Black Lightning

On December 31, Timur Bekmambetov's Black Lightning opens in Russia. He's producing,

rather than directing, as he did with Day Watch and Night Watch, but his hyperrealist visual style is definitely imprinted on this film. It's probably not a good thing that the movie has two directors.

The plot involves a flying car—a Volga, the pride of Soviet Russia's car industry—that transforms a young man into a superhero so that he might ultimately protect Moscow from an evil force that seeks to mine the city's underground field of diamonds. The kid who stars certainly looks like Hayden Christensen's Anakin. It's also rather ironic that Russia's first superhero film, as Bekmambetov has described it, carries the same name as one of DC's first African-American superheroes. The latter

debuted in 1977 and seems much cooler. (This cover, by Eddy Newell, is from

1995).

The teaser trailer is pretty scant and doesn't whet my curiosity. The feature trailer has been pulled from the interwebs. The concept pictures do resemble Wanted (for what that's worth), or a modern-day Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as io9 observed, but I can't help but think of the Wachowski's Speed Racer meets Herbie the Love Bug.

Unclothed Man redux

Has it really been a whole week? I've a little been busy.

Knit my fornix

My father, a cell biologist, loves to pester me with the question, Is there art in science? Well, sort of.

Axis of Evo

Dr. Colin Purrington, a professor of evolutionary biology at Swarthmore, maintains Axis of Evo, where he blogs on issues related to Darwin's theory of evolution and creates projects designed to encourage the acceptance of the theory, particularly among children. He created the awesome "Darwin Has a Posse" stickers. His latest project: textbook disclaimer stickers. Unsurprisingly, he gets a lot of hate mail. My favorite: "What a waste of internet space."

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D.

All four episodes of Dash Shaw's The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. are available on IFC's website. The animation is fantastic. It manages to stay true to Shaw's style without looking like static drawings conferred with halting movement. I particularly like his use of abstract sequences of color and form, which are reminiscent of early twentieth century abstract film—Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger, for instance. There's also something of Viking Eggeling's Diagonal Symphony in the progression and formation of shapes (though in The Unclothed Man, these transformations are less articulated and more natural) and of Jeremy Blake's color gradations for Punch-Drunk Love, with certain sequences resembling animated Rothko paintings.

Pasternak's spiritual wilderness

English Russia has posted photographs of forests and waterfalls in the Northern Urals. They make me think of that vast wilderness in Doctor Zhivago and Pasternak's unforgettable descriptions of nature, in particular a forest cathedral:

Many of the trees in the first had not yet turned; in its depths they were still fresh and green. The afternoon sun was setting behind the forest, piercing it with its rays, and the leaves, letting them through, flowed green like transparent bottle glass.

...

Ever since his childhood Yurii Andreievich had been fond of woods seen at evening against the setting sun. At such moments he felt as if he too were being pierced by shafts of light. It was as though the gift of the living spirit were streaming into his breast, piercing his being and coming out at his shoulders like a pair of wings. The archetype that is

formed in every child for life and seems for ever after to be his inward face, his personality, awoke in him in its full primordial strength, and compelled nature, the forest, the afterglow, and everything else visible to be transfigured into a similarly primordial and all-embracing likeness of a girl. Closing his eyes, "Lara," he whispered and thought, addressing the whole of his life, all God's earth, all the sunlit space spread out before him.

Dutch Picture Books

Some great covers of Dutch picture books at BibliOdyssey, one of my favorite sites for illustrated books.

Go here to see more. Plus, contemporary movies as Russian lubki (via). See if you can guess what this one is.

Piss Pooh

Last week, a small gallery in San Francisco hosted a group show called "Kinkade Cannibalized! An Exhibition of Augmented Thomas Kinkade Paintings." The idea, as reported in this SF Gate article, is that a number of artists take offense at Thomas Kinkade's blend of idealized landscapes and fairytale, his creation of banal, formulaic images that have earned him the title "master of light." The artists in the exhibition wanted to critique his work in order to "communicate a message." Though what this message entails is unclear, other than a certain bitterness—Kinkade is reportedly the most collected living artist in the US. The work in the show seems as hackneyed and dull as the paintings they seek to satirize:

One of Evans' works was called "The Bloodshot Eye of the Beholder." Evans created a "badly done San Francisco landscape with a bloodshot eye in the middle," explaining: "It gives you bloodshot eyes to have to look at Kinkade's works."

In all, there were more than 20 pieces, ranging from paintings and multimedia sculpture to a diorama light box, a meat cleaver cutting cheese and several collage works.

Whoa, snap!

What's in it for purportedly "serious" artists to attack the work of someone they hold to be so beneath them intellectually and conceptually? How does bitch slapping constitute a valid and thoughtful critique?

