I’ve started a game called Occupy White Walls, a sort of MMO art gallery building thingy. The grind is starting to hit; you basically have to excavate space one 4-metre cube at a time, and raise money by throwing open the doors as often as possible. Some people have been here long enough to create visual cacaphonies; I would too, but there doesn’t seem to be all that much modern art or abstract expressionism available. If you do play, please visit the gallery of hiatus (me.)
ART: Canned Qualities by Flow Market
Life is mostly defined by materialistic needs. It’s always about needing, wanting, buying, consuming, and many more verbs. Yet some things are “priceless” and can’t be bought because they are non-existent.
Which is why the Flow Market is selling these non-existent items.
I would have expected these qualities to be branded, rather than packaged generically, but on reflection that would have detracted from the core message.
I’m not sure where these are taken, but they’re simultaneously quiet, pretty, and slightly ominous.
Martin Klimas - Miles Davis, “Pharaoh’s Dance,” from “Bitches Brew”
Like a 3-D take on Jackson Pollock, the latest work by the artist Martin Klimas begins with splatters of paint in fuchsia, teal and lime green, positioned on a scrim over the diaphragm of a speaker. Then the volume is turned up. For each image, Klimas selects music — typically something dynamic and percussive, like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Miles Davis or Kraftwerk — and the vibration of the speaker sends the paint aloft in patterns that reveal themselves through the lens of his Hasselblad. Klimas rose to prominence in the art world four years ago for a series of photos that captured porcelain figurines just as they shattered. For this series, Klimas spent six months and about 1,000 shots to produce the final images from his studio in Düsseldorf, Germany. In addition to the obvious debt owed to abstract expressionism, Klimas says his major influence was Hans Jenny, the father of cymatics, the study of wave phenomena. The resulting images are Klimas’s attempt to answer the question “What does music look like?”
AVERAGE AMOUNT OF PAINT USED PER SHOT: 6 OUNCES
TOTAL AMOUNT OF PAINT USED ON THE PROJECT: 18.5 GALLONS
FINAL NUMBER OF IMAGES PRINTED: 212
SHUTTER SPEED: 1/7,000TH OF A SECOND
NUMBER OF BLOWN SPEAKERS: 2
The print is based on kozy’s 2009 drawing “Spirit Animal Collective”. The drawing was the culmination of kozy’s 4 year-long “Unknown Portraits” project, which involved Kozy’s nearly obsessive search through old photographs in junk shops from Australia to Spain to Northern England to San Francisco to our own backyard in Venice Beach (and more!). Most of the drawings were the size of playing cards, but for the final artwork Kozy [created] a massive graphite rendering of a 1940’s-era New Zealand primary school class photo. In it she imagined the camera to reveal the spirit animal within each of the students. This summer we decided to produce a colorized version reminiscent of old tinted photos (Dan’s grandmother used to tint photos as a side job while raising her children) and this is the result.
All my tears.
Again.
I think I found my 2012 New Years resolution.
MINDFUCKED.
AWESOME!
Yeah… some of those will probably end up on greeting cards at some stage.
Behind the Tin Man by AM Radio.
I used to draw comics - especially the grandiose and doomed E Motel - but in the 2008s it finally died with a whimper.
This is perhaps the first comic I’ve ever drawn since.
Don’t bother encouraging me. Your encouragement is no match for my pessimism.
dresdencodak