Archive for Art and Culture

Weekly Literature: Birches, Robert Frost

Posted by: Jason | July 25th, 2008 · 10:56 AM

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

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The Other Side of George Washington Carver

Posted by: Jason | July 6th, 2008 · 9:42 AM

(image: National Park Service)

Call me ignorant, but I never realized that George Washington Carver was an amateur oil painter. This particular work, a simple oil on linen without a title, hangs at the Tuskegee Institute National Historic site.

As someone who dabbles in a love of horticulture, as well as American history, Carver has always been a figure of interest for me. But concerning the world of oil painting, I tend to enjoy the works and still life paintings that feature floral arrangements. I was particularly attracted to this painting by Carver, and wanted to share it with the PP viewers.

To close the post, I’ll leave with another painting, this one being of the subject himself, George Washington Carver, by Betsy Graves Reyneau, which currently hangs at the Smithsonian. I’ve always found a liking for its style, color arrangement, and positive feeling.

(image: museum network)

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Russian Constructivism Against Crystal Meth

Posted by: Ion | September 19th, 2007 · 5:46 AM

Have you ever visited the the anti-drug site ResistMeth? It’s a rather odd site produced by public service marketing specialists at Better World Advertising, a SanFran & NYC ad agency. According to BWA, it’s targeted at “Gay male methamphetamine users, non-users and gay community” and funded by the San Francisco Dept. of Public Health and half a dozen other orgs.

The site is part of a broader multimedia campaign, which uses a Soviet propaganda aesthetic marketing strategy, as though personal resistance to methamphetamines represents some sort of chic socialist revolution. The various approaches to message dissemination include city funded vandalism and unnerving blocky typography message posters with resistance slogans.

Perhaps this is awfully droll and clever in San Francisco, but to me it looks downright creepy. Kind of like using Nazi propaganda imagery to campaign against child abuse. Perhaps it’s merely what you end up with when once socially marginalized activity groups have become so normalized, that you start allocating public funding for marketing self-help without thinking it odd.

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The Last Supper of the Liberation Theologist

Posted by: Ion | September 16th, 2007 · 3:18 AM

If you thought the Da Vinci Code was grotesque for its blasphemy, get a load of the image above. This is a mural our friend Ms. Feathers found in a socialist neighborhood in Caracas. In it a “liberation theology” devotee of a particularly deranged sort has recreated Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. But in an act of truly extraordinary blasphemy, the artist has replaced Christ’s disciples with some of the greatest mass murderers in history. Among them are Mao Tse Tung (in place of Saint Peter), Fidel Castro (in place of James, son of Alphaeus), and Manuel Marulanda (in place of Bartholomew).

Given that most of the men pictured were rather outspoken and extravagant atheists (some even had the notable tendency of specifically killing those who preached the Gospel), the level of cynicism present here is so high it’s hard to really even criticize it. It manages to be its own insult as both inept art and illiterate propaganda.

One might note for instance that Karl Marx –who is sitting in place of John the Apostle of all people– looks rather happy for a man who once wrote that “the first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.” Of course by the time you realize that Hugo Chavez takes the place of Matthew the Evangelist, you’re probably laughing, despite the savage sacrilege of it all.

For me, this painting can only demonstrate how dreadful the state of education must be in Venezuela under Chavez. One would have to be subsisting on a astonishing level of ignorance to think these symbolic substitutions make any sense, in light of the writings and views of both the Apostles and the Marxists.