That said, a couple of the works are somewhat interesting. I like that this one plays off the idea of a found painting:

This one is called Serrano's Kinkade II, though it has nothing to do with Kincade (other than being premised on a fictional and ridiculous backstory). It might've been more interesting as a revision/update of Serrano's Piss Christ, a contemporary examination of the abject and sacred. Of course, such an artwork would require critical thinking, purposeful reflection, not knee-jerk reaction.

Rotopol

Love Michael Meier's poster for Rotopol's "Secret Service" show. I haven't dug out my 3-D glasses yet. Apparently, it works.

New Ben Jones zine

Nieves has new zines from the whole Paper Rad crew. It's worth reading the description for Ben Jones's 24-page tour de force.

What Hits the Moon

Love this Lilli Carré animated film, What Hits the Moon. The lulling rhythm of the crickets matches her wavering line so perfectly.

Geisha This

Digging through old files, I found this collection of the first six issues, made between 1975 and 1979, of Destroy All Monsters magazine. The cover is proving hard to reproduce, since some of the ink is metallic. My scanner doesn't like it, and my camera is dying (hence not one but two crummy versions).

Each issue mostly contains hectic collages (using comics, ads, photos), newspaper articles about the group, and music reviews (one of which aptly quotes John Cage: "You needn't call it music, if the term offends you"). There is also a smattering of full-page drawings by Niagra (such as the cover image above). The one to the right is my favorite. The magazines are an amazing repository of early reactions to their sound, which didn't always go over well in Detroit Rock City. "Kelley remembers their first such 'gig' as being an assault on Black Sabbath's 'Iron Man' that went on until the plug was pulled, the only resemblance to the original being the repeated recitation of two lines of the songs lyrics accompanied by a deafening wall of tape loops, feedback, and aural pain."

Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, Niagra, and Cary Loren formed DAM in the early '70s as an "anti-rock band." Niagra played a scratchy violin and sometimes sang off-key, they bought their first guitar and keyboard at K-Mart and used a bunch of broken pedals. They were art students, after all, so experimentation seems mainly to have been the point. This, from the "Manifesto of Ignorance": "We were . . . freaky nerds flying through time in a blur of art and noise. Our music sometimes contained a narrative or storytelling direction that was never explored . . . a sense of gloom, disaster and apocalypse mixed with a dose of anarchy, comedy and absurdity kept us together and were some of the major themes which colored our small scene . . . our alienation and heightened anxiety was a psychotronic view of life we each shared to various degrees. We were creating sounds we wanted to exist but weren't to be found in the slick desolate landscape around us . . ." Gee, sounds a bit like Fort Thunder/Lightning Bolt.

I concur

with this

Socialist Realism, wave of the future?

The period of Soviet socialist realist art isn't the cultural wasteland it's often made out to be. It produced some excellent artists, some of whom pushed the boundaries of the doctrine (see, A. Deineka, for instance), but let's remember that not only was it officially approved, it was officially demanded. So, yes, some of the war images BoingBoing links to are powerful, but many are also kitsch—not well executed and not particularly imaginative. They're meant to be propaganda—political content laid bare—intended to produce a very specific reaction among the citizenry of a country at war. So I find it ridiculous that Alllie laments (in the same post) the sad fact that Western art didn't follow suit in the decades following Goya's Third of May and Van Gogh's Potato Eaters.

Really? Blatant politicizing is the heir to the impressionists and postimpressionists? No, Picasso's Guernica is the heir. Barbara Kruger, Leon Golub, and Nancy Spero are the heirs. Even Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed is the heir.

Anyway, what really interested me in the slew of Soviet war images here was the Pimenov painting On the Front Road.

I thought I'd seen something just like it. Turns out I had.

Seems ol' Pimenov liked to recycle ideas. This one, called New Moscow, is from 1938, so it preceded the one above.

Emory Douglas at the New Museum

I managed to get to the New Museum last week to see two shows there before they closed. One was a survey of work by Emory Douglas, the Black Panther Party's Minister of Culture who transformed the Panther's revolutionary call and righteous fashion sense into the most recognizable visual vocabulary since the Russian avant-garde. Douglas's graphic elements are no doubt indebted to the experiments of the Soviet artistic vanguard ( the Bolsheviks sported the black-leather-jacket look, too), but he managed to parlay the Panther's political anger into a series of posters, illustrations, and newspaper layouts that are as focused, productive, and imaginative as the program it espoused.

It's hard not to be attracted to the Panther's ideals. Their focus on economic and political grievances ("Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice, Peace") among minority groups and their institution of social programs designed to alleviate poverty and a lack of health care are significant even now—and are still being debated today.

Tron meets Pynchon?

Mariah Robertson at Marvelli Gallery.

Take my word for it, it's good stuff.

