The title of this post WAS gonna be “Reasons Why We Love Molly Crabapple, Part #2369138459008164548939347”, but we decided on something sliiiiightly less effusive– only because it more properly trumpets the existence of her beautiful new “Happy Birthday, Coilhouse” print to high heaven:

Limited edition serigraph by Molly Crabapple. BUY IT HERE.

Yes! Indeed, Coilhouse’s 4th birthday is upon us. Although the site didn’t officially launch until October, we first started blogging in August of 2007. In recent, tumultuous days, as we’ve revved up the fundraising engines to ensure our wee company’s continuing evolution and stability, countless incredible people have stepped up to help. One of our most tireless and powerful champions has been Molly Crabapple.

Since day one of Coilhouse, Molly has been relentlessly generous with her time, her contributions, her immense resources, and even her checkbook.

Ms. Crabapple’s latest contribution to our continuing push for growth and financial stability is this gobsmackingly lovely limited edition Commemorative Coilhouse Birthday Serigraph– a high-end print which we are offering for sale internationally as a supplemental fundraising item to the big Black & White & Red All Over Ball in New York City this coming Sunday. Molly obviously kept the palette of the party and our forthcoming Issue 06 in mind when she drew this loveliness. (Isn’t our newest poster child a dream, with her grandiose cake hat, red ringlets and mischievous smile? We covet her bird mask.)

A bit of background on how this print came to be: when Molly found out we were throwing a fundraising ball in her backyard, she was among the first to start helping us organize it. During one brainstorming session, she came up with a great suggestion; undoubtedly, there will be many folks all over the world who can’t make it to the ball, but would nonetheless like to substantially support our fundraising efforts. Maybe we could offer a really meaningful, experiential way for them to help us from afar?

Molly got in touch with her frabjous friend Melissa Dowell. Melissa, an accomplished artist herself, will be taking the time and effort to create these hand-silkscreened prints for us at cost at Bushwick Print Lab. (Melissa. Holy cow. Thank you.)

Within less than a day of suggesting an auxiliary fundraising art object, Molly had made good on her offer of artwork for a gorgeous commemorative print. Later this week, Melissa will produce a very limited edition run of them. The Commemorative Coilhouse Birthday Serigraph by Molly Crabapple is 19″ x 25″, printed in matte red and semi-gloss black ink onto smooth 100+ paper stock from the deliciously-designed French Paper, with a thick border of white paper to frame the print. The edition size is a mere 35, and we are selling them for sixty-six dollars and sixty cents bucks a pop ($66.60 USD, plus shipping).

Comrades, please know that by purchasing this beautiful birthday print, you’ll not only be helping Coilhouse tremendously in a financial way– you will be celebrating with us, too. Four years on, we are still so glad to be here, and we’re ecstatic that you’re here, too. Thank you.

CLICK HERE TO BUY.

Oscar Wilde from Molly Crabapple’s delightful “Saints and Sinners” series.

Back to Ms. Crabapple for a minute, now…

Mindful as we are of Molly’s long list of previous kindnesses toward Coilhouse, it’s still astonishing to us that this world-class woman, in the midst of everything else piled up on her drawing table, took the time to make this happen for us, for free, without even blinking. We can never thank her enough, or tire of singing her praises.

Many of you will have, no doubt, already heard all about Molly and her many art projects, but just in case you haven’t, please do give MollyCrabapple.com a visit and take a look at the many remarkable ventures she’s been up to lately.

• Saints and Sinners “Portraits of whores, scoundrels, scammers and heroes from history, all of whom I like, whether or not they deserve it.”
• Sixty Six Project “Here’s my capsule of some people I adore, who awe me. …writers and artists and porn stars and firebrand journalists and rockstars.”
• Molly Crabapple’s “Week In Hell” Kickstarter phenomenon.
• Dr Sketchy’s Anti-Art School.
• Wired Magazine on Molly Crabapple’s Week In Hell.
• Mer interviews Molly for SXSW.
• A handful of Molly’s many previous appearances on Coilhouse Blog: “I Have Your Heart“, “Fashion Week During the Apocalypse Part One and Part Two“, and “Thank You, Tura Satana“.

And one more time, CLICK HERE to buy the beautiful Coilhouse/Crabapple limited edition fundraising print.

“Don’t look at me that way,” detail.

Textured scaffolding made out of paper. Spun cavities, spiraling angles and floating bristol-board islands. A mysterious, solitary logo consisting of circle and the letter X, reinterpreted in dozens of different ways.

