Posts Tagged ‘visual culture’
Tactile Things
Local art concern, Artesan Gallery + Studio, has gleaming, pristine new digs at the Raffles Hotel.
And I do mean gleaming.
Not that their Bukit Timah home was lacking — if anything, the space was both charming and cozy — but in a sense the present move really marks an arrival of sorts.
The inaugural show is a solo presentation of Filipino artist Roldan “Manok” Ventura‘s latest work.
Enjoy.
(as yet untitled)
Aftermath I (2012), oil on canvas.
Withstand (2012), oil on canvas.
(as yet untitled)
Effect (2012), oil on canvas.
Edged (2012), oil on canvas.
“I don’t even know what I was running for — I guess I just felt like it.”
Bruce Davidson‘s been on the mind lately.
Was revisiting his Subway book for a short project I’m currently working on with a friend (apropos of the SKL0 affair). The images are justifiably admired: graceful, single-minded, beguilingly insalubrious snapshots of a New York City I thought I was going to discover when I moved there in the early 2000s — only to find, of course, that that world of urban decay, of dirt and graffiti and muggings and CBGB and Bernhard Goetz, had long given way to what, by then, statistics proved was the safest large city in the country. (A fact corroborated by the number of Starbucks cafes and D’agostino’s supermarkets I found on every block. Both phenomena thanks in large part to Giuliani-driven gentrification.)
But that’s not the point here.
Another pal and I were having drinks at a rooftop bar a couple of nights ago: a cool, balmy evening, with a slight breeze and a couple of beers (and the high of seeing one’s name on a wall) and talk for some reason turned to our adolescent days — misspent adolescence, in my case.
Of playing hooky, of screwing up the ‘O’s, of hiding out in the bathrooms to smoke during P.E. lessons …
Fast-forward two decades later, and sometimes I’d dream of some amateur photog out there who’s amassed an unseen stash of images capturing the subculture of ’90s ‘kids’: the doc marts and Birkenstocks, the Guess berms, the Hunting World tees, the black JPG wallets and the Sonia Rykiel quilted bags, the tea dances at Fire and hanging out at the McDonald’s outlet at Centrepoint … You know, the way Carol Jerrems did for the Sharpie movement in Melbourne, or Gavin Watson’s punks and skinheads.
The pal and I soon moved on to other topics, but the exchange, however brief, dredged up out of the cold-freeze of consciousness a younger self I haven’t seen around in a while. A younger, hungrier, more starry-eyed self. And, oddly enough, he’s been missed.
The images here are from another iconic Bruce Davidson project, his Brooklyn Gang series, which preceded the work of Jerrems and Watson. According to one commentator, it “stands as one of the first in-depth photographic records of rebellious postwar youth culture”:
In 1959, there were about 1,000 gang members in New York City, mainly teenage males from ethnically-defined neighbourhoods in the outer boroughs. In the spring of that year, Bruce Davidson read a newspaper article about outbreaks of street fighting in Prospect Park and travelled across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan in search of a gang to photograph.
“I met a group of teenagers called the Jokers,” he wrote in the afterword to his seminal book of insider reportage, Brooklyn Gang. “I was 25 and they were about 16. I could easily have been taken for one of them.”
…… For several months Davidson followed the Jokers on their endless wanderings around their Brooklyn turf and beyond. He captured them hanging out in Prospect Park, where outdoor dances were held on weekend summer nights, and lounging on the beach at Coney Island. He snapped the young men as they killed time in a neighbourhood diner called Helen’s Candy Store. In his photographs, the Jokers look both tough and innocent, uncertain adolescent kids caught in that hinterland between childhood and – this being New York – premature adulthood.
(Read the full Guardian article here.)
More pictures from the series below. The opening image at the top of the post, though, pretty much encapsulates my sentiments about vanished selves and halycon springs: a seemingly perfect moment fixed in monochrome, a taxidermic impression of a street corner, reckless hijinks, an endless stretch of street, and the splintered corona of a late-afternoon sunbeam scintillating out of an open sky — the Peter Pan-nish promise of the eternal good vibe.
