Category Archives: art

General arts and culture posts

Mind the Machine

Posted on by

P1140624

Tristan Perch is currently on his second large wall drawing at the Georgia Museum of Art. Three drawings will stretch across one long white hallway on the second floor of the museum. When the third, final drawing is finished on September 3, 2014, the wall will be painted over. In the meantime, the wall is being drawn on not by Perch’s hand, but by a machine holding a pen. Perch programmed the machine to move around the wall to create this drawing as the pen in weighted down by a clip and gravity from a long wire. The artist, who also works in electronic sound art, is interested in the balance and interaction between the code (his program for the pen’s path on the wall) and physics (how it actually manifests in the environment). It certainly takes automatic drawing to the next level, although rather than stemming from the unconscious this stems from a programmed computer chip.

P1140625

 

Vito Acconci and David Antin On Art in Public Space

Posted on by

endgames

“An open public space, like the piazza, is a vast multidirectional space. People are dots sprinkled across the floor; one dot slides into another and slips past to continue on its own. A number of dots queue up to form a a dotted line of tourists who follow a flag and crisscross another dotted line of tourists. Here and there, as if scattered through a sea, dots merge into islands. Its every person for him- or herself here, every group for itself, and the tower above all.” -Vito Acconci, “Public Space, Private Time”

giacometti

Alberto Giacometti, Piazza, 1947–48

“Nobody knows who the public is or what it wants or needs. Or whether it should be considered singular or plural. Though there are many people claiming to act on its behalf or speak in its name. And no one is quite sure what space belongs to it or to them, though that usually seems to be only what’s left over when all the other spaces have been appropriated, walled, shut, fenced, or screened off by whatever groups or individuals lay claims to them. So what we are left with are discards and transition spaces, spaces for a kind of temporary and idle occupation like lounging, strolling, and hanging around–streets, squares, parks, benches, bus stops, subways stations, railroad and airport terminals.” -David Antin, “Fine Furs”

Alvin Landon Coburn, The Octopus, 1909

Alvin Landon Coburn, The Octopus, 1909

Little Grand Canyon Yellow: Earth Pigments from Places

Posted on by

P1140653

Called Little Grand Canyon Yellow, this 1964 painting by Howard Thomas is hung next to a vitrine of small, re-purposed glass jars at the Georgia Museum of Art. The title of the work was intended literally. The artist made the yellow pigment from earth from the Grand Canyon. Perhaps it is not coincidental this painting preceded the earthworks of Robert Smithson and Ana Mendieta of the 1970s.  Although still on canvas, Thomas engages with site through the locally sourced pigment that are referenced in the title. The style of the work, however, rather than being a fragmented areal view, seems to me more like formalist play because of the  centered shapes bounded by the canvas, suggesting no expansive horizon, and the disjointed layerings that creates a tone-on-tone sense of motion or depth.

P1140648

The glass jars showing Thomas’s pigments have fascinating labels, like the one below labelled “Frat House.” What kind of painting might that have been used in versus the one above, I wonder.

P1140649

P1140650