rave review for "What If Art..."

What a pleasant surprise to find this supportive message in my inbox today, in reaction to the LeopardFlip(tm) extravaganza What If Art Did Not Exist?:

"Wow, that is a cool use of Jing. I don't think I have seen anything unique like that yet."
-April Noren, Jing Developer, TechSmith

Thanks, April! Funding for the next project may be only a heartbeat or two away. (I'm kidding.) In any case, I appreciate the feedback. It makes the moral perspiration; loss of income; and assorted, miscellaneous sacrifices so much easier to swallow.

In other news, mm reached a landmark single-day, unique-viewer total of 53 on January 28. Viewers have been served from networks as far off as Bangkok, Thailand; Caracas, Venezuela; London, England; and Invercargill, New Zealand.

Thanks to all, and let us know what you like and what you might rather not see.

russell hoban no. 2

The first half of Come Dance With Me is a lighthearted, sometimes funny description of the budding romance of a 50-something woman who heads a heavy metal band and a 60-something physician. Hoban's sly social commentary can be heard in whispers throughout. But every once in a while, the tone changes to one of concession to the largeness of inexplicable experience, as shown in this account of crossing the line between the states of sleep and wake.

Get it here.

young moderns

I had the chance to see this band a couple weeks ago and will testify that they really know how to sprinkle their box of hooks around a room. That is to say, most of the crowd I could see were engaged by the enthusiastic performance of dynamic, well-crafted pop tunes.

Clever lyrics weave a mildly sardonic cultural commentary with a low-grade empathy and remorse—none of that brooding angst, anger or rage you might associate with some of the 80s alt-acts that have surely influenced these guys. Instead, it's upbeat pop, fairly complex and without the nasty cheerleader sheen. Check 'em out. Bring friends.

Listen here.

leopardflip

And now, as they say, something completely different: a refreshingly concise multimedia presentation, as Painter Worship week draws to a close.

This artifact is powered by proprietary technology I call LeopardFlip(tm), which marries Leopard (the new Macintosh operating system) to the Jing Project (a screen capture utility).

An Early Concept Illustration

The engine is Leopard's folder view, which shows a preview of the first page of each file within a given folder. As one scrolls through the files, the first pages of each file are displayed in sequence. Jing is a free app that captures screencasts; that is, it records what's going on on your desktop and saves the recording as a video file.

In essence, I created individual documents in a word processing application, used Leopard to display the first pages of each document as slides, then recorded the folder window as I scrolled through the files. Click on the window below to start the show.


Click to start the show.


What if Art did not exist? is for sale for $9,000.

In the spirit of Modernism, shareware, and open source apps, I will now do what Sol LeWitt would have done, were he with us now. That is, I will offer precise instructions as to how any artist, artist's assistant, or art student can reproduce the work exactly as it appears here. If you do embark on such an endeavor, I wish you the best of fortune, asking only that you report outcomes to these pages.

Click me.

gerhard richter

The photo-based, realistic, figurative technique displayed in Richter's early and middle career has the peculiar effect of stopping a viewer's eye at the surface of the painting and reflecting his attention, rendering the composition a mirror of sorts. The anemic pigmentation and grainy textures of these paintings imply motion and decay. It's the mixing of these ingredients that catalyzes the emotional qualities of the sometimes ordinary, everyday subjects.

Among Americans, Two Candles is probably Richter's most popular painting. (A bucket of chicken for the first commenter who can identify the No Wave band whose album/CD cover featured this painting—without looking it up.)

In response to the suggestion that because he avoids "taking a position" in his work he is an aesthetic cynic, Richter said:

"I believe it would be a misunderstanding to call what I do cynical. I'd rather call it sentimental. Rather, what I do is naive."

Get it here.

pietro perugino

Perugino is known as a major influence of Renaissance painters throughout Europe as both a painter and a teacher. According to my friend J. Antenucchi Becherer's excellent volume Pietro Perugino, Master of the Italian Renaissance, the painter gained a formal notoriety in his early thirties when the pope commissioned him to organize the decoration of the walls of the newly built Sistine Chapel.

