Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Monday, February 27, 2012
So I should probably explain why I have grouped the following images together. I am not really sure. This first image really appeals to me because I love the physicality that comes across in the photo. This roller is really illustrating the feeling of moving ink over glass in preparation for making a print. I would love to be able to do a multi-colored print like this with only a single registration.
This close up of the face here seems in harsh contrast to the painting I have by Gerhardt Richter bellow. This picture of his painting doesn't do it justice at all. I highly recommend you go see it in person on the third or second floor of the modern wing at the art institute. sorry I am forgetting at the moment. I am stunned by the image every time I see it.
it is magic!
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Live Performance at Trigram Aoyama Tokyo "ontama 10th" 10/9/2011 from Yousuke Fuyama on Vimeo.
Interactive Robotic Painting Machine (2011) from benjamin grosser on Vimeo.
interactive Robotic Painting Machine by Benjamin Grosser
Saturday, December 24, 2011
diy: marbling paper
modern method described briefly: acrylic paint is dropped onto the surface of an aqueous solution of carrageenan (a polysaccharide extracted from seaweed) and manipulated to create a pattern. Next, paper coated with alum (the mordant) is laid onto the surface to transform the pattern. remember to set the paper on an angled board after and rinse with water 
Sunday, October 9, 2011
It's now roughly 30 years since the artist Cindy Sherman first put on makeup and a wig, arranged herself into some B-movie poses in B-movie settings and pointed her face toward her own camera to ask the questions: So what's real here? Is this a picture of me? Or a picture of the role I've taken on? And when we're talking about pictures, what exactly do we mean by real?
As it turned out, a lot of artists had begun to ask the same questions around that time. Three decades later, pictures constructed for the camera--staged photographs--have become a standard art-world practice. And we're so accustomed now to Photoshopped realities that we've let go, for good, of our assumption that pictures don't lie. Which means we've come to that moment when it's time to sort seriously through the photographers who work this way and see what we think. Has all this stagecraft left behind much worth seeing?
This impulse to take stock is one reason why the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City is opening a retrospective this week devoted to Jeff Wall, a Canadian artist who started making staged pictures around the same time as Sherman. (The Wall show continues at MOMA through May 14, then travels to Chicago and San Francisco.) In 1977, when he was 31 and teaching art history and studio practice in his hometown of Vancouver, Wall took his family on a trip to Europe, where he spent a lot of time looking at the old masters in the Prado. His hours with Velázquez, Zurbarán and Goya got him thinking. Was it still possible, in the 20th century, to make representational art with anything like the same power? He happened to be traveling by bus at the time and at each terminal his attention was grabbed by those backlit light boxes that display ads. A light came on in his head.
Today Wall is famous for making large, sometimes very large, transparencies. These are mounted in steel light boxes about a foot thick that are lit from within by scores of white fluorescent tubes, so that the pictures glow like a movie screen. Although he's also done some "straight" photography, mainly landscapes, most of Wall's photos are staged. He's made social commentary, deadpan domestic interiors and still-life paradoxes like Staining bench, furniture manufacturer's, Vancouver, a dazzling shot of a densely spattered work space that's both a genuine document of a workplace--O.K., depending on what we mean by genuine--and a fierce photographic equivalent of a Jackson Pollock drip painting.
Wall arrived at photography by way of conceptual art, and some of his work has the feel of small conceptual points inflated to large dimensions. But with the right pictures, the scale lends power and mystery. Dead Troops Talk is a fantasy of Russian soldiers massacred in Afghanistan in 1986 who have come back to life on the gray rocky roadway where they died. In an enormous tableau--the picture is 7 1/2 ft. tall and almost 14 ft. wide--they awaken to discover their own mangled flesh in shock, grief, sleepy-eyed indifference and also wild-eyed amusement.
The most surprising turn that Wall's career has taken started in the mid-1990s, when he produced the first of three painstakingly constructed illustrations of passages from literature. Artists have been imagining scenes from books for centuries, but modernism expelled narrative from art. Storytelling was for writers. Pictures were supposed to do things only pictures could do, which meant that from about the time of Manet onward even representational painting, unless it was by Norman Rockwell, featured very ambiguous scenes. Clear anecdote got you laughed out of the art-history books.
Wall's solution to that problem seems to be to choose the most enigmatic moment from the story, a moment when it doesn't quite tell its story. So his picture After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue is a bristling construction based on the opening pages of Ellison's novel, in which the narrator, a black man, speaks to us from a room hung with hundreds of lightbulbs. He keeps those turned on as an antidote to the "invisibility" forced on him every day by the white society that is outside his door. But the man turns his back to us. We see the massive machinery of his self-disclosure, but we still do not really see him.
