Call For Submissions: Larry Sultan Pin-Up Show At CCA

The California College for The Arts is organizing an open pin-up show to honor Larry Sultan, the photographer, conceptual artist, and teacher who passed away last month:

This show is a way for us to mark his passing and his enormous contributions and come together as a community. It is somewhat informal and open to all participants, so please feel free to forward this information. You can contribute an image, an object, a letter, text, really anything you believe honors Larry as a person, artist, and teacher. The show will be an evolving installation in the Oliver Art Center on the Oakland campus from January 11-17th, 2010. We will of course be documenting the show as it comes together.

Submissions can be via mail, email, or in person in Oakland. For details, see the full post at Conscientious.
A Show For Larry [conscientious]

“American Pixels,” Adaptive Jpegs By Jörg M Colberg

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Jörg M Colberg [who blogs photography at concientious] introduces complexity and subjectivity with content-sensitive jpeg compression:

These Adaptive Jpegs (ajpegs) [1] – “American Pixels” – are an experiment. Jpegs are images where the original information was compressed to save space. A computer that creates a jpeg does not know anything about the contents of the image: It does what it is told, in a uniform manner across the image.
My idea was to create a variant that followed in the footsteps of what jpegs do, but to pharmaciefr have the final result depend on the original image: the computer algorithm becomes part of the image creation, in a very direct way. The idea was to build a hierarchical jpeg algorithm, where the compression – in effect the pixel size – depends on the information in each uncompressed pixel and its neighbours. So ajpeg is a new image compression algorithm where the focus is not on making its compression efficient but, rather, on making its result interesting.

The info of interest in many of Colberg’s images is military [they’re titled “American Pixels,” after all] but I like the way the variegated pixels play out in the more ambiguous, atmospheric images best.
[1] UPDATE: Jörg emails to say that because the term “ajpeg” has been causing some misunderstanding about the works and how they’re made, he’s changed it to “acomp,” short for “adaptive compression.” Duly noted. He’s also added some new images to his site; be sure to check back.
American Pixels [jmcolberg.com, thanks joerg]

Ashes To Ashes, Toast To Toast

So I was watching Marie Lorenz’ video, Capsized, on WNYC’s Culture Blog, like I was told to do.
And not just because she had co-curated Invisible Graffiti Magnet Show inside those Richard Serra torqued spiral segments stored along the Bronx waterfront, I clicked through to see photos from Lorenz’ less harrowing journeys down the Tiber in her handmade boat.
Including Tiber River III, where she and a colleague from the American Academy look into the Protestant cemetery at Keats’ grave.
Which contains the epitaph that ends, “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water,” which prompts Lorenz to wonder what it means.

“I’m not really sure.” said Margaret. “Something about spirituality maybe, or the eternal nature of art. Its just good writing.” She said.

Well, the last one out of three, sure, but. So I looked it up.
And the full inscription overexplains it a bit:

This Grave
contains all that was Mortal,
of a
YOUNG ENGLISH POET,
Who,
on his Death Bed,
in the Bitterness of his Heart,
at the Malicious Power of his Enemies,
Desired
these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone:
“Here lies One
Whose Name was writ in Water.”
th
Feb 24 1821

Which makes wonder if Keats was murdered by his editor.
No, The Phrases Finder entry from 2003 tells me that Keats, 25, whose tuberculosis was not, in fact, getting better on his winter trip to Italy, and whose pursuit of true love was thwarted by his poverty, composed the last bit, at least, as a reference to a line from a Jacobean tragicomedy called “Philaster, or Love Lies-Ableeding,”: “All your better deeds/ Shall be in water writ.”
Which is spiritual in an “All we are is dust in the wind,” sort of way, I guess.
But then the Google Ad next to this epitaph is from an outfit called westmemorials.com:
toaster_shaped_memorial.jpg

She was everything to you
Mark her history
with something more
than a gray toaster-shaped
memorial.

Which, Bread of Life and all, maybe is something about spirituality, but really, it’s just good writing.

‘The Most Important Unreported Stories In The Art World’

Inspired by Hans Ulrich Obrist’s perennial interview question, I wrote about artists’ unrealized projects a few years ago for the NY Times. As I stack up some [as-yet] unrealized projects of my own–including, alas, catching up on my unread e-flux journals–I’m glad to hear HUO’s still got the fire:

I see unrealized projects as the most important unreported stories in the art world. As Henri Bergson showed, actual realization is only one possibility surrounded by many others that merit close attention.13 There are many amazing unrealized projects out there, forgotten projects, misunderstood projects, lost projects, desk-drawer projects, realizable projects, poetic-utopian dream constructs, unrealizable projects, partially realized projects, censored projects, and so on. It seems urgent to remember certain roads not taken, and–in an active and dynamic, rather than nostalgic or melancholic way–transform some of them into propositions or possibilities for the future.