The mythology of memory ……
Here’s perhaps the perfect counterpoint (culled from one of the most famous novels of prodigal youth):
I don’t even know what I was running for — I guess I just felt like it. After I got across the road, I felt like I was sort of disappearing. It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like disappearing every time you crossed a road.
Not beating the heat …
This is one of those randomly topical posts.
Image of the day: photog Franco Rubartelli’s iconic image of ’60s supermodel Veruschka, swaddled in fawn-hued fur and leather straps.
The humidity ’round here has been out of control this past week. (The April-May season is a killer. Killer.) We denizens of the tropics, though, have at least the comforts of casual wear and flip-flops … for this spread for the July ’68 edition of Vogue, shot under the searing sun of Arizona’s Painted Desert, stylist Giorgio di Sant’Angelo (yes, the designer started out as a lowly stylist) swathed Veruschka in a full-body, fur-lined wrap, held together with asphyxiating tightness by bands of brown leather. Rubartelli’s photograph of his then-squeeze made fashion history – it remains one of the most famous images of her – but the combination of sizzling heat and winter wear proved too much: she simply “tipped over like a tree.” (“Lummbeerrrrr !”)
Read an account of the episode here.
Hey, don’t get me wrong, the sun’s been great for getting the brown on, but just looking at this image (and the ones below) is making me slightly dizzy …
Like the good people of PETA, I want to say “NO TO FUR” — but that hardly seems necessary in Singapore’s context.
Image from youthquakers.
Art of the Poster: Mondo
Dracula, Aaron Horkey & Vania Zouravliov.
Film buffs – or fans of the movie poster genre – will have heard of Mondo by now.
A recent article in the NYT describes its work as such:
But an outfit far from Hollywood has sought to recapture the vintage hand-drawn spirit while injecting some contemporary flair. The company is Mondo, an offshoot of the Austin, Tex., theater chain Alamo Drafthouse. It commissions artists to design alternative versions of posters for films considered cult or genre pictures. The styles range from multi-tiered, character-packed collage (like Tyler Stout’s fanboy-friendly work for “The Empire Strikes Back”) to subdued prints that express a movie’s mood more than anything else (like the simple smoking gun forming Clint Eastwood’s profile in Olly Moss’s “Dirty Harry”).
(Read the piece here, or scroll down – it’s reproduced at the end of the post.)
For a full visual listing of the posters, see the Mondo Archive.
Enjoy.
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, Heads of State.
Iron Giant, Kevin Tong.
The Breakfast Club, Jay Ryan.
Dirty Harry, Olly Moss.
Jurassic Park, Aaron Horkey.
The Shining, Jeff Kleinsmith.
The Lost World, Dan McCarthy.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jason Munn.
John Waters Dusk-Til-Dawn Movie Marathon, Little Friends of Printmaking.
Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, Jeff Kleinsmith.
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HAND-DRAWN HOMAGE TO CLASSIC FILMS
By Mekado Murphy. Published: 7 October 2011.
THE movie poster is dead. Long live the movie poster. Gone are the days of hand-drawn studio posters that possessed a creativity and artistry matching that of the films themselves. Think of “King Kong,” with its harrowing illustrations, or Saul Bass’s Minimalist design for “Vertigo.” The contemporary studio poster is often a literal, less adventurous affair, like the vision of Julia Roberts on the back of Tom Hanks’s scooter in the poster for “Larry Crowne,” a typical example of today’s photography-driven advertisements.
But an outfit far from Hollywood has sought to recapture the vintage hand-drawn spirit while injecting some contemporary flair. The company is Mondo, an offshoot of the Austin, Tex., theater chain Alamo Drafthouse. It commissions artists to design alternative versions of posters for films considered cult or genre pictures. The styles range from multi-tiered, character-packed collage (like Tyler Stout’s fanboy-friendly work for “The Empire Strikes Back”) to subdued prints that express a movie’s mood more than anything else (like the simple smoking gun forming Clint Eastwood’s profile in Olly Moss’s “Dirty Harry”).
