Remembering ¨Into White¨ by Cat Stevens

Barley House. Digital art by Myriam B. Mahiques

I like Cat Stevens´ old songs, but I´m not crazy about them, except for this one -Into White- that tells us about a mystic house:

I built my house from barley rice

Green pepper walls and water ice

Tables of paper wood, windows of light

And everything emptying into white.

A simple garden, with acres of sky

A Brown-haired dogmouse

If one dropped by

Yellow Delanie would sleep well at night

With everything emptying into white.

A sad Blue eyed drummer rehearses outside

A Black spider dancing on top of his eye

Red legged chicken stands ready to strike

And everything emptying into white.

I built my house from barley rice

Green pepper walls and water ice

And everything emptying into white

The knotted curtains of Chazen Museum, University of Wisconsin, Madison

I´ve always thought that the designs of the Argentine born architects Machado and Silvetti were like old fashioned, post modernist and didn´t show new investigations on design.

But this time, I am satisfied to see this beautiful project of knotted curtains inside the lobby of the Chazen Museum, University of Wisconsin. Though, this particular design do not belong to them but to the Dutch textile designer, Petra Blaisse, at least Rodolfo (with O) was bright enough to hire her. From the post by Molly Heintz, for Archpaper.com:

Rudolfo Machado, principal at the Boston-based architecture firm Machado and Silvetti Associates, was seeking a way to create a sense of place and privacy in the new glass-walled lobby of the Chazen Museum. Located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the 86,000-square-foot building is a freestanding extension of the existing museum designed in 1970 by Harry Weese. The new three-story structure, which opens to the public on October 22, houses galleries but will also serve as a space for performances and events, including both university-sponsored and private soirées in the lobby. “We needed something to help visually define the lobby from the courtyard, and we wanted it to be contemporary and site-specific,” said Machado.

Machado proposed commissioning a piece by Dutch textile designer Petra Blaisse, whose work had made an impression on him during a visit to the Casa da Musica in Porto, Portugal. Blaisse’s firm Inside Outside created massive knotted curtains that added texture to the OMA-designed space and also acted a screen for concert hall windows. Machado organized a trip for the Chazen’s director Russell Panczenko to Blaisse’s studio in Amsterdam, and Blaisse in turn visited the site in Madison. When she began to sketch out her vision of a semi-transparent curtain, Panczenko was convinced of the project’s merit as an artwork in its own right. “We have a textile collection here, so we were able to use accession funds for it,” said Panczenko, describing how the museum was able to cover the roughly $250,000 cost of Inside Outside’s installation.

Pictures and excerpt from:

http://www.archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=5706

Abandoned televisions. Urban installations by Alex Beker

Driving through a city block or suburban neighborhood anywhere, you'll often see discarded items chillin' on the street corner, abandoned and left for the trash man or those who might find it valuable. "Abandoned Televisions" is a series by Miami-based graphic designer/photographer Alex Beker that is meant to conjure up nostalgia in us about our favorite childhood television shows. The TV screens feature moments during the show, frozen in time to help us remember.

"We travel back to our younger years, recalling the house we used to live in, the room where the television set was, the chair we sat in to watch, the smells of our house, and those we watched the show with. A snapshot of popular culture tells a piece of our own personal story."

Pictures and text from:

http://www.complex.com/art-design/2011/10/abandoned-televisions-photography-series-freezes-our-favorite-childhood-tv-shows-on-discarded-tvs

The coolest fictional cities

Gotham city. From intramuros.es

Gotham City. From http://paavo.tumblr.com/

My favorite fictional city ever is Gotham City, designed by Tim Burton for Batman.
And from the 50 coolest cities selected by Complex City Guide, I´m sharing the ones I like most:

Atlantis

Dark City

Hogsmeade

Kings landing

Los Angeles (Blade Runner)

Metropolis (Fritz Lang)

Neverland

New York (Futurama)

The Citadel

Venusville

See the rest of the selected ones:

http://www.complex.com/city-guide/2011/10/the-50-coolest-fictional-cities#3

Some urban sculptures by Claes Oldenburg

Pennsylvania Academy of Arts. Picture by Tom Crane

Hats in Salinas, California. From http://www.agilitynut.com/08/8/shats2.jpg

Spoon bridge and cherry, Minneapolis. From http://www.agilitynut.com/07/7/mcherry3.jpg

Claes Oldenburg unveils his latest outdoor sculpture — a giant paintbrush — outside the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia this weekend. At first, Oldenburg's giant clothespins and spoons made him a target for ridicule. But now you can find examples of his work all over the world. And like all of his work, it's intended to provoke a response.

