Tauba Auerbach

The blog needed some love.

Tauba Auerbach is a contemporary artist who I thought was somewhat of interest in regards to our process drawing/all-over composition assignment. Her work explores language as both a communicative and visual system. Her drawings often consist of letters, yet they forcefully and purposely deny the viewer the ability to read them or comprehend the work's meaning solely from a linguistic standpoint. Despite having words or letters, the works are strongly visual before they are legible, if at all. That being said, they are all beautifully crafted - with beautiful results - despite their heavy conceptual aspects, which I think is related to the purpose of the process/all-over assignment and, really, that type of drawing in general.


One of my favorite of her works is "Alphabetized Bible," which is well, exactly what it sounds like. Though the words are scrambled, the book is still recognizable as a Bible. There is also a strange relationship between the lists of letters and prayer.

Here is a great article from "Art in America" about Auerbach. I also encourage you all to visit her website. Aside from being visually exciting, it is conceptually intriguing in its relationship to her work in the use of both language and design to communicate to the visitor and direct him or her around. There is a good inventory of her work on the website that I really encourage you all to look at because it is all really beautiful and thought-provoking. Some more of my personal favorites that I find especially compelling:
      -Thirty Letters I
      -Uppercase Insides
      -Anagram I

Drawing on Hands

Not only can people draw on cats but they can draw on hands. These paintings are done by
Italian artist Guido Daniele who was hired by an advertising agency to create body paintings of animals that would bring the animals to life.

Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz's work has a fun relationship to the master copy/response project. Look under "gallery" on the left hand column for the titles of his projects, and take a look at Pictures of Junk, Chocolate, Thread, Dust, Ink, etc. There is much to see on this site.

more cats + art

So, the cats that paint seem to be a hoax, as are the cats that are painted on.  The myth got started by a very clever book called Why Paint Cats, featuring digitally altered cat pictures accompanied by slightly-too-official-sounding art jargon.  A similar book about cats that paint was written by the same author.  It's pretty funny, and the cat pictures must have taken forever to do, some might even consider them satiric art in their own right.

The Snopes article about the book is here, with pictures:

http://www.snopes.com/photos/arts/paintedcats.asp

and here is some funny discussion from people who have taken it seriously:

http://www.whypaintcats.com

Jasper Johns: Gray

“To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished...It’s done out of a different kind of energy. I love drawings, so I’ve always enjoyed making drawings that exist on their own." -Jasper Johns

Over the weekend I attended the "Jasper Johns: Gray" exhibit at the Met in NYC. It is a stirring exhibit, both in its haunting beauty and conceptual depth, and I encourage everyone to see it (it's open until May 4th). Though Johns is primarily known for his work as a painter, I think the exhibit raises a lot of issues pertinent to drawing. Many of the paintings are exhibited along with drawings and lithographs, some of which were preparatory but many of which were done after the painting, something Johns often does. Seeing the works together brings to light the "different kind of energy," as Johns mentions, as well as the different process of seeing and interpreting that distinguishes drawing from painting.

Also, the use of gray is very pertinent, since so many of the media in which we work are gray. The varying media Johns uses and the opportunity to compare them reveals how expressive gray can be in itself. I was really struck by how much color there is inherent in each work, both through the coloring of the media (be it encaustic, graphite, etc.) and through the feeling and mood of each work. There is no single "gray" color the way there is a pure pigment of red or blue; instead, every gray is made up of different colors while still being identifiable as gray. The whole spectrum of color is compressed into gray, and the subtlety of variation and expression that allows for is really conveyed in Johns's work.

Edit: If anyone is especially interested in Jasper Johns's drawings, there is a corollary exhibit of his drawings at the Matthew Marks Gallery.

Science and Art

I just finished a book that deals with connections between art and science, and I thought I would share it. Its called An Anthropologist on Mars and its by Oliver Sacks who is a neurologist. It is a group of seven case studies dealing with how neurological disorders can affect creativity. One of the case studies is of a painter and how he loses his sight after a car crash. It touches on how it changes his art and his perception of the world. What is interesting is that the man's visual memory changes to the point where he can't imagine te world in color but only in different shades of gray. It talks a lot about how much color infiltrates art, even in the undertones of black and white works, and how color is sort of taken for granted. Another story is about an accomplished child artist who has autism. This story touches on the idea that different neurological disorders produce their own unique type of art. The book is a really easy read and I would suggest it to anyone that is curious about how the brain, and its disorders, affect the concept of art.

the journey is the destination

This is a link to one of my favorite books. It's a compilation of Dan Eldon's journals which are filled of collages. He was a photo journalist in many African countries and was killed by the people he was trying to help at age 22. His mom (and sister?) compiled this book using Dan's journals. It inspires me to make art when I'm out of ideas.

Here are some images from the Comic Abstraction Show I mentioned in class, I'll return the book tomorrow, so check it out if you're interested. The last image is by Janet Fish, who Sarah mentioned.

The Artist's Survival Kit

During the conversation we had at the end of class today, I decided that Keri Smith's Artist's Survival Kit would be a really fantastic thing to share with you all. A friend showed it to me sometime in high school--it's a really great set of PDFs you print out and cut up into little cards/notes/whatever. There are "What to do When You're Stuck" cards, a "Permission to Make Mistakes" card, and a "How to Feel Miserable as an Artist" card, among others. I like the rest of Smith's website, too (particularly her 100 ideas and her collage experiment).

Perspective types and the science of representation

An interesting collection of images and descriptions of perspective techniques from an MIT class taught by Fredo Durand at the lab for computer science.  Here is a link to the main page for the class- looks amazing.

Cyborg Bodies

Found this interesting link to altered bodies in art- go backwards also to the main Cyborg Bodies page.

Robert Lazzarini

Anamorphic sculptures. 

This information from an exhibition he had at Pierogi gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is helpful, as is this page from the Deitch Projects gallery. These have an interesting relationship to still life and to drawing, even though they are three-dimensional works. 

Mark Tansey

Anamorphic Painting- look at this from a 45 degree angle.

Marla Olmstead, Child Artist

The child painter from upstate New York. It turns out that there is a documentary that came out this past fall called My Kid Could Paint That. Wikipedia explains the drama.

Painting Apparatus

And for a Wesleyan made painting machine: