I woke up in a nightmarish state recently, haunted by a news image of a bloodied, terrified Moammar Gadhafi being beaten and driven away to his brutal death. The image morphed to the eerily similar self-portrait of Michelangelo with flayed skin in his monumental Sistine Chapel fresco, The Last Judgment. I stumbled to the kitchen for a glass of milk to ward off the evil spirits. I prefer my demons in a slightly less anxiety producing state, without the existential meltdown. All of which leads me to my favorite holiday, Halloween, that festive time of year where we dress up as whatever our imagination dictates to celebrate death, evil, monsters, and other inhabitants of the dark, freak-show side of life.
I've put together a few videos to help you get in the mood.
Let's start with the most amazing pumpkin carvings I've ever seen, created by sculptor Ray Villafane.
This next video, Disney's 1929 "The Skeleton Dance," part of the Silly Symphonies series of cartoon shorts, is classic, early, black and white Disney animation. At the stroke of midnight four skeletons embark on a musical romp through a graveyard until a rooster's crow at dawn sends them scurrying back into their grave.
What would Halloween be without the costumes? This next video was produced by the Metropolitan Museum for its wildly popular Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibition. McQueen often referred to himself as "the Edgar Allan Poe of fashion." He was certainly one of the most brilliant costumiers of our time.
Click here to see more MET videos of McQueen's runway shows.
Last, but not least, is a happy little Halloween song that my goddaughter recommended to me by actor, singer and comedian Steven Lynch.
November 20:
Closing Reception for Susan Sironi: New ABCs: Altered Books & Collages, 2-5pm
Artist's Talk by Susan Sironi, 3pm November 21 - December 3:
Closed for installation
December 4-11: ArtZone 2011 Opening Reception: Sunday, December 4, 2-5pm
Closing Reception: Sunday, December 11, 2-5pm
I watched two short documentaries this week about visuals that exist in the shadowy world between art and mathematics. The first film is from the PBS's "Nova" series, Fractals, Hunting the Hidden Dimension. The second is Vanessa Gould's 2009 documentary Between the Folds, a fascinating look at the history and evolution of the world of paper folding.
Fractals, Hunting the Hidden Dimension tells the fascinating story of how mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot came to discover the mathematics of fractals. Always considered outside the mainstream of mathematics, Mandelbrot was one of a group of "oddballs" hired by IBM in 1958 to develop the then fledgling computer field. Mandelbrot was fascinated by a problem presented to him about noise created by transmitting computer data over jammed phone lines, often resulting in data not getting through. When he looked at the pattern of the noise and zoomed in on a small area, he was surprised to find how similar the small area was to the whole.
Mandelbrot thought classical mathematics was great for describing forms with smooth edges and curves, primarily man-made forms, but found it lacking when it came to describing rough-edged forms as found in the natural world. Once he started pointing out fractals in nature, he was usually confronted with the response "of course!" Many of us associate fractals with the eye-candy of psychedelic posters and videos, but fractals are all around us in the natural world in the form of leaves, trees, lightning, blood vessels, mountains, clouds and even galaxies. Mandelbrot was eventually able to write a formula, "the Mandelbrot set" for the repeating "self-similarity" of the patterns within patterns within patterns that he discovered.
The fractal shape form of a Romanesco broccoli
Mandelbrot's discovery of fractals was eventually put to practical use in the first-ever computer generated special effects sequence in a feature film (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan), as well as the small fractal antennae that are used in cell phones and other electronic devices.
After watching Gould's film about origami, Between the Folds, I went into high procrastination mode and instead of sitting down and writing this blog as I had intended, I found myself folding a large sheet of paper into a hyperbolic paraboloid. (I did this mainly for the bragging rights -- it's not as difficult as it sounds.) What I learned from this little exercise was how easily one could be seduced by the endless possibilities of something as simple as folding a sheet of paper. Gould's film chronicles the work of 10 artists and scientists who took the plunge, abandoning careers and hard-earned graduate degrees to devote themselves to origami.
Akira Yoshizawa (1911-2005) is considered the father of modern origami. Self-taught, he abandoned a factory job to devote himself to the study of paper folding. He supported himself working odd jobs and by selling soup door-to-door. He was the first origamist to keep his paper moist while folding, allowing him to make softer, more organic looking figures. He made some 50,000 models in his life time, none of which he ever sold.
The film looks at other modern day practitioners whose styles range from realistic to abstract, kinetic to work by le Crimp, a group of French origamists who make their forms from randomly crumpled paper, and a teacher in Israel who uses origami to teach geometry to children.
Perhaps most interesting is the amazingly gifted father/son team of Marty and Erik Demaine.
Erik Demaine was home-schooled by his father Marty, a single parent, sculptor, glass-blower, self-taught computer scientist and avid puzzle maker. Erik entered college at the age of 12 and got his PhD at the age of 20. He was the youngest professor ever hired at MIT and two years later was a recipient of the MacArthur genius grant. Together, the Demaines have pushed the boundaries of what origami can be -- from saving lives by designing folds for air bags to looking for cures for diseases by folding proteins.
November 20:
Closing Reception for Susan Sironi: New ABCs: Altered Books & Collages, 2-5pm
Artist's Talk by Susan Sironi, 3pm November 21 - December 3:
Closed for installation
December 4-11: ArtZone 2011 Opening Reception: Sunday, December 4, 2-5pm
Closing Reception: Sunday, December 11, 2-5pm
I have always had a fascination with the outer limits of visual experience -- outsider art, mental illness and art, psychoactive drugs and art. What happens as artists when our "cerebral reducing valve," as Aldous Huxley termed it, is stuck in the open position? How do we classify these works in the canons of visual art? Do we in the West tend to undervalue the visionary, the hallucinatory, the spiritual in art?
Rather than trying to answer these complex questions, I've put together a series of videos that addresses some of these issues and, I hope, provides food for thought.
If you follow the instructions on the screen of this first video, you will experience a brief and very real visual hallucination at the end. Nothing scary pops out at you. If you are prone to seizures or are afraid of this sort of thing, I suggest you skip this video.
This next video is about a series of nine drawings done by an artist under the influence of LSD 25 as part of a government research program in the 1950s.
This video tells the story of English artist Louis Wain (1860-1939) who was well known for his anthropomorphized drawings of cats. He developed late-onset schizophrenia at the age of 57 and continued to draw increasingly psychedelic cats.
This last video is of Chinese choreographer Zhang Jigang's Thousand Hand Bodhisattva (Guan Yin). While technically this is a dance performance, I think you'll agree that it qualifies as an intensely visual experience.
October 9:
Closing Reception for Lisa Adams: Born This Way, 2-5pm
Book Signing for Lisa Adams's Monograph: Vicissitude of Circumstance, 2-3pm
Artist's Talk by Lisa Adams, 3pm
November 20:
Closing Reception for Susan Sironi: New ABCs: Altered Books & Collages, 2-5pm
Artist's Talk by Susan Sironi, 3pm November 21 - December 3:
Closed for installation
December 4-11: ArtZone 2011 Opening Reception: Sunday, December 4, 2-5pm
Closing Reception: Sunday, December 11, 2-5pm
