Friday, October 26, 2012

Videos: Bosch and Brueghel get Animated for Halloween

If your need for the macabre this Halloween goes beyond cute kids in costumes and Hallmark notions of creepy, this animated look at two giants of art history, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, should transport you to those depraved depths you crave.

We'll start with a jaunty video by Eli Rosen based on the drawing Big Fish Eat Little Fish by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.





This next video, by Dobromil Nosek, is based on Bosch's Seven Sins. Unfortunately, we only get an enticing glimpse of three of the seven.





Ray Koefoed's music video, A Plague on You, is based on Brueghel's Triumph of Death and ups the ante on the creepiness factor.




Ready for more? Andrey Zakirzyanov's edgy Break the Silence music video is a mash-up of Bosch and Brueghel imagery with a cameo appearance by a certain someone from the work of Leonardo da Vinci.
 

I've saved the most gruesome for last, Buckethead's video for Spokes for the Wheel of Torment. Based on several paintings by Bosch, it is not for the faint of heart. You have been forewarned.





Happy Halloween!

 







Upcoming at Offramp Gallery

Anita Bunn: Detour
through October 28
Closing Reception & Artist's Talk: Sunday, October 28, 2-5pm

November 3-4, 2012

Benefit Exhibition & Sale for Lisa Adams
Be among the first to select works at benefit prices by Los Angeles luminaries such as Laddie John Dill, Ed Moses, Kristin Calabrese, Larry Bell, Chuck Arnoldi, Iva Gueorguieva, Anita Bunn, Susan Sironi, Jim Ganser and many more.

Patssi Valdez: Mementos
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
Closing Reception & Holiday Party: Sunday, December 23, 2-5pm


Elaine Carhartt: Portraits
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
Closing Reception & Holiday Party: Sunday, December 23, 2-5pm


James Griffith: Natural Selection
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
Closing Reception & Holiday Party: Sunday, December 23, 2-5pm








 

Friday, October 19, 2012

Art. Books. Art Books. Book Art: An Embarrassment of Riches

 
Click here to buy from
Amazon.com


Art. Books. Art books. Book art. I have lived most of my adult life near the intersection of these two worlds, as an artist, diarist,  voracious reader, art-gallery/art-book-store director and blogger about art and books. You could say it is my happy place -- and for the last two weeks my proverbial cup runneth over!

Artists, always sensitive to cultural changes on what seems to be a cellular level, have turned to books as medium, just as books are losing their dominance as conveyors of information, while maintaining or perhaps even gaining importance as aesthetic objects. Book Art: Iconic Sculptures and Installations Made from Books, published by Gestalten in 2011, features the work of 46 artists who use books as a medium -- cutting, slicing, carving, gouging, stacking, suspending, rolling and otherwise manipulating these mass-produced works into one-of-a-kind precious objects. (Click here to buy Book Art from Amazon.com.)

In her introduction to Book Art Christine Antaya states: 
 

By Gene Epstein from Book Art,
Copyright Gestalten 2012
"Artists who have opened their eyes to the interplay of structure and format within the book, a feature largely taken for granted until texts became available through different media, have been exploring this using the scalpel and the knife. Sentences are cut and peeled out to create new contexts and more fluid meanings for narratives; words are erased; the shapes of books are returned to the organic matter from which the paper they are printed on first came."











Another happy foray down the art/book rabbit hole is an exhibition I attended last week, Pages, on view through January 13, 2013 at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design here in Pasadena. Pages displays the work of contemporary artists who use books and pages as mediums, alongside manuscripts, documents, doodles and other forms of written or printed pages from the 15th century to the 21st.

New York artist Robert Kushner’s Scriptorium: Devout Exercises of the Heart consists of hundreds of drawings and paintings of foliage and flowers on antique book pages and covers, and is hung salon style with pins on a wall that spans the entire depth of the gallery space. Opposite the wall is a row of six vitrines displaying pages from 15th and 16th century Herbals, the neat calligraphy and herbal illustrations quietly foreshadowing Kushner's impressive installation.

Three stunning wall pieces by Echiko Ohira made from cardboard, tea-stained paper, glue, and tea-stained sketchbooks provide sophisticated visual counterpoint to objects such as a placemat from a restaurant in Altadena covered with handwritten scientific formulae by Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Fineman, and large wall-hung copies of pages from a first edition of Mark Twain's Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County with Twain's handwritten edits and marginalia.

All of which brings us to my third and final harmonious convergence in the art/book matrix. In my last post I wrote about Nobel prize winning author Orhan Pamuk's recently released book, The Innocence of Objects, a catalog of his museum that opened last spring in Istanbul -- a museum that Pamuk conceived in tandem with his novel, The Museum of Innocence. I told myself I didn't have time to read a 500+ page novel, then immediately downloaded and devoured it. It is a mesmerizing tale of lost love and obsession. Having the museum catalog to refer to is icing on this masterful cake. (Click here to buy The Museum of Innocence from Amazon.com. Click here to download for Kindle.)






