Francine.

We all feel like monsters sometimes!

One of those times you're like "oh man, so original!" and then you realize you probably stole it from this guy:

Hahaha oh well, Nick Cave is a genius, so no biggie. When people aren't wearing his soundsuits they have this presence in the gallery. A few days ago i met a friend for lunch and we were talking about the power objects get when they've been handled and used by people. It's definitely a strange idea, but makes so much natural sense. The more something is loved, or hated, or passively woven into our everyday life the more it changes and becomes something we later cherish. Maybe not necessarily always a power that exists because people do but then that goes into that whole "if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound" concept.

Anyway, Francine was actually one monster out of many. If I can find the original magic marker sketches I'll do them too and montage them into an epic birthday scene! But really, they may be lost to the abyss that is my bookshelf. You see, I tend to shove notes, checks and other important documents in between my books and under objects to keep them safe...and then lose them.

Tomorrow is back to school and back to work. A bittersweet goodbye to Spring break. I gotta get my learn on :)

Where have all the illustrators gone?

 Yesterday I dragged a friend along for some Christmas shopping and we wandered into the Children's book section of Barnes and Nobles. And amid all the fancy schmancy illustration with their photoshopped elephants and christmas robots was Madeline. Though I can't remember my mom actually reading it to me, I know that I often read it on my own, or probably more accurately looked at the pictures while naively wishing I were also an orphan :) 

There was something captivating about the orphanage depicted in this simple children's story, and it was definitely to the illustrator's credit. It's just seems so effortlessly beautiful. This is someone who is clearly skilled, its obvious in every picture, sometimes in the allignment of the orphan's beds, or the movement of one of the characters tilted forward in a suggested paniced run. How do you draw panic in less than five lines?!? Or, and here I wish I had a picture to show you guys, but in one image the skyline of buildings is only an outline that tapers off into nothing. My breath literally caught when I saw those buildings disapear. They are just perfect I want to cry!  

And it's easy to say that the past was awsome and now nobody can do anything right when it comes to art, but damn, these illustrations with their gimpy little trees and tilted parisien land marks have something nobody has deemed important enough to teach but would outshine a million James Jeans.

Yeah, I said it. Now put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Facade of the Chicago Stock Exchange: The Key to Designer Heaven

Exerpts from a final paper for an Art History class. Most of the descriptions were left out to spare you readers as well as a whole section of badly argued connections to Islamic artwork. Critique wise I agreed that I talk too much but don't say enough and need to learn to weave in more factual information. Either way I thought sharing my lyrical ridiculousness would be kind of fun ;) But also, pretty pictures! 

    
          Of all the artifacts that the Seattle Art Museum has acquired over the years, none are quite as interesting or underexposed as SAM's Louis Sullivan's 1893 Chicago Stock Exchange Elevator Facade. It went on display in the American Art gallery March 31, 2010 after it was purchased from Sotheby's auction in 2008 from an undisclosed seller for an undisclosed price[1]. It resembles a prop taken straight out of the 1982 science fiction film noir, Blade Runner, in that it holds the same elements of ancient design glazed with modernity . Such a film reference might not crop up in everyone's first impression of Sullivan's design but that sense of mixing of past and future grandeur surely comes to attention. The elements incorporated seem both familiar and alien, archaic yet modern and it's mystery deepens when made known that the artifact was in fact rescued from the rubble of the original Chicago Stock Exchange demolished in 1972 as part of Chicago's Urban renewal project. The facade then becomes the coded message outlining Sullivan's own methodologies and obsessions with design as something higher than just art calling for an absent Rosetta stone. Definitively defining the inner workings of an artist's mind and intention at the moment of creation is of course impossible, but through tracing certain impressions and imagery that appear in the elevator facade a hypothesis of motivation can be developed. From what is presented to the viewer, the numerous allusions made to the divine point to the Chicago Stock Exchange acting as a threshold to modern spirituality that emphasized society's reverence for the accumulation of abstract wealth, a wealth that allowed Sullivan to indulge in his personal glorification of high design.


      When the overall layout of the Sullivan's Elevator covering is taken into account a tentative connection is made with another historically well known entrance design. The facade designed for the Chicago Stock Exchange is completely symmetrical and as stated before sectioned off into rectangular quadrants that frame specifically designed images without allowing cross contaminate from one section to another to occur. This high level of boxy structuring and grandeur, as well as the shared bronze-gold coloring alludes to a connection between the elevator facade and The Gates of Paradise designed by Lorenzo Ghiberti . As a student of architecture and art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,  it is more than likely that Sullivan encountered Ghiberti's work, especially his infamous gates that are the cornerstone of any European art history curriculum. The Gates of Paradise show ten scenes from the Old Testament and also uses intimidation factors (size, gold wealth, dramatized scenes of Godly acts) in bringing church goers into the mindset of worship when entering the Florence Baptistery. The similar amount of detail, scale of design and use of encapsulating gridded formatting bring about similar feelings of "smallness" in the viewer. Something able to effect even those uninterested in the religious connotations that Sullivan created by unabashedly tying his facade to the religious teachings of the past. In doing so he creates an identical feeling of entering someplace holy through gates that no doubt intend to simulate the indoctrinated image of the "holy gates" otherwise known as the illustrious gates of heaven.