Tonight in the Bay Area, artist, photographer and Syzygryd co-designer Nicole Aptekar unveils a series called New / Exploration / Paper at the Satellite66 gallery in SOMA. Coilhouse caught up with Nicole during the hectic last day of gallery preparation to discuss these pieces and the process behind them.

“Play revolver,” detail. Photo by Nicole Aptekar

COILHOUSE: Let’s start with this logo, the circle with the letter “x” positioned inside of it. How long has it been around? What’s the story behind it?
NICOLE APTEKAR:  I came up with the symbol in the summer of 2009. I was interested in sticker art, and wanted something to tag with that was not obviously a tag. I was experimenting with a number of different logos. In some versions, the circle was very dominant. In other versions, it was the “x”. The x-heavy versions of the logo were significantly more… vicious? Aggressive? They had no meaning, yet they had this built-in aggression that I found really interesting and kind of desirable, which I thought was curious, since they were just abstract symbols.  I started putting stickers of the logo up all over San Francisco and wherever I traveled. It was fascinating to see which ones stayed and which ones didn’t.  This version with the double-x is the one that I claimed for myself as a logo. Then I started using it to label things: my laptop, my bike, etc. When I had the opportunity to make it a part of a composition, I took it, instead of just slapping a logo on top of things. One example of that is the “Clear” button on the Syzygryd controller touchscreen… yeah, I tagged my own art.

Conventionally, it’s corporations that have logos, not individual people. So why your own logo?
A big part of it is that I find stickering really fascinating. I’m a big fan of B.N.E. and AERA HAKR. I watch the streets to see all the new sticker people because, for their brief moment, they are prolific. You can’t spray-paint every street, but you can absolutely throw seven stickers down as you’re walking. But I don’t really have the attachment to a name that many in the graffiti community seem to have.  Coming up with a fake name and throwing that down is not my thing. I don’t want people to know who I am, I’m not concerned with getting my name out. I’ve always been into graphic design and typography, though. Seeing abstract symbols in the wild engages my curiosity. There’s moment of puzzlement when you see some strange symbol in some random place, like on a trash can. Like, “what could this mean?” I feel like seeing the same logo in different places gives people the opportunity to get curious and find out. With an abstract logo, it’s not necessarily as obvious as with with a name. I feel like that’s more interesting.

Laser cutter in action. Photo by Nicole Aptekar

How did you transition from making stickers to making these sculptural paper compositions?
In January, I came across Matt Shlian’s work, and I became really inspired. He made a set called The Process Series, which are blocks of stacked paper that was cut using a plotter. He was taking grids and moving them around, and I thought that was really amazing. I’d been using laser cutter for a year and a half at that point, and I thought I could do something similar with it. So I just booked the laser at Techshop to see if it would be possible to laser-cut a piece similar to ones in The Process Series. Except that, instead of using one of his shapes, I used my logo. So I cut it, glued it together – hated the process of gluing it together – and I came up with this. I liked it, but it was so entirely similar to Shlian’s concept that I was really embarrassed by it. But I didn’t want to give up on it, either. So I started to ask myself: what could I do to feature my logo in a way that exposes the depth and breaks away form the grid structure? Shlian’s thing was repeated grids: squares, triangles, etc. He had his own unique way of pulling through depth, and I wanted to see what the variations are on that. I wanted to see what kind of shapes I could compose from my logo that were definitely mine, and not reminiscent of his. I developed several concepts for how to accomplish this using my own terminology. A projected cavity is large shape swept around to make a smaller shape. A spun cavity is when I take a shape and twist it. Spars and scaffolding are beams attached to the side of the frame that hold up elements that need to float.

“Don’t look at me that way” before it’s printed and cut, in Rhino 3D.

Can you describe your process for making these?
I start by designing these in CAD using Rhino 3D. In Rhino, none of these pieces are cut – it’s all one solid piece – so it’s hard to predict what kind of interplay all the individual layers will have. By the time I chop them up with the laser and lay out the pieces, I have no idea what it will all look like until it’s assembled. I’m completely unable to work on more than one of these at once. Each one leads directly onto the next; many of these contain new variations on a technique I had just learned while making the previous piece. For example with this one, I developed the notion of having the frame turn into that shape in the center, becoming part of the composition. And then with this one, which I made right after it, I did the same thing but also took that shape and twisted it. The shape of this one is basically secondary to the movement of the bar and its center point. That’s something that I never saw when I was doing it in CAD, but it looked shockingly beautiful to me when I started to put it all together. And then in the next one after that, I also had that frame and that spun cavity, but I added scaffolding at the top. In putting together this exhibition, I’ve learned a ton. Each one of these pieces represents an amount of knowledge I have gained.

