panamarenko. assignment report,final deliverable.

stijn stumpelb3.2

During one of the assignment meetings we watched the documentary Man On Wire. Reading the reviews online you get a very positive view of this movie. Many people use words like ‘genius’ and ‘awe inspiring’. For me, the documentary certainly started off this way; as an inspiring story about a somewhat peculiar man with a dream to walk between the world trade center towers. However, as the movie progressed I found my opinion shift about this movie and it’s main subject.

It gradually turned from an inspiring story about a great acrobatic feat in to an interesting portrait of a nostalgic narcissist. He sacrificed friendships and the relationship with his girlfriend for a piece of performance art, and talks about it with a degree increasing enthusiasm that makes him less and less likable as the movie progresses.

After doing some online research, I find it strange that there are so little reviews of this movie that agree with me on this sentiment. If the movie, or rather the popular reaction to this movie teaches us anything, it’s that it’s easy to get away with self-indulgence as an artist, if it’s brushed off as eccentricity and your story is presented well.

Throughout the movie it is clear he does not seem to be able to separate himself from his work, nor do the people around him. I believe the artist is never the artwork. Your work is always the product of your environment, your upbringing and the people around you, leaving a small portion of credit to you as the conduit for inspiration. This movie is a great example of somebody who has not internalized this notion.

However, if this man has one redeeming quality, it’s his focus. In that we he brings up feeling of respect similar to what I often feel when I see a craftsman at work. Seen this way, what might look like egomania on the surface could be seen as personal sacrifice, as dedicating my life to a single purpose would certainly feel to me.

Going to the exhibition by Theo Janssen was very interesting. I had heard of him before, and seen some of his works on video without thinking much of it. It seemed like the kind of art that you frequently see getting popular on the internet: easy to understand, visually pleasing , repetitive and evoking little reflection. More like a conceptual artistic gimmick that repeating itself than anything else.

Seeing the exhibition I could not be more wrong. Hearing Theo Janssen talk about his work completely changed my view on him as an artist. He seems to use the medium of his ‘strandbeesten’ to explore topics like evolution, intelligence and consciousness in a very tangible and understandable way. Even though talking about these topics when explaining one’s conceptual art could very easy come over as clichéd or even pretentious, the reality of Janssen’s work is far from this. He seems incorporate these topics in a very natural down to earth way, that does not seem forced in to the concept of his work at all.

Seeing the demonstration on his latest piece was almost too impressive. The engineering he put in to the object rightly makes one question if this could even be considered art anymore, because it is so reminiscent of robotics or architecture. It’s like a sculptor suddenly decided to use brick-laying as his medium and did it so well you start to wonder whether he’s even making a sculpture or just building a beautiful wall.

However, upon reflection Janssen’s work can definitely be considered art, even though his influences are scientific. However you try to classify his work, I certainly believe he would have fit right in with the artists of the high renaissance, who would have probably classified him as neither, but rather simply a renaissance man.

man on wire.opinion: from good to bad

theo janssen.opinion: from bad to good

After not knowing what to do with this completely free assignment I realized it was an opportunity to do something I had been thinking about for a while. A lot of people (like me) who do creative work keep an inspiration folder on their desktop. I have been adding a spectrum of art and design related images to this folder for the past three years of this study with no particular goal in mind. Often those images just sit there, to be looked at every once in a while. However, after showing some of the images to a friend I discovered there are interesting stories to tell about a many of them.

During this assignment I took the opportunity to curate some of this work and find a good use for it. Upon organizing the images by ‘date added’ in the folder I realized I had a very valuable time line of the development of my taste over the years, and the various phases of interest where

I decided to combine this with an interest for publishing I have been cultivating over the past year, in to the first issue of a magazine I plan to work on in the summer about my personal taste. I select images from my inspiration folder and write short articles or combine them in to interesting diptychs. I have also placed a lot of value on my skills in writing over the years, so it was also a good opportunity to do some free writing on things that interest me.

This first issue is still a work in progress, but a theme for it started to take shape as I was working on it. Without consciously doing so I later realized that I had been adding a lot of images on the cross-section between science and art, incidentally one of the themes of the panamarenko assignment. However, to be honest the ‘what is art’ discussion get old and tiresome very quickly. In none of the pieces I discuss in this magazine I bring up the question as more than a though experiment to serve the purpose of making a more interesting point.

“The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.” - Leonardo da Vinic.

Even a foot is art, let alone a urinal. Discussion irrelevant.

In-spira-tion/asso-cia-tion.

Issue 1, June 2014

assignment reflection.from useless images to challenge in curation.

colorMark Rothko, 1950

fieldMishka Henner, 2013

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins

Benjamin Hawkins was a natural history artist born in 1807. He is well known for the reconstruction of life-sized models in Crystal Palace Park. Aside from this he also made beautiful anatomical studies the most beautiful of which compare the skeletons of man and animal.

