Big Window

City Glow

At the MFAH in Houston, you can see an exhibit of the artistic origins of Japanese anime.  This still is from a short film by Chiho Aoshima, done in collaboration with Bruce Ferguson.  In Aoshima's work, we see an amalgamation of pop art, anime, manga, and the Japanese "cult of cuteness" (think Hello Kitty).  Here is a summary from the MFAH website about the history leading up to work included in this exhibit.

In 1996 Tokyo artist Takashi Murakami established the Hiropon Factory (later renamed Kaikai Kiki), a studio dedicated to producing his increasingly large-scale sculptures and paintings. Working with a select group of extraordinarily talented young assistants, Murakami promoted a fresh approach to art and commerce. His efforts produced a dynamic new wave of Japanese Pop, embracing the pictorial style of manga (comic books) and anime (cartoons), all within the spirit of kawaii or cuteness. Japanese Pop has since become one of the most vital currents in today´s international scene and many of Murakami´s assistants have emerged as important artists in their own right.
 
Chiho Aoshima began working with Murakami in the late 1990s, and in 1999 she began to exhibit independently as well. Using the computer as a compositional tool, Aoshima realizes her images freely in various media, including sculpture, mural design, prints, clothing, and, in collaboration with animator Bruce Ferguson, video. Her imagery draws upon traditional Japanese scroll paintings as well as contemporary sources, blending landscape and narrative to create a vision of our planet´s potential for both creation and chaos.
 
City Glow, 2005, is both monumental and playfully engaging. Spanning five monitors, it opens in a garden, filled with fantastic foliage and creatures. Slowly a modern city with living skyscrapers grows from this Edenic paradise, and then as night falls, nature takes over once again. Aoshima populates this landscape with both the forces of good and evil: a graveyard filled with demonic ghosts is ultimately banished by fairytale spirits and a new dawn.
 
Aoshima´s poetic evolutionary cycle can be understood as a commentary on the perils of global warming.  Ultimately, however, City Glow offers a promise of hope and regeneration. Aoshima´s witty animation is a delight to all ages, uniting the vivid graphic conventions of contemporary anime with ancient traditions in Japanese art and thought.

Monkeys Fish the Moon

If I were in Berkeley, I'd be checking this out.

Talking Walls

Talking Walls is a website by Jody Zellen, a Los Angeles artist. By juxtaposing photographic images and videotape of urban detail, she creates a grid of street signs and symbols.  Give the website some time to load properly.  The effect is very powerful. 
via rhizome

Graffiti Research Lab

The Graffiti Research Lab has an unusual mission, to outfit graffiti artists with open source technologies for urban communication. Regardless of your views on graffiti, it's a website with art that moves.  Fast.  You might like it.

Recap

I haven't seen it yet, but I'm very curious about RECAP by Rick Silva.  Read about it on Rhizome.

Art on Film

This week, thanks to my Netflix membership, I got to see two bio documentaries on artists.  I found How To Draw a Bunny interesting and also pretty depressing.  It's about the life and death of pop artist Ray Johnson. He was prolific, a neverending string of firecrackers.  Many of his pieces were postcard sized.  He mailed them to friends, messages in bottles.  He never did a show in an art gallery or museum. He did "happenings" which he refered to as "nothings."  I remember reading the story about his disappearance in the New York Times around ten years ago. I had never  heard of him then.  The saddest thing about the film is that although Johnson seemed to know "everyone" -- his phone book included more famous names that I could list -- all the people interviewed said that they felt like they never really knew him.

On the other hand, Rivers and Tides, a documentary about the work of Andy Goldsworthy was very inspiring.  Goldsworthy is a sculptor, and all his raw materials come from the natural world.  He rearranges nature, I guess you could say.  He works with tiny icicles or marked stones or brilliant scarlet leaves.  Often his work is temporary and quickly unraveled by tides or winds or other forces of nature.  Just watching the film, I felt like I was being inviting "in," and it was pretty astonishing.

Off to California in the morning.  Must sleep.  Both films are worth seeing.

The Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist

"I tried to be always as obtrusive as possible."

Check out this great interview with Errol Morris.  I especially liked reading about the earliest films.

Fluxus

On U B U W E B, you can access short Fluxus films from the 60s, such as Zen for Film by Nam June Paik, Word Movie by Paul Sharits, and Eye Blink by Yoko Ono.  These are cool.  Poem-cool.

Starting in the early sixties, Fluxus (which means "to flow") followed in the footsteps of the Futurist and Dada avant-gardes, going against The Establishment and promoting imposture as an aesthetic.

Fluxus valorizes the interdisciplinary, bringing together diverging sources of inspiration. Initially received as little more than an international network of pranksters, the playful artists of Fluxus were, and remain, a network of visionaries whose work aims to reconcile art with everyday life.

Portrait of an Artist

The way that Hollywood portrays writers, artists, and poets in film can be truly annoying.  Tell us about the movie that you've found most galling. 

Sans Soleil

Question: What film seems most like a poem to you?

My answer to this question is Sans Soleil by Chris Marker.  This 1982 film is categorized as a documentary, but it's not really typical of the form.  The female narrator refers constantly to the letters and diary of a man who traveled all over the world.  The footage transports us to the places he visited--Tokyo, Iceland, and the San Francisco Bay area.  We hear his thoughts and questions and observations in her voice, so there's a constant tug between he said and she said:

"He said, 'The more you watch Japanese TV, the more you realize it watches you.'"

Marker's juxtaposition of scene and image is jarring and beautiful.  The travelogue structure allows for a wide range of reflection, from the popularity of arcade games to the Hitchcock film Vertigo to a line in a poem by T.S. Eliot.  We visit a temple dedicated to lost cats.  Say a prayer and perhaps your kitten will come home.  We visit a family bending in the wind in a meadow.  We see dogs running on the beach, barking at the surf.  We are asked to analyze our world in this imagery.  Sans Soleil is a  film for thinking and in thinking, getting lost in thought.