Pop art master Claes Oldenburg will officially unveil his latest sculpture outside the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on Saturday. Oldenburg is known for taking everyday objects and blowing them up to impossible sizes. At first, his giant clothespins and spoons made him a target for ridicule. But now you can find examples of Oldenburg's work all over the world, from Cologne to Cleveland. And they've been embraced — for the most part.

REFERENCE

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/30/140929475/pop-art-master-oldenburg-unveils-another-big-idea

Botticelli and Leonardo: different ways of seeing landscapes

St. John on Patmos. 1490. By Sandro Botticelli. Google images

Sandro Botticelli. Agony in the garden. 1500. Google images

Botticelli didn´t paint landscapes but if so, they were as a background where the main frame was acquired by the addition of arches, architecture in general. Even rocks seem to be built by humans. From Au-dela de la peinture, 1936; first published in Cahiers d´Art, Special Issue, 1937, the words by Max Ernst:

Sandro Botticelli. Virgin and the Child enthroned. Google images.

Landscape detail. Sandro Botticelli.

¨Botticelli did not like landscape painting, regarding it as a ¨limited and mediocre kind of investigation.¨He said contemptuously that ¨by throwing a sponge soaked with different colours at a wall one can make a spot in which a beautiful landscape can be seen.¨ This earned him a severe admonition from his colleague Leonardo da Vinci:

¨He (Botticelli) is right: one is bound to see bizarre inventions in such a smudge; I mean that he who will gaze attentively at that spot will see in it human heads, various animals, a battle, rocks, the sea, clouds, thickets, and still more: it is like the tinkling of a bell which makes one hear what one imagines. Although that stain may suggest ideas, it will not teach you to complete any art, and the above mentioned painter (Botticelli) paints very bad landscapes.¨

Reproduced in Surrealism. By Patrick Waldberg.

Arno´s landscape. By Leonardo da Vinci. Google images

A storm over a hilly landscape. Leonardo da Vinci. Google images

Landscape near Pisa. Leonardo da Vinci. Google images

City in the night. Ciudad en la noche

This digital painting is tricky and it´s influenced by my research on urban morphology. Seen from a satellite, the cities show areas of different colors with more density, usually called ¨urban sprawl¨ or in Spanish, defined as ¨manchas de aceite¨ (oil stains). In this case, the clusters appear to be in a desert land with spots of water, like some areas in Peru, for example. But the light color in the edge of the sea is tempting us to look at the picture as a ¨vertical¨ landscape, being the sea the blue, the stains with lighting an urban horizon, and the rest, a dark-brownish sky. We can read it both ways.

The color and the city

Ancient Beijing. Ref. below

Ancient Beijing. Ref. below

Pueblo Blanco in Spain. From http://www.highonadventure.com/Hoa98jun/Arcos/arcos.htm

Black and white thus evoke positive and negative affective associations and meanings. These are more polarized in the West, where black has extremely negative meaning than, for example, in Japan, where black and white tend to harmonize more and are seen more in terms of a complementary balance of opposites, although even in Japan white is still preferred. White is rated positively by Hong Kong Chinese, Asian Indians, Danes, English, Germans and white Americans, whereas black is uniformly negative. These two colors seem to involve universal meanings (...) modified by culture (...)

It is quite clear, though, that colors generally do have a meaning both in themselves, by contrast with noncolors, and in terms of increasing the redundancy of other cues. For example in ancient Peking most of the city was low and grey, the sacred and hierarchically important section was centrally located, larger in scale, more elaborate and higher, and the use of colors were restricted to that section.

San Salvador de Bahía de Todos los Santos, Brasil. From http://www.enviajes.com/videos/senti-salvador-de-bahia.html

Corner in La Boca, Buenos Aires. Personal archive. Picture by Myriam B. Mahiques

Amos Rapoport. The Meanings of the Built Environment. A Nonverbal Communication Approach. P.113. California, 1982

Pictures of ancient Beijing from

 http://www.ebeijing.gov.cn/Elementals/eBeijing_Neighbourhood/t1051247.htm

Two pictures to remember 9/11

Pictures by Eric O´Connell, courtesy HBO. From

 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/arts/television/911s-pain-through-the-prism-of-tv.html

Jim Campbell en Buenos Aires: 20 años de arte electrónico

Reloj Digital. 1991. Fundación Telefónica

Low Resolution installation. 

