Fritz Goro was the longtime science photographer for LIFE magazine. He covered the Manhattan Project, including shooting at the original Ground Zero. His image of a fetus in an artificial womb inspired Kubrick’s 2001. He crafted photo-simulations of x-ray diffraction and created elaborate graphics in-camera using multiple exposures, lenses and focal depths to depict atomic structure. Much of America’s 20th century image of science was either made or influenced by Goro.
In 1945, he also shot an unidentified collection of slightly odd 19th century technologies and inventions. Such as these rocking stilts, for crossing a swamp. Goro’s technique for shooting these objects was to cast as strong a light as he could on them. The harsh, high-contrast images remind me of some of Charles Sheeler’s domestic photography, which reveled in the hard edges and abstractions of pre-Industrial machinism.
Also, the 19th century folks were just as crazy as we are.
But also brilliant. Just look at this photo of a “reflection candlestick,” more commonly called–when it’s called at all anymore, I mean–a candlestick reflector. It’s somewhere between Olafur Eliasson, the end of Diamonds Are Forever, and ye olde ocularift fhoppe in downtown Fitchburg. Fantastic.
Category: etc.
Dress, 1952, by Ellsworth Kelly??
Though I suspect the easiest thing would be for Michael to let Cerre know where he scanned the image from, here’s what I can figure out about this dress made by Ellsworth Kelly in Sanary, France in 1952:
Sanary, west along the Mediterranean coast from Toulon, was where Kelly spent a great deal of time during his formative postwar sojourn in France, from 1949 to 1953 1948 to 1954. It was where Kelly found color:
While working in Paris after the war everything was grey and, as I’ve said, I used very little colour. When I finally went to Sanary, I did Colors for a Large Wall. It was the first work I painted in the south of France.
That was in 1951, when his, um, friend and fellow artist Ralph Coburn was with him on one of his four 6-mo to 1-yr long visits. [Is it, to quote a too-well-known idiot, impossible to fully understand Kelly’s work unless you know he’s gay? Was Coburn his boyfriend, or just the guy he lived with and took to dinners with John Cage and Alice B. Toklas the whole time? Kelly’s certainly out, but from the way Coburn’s bio was written, there are still closet doors a-slammin’.]
Kelly was looking at the colors around him, using found, “readymade” colors from papers and color wheels as inspiration and raw material for studies and collages. Such as this 1952 collage in the Philadelphia Museum, Boats in Sanary Harbor:
Back to that Tate interview, where Kelly talks about other foundational developments in his work that took place in Sanary, including his interest in “painting objects,” monochrome canvases abutting each other [e.g., Colors for a Large Wall, 1951, at MoMA; and Méditerannée,1952], which prefigured Minimalism’s interest in a painting as a thing itself, not a depiction or image of something:
I didn’t want to paint an overlap, meaning that it would be a deception or illusion. I no longer wanted to depict space, but to make a work that existed in literal space. Thus, my recent works are one canvas as a relief over another canvas. Another important example of a panel painting that explores the idea of the mural was Red Yellow Blue White (1952). It’s the only one I ever did using actual dyed fabric of ready-made colours, which moves the painting into the realm of real objects. It consists of five vertical panels, each with five canvases. The vertical panels are separated on the wall and the intervals of the wall surface between them are part of the painting. [emphasis added on the seemingly dress-relevant part]
Seemingly relevant indeed. In Branden Joseph’s book, Random Order, on Robert Rauschenberg’s relationships with the “avant-garde,” the extensive discussion on Kelly’s highly specific use and treatment of color confirms that Kelly used the same fabrics from Red Yellow Blue White to make a dress for his friend Anne Weber. The footnote says “a photograph of Weber wearing the dress designed by Kelly” was reproduced in Diane Waldman’s catalogue for the Guggenheim’s 1997 Kelly retrospective–what a spectacular show that was, btw, though I remember Lisa Dennison telling stories of the museum expecting Kelly and other artists who get retrospectives to donate their work, essentially a quid pro quo, and then she bragged about the giant, arced Kelly sculpture that was in the theater at one point–as well as in Nathalie Brunet’s extremely detailed and informative “Chronology 1943-1954,” which appeared in Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948-1954, the catalogue for the National Gallery’s 1992 exhibition, which looked infinitely better at the Jeu de Paume.
