There’s not much I can say about Basil Wolverton that others haven’t said better and earlier. You may recognize his work from Mad Magazine, as I did, or perhaps from the work of the many artists he inspired.
I just happened across the poster below, which I love, and which generated this post. Click on it for a full-size image:
Wow — a group of artists in Detroit (where the foreclosure crisis is at its worst) are working to enclose a house completely in ice.
When you talk about “frozen” assets, you’re talking about money and possessions that you can’t use. This makes a legal and economic term absolutely physically real.
They’re getting positive reactions from the neighbourhood, as this video makes clear:
Check out the Ice House Detroit blog here.
Now I don’t know how to feel about the possibility of an economic meltdown.
I love the repetitive assembly/disassembly of this clockwork-driven exploding frame. Labled “Prototype 2″, it appears to be a work in progress (here’s Prototype 1) and I can’t wait to see what the final outcome is.
Personally, I’d like to see it as a clock, moving in slow motion, with pieces exploding during the hectic day and then settling down for a quiet night’s sleep (or vice versa, if you wanted to make a statement about nightlife or dreams or something).
(
This art project made me laugh with recognition. Not only does it capture busy-work essence of most minimum-wage jobs, it really makes the point of how low-paying they are:
The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 5.04 seconds, for $7.15 an hour (NY state minimum wage). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine’s mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and pennies are stored in a plexiglas box.
Now, some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations:
Poverty activists where I am have long been agitating for a $10/hour minimum wage. That would be 1,000 pennies per hour. But, because there are 3,600 seconds in every hour, that’s still only a penny every 3.6 seconds. Try cranking that crank for a minute and a half, and I’ll bet it seems like the longest minute a a half of your life. Also, congratulations, you’ll have earned a whole quarter.
(via Boingboing)
From BuckinghamStudio.com:
David Buckingham roams the windblown alleys, abandoned factories, gritty industrial areas, dodgy neighborhoods, and low deserts of Southern California in search of the cast away, the discarded, the forgotten: old 55-gallon barrels, wheelbarrows, tool boxes, road signs, tractor parts, car doors, gas cans, etc. These battered relics are carted to a dusty studio in downtown Los Angeles where they are muscled into works of art with a bewildering array of power tools and sheer force of will. All colors are original as found; David Buckingham is no painter.
I think I like “Charlie Don’t Surf” — one of a selection of movie quotes that he’s done. But there are loads of others.
He’s even got a video, if you poke around a bit.
Temporary.cc sounds like an html version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Basically, it’s a webpage that, with each unique visitor, deletes a bit of itself. When I visited, it was about 3/4 malformed code, with some chunky blocks of colour at the very bottom. As more and more people visit, it will eventually disappear entirely.
But, the questions that it raises live on. Am I partially responsible for the demise of this webpage? Should I feel guilty? Is it really a static webpage at all? Or should it be more properly thought-of as a slow-motion animation, where you can only see one frame at a time, and which requires collaboration to advance.
The designers say:
These deletions change the way browsers understand the website’s code and create a unique (de)generative piece after each new user. Because each unique visit produces a new composition through self-destruction, Temporary.cc can never be truly indexed, as any subsequent act of viewing could irreparably modifiy it.
Eventually, like tangible media, Temporary.cc will fall apart entirely, becoming a blank white website. Its existence will be remembered only by those who saw or heard about it.
Like many people, I often eschew the humble penny. I have even argued for getting rid of it, in the past. The penny above, for example, is pretty unremarkable.
Except, that is, for the fact that it was made by artist Jack Daws out of solid 18K gold. They’re plated with copper so that they look and feel like regular pennies; however, they weight a little heavier, and the casting process made them a tiny bit smaller than a normal penny.
When he cast the gold pennies, in early 2007, he used about $100 worth of gold. Of course, the price of gold has skyrocketed since then, so the pure metal value of the “penny” might be several hundred dollars by now.
As pieces of art, Daws was selling the one-cent pieces for $1,000.
But then he decided to take it one step further. Armed with a golden penny and a handful of regular money, Daws went to LAX in March, 2007 — and spent it. From the New York Times:
He carefully put the counterfeit penny, dated 1970, down on the counter, counted out enough change to pay $11.90 for a Hustler magazine and left. He got a cup of coffee and sat down on a seat with the newsstand in sight, and watched for an hour wondering if any of the travelers had walked off with his golden penny and where it would end up at the end of the day.