Upcoming at Offramp Gallery
through October 28
Closing Reception & Artist's Talk: Sunday, October 28, 2-5pm


November 3-4, 2012
Benefit Exhibition & Sale for Lisa Adams
Be among the first to select works at benefit prices by Los Angeles luminaries such as Laddie John Dill, Ed Moses, Kristin Calabrese, Larry Bell, Chuck Arnoldi, Iva Gueorguieva, Anita Bunn, Susan Sironi, Jim Ganser and many more.

Patssi Valdez: Mementos
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
Closing Reception & Holiday Party: Sunday, December 23, 2-5pm

Elaine Carhartt: Portraits
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
Closing Reception & Holiday Party: Sunday, December 23, 2-5pm

James Griffith: Natural Selection
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
Closing Reception & Holiday Party: Sunday, December 23, 2-5pm


Thursday, October 4, 2012

Orhan Pamuk's "The Innocence of Objects:" An Amazing Catalog About a Real Museum Based on Fiction

Click here to purchase The Innocence of Objects
from Amazon.com
In a week that has strongly reinforced my belief that large international art fairs, however else you want to defend them, are the worst possible, most sterile environments ever conceived for viewing art -- the amazing book that I now have before me, Orhan Pamuk's The Innocence of Obects (click here to purchase from Amazon.com), makes me want to stand up and shout! It is a triumph of intimacy over sterility, depth over superficiality and humanity over inhumanity. It is also the most perfect intersection of art and literature that I have ever encountered.

Nobel prize winning author Orhan Pamuk's 2009 novel about lost love and the obsessive collecting of objects, The Museum of Innocence, (click here to purchase from Amazon.com) was conceived simultaneously with the idea of creating a bricks-and-mortar museum to house the objects collected while writing and researching the novel. The museum, which opened to the public in Istanbul earlier this year (click here to read The New York Time's coverage of the opening) is housed in a modest 19th century house. The Innocence of Objects beautifully catalogs the museum's collection and in Pamuk's own words, tells the story of how the museum came to be. Pamuk writes:

"The more objects I collected for the museum, the more the story in my mind progressed. Sometimes I'd spot a teacup I wanted in an acquaintance's house or inside the old cupboards where my mother kept the pots and pans she no longer used, her porcelain, her sugar bowls, and her trinkets for display, and one day I'd take it without telling anyone that it was destined for the museum."

The museum consists of 83 numbered display cases, each referring to a chapter in the novel: assemblages of bric-a-brac, items rummaged from junk stores in the back streets of Istanbul, photography of old Istanbul by Turkish photographer Ara Güler, illustrations by Pamuk himself (a former painter) and others, and convincing molded plastic food made especially for the museum.


The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul, Turkey, photo credit: Refik Anadol. Abrams.
Pamuk writes about conversations between himself and the novel's main character, Kemal, taking place in the museum's penthouse, an actual bedroom that the fictional Kemal inhabits -- so convincingly that the already fuzzy lines between reality and fiction become even more blurred. The caption beneath a photograph of the bedroom reads:

"Kemal first told me what he had been through over the course of three hours in a restaurant. When I decided to write a novel about his love for Füsun, we inevitably became friends. On many a night over the seven years between March 2000 and February 2007, I sat in the attic on the chair on the right and listened to his story."



Box 22. The Hand of Rahmi Efendi. The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul, Turkey,
photo credit: Refik Anadol. Abrams.

In his tale of how he came to create the museum, Pamuk asks himself the question: "Why has no one else ever thought of something like this, of bringing together a novel and a museum in a single story? . . . If someone made an Anna Karenina Museum, finding a way to display the material world of the novel, I'd come running." He decided that if he were going to realize his museum, he needed to write a manifesto. What resulted is an 11-point " Modest Manifesto for Museums" that everyone in the art and museum world should read. I will end with the last last two points:

10. Monumental buildings that dominate neighborhoods and entire cities do not bring out our humanity; on the contrary, they quash it. Instead, we need modest museums that honor the neighborhoods and streets and the homes and shops nearby, and turn them into elements of their exhibitions.

11. The future of museums in inside our own homes.

Click here to purchase The Innocence of Objects from Amazon.com.

Click here to purchase The Museum of Innocence from Amazon.com.


Upcoming at Offramp Gallery

Anita Bunn: Detour
through October 28
Closing Reception & Artist's Talk:
Sunday, October 28, 2-5pm

Panel Discussion: Contemporary Art Conversations #13
Sunday, October 7, 4-6pm
Contemporary Art Conversations #13 will include critics Shana Nys Dambrot, Ezrha Jean Black and Peter Frank, artist/writerJohn O'Brien. The panel will be moderated by art historian Betty Ann Brown.

Patssi Valdez: Mementos
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
Closing Reception & Holiday Party: Sunday, December 23, 2-5pm

Elaine Carhartt: Portraits
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
Closing Reception & Holiday Party: Sunday, December 23, 2-5pm

James Griffith: Natural Selection
November 18 - December 23, 2012
Opening Reception: Sunday, November 18, 2-5pm
Closing Reception & Holiday Party: Sunday, December 23, 2-5pm