Weber, who was married to the cubist pioneer Max Weber–really? He had to have been in his 70’s in 1952, yet in that photo, she doesn’t look 30–later ran a gallery in Georgetown, Maine. [Mar 2015 update: No. Thanks to a reader Laura’s incredulity, which was stronger than mine in 2009, I dug a bit and realized that Anne was not married to Max. I had to have read that somewhere, because it’s just too odd a pairing to make up. She turns out to have been married to Swiss artist Hugo Weber, who taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology with Mies van der Rohe and Moholy-Nagy. Glad to have that straightened out.]
Last year, Kelly was on hand for the opening of theWeber Kelly Preserve and Trail . Weber financed the 1999 purchase and donation of 105 acres on Georgetown Island by selling an early Kelly painting.
So there you go. Ellsworth Kelly dress.
[Other March 2015 update: However obscure this dress has been, my friend and former MoMA committee colleague Sharon Coplan Hurowitz worked with Kelly to recreate the dress in late 2013. It was created as an edition of 10 by Calvin Klein’s Francisco Costa. Copies were donated to the Met’s Costume Institute and the Philadelphia Museum, where Kelly donated Red Yellow Blue White in 2010. Nice hustle.
Bompiani Librimobile, 1955, by Enzo Mari
Hans Ulrich Obrist – Yes, I see here – there’s a vehicle, a truck, in the picture.
Enzo Mari – The editor [of Bompiani] had a problem, and we’re speaking about the fifties, in that he needed to transport retail books to remote places in the Italian provinces. These remote places were not as we know them today, as they didn’t even have bookstores. We had to create a truck that could be used as a small bookstore. Once it arrived in a small town, people could make use of it like a shop. The truck, from one point of view, presented itself as a bookstore with windows; inside there was a small parlor, a sofa, a small collection of books, where the merchant could receive and converse with the visitors.
images from [I think] Mari’s 2004 book, La Valigia senza manico, reproduced in Hans Ulrich Obrist & Enzo Mari: The Conversation Series – 15 [amazon]
On Making Them Like They Used To
Ever since discovering Mister Jalopy’s blog Hoopty Rides a couple of years back, I’ve been low-grade obsessed with vintage tools and vintage toolboxes. There’s something about the combination of lost quality, survival, and embedded history that makes an intact box of tools a veritable mirror of at least one man’s soul–or less loftily, of his life and his projects.
Von Dutch was apparently a racist a##hole drunk, so I just admire his hand-lettered, gold Snap-On tool chest as an object. An object that was too expensive to be my first vintage toolbox purchase when it came up for auction in 2006 or so.
But a remarkable thread full of vintage tool chests and tool boxes has developed on the message board at JalopyJournal.com [no relation]. Many of the boxes were bought at garage sales. A user named Nealinca got the cabinet above from the estate of a high school shop teacher.
Many more, though, are inherited from fathers and grandfathers–especially grandfathers. A man rarely gives away his tools as long as there’s a chance he might need them. To commemorate his late grandfather’s 80th birthday, Imp59 had his awesome artillery shell-shaped toolbox pinstriped–later on in the thread, someone identifies it as a 1947 Nuggets socket case from Blackhawk.
And every few pagedowns, there’s a shot of a shiny metal toolbox, stripped clean of stickers, paint, chips, and grime, every sign of its previous history. It’s tempting to say it’s sad, but then someone’ll point out their daddy didn’t give’em anything but alcoholism, and you realize that wistful embrace of the past can be a luxury, or certainly an indulgence, that is not to everyone’s taste.
Hand Lettering [hooptyrides]
The H.A.M.B. “Vintage” Tool Box Club [jalopyjournal.com]
Classy Raccoon
Yo te amo, Cintra Wilson:
One $75 T-shirt bore the word ARTIST across the chest in a bold glitter font. Now, any artist I know who’s worth his salt would print the shirt himself if it cost more than $22 — and it would never say ARTIST. It might say JANITOR, or IDIOT, or possibly HOOKER. But wearing a $75 T-shirt that says ARTIST suggests that the most artistic thing about the wearer is the T-shirt itself, much as you know that anyone who actually uses the word “classy” probably isn’t. Even if they could afford it, real artists wouldn’t wear such redundancies, any more than raccoons would buy themselves $75 T-shirts that say RACCOON.