It could have ended up forgotten in the bottom of a drawer, or melted down at a bank, or just lost or forgotten. But maybe it ended up in circulation, with dozens, perhaps hundreds of hands touching it, perceiving it as nearly worthless, and then passing on hundreds of dollars worth of gold to another stranger.
Would he ever know?
Well, a couple of weeks ago, a graphic designer in Brooklyn tracked his phone number down and left him a voice mail: “I think I found your gold penny.” From the Times story again:
Late this summer, when [Jessica] Reed was paying for groceries at the C-Town supermarket in Greenpoint [Brooklyn], she noticed the penny because the gold color had started to peek through. A fan of unusual coins, she slipped it back into her change purse and tucked it into the recesses of her mind.
Then recently, while doing research about a 1924 Mercury-head dime, she remembered the penny and typed “gold penny” into Google, which returned information on science experiments to give a penny a gold color. She added “1970” and found an item about … Mr. Daws.
She’s thinking about having it framed, which I think would make an awesome piece of art, along with a great conversation piece.
I’m certainly never going to look at a penny the same way again.
In case you’re interested, the gallery page (with original news release about the penny being placed into circulation and some other art pieces) is here. And I’m pretty sure that the graphic designer who found it, Jessica Reed, is the person being profiled here, and that she runs an unusual blog called “Pictures of Cake.” As far as I can tell, she hasn’t posted about the penny yet. Maybe she’ll bake about it.
Commissioned by the Liverpool Bienniel, this art installation was created by Richard Wilson, and is called Turning the Place Over.
From the description on the Liverpool Bienniel website:
Turning the Place Over consists of an 8 metres diameter ovoid cut from the façade of a building in Liverpool city centre and made to oscillate in three dimensions. The revolving façade rests on a specially designed giant rotator, usually used in the shipping and nuclear industries, and acts as a huge opening and closing ‘window’, offering recurrent glimpses of the interior during its constant cycle during daylight hours.
The construction programme started in February 2007 and involved the careful deconstruction of the façade across three floors of the building, which was then reconstructed and fixed to the enormous pivot installed at the heart of the building. This astonishing feat of engineering is stunning audiences on many levels. Disturbing and disorientating from a distance, from close-up passers-by have a thrilling experience as the building rotates above them.
I can imagine this would be a pretty incredible sight to see in person. I was sitting here in awe just watching it on my computer.
Admittedly, I don’t know much about conceptual art pieces like this (or much about art in general), so I don’t really understand the why’s of making something like this, but it sure looks cool.
(via Today and Tomorrow)
Excellent blog that I’ll be checking regularly, called Covered. It’s a series of classic comic book covers, each presented as an original (like the 1987 Uncanny X-Men, above) as well as reinterpreted by a different artist (such as Aaron Conley’s take, below). Some of the covers are similar, others are wildly different — all are worth a view.
Artist Erika Simmons is a Georgia-based artist who, among other things, unspools the magnetic tape inside cassettes and turns them into portraits of musicians. I was struck by the Clash one, above, but she’s also got fantastic ones of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and Michael Jackson.
One of her most recent pieces is a portrait of The Dude made out of a Big Lebowski VHS tape.
I read a cool interview with her at Go Media Zine, where she explains a little about how she creates this art (draw the portrait in glue, cut the tape as little as possible) as well as the inspiration:
The cassette tape series came out of a desire to explore a theme of recursion… tangled hierarchy. Where is the music? On the cassette tape? In the head of the musician portrayed? Where does one begin and the other end? But you don’t have to look at it in that way to enjoy it. I tried to make something fun and easy-to-understand, but with deeper things to think about, if you so choose.
She’s got a website of her own, but it links to her Flickr page for her full portfolio. There’s also an online store, if you’re interested in owning an original (MJ will set you back $2,000 but she doesn’t do prints, so this is one of a kind).
I love photography, and I love music. It would be hard to say which I love more, or if it’s even possible to pick one over the other.
Laurie Scavo seems to have the same passions that I do, and instead of picking one, she has melded the two together in a new artistic project.
Her website, Stolen Lyric, is a series of photographs with a line of a song imposed over the image. She also includes the song and artist that the lyric is from. The photos and the song can look kind of random, but at other times speak to each other, enhancing the other in a way.
I’m partial to her latest image:
The line is from a great Pete Yorn song, Strange Condition. Here it is:
Scavo says on the site that she will do commissioned work, and that the images are made to fit into a record frame (a design style that Grant is partial to).
(via music blog I Am Fuel, You Are Friends)
Sorry about the misleading title — this post will not actually teach you how to make a gun from scratch. But the video that I’m linking to here will show you brief story about a craftsman who does just that — and who sells his creations for £38,500 or more.
It’s a neat glimpse at a job that I’ve never really thought of — and if I did, I wold have through that it was long-since outsourced to a factory. But I guess just like there are hand-tailored suits, if you’re rich enough, you don’t want an off-the-rack gun.
These are some serious creations, too. Worth a watch.
But even if you don’t watch the video (what, you don’t have two freaking minutes?) please be sure that you don’t miss the comment thread!
Metafilter points me to a Flickr set of paintings done by one Lea F McCarty. Once deputized to Wyatt Earp, McCarty is kind of a bad painter, but there’s something about the amateurish nature that lends it some authenticity. In 1959, he collected the paintings in a book called “The Gunfighters,” and you can click through all the text and painting here.
I kind of liked “Mysterious Dave Mather“:
Dave had become known as a killer lawman, when a preacher came to town and pitched his tent and was holding a sawdust revival. Dave drifted into the meeting one night, a little liquored up and sat down to listen. The skypilot directed his religion at Dave, saying he would gladly die to save this man who had sent seven men to Hell. Dave resented the remark, rose to his feet with a gun in either hand. The tent became vacant in a few seconds as people scattered, and one blast from Dave’s gun sent the parson under the canvas out into the night. The next morning the tent had been struck and a few kids were searching the sawdust circle looking for lost coins.
Apparently, says McCarty he then went up to Canada and joined the RCMP.
Wikipedia (where you can compare the painting to an actual photo) isn’t so sure. The article on Mather offers a few contradictory claims as to what ended up happening to him, and manages to tack down a nice collection of links, including a genealogy page.
Most likely, he died in Texas and was dumped on the railroad tracks. But The Weekly World News claims he was abducted by aliens. Damn, I miss that publication.
Seems like I’ve got a journalism theme going on here. Well, I won’t fight it. Here’s something I ran across the other day: A respected Hebrew-language newspaper in Israel decided to get other writers, besides professional journalists, involved in writing and reporting the news of the day (for one day — as an experiment). It was a special edition that also helped to honour Israel’s annual Hebrew Book Week.
The results, although I don’t know if they would work on a day-to-day basis, I found exceedingly interesting. When you’re up to your eyeballs in the news every single day, like I am, it’s difficult to remember what a newspaper looks like to an average, casual reader. Here’s how some of what Israel’s authors and poets see the news:
Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: “Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….” The TV review by Eshkol Nevo opened with these words: “I didn’t watch TV yesterday.” And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled “Summer Sonnet.” (“Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons’ pencil case.”) News junkies might call this a postmodern farce, but considering that the stock market won’t be soaring anytime soon, and that “hot” is really the only weather forecast there is during Israeli summers, who’s to say these articles aren’t factual?
Not everything was fanciful, though. Some respected novelists wrote feature-style pieces that drew on their prose experience to create soaring, touching, human-interest pieces. This is something that journalists are often told to do, but rarely have the training to do.
Anyone looking for the original pieces can probably find them at the Haaretz website, but I hope you speak Hebrew! Anyway, it’s worth a visit to see how a right-to-left language website is laid out nearly in a mirror image from what I’m used to.
There’s a post over at Prison Photography (who knew?) showing images taken by imprisoned girls in Washington State, using a pinhole camera.
It was a project by photographer Steve Davis, who took his own photos of the girls. There was a strict policy on not capturing faces, that both Steve and the girls had to follow.
The result are truly eerie, and capture the mental exhaustion from isolation.
(I would credit the photos, but there was no indication of who exactly took them on the site)
The author of the blog, Pete Brook, then has an interesting take on the problem of clichés that photographers face when taking prison photos that these girls just don’t have to worry about because they’re the ones in prison.