Out of Lascaux

Performance Arts

Blue Wyvern always manages to find the most unique and amazing images. She has posted videos of performance art on her blog. The Thousand-Hand Bodhisattva is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen on video. You must take a look. Busby Berkeley would have killed to have these dancers on his sets.

The Replicator

If you haven't registered for the New York Times online, do so right now. This is the coolest thing I have seen in many years. If I lived anywhere near NYC, I would make a special trip to go to this gallery (and that's saying a whole lot for this homebody). Unfotunately, it ends tonight. But you can check out the Slide Show of some of the pieces. This will tickle your fancy, I'm sure.

Mail Art

I've discovered an interesting fad in blogging. Well, it's actually in art and snail mail, but there are lots of blogs about it. It's mail art, and it consists of people creating works of art on postcards and sending them to each other. There are some really beautiful things out there. This one is a favorite of mine. You can see a brief list of these blogs on Blogshares

Art is What We Say it is

An article in today's New York Times reviews a show at the Museum of Biblical Art called "The Next Generation: Contemporary Expressions of Faith". The show itself sounds interesting enough, but what caught my attention is the fact that these artists are specifically painting expressions of their (Christian) faith.

Including traditional still-life painting, sculpture, installation, photographs documenting a performance, and an interactive video projection, the show reflects the range of techniques found in contemporary art in general. In many cases, you would not know that Christian faith had anything to do with the work were it not for accompanying statements by the artists [my emphasis].

For hundreds of years, most European art was an expression of faith in some way, whether directly or indirectly. God is in everything, after all, and any image is a representation of God's world. In our modern, secular times, though, God has been removed from the picture. He is not part of the meaning, unless the artist says He is.

Christine Huck and George Wingate, for example, say their small, sensitively made still-life paintings are about seeing ordinary things in God's beneficent light. And while a handsome grid of pages from pool design books, with everything obscured by gold paint except windows and swimming pools, would look like a comment on consumerism in another context, it is said by its maker, Lynn Aldrich, to be about baptism.

Given our habits of viewing art aesthetically and psychologically rather than religiously, paintings that involve the appropriation of Christian imagery from antique pictures do not necessarily read as expressions of faith. An intensively worked, organically shaped panel by Robert B. Eustace, with a medieval Madonna and Child emerging at the center as though in a luminous vision, could have been manufactured by a nonbeliever toying with conventions of Roman Catholic kitsch.

Such is contemporary art. A urinal disassociated from a restroom beomes art because the artist has proclaimed it so. An image of a mother bathing her child is a symbol for the Madonna and Child, only if the artist proclaims it as such. Otherwise, anything we might read into it is pure speculation.

The Gates

So, The Gates are open. The NYT has a lot of pictures and video well worth registering for if you haven't already. I have a feeling that the Gates are much more impressive in person than on film. It seems like the preliminary drawings are more interesting, but I don't think that's true. It still looks very cool, and I would really like to see it for myself. Oh, well.

New Art Blog

Looks like Diane is gaining some well deserved fame for herself. The inaugural post of Art in Toronto is an interview with her. I'm not sure about the whole red-on-black color scheme, but the blog might be worth keeping an eye on.

Famous by Accident

An article in the NYTimes, Artist's Erotic Oeuvre Is Rescued From the Trash really caught my attention this morning. It seems a man named Edward Victus has been in the hospital, and when he gets home, he will be needing some nursing care. His friends decided to clean up his apartment, getting rid of any "offensive" material in the process. Apparently, most, if not all his artwork was deemed offensive for it's erotic nature. A painter named Brian Ermanski rescued hundreds of sketches, drawings and paintings from a dumpster outside the apartment. He laid them out on the sidewalk, creating an impromptu art show of the man's works, as well as giving people a chance to give the artworks good homes.

There are so many levels to how fascinating this is. First, here is this 76 year old man's life strewn across a Manhattan street. Along with artwork, there were also resumes and tax forms in the dumpster, so we now know that Mr.Victus was never even an artist by trade. But he'll soon be an artist by reknown.

Jeffrey Miles, 21, a English student at New York University, said he had saved Mr. Victus's tax returns in case he wanted them back, and had begun shooting segments on Tuesday for a documentary film about Mr. Victus's art.

Had anyone ever heard of this man before? Had anyone ever even seen any of it? I have no idea if his work is even considered good or not, but there were many people who thought it good enough to take home. And I don't know if Mr.Victus ever showed his work anywhere. We don't even know how he feels about this whole thing because he could not be reached for comment. It's as if some small twist of fate has just turned Edward Victus from "working stiff" to artist. I sincerely hope there is a follow-up to this somewhere, because I really want to know more about this man who's become famous by accident.

Industrial Art

Several days ago, I discovered Industrial Art. The artist posts very interesting paintings and sketches of mining complexes in Canada. I started digging a bit more when I discovered the artist is a woman who teaches art. Her stuff is great. When you've finished digging around the archives in Industrial Art, check out the other three blogs listed at the bottom of the page and see what else she does.