Although they are the result of anatomical studies, there is always just a little bit of drama going on in each piece. Through the tiny bit of artistic interpretation he puts in his scientific drawings he makes a big elephant skull look almost cute.

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, 1807

Scientific illustration.

Scientific illustrations have a certain appeal to them. This seemingly laborious technique was necessary to catalog species before photography, but I am of the opinion that scientific drawing actually serve this purpose better than photo’s do. I believe this has something to do with a principle in cognitive science called the ‘prototype theory’.

When we think about concepts like ‘furniture’ or ‘fruit’, our mental image is that of the prototype of that concept (a chair or an apple). This drawing of a bird of paradise does not depict a particular individual like the photo does. In a way creating a better mental ‘prototype’ of the species.

“My friend Dudley Wright suggested ‘Au Fait,’ which means ‘It is done’ in French. I spelled it O-f-e-y, which turned out to be a name the blacks used for ‘whitey.’ But after all, I was whitey, so it was all right.”

“I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion.”

RichardPhillips Feynman

Richard Feynman was a world famous theoretical physicist. He participated in the Manhattan Project and won a nobel prise for contributing to theories of quantum electrodynamics. He is also the inventor of the so called Feynman Diagram (show above). Few people know he also drew quite well, under the pseudonym Ofey.

The left portrait (1) is the first drawing he ever did. He clearly improved over the years (2). He would often be found at strip-clubs drawing the girls (3). The last line on the drawing on the right below (4) was drawn by his 2 year old son.

He once mentioned in an interview him and an artist friend of his aspired to become renaissance men. They then decided to give each other science lectures and drawing lessons every other week.

2

4

1

3

source: The Art of Richard P. Feynman: Images by a Curious Character.

Shown here are Chinese signs prohibiting walking on grass. They take an interesting approach to convince the reader to follow the rules, not by appealing to authority like western signs, but by appealing to a sense of humor and empathy.

There is probably a lesson on design to be learned here although I am not exactly sure what it is yet.

IvanIvanovichShishkin

Ivan Shishkin was a Russian landscape painter. As can be seen in the beautifully rendered clouds, water and plants in the painting below he had a very analytical eye for the true appearance of nature. The painting on the right shows beautiful use of atmospheric perspective. It takes incredible skill to properly paint scenes like this , especially considering these were long before proper color photography became common.

Ice Age Man/Woman 40,000 years old.

Lion man of the Hohlenstein Stadel

I have been fascinated with stone age art for a long time. What I have always like about it is the two lenses through which this art can be viewed: as an archaeological curiosity or as an artwork made by another human being. I would like to invite the reader to look at the following two images (right, next page) in those two ways. When one looks at the images on the right it’s clearly an archaeological object. It’s weathered, and looks kind of goofy, but it does have a lot of personality. Perhaps the more close-up image makes the perspective shift easier.

The effect can be compared to looking at an isometric cube. By shifting your inner perspective you can turn the center corner inward or outward. The same can be done with paleolithic art.

The image on the next page can be viewed in it’s totality as an interesting sculpture, but once you start looking at the tiny scratches on it’s lower jaw it dawns on you those scratches were made by a human 40,000 years ago and it becomes hard to see it as a pure ‘object d’art’.

The immense time-span and anonymity of the artist is just too much. I wonder how much time it would take for the Venus of Milo (shown on the cover being moved from the Louvre for restoration) to no longer be viewed as personal expression but archeology. Time and anonymity might slowly be moving artworks from art museums to historical museums.

Many painters throughout history have made attempts at drawing the folds in fabric. This is difficult with models, because as they move, the fabric moves. The solution often used was wet paper folded and dried. This could be used as a reference for drawing folds in clothes after the model had been drawn from life.

On the left is a close up image of some cabbage, which in my opinion could just as easily have been used for this same purpose. When one first looks at this image it appears to be folded satin, only the single water droplet on the top part reveals the true identity of the photograph.

Jan van Eyck

These are 100 year old life-tips published by tobacco company Gallaher. Below an example of the helpful tips provided by current cigarette packaging.

Two lovers on a train by Stanley Kubrick.

Before Stanley Kubrick was a filmmaker he had a career as a photographer. The photo above is by Kubrick, the photo on the right is a detail of a photo by photographer Jeff Wall. Jeff wall carefully plans his photo’s, in a way simulating his photography. The comparison between the ‘non-scripted’ photo of Kubrick and the ‘scripted’ photo by Wall is an interesting parallel, and a compliment to both of them.

Drawings of the sun by Galileo, made using one of the first telescopes. This fits in to a recurring theme in the images I collect of a boundary between scientific images and artistic images, depending on how you look at them. Through a shift in mental perspective these drawings could easily be considered art, just like the lion man of Hohlenstein, or the anatomical drawings by Waterhouse Hawkins.