#i also know that flatland houses don’t really look like this on the interior

[kismetmoon]

quick concept for ruth’s (and her loud roommate’s) cottage :

[Plain text ID: a digital monochrome drawing of a Flatland pentagon-shaped house with various rooms on a grey background. There are various pieces of geometric furniture inside the house, which include shapes like squares, rectangles, circles and flowers. There are four occupants of the house; two line-shaped creatures and two smaller star-shaped creatures. End ID.]

and with some room labels

[Plain text ID: the same drawing as above, but with labels added around the outside of the house. From the top centre going clockwise, the labels read as follows: "ruth's room", "liz's room", "storage / laundry / tiny library" "lounge", "main entrance" and "kitchen".

End ID.]

key under the cut

key :

✽ - houseplants

□ - closed boxes / storage structures (cabinets, etc.)

⊡ - liz’s locked box with a green colour sample

★ - cats (jinx (black cat) and socks (grey tabby))

◦ - glowpoints

▥ - ruth’s wardrobe (in ruth’s room) / liz’s wardrobe (in liz’s room) / small bookshelf (in storage / laundry / tiny library room)

E - sofa (large one) / cats’ side-by-side beds (smaller one)

▭ - television

┐and ╒╕ - open boxes / shelves

[caveartfair]

Jamian Juliano-Villani Pranks the Art World with Dumb Jokes—and Serious Painting Chops

Portrait of Jamian Juliano-Villani. Photo by Scott Indrisek.

The art world tends to play by its own inscribed rules and sense of decorum, but every now and then a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, irreverent outlier from New Jersey comes around to upset that balance. Such is the case with Jamian Juliano-Villani, 31, a painter known for shoving compositional logic off a cliff. One typical example, from 2017, shows the artist as an orange tabby cat, lounging in the sunshine of a Greek island while surrounded by bottles of Proactiv skincare products. In The Pleasure Garden (2016), two ballerinas dip their toes into a garden salad while the portly shadow of Alfred Hitchcock looms above them. Everything is a blending of tones and moments, a borderland where sci-fi landscapes might tumble over borrowed Japanese advertisements, fonts cut from the New Yorker, D-list celebrities, classic animation, corporate logos, and one-liners.  

A few years ago, Juliano-Villani was a studio assistant for the artist Erik Parker, laboring over her own paintings out of a cramped Brooklyn bedroom. She’s since risen to her own buzzy level of acclaim, with a fan club that includes the mega-curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist. The Whitney acquired a painting. She’s also had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, at Tanya Leighton in Berlin, and at Studio Voltaire in London. The artist now keeps a significantly more spacious studio in Ridgewood, Queens, where I meet her a few weeks after the opening of “Ten Pound Hand,” her most recent solo show at JTT in New York.

She’s a little hungover, and has just come from dealing with a domestic dilemma that seems ripe to be translated into a Juliano-Villaniesque painting: The artist has a mouse in her house. She’s nicknamed him Biscuit. She imagines him scrounging last night’s Indian takeout from the fridge, wrinkling his rodential nose in disgust.

Jamian Juliano-Villain, October, 2018. Photo by Charles Benton. Courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York.

The studio at the moment is fairly bare, the blank walls streaked with the residue of paintings that have since shipped out. Small reproductions of the works in “Ten Pound Hand” are taped in one corner. “It looks like I had a seizure and made a show,” the artist says, reflecting on the selection, which includes a portrait of the white Texan rapper Paul Wall, a painting of a mob of motorbike riders on their way to a wedding, and a large-scale composition that appropriates a planning image for a cereal commercial and a hazy photograph of an opossum. That last one is called Penis Breath (2018), because, why not?

When asked if there’s a throughline connecting all of these disparate moments, Juliano-Villani tells me that she thinks of the works as a collection of self-portraits. They’re the product of intricate airbrushing, vinyl stencils, projectors, “drunk Photoshop,” and promiscuous appropriation. What they’re not—at least, in the artist’s mind—are an offshoot of Surrealism, or cartoons, two things that she’d really, really like critics to stop comparing her work to.  

