Category: Art

The Cartoonist posted this link over the weekend to this online database of OZ magazine, a hippie/psychedelic zine from the U.K. that lasted five years. Check out the variety in the cover design. Never the same thing twice, graphically adventurous, bold (not too many words). And their readers were stoned out of their heads too! Yet they found the issue each time, how is that?

More wonderful printwork, this time from Sapporo-based Yumiko Kayukawa. I dig this stuff, man, we need something like this up in S.B. By the way, I found this at a gallery site based in Palm Springs. On my one trip to the city I never managed to see anything like this, just “rich people art”. I wish I had known this place existed!

Once again, Danny Gregory points out another artist to take note of. Julie Dermansky does damn near everything, from photography to metalwork to “events” to paintings. The latter are in the neo-outsider style that is pretty common these days, and I quite like her series of Bishop Paintings.

I have no idea who The Royal Art Lodge are, but it’s some sort of Winnipeg-based collective. The work has a Shrigley-like feel to it, but more deadpan.
By way of The Cartoonist.

Fans of surrealism, fantasy, and late ’70s European illustration should find much to groove on in Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, a 400-page imaginary encyclopedia of a world similar to ours populated by bizarre creatures. The above site features a little background on the mysterious work, and links to illustrations. Totally out of print, used copies cost boogaloo bucks. (Or do they?) At least the Amazon link suggests other strange books, even if there’s not a Codex in stock.
Serafini has a site, but it’s under construction. There is, however, a site devoted to the Codex. And apparently Serafini is just updating the original “mysterious” work, the Voynich Manuscript.

Sunday was a day of lasts. It was last day at the S.B. Museum of Art to catch the Bo Bartlett exhibition, which I wanted to see again after a brief viewing a month ago. Bartlett is one of the latest in the new traditionalist (I’m sure there’s some better name) school of American painting. He paints in oil, on big canvases, and depicts modern Americans in sometimes surreal settings that reference religious paintings of the old masters. He’s modern, but the activities in his paintings seem timeless (there are no city scenes, no televisions, no consumer culture). His painting “Homecoming” (see above) shows a post-game bonfire at some high school stadium, but the activity seems like ancient ritual. A coach and a parent stand nearby, pointing off into the distance, discussing…what? The horizon is fields and water. Where are we? There are echoes of Hopper here, as well as Eakins. All his work has a great enigmatic quality to it, and they are very open texts. You bring what you want to them. His use of color is also astonishing, but the computer screen doesn’t do it justice.
Also in its last day was Contemporary Arts Forum‘s “Videodrome” show, a daily program of recent video art. I hadn’t been too lucky the days that I went in over the last month. Some video art is just atrocious–after patriotism, it is the last refuge of scoundrels. Only these scoundrels have DV cams and a few AfterEffects filters. Holly Mackay, whose title at CAF I’ve forgotten, but high on the ladder, invited me over for a final “best of” screening. Apart from a groovy short from Marco Brambilla called “Wall of Death” (various angles on a centrifugal stunt motorbike rider, looking like an old kinetoscope), I loved the collaborative shorts by Christoph Giradet and Matthias Muller (most recently known for their Hitchcock cutups). “Manual” cut together all these cutaway shots of scientific equipment, speakers, tape machines, and so on, from various 1950’s Technicolor films and created an alienating universe of control, while a disembodied female voice tries to communicate something about memory and time. I also liked “Scratch,” a similar set-up, this time using cutaway shots of record players from Hollywood films, looped like a runout groove. Both films were also good at fetishizing old technology. Holly and I agreed that we’ve definitely lost something when all machines lost dials and switches. Everything is run by a computer and a mouse these days.
Strangely enough, Muller’s own solo video work was dull, yet you could see what he brought to their collaboration (ideas of isolation and alienation).

I was surprised to hear, apparently several months late, that collage artist extraordinaire Jess Collins (later just known as Jess) had died this year. Jess is not very well known but his Max Ernst-meets-Lichtenstein cut-up of Dick Tracy comics, entitled “Tricky Cad” was a major influence on me as a teenager. You can find very small reproductions of the work in Pop Art books, but I’ve never the seen the thing close-up or in a decent reproduction. Surely these pieces are worth a reissue or a Taschen book of some kind. The one retrospective he had in 1993 produced a book that is now going for something like $75. Yikes.
Last month I traveled to San Francisco (I’m still working on the photo diary where you can see my journey) and in SFMOMA there were several large-scale works by him. At the time, however, I didn’t know that Jess and Jess Collins were the same. One work was something close to 4×5 feet and was a collage of black and white engravings that he had then drawn as a whole, organic work. It was “everything but the kitchen sink” collage of the first order.
Read 2Blowhard’s own blog entry on Jess, which is where I found the news.
I later wrote LACMA, where a number of Tricky Cad pieces are part of the collection, but the curator says that due to the fragile, all paper and glue nature of the work, they are not on display. I was happy, though, with the speed in which the curator got back to me (two hours).

Talking about trompe l’oeil, I came across this site of oil paintings by Ron Francis, an Australian artist of trompe l’oeil. I prefer his oil work, as the hyper realism he uses in his murals translates into a Magritte-like dream state. This one and this one are particularly good, especially the early morning light seen in the latter.

Here’s a collaboration between Andrew Dunbar (photographer) and Anthony Chiappin (painter), a strange collection of grotesque bodypainting and trompe l’oeil. I wish the pics were a little bigger as it takes some looking to fully see all the figures and their poses.
By way of Everlasting Blort

Most film geeks know Saul Bass as the master of the opening credit sequence. “Vertigo” and the original “Ocean’s 11” both start off with famous Bass sequences. But what I wasn’t aware of was that Bass designed many famous corporate logos, most of which will be immediately recognizable (Exxon, Girl Scouts, United Airlines).