I sometimes take photographs and write about things that aren't Open Science, and although I am trying to do something somehow meaningful -- and I even think I'm getting better at it -- I have a very hard time saying just what that "meaning" might be.

I'm going to start collecting pictures and words that either resonate with me and whatever it is I'm trying to say with my own pictures and words -- or that annoy me into talking about it. In the latter category, here's Jacob Collins, from an article in Columbia Magazine (thanks, Abbas):

I always wanted to do two things: to be skillful and to make beautiful art. I never had any confusion. Not that I am so skillful. I've been looking at Holbein drawings, Diego Velásquez portraits, and ancient Greek sculptures my whole cogent life, and you can't look at those things and really feel good about yourself. The other thing that interests me is to make things beautiful. Often, when you're in art school you get people saying, 'Sure, this is pretty, but let me see what your ideas are.' When I was a kid I didn't know why that bothered me, but later I realized that it's based upon the fallacy that beauty isn't an idea. Beauty is a set of ideas, it is vastly complicated, and to understand whether something is beautiful, you're using anthropology and psychology, and culture and nature, and even biology. You have to understand what 'beauty' is to know why you think something is beautiful.

I have nothing against classicism or realism, but if the galleries on his site are anything to go by I don't care for most of Collins' work. I find it somehow -- pedestrian; more conventional than classical. (I liked Maureen Mullarkey's description of Collins' nudes: "McNudes for the carriage trade... fastidious erotica to go with the Jado bidet and high-thread-count linens from Yves Delorme.") I don't know whether that bit about not feeling good about himself is false or real modesty, but take a look at his drawings. Lack of skill is not the problem, even if he's right and doesn't compare to the transcendent examples he chose. A large part of my reaction to Collins is his choice of subject -- I like him best when he applies his "high art" methods to quotidian objects, or when he gets out of the way and lets a portrait speak for itself. I like him least when he is rehashing ideas of beauty that have been imitated so much that they have become stale.

I originally started writing this as the other kind of inspiration piece, on the basis of the quoted comments above. I like Collins' idea that beauty is sufficient as an end, that it is a complex statement in and of itself. I just disagree with him on the particulars of which things are, in fact, beautiful. If there's any point to saying more about art than "I like/don't like that", then I think Collins' rather impersonal portrayals of rather standard subject choices must qualify only as pretty -- decorative -- and not really beautiful.

So, in writing this out, I find at least one thing I'm trying to do with what, if I were not intensely self-conscious about it, I would call "my art": I want to make beautiful things, and I want to understand why they are beautiful to me. But that's hardly satisfactory, being so broad a comment that it probably applies to anyone who makes anything. I'll keep trying.

(Hat-tips: Andrew Walkingshaw, whose recent musings on creativity and compartmentalisation struck a chord with me; and my old friend Ralf, who always takes "my art" just seriously enough.)

Heh. Me too, for the most part. Richard Akerman, talking about Flickr groups and other very, very special interest online groups ("narrowcasting"):

"There are of course huge Flickr groups devoted to topics of typical photographic interest, like Sunrises and Sunsets (12,453 members).  But there is also the "I didn't think anyone else was interested in that" sort of groups.  For example, I like to take photos that are empty of people.  I consider humans to be noise that messes up the framing of my shots.  As luck would have it, I can submit my photos to the Flickr group The Last Person on Earth (1,036 members) (or see just my contributions). This isn't even the only "no people in the photo" group, there's also No people. Beyond that, in Lonely City, you can't even have animals in the photos."

I usually like to keep people out of my photos, for two good reasons: 1. they are really hard to photograph; seriously, people are some of the most difficult subjects there are; and 2. privacy concerns. I never publish photos with identifiable humans in them, unless I have explicit permission to do so (and since I almost never have the gumption to ask, that means I almost never post people shots). I know that one has a diminished expectation of privacy in a public space, but I am not making a living as a photographer or journalist. I can afford to go a bit further in my consideration of other people's privacy than the law strictly requires.

I wanted to use Richard's photos, but he reserves all rights and I'm lazy, so I hunted around the LPOE pool until I found Zioluc, who releases his shots under a Creative Commons licence (attribution/noncommercial/noderivs) that lets me use them. Grazie, signore! Top left: isoletta aspettami; bottom right: welcome.