Wall talks freely about his debt to filmmaking, his desire to achieve the beguilements of cinema. (One day someone will have to attempt a history of cinema-envy in the arts.) Some of the photographers who make staged images have virtually become directors. The American artist Gregory Crewdson operates like a small studio. He conceives his pictures, casts them and then has complicated sets constructed and lit by large crews. Klieg lights and fog machines are involved. Like a good director, he doesn't even always get behind the camera himself. He's directing--somebody else can click the shutter.
Crewdson returns again and again to the same territory, a scene from the suburbs or from rural America invaded by its desires and anxieties. A man attempts to lay lawn turf across the road in front of his house. A woman kneels in a flower garden that has sprung up in her kitchen. It's no surprise that he loves David Lynch. To get into Crewdson's perennial frame of mind, Lynch's Blue Velvet is recommended viewing. It's also not surprising that his father was a psychoanalyst, because Crewdson has the good Freudian's obsession with fetishes. Circles, birds, stains and windows figure repeatedly and mysteriously in his pictures. Fetishes were an obsession for Alfred Hitchcock too.
Crewdson has made some fascinating pictures, enigmatic scenes of puzzlement, regret and frustration. But for an artist, an infatuation with movies can be a tricky thing. He made a wrong turn with the Dream House series he worked on from 1998 to 2002, where for the first time he recruited famous faces to play his people. No doubt getting Gwyneth Paltrow and Philip Seymour Hoffman to appear in your photographs brings you enhanced market cred. Put Julianne Moore in front of your camera, and you're practically doing a Vanity Fair shoot. Let's assume that Crewdson also hoped that the pre-established power of movie stars over our imaginings would somehow act as a force multiplier for the private fantasies they act out in his pictures.
But that's exactly where he got it wrong. When his photographs work they bid us into a realm of privacy, inwardness and even shame. To sustain that mood requires them to shut out the banalities of the outside world. And what's more banal than celebrity? Yes, yes, we've heard, stardom is a fantasy too, but it's the type that steamrollers every more intimate kind. Anybody who thinks that the red carpet is the royal road to the unconscious has lost his bearings. Crewdson's pictures stop working the minute you find yourself wondering about the wrap party.
But there it is. At its weakest, staged photography succumbs to the temptation to imitate the staged worlds we see every day in movies and advertising. It adopts their shopworn postures in the hope of pushing our most familiar buttons. This happens in the work of the collective of four Russian artists who operate under the name AES&F. Their pictures of kids flourishing heavy weaponry in futuristic wastelands count too much on our response to the poses of fashion photography. Maybe you can arrive at some sleek, sexy images that way. But at that point, you're not making conceptual art. You're trying out for the next Prada campaign.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1592850,00.html#ixzz1aKoTFyTa
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1592850,00.html#ixzz1aKoOZUtt
As it turned out, a lot of artists had begun to ask the same questions around that time. Three decades later, pictures constructed for the camera--staged photographs--have become a standard art-world practice. And we're so accustomed now to Photoshopped realities that we've let go, for good, of our assumption that pictures don't lie. Which means we've come to that moment when it's time to sort seriously through the photographers who work this way and see what we think. Has all this stagecraft left behind much worth seeing?
This impulse to take stock is one reason why the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City is opening a retrospective this week devoted to Jeff Wall, a Canadian artist who started making staged pictures around the same time as Sherman. (The Wall show continues at MOMA through May 14, then travels to Chicago and San Francisco.) In 1977, when he was 31 and teaching art history and studio practice in his hometown of Vancouver, Wall took his family on a trip to Europe, where he spent a lot of time looking at the old masters in the Prado. His hours with Velázquez, Zurbarán and Goya got him thinking. Was it still possible, in the 20th century, to make representational art with anything like the same power? He happened to be traveling by bus at the time and at each terminal his attention was grabbed by those backlit light boxes that display ads. A light came on in his head.
Today Wall is famous for making large, sometimes very large, transparencies. These are mounted in steel light boxes about a foot thick that are lit from within by scores of white fluorescent tubes, so that the pictures glow like a movie screen. Although he's also done some "straight" photography, mainly landscapes, most of Wall's photos are staged. He's made social commentary, deadpan domestic interiors and still-life paradoxes like Staining bench, furniture manufacturer's, Vancouver, a dazzling shot of a densely spattered work space that's both a genuine document of a workplace--O.K., depending on what we mean by genuine--and a fierce photographic equivalent of a Jackson Pollock drip painting.
Wall arrived at photography by way of conceptual art, and some of his work has the feel of small conceptual points inflated to large dimensions. But with the right pictures, the scale lends power and mystery. Dead Troops Talk is a fantasy of Russian soldiers massacred in Afghanistan in 1986 who have come back to life on the gray rocky roadway where they died. In an enormous tableau--the picture is 7 1/2 ft. tall and almost 14 ft. wide--they awaken to discover their own mangled flesh in shock, grief, sleepy-eyed indifference and also wild-eyed amusement.
