Last month marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Czech artist Alphonse Maria Mucha, father of Art Nouveau. In celebration — and to advertise some, no doubt, absurdly priced wristwatches — photography studio Mierswa-Kluska put together a shoot chock full of decorative borders and swirly, tendril-like hair entitled “Temp Nouveau” for Plaza Watch a magazine dedicated, obviously, to the aforementioned timepieces. It’s mostly successful in replicating Mucha’s ornate style though when juxtaposed with a flesh and blood person some of his trademark design elements can seem a bit jarring. Mucha’s figures always felt integrated with his decorative flourishes and that feeling is lost here. Still, niggling criticisms aside, it’s a wonderfully imaginative concept. You can see these images and the rest of the set at a much higher resolution at the link below.
Corporate patronage does not equal crappy art, even if said art is associated with a stupid campaign. That statement may be literally true in the case of this short film commissioned by Diesel:U:Music:
The concept for “Ritalin” (a Dancing Pigeons music video directed by Tomas Mankovsky) is based on Diesel’s theme for their spring jeans collection, Fire & Water.It’s easy to see how the gonzo style of the short dovetails nicely into Diesel’s recent, polarizing “Be Stupid” commercial campaign. Still, “Ritalin” stands on its own as a feisty, snarling gem of a short film.
Come with us as the FAM takes you on an extraordinary journey. Today’s offering is no doubt familiar to many, and yet bears repeated viewings. Released in Japan in 2001, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi which translates literally to Sen and Chihiro’s Spiriting Away) remains his most popular film. By the time of its release in the US in 2002 nearly a sixth of Japan’s population had seen the film, making it the highest-grossing film in the nation’s history. It would eventually win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature becoming the first anime film and, thus far, only foreign language film to win the award.
Spirited Away, then, is the ambassador for Miyazaki’s work in the States. While his other films had seen release here, none did so much for his reputation among the general public than this film; and it’s not hard to see why. Spirited Away is a stunning piece of animation, the culmination of decades of Studio Ghibli’s work. It’s a film that upon each successive viewing reveals new details. The bathhouse scenes in particular are wonders, packed to the brim with background points of interest. For their part, when Disney localized the movie for North America they resisted the urge to fill the cast with big-name actors (something they did previously with Princess Mononoke and since with other Studio Ghibli releases). It makes the English dub much less intrusive to me.
It is easily my favorite of Miyazaki’s films, a man whose oeuvre is rife with amazing offerings. Spirited Away strikes me as the film that he let his imagination run wild while still managing to retain a cohesive narrative. It’s also a film that allows the viewer to enjoy it as merely a story and not necessarily a parable like, say, Princess Mononoke a film that, while beautiful, was bogged down by its environmentalist message. Spirited Away is a surrealist journey in the tradition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, its messages and meanings subtly woven into the fabric of the story; there for those who wish to find it, invisible for those who don’t. It’s a truly timeless piece of movie making.
Pink Tentacle recently posted a glut of gorgeously creepy children’s book illustrations by Ishihara Gōjin (or Gōjin Ishihara). A prolific illustrator in post-WWII Tokyo, the man has been repeatedly referred to as “The Norman Rockwell of Japan”. Which, of course, in the context of drawings of shrieking children being terrorized by human-headed snakes and anus-gobbling demonic turtle men, is pretty goshdarn special.
The first several images in Pink Tentacle’s gallery of Ishihara Gōjin’s work “appeared in the Illustrated Book of Japanese Monsters (1972), which profiled supernatural creatures from Japanese legend. The other illustrations appeared in various educational and entertainment-oriented publications for children.” But wait, there’s more! Soooo much more.
Kiddie yokai and sci-fi are only the beginning. Delve a little deeper, and you’ll discover that in addition to creating monstrous children’s fare, Ishihara Gōjin adapted the story of famed samurai Yagyū Jūbēi, which this manga reviewer describes as “Norman Rockwell drawing a manga series…about a gay love affair between Abraham Lincoln and a lean-hipped, square-jawed cowboy”. He’s also the mastermind behind this utterly mind-rending, eye-melting, Joe Coleman-would-be-proud cover of issue 2 of The Seikimatsu Club manga:
Lessee now… Charlie Manson’s got Sharon Tate in a chokehold while rubbing elbows with members of the Klu Klux Klan, and there’s benevolent ol’ Jim Jones, and AUM Shinrikyō’s Asahara Shōko on the cross… Alex Sanders… Ya Ho Wha 13… Anton LaVey (and barnyard pals), Deguchi Onisaburo… Ruth Norman (speak of the Atlantian!), and last but not least… Aleister Crowley? Holy fucking shitballs.