Or should I say, je t’aime? [critical shopper – nyt]
“And We’re On The Street In New York”
Until they start re-enacting Metropolitan Diary anecdotes with sock puppets [OMH! BRB!], the pinnacle of NY Times multimedia achievement is Bill Cunningham’s weekly narration of his On The Street fashion photos.
Normally, he lays down the audio back in the office. But this week, he’s actually on the street. There’s ambient street sound and everything. It’s like we’re hanging out with him, hearing his subjects exclaim, “How’d you know it was Kansai Yamamoto?”
Could a live, streaming Bill Cunningham channel be far behind?
Every Abandoned House On The West Robinson Street Strip
On one block of West Robinson Rd West Robinwood Rd in Detroit, all but five of the houses are abandoned. Jim Griffioen took photos of both sides of the street. His massive, stitched together photos are on Sweet Juniper and his flickr stream. I flipped the south side and combined them, a la Ed Ruscha’s Every Building On The Sunset Strip.
The Singularity [sweet-juniper]
Previously: Every Building on The Sunset Strip–and then some
Apologies to anyone still living on Robinson St.
“Design as money laundering bon-bon.”
Dan has been my main source of Postopolis! LA coverage this year. Design theorist Benjamin Bratton wrapped up the event’s discussion with an interesting, twisted bow of a speech. He talked about “Post,” but in the sense of Post-/Pre-, not the original Post/Comment the conference’s blogger organizers originally imagined.
He hopes we’re Post-Bubble, for instance, but isn’t quite certain:
Because design was a symbol of the bubble it is also a symbol of the bubble’s collapse. Think of OMA’s burned out Mandarin Hotel as the anti-Bilbao.
….
But what also seems clear at least to me, is that very many ways of doing things, of designing things, of consuming things, of consuming design are very likely, to sample Paul Krugman, zombie ideas. Design as money laundering bon-bon. The destiny of the post-Bilbao coke high of Dubai, seems be a psychotic desert ruin.
I hope Jurgen Bey is already working on Murray Moss’s pitchfork-proof panic room.
Benjamin H. Bratton (Postopolis! LA) [cityofsound.com]
Climate Control [hah]
Seriously, who had the hubris to come up with that phrase? Unbelievable.
The irony, of course, is that early spring and fall are the times of the year when you, the pre-war apartment dweller, realize how little control over your climate you actually have.
It’s freakin’ cold in here, but not cold enough that the boiler kicks in. The sun warms the place nicely in the day, but now you realize that all these months, you’ve actually been dependent on the radiators, not the sun, for your comfort.
The Ambush Photo They Save May Be Your Own
Apparently, with all the digital technology and whatnot, they hold onto that stuff at Bloomberg News, even if you’re not indicted immediately.
Art Dealer Charged With Stealing $88 Million [image: chip east/bloomberg news, photographed in 2007]
I’m Just A Bill
But not that Bill.
The Obamas Get Up Close and Personal In DC [nyt’s automated related link generator]
On A More Conceptual Approach To Hair Loss
I’m not interested in the so-called PC aspects of discussing hair loss. The parody of an apologetically sensitive term like “follicularly challenged” is still of a piece with the negative connotation baked into the term, “hair loss” itself. Same with the self-affirming bald pride nonsense of the “God only made a few perfect heads. The rest he covered with hair.” variety with gets cross-stitched onto too many pillows.
I’m interested in the seemingly universal, unquestioning acceptance of the hair loss [sic] paradigm. Now there’s obviously a strong, pro-bald paradigm at work as well, thanks in large part to Michael Jordan and his shaved head.
But when it’s discussed at all, the language and perception of hair loss is consistently negative. It’s a loss, not “scalp expansion.” “Hairlines recede,” foreheads don’t “advance.” At best, it’s a “problem” that guys “deal with” or “accept.” At worst, they deny it, fight it, hide it. Whether it’s a transplant, a toupee, or a combover, the results are always unsatisfactory, or at least aesthetically sub-optimal. And yet, does anyone ever say anything to the guy about his self-inflicted hair mistake? Not likely. Whether it’s someone else’s or our own, hair loss is usually slow enough that most people pretend it’s not happening and move on.
