Review: The Pilgrim's Progress

I wrote up a review of a good show in San Francisco, Ben Peterson's "The Pilgrim's Progress," for the Shotgun Review. It's an intriguing collection of drawings -- read the full review here.

Unacceptable Art in Iraq

The above statue, a tribute the Iraqi journalist and shoe-thrower Muntazer al-Zaidi, was removed from the site of an orphanage by Iraqi police. The AP story is here.

Al-Zaidi is currently in jail, awaiting trial -- evidently, he was able to vote in the Jan. 28 elections.

Feeling Pixilated

On her blog, Becca recently posted a video of some animation experimentation she's doing, using her own face as the puppet. Which seems like a good excuse to mention the art of Pixilation -- which is the name for the technique she's using. ("Pixilation" itself, as a word, lives in the funny zone between being "pixilated," which means being drunk, and being "pixelated," which means being broken up into boxy lo-res squares).

Wikipedia has a page on Pixilation here, which is a good starting point for hunting down examples of the technique -- probably the two most famous animators who have used it are Jan Svankmajer and Norman McLaren. McLaren won an Oscar for his pixilated short "Neighbors," posted below:



"Neighbors" is actually one of my least favorite of the McLaren films I've seen -- once you know where it's going (which is pretty early into the film), the rest seems a foregone conclusion -- though there are some nice bits of whimsy strewn along the way. A smaller (but better quality) version of "Neighbors" is posted up on the National Film Board of Canada's website -- their animation section has posted up many of the animated films they produced over the years -- it's an amazing collection of work, now up for web viewing, and any enthusiast of animation owes it to themselves to spend some time browsing.

A Moment of Zen

Click on the above image for a web page that keeps getting better and better the more you scroll down.

BFA NOW!!

BFA students....here is a not to miss opportunity to show your work!

"The 2009 event is a painting and printmaking competition."

"There will be five printmaking and five painting awards given for the 2009 competition.  Over $10,000 in awards and scholarships will be give to award winners, and all 10 artists will participate in a 1-week exhibition program during the summer in New York City. 'Students will work live and work together in a workshop environment to design, construct, hang, and ope their own show.  Each award winner will be provided travel expenses, room and board, the cost of shipping artwork to the event site.  At the conclusion of the show, BFA Now will host a rooftop party with 360 degree views of New York City.' "

FOR MORE INFORMATION CHECK OUT:

www.bfanow.org

"Red Colored Elegy" Review in The Believer

The new issue of The Believer has my short review of Seiichi Hayashi's "Red Colored Elegy," an amazing comic first serialized in Japan in 1970-71, and receiving its first english translation late last year. Formally experimental and emotionally wise, it's easily one of the best comics I've read in the last few years.

The first two paragraphs of the review are posted online - for the whole thing you need to hit the magazine stands.

MARTIN KIPPENBERGER at the MOCA, Los Angeles

MOCA, Los Angeles.

Martin Kippenberger, The Problem Perspective

REJUVENATING, COLORFUL, ENERGETIC AND SKETCH-TASTIC!!

Energetic, colorful and massive body of work by an artist whose career spanned an impressive but quick 20 years. The work ranges from simple line drawings, large-scale paintings both representational and abstract, to large installations while containing a seriously wide range of subject matter using humor, satire, historical reference, personal experience, lots of self reference,  and all-around acute technical craftsmanship.

The variety of medium, subject matter, and the overall expansive number of amazing works is quite refreshing.  

The greatest part of the exhibition (besides ALL OF THE COLOR....for a color junkie it was seriously satisfying) were the arrangement of hundreds of sketches running through each exhibition room Kippenberger would create at different hotels he would stay at.  Each of the pieces of paper the drawings were composed on still contained each Hotel's Monogram!  The range of subject matter and the technical skill of the "sketches" is incredible, as you could actually see the wheels spinning in this man's head right there on paper.  I have to admit it kicked me in the butt a bit to begin sketching again, and reminded me of the possibility, exercise, and beauty simple (or in this case not so simple) sketching holds!  So my mixed media class is going to be in for some serious sketching exercising this upcoming semester!!! wooohoooo!!

Kitt & Pinter

I've been to discombobulated to keep up posting over the break, but I couldn't let the deaths of Eartha Kitt and Harold Pinter pass without at least a couple links.

Here are a couple choice Kitt performances (the first, "I Want To Be Evil," was the tune that made me fall for her -- the second, "Uska Dara" is in Turkish):





And here's the first segment of a TV version of Pinter's play "The Collection," starring a quartet of terrific actors: Helen Mirren, Malcolm McDowell, Laurence Olivier and Alan Bates (you can get to the other parts if you click through to youtube):

Exhibits of note in San Francisco

I will be making a trip to S.F. over this winter break. Here are a few exhibits or venues of note that will receive my attention. The third image is a "light on paper" piece by Josephine Taylor titled Me Drinking Milk and Saliva at Catherine Clark (which is now in a new location on Minna St.). The Yerba Buena Center For the Arts has an exhibit that at least caught my attention. It is titled The Gatherers: Greening Our Urban Spheres. It could be awful or engaging-?
The Walter and McBean Gallery on the San Francisco Art Institute campus has an exhibit as well that I will check into. (See image with shovels- click for link to description.)

j.

Lo-fi and Proud

Melissa Swanson, a student, has completed a couple shots for a "trailer" for an animated film (an animated film she doesn't intend to actually complete). She's using a melange of techniques -- the backgrounds are woodcut prints, some of the animation is done in Flash and then printed out on transparencies, and then she's shooting the transparencies against the backgrounds with a digital camera -- then compiling the shots with QuickTime. She's also started using paper cut-outs, and painting on the transparencies. You can sometimes see light reflections on the transparencies -- Melissa's been wondering if that's problematic, or if it actually adds something worthwhile. I don't think she intended the shots to look so lo-fi, but she seems to be developing an affection for its lo-fi qualities.

It reminded me of some animation I'd seen by Brent Green -- he does stop-motion animation, drawing on transparencies whose edges you can clearly see -- sometimes the light flares along their edges to pleasing effect. He doesn't try to hide the seams of his process at all, and the layers of lo-fi attack accrete into a genuine aesthetic. Here are some excerpts of his short "Hadacol Christmas" -- I particularly love the scene at the end of the clip, where Santa's sleigh is held to the sky with flickering scotch tape, and a slurry of blurred snow makes the night look like a pulled-apart cotton-ball:



The full animated short can be found on youtube in two parts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRefdcvqDfw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dcQtpSThEc&feature=related

More films can be found on his website, and he also has a DVD of his films for sale.