Art Archive

An exhibition of Henri-Cartier Bresson is coming to New York's MOMA in April. Here are the notes from the MOMA website:

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) is one of the most original, accomplished, influential, and beloved figures in the history of photography. His inventive work of the early 1930s helped define the creative potential of modern photography, and his uncanny ability to capture life on the run made his work synonymous with "the decisive moment"--the title of his first major book. After World War II (most of which he spent as a prisoner of war) and his first museum show (at MoMA in 1947), he joined Robert Capa and others in founding the Magnum photo agency, which enabled photojournalists to reach a broad audience through magazines such as Life while retaining control over their work. In the decade following the war, Cartier-Bresson produced major bodies of photographic reportage on India and Indonesia at the time of independence, China during the revolution, the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, the United States during the postwar boom, and Europe as its old cultures confronted modern realities. For more than twenty-five years, he was the keenest observer of the global theater of human affairs--and one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century. MoMA's retrospective, the first in the United States in three decades, surveys Cartier-Bresson's entire career, with a presentation of about three hundred photographs, mostly arranged thematically and supplemented with periodicals and books. The exhibition travels to The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Might take some time, but eventually the show will travel out west to SF where I will definitely see it.

Until recently, I had a poster of this Bresson image, En Brie hanging in my place:

Here's the time lapse video of the the making of In Bed. It's truly amazing to watch this hyper-realistic sculpture by Ron Mueck come to life. (follow the link to the video)

If you're lucky enough to be in Melbourne, you can see a showing of his work at the National Gallery of Victoria.

"Inspired by how some animals can blend into their environment, Liu Bolin from China uses camouflage principles to create amazing contemporary art."

Has to be seen to be believed. More here. The one with the bulldozer is amazing. I had to work hard to find Liu. Really incredible.

Literally giving new dimension to a Picasso classic:

I've seen the King Tut exhibit twice before, once in 1979 at the LA County Musuem of Art, again 10 years ago at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, but I'm psyched to see it again tonight at the De Young Museum in SF. It's a truly remarkable collection. Here's Tutankhamun on Wikipedia in case you're interested.

And for the truly nostalgic, there's this:

Yesterday, we went to see this tiny, curvy cobblestoned street in Vila Madalena called Rua do Batman where the walls of all the houses are covered in graffiti. The art is changed periodically as the artists wish. Not all of it is great. Some is very odd in fact, but most of it is incredibly colorful and beautiful.

I am trying to upload the photos from here in Brazil. It is slow going, but eventually, they will all be here on Flickr.

I think the logo for the Yellowjackets is kinda wimpy. You can see it on the website. Doesn't exactly inspire much of anything. The jerseys are these purplish red sun bursts which besides being pretty ugly, don't exactly say "yellowjackets" to me. I think something a little more muscular as well as black and yellow would be better. I found some stock art (I will download and pay for it if the club decides it wants a new logo) and played around with some ideas and came up with the above image. How cool would that look on the back of a jersey?

I just bought this picture from a talented artist I found while surfing on the web. I'm not really one for buying original art, but this one just speaks to me in volumes.

I came across this site, The Superest recently and I think it's amazing so I feel compelled to share. Basically it's a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. Here are the rules: Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.

The best way to enjoy this is to start at thefirst hero and just click through the Defeated by link. Not all the heros are great. Some are total dogs, but many are incredible and you can really see the evolution both in terms of creativity and quality (both the hero drawings and the hand drawn fonts). It'll make for a nice diversion from whatever is you're doing (and, obviously, you're just killing time, since you're reading this blog.)

This one slays me, especially the dude with the rake:

Have you seen this guy at work? He makes art out of oreos, peeing in the snow and he can this:

Clearly he's a little touched, in both good and bad ways, but there's no doubt that he's a artistic genius. This one is particularly amazing. More here on You Tube and on Yahoo! People of the Web (which is how I originally found him). Here's Phil's website.

