Artist / Capitalist

Todays post: is about Rene Lalique, a guy who started, lived and finished his life as an artist. In fact, not only did he make a living at it - he also built a (so far) permanent family financial empire on it. I say: cut me a big slice of whatever he was having.

Along the way, he created magnificent jewelry like this:

Dragonfly Woman Corsage Ornament (ca. 1898)
[original image HERE]

and this:

Opal and Enamel Pendant Earrings
[original image HERE]

and, later, incredible perfume bottles, vases and other mass-produced art-piece glassware, as well as a beautiful series of luxury car "mascots" (hood ornaments):

Cinq Chevaux (Five Horses) - Rene Lalique, 1925
Clear glass, 6" high
[original photo from secondchancegarage.com: HERE;
See this REALLY COOL SLIDESHOW of these pieces under this NYTimes story]

Born in the rural champagne region of Northeastern France in 1860, Lalique was apprenticed at age 16 (due to his father's death) to a goldsmith in Paris. He began as a freelance designer for acclaimed design houses like Cartier and Boucheron at 21, and opened his own shop at 25. He rode the early-20th-century Art Nouveau movement to fame and more fortune, and went on to become one of France's leading jewelers, turning exclusively to glassware in about 1908 and adapting industrial production methods. Unfortunately, Lalique saw his workshop and entire inventory seized by the rising Nazis in 1939, but his work is still in demand by collectors and investors - a complete set of 30 hood ornaments recently sold at auction for $805,000 [there's a really good full bio HERE.]

So, to the obvious question: HOW did he DO it? He was born in an agrarian district, not (by all accounts) into privilege; won his first award - for drawing - at age 12; studied abroad; did freelance design, from which the quality of his work was obviously recognized; changed from jewelry to glass as his major medium; and then: got really rich and famous. How did he make that last major jump? Apparently, by creating - and then dominating - a mass market. In fact:

"he turned from creating unique jewelry and objects d'art, to the mass production of innovative and usable art glass. He brought glass into the home of everyday people where it had never been before, and he worked out the industrial techniques to mass produce his useful art glass objects on a scale and cost to complement the spreading industrial revolution and resulting worldwide appetite for his products."

[emphasis added; source is good professional bio HERE]. 

In short, he was a Capitalist - at precisely the right time in history: the "glory days" of the Industrial Revolution.  He was apparently gifted in the core artistic skills (unlike the later "Visionary" Steve Jobs who, it seems, was not much of an engineer - Bill Gates has said Jobs "never really understood much about technology" - though he was clearly a genius at recognizing and/or creating markets), but that wasn't enough. He was apparently successful in the  creative-productivity sense, having been hired to do work for Paris' major design houses and embraced by the Art Nouveau movement, but that wasn't enough. He was prolific in both the range and amount of his creative output (an impressive overview of the media, techniques, clientele and sales outlets which he mastered and pioneered over his career is HERE), but ...

None of these attributes, though, seem to explain his ultimate financial success; he didn't "Hit It Fat" until he started using emerging industrial manufacturing techniques to (1) create and (2) fill the newfound (maybe "invented" is a better word) needs of consumers for "useable art glass." He made stuff they didn't know they needed until he gave it to them. Sounds kinda like the iPod story to me. The guy was Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs.

How to match this up with the "starving artist" model many of us (okay, by that I mean "me") carry around? Why did Van Gogh supposedly only sell one painting during his lifetime while his works regularly sell in the hundreds-of-millions today? Why, as the joke goes, are the first four words you hear from an Art School Grad: "(w)ant fries with that?" Based on the success of Lalique, the answer is "Capitalism", I guess.

Something to ponder the next time you're buying Art from a card table at a flea market. Please go ahead and buy it, by all means; just think about this as you hand over the cash.