As wild as the company is about movies, Mondo is serious about its posters, and it is not alone in this sentiment. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which has an archive of more than 38,000 movie posters, recently started adding Mondo’s work to its collection. While the archive is diverse, adding a large series of alternative posters from an independent company is a rarity.
“We’re always seeking out the unusual,” said Anne Coco, an archivist for the Academy, which will collect every poster Mondo designs from now on. “As we became more aware of what Mondo was doing, it just seemed like a good fit.”
That’s quite a step up from Mondo’s beginnings, in 2004, as Mondo Tees, a T-shirt shop started by Tim League, the founder and chief executive of Alamo Drafthouse. The shop carried shirts decorated with classic movie images, as well as vintage iron-on decals.
The same year the shop opened, Alamo Drafthouse collaborated with the Austin nightclub Emo’s for a music and film event called Cinemania. Mondo made its first foray into poster creation, turning to Rob Jones, a designer of rock posters. The results were high-energy screen prints for “The Warriors,” “Foxy Brown” and “Better Off Dead.”
“It was so novel to have subject material that was based in cult movies,” Mr. League said about the collaboration, “that there was interest from other artists saying, ‘Hey, I’d love to be involved in what you guys are doing.’ We honestly didn’t even know what we were doing yet. It was just three posters.”
They began to figure it out fairly quickly and commissioned more posters the next year for the Alamo Drafthouse’s Rolling Roadshow, a national tour of screenings at towns and cities famous as settings for the movies shown. Meanwhile the Drafthouse continued to work with artists on posters for special screenings offered by the chain in Austin. Though a physical shop still exists, the center of gravity shifted to an online site with posters as the focus.
Mondo wasn’t blazing a trail. “There’s a long tradition of theaters doing their own posters,” said Rudy Franchi, an expert on movie collectibles who runs the Web site posterappraisal.com. “There was a famous movie theater in London, the Academy Cinema, and they had a man named Peter Strausfeld who did these beautiful woodblock posters for them.”
But Mondo is one of the few to parlay its designs into a thriving business. Licensing deals allow it to produce official posters for series in which there is major fan interest, like a “Star Wars” collection from 2010. A set of three posters from that series, designed by Mr. Moss, was recently listed on eBay for $7,499.99.
And studios are now going to Mondo to request alternative posters. This summer it collaborated with Paramount Pictures on posters for “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” (with a highly stylized, colorful look) and “Captain America: The First Avenger” (with a stark, retro feel). While a studio doesn’t often commission alternatives, Paramount executives saw Mondo’s work appealing to a coveted demographic. But designs are set on Mondo’s terms, not the studio’s.
“One of the riders in our contract is that we pick the artist and have, more or less, final cut on what we do,” said Justin Ishmael, Mondo’s creative director.
Its artist roster has grown significantly over the years, including a few high-profile names. Mondo used Shepard Fairey, best known for his poster for the Obama campaign, to work on John Carpenter’s “They Live.” And Drew Struzan, one of the mammoths in the field for his work on posters in the “Indiana Jones” and “Back to the Future” franchises, designed a 21-color “Frankenstein” poster that feels as if it could have been the original advertisement. (All 325 in the run sold out, at $285 each.)
This year Mondo began a directors’ series, with posters focusing on the bodies of work from the likes of Wes Craven, Zack Snyder and Guillermo del Toro.
“I felt completely overwhelmed and happy,” Mr. Del Toro said about being chosen for the series. “I’m a huge fan of their posters. They involved me in approving every step of the design. They took some of my notes to heart, but mostly my notes were ‘Wow!’ The ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ poster is the most beautiful piece I’ve seen.” That Art Nouveau-like concoction evokes the film’s fantasy elements in a lush composition.
Paradoxically, while Mondo has mostly become a poster business that sells T-shirts on the side, buying a poster from the site is virtually impossible. By the time one is displayed on the site, it has already sold out. Each release generates considerable traffic, so Mr. Ishmael uses the company’s Twitter account, @MondoNews, to announce, randomly, when posters go on sale. The limited editions can sell out in a minute or less (raising their coolness factor); often it’s easier for a casual buyer to find Mondo’s work on eBay.
