Attention Economy – July 8, 2012

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Mark Willis

Paul Delvaux. The Great Sirens. Oil on canvas. 1947. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/210002193
Paul Delvaux. The Great Sirens. 1947. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art – The Great Sirens
    Identified with the Belgian Surrealist movement, although never an official member, Paul Delvaux was influenced by his contemporary René Magritte, as well as by the Italian Metaphysical and proto-Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. Like Magritte, Delvaux relied on the provocative and incongruous juxtapositioning of precisely rendered objects, persons, or situations to create imaginative dreamscapes. From de Chirico he adopted the use of dramatic settings characterized by receding diagonals and classical architecture. With a sense of theater, he evokes a classical world that, in fact, never existed. Here, the architectural elements are reminiscent of Greek temples-like those on the Acropolis-and secular Roman architecture, but do not represent any known buildings. In assimilating a variety of images, Delvaux’s goal was to produce “poetic shock” by “putting heterogeneous but real things together in an unexpected way.”
  • Don Byron New Gospel Quintet feat DK Dyson – Hide Me In Thy Bosom – YouTube
    with Frank Wilkins, Pheeroan AkLaff, Brad Jones
  • Don Byron & New Gospel Quintet – Precious Lord – Bridgestone Music Festival 2010 – YouTube
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Attention Economy – June 18, 2012

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Mark Willis
  • Siebert Collection : Compound Object Viewer | Ohio Historical Society
    A photograph of a stone building in Yellow Springs, OH that was an Underground Railroad station.
  • Baptists look to rich village history | Yellow Springs News Online
    Virgil Hervey “Moncure Conway, a Methodist minister and abolitionist son of former Virginia slave owners, had found his family’s runaway slaves in the Washington, D.C. area and escorted them to Yellow Springs, because he apparently perceived it as a welcoming place. That the group founded a church in the same year as their liberation is a testament to a piety that continues to this day. Isabel Newman, the church historian, is a great, great granddaughter of Dunmore and Eliza Guinn, two of the original founders of the church, which first held meetings in a home at 117 West Center College Street. Many other descendants of that group are still members of the church today.”
  • Internet Archive Search: creator:”Nichols, Mary Sargeant Gove, 1810-1884″
    7 results. Mary Sargeant Gove, 1810-1884
  • Internet Archive Search: creator:”Thomas Low Nichols”
    19 results.
  • Yellow Springs Historical Society
  • Yellow Springs Historical Society | Yellow Springs…There’s something in the water that makes it what it was and is
    Yellow Springs history, like the layout of the village, has many byways and odd pockets. It is our hope to share our discoveries.
  • Mary Peabody Mann | YS History — Vignettes
    Mary Mann ca. 1850s: “The boys were wild with making maple sugar early in the spring – there is a fine camp directly below us. They pass much of every day in the ravine, where they bathe in the living water, & gather water cresses & cowslips from under the very springs as they gush from the rocks. These woods are more like the park of an English country seat than anything else I ever saw. There is something in the fresh society & country & these virgin woods that excites me greatly. We have such a wealth of wildflowers here, that garden flowers are almost a superfluity. We actually found trascadentias growing wild on the railroad bank today. Last year we found SIXTY VARIETIES of flowers in our ravine within half a mile of the college. Among these are many of our eastern garden flowers – phloxes … bee larkspurs, jonquils, lilies… violets, blue & yellow-eyed grasses, laurustinus trees, white hawthorne now in splendid bloom, horse chestnuts (the buckeye of Ohio…”
  • “Free Love” in the Glen — in 1856 | YS History — Vignettes
    Scott Sanders: “They didn’t need to send the copy they mailed to the president’s office at Antioch. Mann knew their work all too well, and was none too pleased at the prospect of their arrival. By this time the Nichols were already noted (and notorious) for their published avocations of free love in their journal Nichols’ Monthly. In 1855 Mrs. Nichols’ autobiographical novel Mary Lyndon first appeared, receiving harsh reviews (including four full columns in the New York Times entitled “A Bad Book Gibbeted”) for its attack on the institution of marriage. Dr. Nichols had further given a series of lectures in Cincinnati on “Free-Love, a Doctrine of Spiritualism.” Free-love and spiritualism were, in fact, only the latest of the Nichols’ interests, which also included vegetarianism, hydropathy, phrenology, Swedenborgianism, Fourieristic socialism, and women’s rights. They gravitated to intellectual trends like gadflies.”
  • Elephant of the Bastille – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    [referring link, see note 6] The Elephant of the Bastille was a monument in Paris between 1813 and 1846. Originally conceived in 1808 by Napoleon, the statue was intended to be created out of bronze and placed in Place de la Bastille, but only a plaster full-scale model was built. At 24 m (78 ft) in height the model itself became a recognisable construction and was immortalised by Victor Hugo in his novel Les Misérables in which it is used as a shelter by Gavroche. It was built at the site of the Bastille and although part of the original construction remains the elephant itself was replaced by the July Column.
  • 40 years later, girl in iconic Vietnam napalm photo thanks those who saved her life | Detroit Free Press | freep.com 060812
    “TORONTO (AP) – It was a chilling photograph that came to symbolize the horrors of the Vietnam War and, ultimately, helped end it. It also saved the life of Kim Phuc, who was just 9 years old when, on June 8, 1972, her village was attacked by south Vietnamese planes. Phuc, who lives near Toronto with her family, honored those who saved her at a dinner Friday to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the iconic photograph. They include AP photographer Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut, who snapped the shot, as well as other journalists, doctors and nurses who helped her get help and who treated her injuries. Ut, who was 21 at the time, heard Phuc’s screams as she ran down the road to escape her burning village, and snapped the photo that became famous around the world. The Vietnamese photographer then drove the badly burned child to a small hospital, where he was told she was too far gone to help. He flashed his American press badge, demanded that doctors treat the girl…”
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Attention Economy – June 11, 2012

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Mark Willis

  • Into the Void | OntheBoards.tv
    Josef Vascovitz: “As a commissioned work, Catherine Cabeen’s Into the Void is a smart choice for OtB, especially as the theatre season winds down. First it’s a beautiful blend of music and stagecraft, with exquisite (ly performed) dance gracefully stepping through a narrative about art. When art speaks well about art , it finds a way to reexamine even your most steadfast assumptions. Coupled with Catherine and her troop’s remarkable dance movement- at times she seemed to float through the air like Klein’s famous leap- held motionless against gravity.”
  • The Arts | Review: Seattle dancer-choreographer Catherine Cabeen explores a dreamlike ‘Void’ | Seattle Times 042011
    Sound can be a trance. Colors can be an embrace. Air can be a shape. Those might seem like vague impressions to take away from “Into the Void,” Seattle choreographer Catherine Cabeen’s first evening-length piece, especially when you’re aware of the research that went into “Void.” […] Yves Klein, the French artist who inspired “Void,” had his eye on the ineffable — and that, in large part, is what has drawn Cabeen to him. Klein created work that sometimes left no trace but a memory. At other times, he suggested that his artistic process was as integral to the appreciation of a piece as any innate qualities in the work itself — for instance, in his “Anthropométries,” created by covering nude models in paint, then having them roll across white paper. Cabeen’s 70-minute work alludes to certain specifics of Klein’s life. But if you want to catch the references she’s making, you’ll have to do some homework first. Far from being a literal illustration of Klein’s life and career, “Void” is a d
  • Yveskleinarchives / Pinterest
    Pins from Yveskleinarchives
  • Catherine Cabeen and Company: Gender/Drag/Truth and Lies 041111
    Catherine Cabeen: “Klein once said that, “A painter should only paint a single masterpiece, himself, constantly.” His admiration for the daily practice of art making, and the lack of separation between art and life, which that creates, is one aspect of his work that continues to draw me to him. I wonder how this connection between art and life played out for Klein in relation to his gender expression. He was a small man, not physically imposing, but a black belt in judo who was always full of energy. His work is often seen as misogynistic, though his wife and many of the female models he worked with claim that he was full of spiritual integrity, enthusiasm and joy when he created the work in question. While I aim to dismantle the problematic gendered hierarchy in Klein’s performance art through how I reference the 1960 Anthropometries in Into the Void, I hope to do so by complicating the issue and posing new questions, not by solving or underlining the binary nature of male/female…”
  • The Girl, the Swing and a Row House in Ruins – New York Times
    Evelyn Nesbit was just 16 years old when she used to kick high into the air from the red velvet swing, aiming her toes at the great Japanese fan that hung from the ceiling of the hideaway built for seduction. The year was 1901, and Nesbit, a model and chorus girl with long black hair, full lips and dark eyes, was there to charm her seducer, Stanford White, one of the most celebrated architects of the Gilded Age. White had designed the swing for his adulterous loft in a four-story brick row house at 22 West 24th Street so that Nesbit and other young women in varying degrees of undress could entertain him. When the building partly collapsed last weekend, after complaints about its precarious state of disrepair, it took down with it the setting of a rich and bizarre turn-of-the-century Manhattan narrative, one that involved beauty, opulence, fame, sex and eventually murder.
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Attention Economy – June 4, 2012