El de Jim Campbell es un universo de complejidad cierta pero en absoluto vociferante; arte electrónico con amable rostro low tech , elaboradas reflexiones sobre la percepción humana en las que el entramado de LED, monitores y circuitos se transmuta en una delicada poética de lo mínimo.

"Muchas de mis obras parten de experimentos con la percepción. Cuando comienzo a trabajar con ellas, no siempre sé si van a funcionar como obras de arte, si lograrán generar alguna conexión con la gente", comenta el artista, de paso por Buenos Aires, donde participó de la inauguración de Tiempo estático , muestra que recorre sus últimos 20 años de trabajo y puede visitarse actualmente en el Espacio Fundación Telefónica. Además, el estadounidense, considerado un pionero en el uso expresivo de los LED, integró el jurado de la edición 2011 de los premios Mamba-Fundación Telefónica Arte y Nuevas Tecnologías.

Formado en Ingeniería Eléctrica y Matemática en el Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Campbell explora, en la instalación Marcos de referencia , el principio físico que indica que la perspectiva del mundo varía de acuerdo con la posición en que se encuentre el observador, sumergiendo a éste en el punto de vista de un? clavo.

Menos lúdica, Reloj digital , al profundizar en el registro sobre lo temporal, gana en misterio y sugerencia. La precisa articulación de dos videocámaras y un monitor de retroproyección "atrapa" al espectador -o, más bien, a su imagen ralentizada- dentro de una obra que oscila entre ofrecerse como espejo fantasmal o singular referencia a la fractura entre el tiempo de lo analógico y el de lo digital.

En el otro extremo, y debido tanto a su tamaño como a su textura visual, obras del tipo de Un fuego, una autopista y un paseo o Pelea ofrecen la fugaz ilusión de una tela de pequeño formato. Pero, en lugar de evanescentes "óleos" abstractos, se observan refinadas estructuras conformadas por LED, fruto de indagaciones sobre los efectos de la luz a partir de otra de las obsesiones de Campbell: las imágenes en baja resolución.

En esta línea, el autor parte de videos caseros (algunos son de 1950) en los que se preocupa, particularmente, por el registro del movimiento. Como el destilado de una fragancia, lo que finalmente se traduce en los LED es algo así como el grado cero de la ilusión óptica del movimiento: no hay rostros, edades, vestimentas o contexto. Sólo la huella de algo que alguna vez fue, discretamente aludida, ahora, por un conglomerado de píxeles.

Aunque más escultórica, Vista explotada insiste en las tramas lumínicas. En este caso, a partir de una impactante estructura cúbica conformada por hileras de LED suspendidos por cables. La abstracción de los juegos de luz se transforma en marca figurativa a medida que el observador se aleja de la obra. Campbell desarrolla así un paradójico dispositivo sensorial que fascina en la misma medida en que procura desmontar algo de ese efecto hipnótico para reflexionar sobre lo perceptivo como resultado de una construcción.

Una línea de trabajo tan marcada por lo temporal y los enigmas perceptivos tenía que derivar en obras relacionadas con la memoria. De eso se tratan Retrato de mi padre y Foto de mi madre , obras conmovedoras, más allá de estar inscriptas en una aséptica exploración sobre la analogía entre la memoria humana y la memoria informática.

En la primera, una foto digitalizada del padre del artista aparece y se esfuma de manera intermitente, al ritmo de los latidos de un corazón. En la segunda ocurre algo similar, pero lo que se escucha es una respiración. Imágenes y sonidos, preservados digitalmente, son capaces de evocar, capturar incluso, un instante del continuo temporal que atraviesa todo lo vivo. Pero no sin la misma cuota de carencia, parcialidad y persistente sensación de arena que se escurre entre los dedos, que irremediablemente acompaña a la memoria humana.

"¿Qué queda de la memoria, sin un relato que la sostenga?", parecen preguntar estos objetos. "Sólo el enigma", podría pensarse que les responde la obra Nunca he leído la Biblia , en la cual la memoria es un texto bíblico, susurrado a razón de una letra por vez.

Home movies series

Powell St

East Broadway

Bus stop

Library

Tiempo estático. Jim Campbell: 20 años de arte electrónico , en Espacio Fundación Telefónica (Arenales 1540), hasta el 1 de octubre

Siga leyendo la nota de Diana Fernández Irusta:

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1400048-y-se-hizo-la-luzlo-espiritual-en-el-arte

Visite la página web de Jim Campbell

http://www.jimcampbell.tv/