Juliano-Villani’s practice can seem both flippant (nothing matters!) and intense (everything is ridiculous and pointless, but it also still matters a lot, somehow!). “Ten Pound Hand” opens with a sort of confusing, purpose-built foyer room, in which the artist has hung intentionally crappy, graffiti-style works on the walls, and decorated the space with a rug branded with the logo for Robbi, a silk-screening company that her father runs. The blatantly ugly installation, which Juliano-Villani thinks of as a sort of send-up of bro culture, is called If Balls Could Talk (2018). The title “Ten Pound Hand” is a reference—to put this somewhat delicately—to a man’s overeager physical maneuvering in order to initiate oral sex.

The Prophecy, 2016. Jamian Juliano-Villani Simon Lee Gallery

Stone Love, 2015. Jamian Juliano-Villani "Flatlands" at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Given all this lowbrow clowning, one could be forgiven for thinking that the artist is just messing around, having a laugh at the art world’s expense. In some ways, she is. But that middle-finger attitude is joined by a suspicious level of care and craftsmanship, not to mention a hypercharged work ethic. “I joke around about these being so dumb,” she says of her paintings’ subject matter, “but I love all of these things. I take them very seriously, and I’m not making fun.”

Yet at the same time, Juliano-Villani seems to be in tension with some basic existential issues—what painting can even do, for instance. When I ask her about Gone with the Wind (2018)—a photorealistic rendering of an image of the California wildfires, paired with a tiny, David Salle-style inset canvas depicting a fish drinking Coca-Cola—she seems to suggest that the goal is to have two images that “cancel each other out,” that end up at “nothing.”

During the course of our conversation she compares that sensation as akin to having two magnets pushed together, or to reiki; later, she draws an analogy between painting and the simple relief of defecating: “It’s embarrassing, but I’m glad I did it.” One painting-in-progress she equates to the aesthetic of R.L. Stine’s classic series of Goosebumps novels for young adults. “I don’t know what the point of these things is,” she says, other than, perhaps, “‘I haven’t seen something that stupid yet, and I wanted to make it.’”  

Jamian Juliano-Villain, Gone with the Wind, 2018. Photo by Charles Benton. Courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York.

Jamian Juliano-Villain, Star Named After You For Free, 2018. Photo by Charles Benton. Courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York.

Jamian Juliano-Villain, Expressions, 2018. Photo by Charles Benton. Courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York.

Jamian Juliano-Villain, Does This Side Or Do I Pull, 2018. Photo by Charles Benton. Courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York.

Jamian Juliano-Villain, Three Penny Opera, 2018. Photo by Charles Benton. Courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York.

The brainstorming process for Juliano-Villani’s recent work involved a lot of circuitous, labor-intensive research and development. Barely any of it ended up affecting the finished paintings, but the artist doesn’t seem to regret having wasted time. Through her friend Nathan Fielder of Nathan for You fame—himself a sort of maestro of circuitous time-wasting—Juliano-Villani commissioned an L.A.-based comedy writer to generate dozens of short scenarios that she could then paint. The goal was to challenge notions of authorship, she says. “I thought it’d be interesting if someone else dictated what to paint, and I just did it,” the artist explains. “And if they sucked, I wasn’t responsible.”

Unfortunately, the ideas themselves proved unusable—too many specific brand references, for one thing. “A house made of Altoids tins belonging to Channing Tatum (we know this because the mailbox says ‘C. Tatum’ on it.) The house is nothing fancy, he’s a modest man!” read one. And another: “A person using a neti pot with spaghetti coming out of it OR a snake or SOMETHING other than snot and water, perhaps into a wine glass or into the mouth of a yelling person.”

Equally fruitless was an experiment in which Juliano-Villani and an artist friend visited a local bar, pretending to be affiliated with the ABC reality show Wife Swap, and asked strangers to fill out a Mad Libs-style form that could be used to generate future paintings. (Apparently everyone involved was drunk enough that this nonsensical cover story made sense.) “All these bros,” Juliano-Villani laments, recalling some typical answers, from equity to jell-o shot.