“Manifestos for the future”, e-flux journal #12 [e-flux.com]

Adaptive Subdivision By Quasimondo



Adaptive Subdivision, originally uploaded by Quasimondo.

Saying they reminded him a bit of the polygonal distortions of the Dutch Landscape images from Google Maps, greg.org reader Patrick passed along these examples of adaptive subdivision from flickr user Quasimondo.

Googling around on it, I gather it’s a tiling technique used in mapping that partitions an image based on the similarity of adjacent data; more similar=larger polygon. More detail/variation=smaller divisions.

I’ve been debating in my head whether to really delve into the actual algorithms and techniques used to camouflage the various military & intelligence sites I’ve been pulling. It’s not clear that it’d help the project along in any way, but it does fascinate me.

What became immediately obvious is that while the geometric abstractions of some sites are clearly based on the underlying image, others have been pasted over by totally unrelated polygon blobs. Compare in the map of The Hague below, the detail of the Noordeinde Palace in the upper left and the outsize blob hiding the Department of Defense on the right.


View Larger Map

I wonder if sometimes it’s best–or enough–to just be stoked for the found images I’ve found as I’ve found them.

Lookin’ For Love In All Wrong Places

Last night on very short notice, I went to “Running for Cover(age), A panel discussion on arts criticism in the DC area,” organized by the Washington Project for the Arts. Here are the impetus and content of the discussion in a nutshell:
The Rubells have a Morris Lapidus-designed hotel in SW DC that they’ve been working to turn from ghetto-sketchy-by-the-freeway to edgy-hip.
A few years back, they bought a Dan Steinhilber sculpture at the WPA benefit auction, and he became suddenly/locally famous.
This year, the WPA asked Mera Rubell to select artists for its auction.
Instead of guaranteeing a big auction haul and a little more glamour by importing art world hotness, she decided to find work by visiting DMV [DC, Virginia, Maryland, it always confuses me] artist studios en masse.
The WPA received 200 applications. For studio visits. To donate art to a benefit.
[Slightly less dramatic pause/update: Adam from WPA emailed to clarify that donor artists receive half the proceeds of the work sold at the benefit auction, so it’s not a straight-up, NY-style call for donations. Duly noted.]

Continue reading “Lookin’ For Love In All Wrong Places”

Which Crystalline Minimalism?

I’m fine with somethings in the air, and zeitgeists, and influences, and inspirations, and appropriations. When I finish some of these Dutch Landscape paintings, I’ll go up to Mary Heilmann and Gerhard Richter and a dozen other folks and give them each a big ol’ hug.
But what I don’t like is thinking I’m having my own thoughts and ideas, then getting blindsided by a trend. So until I can delve a little deeper into what painter Steve DiBenedetto means here, I’m going to have to be a little pissed off with myself:

One thing led to another, and it ended up being a reference to Gothic stuff or some of this crystalline Minimalism we’re dealing with now.

Steve DiBenedetto
Breaking the ice–and the surface–with the painter.
By T.J. Carlin
[timeout.com via two coats of paint]

Whoa, Have You Ever Heard Of The DESTE Foundation??

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Just getting caught up on some blogs I lost track of the last couple of months. Regine at We Make Money Not Art has a great writeup of an amazing-sounding show in Athens at the DESTE Foundation titled, “A Guest + A Host = A Ghost,” which is a witty play on words taken from a 1953 Marcel Duchamp piece. Here’s what the DESTE Foundation is:

Each year, a show at DESTE focuses on the collection of Dakis Joannou, the industrialist who established the foundation in 1983. New acquisitions are standing side by side with older pieces, making emerge new meanings and relationships between the artworks.

What makes the show so interesting is that it was curated by artists whose works are in the collection. DESTE’s curatorial adviser is the artistic director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Massimiliano Gioni, and he put the show together with Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, and Cecilia Alemani.
Up top is an Urs Fischer hole in the floor surrounded by Kara Walkers. Below is a Cattelan hole in the floor with a little Maurizio peering out at Paul Chan’s portraits of the US Supreme Court.
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Reg has tons more photos and information. Jouannou’s collection sounds amazing, and to see it through artists’ eyes? Wow, where could you ever have something so cool, but in Greece? Unfortunately, we’ll never get to see a show this cool, because “A Guest + A Host = A Ghost” closed Dec. 31. Oh well, an art lover can dream! Thanks, Reg, for sharing such a rare and innovative artistic treasure!

Neto > Bloc > Klein

While poking around last night looking for more films and videos made by Ernesto Neto, I found this clip, a black & white making-of short for Looking for the end, an installation Neto made in the southern Paris suburb of Meudon in 2007.

