John Haddock
John Haddock has some of the coolest art I've seen in a while: computer game style drawings of real and fictional events (example above) and pornography with the actors removed. (via consumptive.org)
Art Archives
May 1, 2003
May 15, 2003
New Russian Media
Interestingly enough, even though the exhibit of Soviet-era posters is coming from the very university I'm working at, I actually found it through The Solipsistic Gazette (which seems to be everybody's darling weblog - so check it out!).
May 22, 2003
William Wegman's Paintings
William Wegman is mostly known for his photos of dogs. No comment on those. But he's also a painter, and here it's getting interesting. Here's an dinteresting review of one of his shows in New York - which includes a bunch of examples to look at. The show featured oil paintings Wegman did around found postcards.
June 29, 2003
Art, Inside and Out
Martin Herbert discusses Outsider Art and 'Insider' Art.
(thru artnotes)
PS: I wish he had made the following sentence the first sentence of his essy: "It's a safe bet that Sam Taylor-Wood has never cleaned a toilet in her life." That would have been priceless.
July 7, 2003
ventilate.ca
Check out nifty web magazine ventilate.ca - the current issue has an interview with Sacha Dean Biyan.
August 3, 2003
Amedeo Modigliani and Loretta Lux
pretty serendipities noted a canning similarity between paintings by Amedeo Modigliani and photos by Loretta Lux. How odd is that?
August 18, 2003
Posters from the WPA 1936-43
August 20, 2003
Prehistoric art and us
If you want to amuse yourself read this article about prehistoric art and imagine that all those artists who left us the works described here were surrounded by a mob yelling "I could do that!" or "We don't to give them any more money! They should all get a proper job!"
September 7, 2003
Feike Kloostra's Glue Books
October 16, 2003
Andy Warhol's Time Capsules
While being in Frankfurt, I went to see an exhibition of 15 of Andy Warhol's Time Capsules at the utterly fabulous Frankfurt Museum for Modern Art (more information). That show is a total must for anybody who's even remotely interested in modern art.
October 18, 2003
Wim Delvoye
Alex Kanevsky
November 15, 2003
Corrado Zeni
And while at it (where "it" stands for "looking at Italian sites that only speakers of Italian understand") have a look at Corrado Zeni's paintings.
January 20, 2004
Eric Fischl
February 7, 2004
Lucian Freud
March 22, 2004
Francis Bacon and the tradition of art
Excellent comparison of Bacon's work with older paintings/masters.
(thru vigna maru)
April 9, 2004
Aleksandr Rodchenko
El Lissitzky
June 5, 2004
50 years of British art lies in ashes
Having been very busy with a visitor this past week I almost missed the big fire that destroyed "a vast swath of British art spanning the past half century, including more than 50 major works by the great abstract painter Patrick Heron." (story) There are photos of some of the lost art work here. You can read about Tracey Emin's reaction here, and Jonathan Jones argues that "we have lost at least one irreplaceable masterpiece".
July 19, 2004
The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art
Check out The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art and learn how to create little computer people.
(thru things magazine)
October 21, 2004
David Fried
January 18, 2005
The Recent Hockney Hubbub
I wasn't aware of the full extent of the controversy about David Hockney's theories. Fortunately, Luke Strosnider emailed me to fill me in. The other day, I had posted the entry
"Computer analysis of a 17th century painting shows that the artist did not, as has been claimed, use optical devices to project a perfect image of the scene onto his canvas. The researcher behind the analysis believes his findings undermine many aspects of a theory recently put forward by the painter David Hockney." - story
You can find more background about this on a page of resources in Believer Magazine. The current edition of the magazine also features (or more accurately: reproduces) a six-page hand-written fax that Hockney sent to the New York Times (which, following the shoddy journalistic behaviour they have been showing lately, they didn't publish). As Luke writes "in the fax, hockney very eloquently refutes the idea that his theory is in need of being proven/discredited. instead, he seems to think the emphasis is more on getting people to relate to the history of image-making as a history of optics. he also brings up many other fascinating points - it's riveting."
