1 pce.

Happy 2nd Birthday Blake!

Today was good. 

Today was fun. 

Tomorrow is another one. 

Dr. Seuss

True Blood's Killer Main Title Opener -- By Digital Kitchen

“Focus: Oskar Kokoschka”

The Neue Galerie has organized “Focus: Oskar Kokoschka,” a nice, small exhibition of works by this Viennese Expressionist. 

In the earliest and most compelling works, Kokoschka (1886-1980) painted the faces of his sitters with small, wiggly strokes and in sickly colors so they look as if they’d had their skin peeled off. With their bony, veiny, weirdly gesturing hands, they resemble extras from a remake of “Night of the Living Dead.” The gaunt, hollow-eyed “Martha Hirsch (Dreaming Woman)” projects an eerie, erotic charm, while her male counterparts look like Frankensteinian madmen.

With such pictures, Kokoschka made a place for himself near the start of a long tradition of moralizing portraiture — from Ensor to Ivan Albright to Peter Saul — in which grotesque distortion stands for sickness of the soul.

link: Modernity Met With Hope and Despair 

By Ken Johnson

The New York Times

"Dust"

Face powder, gunpowder, talcum of anthrax,

shavings of steel, crematoria ash, chips

of crumbling poetry paper—all these in my lockbox,

and dust, tanks, tempests, temples of dust.

 

Saw-, silk-, chalk-dust and chaff,

the dust the drool of a bull swinging its head

as it dreams its death

slobs out on; dust even from the scoured,

 

scraped littoral of the Aegean,

troops streaming screaming across it

at those who that day, that age or forever

would be foe, worthy of being dust for.

 

Last, hovering dust of the harvest, brief

as the half-instant hitch in the flight

of the hawk, as the poplets of light

through the leaves of the bronzing maples.

 

Animal dust, mineral, mental, all hoarded

not in the jar of sexy Pandora, not

in the ark where the dust of the holy aspiring

to congeal as glorious mud-thing still writhes—

 

just this leathery, crackled, obsolete box,

heart-sized or brain, rusted lock shattered,

hinge howling with glee to be lifted again . . .

Face powder, gunpowder, dust, darling dust.

Dust  By C. K. Williams

via: The New Yorker 

Bronx Buildup

We've seen plenty of old images of the Bronx, but what about the current state of affairs in the borough? Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao's photographs of the Bronx document today, and are part of the upcoming Intersections: The Grand Concourse Commissions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (running from Sunday, August 2nd through January 4, 2010). Liao is just one of the artists who will be a part of the installation; his "series features several vast and virtuosic panoramas of the Grand Concourse, including two 128-foot wide, hyper-detailed panorama of every building on the thoroughfare." Learn more about the exhibit, and other artists involved, here.

via:Gothamist

"Ichthyo: The Architecture of Fish"

The stark X-ray images of the ichthyological specimens of the Smithsonian Institution, intricate and delicate, offer an unusual combination of art and science. 

The X-rays are first presented in black-and-white splendor, followed by a visual directory with each specimen's Latin and common names, location, order, family, and collection date. Jean-Michel Cousteau provides one of the three brief introductions, but the true focus of the book is the amazing images.

“With foxes we must play the fox.” Thomas Fuller

Foxes are an important part of human culture, being central characters of many myths and folklore. In the past, they were associated with forces of the supernatural. The Achumawi Indians believed that a silver fox assisted the coyote in preparing the world for the coming of the first people.

In Finland, the aurora borealis is known as revontulet ("fox fires") because it was believed that the lights were produced by a fox, painting the sky with its tail as it ran through the sky.

Shape shifting is also commonly associated with foxes. In particular, kitsune, or spirit fox, is part of the Shinto religion. In many of these stories, foxes take the form of humans, particularly women, to ensnare unwary humans. Fox shape shifting has also been explored in contemporary western literature, such as Lady into Fox (1923) and The Fox Woman (2000). It is also a key component of Janáček's opera The cunning little vixen (1922-3).

via: The Fox Website

Gray Fox 

(taxidermy)

designer:

Melissa Dixson

design year:

2008

Traces of Light

Vera Lutter's photography focuses on architectural or industrial landmarks and places with iconic resonance, from the abandoned Pepsi Cola Factory in Long Island City to the now defunct Battersea Power Station in London. Her depiction of these structures emphasizes their formidable stature while personifying their melancholic solitude and isolation. A haunting quality and ethereal tones dominate Lutter's images, reflecting the passing of time and signifying both the transient and the perpetual.

Vera Lutter 

July 24 - September 12, 2009

Gagosian Gallery (Beverly Hills)

“I sell architecture better and more directly and more vividly than the architect does” Julius Shulman (1910–2009)

 

Julius Shulman, whose luminous photographs of homes and buildings brought fame to a number of mid-twentieth century Modernist architects and made him a household name in the architectural world, died Wednesday night, reports Claudia Luther for the Los Angeles Times. He was ninety-eight.

Shulman, who had been in declining health, died at his home in Los Angeles, according to gallery owner Craig Krull, who represented him. Starting with Richard Neutra in 1936, Shulman’s roster of clients read like a who’s who of pioneering contemporary architecture: Rudolf M. Schindler, Gregory Ain, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles Eames, Raphael S. Soriano, John Lautner, Eero Saarinen, Albert Frey, Pierre Koenig, Harwell Harris, and many others. His work was contained in virtually every book published on Modernist architects.

Shulman’s 1960 photograph of Koenig’s Case Study House #22—a glass-walled, cantilevered structure hovering above the lights of Los Angeles—became one of the most famous architectural pictures ever taken in the US. It was, as architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in the New York Times, “one of those singular images that sum up an entire city at a moment in time.”

via: artforum news

Dashed

Dash Snow, who rebelled against his privileged and art-loving family to become a promising young New York artist in his own right, died Monday night at a hotel in the East Village. He was 27 and lived in Manhattan.

His death, at Lafayette House, on East Fourth Street, was confirmed by his grandmother, the art collector and philanthropist Christophe de Menil. The cause was a drug overdose, she said.

Mr. Snow was known to be a heroin addict, but Ms. de Menil said he had been in rehab in March and had been off drugs until very recently.

Sexuality, violence and life’s fragility were frequent themes in Mr. Snow’s work, but there was also an air of exuberant misbehavior. A 2007 article in New York magazine, “Warhol’s Children,” highlighted Mr. Snow’s art, antics and underground stature, bringing his notoriety to a wider audience. It mentioned that he and his friends liked to turn hotel rooms into “hamster nests” by littering them with torn-up telephone books.

Read more here

Photograph: Olivier Zahm