One of Nicole Aptekar’s original pieces will be available at the Coilhouse Black & White & Red All Over Ball silent auction in New York this August 21st. See you there!

Monty Python era Terry Gilliam gives a lesson in the cut out animation he was so well known for. Watching this, site I was struck by how inventive Gilliam was in playing with perspective and appropriating images as well as how maddeningly fiddly the entire process seems. Even with the help of tape I would be terrified that a stray gust of air or a sneeze would take everything away with it. Stop motion animators have nerves of steel and more patience than I shall ever possess.

Via Drawn

I know everyone’s waiting with bated breath for more news about Coilhouse’s Black & White & Red All Over Ball in New York. We’d been working on the announcement all weekend, but with more art and performers still being confirmed, and some other details to iron out, we’ve decided to wait just one more day to spill the beans. In the meantime, check out these lovely new creations from Miyu Decay, the jewelry and adornments company of artist Stephanie Inagaki (previously on Coilhouse). Shot beautifully by Allan Amato, the images feature models Lacy Soto, Alexandra Matthews, Jill Evyn, and Yellow Strange. All these items can be purchased at Miyu Decay’s Etsy store.

Later this month, Stephanie and the other artists involved in this shoot will be throwing a very special fundraising event in LA in honor of James Ribiat, Stephanie’s fiancee, who died of a heart attack nearly two years ago. We met Stephanie and James when they became impromptu bartenders at the Coilhouse launch party three years ago, and James’ passing was a shock for everyone on the staff. Stephanie writes:

James always encouraged me to be creative, to continuously do better and was my biggest critic.

Our family established an arts endowment in his honor, which will be used to give scholarships to local students who want to pursue the arts.  James was an ardent supporter, always donating to museums and the LA Philharmonic. We had received generous donations from friends to initially start up the endowment but it is necessary to raise more funds in order to give back to the community.  An endowment works similarily like a savings account, where you can only take off of what the interest makes.

I am organizing a memorial benefit show to raise more funds. It will be held on Friday, August 26th from 7pm-12am at Sancho Gallery in Echo Park. I am in the process of hopefully attaining an Alcoholic Beverage Control One Day License as well because everyone knows booze brings in the most cash! The entrance fee will include one raffle ticket, which I think will be about $10.  There will also be an option to buy more raffle tickets as well!

The event will feature performances by Daniel Ribiat of Cinema Strange and Colin Ambulance, as well as a raffle for artwork donations from Zoetica, Tas Limur, Yume Ninja, Paul Koudounaris, and many other artists. See the full details on at the event page here.

Some stunning images by photographer Catherine Hyland from her China Series and Wonderland. Located outside Bejing, Wonderland was designed to be the largest theme park in Asia. Construction began in 1998, but was halted because its developers and the local farmers could not come to an agreement on the proposed 120 acres of land required to fulfill such a grandiose vision. What’s left is one of those seemingly post apocalyptic landscapes that photograph so well.

Her other photographs from China are equally as impressive, featuring stark, urban lanscapes. The images of giant, towering apartment blocks and crowded alleys, cast in the perpetual daylight of a vast metropolis, have an otherworldly quality to them. You can see more from both series after the jump.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE: This week marks the final chance to see Savage Beauty before it closes on Sunday, August 7th. Due to the exhibit’s overwhelming popularity, the Metropolitan Museum has scheduled special viewing times for the upcoming weekend. Do not miss the opportunity to witness this one-of-a-kind show honoring one of the most spectacular talents to ever grace the fashion world.

Alexander McQueen’s “The Horn of Plenty”,  autumn/winter 2009-10. Black duck feathers. (via)

“When I am dead and gone, people will know that the twenty-first century was started by Alexander McQueen.” -Alexander McQueen (1969-2010)

The death of the Scottish designer Lee Alexander McQueen in February of 2010 sent shockwaves throughout the fashion industry that rippled steadily outward, pervading the worlds of fine art, music, theatre and design. Suddenly, one of the bravest, boldest and incredibly imaginative forces in fashion was gone. McQueen’s suicide took place just a week after his beloved mother, Joyce, died from cancer, and with little more than a month to go before he was to debut a new collection in Paris. The international outpouring of grief was palpable, as everyone, from socialites, celebrities and fashion students from countless walks of life remembered the designer in extensive magazine features, blog posts, Twitter updates, and Tumblr tributes. McQueen’s strong features and piercing stare appeared on the cover of most major newspapers.

