A Slight Delay

I’ve always loved maps. Granted, sometimes a map is just a utilitarian thing, a means of getting from point A to point B without getting (more) lost. But the fun thing about atlases and especially about old maps (you know, the ones with archaic boundaries, road and place names) is a sense not only of the “there” there, but also a sense of possibilities. Just as I’d get lost in books or pretty much anything else with words printed on it, maps were wonderful fodder for an overactive imagination; if you didn’t know exactly what went on in Dahomey, you could just imagine it as you went along.

Well, one of the nice things about the web is finding out that whatever you find interesting, you’re probably not alone in your pleasure. Case in point, for me at least, would be the recent discovery of Strange Maps. It’s not devoted to all things cartographic, exactly, just the more interesting bits.

Maps nowadays are pedestrian affairs. Nobody expects a map to be funky, artistic, or thought-provoking, much less poignant. Strange Maps has all of the above, and then some, in spades. Do you see maps in random objects? Wonder what happens when you map people’s weenie preferences in West Virginia (I have to admit, I hadn’t wondered that, but the map provoked a chuckle)? Here’s your site.

I can’t find a pearl earring on any of Daphne Louter’s many (painted) rabbits. I’ve tried. It seems as though they should be there, at least in part because the artist’s style owes more than a bit to fellow (if deceased) Dutchman Vermeer, but also because nothing seems quite out of place in Louter’s world.

Visual puns are easy enough. What’s challenging is keeping them within the realm of the plausible. A morose-looking fox toting a bag of groceries? Why not? A hummingbird flitting around a coral reef? Sure. While you’re at it, why not just have a woman applying icing to a toad… Okay, I’ll provisionally take the plausibility part back. But it’s part of the charm of Louter’s work that these things actually make sense, albeit in a sometimes disturbing way. She cites Sowa as an influence, but on the evidence it’s pretty clear that her style is her own.

The illustration and painting aside, she also works in textiles, photography, computer graphics, and text. If you had it in mind to find something edgy, this probably won’t be your cup of tea. If you don’t mind sharing said cup of tea with an anteater, on the other hand, you’ll probably feel right at home.

A long while back, I accidentally got into architecture. Not as an architect, mind you, just as a spectator. The way some people channel surf to find a good game, I’ll scan anything from bookstores to skylines to find something interesting.

What started it was a Rem Koolhaas exhibition at MoMA, and reading the architect’s classic Delerious New York not long after. If Koolhaas’s architecture was interesting stuff, his writing on architecture is really something; you could tell that this was someone who was interested not only in pretty buildings with his firm’s name on them, but also in the architect’s broader social responsibility. The architect’s firm, OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) seems to have put out more books on building than the buildings themselves, taking on issues of context, commerce, geography, and pretty much everything else that can be thought and written about buildings.

All of this is a long-ish way of saying that I’m glad I found Studio Wikitecture. The group is a loosely-knit collective of architects and others* that applies the same open-source/crowd-sourced methodology that underpins Wikipedia to architecture. This may not sound like much on its surface, but let’s take your typical architectural project as a basis for comparison. Generally speaking, there will be a competition to draw in designs from a number of top firms, from which a winning design will be selected, and on which basis building can start; from time to time–as was the case with the Freedom Tower–the designs from the first round will be found wanting, and another round of designs will be submitted. The winning design won’t always be re-tooled to take into account the better features of other entries, and so the end result will be built with its shortcomings intact. (more…)

Sometimes I get the feeling that someone, somewhere, has decided it’s just not art if it can’t be given a label or title. So imagine the difficulty posed by the works of Michael Sowa.

Sure, you can peg him as a Surrealist (the most common label slapped on his work), but it’s not the kind of Surrealism that you find in artists like DeChirico, Dali, or Ernst. Indeed, the closest affinity in a lot of Sowa’s art would seem to be with Edward Hopper, if you could picture Hopper’s world populated with Autobahn pigs, driving pickles, and bunnies on trains. In the wrong hands this could be a recipe for disaster, as though Thomas Kincaid tried his hand at The Far Side. It’s the attention to technique that keeps Sowa’s art from veering either into sentimental kitsch at one extreme, or cheap sight gags on the other.

