Monthly Archive for May, 2010

Images That Steered a Drive for Freedom

Published on May 25, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From Holland Cotter at The New York Times…

It’s unwise to be sniffy about popular culture.

Television — the idiot box, the boob tube — was best of friends with the civil rights movement in the 1960s, bringing its valiant images, week after week, into American homes. Pictorial glossies like Life and Look had done a similar service a decade earlier.

Were such corporate media acting on unsuspected reserves of social good will? For the most part, no. They had news to sell, and the illustrations for that news — images of people subjected to violence and then gathering together in the largest mass meeting the country had ever seen — happened to be sensational. You had to pay attention. You couldn’t not have a reaction.

But how, exactly, did the delivery of such images come about? And why? An exhibition called “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights” at the International Center of Photography is here to give some answers, backed up by a second show, “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. More…

Inside the Mundaneum

Published on May 23, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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By Molly Springfield at triplecanopy…

On the night of June 1, 1934, a Belgian information scientist named Paul Otlet sat in silent, peaceful protest outside the locked doors of a government building in Brussels from which he had just been evicted. Inside was his life’s work: a vast archive of more than twelve million bibliographic three-by-five-inch index cards, which attempted to catalog and cross-reference the relationships among all the world’s published information. For Otlet, the archive was at the center of a plan to universalize human knowledge. He called it the Mundaneum, and he believed it would usher in a new era of peace and progress. The Belgian government, however, had come to view Otlet and his fine mess of papers, dusty boxes, and customized filing cabinets as a financial and political nuisance.

Thirteen years earlier, Otlet’s Mundaneum—then called the Palais Mondial—had occupied 150 gleaming rooms in the Palais du Cinquatenaire in Brussels. Thousands of visitors a day filed through, marveling at the seven-foot-high card-catalog cabinets lining the walls of an eighty-foot-long room. More…

The Opposition Paradigm (Together Again for the First Time)

Published on May 21, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

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figure i : he stands opposite his rivals

From Daniel Rourke at 3quarksdaily.com…

You are the only one who can never see yourself apart from your image. In the reflection of a mirror, or the pigment of the photograph you entertain yourself. Every gaze you cast is mediated by a looking apparatus, by an image you must stand alongside. The gaze welcomes itself as a guest. The eye orders you to sit at its table, to share in the feast of one’s own image. The image stands beside the real, all the while eating at its table, stealing morsels from the feast it enables. The image is not reality, but the image is the only gesture you have in the direction of reality. More…

Female Photographers Take on the World

Published on May 19, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From Fans in a Flashbulb: International Center of Photography…

The works of both the American photographer Susan Meiselas and the Iranian-born, American-based artist Shirin Neshat document politics in surprisingly similar ways.

For Meiselas, still best known for her first photojournalistic project chronicling the political upheavals in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, documenting political change was more than just shooting photographs of military officers and armed insurgents. Over her five years in Nicaragua and El Salvador she photographed other things as well, from weddings to funeral processions, leaving one with the sense of how the turmoil affected all aspects of everyday life. Her use of color, pioneering and controversial in war photography at that time, gave an added immediacy to the images to which she applied it. For more, as well as additional images…

A bit of a Renaissance

Published on May 17, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

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From Jackie Wullschlager at Financial Times…

Until the early 19th century, visiting Italy was the sine qua non of artistic formation, whether you came from France (Ingres, Corot), Spain (Goya), England (Turner) or Germany (Schinkel). It was only when art’s unbroken line back to quattrocento classicism started to falter that the theorists moved in. Jacob Burckhardt in his 1860 book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was the first art historian to use and popularise the term “Renaissance”. Since then, the epoch has been all things to all men.

Burckhardt, whose book remains a template, saw the Renaissance as the dawn of the spirit of individuality and of modernity. In the following years, Walter Pater in The Renaissance interpreted it through the prism of fin-de-siècle aestheticism; Freud psychoanalysed Leonardo; in the 1930s, Marxist critic Meyer Schapiro pinpointed the emergence of capitalism in the period. What we do with the Renaissance, then, defines how we see ourselves, which is why this current crop of histories is so mordantly entertaining and illuminating. Holding up a mirror to the cut-throat competition, personality cults and public display of the 21st-century art world, all are portraits of creative rivalry and power play which will be recognisable to anyone observing, to take one example, the recent face-off between Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor over London’s Olympic commission. More…

IOGraph: Tracking Computer Mouse Movements as Art Work

Published on May 14, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

iograph

From information aesthetics…

IOGraph [iographica.com] is a little software application that turns the continuous tracking of computer mouse movements into a modern art.

The basic concept is that people just “run” the application in the background, and then accomplish their usual activities at the computer. After a long day of hard work, a beautiful image is then created by cumulating all mouse movements and representing them as continuous paths. For people who work in a single application for a considerably long time, IOGraph could even provide potentially interesting usability data when overlayed on a screenshot of the actual window configuration. More…

East Meets the American West: Xie Zhiliu’s Yosemite images

Published on May 7, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

east_west

From Morgan Meis at The Smart Set…

An old Chinese man went to Yosemite and it blew his mind. To explain why, we have to go back a few thousand years. Chinese people have an old civilization. Older, perhaps, than anybody else’s civilization. That depends on how you define “civilization,” but who has the time to fight about these things? Point is, it’s old. Chinese art thus has a lot of tradition. Chinese artists predictably spend a lot of time coming to terms with that tradition. You study the old masters, you reject the old masters, you copy the old masters, you desperately try to ignore the old masters, you become the old masters.

Xie Zhiliu was born in 1910 and he died in 1997. He grew up in Changzhou, which is known to have had a great tradition of Chinese painting, especially bird and flower stuff, which is the bread and butter of hundreds of years of Chinese painting. He later moved to Shanghai, where he was a professor of painting and an advisor to the Shanghai Museum. He was as firmly implanted in the tradition as a man can be. More…