(thanks, Luke!)
January 20, 2005
Ilkka Halso
Ilkka Halso (also see this page) is a Finnish artist whose work - as far as I understand it - stages Nature, for example by creating photos (on the computer) that show pieces of Nature in a museum.
(thanks, Tobias!)
House of German Art
When the Nazis came to power, most contemporary art was banned and removed from museums and private collections (and sold abroad for the financial benefit of the Reich). What the Nazis really wanted to see they put into their House of German Art.
BTW, the building survived World War II and still serves as an art museum. However, now they have actual art there (and good one, too). In any case, if you ever happen to be in Munich look around a little bit. Munich is one of the feew places where you can still see Nazi architecture (but don't ask the locals - they'll deny it).
January 27, 2005
Flick Collection Attacked Again
Today, there was another attack on the Flick Collection (story [in German only]). Read an older article on the controversy. A large group of German artists and intellectuals also just published a full-page ad in one of Germany's most respected newspapers, blasting the show. In a sense, the controversy about the Flick Collection gives an almost quintessential example of how Germany is still struggling with its past. I personally side with the protestors. Flick's behaviour is nothing but disgraceful and disgusting - I guess that runs in the family.
February 7, 2005
To conserve or not to conserve?
You spend 12m US dollars on a piece of art only to find that it is literally decaying. What to do? This might not be the kind of problem that most of us have on a daily (or anyother sort of) basis. However, for some people this problem exists.
February 21, 2005
John Zoller
John Zoller's photographic work doesn't have much to do with regular photography, but the results are quite appealing anyway.
(thanks, John!)
March 24, 2005
Jakob Boeskov
Jakob Boeskov is a Danish performance artist. Apart from being behind Danes for Bush - an Ali G-style joke - he is up to all kinds of weird things, including Empire North, a fictitious company, which supposedly produces sniper guns to tag people etc. In the spirit of true performance art, Jakob Boeskov went to the fair "China Police", a real fair all about... well, that's easy to guess. Those able to understand German can find the details in an article in Spiegel magazine. For those unable to understand German: He got scared after a day, after having got too many serious offers from all over Asia, Qatar, and South Africa.
April 21, 2005
Contemporary Photorealistic Painting
I admit I am no expert as far as painting is concerned, but I've noted an increase in the number of painters doing photorealistic work. Given that even photo-eye got a little confused I thought I'd post some links. Note that when you look at the individual biographies, many of the painters linked to below are actually quite young.
Tim Eitel's paintings are very photorealistic and have already generated some attention beyond his native Germany.
Lauren Hegele's works contain an extra element of humour, and many of them are dyptichs.
Lorraine Shemesh's subject matters are more varied. Her Painted Pools are nothing but amazing.
To use photographic comparisons, if Joel Peter Witkin did SX-70 manipulations he'd end up at what Jenny Saville is painting (note, however, that that website seems to be a tad unreliable).
It's interesting that photorealistic painting also seems to cover areas as does photography. For example, Lars Käker (also see this page) specializes in portraits, while the works of David FeBland will probably appeal to fans of street photography or Henri Cartier-Bresson.
And while this list defeinitely is not complete in any sense of the word, space here is; so as a final entry let me point out Chuck Close (in order to get an idea of his standing see, for example, this page).
(many thanks, Lauren for sending many of the extra links!)
May 2, 2005
"The only thing I can really paint well is anger"
"The history of the world as blood bath. East German painter Bernhard Heisig has been honoured and vilified by turns." - story
May 10, 2005
Robert Bechtle
May 31, 2005
Jared Tarbell
"I write computer programs to create graphic images." - Jared Tarbell - These images are quite fascinating; and they possess an unusual beauty.
(thanks, John!)
June 5, 2005
kawaii
Little Boy: The Arts of Japans Exploding Subculture, on view at the Japan Society in New York (thru 24 July 2005), has generated quite the splash, with the big question being: "What is this all about?"
