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The fact that Fountain is pissing off trads over a 100 years later is so fucking funny

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So cool to see the growth!

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My local library had a guide by Michel Lauricella and since I'd seen it on here I checked it out and this fucking rules

Finally some fucking art instruction that isn't about the skeleton

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Model of a pigeon with mother-of-pearl inlaid feathers (Japan, Meiji period, 1880)

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Arjan Van Helmond (Netherlands b. 1971) Tree #17 (2022) gouache, acrylic paint on canvas 120 x 95 cm

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I'm thinking of Symphony of the Sixth Blast Furnace by Evgeny Sedukhin again...

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btw there was actually an art project led by three students (Ail Hwang, Hae-Ryaan Jeon and Ghung Ki Park) in Germany to install colorful window panes onto an electrical transmission tower to create a stained glass mosaic effect, called "Leuchtturm" ("lighthouse") and even such a simple effect is dazzling

imaging looking up at one of these and being surrounded by illustrations and iconography climbing to the heavens

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everybody say THANK YOU MUSEUMS WHO PUT THEIR COLLECTIONS ONLINE so that we can DRAW THE THINGS WITHOUT BEING IN LONDON

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Inverted ballpoint pen drawing!! The first picture is what I drew and the second picture is the inverted final piece

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how do you do, fellow Creatives™

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what is funny about ad Reinhardt and yves Klein? i want to be let in on the joke

so yves klein was a color field painter, also known as those guys who just paint a canvas blue, all blue, all the same color of blue, and sell it for a shitton of money. actually when it came to blue, yves klein was kind of The Guy. 

BLUE

but back before all the fame and the blue, he made “yves peintures,” which was a catalog of his monochromes, pictured here:

the joke is that it’s bullshit! it’s just squares of construction paper glued on the page with little titles written below them. even the preface isn’t a preface -- it’s just horizontal lines that he had a buddy of his sign with his name. one time yves klein and his art pals all hyped up a big big gallery show that he was opening. a solo exhibition! very exciting! all the critics and fancy motherfuckers showed up -- three thousand people came. with great drama, they were led into a completely empty gallery. “welcome,” yves klein said. “I call it THE SPECIALIZATION OF SENSIBILITY IN THE RAW MATERIAL STAT INTO STABILIZED PICTORIAL SENSIBILITY, LE VIDE (THE VOID).” he was, in every way, a total fucker who loved bright colors and pranking the art world.

meanwhile, ad reinhardt -- what’s ad reinhardt’s gig?

ad reinhardt’s gig is BLACK

more specifically, black-on-black grids of very slightly varying shades of black, applied in a very matte, powdery way that left the paintings with almost no sheen. it’s a pretty cool effect in person (if vantablack 2.0 had been a thing in the 50s, ad reinhardt would have busted a nut)

unfortunately, the way he did the paint makes the paintings incredibly difficult to maintain. if you touch one, the oils on your hands will immediately stain the painting, and it can’t be cleaned or repaired.

“no prob, bob,” ad reinhardt said to the flustered museum curators and collectors. “if you mess it up i’ll just replace it.”

“but what about our original ad reinhardt!” said the curators and collectors

“yeah i’ll replace it,” ad reinhardt said, “with the same original painting but not fucked up.” this caused some consternation

incidentally, he also made this small comic, which never fails to tickle me:

YOU, SIR, ARE A SPACE TOO!

one of my real favorite artworks in this vein is by robert rauschenberg, and i’m going to include the story of it because it makes me very happy. rauschenberg was an insane post-modernist -- one of his most famous pieces includes a taxidermy goat with paint thrown all over it and a car tire around its neck, that kind of thing -- and i love his piece titled “erased de kooning drawing”

so willem de kooning was the husband of elaine de kooning, who painted sick abstract expressionist portraits and was slamming hot

wow

willem was also an artist, and kind of a big deal in his own right, and friends with rauschenberg

one day rauschenberg calls him up like “hey i have an idea for a collaboration between us two art bastards. i need you to do me a drawing, in pencil”

and willem said “why”

and rauschenberg said “wouldn’t you like to know”