Robert Hughes once wrote of Hopper that there was a certain ambiguity about the painter’s works; you could never be quite sure if they were about solitude or loneliness. Similarly, Sowa’s art defies easy categorization. The scenes have a nearly voyeuristic quality about them, as if we’ve wandered into someone else’s daydream, or another reality that hovers just at the edge of perception. It’s appropriate, in a way, that Sowa’s visuals played a part in the film Amelie. As with the film, Sowa’s art displays a sweetly off-kilter sense of humor that’s tinged with a sepia-toned melancholy.

Postscript: These images, and others, are available in Sowa’s Ark, a collection of the artist’s work that’s finally back in print.

One of my favorite things: stuff that happens only once, completely at random. Those snippets of found sounds, overheard dialog, or improbable phrasing are a sort of assemblage by accident. Reason and design get lost in the kind of haze that seems to be exactly why the word “ephemeral” was coined in the first place. These things only happen, it seems, when they can’t be captured, whether at the edge of hearing, from the corner of the eye, or in those fleeting moments between waking and dreaming.

And when you try to capture something like this, it ends up losing something in translation. By trying to give it form, make it last, you somehow rob it of its spirit or essence; you end up stripping it of its immediacy, and a large part of what made it special in the first place. (more…)

This post is safe for work. See Mike Draw, not so much. It’s decidedly un-PC, warped, scatalogical, sacreligious, and seriously disturbed. Mind you, I mean each of those things, in this instance, as accolades. Mike Jacobsen has a sense of exactly how far to go; the humor doesn’t rely on shock value, which is probably a good thing (look what an over-reliance on shock value did to South Park over the long run, and you’ll see what I mean).

This isn’t “Family Circus.” Be thankful for that.

I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately. –George Carlin

I’m not normally big on dead celebrities. Often as not–though there are exceptions–they’re gone when they’re well past their prime, and this seems especially true of comedians. Bob Hope would be Exhibit A, keeping good company with George Burns, and others of that ilk.

But then there are the exceptions. Bill Hicks, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and one George Denis Patrick Carlin. The same “safe” Carlin who was a frequent guest on the Tonight Show (starting back in the Jack Paar days) would, soon enough, be the same Carlin who gave America the Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television (the original seven, which grew to something close to 2,500, were shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits, in case you were curious), “A Place for My Stuff,” and Brain Droppings. Carlin could be maddeningly hit-or-miss, but when he was on, he was as much standup philosopher as he was comedian, holding a mirror up to the uglier bits of human nature and playing them for laughs. He could be as dead-on (forgive the pun) about politics as he was about religion and so much else.

Usually when a great personality dies, someone ends up saying that the world seems like a smaller place without them in it. In George Carlin’s case, though, the world seems somehow more serious, which in its own way seems an even bigger shame…

 The Dada painters and poets aren’t exactly on the tip of people’s tongues these days. Styles and tastes change, and what seemed fresh and shocking in 1920 doesn’t have the same impact now that it did then. Hell, things done more recently than that don’t shock like they used to, either. Just ask Damien Hirst.

But as I was saying. John Heartfield (1891-1968) has faded into obscurity, known mostly to art history students, artists, and a handful of other people. It’s a shame, really, because Heartfield presaged some of the methods, and the esthetic, of Pop art, influenced his contemporaries, and helped–whether he either realized it, wanted it, or not–to usher in a breed of contemporary artists (Cindy Sherman comes to mind) who would mine the same vein that Heartfield did, but without his insight or mordant humor. (more…)

Books, lectures, films and articles on the state of society, and speculation over where it’s going, have never been in short supply. The amount of it worth reading, on the other hand… well, that’s something else again. One site that takes a broad view of what a public intellectual is, and what they have to offer, is Edge.

The site is a hodgepodge of current thinking in and about the arts, sciences, and culture. Past and present contributors have included Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Clifford Stoll, Esther Dyson, Elaine Pagels, and Stephen Jay Gould. The Foundation seeks to lay bare the forces shaping modern life, “rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.” It’s an ambitious undertaking, and if its reach occasionally exceeds its grasp, it never fails to make for interesting reading.