We were looking for a little gift to leave on the blog this last day of summer and thought The Wilderness Downtown would be just right…It is one of the very best things we’ve seen on the internet: crazy beautiful, imaginative, really surprising and moving…
…click here, have patience while it loads, and watch to the end…
Wishing you a wonderful Labor Day!
A few weeks ago, we wrote about the artist Tom Sachs, whose amazing studio was featured in The Selby. When Todd Selby asked Sachs “What are the ten rules of your studio?” Number Ten was: “creativity is the enemy”. It is also the subject of an artwork Sachs created. Then, a reader wrote us an email that said: “I’d love follow up on why ‘creativity is the enemy’”. Good idea.
We figure the answer lies partly in the title of Sach’s artwork-sign:”Self-Fullfilling Prophecies”…It seems to warn of the danger of trying TOO hard, of being self-consciously creative and arty, rather than just…being…Maybe creativity is the enemy because it threatens the status quo, takes energy, takes us into various kinds of chaos and unknowing. Whew…We didn’t realize how Sach’s sign would make us think!
While we were mulling, we stumbled on New Liberal Arts, a free “book full of ideas” masterminded by Snarkmarket‘s Tim Carmody, and a collaboration of many. Aaron MCleran,”Generative Media Artist” wrote a section about Creativity, which we thought was SWELL even though we weren’t sure what “generative”* means. We’ve excerpted it here (underscores, ours):
“…creativity should be studied as a kind of martial art. You should train to be a ninja of creativity. read more…
We’ve spent the past ten days or so on the other side of the country, looking at everything but our laptops, and being nothing but lazy. Somehow doing NOTHING filled us up, gave us lots to think about and share…
Like this sign we saw (when Nina said LOOK UP!) in Balmy Alley in San Francisco, known for its wonderful murals, from one end to another…
(and which happens to be right around the corner from Humphry Slocum, our favorite ice cream place – more on that later)… read more…
We wish every cardboard box we come across to look like this, which is, actually, an artwork by Hreinn Fridfinnsson. Being barbarians, we’d like to copy Fridfinnsson’s idea for our closet boxes…or, as an unexpected spin on a gift box: it would look ordinary and rather humdrum on the outside, but when the giftee pulls back the flaps…a big surprise!
…a cardboard box + flourescent paper + bookbinding material = a complete change of view.
We’re sending this post to our friend Vicki Lynn who LOVES pink – a sort of virtual gift – until we can give her a real one.
Happy Birthday, Vicki Beth Lynn!
Via LNKNG
Related posts: Cardboard, Crates + Chairs as Building Materials
Andrea Zittel’s Investigative Living
Clipped-Together Shelving Pt.2: Cardboard Boxes
Couturier de Cardboard: Matthew Sporzynski
Halloween Inspiration: Cardboard Box as Empire State Building
Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules
When we read that Centre Pompidou in Paris was offering a Cardboard Carton Workshop, we wanted to beam ourselves there, a la Star Trek, to see what more we could add to our overflowing file and minds about this wonderfully versatile material. We were stunned by a photo of an archway made of cardboard sheets combined in layers and compressed; it flies in the face of the usual ways of building with cardboard, of using the flat sides as walls. It is the work of Tadashi Kawamata who is known for the spare structures he builds out of humble materials – pine boards, cardboard, packing materials, chairs – in unlikely places. They seem impromptu (though they take a great deal of work and planning), and speak of temporariness and informality; they somehow question the spaces and structures we take for granted. Now wonder his workshop has lines around the block.
When we saw pictures of Kawamata’s art at the Pompidou’s site, we realized we had seen his work before and had a vivid unattributed memory of it: of beautiful, odd, slapped together-looking nests and houses perched high up in the ancient tress of Madison Square Park, in the center of New York City. They made us LOOK with wonder and, for a moment, imagine ourselves hiding out in one of them but we never stopped to find out who had made them. Now we know, and are inspired by a central theme of Kawamata’s art: read more…
One of our favorite books about improvising is Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
“…Sometimes we damn the limits, but without them art is not possible. They provide us with something to work with and against. In practicing our craft we surrender, to a great extent, to letting the materials dictate the design…”
Among the many jacket quotes praising the book is one by Keith Jarrett, the jazz pianist known for his astonishing improvisational work the Koln Concert
“You are called to an important meeting, the subject of which you are not told. It is of utmost importance that you ‘Be Yourself’. The meeting starts immediately and your clothes are in the laundry and you have no time to wash up or shave. Is this a ‘serious’ situation? Then so is improvisation…”
And that is what The Koln Concert was. In the video, Jarrett describes the impossible circumstances that made for a stunning creation.
That’s what Free Play is about.
We view them as an essential part of our toolBox.
(You can listen to samples of The Koln Concert, and/or buy it as an MP3, here
Pamela Hovland‘s Comment in response to our recent wallpaper post is an amazing report from MOMA of a wallpaper installation that is so wonderfully described, hilarious and thoughtful, that we had to publish it here. And just as we were despairing of not being able to find any image like it on MOMA’s website, Pamela sent us one by email: blurry but completely expressive…
“I stopped by MoMA today, for a quick dose of inspiration. The Matisse show is on view so it is quite crowded — it takes all one’s attention just to negotiate the hallways. As a result, I don’t think many people stopped to look closely at a wallpaper “installation” between two galleries. The wallpaper is a temporary construction made simply by repeating a photograph numerous times in a grid. The image is a tightly cropped view of a man’s bare bottom (I’m trying to be polite) with his crack (I can’t think of another word here) in the center of the composition. It’s not a particularly photogenic specimen; upon closer analysis you see the dimples and blemishes of some anonymous middle aged guy’s rear end. In this presentation, however, the image takes on a kind of architectural quality – a kind of industrial building block, I guess. The imperfections are lost as the sum of the parts takes precedence.