NY Gates

I will be really interested to see how this turns out in February. The drawings are wonderful. I hope the actual project compares favorably.

Highlights: 12/04/02

I wrote an article a couple of weeks back about Wonder Woman for SoloHQ. As far as I can tell, no one read it. That's ok, it wasn't that good. Anyway, I scanned and uploaded a couple of images for that article that were never included. They deserve to be seen and discussed. (You can also go to the article to see what I said about them there.)
For those who aren't up on comic books, let me begin by saying that the artwork has improved phenominally over the years. Many comic book artists are true geniuses, like Todd McFarlane who created Spawn, and Alex Ross who is one of DC's finest. Wonder Woman has benefited greatly from this groundswell of talent. This is probably due to the fact that she is a woman, and most artists revel in drawing the female form. One can certainly see that in Wonder Woman. Another reason may be that DC editors have seen a need to spice up her image. She is not the most popular of DC's 3 major icons, just the only female one. So, her covers have been painted in lucious detail while the interior artwork suffers because the great artists are not the ones working on it - too busy doing Batman, you know. The image below is one of many covers by the brilliant artist Adam Hughs. He has done some stunning covers fror WW over the last year or so, well worth framing.

I just love his stuff.

Recently, DC published an oversized graphic novel Wonder Woman:Spirit of Truth in which the amazon princess questions her roll as a superhero. She goes to an unnamed middle eastern country in order to help the populace, but they merely stone her as a foreign, half-nude temptress of Satan. She has similar reactions in other countries (though not as extreme) and decides to visit her buddy Clark Kent and ask how he deals with the issue of being "other". His answer: blend in. Take a secret identity. She tries it, likes it, and returns to this unnamed middle eastern country, this time covered from head to foot in order to blend in. This can't last, though, and in a very dramatic scene she drops her abbaya and steps forth as the shining godess she is.

This image gave me chills. She is so beautifully rendered, tall and statuesque. And she steps out looking almost nude among the black-shrouded native women. She could be the erotic daydream for a man or a woman.

Well, my advice is that if you haven't looked at comic books in many years, check them out. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Highlights: 9-26-02

All this talk about Postmodern art being anti-art has got me thinking. If an artist wants to do something new and different without being a total nihilist, what does he do? Not much, I'm afraid. Not that he can't create wonderful art that speaks to your heart and mind. That is hard to do, and should be something to strive for. So you won't be in the newspapers because you pissed someone off. Instead, you made people happy. Doesn't that count for something?

I've been looking out for this one artist for many years now, Benjamin Dominguez. He's from Juarez, and he did this wonderful series of paintings re-interpreting the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait. He had a show here at the El Paso Museum of Art back in '91, and I made my Art 101 students go see it. They Loved it! I don't remember too many details, but there were at least a dozen versions of the Arnolfin Wedding Portrait, all technically flawless copies of the original except for small (or not so small) differences. I remember one had them riding Harleys, while in another, her green dress turned into a serpent. I think he has done something new and different without being nihilistic and destructive, but he did have to look at the old masters to do it. Unfortunately, all I could find on the web was this, and it isn't the one I would have chosen to represent the series. Do you read Dutch?

Highlights: 9-25-02

Just read a very fine article, again by Michael Newberry. In it he explains how Postmodern art is anti-art, and therefore nihilistic and destructive. Quite right. While I learned to understand some of the principles behind modern art in art school, I never learned to really respect it. Picasso was a visionary, a real artist who saw things a bit differently. However, by the time he was rich and famous, he was just cranking them out (imho). And everyone else were just sheep. The Dadaists were revolutionaries, but they weren't artists. Yes, it's important to see things in a different way. It's good to shock someone out of their rut, sometimes, but it is pointless to just gross them out or merely offend them. Postmodernists have missed the point, thinking that shocking, disgusting or offending someone is all there is to it.

I did like his mention of Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning. Personally, I think anyone who erases a De Kooning is doing society a favor. He also talks about Cristo's Umbrellas, you know, the one in California where tons of money was spent on setting up hundreds of giant umbrellas along the coastal highway. One of them blew away in a storm and caused a fatal accident, so they dismantled it early. Anyway, he mentions this as being art as the absence of art. I don't quite see it that way. It was just taken down, a temporary visual experiment that was never meant to be anything more than "unique". I thought about Tibetan sand paintings, which are glorious works of art which take hours and hours to complete, but in the end, they are swept away as a symbol of the impermanence of things. I think the idea has value as a philosophical ideal.

One thing I miss in Mr. Newberry's article is the language used by modern art critics and historians today. I remember trying to read some of this drivel in school and being completely repelled by it. These people would take pages and pages to say absolutely nothing. To this day I don't remember what was written about in Theories if Modern Art by Chipp. It may be a symptom of academic rigor mortis, though. I started to read an article sent to me by an economist friend about the art market, and I couldn't get past the first sentence. I would put it here to show you, but I threw it out! Anyway, you'll find Mr.Newberry's article refreshingly free of the academic language that plagues so many critics of modern art.