Given we're dealing with what is called "pop art", it's inevitable to encounter the following. First, the reaction of many people who think that this kind of art is basically a joke, and second, some kind of grandiose manifesto written by one of the leading proponents, explaining the vision behind it all. Notice how these two aspects almost seem to go hand-in-hand. Add to that the fact that New York has seen pretty much everything, and you got all the ingredients for some excitement in the art world.
I'm not sure what to make of all of this, but I think I can say the following. I don't think that art necessarily has to be something that requires an enormous effort. If you want to define art that way, you're restricting it to a craft. Not a good idea. But I'm also quite wary of grandiose manifestos, especially if they contain some sort of idea that foreigners won't get this kind of art anyway.
Having said all that (not much, actually!), there's an excellent review in the New York Review of Books, written by Ian Buruma, whose book Inventing Japan, 1853-1964 I can't recommend too much.
If you want to have an online look at some of the artists participating in the show, check out Takashi Murakami (interview, bio, more samples), author of the aforementioned manifesto and driving force behind the show, Chiho Aoshima, and Yoshitomo Nara.
June 8, 2005
The Russian Avant-Garde Book
Have a look at the Museum of Modern Art's utterly cool Russian Avant-Garde Book!
(seen at swens blog)
June 29, 2005
Patricia Piccinini
I'm somewhat at a loss as to how to describe Patricia Piccinini's art work. My favourites are all in the "Biosphere" section, especially the utterly fantastic and fantastically creepy We Are Family.
Florian Süssmayer
Florian Süssmayer does photo-realistic paintings. Unlike most of the painters that I linked to before, his paintings focus on details of objects. Just click on the links. Many of those paintings and sketches show the surfaces of beergarten tables.
(thanks, Felix!)
July 26, 2005
Pinar Yolacan
Art for a bored society of affluence: For her latest show artist Pinar Yolacan covered old women with all kinds of meat and then took their photos. Now we can say that we have finally seen that, too. Phew!
(seen at gmtPlus9)
August 21, 2005
A sight for sore eyes
"There must be good reasons when gallerists start talking about miracles and proclaiming Leipzig as the world's art capital. There must be more to it that the hustle and bustle of the art market when American collectors learjet over to Leipzig to plough through studios and galleries. Something major must have happened if suddenly thousands of dollars changing hands for the offerings of third year students. What's going on in Leipzig at the moment is prosaic, gobsmacking, and obvious at the same time." - story
August 30, 2005
Jacqueline Devreux
Jacqueline Devreux' paintings (see more here) evoke photographic imagery. Isn't it interesting how many people accept this kind of work, but if somebody did this kind of stuff with a camera and Photoshop people would react quite differently? What does that teach us about "art"?
(seen at gmtPlus9)
August 31, 2005
Sherrie Levine
"Image appropriation is a genre of art that is often questioned for its originality and ethics. [...] Image appropriators like Sherrie Levine, , who credits the original photographer of her reproductions with titles like 'After Walker Evans,' etc., breathe new life into artworks that many might not otherwise see. Levine has appropriated photographs by Walker Evans and Edward Weston, sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and Marcel Duchamp, and paintings by Vincent van Gogh, among others."
I'm not that sure I would agree with the "new life" bit there. However, here's a little stinger: "Duchamp, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Cindy Sherman, has also appropriated work from various media." So what are we to make out of this?
This page looks like it was set up for law students, but it contains lots and lots of links, some to legal pages, some to actual art work. So what about or Warhol's Micky Mouse? Or Thomas Ruff's manipulations? And is the law really the appropriate means to deal with this kind of stuff?
(thanks, Harlan!)
September 28, 2005
A new dimension in painting
"Michael Burges has achieved in doing what artists have strived to do for centuries: transcending the picture." - story
October 5, 2005
William Steiger
Those who have frequented this weblog on a regular basis will not be surprised by my appreciation of the paintings of William Steiger.
October 10, 2005
Linden Frederick
More photorealistic painting: The work of Linden Frederick.