(via)

McQueen’s influence was undeniable; he had unleashed, with collection after collection, a romantic assault on the senses and invited his viewers to look with their minds, not merely their bodies, when deciding what to wear and how to wear it.

Never had a designer injected so much personal anguish and cerebral delight in his creations, and the materials he used, from pony skin, ostrich feathers, medical slides, hammered silver, balsa wood and tulle, became fashioning for the soul. For the past several months, devotees have streamed through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to personally experience many of his most iconic creations up close, presented in the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty retrospective. Curated by Andrew Bolton of The Costume Institute, the exhibit shows more than one hundred designs in tailor-made galleries befitting each of McQueen’s influences.

Who’s Afraid Of Mr Greedy comes to us from the directorial team of Simon Boucachard, Jean Baptiste Cumont, Sylvain Fabre, Guillaume Fesquet, Adeline Grange, Maxime Mary and Julien Rossire, graduates of Gobelins, the French animation school. It tells the story of a gentleman looking for something stolen from him from the titular villain. It’s a simple premise, beautifully animated. I especially like the seeing-eye dog/child gag at the beginning.

Via The Fox Is Black

Katsuyo Aoki works principally in ceramics, cialis creating incredibly complex pieces. Her Predictive Dream series is especially impressive, recipe comprised of a number of skulls formed by lacy, online swooping, and fragile ceramic tendrils.

The treasure-dispensing giant in the green forest or the fairy who grants one wish
– they appear to each of us at least once in a lifetime. But only
Sunday’s children remember the wish they made, and so it is
only a few who recognize its fulfillment in their lives. – Walter Benjamin

Benjamin Birthday Cake! Photoshop by Nadya.

There is a Yiddish expression offered on someone’s birthday which is affectionate and contains a subtle blessing: “Bis hundert und zwanzig.” In other words, people are wished a life that extends to their 120th year. So what should we do if someone dear (if not near) somehow turns 120? What are they wished then and each year thereafter? I offer these questions as a point of entry for considering Walter Benjamin, a writer whose life ended in suicide as he contemplated his chances of eluding the Nazi Gestapo some seventy-three years before this question may have become material for those around him.  Today marks the 119th anniversary of Benjamin’s birth – the last time someone could have addressed him with the wish of living to 120.

Walter Benjamin was a literary critic, philosopher, memoirist, and collector during Germany’s ill-fated Weimar Republic. Among his adventures were sojourns from Berlin to Moscow to witness the building of history and to Marseilles to smoke hashish and to Riga to have his love rejected. His last seven years were spent in exile while his works were banned and burned in his native land. Under other conditions, Benjamin’s Francophile desires would have found their easy appeasement in Paris, but the Third Reich cast an increasingly tall shadow and he became, tragically, a prisoner in the country of his dreams. In his forty-eight year life, Benjamin ran with Bertolt Brecht, Rainer Maria Rilke, Asja Lacis, Theodor and Gretel Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, Hannah Arendt, Georges Bataille, Leo Strauss, Max Brod and Gershom Scholem. And in many ways, Benjamin’s thought is a playful and poetic montage of the ideas of his associates – a “constellation” of Romanticism, Idealism, Marxism, Surrealism, and Jewish mysticism that is more than its unlikely parts: “Satan is a dialectician, and a kind of spurious success…betrays him, just as does the spirit of gravity.”

Einbahnstrasse by Sasha Stone (1928)

Benjamin brought to this heady mix his fascination, at once childish and insightful, for art and artifacts as relics containing clues to history. The scion of an antiquities dealer, Benjamin discerned an impending revolutionary–cum-spiritual cataclysm by contemplating and indexing paintings, books, and the most banal debris of economic life he could find, regarding them as might wily Detective Columbo if he was prodigiously stoned. As Bloch wrote of Benjamin’s book One Way Street, “when the current cabaret passes through a surrealist philosophy, what emerges into the light of day from the debris of meanings…is a kaleidoscope of a different sort.” The spooky thing is that Benjamin’s apocalyptic vision of lawmaking described in 1921 as “bloody power for its own sake” came to pass in many ways a little more than a decade later.