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Mark Willis

Yves Klein. Anthropométrie de l'époque bleue (ANT 82). 1960. [Source: Yves Klein Archive]
Yves Klein. Anthropométrie de l’époque bleue (ANT 82). 1960. [Source: Yves Klein Archive]

  • Catherine Cabeen and Company: Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers; Opening Day at the Walker Art Center 102310 Catherine Cabeen: “As a woman artist who is investigating Klein’s work, I am very aware of the feminist critiques of Klein that call him a misogynist for things like wearing a tuxedo while women use their naked bodies to paint all around him. Have you spoken to any of the models for the Anthropomorphic? Do you know how they felt about their involvement in the work?” Daniel nodded and Rotraut’s face lit up with a huge smile. “That’s me.” She said, pointing to a huge canvas on a near wall, “we had so much fun!” Daniel said that he actually had requested letters from several of the models for a different catalog because he was so tired of those kinds of critiques when in fact the models unanimously remembered the events as exciting, and rigorous, ritualistic performances. Most of them were dancers who were as excited about having the movements of their bodies recorded as Klein was. “We got to be sensual and free.” Rotraut said, “and it was so fun to see the images your body would make!”
  • Yves Klein, at his very bluest – Features – Art – The Independent 030810
    Arifa Akbar: “It was a musical performance with a twist that sent tremors across the art world when it was staged in 1960. An artist wearing white gloves and a tuxedo emerged from behind a screen to conduct an orchestra in front of a tastefully dressed Parisian audience at the Rive Droite art gallery. As he did so, numerous naked women sashayed out carrying pots of blue paint. The paint – a shade that would later be immortalised as an Yves Klein blue – was smeared by the models on to their naked breasts, pubic area and the length of their torsos. Some of these women got down on the floor and began writhing their bodies in puddles of blue paint before, as “living paint-brushes”, pressing themselves against a blank canvas to create a series of artworks.
  • MILKY PINKY WAY: BLUE KLEIN
  • Yves Klein’s FC-1
    Klein’s FC 1 represents the pinnacle of the artist’s career, not only in chronological terms, but also in a deeply spiritual way. By placing the sensual apparitions of the female body amongst the flame bursts and smoke shadows, Klein combines life and death in way that speaks to the fragility of life, but also to its permanence. On the one hand, there is a clear sense of destructive power of the flame, yet on the other the presence of the curvaceous female form hints at the eternal power life that transcends all things.
  • Yves Klein Archives
    With galleries of Klein’s work, including original film footage for “Anthropométrie de l’Époque bleue” (2’26)
    March 9, 1960
  • Inside Art – Yves Klein Works Attract Attention in Sales and Exhibitions – NYTimes.com 031112
    Four years in the making, “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers” will open in May at the Hirshhorn and will include more than 100 works arranged thematically. Loans are coming from the artist’s archives, institutions in Europe and the United States, and private collections.

