accustomed to getting them free with purchase.
There’s nothing to buy in this “store.”
It’s a performance of sorts, but there’s no admission charge.
It’s definitely an education, and a meditation on how history can be doomed to repeat itself, in one way or another.
The Plastic Bag Store just ended its sold out 3‑week run, playing to crowds of ticket holders now capped at 12 audience members per performance. The live elements have morphed into a trio of short films that are projected after ticket holders—customers if you will—have had a chance to look around.
There’s plenty to see.
The Times Square installation space has been kitted out to resemble a roomy bodega stocked with produce, baked goods, sushi rolls on plastic trays, shrink wrapped meat, and other familiar, if slightly skewed items.
Rows of 2 liter soda bottles with iconic red labels are shelved across from the magazine rack. Tubs of Bag & Jerry’s Mint Plastic Chip are in the freezer case.
The original plan allowed for customers to handle the goods as they wanted. Now such interactions are prohibited.
Prior to March, New Yorkers were pretty handsy with produce, unabashedly pressing thumbs into avocados and holding tomatoes and melons to nostrils to determine ripeness.
The pandemic curbed that habit.
No matter. Nothing is ripe in the Plastic Bag Store, where any item not contained in a can or cardboard box has been constructed from the thousands of plastic bags Frohardt has collected over the years.
I’m a real connoisseur now. There are certain colors I’m really attracted to. Certain bags are harder to find. I definitely look at trash differently than most people. I’m always looking for reds and oranges and greens. Sometimes I find a really interesting color that I haven’t seen before, like salmon or lavender. That’s always exciting.
This diversity of materials helps with visual verisimilitude, most impressive in the produce section.
The product labels been richly fortified with satirical commentary.
A family sized package of Yucky Shards appeals to children with sparkles, a rainbow, and a bright eyed cartoon mascot who doesn’t seem to mind the 6‑pack yoke that’s attached itself to its person.
Everything about the “non-organic, triple-washed Spring Green Mix” from “Earthbag Farm” looks familiar, including the plastic container.
Packages of Sometimes feminine pads promise “super protection” that will “literally last forever.”
The cupcakes on display in the bakery section are topped with such festive embellishments as a “disposable” lighter and flossing pick.
The tone is not scolding but rather comic, as Frohardt uses her spoofs to delight attendees into serious consideration of the “foreverness” of plastic and its environmental impact:
There is great humor to be found in the pitfalls of capitalism, and I find that humor and satire can be powerful tools for social criticism especially with issues that feel too sad and overwhelming to confront directly.
It’s really easy to turn away from images of turtles choking on straws. That stuff comes up in my Instagram feed all the time, and I’m like “Whoa! Swipe on past” because it’s too hard to look at. So what I’m trying to do is to make something that’s fun to look at, and fun to engage with, so you can think about it. Instead of just saying, “That’s fucked up! Ok on to the next thing.”
The Plastic Bag Store’s film segments also wield comedy to get their message across.
From the stiff shadow puppet Ancient Greeks who are seduced by the self-flattering slogan of a new product, Knowledge Water, which comes in single use vessels, to the recipient of a message in a plastic bottle, discovered so far into the future that he can only admire its craftsmanship, having no clue as to its purpose. (Letter carrier is his best guess. Eventually, other letter carriers are discovered in the freezing equatorial ocean, and housed in a museum alongside other hilariously mislabeled relics of a long dead civilization.)
If you happen to have grown up in the English countryside, you probably retain a certain sensitivity to and affinity for nature. This can express itself in any number of ways, most often by a compulsion to garden, no matter how urban the setting in which you now live. But Jo Brown has shown how to base a career on it: an artist and illustrator — and “birder wildlifer mushroomer,” according to her Twitter bio — she has long kept a “nature journal” documenting the flora and fauna encountered in the countryside around her home in Devon.
“At the end of April 2019, Jo posted a video of her journal so far on Twitter,” says her web site. “It went viral and her followers jumped from 9K followers to 20K followers in two days.” A glance at any given page reveals what so impressed them. “Each page of Brown’s notebook contains a pen and colored pencil drawing that begins at the pages’ edges, appearing to grow from the corner or across the paper,” writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert.
“Sometimes captured through close-ups that mimic scientific illustrations, the delicate renderings depict the detail of a buff-tailed bumblebee’s fuzzy torso and the red tendrils of a round-leaved sundew. Brown notes the common and Latin names for each species and common characteristics, in addition to where and when she spotted it.”
In other words, the nature journal showcases at once its creator’s keen eye, well-trained hand, and formidable knowledge of the natural world. It also stands as a prime example of the art of notebooking.
Using to its fullest advantage her ruled Moleskine notebook (the brand of choice for those invested in doing their jotting and sketching on the go for a couple of decades now), Brown effectively delivers a master class in the vivid, legible, and elegant — dare we say organic? — organization of both visual and textual information in the space of a small page.
You can take a closer look at how she does it on her web site as well as her feeds on both Twitter and Instagram. More recently, her journal has been published in book form as Secrets of a Devon Wood. Few nature-lovers, perhaps, can equal Jo Brown as an artist, but everyone can enjoy the gloriously varied realm of life that surrounds them just as much as she does. “All that’s required,” she says, “is a little patience and quiet observation.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
How, exactly, does one go about making a global dictionary of symbols? It is a Herculean task, one few scholars would take on today, not only because of its scope but because the philological approach that gathers and compares artifacts from every culture underwent a correction: No one person can have the expertise to cover everything. Yet the attempts to do so have had tremendous creative value. Such explorations bring us closer to what makes humans the same the world over: our productive imaginations and the archetypal wellspring of images that guide us through the unknown.