Quivering brainmeats not yet liquified? Observe more embolism-inducing imagery after the jump. Apologies in advance for the lack of English titles and references– most of the scans were ganked from an incredibleJapanese language shrine to Ishihara Gojin. Also, sure to read the in-depth feature over at Comipress covering his visionary career.
There is a weirdly compelling sort of attraction to the exaggerated melodrama present in Josef Fenneker’s work. Inky backgrounds of blackest shadows and murky, moody gloom provide stark contrast to bloodless facial expressions, vivid with violent emotion – whether delirious passion, or murderous lunacy – and it is not difficult to imagine oneself mesmerized, whipped into a maelstrom of sympathetic mania when confronted with such imagery.
Toten Tanz, Marmorhaus
Fenneker, a German artist in 1920s Berlin, “became the eye of the cultural and political hurricane that was Weimar Germany”. A painter, graphic designer, and stage designer, he worked in a “mixed style, strongly tinged with expressionist characteristics”, and there is the foreboding of gathering storms and imminent, though decadent, doom in almost all his work.
Born in 1895, the son of a grocer, little of Josef Fenneker’s early life in Bocholt is known. Perhaps inspired by his uncle Anton Marx, a church painter and architect, Fenneker studied at the Arts and Crafts schools in Munster, Dusseldorf and Munich, and became one of Emil Orlik’s master-class students at the school of the Berlin Arts and Crafts Museum.
First employed by Berlin theaters – most notably the Marmorhaus, the “paramount movie palace of Germany” – Fenneker designed numerous film posters, between 1919 and 1924. A “ combination of Radio City Music Hall and Graumans Chinese Theater”, any film premiering there gained “instant prestige”. Thus, Fenneker was not just another movie poster designer, but THE movie posterist of his day, in whose hands the “art of the film poster arguably reached its zenith,” and in the postwar years he became “one of the most sought after designers of film posters. “ Fenneker went on to create stage designs for theater and illustrations for such magazines as Simplicissimus and Jugend.
Josef Fenneker died in Frankfurt in January1956 of heart failure. In the obituaries of the regional and national press, he was noted as one of the most important and most original German set designers of the 1920s and 1930s. More than 300 works have been preserved from his vast oeuvre by the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, several more of which can be seen below the cut.
A patchwork biography of Igor Oleynikov: Growing up in Lubertsy, Russia — a small town outside of Moscow — his entrance into the art world was at the Russian animation studio Soyuzmultfilm in 1979. Since 1986 he has been illustrating children’s books and has done 25 to date.
Children’s book illustration is a lot like veterinary school — the common misconception being that medical school has a much higher barrier of entry, and yet the opposite is true. Children’s book illustration is a notoriously difficult nut to crack.
Oleynikov’s work is testament to the talent involved in the field. His paintings are lush and yet his tones are muted just enough to give everything a dream-like quality. In addition, they possess that air of danger and foreboding so often found in literature for young readers. Really, I could look at these all day. See more after the jump and even more here, here, and here.
Inspired by the music we had the idea of making a decaying world. One single camera movement from left to right, showing a landscape, looping 9 times. Day becomes night and even the seasons go by. After we finished the production, we decided to reverse the whole video. This gives you a seemingly happy end, but you know what’s going to happen. There are no lyrics and we did not pay attention to the title of the song, we just felt this was the right thing to do.
A beautiful video from circa 2008, a lifetime ago on the internet. The song is from the album A Memory Stream which can be purchased here, among other places.