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Today's Creation is: these two half-sheet flyers for courses Kristin's planning to offer at a friend's pediatric clinic:

[© me, today]

and:

[©me, today]

I did 'em in InDesign/Photoshop. Not thrilled with the 2nd one yet; the text is kind of busy for a half-sheet size because the class times/requirements have gotten complex since the first drafts. I hate to go to a full-page spread just to accommodate the new amount of text, but it might be the only solution. Both look fine as an 8 1/2" X 11" wall poster; I'd just rather use a smaller-scale flyer so people might be more inclined to grab one off the desk than if it were a full page. We'll see what happens.
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Art by machine

Todays post is: about a creative genre called "Generative Art", which - in the foofy right-brain tradition of ArtSpeak ("can't be labelled; words too restrictive; blah blah blah") - translates roughly as "art created by use of non-human autonomous systems" (wiki is HERE). Right now it generally means that a computer is one of the tools. Actually, as I argue below, the term isn't really very clear-cut at all. Maybe ArtSpeak ain't really so foofy? You can decide when you're done reading this posting.

The art can be music, literature or architecture design; it can also be "interactive" art (like the environmental pieces I wrote about earlier - read it HERE). It can even be sculpted in 3D form like these:

Generative Sculpture by Tom Beddard
(original image from butdoesitfloat.com HERE)

by Eva Schindlin - original image from butdoesitfloat.com HERE)
(Eva's process is described HERE)

In fact, it can actually be physically produced by a machine, using the recently-emerged plastic extrusion technology called "3D printing" (see: Empire State Building time lapse on YouTube).

The meaning I'm using here, though, is: 2D visual art. The person in this field I find REALLY interesting right now is a photographer named Jason Salavon; he presents large scale images (and some video pieces) generated pixel-by-pixel by computer software that processes large bodies of data and presents it in visual form. Some of the cooler examples are:

Emblem: Apocalypse Now (2004)
Digital C-Print by Jason Salavon
(original image HERE)
[the film was sampled frame-by-frame; results printed in concentric circles]

and:

from: Every Playboy Centerfold: The Decades (normalized) - 2002
Digital C-prints by Jason Salavon
(original image HERE)
[every Playboy centerfold was mean-averaged pixel-by-pixel;
results summarized and printed for each decade, 1960-1999]

I find the digital techniques used in this work to be interesting as well; I guess that makes it "conceptual art" since the ideas behind these artists' methods are very important, and they also relate to my experience of the actual image. They're beautiful, AND they make me think about a bigger idea while I'm viewing them.

What this all brings up for me is: how much "non-human intervention" is required before we can call the final result "Generative Art"? You and I use VERY sopisticated computer technology every time we snap a cellphone photo or point a digital camera at a kid blowing out birthday candles. Believe me, there's WAAAYYY more computing power at work than just a light-sensing chip that records how much light is hitting it.

Before the shutter ever clicks, at a minimum: some software measures the light, averages it across the frame, finds contrasty edges or faces (yes, it knows what a "face" looks like in pixels) on which to focus the lens, balances the color data to match the scene's lighting, decides how much data it'll have to record, picks a place to store the data, and reboots everything before you click the shutter again. If that ain't "computer technology" at work, nothing is. And, of course, producing the image after it's stored takes another whole bunch of processing power. PhotoShop? Making a print? Uploading it to Flickr or Facebook or a website? HuMONgous computer power at work.

So, how can anyone draw the line on what's "Generative Art" and what isn't? You tell ME. I just like to throw rocks and make people think a bit. Hopefully, that gets us both out of the 24-hour-newscycle brain numbness for a while.

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Today's creation is: these images of a couple of rocks I've carried around with me for a few weeks. I recently used them in an 11-day meditation process and they've brought up some useful insights for me.

Citrine and Pipestone
(photo © me)

Citrine and Pipestone - detail
(photo © me)

They also spurred me to get moving (FINALLY!) on a photo series about Transcendant Objects; physical objects that people use to connect with Spirit, or the Divine, or whatever larger world there may be beyond our physical plane. Minerals/crystals are one set; objects of worship (e.g., the Sacred Pipe used in Native American ceremonies) another; literary devices (e.g., a Bible, the Torah, stone tablets) yet another. Anyway, the textures of these rocks seems important, so I took these photos as studies for an acrylic painting, probably mixing in mediums like sand, fiber and gel with the paints, to let me use textures as well as colors and shapes. I'll post more as this stuff comes out.

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[SideNote]:

I quit Blogging for a while, mostly because I got bummed out that the pageviews were dropping way off. Basically, after my first few weeks, almost NOBODY was reading this blog. I got discouraged.To say the least. And I quit.