This is part of an installation by Chinese artist on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Guess where the knives are from?

I finally put the images from the Pageant finals online. You can find them here. Personally, I think, because there are so many shots, over 800, it's best to view the slideshow. Just click on the slideshow link, set the interval to 1 second and watch the show. It's almost like you were there, or would be if I didn't have to delete so many shots because they were blury or out of focus, but like I explained before, the photography conditions were rough for a novice like me. I'm happy any of them came out to be honest.

The finals were really good. Lots of very talented dancers. The results were somewhat surprising, at least to my amateur eye. I really thought Nadira, a tall, elegant, stunningly blond dancer from Seattle was going to take the title, but she finished second to a local dancer from Oakland named Shabnam, a tiny bundle of frenetic whirling dervish energy. The judges are valuing a whole set of criteria based of their collective years of experience that I can hardly begin to comprehend ranging from music, costuming, finger cymbals and choreogaphy. It's much more complicated than you think.

Anyway, the Pageant was good fun despite the problems with the program. I really enjoyed taking these shots and am reasonably happy with the results from my first time shooting anything indoors. I hope you like the photos. Please let me know what you think.
I would have put all the images up earlier, but I had run out of bandwidth on my Flickr account. I can harly believe it myself, but somehow I managed to put 2 gigs of images online in May. Mostly this was because I didn't want to resize any of them because I wanted Flickr to retain the metadata and also have to the largest resolution images on the web in case, I don't know, I ever needed them or my hard drive really crashed or whatever. It's a really tedious process, getting them all online, giving them all unique and relevant title and tagging them with keywords so I can search and sort them.

Flickr is really a great service, one of the few things worth paying for on the web. The only thing that I wish Flickr would enable in the next version is to have "subsets". Right now you can create sets to organize photos, which is great, but I have some sets that have a large number of photos, upwards of 1500 in one case, and it would be really nice to be able to subdivide the sets. It would keep everything nicely organized and make it easier for me and anyone else to view the photos. Flickr, are you listening?

That's it for harping on Flicker and that's definitely it for belly dancing for a while. Now back to regularly scheduled programming.

While most Americans are traveling, camping, having backyard barbeques and drinking themselves into a three day slumber on Memorial Day Weekend, a small but enthusiastic group of belly dancers have been meeting in Northern California for the past 32 years to celebrate their art form and compete for the crown of "Belly Dancer of the Year".

I had been hearing about "The Pageant" for years. It's an occupational hazard of dating a belly dancer. There are two things that will happen to you if you are lucky enough to date a dancer. The first is that you will have lots of incredible sex. The second is that you will see lots of belly dancing. Lots and lots of belly dancing. A tremendous amount of belly dancing.

I can't tell you how many festivals, restaurants and private parties I've been to since I met Jennifer back in 2001. I've seen hundreds of dancers. We broke up a long time ago and yet I still find myself dragged to this stuff. I enjoy it, in general, but sometimes it gets a little much, as would anything. I thought Belly Dancer of Year would be the apotheosis of this overexposure, but I was totally wrong. I was mesmerized.

I had sort of vested interest, since I was conscripted to design the program for the event. I put tons of work into the damn thing and was looking forward to seeing it printed. But the printer totally fucked up the job and when I saw the programs yesterday I wanted to kill. When you put so much work into something and somebody else fucks it up, it's tough to deal with. The pictures were all printed way to dark. Somehow the title font was printed in black so you couldn't see part of it. The program cover was printed at a slight angle so there was some of the white paper visible above the picture. Because the internal pages were printed so dark, it was hard to read the text. From my perspective it completely sucked so when people came up to me to compliment the program I really had to hold my tongue. I was embarrassed. I didn't want to take credit for something that looked that bad. That said, the promoter of the pageant, Leea Azizz, was beside herself with joy about it, so who am I to complain? Next year we'll find a printer that understands the concept of "proofing".