(thanks, Greg!)
October 21, 2005
In pictures: Lost German art
"Thousands of colour photographs of art treasures, commissioned by Hitler at the height of World War II, have been published on the internet. [Note: The site appears to be only in German, and it's utterly cumbersome to navigate through. The images are amazing, though. - JMC] As the Allies bombarded Germany, Hitler ordered photos to be taken of the greatest artworks before they were lost forever. Many were subsequently destroyed. [...] The photographers, working between 1943 and 1945, used the most up to date technology available to take more than 60,000 photographs. [...] The slides were passed to the Central Institute for Art History in Munich and the Marburg Photographic Archive, and in 2002 the archivists began to digitize the pictures." - BBC story
October 24, 2005
Jody Zellen
Jody Zellen is a visual artists whose "photography" portfolio contains many digital collages. Interesting stuff.
(thanks, John!)
October 27, 2005
If contemporary art is all a fraud, why do people keep on looking?'
"Years ago I came across a tiny, misshapen oval grey painting, by the late Blinky Palermo, at ARCO, Madrid's international art fair. [...] I cannot say what exactly Palermo's painting meant, if it means anything at all. This is just the sort of thing suspicious viewers might take as evidence that, for more than a century, artists have been making their work in bad faith, pulling the wool over people's eyes and having a laugh at our expense. This prejudice is hard to budge, even though it is nonsense; not least because no one would go to all that trouble and invest so much of themselves in perpetrating such a gigantic and elaborate confidence trick. Unless, that is, the whole scam were itself a conceptual artwork, or a bogus new religion." - Adrian Searle on contemporary art
November 25, 2005
Alyssa Monks
Alyssa Monks's artworks are painted photographs. I leave this question for the theorists: What is the relationship between photography and painting?
November 30, 2005
Eberhard Havekost
German painter Eberhard Havekost does "Photoshoprealism", as it is called in this article, which disapprovingly concludes that "this kind of art obviously doesn't want to be asked questions of meaning - it's just playing with the mask of coolness. But as anyone who has spent an evening in an extremely cool venue wearing extremely cool sunglasses and the super-cool military look knows, coolness and boredom are closely related." See more examples here.
December 1, 2005
Mental illness link to art and sex (or not)
"A survey comparing mental health and the number of sexual partners among the general population, artists and schizophrenics found that artists are more likely to share key behavioural traits with schizophrenics, and that they have on average twice as many sexual partners as the rest of the population." - article
"What a pile of crap. Those responsible should be shot. Better still, they should be forced to have several thousand sexual partners. Preferably schizoid artists, bad, ugly, psychotic ones. Then shot." - riposte
December 5, 2005
Cédric Tanguy
What do you call the art of Cédric Tanguy? The images look like paintings mixed with photography mixed with digital art. Quite interesting actually - are these visual remixes?
(thru ashley b)
December 9, 2005
Vik Muniz
"Vik Muniz takes well known images remembered from endless reproductions and recreates them from memory, using household materials like sugar, chocolate, and thread. He then uses the camera to record them. Muniz creates a witty and uncanny effect by translating well-known images into strange visual puzzles." (source) Find more images and/or information here, here, and here.
January 26, 2006
Robert Rauschenberg
"Ignored by the establishment and derided by critics, Robert Rauschenberg may just be the most important American artist of the last century, argues Robert Hughes." (story) For more see this American Masters page, and then there's the big show at the Met.
January 27, 2006
Gilbert and George
"Gilbert and George, the rude old men of British art, will lead the UK presence at the 2005 Venice Biennale." (story from The Guardian). Here's the Wikipedia's entry about them; if you want it more serious (kind of un-Gilbert-and-George'ish) go here. Also don't miss this article.
Late last year, I managed to see one of their pieces in London, and I admit I wasn't quite prepared for it: I knew the pieces are quite colourful and impressive, but I had no idea of how they actually work when you see them - they're huge.
