The Form and the Concept

Impossible TV Architectures

takethepicturenow — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 06:48:29 +0000

Mark Bennett – New York, NY 10021 [Home of Lucky and Ricky Ricardo] (2000)

Mark Bennett recreates the lived spaces of television shows into architectural drawings. Looking at the floor plans schematized in this way, the ridiculous arrangements of the environments that we become familiar with through television are revealed.

Copy of a copy of a copy

takethepicturenow — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:01:35 +0000

“Last month, the New York-based photographer Sze Tsung Leong was on location in La Paz, Bolivia, when he received a phone message from his New York gallerist, Yossi Milo. It had come to Milo’s attention that a Canadian photographer was exhibiting a series of works in Vancouver that bore a striking similarity to an ongoing series by Leong. An image of the Canale della Giudecca in Venice? The Canadian photographer had it, and from the same perspective as Leong’s. A cracking ice floe in Iceland? An Egyptian pyramid? A Japanese shrine? He had those, too, all cropped and composed in similar fashion.” (LA Times)

In looking at the pictures by Leong and Burdeny, it would be hard to refute the similarities. From a financial perspective, I can see how Leong would want to protect images he sees as distinctly his from being reproduced in any way and sold. This is understandable.

The issue for me here becomes the photographs themselves. Each image is simply boring and uninspired. The aesthetic issue arises when I look at one of these photographs and am not struck at all by any Barthesian “punctum”, but instead by a cultural boredom. The photographs, even when I viewed the Leong original for the first time already felt like something I had seen time and time again. Now, this could be a greater symptom of a culture saturated with images where reproductions and originals become blurred and sense that everything that can be created in art has already been made. That argument here would be lazy and an attempt to cover up the qualities lacking in these images. They are completely unremarkable and now the only interesting thing about them is their apparent controversy.

Is This Art?

takethepicturenow — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:51:01 +0000

With our life being saturated with images and contexts, it can be difficult to determine what is and isn’t art. Deeplocal and the Mattress Factory take out the guesswork with their iPhone app “Is this art?.” Take a picture of anything and the app will go to work answering its core question. “This work manipulates reality in a realistic but non-manipulative way, therefore THIS IS ART,” is my favorite answer so far. User can then upload their images to isthisart.org where the debate continues. With the Whitney Biennial opening today, this app comes at just the right time.

Mr. Picassohead

takethepicturenow — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:20:09 +0000

With Mr. Picassohead, you can assemble your own Cubist portraits. It is interesting to see the pop-culture notions of what constitutes an artist’s work and an art movement distilled down to basic signifier of its authenticity. It is also just fun to make faux-Cubist portraits.

American Embassy in London

takethepicturenow — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:49:10 +0000

“The new US embassy to the Court of St James’s has been designed, says the US state department, to “reflect the values of the American people”. Just as well, perhaps, that its architects, KieranTimberlake, aren’t being asked to reflect the values of the British people, otherwise we’d probably end up with a building in the guise of a footballer-style Kentucky Fried Georgian luxury mansion with a Cabe-approved Tesco attached and the whole caboodle opened by Justin Timberlake.

Luckily for London, the American people are considerably more sophisticated and less populist than we are. Here in Nine Elms, the new embassy will adopt the form of a giant glass box on stilts rising from a Princess Diana-style memorial park, complete with a lake and what appears to be a ha-ha. Seriously….

Cool, remote and superficially transparent, the winning design does reflect what we can divine of the US political process. Nominally open to all and yet, in practice, tightly controlled, the system of US government and its prevailing culture, aped bad-temperedly in Britain, does indeed inform the brief to KieranTimberlake and their response to it.” These are Jonathan Glancey’s words on the new design for the US Embassy in London. Glancey’s comments drip in a certain British condescension.

Designed by the firm KieranTimberlake, the building attempts to go beyond mere symbolism of American ideal of “transparency” that a glass facade can offer. Instead, this design tries to encompass the ideas of ecological responsibility and friendliness within the lived environment. This is the choice of how America will be represented in London, and its a huge step up from the current Grosvenor Square compound which is an immediately hostile environment and feels locked in a Cold War past.

Based off of the rendering, it appears as though KieranTimberlake’s design will fulfill the vision of the State Department for an embassy. The design by Thom Mayne praised by Rogers (Pompidou Centre Paris) and Palumbo as being “touched by genius” sits on the same stilts in a similar undulating park that KieranTimberlake is criticized for by Glancey. The question is, would the British ever be happy with any design for American embassy in London?