         Take Sullivan's obsession with the circle in these works, a shape we often take for granted because it is so integral to human imagery. "Visual Entropy", or the point of "maximal symmetry, visual and constructional simplicity" has been an obsession for artists, scientists and philosophers for centuries. The Platonian, aka perfect, circle is as un- attainable as God or a let's say, a reliable economy. It's use in the facade points to the designers awareness, if only subconsciously, that the circle is the truest image of the divine and that it will continue to be read as a legitimate part of design for eons to come without the help of recognizable biblical or religious Imagery. It will never grow outdated, unlike the time-specific relief illustrations of The Gates of Paradise, which show telltale signs of their time period. Sullivan's use of the circle as motif render his design as timeless and ideologically transcending of what he saw as the restrictions of modern architecture. In this decision Sullivan finds his own description of the higher power independent of modern material culture and past theological organization that relies on the discovery of timeless imagery at the root of human artistic pursuits.


        In 1896 Sullivan said that "The artistic challenge of the tall office building is to proclaim from its dizzy height, the peaceful evangel of sentiments of beauty, the cult of higher life". Donald Hoffmann responded by asking what the "virtue of a building [is that's] trying to pretend it's something it is not?" Sullivan's gate acts as a threshold for the divide between the mundane unobserving world and the heavenly revelry in technology and human romanticism that the elevator embodies at this time as a new innovation saved only for the powerful wealthy. This divide is contrary to the famous quote "form ever follows function" that Sullivan is so iconically connected with (stated on the Seattle Art Museum description plaque) because instead of building to fulfill a practical requirement he's woven in a very un practical spiritual message that the majority of those viewing and using his design would be uninterested in comprehending. Not only would people be unwilling to decode his elevator but to do so would be to pull away from their worship of money and go back to means of revelry characteristic of an obsolete system of quiet contemplative building patronage. They see the money the building houses, not what the architecture's ornamentation is directly attempting to teach them.


         The facade, echoing The Gates of Paradise is what bars people and allows people to enter a place of either damnation or salvation. Damnation being the world of the commoners stuck in the everyday struggle against the mass of bodies, and salvation the upward mobility of those who can become part of the exclusive club of the educated , privy to secrets and admiration by those further down. This rift can also be characterized as "the artistically enlightened vs. the economically savvy", a struggle Sullivan himself experienced in completely relying on his partner Dankmar Adler to secure such large scale design projects and funding.
        Either way, the doorway itself holds hope for salvation of the perfect world and perfect circle. The facade represents a fork in the road between those acutely aware of the polar hemispheres of knowledge and those unaware and fortunately un-pestered by the realization that everyone is striving for a non-existent utopia, be it a godly, financial one or even a purely visual one. Sullivan exploits this by weaving that hope of someday reaching perfection or "designer's heaven" into the stoic facade through a language that the stock brokers and money managers will unknowingly misunderstand, thus protecting his personal expression of faith. That faith being in the simple beauty of an object and the natural principles it relies on. The faith that there is something truly eternal hidden in the human existence driven by consumption and constant cross exploitation.

Cris Brodahl at the Seattle Art Museum

Today I want to steer your attention to a very talented artist named Cris Brodahl hailing from Belgium, she was just brought to my attention this thursday. Unfortunately her internet presence is very small (not even a website!) so I was unable to locate any of her pieces from the show I saw but these will have to do.

Her first ever US Solo show, Relievo, is being presented at the Seattle Art Museum. Though I often do try to mainly look at the art and not the explanations, one particular sentance sticks in my head. It states that Cris Brodahl has been "quietly" painting for years. The emphasis is on "quietly". Suturing herself within her studio, where only one lone painting hangs, she's been dedicating her life to her images, not the outside world's expectations. This artistic monastary not only blocks out the world but her previous works as well. This purity rings when you see her works. They are clean, calculated and uncomfortably full of madness.

Brodahl pays her respects to classical art by taking her scalpel to it, cutting photos of women apart, cutting them open until their insides in the form of amorphous flowers and knots of finely woven hair tumble out to lay forgotten at your feet.

One could go on about her exquisite painting skills. Though her larger scale figure paintings/ sculptures seemed to be lacking depth, her portraitures of the picture mutants that seemed to be encased in a filmy mask of rock are so full of her obsession for detail, and are so heart wrenching that they make up for their larger counterparts.

Another point that should be noted is though she has been keeping out anything that could sully her work Brodahl is keenly aware of the current art climate. I say this because part of the gallery showcased a series of porcelain sculptures of diaphonous women being lost in a mass of cartilage and bone. This theme carries over to the paintings/ reliefs on an adjacent wall. Upon closer inspection the bony parts of the paintings and the the entirety of sculpture seemed to have been crafted by possibly machine? It was too perfectly cut to be anything hand-made. This use of computers is very ingenious and speaks to the constant pulling sensation in her pieces. Beauty vs. gruesome, artificial vs. traditional.

How convenient these new tools are, but are we selling a little of our souls in the aquisition of these new tools that promise leisure and reproducability? It speaks to something that the current generation is collectively experiencing, especially in the realm of visual culture. What we are seeing is a clash of moving forward and retaining the past, the fear and knowledge that no matter what is done all will not be saved. I was just talking to a friend about this but what we are seeing is an acceleration of technology that is erasing everything from books, movies, cartoons, painting, craftmanship, the real human vs. the idealized version of an avatar or carefully calculated internet persona. The loss of the initial seed is what is feared. I apologize for the sudden downward spiral of this last paragraph but it does illustrate the panic of the handful of people seeing the world move on without them.

Last Observation: What is up with current female artists and the hair obsession? I've done it, classmates have done it, Cris Brodahl is HELLA doin it. Why is hair so important to us? Feel free to comment!