Not all the art at mega art shows is gimmicky, flashy, retro, shiny, LED backlit, or video.
Or a combination of all the above.
Sometimes the most moving pieces startle with their simplicity.
Evol, born in Heilbronn, Germany and living and working in Berlin, paints architectural details and scenes on found cardboard. Like musicians who claim it’s the spaces between the notes that separate capable musicianship from true artistry, Evol’s deft use of the unpainted cardboard areas are what makes his four Scope show contributions so stunning. These restrained architectural compositions are executed with slow and careful precision using a mask-and-spray process, yielding an extremely convincing photo-realist result. More photos after the jump...
The silver and gold mosaic zodiac ceiling and center chandelier (detail)
Now that the Brooklyn Flea is held inside the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Building, photographers and armchair architects are as plentiful as bargain hunters on Saturdays and Sundays at One Hanson Place. This building went up in 1927, and according to Robert A.M. Stern in "New York 1930" (the middle volume of his comprehensive-must-have five book series on architecture and urbanism), the bank expected this Atlantic/Flatbush Ave. intersection to become the heart of Brooklyn's commercial district, but things didn't turn out quite as they had hoped (just ask Bruce Ratner, today). But this did have an upside. Just as with the Empire State Building, which made the same real estate gamble in Manhattan and lost, the lack of tall building development surrounding this building allowed it to become Brooklyn's most visible skyscraper, and its most iconic.
Not apocrypha, but one of the five orders of perriwigs worn to King George’s coronation , as satirized by William Hogarth (was this the first Wigstock?). Only one of the many fascinating things learned from this review of the new exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art. (Your click will enlarge this nicely:)
From the NYTimes article:
And a 1761 print by Hogarth skewers the fashionable jargon of classical architecture and mathematics that must have been the rage of the court: he diagrams the elaborate “Perriwigs” worn to King George’s coronation, showing the hairstyles “Measured Architectonically.” They are ordered with Latinate precision, ranked from the “Episcopal” to the “Queerinthian” and assessed according to an “Athenian Measure.” One wig, the show’s label points out, even “has the distinct appearance of a sheep’s rump.”
Like the satire throughout Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, you need to be an expert on British history and the (then lowly) profession of architecture to fully appreciate all the nuances in this print. But as with the delightful “Narchitecture”, certainly the portmanteau “Queerinthian”, whether in the modern vernacular or as understood in 1761, needs no explanation or annotation. (Dear C-mon, maybe next year’s Basel Frazzle will include a sub-category, with pictures: Queerinthian Narchitecture.)
Question to self: are two portmanteaus together a fourtmanteau?
Feeling Further Fascination? While looking for a picture to perfectly illustrate Queerinthian Narchitecture, I googled “Gay Drug Lord” and found no useable pic, but did find this…
I love New York and I never hesitate to say so. Even when The City is maddening, disappointing, difficult, selfish or unreasonably demanding, it remains easy to declare how much I love it. I love it despite its crazy contradictions, perhaps even because of them. Examples? A list of things I profess to dislike is nearly identical to a list of what makes New York New York. I find shopping for almost anything distasteful. I loathe crass commercialism and relentless consumerism, loud talkers in cramped spaces, waiting in unmoving lines, rude people, traffic jams, obscene wealth, political corruption, haphazard development, and lowest common denominator pop culture.
See what I mean? You would think I’d have ended up in a cabin in Montana, not a tiny studio apartment in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the city. But then, I love the cyclical layer upon layer of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it development and destruction, the architecture and art, the triple parked social schedules, and the fractal-like splintering of groups into sub-groups into ever smaller sub-groups, with every participant constantly on the move, uptown, downtown, across town, underground, performing for the judges, expecting to “win their category” in the absolutely unmatched continuous diversity parade that is every day in New York.
Two thoughts:
It is often stated that you can’t appreciate beauty without knowing what ugly is.
Elevating annoyance to the superlative transforms it into fascination.
In New York, the stimulation is constant. Beauty and filth, color and chaos, serenity and sensationalism, insight and impact, dark corners and bright lights. Attention must be paid, demands the urban landscape, in Helvetica Extra Boldand underlined.
I love the electricity buzzing through the sidewalks, the buildings shedding their skin, falling down, and sprouting up like weeds, sometimes even exploding, all quite literally.
You could easily spend a lifetime - maybe two, attempting to categorize, quantify, critique, or just contain what New York presents, and to many it would be more than enough.
But then there are the details - the cracks and crevasses, the blotches and blobs, pipes, conduits, rust and remnants that decorate the city. An architectural patina of man-made and organic entropy catching the eye of the contrary (those looking down when everyone else is pointing up), or the explorer on the fringe, hoping to find, in that totally forgotten back alley, architectural ruin or industrial wasteland, a decaying mechanical device of unrecognizable purpose or a concrete Ozymandias, silently guarding the secrets of one or many generations of laborers and immigrants, those who began the palimpsest we call New York.
Then, since this is New York, I look up and see a crowd surrounding me, digital cameras ready, looking for exactly the same thing.
Guess I found my sub-group (or they found me).
Here, for your enjoyment, is an iMovie/Garage Band video I made from some of those pictures. (This is my first attempt at original music.) There are some architectural details large enough to be recognizable, but mostly an obvious obsession with rusty metal, storm drains and other industrial design remnants. See anything you recognize?