Walter Benjamin lived in a milieu of such vastly assimilated German-Jewish life that he had little formal understanding of Jewish culture, Yiddish, Hebrew, or even the Jewish religion.  He did, however, harbor an abiding interest in Jewish mysticism and mused furtively over those bits of religion and culture he encountered.  And he certainly seemed to have found spiritual sanction for his already-existing fetishization of objects in the Kabbalist’s meditations on words, names, and numbers.  According to this mystical orientation, influenced by neo-Platonism, reality has multiple dimensions – like a faceted diamond – only a few of which are directly accessible to us. We may approach them only indirectly, as they appear to us as abstract notions like numbers, letters, names, and sentiments. In such times as Benjamin playfully, and perhaps also earnestly, speculated on the mystical significance of language and numbers, he may have come to consider 119 alongside its constitutive outside, the number 120, the last year we can legitimately hope for someone else.  If so, it is entirely likely that Benjamin, a thinker who invited the mystical, would have been intrigued by the delimiting function of 120 and may have further speculated on 121 as a possible portal to other dimensions.  Operating, then, as a detective, Benjamin may have investigated the year 120 as a future crime scene – a time-place where this phrase will be eternally transcended. Looking outward, 119 years of life may have been considered the furthermost edge of his generation, a remote vantage from which to contemplate the eternity of space, like a balcony atop “Saturn’s ring.” Upon returning from such reveries, Benjamin would hopefully have finally mentioned that the actual root of this folk expression comes from the biblical datum that Moses lived to be 120. This, then, could have been followed by an analogy that is possibly both specious and interesting, like noting that Moses and Benjamin never completed their exodus from brutality.

The wish that one live beyond the culturally sanctioned, and quite generous, lifespan of 120 is redolent of the posthumous reception of Benjamin’s work throughout the humanities. The fervent interest in his work throughout the humanities since the 1980s is so unlikely as to seem almost a form of Messianic fulfillment on an individual scale. After all, his life was unfulfilled in most respects. He was a failed academic, a divorcee whose affair was an awkward mess, a minor radio personality whose voice was never recorded, and a writer whose masterworks were unfinished or forever lost in history. Years later, his work even achieved “fame” on its own terms when, in 1969, his most significant essay was mistranslated as “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Harry Zohn. For Benjamin, a work has achieved “fame” when it its translation transmits information not contained in the original. Two generations of scholars and art critics referenced his most significant essay through a misleading title, when now, as if language shifted its tectonic plates under our feet, the essay is emphatically translated as “Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.”  In the digital age, articles like this one are re-posted with attention to errata, such as mistaking today for his 121st anniversary, whereas it is only his 119th.  If only Zohn had used WordPress his translation would have been unfinished and arguably better for it.  Perhaps as the author of that essay – however titled – Benjamin would have come to consider fame in the age of American Idol in terms of having a finger puppet refrigerator magnet in one’s visgage. “All that is holy is profaned,” sayeth Marx. What does familiarity breed? So much for the “aura” of the author, eh?

In his essay on “The Metaphysics of Youth” Benjamin contemplates one’s diary as a temporal domain, an inner life expressed in writing which begins in medias res, with life already in motion, and which can never be concluded by an author whose death occludes continued authorship. The project is never finished and the life, as written in the diary, exists in its own sort of time, like the life the mind, an eternal moment delimited by birth and death, and unable to experience either. Benjamin’s life is thus suspended within the pages of his books, essays, memoirs, and personal effects – as in his Paris address book shown below. Something of his life may sometimes seem to flash in our minds as we read him, just as Benjamin once suggested that art and artifacts can communicate something of their creation in flashes. In this sense, Benjamin’s work has escaped the bounds of the moment in which it was written, although it has yet to allow its readers to tear the fabric of time and usher in the Messianic moment of utter destructiveness in which history is fulfilled and completed.

Of course, I cannot literally wish Walter Benjamin 120 years of existence because I have no known way of communicating it to him. I can, however, wish it for him in spirit, and I do. Whether this wish, now communicated in language, effectively gives him happiness, is beyond the scope of this essay to determine, but my wish that it do so has some affinity with Benjamin’s own work. In his essay, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Benjamin posits language as constitutive of thought and life as we know it – not merely a conduit for them – as, in his example, a divine speech act once set the universe in motion with illumination: “Let there be light.” Likewise, Benjamin may have noted that the wish that someone live to 120 implies a blessing, as in the Yiddish expression: “From your mouth to God’s ear.” As this is the last time I may properly wish Walter a 120th year,  I am ever-more concerned that it take the form of a blessing where numbers and sentiments are tangible – on the other side of language.

This essay is dedicated to Lionel Ziprin, z”l.

Courtesy of the wonderful, search talented tykylevits, producer of fine Finnish nonsense for four years and counting.