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Art as an Invitation to Injury

Posted by: Ion | June 23rd, 2007 · 8:42 AM

(image: Daily Mail)

From the UK, we have here what is arguably one of the most irresponsible roadside art projects I’ve ever seen. This perilously confusing monstrosity was assembled at a busy intersection in Ashford, at a cost to the taxpayer of about $100,000 (£50,000). Fatal collision in 3…2…1…

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Conforming to Courage

Posted by: Ion | June 6th, 2007 · 7:13 PM

Bernard Chapin had an interesting little chat with Mark Steyn about all sorts of things in ESR on Sunday. In the middle of it, Steyn had an bit to say about Broadway and the state of American arts:

What I find astonishing about Broadway and the arts in general is that you read a profile of Stephen Sondheim in which he congratulates himself on his courage and boldness for speaking out, but nothing he says is the slightest bit unusual in that environment. He says the exact things that 99 or 98 percent of his peers say. They all think about the world in the same way. Sondheim’s is an entirely conformist view. Broadway is an environment of homogenistic variety. Everyone agrees with what everything everyone else is saying and it ruins creativity.
(ESR)

Quite true of course. In contemporary theater criticism (or self-regard) this word “courage” has come to be so commonly misapplied to work which is so timid in its adherence to orthodoxy, it’s often laughable. Even as desensitized as we’ve become to the exchange of the word for its antonym.

The word has a particularly nasty habit of showing up in descriptions of specifically political work too. Which reminds me of the rather incredible conclusion Terry Teachout reached, after having reviewed two hundred plays for the Wall Street Journal:

[N]ot one could be described as embodying a specifically right-wing political perspective, nor do I know any New York-based playwrights or actors who are openly conservative.
(InCharacter)

There is no creative courage worthy of the name, in the midst of such a consensus, whatever the subject or era.

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Insanely Twisted Rabbits

Posted by: Ion | May 16th, 2007 · 3:30 PM

Prolific Canadian commercial illustrator Michel Gagné is a character designer, effects consultant and Hollywood conceptual animator (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles) of considerable talent.

In 1991 he was working for Don Bluth Animation Studios and began a series of competitive illustrations of redesigned/reimagined rabbits, with veteran animator Dave Kupczyk (Pocahontas, Mulan). The whole exercise was touched off by a cartoon illustration Dave had done of his pet rabbit, only where he’d given the little herbivorous rodent sharp canine teeth. Gagné found the idea inspired, and the subsequent morphologies of the rabbits they designed took on outrageously warped and innovative forms. Word soon leaked out into the office of their contest and pretty soon everyone at Bluth was following the “rabbit project.”

By the time Bluth shut its doors in 1992, Dave and Michel had compiled over fifty original rabbit prototypes. Fortunately, Michel kept his sketchbooks when he departed the company and eventually managed to publish several of the illustrations in a short art book titled Insanely Twisted Rabbits, in 2001. As you’ll see below, it’s an apt title for an exceedingly fun little collection of work.

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Ruined Tokyo

Posted by: Ion | May 11th, 2007 · 12:32 AM

Japanese artist Motoda Hisaharu, works in a curious genre. He likes to visualize through lithography, what Tokyo might look like long after the fall of civilization. He calls his lithographs “neo-ruins.” They’re quite arresting to look at.

Full Gallery>>>

(credit: Pink Tentacle)

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Dark Visions of an Islamic Future

Posted by: Ion | May 10th, 2007 · 2:08 PM

In 2005, when Orb republished George Alec Effinger’s classic and increasingly relevant cyberpunk Budayeen trilogy, the publisher commissioned Hawaii based concept artist Craig Mullins to paint an original cover for each volume. It was an inspired choice. Mullins had done matte painting on movies (Apollo 13) and concept design work on games (Age of Empires III). Craig’s rich Syd Mead-like electric stylizations, create a truly enigmatic future ummah in street scene, which is well worth a look here.

First some context. The books depict a grim future, where the West has fallen and is without confidence in its unified culture. Something that seemed silly in 1989, when the first book was published, but thanks to the turn of events, the slow demographic fall of Europe to Islam and the work of Mark Steyn, Bruce Bawer, Daniel Pipes and others, has become a common idea. In Effinger’s Budayeen stories, Islam remains vigorous, devoutly believed by even criminals and thus has once again become the ascendant civilization on the Earth.

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