Later this year Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers will unleash upon the unsuspecting public a vicious betrayal of my childhood in the form of Where the Wild Things Are or: Max and the Island of Misfit Baseball Mascots, the trailer for which features a child dressed like Max cavorting to the strains of Arcade Fire, making it appear to be squarely aimed at the trilby-wearing, fixie-riding crowd. Eggers is also set to release a novel based on his script based on the children’s book, no doubt filled with long, rambling passages detailing how Max was eating peanut butter with a spoon when his cat was diagnosed with feline AIDS and pockmarked with self-aware, ironic footnotes detailing how you should read the book.*
Either way people are planning on making a significant amount of lucre by tricking us all into putting down our hard earned cash to watch Max Just Wants A Hug by appealing to our powerful sense of nostalgia. In this regard they shall no doubt succeed. As depressing as this fate is to me at the very least there is some small ray of sunshine to be found in the sense that there seems to be a resurgence of interest in the book and its creator. Case in point, Terrible Yellow Eyes, a blog dedicated to artist’s interpretations of Maurice Sendak’s timeless art. Content to be homages and not reimaginings, these appeal to me in all the ways that the upcoming film does not.
*I used to eat peanut butter using a spoon which is why it is included in that joke. Also, I actually know someone whose cats have feline AIDS, although I cannot confirm or deny any occasions on which they ate peanut butter with a spoon. You’ll also notice that I poke fun at people who wear trilby hats. This is because I am unable to wear hats due the massive and irregular circumference of my skull. Lastly, you should probably just skip to the link at this point as I am probably just going to continue to make fun of post-modernist literature and complain about how Mssrs. Jonze and Eggers are raping my childhood.**
**At least, that’s the plan. It may all go horribly awry and I may just completely blow my load writing footnotes, which seems to be happening. Fuck. Seriously, get out now because it’s all downhill from here.
JUNE 12–A North Carolina man is facing criminal charges for creating an amusing piece of public art from construction barrels. Joseph Carnevale, 21, was nabbed Wednesday after a Raleigh Police Department investigation determined that he was responsible for the work constructed May 31 on a roadway adjacent to North Carolina State University. Carnevale was charged with misdemeanor larceny for allegedly building his orange monster from materials pilfered from a construction site. According to an arrest warrant, Carnevale “destroyed three road blocking barrels by cutting and screwing them together to form a statue.” Police estimated that Carnevale’s artwork caused $360 in damages to Hamlett Associates, the North Carolina construction company that owned the barrels. Carnevale is scheduled for a July 21 court appearance in Wake County.
With an Old-World, malady painterly flourish Christian rex Van Minnen creates creepy, surreal portraits using vegetables, fungi, and animal carcasses. The similarities to the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo is immediately apparent; unlike Arcimboldo, however, Van Minnen shows no desire to render realistic visages. Using only the barest of draped cloth, and sometimes a hat, he lends his piles of detritus just enough shape to appear human, thereby making them appear that much more alien; their eyeless faces sprouting tendrils and clumps of tumor-like, vegetative growths. In that regard they are more still-life than they seem at first glance; more a window into a separate dimension than an optical illusion.
This bust is the first in Paul Komoda’s highly-anticipated “Human Pathology” series. Paul, who previously brought you this cauliflower-tastic take on the Elephant Man, recently completed this sculpture of a woman suffering from Tertiary Syphilis (more images of the sculpt here). These busts were originally commissioned from Paul by the U. S. Department of Education – one for every classroom, placed squarely atop each health teacher’s desk, to scare students into finally taking the subject matter seriously. Unfortunately, the piece came out more garish than they expected, and the Department refused the final product. Well, their loss is your gain! Castings of this fine piece, titled La Pestilencia, are available from Artist Proof Studio for $160 a pop. What a fine thing to place on top of your piano, where you can serenade it every night – or perhaps you’d want place it on your bookshelf, betwixt your most rare leather-bound medical textbooks. It could greet guests at the dinner table, or look up at visitors mournfully from your office cubicle.