While the store’s posters aren’t frequently selling to collectors of classic material, its work is being invited to the party. Heritage, an auction house that hosts the largest sales of vintage movie posters, added some of Mondo’s pieces to its catalog this year.
Time will tell how Mondo’s work fits into movie memorabilia history, but for now it’s giving genre fans a new visual way to celebrate the films they love.
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Happy Birthday, Jeff Koons.
Made in Heaven billboard on display, 1989.
Art world mega-star Jeff Koons turns 57 today.
I don’t much care for his stuff, but he was hawt – once upon a time. (Check out his Made in Heaven series. The example above is one of the tamer pieces.)
Happy hatch day, Mr. Koons.
[Non-review] CUT THRU: A View on 21st Century Thai Art
CUT THRU: A View on 21st Century Thai Art is currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore (ICAS), Lasalle.
A snippet from an essay by the show’s curator, Loredana Pazzini-Parraciani, included in the accompanying booklet:
Slicing through vernacular culture, secular beliefs and religion, CUT THRU presents new and recent bodies of works by nine young art practitioners from Thailand. Invested by the holy significance of three times three, the number nine in Thai culture is also semantic [sic] with the Thai word for ‘advance’ or ‘forward’ (kaoo). To go forward is the core aim of this exhibition: to explore the intentions and means of 21st century artists from Thailand while attempting to decode the individual approach these artists take towards their home culture. Thai culture is indeed a culture difficult to fully grasp and understand, for behind the iconic Thai smile, which often carries greater meaning, there is a complex, multi-layered society.
Each work presented in CUT THRU expounds a strong senses of materiality – industrial/traditional, secular/religious, old/new – offering to the audience sensory experiences by transporting the viewer to the streets of Bangkok, old shadow puppet theaters, homes of the local people, and ancestral places of worship.
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[top] Angkrit Ajchariyasophon’s canvases. [middle and bottom] 2011086 (2011), Angkrit Ajchariyasophon. Oil, acrylic, enamel on canvas.
Re-Appearing (2010), Vichaya Mukdamanee. Video and found object installation.
[top] Piyatat Hemmatat’s work. [2nd from top] Apasmara – Fendi (2010) and Apasmara – Gucci (2010). Both Lambda prints on Kodak endura paper. [3rd from top] Apasmara – Celine (2010). Lambda print on Kodak endura paper. [bottom] Apasmara – Dior (2010). Lambda print on Kodak endura paper. All, Piyatat Hemmatat.
AshHeart Project (2007), Ruangsak Anuwatwimon. Ashes from various sources.
[top] E-dam (2010), Coyote (2010) and E-Dang (2010), Tawan Wattuya. All watercolour on paper. [middle] Coyote (2010), Tawan Wattuya. Watercolour on paper. [bottom] Honesty at All Costs, Even to Lose One’s Life (2010) and Lady Boys (2009), Tawan Wattuya. All watercolour on paper.
Bangkok Tanks (2006), Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit. Video.
[top] Lineament of Pranee (2011), Dusk (2011), and Lineament of Sukon (2011), Preeyachanok Ketsuwan. All drawing on c-print, hair and resin. [bottom] Detail of hair contained in clear plastic frame.
[top] Chusak Srikwan’s work. [2nd from top] Shadow-Play Dharma (2010). Leather carving installation. [3rd from top] Shoot (2010). Leather carving. [bottom] Buddha (2010) and Onguleeman (2010). Both leather carving.
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The Great Wiki Blackout of 2012
I’ll admit it: I’m suffering from Wiki withdrawal symptoms something bad.
It does help though that I find their blackout page utterly breathtaking (above).
I think there’s something to be said for the incongruous yoking of an urgent political statement to sublime aesthetic form.
For more on Wikipedia’s 24-hour anti-SOPA and -PIPA blackout protest, see here. For the internet-wide strike movement, see here.
[Non-review] Art Stage Singapore 2012
First part of the Art Stage experience here. (With pictures of Zhao Renhui’s and Michael Lee’s stuff.)