Jamian Juliano-Villain, Penis Breath, 2018. Photo by Charles Benton. Courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York.

Thankfully, the internet has always been there, waiting to be plundered. “I’m just the DJ, editing the playlist,” Juliano-Villani says of her basic tactic: scouring image databases, obscure websites, DeviantArt, and other sources for imagery that can be recontextualized. She’s not unaware that this can be a controversial move. Peers like Jeanette Hayes have been widely attacked for testing the line between appropriation and plagiarism; Juliano-Villani is no stranger to similar controversies.

Earlier in her career, the artist recalled, she might specifically request permission to sample someone’s work; for a painting that culled liberally from the animator Ralph Bakshi, Juliano-Villani made a personal call to get his blessing. “Now, if I did that for everything, I’d be on the phone all day,” she tells me. Plus, asking permission can drain some of the thrill. A 2017 painting in the JTT show borrows the face of a doll made by the artist KAWS. “I thought he was going to be pissed, [but] I asked him: Is this cool?” KAWS said it was, indeed, cool. “I was like: ‘Fuck! This is so not fun after he says it’s okay—it’s not evil anymore.’”  

Jamian Juliano-Villain, Shut Up, the Painting, 2018. Photo by Charles Benton. Courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York.

For a 2016 work, My Memories Projected in the Hallways of the Titanic, the artist borrowed from herself. A vertiginous view of the interior of the doomed ship is populated by floating images—a BEWARE OF DOG sign, an external hard drive, a few ghostly heads—some of which are plucked from previous paintings. A brooch owned by Juliano-Villani’s grandmother is transformed into a Disneyesque figure, clambering up the Titanic’s staircase. Beneath all the pop cultural noise and absurdity, it’s a deeply sentimental picture.  

And though she can sometimes seem eager to undermine the importance of painting, Juliano-Villani also feels a real responsibility to the medium—and to her strange, unlovely subjects. “It’s almost like no one wants to paint these things,” she says. “No one wants to paint Paul Wall, or a traffic light that says SHUT UP. A frog with a giant ass. But I want to. It feels like: Yes. Finally.”

from Artsy News

[louisbalmerualblog-blog]

Inherent Vice (novel) research for set design

Set design

Although I will look at other films to get an idea of how to dress a set, I’ve found while reading Thomas Pynchon novels through describing the general clutter of a scene the audience gains a deeper insight into the characters. For example in Inherent Vice:

Back at his place, Doc stood for a while gazing at a velvet painting from one of the Mexican families who set up their weekend pitches along the boulevards through the green flatland where people still rode horses, between Gordita and the freeway. Out of the vans and into the calm early mornings would come sofa-width Crucifixions and Last Suppers, outlaw bikers on elaborately detailed Harleys, superhero bad-asses in Special Forces gear packing M16s and so forth. This picture of Doc’s showed a Southern California beach that never was—palms, bikini babes, surfboards, the works. He thought of it as a window to look out of when he couldn’t deal with looking out of the traditional glass-type one in the other room. Sometimes in the shadows the view would light up, usually when he was smoking weed, as if the contrast knob of Creation had been messed with just enough to give everything an underglow, a luminous edge, and promise that the night was about to turn epic somehow.

This paragraph, which does nothing to further the narrative, gives us a real insight into the character of Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello, as apart from being the type of person who decorates his house with cheap art brought from Mexican market stalls, this object also describes an essential aspact of the character and the larger story which is the deep yearning and (probably cannabis infused) nostalgia for a 1960’s California that has passed with the turn of the decade, and, perhaps never was.

Further examples:

He almost said, “There’s room here,” which in fact there wasn’t, but he’d seen her looking around at everything that hadn’t changed, the authentic English Pub Dartboard up on the wagon wheel and the whorehouse swag lamp with the purple psychedelic bulb with the vibrating filament, the collection of model hot rods made entirely of Coors cans, the beach volleyball autographed by Wilt Chamberlain in Day- Glo felt marker, the velvet painting and so forth, with an expression of, you would have to say, distaste.