When I was a little boy, my paternal grandfather wore a toupee. It was thick, dark, and carefully styled–immediately recognizable to the most casual viewer. To me, the most remarkable thing about it was that he’d take it off when he got home, like a hat. He placed it upside-down on the coffee table, where it looked Meret Oppenheim-esque, a furry candy bowl with a strip of double-sided tape running down the center. I don’t remember anyone in our family or beyond ever talking about it, or even acknowledging its existence. What my grandfather’s motivations were for wearing it, and how it related to his perception of himself and the image he sought to project once he stepped out his door, I don’t know. I wish I did.
Actually, what I really wish was that I had the guts and presence of mind to take a conceptual, dispassionate, but engaged view of hair loss. Specifically, I wanted to get–OK, I wanted to see someone get–a tattoo of his hairline.
The idea came to me in 1995, soon after seeing Alix Lambert’s photograph of a tattooed head on the cover of Open City magazine. Wouldn’t it be awesome, I thought, for a guy to periodically trace a tatoo along his hairline as soon as he saw that it was changing? Add a new line maybe once or twice a year. As his hairline moved back, his tattoo would grow, and it would take on some kind of chronotopographical shape, somewhere between ripples in the sand and hollows in a sandstone cliff. Like carving notches in a growing kid’s door jamb, the tattoo would become a portable, integral memento of a passage of the man’s life.
Obviously, as my own tattoo-less head proves, there are complications to such a project. The generally negative perception of hair loss means that a guy’s denial and anxiety are strongest when it starts; you’re ignoring your hairline is shifting at the exact moment you’d need to start documenting the migration. You wash your face, and your muscle memory fails to take into account your extra forehead. But it works out because when you shampoo, you still try to lather up the top of your head the most, even though that’s not where most of your hair is anymore.
Tattoos have become far more popular and destigmatized since 1995, but facial/head tattoos still seem to carry a taboo that can affect acceptance among the mainstream culture. A guy with a bad hair transplant could become Vice-freaking-President in this country, but a guy with a conceptual scalp tattoo would be unemployable.
A corollary project would be a conceptual approach to hair transplants that rejects the default “naturalistic” aesthetic which is the unquestioned ideal. I remember seeing a guy in that first Barnes & Noble on Broadway, up from Zabar’s, an Indian/Asian guy with a vast, smooth head with a tiny fringe and like ten hair plugs on top. It’s like he was determined to get something done, but he only had money enough for a dozen plugs. And yet some doctor took his money and arranged his plugs in bowling pin formation on the top of his endlessly bald head.
But what if a guy laid out his hair transplants in a design? A spiral, a fan radiating from his now-invisible widow’s peak? A lightning bolt? The Nike Swoosh? Any one of the thousands of designs that guys get shaved into their fades every day on Astor Place–only in reverse and permanent?
Getting Into Trouble With The NY Times
The report this weekend–from Apartment Therapy–about Apartment Therapy getting a takedown notice from the NY Times legal department for unauthorized use of the Times’ IP reminds me of the Apartment Therapy story from June 2004 about Apartment Therapy getting an angry call from the NY Times Home Section writer Marianne Rohrlich.
Rohrlich was pissed at AT’s weekly replication of the Times Home Section content, photos, links and such. AT’s response was to aw shucks about what big fans they are, and to tout the amount of traffic they’re driving to the Times’ site:
“Did it occur to you that it is not right to just LIFT other people’s work?” she asks me. (“Do you know what blogging is?” I want to ask.) “Our legal department is going to be calling you.”
Calling us! Legal department! Whoa!
I had a Shawn Fanning moment. Is this Napster 2004? Are we in trouble?
Now Matt and Andy are on the case, The Case of the Fishy DMCA Martyr Ploy.
DMCA Takedown notice: The NYTimes goes to war, wants to shut us down [at]
Apartment Therapy on Getting Into Trouble [at]
Mark Ravalomanana Of The Antananarivo Ravalomananas
On the way to the gym, I was really enjoying a news report on the radio about the political unrest in Madagascar. [Capital: Antananarivo, (AN-tan-uh-Na-REEV]
The about-to-be-deposed president must be pretty bad; why else would they give up such an awesomely named leader as Marc Ravalomanana? [RAH-vel-oh MUH-nuh-nuh] Makes me wish I’d been listening to Madagascan radio the last couple of years.