The need to start up again has come up for me three times in the last 24 hours. The first one was a good friend (he's by FAR the most action-biased person I know) who eMailed me to say "DO IT TODAY!" He's a mentor and pest of the best possible kind for me. Thanks, Jay.

The second was an article by Neil Patel I read on the web this morning ("12 Things That Will Kill Your Blog Posting Every Time") that says: it takes about TWO YEARS for a blogger to get found on the web, and one sure way to kill your blog off completely is to give up and QUIT POSTING on it. Like I had done. Okay - that's two.

The third was another good friend (thanks, Greg - I really appreciated it) who called this morning and basically said "Hey! I check your blog every morning, and you've been off the air for almost TWO MONTHS! What's UP with THAT?" Message received.

I think it's some Buddhist tradition that if something comes up for you three times you'd better listen, because the Universe is trying to get your attention. Also, in my experience, those unheeded messages get louder and louder until you hear 'em - and I never like how loud they get after I ignore them. So here I am.

Who's The Muse?

I'm back. After about a month of laying around, feeling stuck, walking around in my bathrobe, and [my favorite part] whining and complaining about it, I woke up early this morning and just HAD to get back out here. And now I'm wasting time wondering where "The Muse" went, and why she came back. In that vein:

Today's post is about: Yarn Bombs. They've been called 'knit graffiti'. To me, they're pointless acts of beauty, spontaneous decorations, random creativity. Go ahead: grab some yarn and go splash harmless, non-toxic, removable color -- on ANYTHING:

(image from: rebelyarns)

 (image from: handmadeology)

(image from: onekindword)

I first came across this (apparently) worldwide movement in an incredible facebook album [from Kate Afonina Gallery in Moscow], and after I stopped laughing I wondered: what would possess someone to DO such a thing? What crazy muse must've whacked these people over their heads? And -- where can I get some of that stuff? There I was, rolling around in whiny misery of my own making, looking for something external to pull me out of it, and BAM! These guys were just GUSHING creative juice all over the place, with no apparent "motivation" or financial payoff or ... what?

Even seeing this amazing, pointless burst of creativity wasn't enough for me. No -- for a couple of weeks, I still needed to hang on to my LONNGG list of excuses: it's winter here; I must have S.A.D.; the Love Of My Life is out of town for a month; I need this time to recharge; I'm pre-occupied with money problems; everybody's got the post-holiday blues; it's brain chemistry; it's Winter Solstice - time for seeds to rest and prepare; blah blah friggin' BLAH. All of it's just what a former boss called "intellectual flatulence". I just - had - nothing. All the books I've read about it, all the late-night/early morning talks about it with friends, all the motivation "strategies" I've used before - all worthless. For a month.

And then, at about 4:00 this morning ...

Sitting here in this coffee shop, absolutely rushing to get these thoughts down and put them out there, I have no idea where this stuff comes from, or where it goes. I'm just glad it's back.
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Today's creation is: some wall(paper) images. Sitting in a parking lot waiting to pick up my wife, I was so grabbed by these brick textures that I (finally!) remembered I use my phone/camera as a visual sketch pad:

(photo © me)  

(photo © me)

(photo © me - saturation tweaked in
Adobe® Photoshop® Express for Android)

(photo © me - saturation tweaked in
Adobe® Photoshop® Express for Android)

I did this all on my phone - took the photos, cropped & tweaked them, emailed 'em to myself so I could put them here. These apps are amazing; the power of this one in particular just floors me when I stop to think about it. I don't know where or when I'll use these again (so far, the purple one is wallpaper on my phone), but I often save textures and refer to/use them later - at least, when I'm creatively-awake enough to do it.

Here's hoping.

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art as scrap

Today's post is: more musings on the "value of art", and how that relates to other basic human needs with which art competes for resources today. Earlier this week, an important piece of public art was stolen from a park in London:

Two Forms Divided - Barbara Hepworth (1969)
shown before & after theft
(photos: Southwark Council and Trevor Moore)

The theft of this historically-significant piece by renowned sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth (her Wiki is HERE) is thought to be part of a "sickening epidemic" of public art thefts in England for the scrap value of the bronze metal (report on the theft is HERE) - which is, of course, a small fraction of the actual price at which the work would be valued for sale (something over US$780,000). If this is the case, then someone needed the scrap value in cash so badly s/he was willing to steal the sculpture and risk going to jail for it. It's been speculated that the piece was stolen by someone who "just doesn't care", or "got in with the wrong crowd" (see a thoughtful and interesting commentary by Zoe WIlliams of The Guardian HERE). Regardless of the facts that may ultimately come out in this case, it seems likely that (if the scrap metal motive is true) somebody saw some easy money, needed easy money, and grabbed the artwork at that value - despite what others might have thought the piece was worth at auction.