The Lifesize Mousetrap is exactly what it sounds like: an astoundingly cool, “big kid” version of the classic board game. Created by Mark Perez, constructed from leftover metal/nuts/bolts/spare wood over the course of thirteen years, and operated and maintained by a small, scrappy collective of bay-area based engineers, artists and performers, it’s “a colorful assemblage of kinetic sculptures fantastically handcrafted into a giant, 25 TON Rube Goldberg machine.”
The mechanical spectacle is enhanced by a vaudevillian style road show featuring tap-dancing mouse women, live music, and several dapper “clown engineers” who endeavor to “achieve a chain reaction using Newtonian physics and bowling balls! The action culminates with the spectacular dropping of a 2 TON bank safe from a 30-foot crane.”
This 50,000 pound contraption and its stage show must be seen to be believed. Preferably in person, not on a computer screen– which is why they need our help getting to Maker Faire Detroit and Maker Faire World in New York City. They’ve setup a Kickstarter project to help raise funds for the labor-intensive, rather expensive cross-country trip. There are 10 days left on the clock, and they’ve still got a ways to go before they reach their goal of $6,600 — a buck for every mile they travel. If you’re inspired by small, indie, gloriously strange community art and outreach, here’s a chance to express it. You guys know how this works: a buck here, a fiver there, and spread the word. It adds up so quickly.
A film for violin nerds on today’s FAM. Tom Slade directs 4, a film that follows four different violinists on four different continents playing one of the world’s most well known compositions, Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.
4 begins in Spring in Tokyo, with violinist Sayaka Shoji, segueing into Summer in Australia and violinist Niki Vasilakis before moving on to New York in Autumn with Cho-Liang Lin and finally ending in Finland in Winter with Pekka Kuusisto. It’s a quite a journey, though I’ll admit to being partial to Autumn as there really is nothing like New York City in the fall. The show-stopper here, however, is Finland. The scenery on display in this last act is nothing short of stunning.
All of it is accompanied by a beautiful piece of music. Vivaldi was a mainstay for me growing up. My grandmother had studied the violin and graduated from Juilliard before marriage and WWII sidelined those dreams. She had inherited the love of the instrument from an uncle who was a member of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra. She had, for a time, tried to pass this love and ability down to me, an endeavor she would abandoned in despair, her oldest grandchild seemingly devoid of any musical talent. Her violin, as it is for many who play I would assume, remains her most prized possession. She has, apparently, stipulated in her will that it must never be sold as doing so will, no doubt, bring down some ancient Hungarian curse upon our family.
The musical aspect, then, was what I found most intriguing about this film for while I love The Four Seasons the musicians here are in possession of a wealth of knowledge that I am completely ignorant of. They make for a fascinating lecture on just what is going on in each movement, what events transpire and what each instrument represents, all facets of the music I was never aware of.
It’s a meditative film, made slightly ominous by each musician noting how the weather seems to be changing. But regardless of such politically charged observations it remains delightfully calming — a soothing musical travelogue. The perfect film for a Friday afternoon.
Donald Weber takes a heart wrenching look at the city of Zholtye Vody in Ukraine. Located near two nuclear waste sites and an enrichment factory in the hub of the Soviet Union’s uranium mining and enrichment area, the homes were built using highly contaminated materials. With a higher radiation level than Chernobyl, over half the population of 60,000 people suffer from some sort of radiation sickness.
Upon first viewing this slide-show I was immediately struck with the strangest memory. Specifically, a memory of being a child, sitting in the ophthalmologist’s office and leafing through a copy of National Geographic which contained a large article on the Chernobyl disaster. The same hollow and broken faces are here in Weber’s essay. There is some joy here too, but it never seems to truly outshine the pain.
The image below was especially affecting and I had mixed feelings posting the set. It struck me that my vision of these post Soviet states is largely informed by images like this — a collection of gnarled women in babushkas, all furrowed brows and vacant stares, and emaciated youths, bald and hurting. It’s a world where lives are lived entirely within tiny, cramped apartments in stark, concrete tenements whose facades and walkways are slowly succumbing to an inexorable army of vegetation. I find myself thinking that there must be more to these people’s lives than this and fearing that there isn’t. I worry that I am passing on a misconception; proliferating a stereotype. I suppose that if the purpose of art is to make us question then, at least in my case, Daniel Weber has succeeded.