Their latest series is called "Sonofagod" (subtitled "Was Jesus Heterosexual?"), described in an article aptly entitled We'd hate to offend. Needless to say, some people did get offended (this link for Americans who think that only in the US members of parliament have nothing better to do than to harrass artists). I do like Gilbert and George's response to this: "the artists say that the works are not offensive. Gilbert: 'Christians are abusive to humans - to women, to queers. They threaten us with hell.' George: 'That's offensive, not us.'" They might have a point there.
(updated entry)
February 9, 2006
Computer Analysis Suggests Paintings Are Not Pollocks
"A physicist who is broadly experienced in using computers to identify consistent patterns in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock has determined that half a dozen small paintings recently discovered and claimed by their owner to be original Pollocks do not exhibit the same patterns." (story)
February 22, 2006
Eleanor Antin
I've filed Eleanor Antin under art because even though she has done a fair amount of photography, her work clearly covers a much wider area (also see this page).
March 13, 2006
Artist Turns Synagogue Into Gas Chamber
From the WTF Department: Spanish performance artist Santiago Sierra "is inviting Germans to come and be symbolically gased with car exhaust fumes in a former synagogue. Jewish leaders and media commentators say he is belittling the Holocaust and insulting its victims." (story)
April 3, 2006
Henry Darger
"Henry Darger died in 1973 in a Catholic mission operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor. He was buried in a paupers' cemetery. He had no family or friends. The neighbors in his north Chicago apartment building remembered him as an odd, unkempt man who scavenged through garbage cans and talked to himself in numerous voices. [...] Unknown to his neighbors and to everyone, Darger had been creating and compiling a massive literary and graphic body of work since 1909. [...] Central to Darger's work is his 15,000 page, 12 volume, single-spaced, typewritten epic entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, as caused by the Child Slave Rebellion." - Realm of the Unreal: A Page About Henry Darger
Inevitably - these days, apparently even the life of a hermit artist needs to be spiced up for the amusement of the masses - the book
Update (14 Jan 2005): There's an entry on metafilter with lots of additional links, which appeared just a few days after this one. Conscientious well ahead of the crowd? Or maybe Conscientious visitors not quite as conscientious?
Update (3 April 2006): I had the chance to see some of Henry Darger's art works yesterday, and it was an interesting experience. I didn't quite expect the pieces to be so big. And the details are amazing and, partly, very weird. Also, plenty of his sketches contain drawings of strangled little girls.
June 5, 2006
Christopher Bucklow
Christopher Bucklow (bio) is probably most well-known for his Guests series. Find another page with samples and bio here.
June 19, 2006
Is modern art off its head?
"David Hensel, a sculptor from Sussex, submitted to the Royal Academy summer exhibition a piece that consisted of a large bronze laughing head mounted on a plinth of slate and kept in place by a support shaped like a bone. Pleased to have the piece accepted as item 1201 in the catalogue [...] Hensel was dismayed on visiting the show to find that his effort had been decapitated; he was represented in the exhibition by what looked like a dog's toy on a paving stone. It turned out that the head had become separated from the support during unpacking. [...] The sculptor David Mach, a selector for the summer show, was even on record praising the 'minimalist' qualities of the bone-on-slab display. And as the faces of traditionalists aped the roaring mouth of Hensel's missing head they were given even more cause to cackle when it turned out that the bronze bonce had not simply been left behind in a storeroom but had gone before the selectors as a separate art-work and been rejected. Yet another bone thrown to the anti-modernist dogs is the fact that the plinth with the bit on top is now expected to sell for far more than the original price of the whole combination. For the provisional wing of the watercolourists association this will prove that modern Britart combines artistic indiscrimination with financial idiocy." - story
June 20, 2006
View from the exterior
"It's naive, obsessive and often done with no skill at all. Why are we so entranced by outsider art?" asks Philip Hensher about an exhibition that left Adrian Searle disturbed: "Meet the misfits".