For Looking for the end Neto filled Andre Bloc’s 1964 Habitacle with a construction of giant Octon-shaped elements cut out of strandboard
The look of the film–by Benjamin Seroussi, who grew up in Bloc’s house, and whose dealer/collector mother Natalie Seroussi commissioned Neto’s piece–echos very nicely with the Habitacle’s most famous on-screen appearance, in the opening scene of William Klein’s awesome 1966 debut feature, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?
Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? is a Cold War fashion satire, the freakishly beautiful lovechild of a post-protest march hookup between Funny Face and Dr Strangelove. It’s bizarre to think it came out the same year as Blow-Up.
Klein used Bloc’s post-constructivist brick pile as the stage for a ridiculous fashion show, where models inserted or bolted into creations of razor-sharp, polished metal [by Paco Rabanne, of course] paraded in front of magazine editors perched on scaffolding. In the post-show scrum of designer adulation, the Diana Vreeland character proclaims, “Je suis galvanisée!”

The opening’s on YouTube, but it turns out Criterion released Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? in 2008 as part of a 3-title box set, Eclipse Series 9 – The Delirious Fictions of William Klein.

Ernesto Neto’s Coconut Manifesto


What’s the bigger news, that the traditional shell-and-machete-based distribution system of beachfront coconut water is threatened by industrial-scale canned product? Or that Ernesto Neto is releasing catchy video manifestos for the cause on YouTube?
Água de coco Ernesto Neto [youtube via centre for the aesthetic revolution]
There’s also an Ernesto Neto listed as direção–along with Celso Vilalba and Tiago Gil–and as direção de fotografia [along with Vilalba] on this music video for “Ultimos dias,” by Brazilian heavy metal band called Kiara Rocks. What else is Ernesto hiding there on YouTube, hmm?

The Battle of Hürtgen Forest

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For the Allied forces, The Battle of Hürtgen Forest was the longest and one of the bloodiest, most pointless battles of World War II. Between October 1944 through February 1945, over 33,000 US soldiers were killed in the dense fir forest filled with minefields and fortifications.
Even when the battle turned immediately hellish, far-off Allied generals kept pressing for “victory,” which at the time basically meant preserving the pride of the US Army by not retreating, even though there was no apparent strategic value to the German territory.
At least that’s Charles Whiting’s point in The Battle of Hürtgen Forest, his harrowing-to-overwrought, GI-friendly history, published in 2000. [I bought my copy on Amazon.]
As Wikipedia points out, though, Germany suffered almost as many casualties defending the forest because it stood between the US and a potentially vital dam, and it was a staging ground for the fast-approaching Ardennes Offensive/Battle of the Bulge.
Still, none of that was known or acted upon at the time by US forces, and it certainly wasn’t communicated down the line to the soldiers pinned down for days in their nearly useless foxholes.
The photos in Whiting’s book are somewhat cursory, and when I imagine the conditions, I inevitably fall back to the episode on the wintertime siege of Bastogne from HBO’s Band of Brothers. So Dmitri Kessel’s 1951 photo for LIFE, depicting the bombed out, burned out ruins of the once-impenetrable forest kind of caught me off guard.
My great uncle Lark was a staff sergeant in Hurtgen Forest. He’d already fought in Africa, Sicily and France when he was killed on October 9th, one of the earliest casualties of the battle. When it published his obituary a month later, The Richfield Reaper (UT) said only he died “somewhere in Germany.” I’m not sure if anyone in my family has ever inquired after or discussed Uncle Lark’s experience during the last months and days of his life. But I suspect it was pretty damn grim.
Hurtgen Forest, Germany, 1951, photographed by Dmitri Kessel for LIFE Magazine [life@google]
The Battle of Hürtgen Forest [wikipedia]

Pebble Beach Pollock Case Gives Year-End Burst Of Crazy

Thanks to Find The Warhols! and the Pebble Beach Pollock, 2009 was the Year Of Sketchy Art Thefts here on greg.org. Definitely didn’t see that coming. But after a couple of intense months, both cases have grown dishearteningly cold of late.
Fortunately, Benjamin Amadio, the collector/dealer/consultant/puppy mill operator/boy toy/possible insurance scammer decided to end the year with a flourish. According to the Contra Costa Times, Amadio filed a “rambling complaint” with the Monterey County district attorney using his lawyer/boss/law school professor’s letterhead, demanding an investigation of the local sheriff for botching the theft investigation–and for persecuting a friend of his with check kiting charges or something.
The lawyer has publicly disavowed the complaint, whose “subjects swing from accusations of sex slavery to a detective’s allergy to cats.” Also, the reported insurance policy on the supposed $20-60-80 million hoard turns out to have been off-the-shelf, $500,000 renter’s insurance.
UPDATE local CBS affiliate KION has published the full text of the complaint. It’s like an un-spellchecked script for a telenovela.
But rambling incoherence and teenage psychodrama aside, Amadio’s memo does put what he calls the “Pebble Beach Art Heist” into the context of several months of wrangling with/persecution by the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office. And we get some new characters/suspects: the art driver Todd Griffiths [to whom Dr Kennaugh had given some kind of educational grant, which he canceled?], some other live-in waitresses and hangers-on, and a possible lockbox-stealing guesthouse squatter [their house was a repossessed rental.]
None of this changes the fact, though, that Amadio consistently calls prints “paintings,” or that their still-unseen Pollock is still almost certainly a fiction, fake or fraud. [thanks greg.org reader chris for the heads up.]
Rambling complaint is latest twist in Pebble Beach art heist [contracostatimes.com]