Artists Rotraut and Yves Klein ca. 1962. [Source: Catherine Cabeen and Company]
Artists Rotraut and Yves Klein ca. 1962. [Source: Catherine Cabeen and Company]

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Attention Economy – May 28, 2012

Posted on May 28, 2012 by Mark Willis

“People Begin to Fly” (1961), from the exhibition “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers,” which is coming to Washington. [Source: NYT/ Menil Collection, Houston; Artists Rights Society, New York/ADAGP, Paris]
“People Begin to Fly” (1961) was shown at the Hirshhorn Museum’s 2010 exhibition “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers.” [Source: NYT/ Menil Collection, Houston; Artists Rights Society, New York/ADAGP, Paris] See more of his art at the Yves Klein Archive and a brief bio on Wikipedia.

  • The Making of an Icon: Yves Klein’s FC1 (Fire Color 1) | Video | Christie’s
    DescriptionFifty years after the artist’s death, Christie’s is proud to announce the upcoming auction of Yves Klein’s legendary Fire-Color Painting FC 1, as the highlight of the Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on May 8. Executed a few weeks before his premature death, at the age of 34, FC 1 is widely acclaimed as his ultimate masterpiece.
  • In The Saleroom: Yves Klein’s FC1 (Fire Color 1) | Video | Christie’s
    Yves Klein’s FC1 (Fire Color 1) sold for $36,482,500, setting a work auction record for the artist, at New York, Rockefeller Plaza on 8 May 2012 in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale.
  • Happening d’Yves Klein
    En 1960, l’art nous met dans tous nos états.
  • Blue Women Art – Yves Klein (1962) – YouTube
    Blue Women Art: Starring – naked ladies all painted in blue, Yves Klein, symphony musicians | Directed by – Yves Klein
  • Inside Art – Yves Klein Works Attract Attention in Sales and Exhibitions – NYTimes.com 031110
    Four years in the making, “Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers” will open in May at the Hirshhorn and will include more than 100 works arranged thematically. Loans are coming from the artist’s archives, institutions in Europe and the United States, and private collections.
  • Nicole Glass
    As a journalist currently living in Washington, DC, Nicole Glass has published more than 100 articles in a number of media outlets, including USA TODAY, National Geographic, The Huffington Post, FrumForum and The Eagle. Growing up overseas and having visited more than 40 countries, she has gained an international perspective that sparked her interest in journalism. Her articles have been picked up by Politico, The Week, MSNBC, Roll Call, Policy Mic and Talking Points Memo, and one of her articles has been quoted and discussed by Lawrence O’Donnell on his show “The Last Word.”
  • The Pulitzer Prizes | Works
    2012 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Breaking News Photography: Massoud Hossaini/AFP “Tarana Akbari, 12, screams in fear moments after a suicide bomber detonated a bomb in a crowd at the Abul Fazel Shrine in Kabul on December 06, 2011. ‘When I could stand up, I saw that everybody was around me on the ground, really bloody. I was really, really scared,’ said the Tarana, whose name means ‘melody’ in English. Out of 17 women and children from her family who went to a riverside shrine in Kabul that day to mark the Shiite holy day of Ashura, seven died including her seven-year-old brother Shoaib. More than 70 people lost their lives in all, and at least nine other members of Tarana’s family were wounded. Published December 7, 2011.”
  • Nicole Glass: Afghan Photographer Hopes His Image Will Stop Suicide Bombers 052112
    Nicole Glass: “The first Afghan to win a Pulitzer Prize collected winnings at Columbia University on May 21. Massoud Hossaini was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a photo he took of Tarana Akbari, a 12-year old girl who found herself surrounded by dead bodies after a suicide bombing at a shrine in Kabul. With a look of terror on her face, the girl in the green dress is screaming after two explosions left many of her friends and family dead at her feet on December 6, 2011. [Hossaini on suicide bombers:] “They are blind and they are deaf,” he said. “The leaders never let them access the media. They never watch TV. They never see newspapers. They never want to update themselves.” In the ten years following the September 11 terrorist attacks, there were 736 suicide attacks in Afghanistan. In 2011, the Taliban was responsible for 80 percent of these.”
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Flaneur’s Gallery: Venus with a Mirror

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Mark Willis

Titian. Venus with a Mirror. ca 1555. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D,C.Titian. Venus with a Mirror. ca 1555. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D,C.