The most surprising turn that Wall's career has taken started in the mid-1990s, when he produced the first of three painstakingly constructed illustrations of passages from literature. Artists have been imagining scenes from books for centuries, but modernism expelled narrative from art. Storytelling was for writers. Pictures were supposed to do things only pictures could do, which meant that from about the time of Manet onward even representational painting, unless it was by Norman Rockwell, featured very ambiguous scenes. Clear anecdote got you laughed out of the art-history books.
Wall's solution to that problem seems to be to choose the most enigmatic moment from the story, a moment when it doesn't quite tell its story. So his picture After "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue is a bristling construction based on the opening pages of Ellison's novel, in which the narrator, a black man, speaks to us from a room hung with hundreds of lightbulbs. He keeps those turned on as an antidote to the "invisibility" forced on him every day by the white society that is outside his door. But the man turns his back to us. We see the massive machinery of his self-disclosure, but we still do not really see him.
Wall talks freely about his debt to filmmaking, his desire to achieve the beguilements of cinema. (One day someone will have to attempt a history of cinema-envy in the arts.) Some of the photographers who make staged images have virtually become directors. The American artist Gregory Crewdson operates like a small studio. He conceives his pictures, casts them and then has complicated sets constructed and lit by large crews. Klieg lights and fog machines are involved. Like a good director, he doesn't even always get behind the camera himself. He's directing--somebody else can click the shutter.
Crewdson returns again and again to the same territory, a scene from the suburbs or from rural America invaded by its desires and anxieties. A man attempts to lay lawn turf across the road in front of his house. A woman kneels in a flower garden that has sprung up in her kitchen. It's no surprise that he loves David Lynch. To get into Crewdson's perennial frame of mind, Lynch's Blue Velvet is recommended viewing. It's also not surprising that his father was a psychoanalyst, because Crewdson has the good Freudian's obsession with fetishes. Circles, birds, stains and windows figure repeatedly and mysteriously in his pictures. Fetishes were an obsession for Alfred Hitchcock too.
Crewdson has made some fascinating pictures, enigmatic scenes of puzzlement, regret and frustration. But for an artist, an infatuation with movies can be a tricky thing. He made a wrong turn with the Dream House series he worked on from 1998 to 2002, where for the first time he recruited famous faces to play his people. No doubt getting Gwyneth Paltrow and Philip Seymour Hoffman to appear in your photographs brings you enhanced market cred. Put Julianne Moore in front of your camera, and you're practically doing a Vanity Fair shoot. Let's assume that Crewdson also hoped that the pre-established power of movie stars over our imaginings would somehow act as a force multiplier for the private fantasies they act out in his pictures.
But that's exactly where he got it wrong. When his photographs work they bid us into a realm of privacy, inwardness and even shame. To sustain that mood requires them to shut out the banalities of the outside world. And what's more banal than celebrity? Yes, yes, we've heard, stardom is a fantasy too, but it's the type that steamrollers every more intimate kind. Anybody who thinks that the red carpet is the royal road to the unconscious has lost his bearings. Crewdson's pictures stop working the minute you find yourself wondering about the wrap party.
But there it is. At its weakest, staged photography succumbs to the temptation to imitate the staged worlds we see every day in movies and advertising. It adopts their shopworn postures in the hope of pushing our most familiar buttons. This happens in the work of the collective of four Russian artists who operate under the name AES&F. Their pictures of kids flourishing heavy weaponry in futuristic wastelands count too much on our response to the poses of fashion photography. Maybe you can arrive at some sleek, sexy images that way. But at that point, you're not making conceptual art. You're trying out for the next Prada campaign.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1592850,00.html#ixzz1aKoTFyTa
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1592850,00.html#ixzz1aKoOZUtt
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
wow in an interesting mood
the first video is showing some of the work of the artist Nick cave who is coming this year to michigan to speak. I'm sorta excited and hoping he will have a performance when he speaks.
Okay, Mike Kelley just rocks.
Okay, Mike Kelley just rocks.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
laurie anderson
I saw this at school. amazing. if you get the chance to see her don't pass it up!
just check it out. get a feel for her style
here is an article about the show I recently saw http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/laurie-anderson-dream-vs-delusion/Content?oid=1758399
just check it out. get a feel for her style
here is an article about the show I recently saw http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/laurie-anderson-dream-vs-delusion/Content?oid=1758399
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Saturday, July 30, 2011
A MUST SEE!
I first saw this video my senior year of highschool in ap art history. It had a monumental impact on me. I have to be honest and admit that before this class I didn't have a true appreciation of classical art. Without awareness of our past, we can not truly move forward. What makes this video so significant is that it explains the human beings manipulation of reality in order to suggest a state of being.