For everyone who ever wanted to go Andy Warhol one better: create your own Heinz label. I ordered the one shown; I wonder if they'll actually make and ship it? Hello, Mr CIA Operative. Fuck you, George, I refuse to be afraid. More labels here; via We're Not Wired Right via Coudal Partners.

Update: Phooey.

Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 9:17 AM
From: "Myheinz.com"
To: me
Subject: myheinz.com Website Order Challenge

Upon submission of your order you agreed to the Terms and Conditions set forth by the H.J. Heinz Company. The content of your message is not within the parameters of the Terms and Conditions and cannot be fulfilled. Please revise your message and resubmit your order by clicking the link below and following the instructions. If you choose not to revise the submitted message we will have to regretfully decline the order. [blahblahblah]

Order Confirmation Number: blah

Reason: Political - Political statements are not approved by Heinz.

So film critic Roger Ebert has come up with a list of "102 movies you should have seen if you want to have a serious discussion about film", and all the cool kids are playing. Well, I'm enough of an artwanker to enjoy the occasional serious discussion about film, so here goes; the ones I've seen are in bold:

"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) Stanley Kubrick
"The 400 Blows" (1959) Francois Truffaut
"8 1/2" (1963) Federico Fellini
"Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) Werner Herzog
"Alien" (1979) Ridley Scott
"All About Eve" (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
"Annie Hall" (1977) Woody Allen
"Apocalypse Now" (1979) Francis Ford Coppola
"Bambi" (1942) Disney
"The Battleship Potemkin" (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
"The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) William Wyler
"The Big Red One" (1980) Samuel Fuller
"The Bicycle Thief" (1949) Vittorio De Sica
"The Big Sleep" (1946) Howard Hawks
"Blade Runner" (1982) Ridley Scott
"Blowup" (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
"Blue Velvet" (1986) David Lynch
"Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) Arthur Penn
"Breathless" (1959 Jean-Luc Godard
"Bringing Up Baby" (1938) Howard Hawks
"Carrie" (1975) Brian DePalma
"Casablanca" (1942) Michael Curtiz
"Un Chien Andalou" (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
"Children of Paradise" / "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945) Marcel Carne
"Chinatown" (1974) Roman Polanski
"Citizen Kane" (1941) Orson Welles
"A Clockwork Orange" (1971) Stanley Kubrick
"The Crying Game" (1992) Neil Jordan
"The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) Robert Wise
"Days of Heaven" (1978) Terence Malick
"Dirty Harry" (1971) Don Siegel
"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972) Luis Bunuel
"Do the Right Thing" (1989 Spike Lee
"La Dolce Vita" (1960) Federico Fellini
"Double Indemnity" (1944) Billy Wilder
"Dr. Strangelove" (1964) Stanley Kubrick
"Duck Soup" (1933) Leo McCarey
"E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) Steven Spielberg
"Easy Rider" (1969) Dennis Hopper
"The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) Irvin Kershner
"The Exorcist" (1973) William Friedkin
"Fargo" (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
"Fight Club" (1999) David Fincher
"Frankenstein" (1931) James Whale
"The General" (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
"The Godfather," "The Godfather, Part II" (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
"Gone With the Wind" (1939) Victor Fleming
"GoodFellas" (1990) Martin Scorsese
"The Graduate" (1967) Mike Nichols
"Halloween" (1978) John Carpenter
"A Hard Day's Night" (1964) Richard Lester
"Intolerance" (1916) D.W. Griffith
"It's a Gift" (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
"It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) Frank Capra
"Jaws" (1975) Steven Spielberg
"The Lady Eve" (1941) Preston Sturges
"Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) David Lean
"M" (1931) Fritz Lang
"Mad Max 2" / "The Road Warrior" (1981) George Miller
"The Maltese Falcon" (1941) John Huston
"The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) John Frankenheimer
"Metropolis" (1926) Fritz Lang
"Modern Times" (1936) Charles Chaplin
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
"Nashville" (1975) Robert Altman
"The Night of the Hunter" (1955) Charles Laughton
"Night of the Living Dead" (1968) George Romero
"North by Northwest" (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
"Nosferatu" (1922) F.W. Murnau
"On the Waterfront" (1954) Elia Kazan
"Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968) Sergio Leone
"Out of the Past" (1947) Jacques Tournier
"Persona" (1966) Ingmar Bergman
"Pink Flamingos" (1972) John Waters
"Psycho" (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
"Pulp Fiction" (1994) Quentin Tarantino
"Rashomon" (1950) Akira Kurosawa
"Rear Window" (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
"Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) Nicholas Ray
"Red River" (1948) Howard Hawks
"Repulsion" (1965) Roman Polanski
"The Rules of the Game" (1939) Jean Renoir
"Scarface" (1932) Howard Hawks
"The Scarlet Empress" (1934) Josef von Sternberg
"Schindler's List" (1993) Steven Spielberg
"The Searchers" (1956) John Ford
"The Seven Samurai" (1954) Akira Kurosawa
"Singin' in the Rain" (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
"Some Like It Hot" (1959) Billy Wilder
"A Star Is Born" (1954) George Cukor
"A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) Elia Kazan
"Sunset Boulevard" (1950) Billy Wilder
"Taxi Driver" (1976) Martin Scorsese
"The Third Man" (1949) Carol Reed
"Tokyo Story" (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
"Touch of Evil" (1958) Orson Welles
"The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) John Huston
"Trouble in Paradise" (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
"Vertigo" (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
"West Side Story" (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
"The Wild Bunch" (1969) Sam Peckinpah
"The Wizard of Oz" (1939) Victor Fleming