Please understand: I don't condone this or any other form of theft based on some argument of relative "need". For all I know the thief might be feeding a drug habit, or owe a bunch of money to people with nasty tendencies, or be engaged in who knows what other personal behavior that's been deemed socially unacceptable and/or criminal and thus punishable. My only reason for mentioning this aspect of "value" is to point out that SOMEBODY apparently valued this important piece of artwork based on its immediate scrap value - rather than its value in the Art Marketplace - because they needed the money. I make NO argument that "society is at fault", or that the thie(ves) should be pitied, or that the marketplace is somehow corrupt, or any of that.

I do argue, though, that the assignment of "value" can vary based on one's level of need. In the field of psychology, Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" gave us a structure for this approach to understanding human behavior; he argued that people are motivated to fulfill basic needs before moving on to other needs. If this Hepworth sculpture was stolen to be sold for scrap metal, the thie(ves) valued it at its immediate cash value and NOT at its potential sale price as an artwork. This, to me, is assigning value to an object based on immediate need - which gives a different figure than its value as art. Two numbers, same object.

To play with this "value of art" idea a little farther, consider the legacy of recently-passed sculptor John Chamberlain (his Wiki is HERE), who initially found fame making art from the rusted parts of junked cars:

(untitled)
original image (and others) at The Art Theoretical,
an Avery McCarthy studio blog

Chamberlain said he started working in this scrap metal medium because it was (1) available and (2) inexpensive: "Michelangelo had a lot of marble in his back yard, so to speak; I had a lot of this stuff" (quote from LA Times obituary HERE). To me, this is the other half of the "value of art" argument; this guy chose to work in this medium because the material itself was so cheap, yet he was able to transform that low-value material into high-value artworks (one of his pieces sold last June for $4.7M). So, value is determined by WHAT, exactly? Beats me.

[NOTE: The previous post titled "Art - at what cost?" (read it below) described an amazing but very costly installation of "Land Art", a class of work which often makes use of the massive scale that's possible when the Earth itself is used as the medium. That posting, in which I reflected on other potential (charitable) uses of the $10M being spent to assemble the piece's components - mainly for the cost of transporting a 340-ton granite boulder 106 miles to the site - drew a really insightful and articulate comment from ObsArt (a cool blog on Earth Art) defending the work and its expense.]
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Today's creation is a Quicktime video I made from some still photos of our Christmas tree (we finished decorating it late last night):

(video © me)
Mozart: 8 Variations On A Dutch Song by Christian Ernst Graaf,
performed by Walter Klien
(from a great collection published by Musical Concepts,
available HERE.

I shot the stills this afternoon with some good sunlight coming in a window behind the tree; the mixed light was tricky but it gave a satisfying result. Had some Mozart on while decorating it, so that's what ended up in the clip.

Merry Christmas!
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Art - at what cost?

Today's post is about more rock art; serious rock art - like, say, sculpture using a 340-ton boulder:

Boulder to be used in "Levitated Mass",
an installation by Michael Heiser at LA Museum of Contemporary Art
(photo © THIS BLOG)

Artist Michael Heiser's installation piece called Levitated Mass will consist of this 21' high boulder suspended over a 456'-long trench through which viewers will walk underneath it:

prelim sketch © the artist
(posted at infrascapedesign HERE)

Minor logistical problem, though: the granite boulder Heiser picked for this work is 106 miles from the site. They've build a 290-foot-long transport structure of steel girders to take it thru 3 counties, under permits from 100 governmental bodies, with help from more than 100 utilities, over roads and bridges chosen because they should be able to support the 1.2 million pound load. Total cost is expected to exceed $10M. The moving project is described HERE; a cool video of the preparation process is HERE.

