a week too late + a lifetime too early: RIP alexander mcqueen
Alexander McQueen, fashion’s genius maverick, passed away last week on the eve of NY’s fashion week… his death means Lady Gaga, his master label Gucci, and the rest of the world has lost a rebellious fashion icon. McQueen represented the merging of the ridiculous with the sublime, creating amazingly forward-thinking fashion that was reviving the meaning of avant-garde.
perfecting the portrait: arno rafael minkkinen
Arno Rafael Minkkinen is a photographer, originally from Finland, who has been for many years capturing amazing portraits (and more abstract works with human subjects) in the wilderness of the United States. I have been captivated by the sublimity in his images and the delicate relationship he presents for us between man and his natural habitat. Minkkinen’s self portraits are some of his best, in my opinion. He demonstrates an almost supernatural talent in the practice of yoga in order to twist his body in impossible ways, alternatively melting into and bursting out of the frame. His personal website on ArtNet is currently under construction, but a Google image search will give you ample introduction to his work.
Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Machine, Man vs. Pandora: Age-old Conflicts Dealt With Here:
A while back, I posted on Roxy Paine— a sculptor whose work seems to blur the man-made and natural worlds into one strange hybrid. His installation on the rooftop of the Met this past summer was an abstraction of fallen branches created with stainless steel industrial piping— an “abstraction” which provokes us to consider the relationships between man, nature, and machine. He presents objects of nature as “abstract”, shiny, industrial, so we can’t help but notice the irony: the industrial machine, responsible for so much of our environment’s destruction, now recreates it. While his stainless steel branches remind us of a lightning storm, or those static-electricity globes they used to sell at Radio Shack, the works below— his SCUMAKS— vaguely recall the glowing vegetation on Pandora. They are created with an Auto Sculpture Maker (yes, a machine) which spits out the plastic blobs onto a conveyor belt. Each unique creation retains a certain personality to the effect that it wouldn’t seem inappropriate to give them each a Power Ranger name. ”Zach”, “Billy”, and “Kimberly” (below) were included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and are three examples of the heavily-collected SCUMAKS. No 3D glasses required.
For more info on Roxy Paine, click here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/arts/design/24roof.html
or read a book:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=roxy+paine&x=0&y=0
Having just returned from Tibet I was pretty eager to get these photos up considering that blogging and facebooking (among many others) are illegal activities in the People’s Republic of China. Well now they’re up and the Chinese can’t do shit about it except revoke my visas and arrest me when I go back. But if that happens then we’ll know the Mill has really made it. I digress.
I took these photos at a gallery/workshop outside of Lhasa that we had the rare privilege of seeing. The professor leading our trip has an old friend, a talented Tibetan artist, who runs the place and brought us in. He was trained in Beijing at arguably the best arts institute in the country and has used his skill, alongside his colleagues, to develop their little known gallery- housed in an unassuming, oldish Tibetan building. Some of the pieces are highly controversial by Chinese standards. Others are more subdued. However, it all takes a clever approach to reach the intended result. Much of it deals with a disappearing culture, oppression and the persistence of Buddhism (or what’s left of it). I apologize for the photo quality on some as I was running through the gallery taking snapshots of everything without a tripod or proper exposure but you get the point. This is only a handful of the pieces but it shows the varied mediums and focuses. The artists have no websites or much in the way of professional development but you can access a past catalogue from a recent show in Beijing at the Red Gate Gallery (www.redgategallery.com) under “Return to Lhasa”, artists Gade and Tsering Nyandak.
there are few who’d deny, at what he does he is the best
The extensive exhibition on the work of film mastermind Tim Burton has been open at the MOMA for a couple of weeks now, and it’s giving this Boston girl yet another excuse to head to NYC over winter break. He’s captivated my imagination since the first time I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas as a little girl at my uncle’s house, and just in case you haven’t heard… Burton has (once again) collaborated with the beautiful and eccentric (Bellatrix!) Helena Bonham Carter and (surprise) Johnny Depp, as well as Anne Hathaway, to bring us his version of Alice in Wonderland. You can watch the trailer here. I sense that we should expect a splattering of Big Fish-style, enchanting scenery and Depp’s Willy Wonka-perfected strangeness that makes him all the more delicious (see him as the Mad Hatter below) even when covered in eighteen pounds of stage makeup… Anyway, how about we schedule a Mill field trip for March 5, 2010?
Speaking of treachery in images… Rene Magritte - Empire of Light 1953-54
I know he’s trying to confuse us, but this image is pretty comforting to me.
Cindy Sherman: Lack of Identity in Self-Portraits
Cindy Sherman, a modern female photographer, captures herself in a series of self-portraits from the late 1970s to contemporary time. Although Sherman photographs herself, she takes on different roles and personas within the images and subtly addresses gender and popular culture issues.
Her playfully ironic photographs of the nameless Hollywood celebrity, the young girl in the big city and the housewife fantasizing about escaping reality, capture the essence of the American dream and are tied together through Sherman’s constructed identities. The result is a terrific blend of reality and fiction, and one’s perception of self in relationship to the stereotypes defined by American culture.
Within Sherman’s series of self-portraits she simultaneously appears as herself and as some unknown character. Her lack of identity within the images makes them all the more enjoyable as they actively capture our own desires and dreams for a created identity. In a 1990 New York Times article Sherman stated, “I feel I’m anonymous in my work. When I look at my pictures, I never see myself; they aren’t self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.”
I love escaping into the created reality of these photographs and I hope you will too! Enjoy!
In fifteen words or less, Roxy Paine’s wild-wood tangles of stainless steel reconcile the natural and manmade worlds. In theory, it’s a bit like glitzing up your Christmas tree with a lot of tinsel, but Paine’s informing idea is a good one: he takes the roles of “resource” and “product” and reverses them, manufacturing nature from man-made ingredients in an environment where it is intrinsically the opposite.
He has just taken down his rooftop installation from the Met (that’s THE Met) and is putting together a lil something permanent for the Smithsonian. Oh, and he’s brainstorming for an exhibition at the Mill Gallery…
(Although he made us promise that if he brings his trees to the Mill, we won’t turn them into lumber…)
Neave.com 
Paul Neave is a London-based Interactive Web Designer who has taken his expertise with flash (and coding and all that other nerdy nonsense that get’s me all excited) and channeled it into a pretty sweet medium. His homepage, Neave.com, acts like his own “personal interactive playground; a place where I can explore my ideas and try out risky experiments that I wouldn’t normally get the opportunity to make anywhere else”, according to Neave at least. To me, Neave.com functions as a piece of interactive art more than anything else, with the audience manipulating their own experience to their desired end.
The site has many segments.
Imagination is a Jackson-Pollack-esque splatter of wavy lasers and wobbly colors.
Fractal gives a three-dimensional representation of the Mandelbrot fractal, one of a number of very famous three-dimensional functions that extend forever - Neave allows the user to explore the colorful corners and curves of the graph through zooming.
Webcam is a video-wall that is pretty much run as a free-for-all, allowing users to record videos wherever they want on the wall using whatever effects they want.
My favorite, though, is Television, or what Neave calls “Telly without context”. This is basically a series of forty really trippy video clips from all walks of the Earth and the Internet sorted randomly and played, while the user is able to flip through them with only a mouse-click. Sure, at first, the interface may seem like nothing more than a stoner’s paradise, but eventually, Neave’s Television project sucks you in and exposes the mindlessness of modern television along with the purity of meaningless film.
Paul Neave: “I love trying to dissolve the boundaries between code and design and exploring ways of making technology seem less scary and geeky, but more fun and human.”