This really got me thinking about how I am going to decide on details in set design and props, and how I might be able to use them to express the type of characters on screen. I had already planned to have a kind of ‘still life’ opening shot, with a composition influenced by classical still life paintings, but now I wish to develop this idea to incorporate objects that serve a purpose in outlining the character rather than simply placed for aesthetical purposes. Instead of a glass vase, a staple of still life paintings, I’ve chosen to use a glass bong, which, looking pretty similar to a vase is a piece of cannabis paraphernalia that lets the audience know from the first shot what sort of thing these characters get up to, and also allows me to use minimal verbal exposition in the next shot where cannabis brownies are being cooked.

I had also planned to have a small sculpture in this shot (which I still may do) but once I started thinking about how I could tie it to the characters and the narrative, and taking influence from Inherent Vice’s Doc Sportello and his novelty and knockoff interior design described in the book, chose to buy a ‘dashboard Monk’ to dress this shot. I feel this perfectly exemplifies quasi-spiritual commercialised/westernised Buddhist beliefs many people like this have.

Originally I sought out a bobble head Jesus, getting the idea from a Bob Dylan song It’s Alright Ma (I’m only bleeding) where he sings the verse:  

Disillusioned words like bullets bark As human gods aim for their mark Make everything from toy guns that spark To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark It's easy to see without looking too far That not much is really sacred

I really like the message in this verse about spirituality and capitalism (a theme also explored in Inherent Vice) and it lead my on to this opening shot where I try and sum up with a couple of items these quasi-spiritual consumerist characters. 

Along with this theme, I brought the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which became a staple of the Psychedelic Hippy movement of the 1960’s as it discusses issues such as how one should navigate the unconscious and stripping away one’s ego, which spoke to the spiritual hippy movement in the 1960’s since many of them were experimenting with LSD. Since my film involves a dream sequence induced by drugs I feel this book has some relevance, and because the characters are influenced by Thomas Pynchon’s novels set in the 1960’s (who would probably have been reading this)

Opening shot, using the above items:

I want a range of artwork on the walls that follows the aesthetic of these characters, as well as references the art that influenced this film. I intended to buy some cheap amateur paintings from local markets like those described in the book, however I couldn’t find any that I thought fitted the aesthetic of the film and were in my price range.

The film definitely has a retro aesthetic, so I didn’t think it was suitable for them to be watching the film on a modern, flat screen TV, and so I sought out an old tube television. I knew my friend had one in working condition and I spoke to him a week before filming and he said he was able to drop the TV round at some point in the following days. Two days before filming he hadn’t brought it to my house, so I messaged him again and he revealed that he thought his dad might have thrown it out. This was a pretty major setback, so I looked online and asked around, but I wasn’t able to get one at such short notice. I found a listing on gumtree for a free tube TV for anyone who would be up for picking it up, however the contact details weren’t correct so I couldn’t get it off them. Last minute, when I was in college picking up the last of the equipment I needed, I remembered that there are tube TV’s in college for displaying video work in a gallery. This was a big help but it wasn’t till I got it home that I realised the wires in the back were not the ordinary wires used for connecting to DVD/Video players. This meant that I wasn’t able to get the TV to play The Green Slime on the day of the shoot, and had to have the TV off while the actors were pretending to watch something, and I couldn’t have the TV in any of the shots with the actors, like I had planned to. This also meant that I had to simulate the light coming from the TV with a dimmable LED light at the point of the TV, which a crew member had to stand and flicker. I put a green gel over the light to make it more unnatural, like it might be coming from a TV screen. This had an interesting lighting effect on the actors, but I definitely would have rather just had the actual TV eliminating their faces.

Later, I returned to school and located the correct wires and port adaptors needed to get an image on the TV screen, and shot the TV in close up for the scenes from The Green Slime they discuss in script. This had its own issues which I foresaw but I don’t think there is really a way round, which is flickering of the image when I film the TV screen. Having looked online there is not really much I could do about this except play around with the aperture and shutter speed to partially reduce it to a tolerable level, but to stop it completely is very difficult.