You press the button, we do the rest.

When my then-eighteen-month-old son took an interest in a visiting friend's old digital camera, she gave it to him, and he's been snapping pictures with it ever since. (He's now almost three.) He's so often focused on pushing the button that where the camera is pointed or where his tiny digits are located is of little consequence. We have lots of pictures of eyes and boogery nostrils. The other spaces he ends up capturing—objects on the desk, the carpet, his own face—are surprisingly fascinating. I'm not going to argue that they're formally inventive, but there's something to be said for leaving out the first half of "point and shoot." For instance, he'll take a series of photos of the corner of the ceiling; seen successively, it's like stop-motion animation.   

They remind me of the maybe half dozen photos that always arrived in my packet of vacation pictures. Often of the dashboard of the car, a blurry, rain-dappled window, a close-up of my leg on the car seat, these accidental images were frequently more interesting than the intended ones. They were atmospheric, evocative of single moments rather than larger experiences. The mottled colors, dampened light, and odd angles seemed rich in their abstraction. 

Our digital camera has really destroyed that randomness, the amateur's thrill of not really knowing what you're getting. 

90 Years and Counting

Belly Button Redux

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Insidious Ben Jones

Ben Jones has the video paintings from "The New Dark Age" show posted on his site here. I watched the flickering colors and patterns, mesmerized, for about half an hour. With my mouth open.

Viva La Toña!

A documentary by Betty M. Park about women wrestlers in Bolivia! Mamachas del Ring will screen as part of the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival. Friday, November 13, 9:15 pm, at the Museum of Natural History.

Print is dead, long live print, Part 2

Another one of my favorite exhibitors from the NY Art Book Fair is the Zurich-based Nieves. Their table was chock-full of little books and zines, and I wanted everything. The one I bought is Glamour Banner, a 20-page black-and-white zine (really more like a minicomic) printed in an edition of 150 and created by an artist collective in Los Angeles called Sumi Ink Club. The group, which is open to anyone, creates works like these as a means to encourage social interaction. Nice idea, but what I really like about the process is that it produces a dense, tangle of many different styles that merge into a rhythmic whole, and no one element can be extracted from the larger arrangement.

The front and back cover together display the main drawing:

The inner pages offer detailed views:

They've worked in color elsewhere:

There's a bit of Keith Haring in the colors and playful, rounded, maze-like designs. The vibrating hues also make me think of Ben Jones's work, though his juxtaposed colors are far more intense. Perhaps it's the Ben Jones Approved Patterns that I spot in Glamour Banner. But then, I see them everywhere—which, of course, is very much the point. 

And, look, a Ben Jones postcard I appropriated from PictureBox. Mmmm, Ben Jones Approved Hot Tub. I spent a while at the booth with Dan Nadel bemoaning the sad and incredible fact that Jones, whose solo show at Deitch earlier this year was among the best exhibitions by a young artist, and Gary Panter, one of the most original artists of the past few decades, don't have gallery representation—not to mention critical attention. Panter's influence on a younger generation of artists has yet to be fully understood, though one can certainly get a sense of it from the work of a number of artists, including Brian Chippendale and C. F., both of whom have new books coming out from PictureBox this spring. A lot to look forward to. In the cold winter interim, I'll keep occupied with Mat Brinkman's Teratoid Heights, which ought to be landing in my mailbox any moment now.  

Print is dead, long live print

As the battle for dominance in the war of the electronic reader heats up, it's heartening to attend an event entirely devoted to the possibilities of printed matter. The NY Art Book Fair, which moved out to P. S. 1 in Queens from its usual Manhattan quarters, featured more than 200 presses, publishers, and dealers from around the world. Lots of great stuff, though it only makes me wish for a regular exhibition space for books among the myriad art galleries in NYC. Remember MoMA's brilliant "The Russian Avant-Garde Book" so many years ago?

Speaking of Russians, the aptly named Lubok, a German publisher of "picture books," featured some of the most luscious examples of book art: gorgeous special-editions by Volker Pfüller and Katja Schwalenberg. Both consist of linocuts composed of vivid, velvety colors. These, from Schwalenberg's book.

It's a shame that Schwalenberg's Frau Wow, a book that won a Red Dot award for design in 2005, hasn't been published in the US. It's almost wordless, so it wouldn't require much in the way of translation. In 21 chapters, Schwalenberg employs a wide variety of media and styles to examine the many facets of being a woman—you know, harness racer, coquette, S & M goddess. The book's pages are awash with nuggets from twentieth-century art--Philip Guston, Martha Rosler, Jacob Lawrence, Gary Hume. Did I mention it comes with 3-D glasses?

 

I also snagged this postcard from the Lubok booth. 

I think I look like this a lot, minus the hat.