I’ve been watching Paul sculpt this thing for the past couple of months, and it still gives me the willies every time I see it up close. Paul chose to photograph the bust with some some light illuminating it from below, which I feel is a mistake. The harsh tales-around-the-campfire lighting makes the face look even more monstrous than it needs to be, and fails to show the humanity and sadness that Paul so carefully instilled into its features. For this isn’t some Hollywood ghoul – it’s a real person, based on this tragic and completely NSFL photo taken in 1973 of a syphilis patient. What a piercing photo – you can tell, by the eyes, by the cheekbones, the shape of the jaw – that this was once a beautiful woman, similar in appearance, perhaps, to Winona Ryder, but ruined by an unlucky life. She could still be alive today.
In 1980, artist and filmmaker Bill Brand installed 228 panels in the abandoned Myrtle Avenue station in Brooklyn. Lit by fluorescent lights, the panels are viewed through carefully spaced slits cut in a special housing. Based upon the principle of the 19th century zoetrope, passengers looking out the right side of a Manhattan-bound B or Q train would be able to watch a short animation. Brand’s original idea was to change the panels on a regular basis to make one, epic film comprised of 20 second clips, but soon realized that this would be unfeasible.
In the intervening years the display had fallen into disrepair, the lights broken and the panels covered in graffiti, despite Brand himself regularly going down into the station with a key someone had slipped him to clean the panels. However, over the summer of 2008 Mr. Brand, with the help of volunteers and the transportation authority’s Arts for Transit program, restored the installation and in November of that same year restarted it without any announcement or fanfare; another hidden little gem inside the vast metropolis.
I am a bit enamored with Amy Earles’s body of work. It is almost starkly divided into deceptively simple illustrations, excised from unwritten children’s books and delicate, vaguely unsettling paper dolls like the one pictured below who seems to have stepped out of a medieval painting; a dark stranger from another time, bat-winged and helmeted.
With the illustrations she has expertly achieved that balance — so vital to children’s book illustration — of innocence under the faint shadow of menacing danger. There is an air of malevolence in some of her pieces that I find delightful; the young girls hidden behind wolf masks playing games only they understand.
If you are a fan of her work she has a number of paper dolls available — quite reasonably — via her shop along with a few prints. I’d really like to see her expand the prints section, if only for my own print hording affliction.
Stitched together and strapped with machinery, Ron Rodgers’s creations delicately tiptoe over ruined landscapes on spindly legs; god-like alien centaurs traipsing across a desolate wasteland. Towering over the dusty bones of long dead buildings they roam the land, looking for what no one can be sure.
Rodgers’s work is by turns fascinating and mundane. I’m a huge fan of these centaur pieces; the stitched torsos, gas mask visages, and skeletal limbs make for beautifully bizarre pieces. It’s a shame, then, that a larger part of his portfolio — at least as it is represented at the site linked — is static columns, comprised of limbless torsos bedecked in a range of detritus. They lack the otherworldly qualities of both look and movement that make these such standout efforts. I can only hope that these, perhaps, represent a taste of things to come.
Image from the Tree House ‘s opening night by John Manyjohns.
OK, so you all know about the Steampunk Tree House, right? Towering at 30 feet, the house, constructed of wood, metal and recycled construction materials, debuted in Black Rock City in 2007. Nested between the tree’s rusted-looking metallic branches is a cozy, Myst-inspired interior room full of paintings, books, and all sorts of mysterious gadgets, puzzles, cranks, gears and dials. The brainchild of 60+ Bay Area artists, the Steampunk Tree House was brought into the world through a labor of love as well as the help of art lovers who donated funds to its construction from around the world.
A projection of where the Rocketship will be.
Now, the same team that built the Tree House is tackling an ambitious new project: the Raygun Gothic Rocketship. The Rocketship will surpass in height even the Tree House, the tallest element being 40′. Aesthetically, the project will be designed “in a rococo retro-futurist vernacular between yesterday’s tomorrow and the future that never was, a critical kitsch somewhere between The Moons of Mongo & Manga Nouveau. ” And they need help. I think it’s a cause that all of us can get behind!
Tonight in San Francisco, the creators of the Rocketship are throwing a Galactic Gala: a future-noir fundraising party featuring talented artists and performers from the Bay Area. Among them will be our very own Meredith Yayanos, performing under her Theremina moniker! Additionally, patrons of the event will be graced by a performance cellist extrordinaire Zoe Keating. If you are in the Bay Area, this event is not to be missed.