Sunday mornings make me want to stroll through an art museum. Not a forced march, mind you, and not culture creep in a blockbuster cue, 20 seconds per viewer per painting. I want to stroll and be surprised. I want to visit old flames like Venus with a Mirrorand rediscover passionate engagement.

Were I in Washington this morning, I’d take the Metro to the Archives stop and head for the Constitution Avenue entrance of the National Gallery of Art. I’d plan to arrive just before the grand bronze doors were unlocked. While waiting I might muse on the historical fact that President James Garfield was assassinated on the spot in 1881, when it was the site of a busy railroad station.

Then I’d sweep up the white marble staircase to the black marble rotunda. Returning to this glorious space never fails to move me. I find a bench, sit, and soak it in. Over the years I’ve chosen the rotunda with its cathedral light, its resplendent fountain and resonant echoes as the sacred place where I honor my parents. For me it is a place suffused with meaning and emotion, what Pierre Nora calls a lieu de memoir. Since I am now the steward of my parents’ Yellow Springs house, memories of them are always near to hand. I come to this soaring rotunda to celebrate their spirits. And I thank them for bringing me to the National Gallery of Art as a child.

After the rotunda I choose a direction for my stroll. I could turn east and head for the Monet gallery that is sure to hold Waterloo Bridge, Gray Day. Or I turn west and head for the Titians. The Monet gallery will have relaxing sofas and a stream of people passing through. Bracketed by innumerable Madonna’s with Child and popely/princely portraits, the Titian gallery may be the route less traveled. If there’s a sofa, too, it might be a hidden garden of delight.

I spent a week reading and writing in these galleries in the spring of 1999, three decades after my parents brought me here for the first time. Three months after my mother’s death, it became a spiritual journey to coming to rest here. (See Renoir’s Girl with a Watering Can  for Mary Lou’s most-cherished painting at NGA.) In the Monet gallery I’d try to read Paul Tucker’s biography of the painter, but I spent more time listening to snatches of conversation as others adored the paintings. I realized then that my experience of art in museums draws as much on the social context overheard in the moment as on direct visual perception. That’s how a half-blind flaneur looks at paintings.

In the Titian gallery I sank into the sofa and read John Hale’s magisterial history, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. What a place to read such a book! I filled a notebook with writing about art and history. I paused often to gaze across the gallery at Venus with a Mirror. At a distance of 15 feet I couldn’t begin to see any detailed form beyond a blur. I knew the form; it was a lieu de memoir. What I could see, or apprehend, was the warm, rosy glow of the goddess’s skin.

When I first saw the painting at age 14, I learned how the experience of art could arouse me. Arouse is not a metaphor. Strolling through a museum with Ms. Modigliani is the most enchanting kind of foreplay on a rainy afternoon. At 14 I was amazed to think that Titian must have felt this way about Venus (and the artist’s model) when he painted her. He was approaching 70 then, and he kept the painting in his studio until the day he died. I have to smile now at callow youth and everything left to learn about the sensuality of old men.

At 14 I also apprehended something about painting that would take years to articulate. What makes an oil painting distinct from every other form of visual representation (including this digital image of an oil painting) is the way oil-based pigment absorbs light. Pigment not only reflects light, it absorbs it to some degree and depth, depending on the thickness of paint and varnish applied to the canvas. Titian may have been the first painter to discover how light could animate skin tones. Warmth of fleshly color, not erotic form, breathes the palpable, glowing life into his nudes. In this art Titian remains the master and Venus his muse.

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Attention Economy – May 18, 2012

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Mark Willis
  • Main : JEDRZEJ SKRZYPCZAK PHOTOGRAPHY
    I’m a third year fine art photography student at Camberwell Collage of Arts in London. I am developing an art project that involves collecting short descriptions written by blind and visually impaired people. I am printing them using a Braille embosser. The finished works will be exhibited during my degree exhibition.
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