micro
“Get stuck in and change it”
“If you think academies are a red herring, a partial and inconsistent solution to a problem that has been wrongly framed, then you need to somehow respond to this; choose a school that is still local authority-controlled, and support it to stay that way. Or become a governor of an academy, to uphold the values that you loved in community schools: that they serve the whole community.”
Félix Vallotton, Intimacies (Intimités), 1898
The Van Gogh Museum:
“From the moment they were printed, the series of woodcuts with the title Intimités was considered to be a prestigious project. When the avant-garde publication La Revue blanche printed the series in an exclusive edition of 25 in 1898, the modern art of printmaking was more popular than ever in the Paris art world. Among his fellow printmakers, Félix Vallotton was one of the most renowned artists. He was recognized as an innovator of the medium of the woodcut and his prints dating from 1896 to 1898 are the culmination of his career.
“Intimités has always been recognized as his most impressive work and even in his own time they were already more appreciated than his paintings. With these ten dark woodcuts, their black surfaces cut through by a few white lines, Vallotton probed the emotional lives of the Paris bourgeoisie. He portrayed the eternal struggle between man and woman by means of theatrical scenes and suggestive titles, such as The Lie, The Money and The Irreparable. Vallotton brought to the surface his cynical view on love. Women are portrayed as superficial, calculating creatures: cruel, insatiable and triumphing.”
reblogged from austinkleon
Remembering Spalding
reblogging sundancearchives:
“Today, June 5, would have been Spalding Gray’s 74th birthday. Known for his monologues–funny, sad, neurotic, and deeply human–his influence at Sundance Institute remains strong, even eleven years after his death.
“Spalding served as the emcee of the 1992 Sundance Film Festival’s award ceremony, the same year that the film version of his one-man show Monster in a Box, about his experience writing his first novel, had its US premiere at the Festival. The top photo, from a shoot by @thatrickmcginnis two years prior, captures Spalding with the enormous manuscript that was at least one of the monsters in his life. (Rick’s blog post about the shoot is itself a great portrait of Spalding’s persona.)
“Several other Festival films featured Spalding in some role; one that seems particularly fitting is Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon’s documentary Buckminster Fuller: Thinking Out Loud, in which Spalding read the writings of his fellow iconoclast. And Spalding’s influence extends to alumni, as well; he became friends with Steven Soderbergh after Soderbergh directed his 1996 film Gray’s Anatomy; Soderbergh would go on to direct a 2010 documentary about Spalding’s life titled And Everything is Going Fine.”
“Spalding continues to inspire new works for Sundance artists. Sheila Tousey’s Ghost Supper (Spalding Gray, You’re Invited, Too), supported at our 2014 Theatre Lab, is a solo show that explores how a woman comes to terms with her brother’s suicide through humor, grief, and storytelling. We think Spalding would have approved.”
Here is a clip from Spalding’s incredible 1987 film, Swimming to Cambodia.
Notes, writing, diagrams, and index symbols by Walter Benjamin
(source)
reblogging austinkleon:
Alan Wall’s reflections on Benjamin:
“Of all writers Benjamin was the most aware of the technologies that made writing possible. Although there had been ‘reservoir pens’ of one sort or another for centuries, the nineteenth century delivered the first true fountain pens (and a little later ball-point pens). These eliminated the need for the nib to be kept in close proximity to an inkpot, thus making the activity of writing more itinerant. And Benjamin was certainly an itinerant writer, writing in apartments, libraries, cafes and bars. He carried his pens and his notebooks around, as he often did copies of some of the images that most engaged him. He was a mobile intelligence unit moving through the streets of a city. ”
On his notation system for The Arcades Project:
“[Benjamin] attempted “to integrate the principle of the montage as an epistemological technique.” Color charts, schemata, and diagrams act as guiding principles to navigate the thicket of excerpts and quotations. Benjamin’s personal color-coding shows an attempt to make order within the vast constellation of his own notes—a tension between an impulse toward structure and the potential of the open field of his interests.”
Against Design
“I recognize the value of building an established discipline, and of crafting a shared set of principles that define game design as a profession. But, I also think that in our efforts to define and legitimize our practice as a professional discipline we sometimes forget the history we inherit, the legacy of games made by communities of players, games made by amateurs, by dilettantes, by mathematicians, mothers, scientists, gym teachers, shepherds, inventors, philosophers, eccentrics and cranks.
And in honor of this tradition I would like to suggest other verbs for us to describe where games come from, alternatives to the overconfident precision of the word “design”. Words like invent, discover, compose, write, find, grow, perform, build, support, identify, copy, re-assemble, excavate and preserve.”
Three Playlists for the End of English Spring
A Little Madness in the Spring is Wholesome even for the King
-Emily Dickinson
These three lists, on different platforms and all contain different tracks from each other, are a rough account of what I have been listening to for the last season. After November I didn’t listen to any music at all for a while, then coming back to it like someone who has been on holiday in the seventies and missed all the news in the meantime.
On listening again I personally sense a theme of renewal and progression, pretty obvious for the season I know, maybe you can feel that too.
(beware the 8tracks list autoplays on mobile)
“Artists shouldn’t be making art on the side, it should be their job”
“We need to re-train audiences who’ve grown used to the free YouTube model that shorts are worth paying for. I keep telling my animator friends, “Please sell your work. Even if you put it online and just charge 50 cents, sell it.” “Everything is free” has been doing genuine damage to young artists.” (animation)
Cultural Appropriation makes the World Go Round
Two things coming up recently regarding powerful rich “artists” making kudos and money from the hard work of whom they can only consider to be lesser mortals.
First you should know that Richard Prince has been “re-photographing” since the 1970s. He takes pictures of photos in magazines, advertisements, books or actors’ headshots, then alters them to varying degrees. Often, they look nearly identical to the originals. This has of course, led to legal trouble. In 2008, French photographer Patrick Cariou sued Prince aft..er he re-photographed Cariou’s images of Jamaica’s Rastafarian community. Although Cariou won at first, on appeal, the court ruled that Prince had not committed copyright infringement because his works were “transformative.”
– A reminder that your Instagram photos aren’t really yours: Someone else can sell them for $90,000
..and then Dan Clowes on that Shia Lebeouf thing:
“Speaking of grudges: Have you forgiven Shia LaBeouf?”
“I don’t know. No, not really. I mean, I don’t hold a grudge. I don’t think about it that much. But I don’t think what he did was really forgivable. I don’t know that it matters that much if he’s apologizing or whatever. I just hate the idea of anybody doing that to some young artist who couldn’t hire legal representation. I’m sort of the one guy who could deal with something like that, and it would be really possible for somebody with his amount of money and power to just crush some poor young artist if that happened to them, and I would hate to see that. So I don’t think it’s something that needs to be forgiven; I think it’s something that always needs to be thought of as just a horrible thing to do.”
– Comics Legend Daniel Clowes on Hate Mail, Jim Belushi, and Not Forgiving Shia LaBeouf
Difficult for me to comment on this without falling into ranting, which is how I am supposed to react.
Let’s cleanse ourselves by reading about the true artists who Lichenstein “homaged”, in Deconstructing Lichtenstein.
Finally an article addressing a parallel issue of the popular misconceptions around the creation of CGI for big budget features:
As the debate surrounding what visual effects are worth rages on, it is clear that the studios themselves have an interest in perpetuating the myth that VFX are the product of clinical assembly lines and the results are equally lifeless and mechanical. Blaming computers for the dumbing down of movies has become a journalistic trope that is bandied about to squeeze the one part of the Hollywood machine that has no union or organizational skill to push back.
Paul Greer 