When Spanish poet, critic, translator, and musicologist Juan Eduardo Cirlot began his 1958 Dictionary of Symbols, he did so with Carl Jung in mind, writing against a current of positivism that devalued the symbolic.
Cirlot quotes Jung in his introduction: “For the modern mind, analogies… are nothing but self-evident absurdities. This worthy judgement does not, however, in any way alter the fact that such affinities of thought do exist and that they have been playing an important role for centuries.” Like it or not, we interact through the symbolic realm all the time. Those interactions are freighted with historical and cultural meaning we would do well to understand if we are to understand ourselves.
In his method, Cirlot writes in a Preface:
I wanted to embrace the broadest possible range of objects and cultures, to compare the symbols of the post-Roman West with symbols from India, the Far East, Chaldea, Egypt, Israel and Greece. Images, essential myths, allegories, for my purposes, all these needed to be consulted, not, self-evidently, with the intention of making an exhaustive reckoning, but rather to comb out patterns in meaning, in what counts as essential, in fields both near and far.
Cirlot draws his inspiration from Dada and Surrealism and the comparative method in religious studies popularized by scholars like Mircea Eliade, who influenced prominent students of myth like Joseph Campbell (and through Campbell, the popular culture of film, television, and the internet). “Thus I drew near the luminous labyrinth of symbols,” Cirlot writes, “concerned less with interpretation than with comprehension and concerned most of all, really, with the contemplation of how symbols dwell across time and culture.” And “dwell” they do, as we know, in elemental figures like dragons and serpents, destructive gods and evil eyes. (In 1954, Cirlot published The Eye in Mythology, a precursor to A Dictionary of Symbols.)
In times of trouble and uncertainty like ours, symbols become important ways of organizing chaos in our collective imagination, and are integral to what Sinding Bentzen, professor of economics at the University of Copenhagen, calls “religious coping” in the face of COVID-19. Ripped from their historic context, as happened with the swastika, symbols can be used to intentionally manipulate and mislead, to turn collective anxiety into acquiescence to tyranny and totalitarianism. Cirlot was acutely aware of this as an artist working under the rule of Francisco Franco. As a leading member of a group of painters and poets who called themselves Dau al Set (“the seven-spotted dice”), Cirlot and his contemporaries “championed creative liberty and resistance to the dominant Fascist regime.”
In the 21st century, we can just as well read Cirlot’s dictionary with this same mission. It is not an artifact of another time but as an ever-relevant, erudite, and fascinating resource for our own. Through the study of symbols we learn to see, Cirlot wrote, that “nothing is meaningless or neutral: everything is significant,” every idea connected to others across time and space. “It is only by reading through the volume steadily that one can become aware of the intricate interrelations of symbolic meanings,” wrote Catherine Rau in a 1962 review of the book. We can “develop such awareness by starting off with any random entry,” Angelica Frey observes at Hyperallergic.
Do so in the “original, significantly enlarged” new edition of the Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols, just published by the New York Review of Books in an English translation by Valerie Miles. We can read the book for reference or for pleasure, Herbert Read writes in an introduction to the new edition, “but in general the greatest use of the volume will be for the elucidation of those many symbols which we encounter in the arts and in the history of ideas. Man, it has been said, is a symbolizing animal; it is evident that at no stage in the development of civilization has man been able to dispense with symbols.”
Viewed head on, it appears to be a somewhat unconventional landscape in which one of the few remaining branches of a mutilated tree spreads over a city, far in the distance. Streaky clouds suggest heavy weather is brewing.
Stroll to the end of the corridor and take another look. You’ll find that the tree has contracted, and the clouds have reconfigured themselves into a portrait of Saint Francesco of Paola, praying beneath its boughs.
It’s a prime example of oblique anamorphosis, an image that has been deliberately distorted by an artist well versed in perspective, with the end result that the image’s true nature will only be revealed to those viewing the work from an unconventional point.
The Quay Brothers’ documentary short, above, a collaboration with art historian Roger Cardinal, uses a combination of their delightfully creepy signature puppet stop motion, as well as animated 3‑D cut outs, to lift the curtains on how the human eye can be manipulated, using principles of perspective.
Anamorphosis may not seem like such a feat in an age when a number of software programs can provide a major assist, but why would Renaissance artists put themselves to so much extra trouble?
The Quay Brothers delve into this too.
Perhaps the artist was injecting a bit of social criticism, like Hans Holbein the Younger, whose 1533 portrait, The Ambassadors, includes a secret anamorphic skull. This could be taken as a jab at the excesses of the wealthy young diplomats who provide the painting’s subject, except that the one who commissioned the work, Jean de Dinteville, prized the motto “Memento mori.”
Maybe he knowingly ordered up the naked death’s head to go along with his ermine and bling, an example of having one’s cake and eating it too, and yet another dizzying head trip for those viewing the painting from the intended angle.
(Betcha didn’t have to work too hard to guess the skull’s location, though…)
Or an artist might choose to employ anamorphosis as a brown paper wrapper of sorts, as in the case of Erhard Schön’s erotic woodblock prints.
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