Part three coming up soon. (That’s the interesting one.)
Watch this space.
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Paintings of Sage’s Traces No.1 (2011), Zhang Huan. Incense ashes and adhesive on linen.
Penghargaan, Yudi Sulistyo. Paper.
Icon – Pulp Fiction (2011), Lee Dong-jae. Acrylic, resin object (?) on canvas.
No Title – Yellow (2011), Wu Gaozhong. Mized media.
Navin Rawanchaikul’s works at the Yavuz Fine Art booth.
Childhood – Horizon (2010), Chen Wenling.
Untitled (2009), Ng Joon Kiat. Oil on canvas.
Mercy! Mercy! Mercy! (2011), Made Wiguna Valasara. Rubber silicone.
Subtitle 9 and Subtitle 4 (2010), Clemens Krauss. Oil on canvas.
Coca Killer (2007), Kira Kim. LED system as installation.
[right] Dialogue (2011), Ufan Lee. Oil and mineral pigments on canvas. [left] Marble Chair (2008), Ai Weiwei. Marble.
Vermeer Study: Looking Back (Mirror) (2008), Yasumasa Morimura. Colour photograph mounted on canvas.
Ji Zhou’s Dust series (2010).
Calendars (The Past) series (2011), Heman Chong. Acrylic on canvas.
Miss Mao No.2 (Silver), the Gao Brothers. Painted fiberglass.
Ren Vertu d’Humanite (2011), Fabienne Verdier. Pigments and ink on canvas.
Ma Jun’s series of porcelain works at the Galerie Michael Schultz booth.
The Full Moon Story series (2008), Kim Kyung Soo. Giclee prints.
S Plus, Dadang Christanto.
Steps No.1, Shi Jindian. Coloured stainless steel wire.
era 2 (2011), Peter Zimmermann. Epoxy resin on canvas.
Incendiary Texts II series, Vertical Submarine. [middle] Lim Beh Boey Song (Your Father Not Happy) (2012). Mixed media. [bottom] Lan Jiao Bin (Cock Face / Bluebird Face) (2011). Mixed media.
Campbell’s Soup II (1969), Andy Warhol. Silkscreen on paper.
Emotion of Noodle, Luo Xiangsheng.
Deng Lijun (2005), Zhou Tiehai. Acrylic (airbrush) on canvas.
[top] You Made Me LOVE You (2010). Neon. [bottom] And I Said I Love You! (2011). Neon. Both Tracey Emin.
Green City: Dragon Veins, Hidden Bumps and General Election 2011 (2011), Ng Joon Kiat. Acrylic on cloth.
The Johore Bahru Guggenheim
Obscenely Bad Guggenheim Joke #1 (2011), Heman Chong.
Since Heman Chong’s having a show on right now (my review here) …… a recap of something else he did earlier this year. Plus, I have a massive backlog of badly-taken pictures – of shows I’ve seen – just sitting in my iPhoto folder, doing plenty of nuthin’.
This is Chong’s hilarious series, Obscenely Bad Guggenheim Joke, shown at Valentine Willie’s annual survey of Singapore art in August.
I think these are wasted in a gallery space, by the way. Humour requires an audience, and these posters (such as they are) need to be embedded in a public arena, where their sly, unexpected wit can find its natural niche as a subversive disruption of the lived everyday — and *not* as a monumental statement in and of itself, which the circumscription of a gallery display imposes.
Bit of trivia: Chong seems to hold the number ’7′ dear. The year 2017 here, the duration specified in his Calendars work (1,001 images = 77 years multiplied by 13 images per year) … Oblique references to his year of birth perhaps ?
Anyways.
You snigger, but a Johore Bahru incarnation of the Gug ? – it could happen.
Three words: Crystal Bridges Museum.
Obscenely Bad Guggenheim Joke #2 (2011), Heman Chong.
Obscenely Bad Guggenheim Joke #3 (2011), Heman Chong.
Obscenely Bad Guggenheim Joke #4 (2011), Heman Chong.
Obscenely Bad Guggenheim Joke #5 (2011), Heman Chong.