Makes me want to create wallpaper at home out of some crazy image fragment I have lying around. Not a body part though… it’s been done!
Now that I think about it, this installation is a bit like your Lego post AND the wallpaper post — conflated!” read more…
Ever since an alarming number of readers reported NOT getting a video in their July 23rd Daily Email, we’ve been working to fix the glitch. When we found the clip of Martin Van der Poll’s Do hit chair, we thought it would be the perfect test to see if things have resolved. We’re asking subscribers to PLEASE let us know two things: if the image of the open book and the Do hit chair video have comes through in your morning Daily Email.
With thanks!
A picture of a chair made out of orange-and-white-striped wooden safety barriers that we saw on The Selby led us to discovering Tom Sachs. He’s an artist who makes elaborate recreations of modern icons: masterpieces of engineering and design of one kind or another, from Knoll office furniture to Prada to NASA (like this hilarious video). The all-seams-showing recreations are made out of ordinary stuff like phone books and Foamcoare welded together with duct tape or a glue gun. As it is clear from The Selby’s pictures of Sach’s living/studio space, the work of this imaginative inventor/artist holds ideas for our own more modest creations…
Although we don’t know what it says, we’re crazy about Sach’s bedspread, and the idea of writing on our own…
….not to mention the wonderful chair… read more…
When we wrote about clipped-together cardboard box shelving a while back, we mentioned wanting to paint the cardboard boxes – coat them with something to change their look (we were thinking rubber paint) – knowing that the cardboard would swell slightly and become….something else: not smooth but sculptural, possibly even stronger once it had dried. After a few comments to the effect of: “bad idea…YOU CAN”T paint cardboard”, we put the idea aside. Then we saw Andrea Zittel’s wonderful cardboard construction, with its cryptic blurb:
“For the last year there has been a teetering pile of cardboard boxes precariously stacked against the dining room wall. Today the masterpiece was finished and installed…. Walla!”
Look at that!!! we thought as we sailed from one website to another discovering Andrea Zittel. FOR YEARS she has been following her imaginings and exploring ways to define and organize space, question assumptions about it, experiment with new ways and systems for living.
Zittel’s not-quite-finished website is all about her work as a – WHAT? -, an installation artist-designer-sculptor-lifestyle thinker and investigator… She is the driving force behind A-Z West,”an institute of investigative living” read more…
The Vegetable Orchestra in Vienna, Austria performs original music made and inspired by instruments made of vegetables. Cucumberophones, celery bongos and leek violins might seem like something out of a Max Fleischer cartoon, but they are very real. They yield original sounds and music, with an ephemeral quality because of the living – and fleeting – nature of vegetables…
“The reason why our music is kind of fresh is…because we are forced to make something new on stage to improvise …our musical instruments don’t stay the same…”
Members of the Orchestra forge original instruments using knives, drilling machines, and various other tools. Their work is really about unleashing the possibilities inherent in the most ordinary of things around us.
“You can make music out of nearly everything, each thing contains a very specific acoustic quality and represents an intricate universe of sound…each thing could be a tool to open up that point of view”. read more…
We were walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn one twilight evening when we heard the mellow sound of saxaphones reverberating “a capella” through the trees. We came upon two men standing in a leafy clearing. We stopped to listen, then asked where they were from. The confident man strolling slowly with his alto soprano sax had been a professional musician in Africa and was teaching his friend to play, in the park, where no neighbors would be disturbed. His friend tentatively played notes scribbled on a religious pamphlet propped on the side of his case; the title of his tune “Music in the Air”… read more…
A couple of years ago (when ‘the improvised life’ was just an idea), we stumbled on this picture of Tobias Wong‘s file cabinet bed in Reference Library, and bookmarked it, thinking we’d write a post about it someday. It is such a great, direct idea, with many possibilities for implementing in different ways. But we didn’t think then to follow the little link below the photo, to Wong’s website, brokenoff.com where we would have seen just what a gifted designer and conceptual artist he was. We discovered this in the saddest way possible: reading in the New York Times of Wong’s recent death at thirty-five.
Wong’s work was very much about mocking the pretensions of “great design” in thoughtful, clever, often angry ways. He famously hacked – and mocked – the work of other designers – to their outrage – for his creations. He coined the word “paraconceptual” to describe his work. “When I do pull a prank, it’s my means of sending out a conceptual idea. It’s not just laughing at them.” Although he didn’t like being called a designer, all of his work had the grace and harmony of good design, while pushing you to think or experience things in a new way, like his Stoop Installation: read more…
After we took a look at Wikipedia‘s entry about Memorial Day, we realized that, for us and many folks, the day has come to mean “the beginning of summer” rather than a remembrance of people who had died fighting in wars. We imagined losing someone we love that way and got a different view of the day.
We wondered: what do you wish a person on Memorial Day? Happy Memorial Day doesn’t seem quite right. So we’ve posted this video by Tara Mann called Life’s Journey. I agree.
You can see more of Mann’s work on Vimeo.
BTW: The quote is by George Carlin.
We are big fans of guerrilla activities of all sorts, from the making of art and theater to gardening and marketing. So we loved stumbling on this picture of a striking guerrilla action that took place in Berlin recently: While cars were stopped for green lights, a group of cyclists dumped 13 gallons of colored paint in large puddles onto the street in Berlin’s busy Rosenthaler Platz. As the cars drove through the puddles, their tires inadvertently became brushes to spread the paint, creating a constellation of colored lines. (The artworks’ masterminds posted signs nearby explaining that the paint wasn’t harmful and would wash off with water.) Like the best guerrilla actions, this one shakes up habitual thinking and seeing (and hence maybe living) in positive ways. read more…