Nazis On A Plane

Here’s my 1st Annual List of The Top Two Films I Never Would’ve Expected To Watch On A Plane From London, Not Just Because They Were Overflowing Of The Kind Of Shock & Awesome Violence And Language That Used To Be Edited Out Of Airline Versions As A Matter Of Course, But Because The Teeny Tiny Subtitles Make Them Kind Of A Strain To Watch On Little Armchair Screens:
2. District 9
1. Inglorious Basterds
Which doesn’t mean they weren’t awesome. Inglorious Basterds is still my favorite sloppy, wet kiss to the movies since Cinema Paradiso.

The AMNH’s Digital Universe Atlas

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The American Museum of Natural History maintains a Digital Universe Atlas, which maps all the objects in the universe using the most current data available.
They just released The Known Universe, an animated version of the data, in conjunction with the Rubin Museum of Art [which presumably paid to have the Powers of Ten-style roundtrip through all time and space begin and end in Tibet.]
While it’s encouraging to see so much empty-looking orbital space for me to put my satelloon, this is my favorite shot: “the empty areas we have yet to map.”
Watch The Known Universe by AMNH in HD [youtube via kottke]
Download or visit the Digital Universe Atlas [haydenplanetarium.org/universe]
Previous posts on the charming concept of trying to depict everything in the universe: On The Sky Atlas And The NGS-Palomar Observatory Sky Survey

Delirious DC

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At the 1931 Beaux Arts Ball, more than a dozen New York architects came dressed as their buildings: [l to r] A. Stewart Walker [Fuller Building], Leonard Schultze [Waldorf-Astoria], Ely Jaques Kahn [Squibb Building], William Van Alen [Chrysler Building, who clearly booked his own stylist], Ralph Walker [Irving Trust Company], and Joseph Freedlander [Museum of the City of New York].
Rem Koolhaas included the Ball in his 1978 history/”retroactive manifesto,” Delirious New York.
Which was hook enough for Lali Chetwynd, whose 2006 performance piece, “Delirious!” reimagined the Beaux Arts Ball as a skyscraper cocktail party. It was ably documented by Showstudio:
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“Delirious!” was staged in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond, which comprised a giant, inflatable ovoid canopy atop a cylindrical amphitheater/event space.
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Which, of course, bears a striking resemblance to the much-discussed, little-funded inflatable balloon space Diller Scofidio + Renfro have designed for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC.
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So now we have some idea what will go down in the Hirshhorn Balloon if and when it is realized: Liz Diller will appear at a $5,000-a-table benefit, dressed as her creation, and probably looking not a little like this:
old_chum_parka.jpg
but in light blue.
Or perhaps.
Soon after “Delirious!,” Chetwynd changed her first name to Spartacus. Tom Morton discussed the implications of this move in Frieze:

Chetwynd’s adopted moniker seems designed to make us stage a mock-heroic mini-drama in our minds, in which she persuades a band of artists to stop pitting themselves against each other and instead revolt against their masters. Push this fantasy a little further (and Chetwynd’s art is nothing if not about pushing idle thoughts as far they’ll go), and we might imagine the defeated rebels refusing, pace Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus, to identify their chief, instead claiming one after the other ‘I’m Spartacus’, only to be symbolically crucified by a poor auction result or a less than complimentary review.
If this flight of fancy resembles the absurd, unexpectedly telling narratives and motifs that characterize Chetwynd’s work, then this is no mistake. In her practice the epic and the everyday speak through each other in accents of giggled hope.

Giggled hope seems to be an apt operating principle for the Hirshhorn’s Balloon of Cultural Democracy. Is it not now time for us balloon lovers, each of us, to put on our puffy down coats, cinch our hoods around our noses, and raise the defiant cry to all who dare challenge or pooh-pooh us, “I’m Liz Diller!” “I’m Liz Diller!” To the Mall!
[hoodie image via old chum’s flickr, thanks to the purely coincidentally titled blog, an ambitious project collapsing]