Twenty-four. Meh. Got me some catchin' up to do.

Dear Mayor Tremblay:

I am writing to ask you to intervene in the legal proceedings against a resident of your city, the stencil artist known as Roadsworth. Don't prosecute the man, hire him! His work in no way detracts from the function of the road markings he embellishes, and in fact adds to them the many serious and important functions of public art. He adds to the daily lives of Montreal's pedestrians a touch of whimsy, an opportunity for reflection, a little beauty in the midst of the mundane: surely this is a public good, not the public mischief with which the artist is charged. I understand that one cannot declare the streets an open canvas, but I am certain that a compromise can be reached in the case of an artist whose work is of real value to the city, and is entirely without malice.

Sincerely, etc.

Background here, profile of Roadsworth here, more of his work here and here.

I don't know much about Edwin Morgan's poetry (perhaps I'll learn more when this site is not so "under construction", and if it loses the odd "go look at his books" attitude), but what prompts this entry is his art collection. At 84, he has donated it to the University of Glasgow -- 70 works in all, worth "a fortune" according to the reporter and a "very good and valuable" collection according to a curator quoted. Morgan, who collected the works according to taste rather than fashion, says of his gift:

[The paintings will] be in good hands and lots of people will see them: that is the idea I like the best. You can clutter your life and your home up with many things, with lots of objects that have no use, and the paintings are in my mind: I have been looking at them for so many years. I have got my enjoyment out of them and now other people can too.

That is just so very right. I would very much like to be able to do something similar, eventually, with my own modest collections of books and art. I do not have much, but I like the idea that perhaps I could plug some gaps in a useful academic or museum collection somewhere. (via eeksypeeksy, Ivy and Anne; photo by Jean Maclachlan)

Observant readers will have noticed the spousal unit's new project, Portland Public Art, on the blogroll. Portland has a lot of public art, thanks in large part to a (city? state?) law that says 1% of all building budgets must go to support the arts. The spousal unit went mad and decided to catalog it.


The title is a sneaky segue to our latest acquisitions, two miniatures (about 2.5 inches square) by local artist Bernard O Gross, "Three Cedars" and "Red Oak Hillside". These snaps don't really do them justice. (Man, do I feel like an artwanker now.)

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day took me back to my sci-fi¹ reading days: galaxy rise over Earth-beta, or something. Make sure you go look at the big version, which makes a great desktop.

¹ Yeah, yeah, "skiffy" blah blah whine snivel get over it already.

How rich art is; if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.    -- Vincent to Theo, 1878

The Vincent van Gogh Gallery is the site for van Gogh online. It's endorsed by the van Gogh Museum (<brag> I've been there! </brag>) and features, well, everything: 2200 images and 874 letters, every surviving thing that Vincent ever painted, sketched or wrote. Chronological and subject matter indices, a canonical works gallery, commentary and analysis, biography, an online forum and more, available in thirteen languages on a clean, well designed site. Bravo, Mr Brooks.