I'm sorry I am really failing at saying what I want to say. I guess just watch the video. If you would like to discuss anything I have mentioned or the video, feel free to email me. I'm always open and looking for a good conversation.
I'm sorry I am really failing at saying what I want to say. I guess just watch the video. If you would like to discuss anything I have mentioned or the video, feel free to email me. I'm always open and looking for a good conversation.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
My intentions when making this post were to help me determine future directions for my art. So, if I am too critical of one of the following works don't be offended.
-The works by Annie Lapin drew my attention because of their ability to play with negative and positive space. I see some type of water form in the lower left corner but then all the sudden the same relative colors are forming a figure. What is more, the figure is recognizable even though it has been almost completely abstracted. I am also intreged by the patterning that the artist uses. The brush work feels as if it is done quickly and swiftly. This gives more energy to the piece.
- All I can say about the work of Mr. Goolsby from only looking at this piece is that I like the sketchbook quality of his image.
-The work of Dean Monogenis is confusing to me. It looks very illustrative due to it's simplification of dimension. I am interested by the patterning that is evolving in the flatness. I am also interested in this wierd play I am seeing between geometric and organic marks.
-Sadovsky's work remins me of a lot of the work I have recently been looking at. At the moment I'm not sure what to say about her wok. I think her colors are sort of interesting in that they are very illustrative. I love all the overlying of pattern. I should come back to this when I figure out what intests me so much by her work. Look her name up on google to see more of her work.
- I like Hugo's way of visually playing with the idea of a story within a story. What I mean is he is opening discussion to ideas about what is real. I really want to bring that into my work.
- Formally Francis is a great painter. he is doing a great job of making painting about painting but also creating an image.
-James Jean has great line quality in all of his work. He has a great jesture.
-I am intersted in Yeon's works. I'm not sure what I want to say about them yet though. I guess they are very bodily.
-There is a patheticness to this painting by Lisa Sanditz. But I am loving the patheticness of it!
-Bohac: I love how the image only makes sense for one second intervals. After that, another space forms. There is a great play with patern, flatness, and depth.
-This work by Saddo is just very amusing to me. I admire artists that can make their work humorous.
-Seth Armstong, I stopped to look at your works because they are technically impressive. What is with the woman looking like they just got assaulted though?
-Kim is amazing when it comes to giving the viewer just enough information to understand what is going on but still leave space in the image. Also the artist is mastering space and the play between negative and possitive.
-I am loving the works of Fukushima. They are just the right amount of wrong; the right amount of ugly, pathetic, and childishness.
-The works by Annie Lapin drew my attention because of their ability to play with negative and positive space. I see some type of water form in the lower left corner but then all the sudden the same relative colors are forming a figure. What is more, the figure is recognizable even though it has been almost completely abstracted. I am also intreged by the patterning that the artist uses. The brush work feels as if it is done quickly and swiftly. This gives more energy to the piece.
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| Annie Lapin |
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| Annie Lapin |
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| Annie Lapin |
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| Clark Goolsby |
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| Dean Monogenis |
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| Dean Monogenis |
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| Dean Monogenis |
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| Dean Monogenis |
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| Dean Monogenis |
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| Dean Monogenis |
-Sadovsky's work remins me of a lot of the work I have recently been looking at. At the moment I'm not sure what to say about her wok. I think her colors are sort of interesting in that they are very illustrative. I love all the overlying of pattern. I should come back to this when I figure out what intests me so much by her work. Look her name up on google to see more of her work.
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| Ella Amitay Sadovsky |
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| Ella Amitay Sadovsky |
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| Ella Amitay Sadovsky |
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| Hugo Lugo |
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| Hugo Lugo |
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| Ian Francis |
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| Ian Francis |
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| Ian Francis |
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| James Jean |
 | |
| James Jean |
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| Jung Yeon |
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| Jung Yeon |
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| Jung Yeon |
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| Justin Lee Williams |
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| Kerry James Marshall |
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| Lisa Sanditz |
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| Justin Lee Williams |
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| Nicholas Bohac |
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| Raul Oprea Saddo |
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| Scott Waters |
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| Scott Waters |
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| Scott Waters |
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| Scott Waters |
-Seth Armstong, I stopped to look at your works because they are technically impressive. What is with the woman looking like they just got assaulted though?
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| Seth Armstrong |
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| Seth Armstrong |
-Kim is amazing when it comes to giving the viewer just enough information to understand what is going on but still leave space in the image. Also the artist is mastering space and the play between negative and possitive.
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| Steve Kim |
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| Steve Kim |
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| Yoshiko Fukushima |
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| Yoshiko Fukushima |
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| Yoshiko Fukushima |
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| Yoshiko Fukushima |
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