Incidentally, the demonym [!] for Madagascar is not Madagascan, but Malagasy. Madagascan applies to the island or country, but not to the people. Demonym=populace + name.
Ensure Is George W. Bush’s Blue Gap Dress
Like everyone else in the country, I was glued to the screen September 11th, 1998, scrambling to download the massive Independent Counsel’s Report, aka the Kenneth Starr Report, from a still-scrawny Internet. I finally printed my copy in time for dinner, and my colleague from work and I pored over it at a sidewalk cafe near Dupont Circle, where we had traveled for a client meeting.
At the time, we were advising a group of entertainment and mall development companies on the creation of a startup, the purpose of which was to create the definitive platform for celebrity-driven retail. In other words, monetizable, industrial-scale product placement.
Which is why, while reading parts of the Starr Report out loud to each other, I had one of the lesser epiphanies of my life. I exclaimed to my colleague that this, the Kenneth Starr Report, was proof of the concept. After all, what brand was on every American’s mind that night? Exactly, Gap. the maker of Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. I resolved right then to register the domain kennethstore.com as soon as I got back to my hotel. Which is what I did.
I proceeded to post the full text of the Starr Report, interspersed with illustrations and links–soon to be massive affiliate revenue producers, I’m sure–of the brands and products mentioned in the report: Gap, Ritz Carlton, Bic Pens. Actually, that was about it.
Ken Starr turned out to be no Bret Easton Ellis, and his report was no American Psycho. Also, I was too busy to ever format the pages for easier online reading, so there were two giant pages of text, each more than a hundred printed pages long. [The Library of Congress has formatted the IC Report quite nicely, I think, though there are no Amazon Associates links.] Also, neither Gap, nor Bic, nor much of anything else was really available for product-level linking and shopping in 1998, so while the concept was pure, and the execution wanting, the timing was also a bit early.
Oh, how times have changed. The New York Review of Books has published excerpts from a confidential 2007 report, ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody, presented by the International Committee of the Red Cross to senior US intelligence officials over two years ago. The report methodically lays out the ICRC’s findings from interviews at Guantanamo Bay with presumed terrorist leaders, and declares that US imprisonment and interrogation tactics “constituted torture” and “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Mark Danner’s article on the report is an agonizing, outrage-inducing must-read.
But maybe there’s a silver lining, if not in terms moving actual product, at least in terms of brand awareness? Here’s Al Qaeda administrator Abu Zubaydah describing his first interrogations at a secret CIA base in Thailand:
I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure [a nutrient supplement] and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.
And then describing a later torture session, possibly in Afghanistan:
I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.
This went on for approximately one week. During this time the whole procedure was repeated five times. On each occasion, apart from one, I was suffocated once or twice and was put in the vertical position on the bed in between. On one occasion the suffocation was repeated three times. I vomited each time I was put in the vertical position between the suffocation.
During that week I was not given any solid food. I was only given Ensure to drink. My head and beard were shaved everyday.
I collapsed and lost consciousness on several occasions. Eventually the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor.
Here’s Walid Bin Attash, a Yemeni involved with planning US embassy bombings in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole, describing his treatment after capture in 2003:
On arrival at the place of detention in Afghanistan I was stripped naked. I remained naked for the next two weeks. I was put in a cell measuring approximately [3 1/2 by 6 1/2 feet]. I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light, artificial or natural.
During the first two weeks I did not receive any food. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. A guard would come and hold the bottle for me while I drank…. The toilet consisted of a bucket in the cell…. I was not allowed to clean myself after using the bucket. Loud music was playing twenty-four hours each day throughout the three weeks I was there.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan. Here he is talking about his interrogation:
During the first month I was not provided with any food apart from on two occasions as a reward for perceived cooperation. I was given Ensure to drink every 4 hours. If I refused to drink then my mouth was forced open by the guard and it was poured down my throat by force…. At the time of my arrest I weighed 78kg. After one month in detention I weighed 60kg.
I can see it now: “How I lost 40 pounds–and kept it off!–thanks to Ensure and the CIA Diet!”
US Torture: Voices From The Black Sites by Mark Danner [nybooks.com]
Ensure Plus Complete Balanced Nutrition Drink, Ready to Use, Creamy Milk Chocolate Shake, 24-8 Fluid Ounce Bottles, just $49.99! [amazon.com]