We’re proud to post the first installment in a series of artist features by Coilhouse contributor and friend Jessica Joslin! Jessica and her husband, painter Jared Joslin, appeared in the first issue of the magazine. Jessica was also interviewed on the blog last year. In the post that follows, Jessica takes a look at glass virtuoso Andy Paiko.
Andy Paiko, Spine Jar
Lately, I’ve had glass on the brain. In part, it’s because I recently had the chance to indulge my (admittedly very nerdy) obsession with Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka.I saw some of their glass jellyfish, for the first time, at the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna and the glass tentacles are still vividly trailing through my dreams. Andy Paiko seems to have more than a bit in common with the Blaschkas. There is a palpable sense of dedication to finely wrought craftsmanship and to the lusciousness inherent in the material itself. There is also a fascination with science, particularly with Natural History, and with preserving and celebrating relics from the natural world. Somehow, I suspect that all of the above were also ardent fans of Ole Worm‘s taste in collecting.
Like something from a Cabinet of Curiosities discovered in a dream, Andy Paiko’s mixed-media glass sculptures are mysterious, exquisite and very, very covet-worthy. Paiko’s sculptural vessels include a dizzying array of baroquely ornate glass bell jars, designed to house bones, shells, coral and other natural (and sometimes gold-plated) treasures. A related show-stopper is a glass chair, with compartments designed to accommodate objects, including a rhesus monkey skull and rodent skeleton.
Andy Paiko, Detail of Spinning Wheel
I must admit that I am intrigued, although also a bit mystified by, his pseudoelectrical devices. The first (certain to be a hit with all of you Tesla-philes!) incorporates Tesla coils and “is designed to make you ask questions.” The second mystery device includes an anometer (an instrument that indicates wind speed and strength) and “was designed to answer any questions you might have.”
As if that weren’t enough, there are also machines…antiquated mechanical devices, which have been lovingly re-created entirely in glass. His seismograph, balance scale and spinning wheel are, improbably, fully functioning replicas. There is a wonderful video online that shows some of Paiko’s devices in action. Check it out here. More images after the jump.
Ah, the iPhone, near ubiquitous accessory of the hipster elite and tech obsessed, it seems to be everywhere. When I first arrived at the Catacombs I expected to see the vile object somewhere in its vast warrens, and prepared myself to deal with people intently glazing the surfaces of tiny screens with their filthy finger oils, not bothering to make eye contact. I was not to be disappointed. In fact, one of the first sights to greet me upon my arrival was that of Miss Ebb. She was in an alcove off the main hall. The entryway had no door, but in its stead a yellowed and moldy sheet was hung. This was pulled to the side and I could see Zo sprawled upon a filthy mattress; a soiled nightgown, which at one time may have been white but had long ago darkened to a grimy beige, clinging to her emaciated frame. Her loyal servant girl, Jing Hua, knelt in stoic silence at her side, tending an enormous, ornately carved opium pipe. The odor coming from that alcove smelled of the drug and sweat and urine, all combining into a faint but unmistakable scent, like death.
Zo was gazing languidly at her phone’s screen and it was several seconds before she noticed me. Slowly raising her head she looked at me through half-closed eyes and from her chapped and crusted lips she said, “I’m in Paris. I told everyone on Twitter that I was, so it must be true,” before her head lolled back and she let loose a loping, dizzy giggle. She stopped suddenly, as if she had forgotten what she had found so funny, and let the phone slip from her fingers. She then rolled on her side and Jing Hua, obviously aware of her mistress’s subtle signals, placed the pipe in her mouth, letting her inhale deeply. I turned as she exhaled a massive plume of thick smoke and continued on down the hall, the sounds of a dry, spastic cough echoing behind me, having gotten the distinct impression that this particular conversation was over.
As I walked I thought that there had to be something to Apple’s gadget, if even a spaced-out dope fiend could navigate its surface competently while in the midst of chasing the dragon. It was interesting to note, then, The New Yorker — that bastion of culture and obtuse cartoons — touting that the cover for this week’s magazine was digitally crafted by artist Jorge Colombo using Brushes, and recorded with Brushes Viewer so that we can all see how absolutely mind blowing and future-fabulous it is.
All sarcasm aside, I actually wish they could have filmed his fingers as he painted it. I can’t help but think that my own, clumsy digits would allow for lines too fat and globular for even The New Yorker’s Impressionist leanings.