and willem said “why”

and rauschenberg said “because i’m gay, give it”

and willem said “that’s not a reason”

and rauschenberg said “fine, i wanna make a commentary on the value of art even after it’s destroyed and palimpsests and ephemerality and shit i guess, so i need a drawing by a famous dude to erase, and you’re famous”

willem de kooning said “okay” and proceeded to find the wettest, most difficult to erase grease pencil in his studio, which he then used to make several drawings until he came up with one he liked and sent it to rauschenberg

and to his credit, rauschenberg erased that motherfucker. he put in the effort. in a spectacular show of spite countering spite, he very nearly got rid of it all. look at this shit:

if that almost-blank piece of paper isn’t a work of art, i don’t know what is

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In the pre-dawn hours of August 5, 2001, Richard Ankrom got in his pick-up truck and drove out to a downtown L.A. freeway sign. He parked along an off-ramp near 4th and Beaudry Streets, stashed two large sheets of aluminum in the bushes, and took a deep breath. Ankrom needed a moment to reflect on the laws he was about to break in the name of art. “I was scared,” he recalled recently, perched on an overpass, staring down at the area where this occurred two decades earlier. “I stood there, just to kind of calm down, you know.”

[...]

This was the original germ of the idea: The California Department of Transportation had screwed up. For many years, if you were traveling north on the 110 in downtown Los Angeles and were intending to go north on the 5, there was no easily visible signage to prepare you for the sudden interchange. And it’s not just any interchange, either — it’s a strange corkscrew of an exit on the left side of the freeway, sneaking up on you at the end of a tunnel. Without a decent amount of warning, you would very likely miss it — and plenty of people certainly did — ending up halfway to Pasadena before realizing what had happened. Ankrom was one of those who had missed the exit before, so he decided to fix the problem himself.

[...]

There happened to be a Caltrans crew working nearby when Ankrom was up there, and he was told later that they gave him a good, long look. But ultimately no one questioned him. “They say if you’re dressed correctly and carry a clipboard around, you can get away with a lot of stuff,” he put it. (Also of note: It was still a pre-9/11 world — just barely.) Even so, after 20 or 30 minutes up there, carefully drilling the signs in as traffic zoomed by below, he arrived back at his truck drenched in sweat. “My hair was like I put my head under a faucet. I was soaked to the bone.”

Nevertheless, the installation went off without a hitch, and for a while, that was that. If anybody noticed the new addition, they didn’t suspect it was a forgery — and why would they? To Ankrom, it was something that needed to be done. It helped commuters. It was a service.

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Wally Dion, born 1976, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Fabric Star Quilts.

Wally (Walter) Dion is a Canadian artist of Saulteaux ancestry living and working in Upstate New York. Working in a number of media including painting, drawing and sculpture.

Wally explains:

"The first fabric star quilt was made as part of a 2022 residency at Wanuskewin Park. It was my way of reflecting upon prairie tall grass and the reintroduction of bison into the Great Plaines. I wanted to make several transparent quilts and superimpose them; one in front another... a quilt for the microbiome, another for the bison, their manure & hooves, another for the summer fires that scorch the ground and a final quilt for the sweetgrass braid.

I was considering how all of these things worked together for thousands of years to create what is known as the 'prairie tall grass ecosystem'. A vast and fertile expanse of land stretching from the foothills of Alberta to the banks of the Mississippi. I wanted to highlight the invisibility of systems when everything is working well, as it should be.

I started with the green quilt because it is the colour of the sweet grass braid that is exchanged in ceremony and relationship building. I considered the nature and tradition of quilting; impoverished craftspeople using tiny scraps of fabric. I considered the act of offering fabric and adherence to tradition. I thought of a thousand tiny prayers and how that might look; invisible acts of respect and adherence to protocols spanning decades. My thoughts travelled across the land, imagining the trees and rocks collecting these prayers like a bush of cloth, or an etched boulders."

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Artist is Thomas Deininger.

Moooola!

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The fountain sculptures of Malgorzata Chodakowska

CATALOG OF HER WORKS

The link will take you to YouTube to see her water sculptures in motion -> Fountains