Friday, May 28, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Weekend Video - Memorial Day Edition
I get a lot of press releases suggesting I put various things on this blog but this one seemed straightforward and appealing and it's happening tonight in Brooklyn. The e-mail said:
Hi there,
My name is Jenny and I work with Rooftop Films (rooftopfilms.com), a summer film series dedicated to showcasing new, independent films and emerging bands in unique outdoor locations. This is our 14th year of Underground Movies Outdoors.
THIS WEEK’S SHOWS:
Thursday, May 27
ETIENNE!
NY Premiere! A quirky slacker road movie comedy about a man and his hamster.
Directed by Jeff Mizushima
Where:
On the roof of Brooklyn Technical High School (29 Fort Greene Pl., Fort Greene)
When:
8:00 Doors Open
8:30 Live Music by Natureboy
9:00 Films Begin
Following was this synopsis:
Etienne! tells the story of Richard, a shy type who spends his days taking care of his best friend, Etienne, a dwarf hamster. One day Richard finds out that his hamster has terminal cancer. The veterinarian recommends euthanasia before the animal begins to suffer. Before he lets his best friend go, Richard decides to take Etienne on a bicycle road trip and show it the world.
I dug up the trailer above on YouTube. And if my daughter wasn't in the middle of studying for exams, you would probably see us there. (She loves hamsters.) Maybe we'll even sneak out!
I'll be back next week with some serious photography.
More Water
Photographs by Geoffrey Swaine/Rex Features.
Impressive - but in a different way from the Gursky water shots. These pictures from London's Daily Mail show a Canada goose minding a brood of 40 goslings on the Thames river. Although these geese 'creches' - where the offspring of different parents get mixed up - are not uncommon, ornithologists say this is one of the largest they have seen.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
Why Didn't I?
In the “why didn’t I think of that?” category – Andreas Gursky’s latest work, which just finished showing at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, presented blow-ups of the world’s oceans printed as large as 100 x 140 inches.
Gursky had not taken these pictures himself. They were satellite pictures of the earth that the artist had worked on and cropped to make the ocean the central point of the composition. But interestingly, he now joins his compatriot Thomas Ruff (and numerous others) in making appropriation his new methodology.
The Gagosian Gallery cleverly obfuscated the point in their press release:
In the new Ocean series, Gursky has for the first time relinquished his position behind the camera to work with satellite images of the world as his raw material, creating contemporary mappe del mondo on a scale befitting the cosmic grandeur of the subject. In their darkly nuanced surfaces, he has worked to reconcile the division between the machine eye and the human eye, continuing the debates and practices begun in the nineteenth century regarding photography and the issue of artistic expression versus objective science.
However it does nothing but underscore the fact that so many people are Warhol’s children.
Today, The New York Times reported that the Los Angeles County Museum had acquired four of the pictures.
They were as sublime as the Rothko Chapel,” Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said, referring to the Houston landmark. “They are also satellite photography, which is a breakthrough for the artist.”
Mr. Govan was so taken with the suite of works that he persuaded two trustees — Steven F. Roth, executive vice president of the World Oil Corporation, a family-owned company in Los Angeles, and another trustee who wants to remain anonymous — to buy four of them for the museum. Mr. Govan declined to say what they paid. The gallery was asking $680,000 each.
Although this series was created before the Gulf of Mexico oil spill this spring, Mr. Govan said he considered the subject of oceans “a total obsession of our age,” adding, “It’s so urgent, yet there is a timelessness to these photographs.”
He also said that he was reminded of a historical precedent. Just as 19th-century museums often had a globe of the world and a map of the stars as the linchpin of their displays, these photographs, he said, are the 21st-century equivalent. “This is our globe,” Mr. Govan said.
The museum does not have a specific space to show the Gursky images at the moment. However, Mr. Govan said he planned to have a space designed for them in the middle of its historical collection.
“They will be the centerpiece of our global museum,” Mr. Govan explained. And though the works show only tiny bits of continents and coastline, he added, to him, anyway, “the museum itself becomes the rest of the picture.”
So ... $680,000 x 4. There was obviously a big discount. But still, not bad for reprinting someone else’s pictures. One part of me feels this is out of whack, but another part sees the power and quality of the work. As always, the point is - I didn’t think of it (and neither did you)!
Click on this image for greater detail.
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