What did I do over Thanksgiving break?

Aside from stuffing my face, I was very impressed with the cinematic quality and fantastic graphics of Call of Duty: Black Ops. I expect things should return to normal soon, however.

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Home is Where Thanksgiving Is

Rental Property, Ann Toebbe

 A least for the day. Colorful interior scenes by Ann Toebbe. May your Thanksgiving be happy wherever you celebrate it.

The Ex-Wife's Pies and Things, Ann Toebbe

Words to Live By: Amos Kennedy at the Print Center

Three Untitled Works, Amos Kennedy, 2007

Up at the Print Center in Philly as part of their Pulling from History: Letterpress exhibition.

Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956–1974 at the PMA

Installation shot of the early mirror painting

It started with a mirror painting, like one of those above, when I first became enchanted with Michelangelo Pistoletto's work. This retrospective of his career, currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through January 16, argues for an appreciation of the artist's varied and influential career on the whole, and quite successfully. The early works above remain my favorites of the artist: scenes from life featuring Pistolletos' friends in typical poses and then unmoored from their surroundings by being placed on a mirror.

Early painting, self portrait

A rare early painting attempts the same effect: to take a familiar subject, in this case himself, and while keeping the trappings of the present day with suits, cigarettes, or what not, utterly remove from any situation or outside realty by a glowing flat background. Its a way of looking for the eternal in the everyday.

 

Here you can see the detailed shading on this man's face compared to the shiny surface of the mirror. Pistolleto, working from photographs, would cut silhouettes out of tissue paper and paint then very delicately before affixing them to the mirrors he polished.  

Me, with Three Girls on a Balcony

The tissue he painted on has not always aged well, like the spots across the middle girl's back that you can see here. I love how looking at these mirror paintings is also interacting with them and taking a place in the tableau.

Pistolleto began to take the photographs as guides, for example coloring in this girl's skirt a bright red. 

  

But they aren't all mirror paintings. Above, next to another mirror painting, is one of Pistolleto's plexiglass works. Like with the mirror paintings, he tries to find the essence of the thing. Between two sheets of plexiglass, a trimmed photograph of an electrical plug rests. It flirts with materiality even as it remains a flat image.

Ogetti in menu installation view, 1960s

Pistoletto also created sculptures that he called Ogetti in menu, or minus objects, because they were made from parts of a whole. Sometimes Pistolleto used these in his growing performance art that was widely influential, as he did some of the rag works below.

Venus in Rags

Stracci (rags) developed along with Pistoletto's performance art in the late 1960s. Venus in Rags was originally used as part of a performance. The rags were those he had used to polish his mirror -- actually stainless steel -- paintings. Arte povera, much?

 Later he continued to create his mirror paintings, but changed how he created the image. Switiching to silkscreen, Pistoletto was able to create bright, photo-realistic images. In many of them a darker element, not present in the early portraits, appears like the jail bars above or the chain face to the left saying "Periculo de morte" (Danger of Death).

The worst painting I have ever seen

 

The Source of Life, Leon Frederic, 1890

The Belgian Symbolist artist created paintings, like this mystical work, that explored the cycle of life, and here he must have reached his nadir. When I saw this hanging on the walls at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I burst out laughing. Keep in mind that the painting is at least 5 feet tall, and how overwhelming all these life-sized naked kitsch babies are when they are looming over you.

Sayings about taste keep running through my head now. But its not just me--the family who walked into the gallery after me also started laughing when they saw it.

Good Ol' Ben

Ben Franklin was just about everywhere in Philly, but I think this is my favorite representation of him, on a sticker on a lamppost.

Isaac Tin Wei Lin at The Print Center, Philadelphia

Speaking of successful installations, One of Us by Philadelphia artist Isaac Tin Wei Lin is a site-specific installation up at The Print Center that I had a chance to see over my visit to Philadelphia this weekend. The exhibition fills the upper gallery with 2- and 3- dimensional printed and painted works inspired by Islamic calligraphy, cartoons, and current events.

3-D glasses definitely added to the Magic Eye sense of optical illusion created by the bright, small patterns covering the walls. The artist created over 600 screen prints to cover the walls and floor. Between that and being able to walk through the painted cat cutouts, I really enjoyed the installation as a whole, and how well it was constructed to be appreciated from all angles. I also like the glasses because they make me look cool.

I'm surprised at how well the different elements worked together, as what should have been an epileptic cacophony became a really fun, explorative installation that worked--with or without 3-D glasses.

Up through November 20 if you happen to be in the area. I actually saw lots of great art there this weekend, which I'm going to try to write about including the awesome Michelangelo Pistoletti at the PMA.

Pat Steir's Nearly Endless Line at Sue Scott Gallery

Installation Shot--does not do it justice...

As I noted above, these photographs hardly due justice to the experience of walking through Steir's installation at the Sue Scott Gallery. The Nearly Endless Line manages to create an energy that is hard to capture without being able to sense all the surfaces of the darkened rooms. There are just two rooms of average size but they seem expansive if not endless. It feels like walking through an Abstract Expressionist painting--a neat experience--and a much warmer one than works by some of her contemporaries like Sol LeWitt.

Another almost useless installation shot

Up close: thin red grid

While the dark lighting smacks a bit of stagecraft, this piece raised the bar for how I want installations to affect me. The precise red grid on the dark background shows off the choas and energy of the white line. Up at the Sue Scott Gallery through January 9th if you want a surprisingly trippy, simple yet immersible art experience.