Heiser is considered part of a school of (mostly-American) artists who began doing "Land Art" in the late 1960's (WIKI is HERE). He's done several well-known works in this field, including "Double Negative", a 1500-foot-long sculpture for which he blasted and excavated two 30' wide X 50' deep trenches in a desert canyon 80 miles SE of Las Vegas:

Double Negative
(original photo for Las Vegas Sun, by Sam Morris)

Since about 1970, he's been working on a massive work called "City":

"City", work in progress by Michael Heiser
(photo by Tom Vinetz, NY Times);
(satellite images are available from Google Earth HERE)

in which he emulates ancient monuments and mounds in concrete, stone and steel structures up to 70'-80' high and 1/4 mile long (that's a cement truck at right in the photo above). Total cost is expected to exceed $25M; more detail HERE.

So, to recap: $10 million, $25 Million; these are BIG numbers - especially in today's troubled economic times. For some, this cost issue raises a pretty obvious question: Are you KIDDING ME?  Granted, it's all funded with private money, but: are you telling me we couldn't find a better way to spend this money? Valid point, I think. This amounts to artwork competing for resources with basic, survival-level human needs. As one LA Times commenter recently pointed out, this just might be the kind of disconnect that the "Occupy Movement" is talking about.

I'm pondering this point myself.

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Today's creation is: a forest. We started production (and mailing - first batch went out last night!) of this year's crop of Christmas cards, including a little handmade popup tree insert. I recently posted the image and some prototypes. Last night I made the first 60 of the little buggers:

(photo and design © me)

which was waaay more handwork than I envisioned, but they do really have the feel I wanted. Success, I think - despite the work required.
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Art as Reality

Today's post is on: the ultimate human interactivity with art. The matrix is here, people - in this complete artificial ecosystem with which people interact just by the act of viewing it:

Time Of Doubles
Interactive digital installation by Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield;
Image from: Media Arts & Technology Program, UCSB
(original image is HERE)

My suggestion: first, watch this YouTube video, which gives you a taste of the interactive experience. Here's my feeble attempt to put it into words: in the center of this room is a curved-panel video display that shows a kind of virtual "aquarium". When you walk into the room, your presence is shown in the aquarium as a sort of "energy being" that throws off swirling threads of light. These threads are consumed by microbeetles, which are in turn consumed by bigger (blue) snake-shaped lifeforms. The snake-forms constantly swim around and form fluid boundaries which shift as people interact within the aquarium [if you really want one, a more detailed verbal description can be found HERE; more amazing still images of the installation are available HERE]. The installation is currently up at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 show in Hong Kong, and it looks VERY cool.

If your brain isn't too fried now, watch the video again - this time paying attention to the people walking around and looking at the screen. Most of them seem to take a little while to realize they're IN the aquarium, a little longer to see that they're interacting with it, and a bit longer still to take in that they're an active part of this self-contained ecosystem. By the act of walking into the room, they've become full-fledged participants in a completely artificial world. As Neo so clearly articulated it, "Whoa ... !"

Neo learns Kung Fu in The Matrix
(© Warner Brothers; original image is HERE)

So what? Well, the piece actually fits into this thread I've recently been writing about the role of art with respect to what we call "life". It can document life; it can "imitate" life. It can affect life; it can be affected by life (as in yesterday's posting on the Japanese-American painters whose artistic lives were effectively erased by events). It can help one contemplate life, even in the abstract (the minimalist painter John McLaughlin once said: "I want to communicate only to the extent that the painting will serve to induce or intensify the viewer's natural desire for contemplation, without the benefit of a guiding principle"). 

In today's posting, I see that it can actually create an other-universe life outside of what we call life: the UCSB project which resulted in this "Time Of Doubles" work is titled "Artificial Nature". Yeah, it's software-generated; sure, our eyes see it via pixels on a screen rather than via light reflected off of physical objects; of course, the software is created by human programmers - and I would argue that NONE of those considerations make it anything less than a "real life". It's an environment with rules, structure and sentient creatures that interact with it - and with each other - just by BEING THERE. You know - just like the one we currently call home.