Saint Gerome (341-420 AD), a scholar and monk, is best known for translating the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament into Latin. (Thanks, man!) Here he is, kneeling in the desert, blood trickling from his chest, a stone in his right hand—a depiction based on a letter he wrote in which he describes flailing himself in order to quell sexual hallucinations.

Get it here.

sol lewitt

A pair of panels painted during the late career of Sol LeWitt, after he had begun to employ more neutral tones in larger color fields.

LeWitt is the rare artist whose work ranges from the purely Conceptual to Abstraction. Not only did he have immense success bending the ideas of various modern schools of thought, but with the unlikely hammers of careful planning and whim he forged a body of work that—by its very nature and means of construction—was accessible to casual observers and art fiends alike.

"Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach." —Sol LeWitt.

lee krasner

Perhaps the bravest 20th-Century American painter—if not for her courageous approach to the balance of color and form, then for what was, by all accounts, a voluntarily marriage to renowned painter Jackson Pollock—Krasner explored the range of Abstract Expressionism as a disparate entity. This painting (Sun Woman 1) is, in the context of her work, somewhat conservative, though in other ways utterly gorgeous.

Another reason to love Krasner is for her very own love of the poetry of French Symbolist Arthur Rimbaud. According to a catalog from a 1999 retrospective, as a young painter she had scrawled these lines on a wall of her studio, from Rimbaud's poem Season In Hell:

To whom should I hire myself out? What beast must I adore?
What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break?
What lie must I maintain? In what blood must I tread?

Are these not the questions any modernist would have asked of herself, in so many words? All of the lines were written on the white wall in black chalk, with the exception of "What lie must I maintain?" which was rendered in blue.

Painter Worship Week

In the spirit of the image—and especially for they who believe that written language is purposed for we who are so tragically unfortunate as to neither paint nor sing—moleskine monday presents a series of entries featuring a few favorite painters. These images are taken from the big books and catalogs on the bottom shelves, which provide an immeasurable stability to the bookcases. Enjoy.




Look for

• Lee Krasner
• Sol Lewitt
• Pietro Perugino
• Gerhard Richter
• and an as of yet unnamed, surprise painter

shirley jackson

The charm of "The Lottery" is in the nearly transparent unfolding of the story—as told in that elegant, understated voice—to the surprisingly barbaric final scene. A brutal race we are, in our gracious clothes.

Get it here.

wislawa szymborska

In "The Poet and the World," the 1996 Nobel Lecture, Szymborska uses the declarative "I don't know" to distinguish the source of inspiration that visits artists and poets from the altogether different kind of inspiration for which despots are famous.

Read the speech in its entirety here.

(Available in print in the 1997 issue of Artes, An International Reader of Literature, Art, and Music, published in the U.S and Sweden.)

russell hoban

Come Dance With Me's protagonist Elias Newman introduces his history of romantic relationships in an attempt to determine if he has ever really been in love.

Get it here.

marina tsvetaeva

Revolution-era Russia's most gifted poet, Tsvetaeva's intense dedication to the world inside—at the expense of her external responsibilities—is evident both in the naked profundity of her work and in the mess that was her personal life, about half of which was lived in exile.

Her poems trample a path between the unbridled abstraction of Russian Symbolism and the formal clarity of Acmeism. Best known for "The Poem of the End."

Get it here.

george orwell

The last sentence of Orwell's Animal Farm. C. M. Woodhouse's introduction to the classic allegory talks about how at Potsdam Marshal Stalin appeared to be oblivious to the global magnitude of the new weapon President Truman described, showing only "polite interest." (We know now that Stalin had been aware of the Manhattan Project since its inception and that nothing Truman told him that day was news.) Woodhouse suggests that both Animal Farm, published in 1945, and the atom bomb were aimed at Russia.

Get it here.

rainer maria rilke

Chapter One of Letters to a Young Poet, which is the first letter in a lengthy correspondence, gently urges universal self-accountability and raises questions about a poet's source of pleasure and drive. Perfect for a Monday.

Get it here.

the book

This is a blank book I bought in Iowa City one year ago next week. There is something about an empty book that makes inking the first page an exercise in intimidation. Then again, I starved it for a year. It shouldn't have much fight left.