COMVIDEO at apexart

"Commercials are one of the most interesting love children of capitalism and ego, trying to seduce the viewer with a trite marketing equation, formulated to have money ejaculate from your less than aroused pocket."

Last night I went to the opening of COMVIDEO at apexart, and took a stance in front on one of the small fuzzy TVs to see what inventive interactions people could come up with when challenged to interact with a commercial. It was a lot of fun, and the results were as varied as you might expect--all challenging, provocative, and sometimes pretty damn funny.

Costume Party's Over, ID #80

However, it was entirely unnecessary. All 124 60-second video manipulations of broadcast commercials are also available online, and open to a popular vote through January 15. The top video gets $2,000, and the top five videos will be shown on a public screen in Manhattan.

Some of my favorites:

• ID# 47
  mcfat 
• ID# 98
  Kitty Litter Revolution 
• ID# 101
  What Should Tiger Do?  
• ID# 109
  The Starburst Shuffle

But here is my plan for world domination: what if we could hack the TV networks and play these commericals instead of the real ones? And while we are at put the staff of The Onion in charge of news broadcasting for a day? Now that's an intervention that would kep me glued to the screen. 

Edward Horsford's Popped Balloons

These photographs capture the second after a balloon bursts. The water is still seemingly held in the hands; the kind of thing that happens to fast to ever really be seen There's so much energy in these simple, but hard to capture shots. I just wish my science classes had used images like this to discuss matter and energy.

Edward Horsford is a British designer and photographer. More image on Flickr and there's a great interview with the photographer here, in which he explains a little bit about how he gets these shots.
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NY Art Book Fair

This weekend was the 5th annual NY Art Book Fair over at MoMA's PS1. I duly wrapped myself up and walked over the Pulaski bridge to check it out--only to find that the walk was the easy part. Making my way through crowded hallways and rooms was the less easy part.

Over 200 booths were set up with everything from books on artists to artist's books to T-shirt to buttons. There was so many clever, funny and well-made things there that I got overwhelmed. I left without even a button.

Cinders Gallery's booth

I think I should just accept the fact the art fairs, or any attempt to stuff a lot of things into one show, does not work well with me. I felt a bit like I was at a really cool mall, got pretty hot, and left without feeling like I was able to appreciate one nifty, neat, or beautiful thing. On top of that, my boyfriend lost the llama hat with ear flaps that I bought in Peru. So its fair to say this awesomely successful fair was, for me, a bust. Props to everyone else involved though.

Tauba Auerbach paper sculpture

Let me know if you've seen my llama hat.

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Discount for Art Ravels Readers * Make Your Own Variation

The folks over at ArtWeLove must have a lotta love to share, because the generously offered a discount on Seth Carne's iheart variation series that I wrote about last week.

• To use, enter code ArtsRavel10 in the "Discount Code" field of the shopping cart.
• It is valid for 10% off any or all print in Seth Indigo Carnes' iheart variation series and in whichever size you prefer through the end of the year (Dec 31, 2010).

But you should also know that all the ArtWeLove prints are affordable without the discount, in case you eye has a tendency to wander as mine has.

Baldessari Redux: Boring Art

 More, if you can stand it, on Youtube here.

Doing Dumb Stuff?

Stills from video "I will not make any more boring art", in which Baldessari writes that phrase repetetively

 "John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad. His style is familiar and recognizable, wry and dry: It usually incorporates a photo or grid of pictures, often black-and-white and grainy, with the vibe of a seventies issue of Artforum; text of some kind; a found object placed casually; a video or maybe a newspaper clipping or some other element taken from popular culture. The approach is hugely influential, setting the precedent for interesting artists like Cindy Sherman and David Salle. In a sense, Baldessari imagined a large circular room with a hundred entrances and exits. Thousands of artists could go through, and did. After a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective, you’ll see that Baldessari’s children have overrun Chelsea.

And that’s the problem. Even a former student like Salle admits that “at least three generations of artists” doing “dumb stuff … is largely John’s fault.” Baldessari’s interesting niche bewitched too many people, creating a hackneyed academy of smarty-pants work that addresses the same issues in the same ways, over and over, just the way Baldessari and others of his generation did 40 years ago."

 -Great article on John Baldessari (ostensibly inspired by the new exhibition at the Met) by Jerry Saltz

True?

Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell, John Baldessari

That time of year

Wind from the Sea, Andrew Wyeth

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth from the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

-That time of year thou mayst in me behold, William Shakespeare

Turkey Pond, Andrew Wyeth

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
---Those dying generations---at their song
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick...

 

-Sailing to Byzantium, William Butler Yeats

Photos from the Halloween Parade

It's close to midnight and something evil's lurking in the dark
Under the moonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart
You try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it
You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes
You're paralyzed

'Cause this is thriller, thriller night

And no one's gonna save you from the beast about strike
You know it's thriller, thriller night

You're fighting for your life inside a killer, thriller tonight

 

 

 

 

There were some creative costumes out there, ranging from scary to creative to conceptual art. And then there were the Lady Gaga's. Quite a few Lady Gaga's.

 

 

The Halloween Parade NYC

Pictures to come. Suffice it to say, always inventive, always amazing. Halloween might be one of my favorite holidays in New York.