June 22, 2006
Painting for Profit
It's probably inevitable in a society that places money above everything else to find this: "For the last several years, two professors at New York University's Stern School of Business, Michael Moses and Jiangping Mei, have been compiling data that allows them to track the long-term performance of fine art." (full story)
July 27, 2006
Point of Purchase
At the Dumbo Arts Center, exhibition "Point of Purchase" is opening on July 29 (can't find a link - see Brian Ulrich's page). Apart from Brian, who has been one of my favourite photographers for a while (as regular visitors will certainly know), I found two other participants whose work looks very interesting: Stefanie Nagorka builds sculptures at Home Depot. Zoë Sheehan Saldaña creates art involves cross stitching and sewing - have a look! Very cool!
July 31, 2006
Hitler's favourite sculptor
"In principle, the idea is good, in principle it's very important that it be executed: the work of sculptor Arno Breker should be exhibited, its creation, aesthetic and political impact should be debated. Breker's oeuvre, demonised for decades by academics and unduly idealised by others, played, for a few years, a very influential role in German cultural history." - story
August 3, 2006
Art under control in North Korea
"What does a totalitarian regime expect from its artists? Jane Portal explores the role of art in North Korea." - "A picture must be painted in such a way that the viewer can understand its meaning. If the people who see a picture cannot grasp its meaning, no matter what a talented artist may have painted it, they cannot say it is a good picture." (Kim Jong-Il) Funny, I have heard similar comments in the West from people who criticize modern art.
August 9, 2006
Ron Mueck
Ron Mueck's artwork are photo-realistic sculptures, often quite large. This site has more examples, and this page tells you everything about one particular example. Jonathan Jones is not impressed, though.
August 10, 2006
'The monumental is my sickness'
"A historic interview conducted by Andre Müller in 1979 with Arno Breker, Hitler's favourite sculptor" - well worth the read.
August 22, 2006
Does Explanation Destroy Art?
Over at Edward Winkleman's blog (btw one of the finest art blogs around - if you're not familiar with it), in one of his most recent posts, Edward discusses whether explanation destroys art. Regardless of whether you agree with him, it's worth the read - as are probably most of the comments.
August 23, 2006
Van Gogh From the Sweatshop
"Southern China is the world's leading center for mass-produced works of art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every year -- most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers can paint up to 30 paintings a day." - story
September 2, 2006
The shame and the glory
In The Guardian, Jonathan Jones asks "But where are the images of 21st-century conflict?". It's certainly an interesting read, but to me, it appears that Jonathan Jones misses a few points. I don't want to go into too much detail - in part lest you read the article with my eyes.
September 7, 2006
Lost in looking
"There was a time when the critic felt obliged to explain why video and photography might be art, what an installation is, to unpack Duchamp's importance and to remind readers who Joseph Beuys was. This no longer feels so necessary. The incomprehensible and the indefensible can look after themselves. What we really want to know is who went to the opening, how much money the artist got for the show, and which architect did their house for them. But describing what something looks or felt like, running with the thoughts it provokes, asking why it may or may not be worth looking at, still feels worthwhile, and more interesting than telling you that Damien [Hirst] has said he'd like to hit me, that there were years when Tracey [Enim] didn't speak to me, and that a stuckist wrote in recently, telling me why I'd got art all wrong, that I hang out with the wrong crowd, but that my heart might be in the right place (this last bit is worrying). Art provokes and deserves something more than silence. Only mediocrity deserves the silent treatment, the critical cold shoulder." - art critic Adrian Searle
September 29, 2006
Gerhard Richter
October 1, 2006
How I suffered for art's sake
"When she was asked to be a Turner Prize judge for this year's competition, Lynn Barber was thrilled. A year later, that has changed. On the eve of the 2006 show she reflects on how months of seeing banal and derivative work have left her depressed about the state of contemporary art in Britain." - story
October 9, 2006
Oh the horror! German ex-scientist turns art bunker into funhouse!
As was entirely predictable, German artist Carsten Höller's new art installation at the Tate Modern is causing quite the fuss. "Carsten Holler (sic!) has built five enormous, stainless steel slides swooping down into the ha