Now, hard-core Gamers might argue they've been living in such worlds for years, in Second Life, Entropia and countless other virtual worlds - and I'd almost agree with them. Dude, they've even got their own money in there! Still, those are mostly based on kind-of-familiar rules of interaction (okay, maybe not true for Portal, which has its own special laws of physics), and you DO need a specific human/screen interface, like a keyboard, controller or joystick. Wii, xBox Kinect and other systems with motion-sensing interfaces are coming ever-closer to what I'm talking about, I guess. Whatever. My point is the same: you interact with, and enter the environment of, this Time Of Doubles installation piece just by the act of viewing it.

Whoa ... !
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Today's creation is: the near-final version of a popup insert for this year's Christmas card. It's about 4" tall, and a composite of two colored ink pieces (tree + star) over a background I photographed last week at the local train station (village tree is there). Here are the image itself and the 3-D version that will go inside the card:

tree image [© me]

popup tree [© me]

I'm finally happy with it, and so is Kristin. Now to finalize the text to go inside the card (she does beautiful calligraphy) and start printing. At least 4 trips out for inks, I'm guessing. Oh, well - the design is done - almost.

Artist, erased

Today's post is about a couple of once-esteemed Japanese-American painters whose careers - and lives - were crushed by the outbreak of WWII. Kamekichi Tokita and Kenjiro Nomura each came to the US at young ages in the early 20th century, and found mainstream success in the Seattle area chronicling life in the "Japantown" district:

"Alley," a 1929 oil on canvas by Kamekichi Tokita.
Seattle Art Museum (Collection of Shokichi & Elise Y. Tokita).

"Street", (c. 1929), oil on canvas by Kenjiro Nomura
 [Seattle Asian Art Museum, Seattle WA, Oct 22-Feb 19] Collection of the Seattle Art Museum

For a time, they ran a sign-painting shop that supported their artwork and provided a studio, and their work was praised and often championed by famous artist Kenneth Callahan (see this review of Barbara Johns' book "Signs Of Home" - which I have NOT yet read - about Tokita's life, paintings and wartime diary). The shop closed in the Great Depression, and after Pearl Harbor was attacked both painters' families were eventually taken to the internment camps and the two stopped painting altogether (they both died soon after the war ended, at ages 51 and 60 - see Jen Graves' Seattle Times article "From Artist To Enemy" HERE). In 1946, when Callahan co-founded what became known as The Northwest School, he credited white artists with looking to "Asian influences", but made no mention of Tokita, Nomura or any other artists actually within the Japanese-American culture. They, their work, and their significance were essentially erased. As Tokita has said "(i)n a moment, we have lost all the value of our existence in this society."


Likely the only reason the importance of these two artists' beautiful work (shown HERE and HERE as part of an exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum thru February 19th) is even acknowledged today is that Tokita kept a journal from 1942 until 1945 while he and his family endured the Idaho internment camp:

(from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art;
these page images are quite beautiful themselves)

and his eldest son recently offered the journal itself for translation. The current Seattle show exhibits 20 of their paintings, with author Barbara Johns as guest Curator of the show.

In my view, the fact that these two gifted artists got totally screwed by the politics of THEIR time means a couple of important things. First, art can require some context to be truly appreciated. I think their work is beautiful, but it gains great meaning and power - and so does its influence on the work of others - when seen thru the lens of their "life and times". This, of course, goes against a prevailing view that "all '⌠Art'⌡ must stand on its own", unadorned and unexplained.

Second, and more chilling and immediate to me: those who create are ALWAYS at the mercy of the politics and moral climate of their times. The ongoing morals-charged debate over NEA's funding is a clear example; You may recall that "(l)ast winter, the Smithsonian Institute removed an artwork that had angered the Christian Right, and last [February], the House voted to cut a quarter of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) budget" (see Travis Korte's related Washington Post item HERE). Given today's toxic US political climate, this ain't gonna stop soon, friends. From my seat, the politics of OUR times are no more art-friendly than those surrounding WWII. Be watching - it's happening again. Or still: 


The wars are long,
the peace is frail.
The madmen come again.
There is no freedom in a land
where fear and hate prevail.
- "Wasn't That A Time", by Pete Seeger with The Weavers
   (performed by Peter, Paul & Mary HERE)
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Today's creation is: missing. The blogspot editor software has been screwed up for three days, during which I've been attempting to edit this post to add a new creation. I'm not waiting any longer. More next time when - HOPEFULLY - the bug is fixed.