I got over it and settled in to watch the competition. Rather than find myself bored out of my mind as I expected (there were 21 performances in the solo category alone), I was consumed with taking pictures of these incredible dancers. So many of them were so good, I don't know how the judges are going to separate the top 5 or so. They managed to whittle down the field to 10 finalists who are dancing this afternoon. There were some surprises, but for the most part, the dancers I thought were best made it through.

It's not the easiest thing in the world to take pictures in a dark theater without a flash. The challenge really comes from finding a compromise between sharpness and dynamism. You want the shots to be as crisp and in-focus as possible. But you don't want to totally freeze the action because you'll lose any sense of movement. Therin lies the trouble.

The dancers are almost constantly in motion, so if you want to capture the movement of a veil during a spin, invariably, because the dancer is also moving, the whole composition will be out of focus. So you really have to concentrate on those moments when the head of the dancer is still and everything else is flying all over the place. It's a challenge.

Because it's so dark, I have to shoot at the widest possible aperture (f2.8 in this case). The result is that the depth of field is incredibly shallow and therefore so is the margin of error. If you focus on anything, like a veil or a sword, that is a little closer or further from the face of the dancer, she (or he, but mostly she) will be out focus enough to ruin the shot. It's a very delicate operation.

You have to find the right balance between shutter speed, film speed and white balance that gives you the best results. What makes it tougher is you can't just find one combo that works because each dancer, with variations in skin tone and costume brightness, is completely different. I don't know if I found the perfect settings, but I tried. You can see the results here. I spent a few hours culling through the shots, deleting most of the bad ones and posting them on Flickr.

I'm headed back today for the finals. Honestly, I'm surprised how much I'm looking forward to it.

IF I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene
and show,

'Twould not be you, Niagara - nor you, ye limitless prairies - nor
your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite - nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic
geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon's white cones - nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes - nor
Mississippi's stream:

- This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name - the still
small voice vibrating - America's choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen - the act itself the main, the
quadriennial choosing,)

The stretch of North and South arous'd - sea-board and inland-

Texas to Maine - the Prairie States - Vermont, Virginia,
California,

The final ballot-shower from East to West - the paradox and conflict,

The countless snow-flakes falling - (a swordless conflict,

Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's:) the
peaceful choice of all,

Or good or ill humanity - welcoming the darker odds, the dross:

- Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify - while the heart
pants, life glows:

These stormy gusts and winds wait precious ships,

Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.

--Walt Whitman

To-day, of all the weary year,
A king of men am I.
To-day, alike are great and small,
The nameless and the known;
My palace is the people's hall,
The ballot-box my throne!
The rich is level with the poor,
The weak is strong to-day;
And sleekest broadcloth counts no more
Than homespun frock of gray.
To-day let pomp and vain pretence
My stubborn right abide;
I set a plain man's common sense
Against the pedant's pride.
The wide world has not wealth to buy
The power in my right hand!

--John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)

Last night, as I was driving to the gym, I was listening to Billy Collins, America's former Poet Laureate, on City Arts & Lectures reading and talking about his poems.

The genius of Collins is that he takes every day ideas, events and problems and transforms them through the prism of his remarkable wit and insightful use of the English language into essential kernals of truth.

I'm really fond of this poem below, ironically so, because I often forget it's title. Oh yes, Billy Collins, there's that one poem of his that I really like, but, what is it again? Oh, right. I only remembered when I heard him recite it last night. Then again, I have a notorious deficient memory.

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the nine Muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag, and even now as you memorize the order of the planets, something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps, the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember it is not poised on the tip of your tongue, not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall, well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

--Billy Collins

Tonight I was walking south down Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side. I came across a gallery showing the work of Ed Heck, including this adorable little pup entitled "City Dog". I love the bold colors and the whimsical subject matter. The style is so simple it's surprising that no one was doing it before, but that's the pure genius of Mr. Heck's work. You can check out more of his stuff here