The Art*o*mat is just plain cool. In 1997, Clark Whittington converted a recently-banned cigarette vending machine to sell his black&white photos for $1 each. Today, his company Artists in Cellophane operates 60 art vending machines in 18 states, featuring the work of over 300 artists from 10 different countries. I note that there are no artomats in Oregon yet; I wonder what it costs to sponsor one?

Way cool update: the artist whose pendant is shown here, Sandra Marchewa, showed up in comments. You can see more of her art here. While I'm updating, it appears there's now an Art*o*mat in Oregon, at Lane Community College -- but still none in Portland...

That's art -- sorry, Art -- you're looking at there. Dave Barry came across it at a Miami Beach art show, and he couldn't make any more sense of it than I can:

...a ratty old collapsed armchair - worn, dirty, leaking stuffing, possibly housing active vermin colonies. I asked the gallery person if the chair was art, and she said yes, it was a work titled "Chair." I asked her what role the artist had played in creating "Chair." She said: "He found it."    [pic]

Dave further notes that "Chair" (actually "chair", otherwise known as "Untitled (ellipses) II"), by brilliant scam artist Rodney McMillian, is for sale: a mere $2800. I wouldn't touch the feculent thing for twice that, but here is one James Scarborough blurbing in artcritical.com:

Rodney McMillian's work limns absence as an unmitigated presence. His take on absence is more sensuous than cerebral. He doesn't deconstruct the idea of absence and then rebuild it as a dialectical opposition which posits that what's not seen, felt, experienced is as significant, perhaps moreso, as that which is. [...] The subject... is not our reaction to a void but our innate tendency to venerate the void itself as something sacred and iconic. [...] As a repository and sum of former posteriors that have dented its cushions, of previous elbows that have grazed the armrests, the chair offers not a weedy patina of desuetude but an apotheosis of its former occupant.

Uh, what? I'd get those innate tendencies looked at, mate. The comedy just writes itself here, and I don't care if I am shooting fish in a barrel: these idiots are funny. My hat's off to your man Rod, though; he's found some festering piece of crap in a bin somewhere and he's conned these wankers into putting it in a gallery. I bet some fool will even buy it.

Metafilter's signal:noise ratio renders the comment threads a waste of time, but with the magic of RSS I can scan the front page for old school posts like these:

From magullo, a link to this polished amateur continuation of the Library of Congress' exhibit and project on the pre-WWI work of Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Prokudin-Gorskii took three black and white exposures of each scene he shot, using a different filter for each; then, by projecting the plates back through the same filters he could create a single colour image on a wall. The LoC, and now Addison Godel and friends, have used modern image manipulation to reproduce some of these extraordinary images. [pic ; I made the grayscale one in Photoshop.]

       

Godel has it exactly right:

...I'd always felt that the past was somehow obscured by being viewed solely through a greyscale window. To see places, buildings, and especially people in color was to understand, on a very deep level, that they had at one time really, truly existed - that the "Typical Russian Peasant of Figure 32" was not merely some gaunt presence in the side of a textbook, but a genuine person who, if not for temporal chance, could have been my neighbor or my friend.

Shibori is a labour intensive Japanese textile dyeing method, and this is a labour intensive post from user lobakgo. Techniques similar to tie-dyeing are used to create patterns like those on the left,from which extraordinarily detailed images like the one on the right are built with months of painstaking effort. [pic 1, pic2]

      

This also ended up on MeFi, but I got it from jwz: the industrial photography of Edward Burtynsky.

      

So I finally saw LotR:RotK, and it sucked. Hard. I'm probably too late to do anyone any good with this, but if you haven't seen it, don't. Jackson treats the characters and the story without respect, pretty much exactly as I'd expected him to do in the first two movies. I was suprised when he exceeded my expectations with FotR and TTT, but the signs were there in some of the egregious abuses of character and plot, and the third movie makes it abundantly clear that Jackson simply does not understand the nature of Tolkien's work. He reduces it to Hollywood pabulum -- Graydon (in this thread) is exactly right when he says, "The generosity has been leeched out of [the story], along with the restraint." Even viewed as schlock RotK is a lousy piece of work. Editing, pacing and visual continuity are all sloppy. The spousal unit postulated time/money problems and/or studio interference, but in the end Jackson must take the blame for turning a grand and epic tale into a stupid action flick.