Even more interesting: Do the British have any room to really complain when their Shanghai World Expo Seed Pavilion is an explosive, violent piece of architecture which literally attacks the visual and architectural space around it with 60,000 7.5m-long transparent acrylic rods?

Jonathan Jones and Perpetual Adolescence

takethepicturenow — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:01:32 +0000

Jonathan Jones posted an article today on criticism and where it is born. He situates this birthplace in the teenage obsession with pop music and says that “every fan is a critic, and a critic is just someone who never grows out of being a fan.” This is true to an extent. I would consider myself a critic of sorts and a fan. The problem is that Jones places his relationship as a fan with the artist and their work, while I would place myself as a fan of the experience of art.

The difference that arises here is that Jones’s criticism based in adolescent fandom will never be able to establish a distance from what it criticizes. This type of criticism seeks to bridge the distance between the work and the reader. In doing so, it assumes the criticism will flesh out the artist’s intent and that this act of writing is purely subordinate to the actual experience of the piece.

Criticism should maintain a critical distance between itself and the work of art. In this distance, we are given the space necessary to evaluate the work and allow the writing to become more than just the mimetic reproduction of the artist’s intent. For criticism to be truly critical, it needs to be distanced and acknowledge all the multiple distances that are inherent in writing. To be a fan, is often to be uncritically close to the very thing we are a criticizing.

Damien Hirst – End of an Era

takethepicturenow — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:58:02 +0000

“While The Golden Calf symbolized the worshipping of a false idol, with End of an Era (2009) Hirst demystifies the biblical tale and, by extension, debunks his own myth-making. ” Gagosian Press Release for Damien Hirst’s End of an Era Exhibition

How can Hirst debunk his own myth-making when in his latest painting shows and even for the last few years, the curtain has already been pulled aside to show us all his paltry talent? This is an exhibition that would had been better suited for sometime in the 90s when he was still relevant and could make interesting work.

James Franco is James Franco in “James Franco”

takethepicturenow — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:53:22 +0000

New York Magazine reports that James Franco is taking his General Hospital artist character Franco’s work to New York’s Deitch Projects for an exhibition. I’m really excited to see how this all plays out after reading and writing about Franco’s Wall Street Journal article where he explored notions of performativity and asked if his acting and exploration of himself and his General Hosptial character was art. Hopefully this will pan out and we will get some interesting insights and commentary into our pop-culture and maybe even bring on a wider interest in the arts.

Inception

takethepicturenow — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:07:29 +0000

IMBD lists the plot for Inception as: Best friends work together as aspiring young architects on the rise, their relationship complicated by a recent inception. Corporations have developed a technology to enter dreams to extract information from certain peoples’ heads. A CEO (Leonardo DiCaprio) enters dreams and things begin to escalate.

After watching the trailer, I’m looking forward to this movie. Having architects in the central roles with Rand nowhere to be found is a plus. I’m also liking the idea of architecture and memory playing off of each other. It is reminiscent of the Situationist ideas of drift and the city, and the idea of memory, specifically the city as a place of memory, has always intrigued me. Here’s to hoping for Inception to deliver.

Cameron on smoking in Avatar

takethepicturenow — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:34:11 +0000

James Cameron has said in a NY Times article that Sigourney Weaver’s character’s smoking habit is a critique on video gamers:

“She’s rude, she swears, she drinks, she smokes,” wrote Mr. Cameron. “Also, from a character perspective, we were showing that Grace doesn’t care about her human body, only her avatar body, which again is a negative comment about people in our real world living too much in their avatars, meaning online and in video games.”

On the surface, this idea carries some weight. There is something to be said about the MMORPG culture (which I used to be a part of, playing WoW on and off since the beta until a few months ago) that, in theory, rewards you the more time you spend in the game world compared to other players.

The problem with Cameron’s hackneyed commentary is that it doesn’t make sense in the context of his film. We are supposed to believe that Weaver’s character is a critique on disregarding the human body in favor of an avatar, when the movie is about celebrating this disregard of the human body in the character of Jake Sully. Never once do we see Sully’s body degrade as he comes to favor his avatar form more and more, and something as simple as this, could have added at least some depth to the movie.

This smoking as a critique of video gaming in a movie that looks like a video game with a video game tie-in seems a little tacked on, like much of the movie itself.