one piece

Hawk-Eyed

John James Audubon was only one of a number of naturalist artists who have made their careers portraying birds. And in his day, before cameras or reliable preservation techniques, bird artists gathered and recorded important scientific information about the ornithological world. For him, his colleagues and rivals, the ability to observe their surroundings and draw what they saw was not just a prerequisite for making and selling art. Observation and illustration were important tools of research.

Four new books illuminate the confluence of science, art and ornithology, which flowered perhaps most brilliantly in Audubon’s day, although it had ancient roots. The art of depicting birds emerged in the cave culture of Paleolithic times. The first drawing of a bird (that we know about) was of an owl, found on the wall of a cave in Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, France, in 1994.

And though sketching may have given way to the high-tech tools of zoology, the authors of three books agree that drawing and painting continue to be superior tools for people seeking to learn about birds. If you find that hard to believe, consider that many contemporary birders prefer the field guide drawings of Roger Tory Peterson and David Allen Sibley to guides relying on photography.

via: Audubon’s Species: Bird Art, in All Its Glory

By Cornelia Dean -- The New York Times

These days are best when one goes nowhere,

The house a reservoir of quiet change,

The creak of furniture, the window panes

Brushed by the half-rhymes of activities

That do not quite declare what thing it was

Gave rise to them outside. The colours, even,

Accord with the tenor of the day—yes, ‘grey’

You will hear reported of the weather,

But what a grey, in which the tinges hover,

About to catch, although they still hold back

The blaze that's in them should the sun appear,

And yet it does not. Then the window pane

With a tremor of glass acknowledges

The distant boom of a departing plane.

"Against Travel"

By Charles Tomlinson

Photograph: William Eggleston

Gilbert and George in Brooklyn

The Brooklyn Museum is the final venue of an international tour of the first retrospective in more than twenty years of work by the internationally acclaimed artists Gilbert & George. The exhibition comprises more than eighty pictures created since 1970, among them more than a dozen that are only in the Brooklyn presentation. The exhibition traces their stylistic and emotional evolution through their pictures and art in other media, ranging from charcoal on paper sculpture from the early 1970s to postcard pieces to ephemera dating back to the 1960s.

Night Fall

I walk outside the stone wall

Looking into the park at night

As armed trees frisk a windfall

Down paths that lampposts light

"Autumn"

By Samuel Menashe

Photograph ByTodd Hido

"Both Changeless and Changing"

The 40th Anniversary issue of New York Magazine, is all about the unusual degree of tumult the city has experienced during the 40 years of the magazine’s life, how New York became the place it has become, and what was gained and lost. It is a hopeful story, especially for what it says about the future. As Woody Allen observes in the pages ahead, if there’s one thing we can all believe in, it’s this city’s capacity to absorb almost anything and keep going.

The title quote is from: "Here Is New York"

By E. B. White

Chihuly at RISD's new Chace Center

From the beginning, the Chace Center was created for people — to be a crossroads where students, faculty, staff, alumni and museum visitors from the general public all come together. With its unpretentious design, it melds student and museum exhibition galleries, an auditorium and other public venues with studios, classrooms and collection conservation areas, creating a welcoming center where art is made, studied and enjoyed.

Distinguished glass artist Dale Chihuly's installation, marks the opening of the new $34 million expansion at the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. Chihuly earned a master's degree from RISD and studied and taught there for 20 years, serving as a visiting artist in 1990. Now 67 and living in Seattle, Chihuly said he always wanted to show at RISD.

José Rafael Moneo, the Pritzker Prize-winning principal of José Rafael Moneo Arquitecto in Madrid, designed the Chace Center.

Piece Work

Tara Donovan, who won a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” award last week, has drawn attention over the last decade for her ability to transform huge quantities of prosaic manufactured materials — plastic-foam cups, pencils, tar paper — into sculptural installations that suggest the wonders of nature.

Her first major museum show, a traveling retrospective, opens on Oct. 10 at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.The retrospective will include many of the works that made her name, like the series “Bluffs” (2006), which she created by gluing hundreds of thousands of clear shirt buttons together into craggy peaks that recall white coral reefs or stalagmites. To construct “Untitled (Plastic Cups)” (2006), which must be freshly built each time it is shown, she stacks millions of transparent plastic cups in a tight, rigorous grid and sculptures the swaying piles into gentle waves that suggest a cross-section of a pixilated landscape. (Like much of her work, it can be expanded or contracted to fit the space.)

To some in the art world, the appeal of Ms. Donovan’s work lies in its relationship to Minimalism, as propounded by the likes of Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse. Nicholas Baume, the Institute of Contemporary Art’s/Boston chief curator, who instigated the retrospective says, “Tara’s work isn’t ironic. It actually takes up the discourse of Minimalism. It’s about creating a system, using a structure, and repeating incremental units that can go from the finite to the seemingly infinite.”

link: The Genius of Little Things By Carol Kino -- The New York Times

"Service"

This summer, the photographer Platon took pictures of hundreds of men and women who volunteered to serve in the military and were sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. He followed them on their journey through training and deployment, after demobilization and in hospitals, to compile a portrait of the dedication of the armed services today.

link: In this week's New Yorker, the photographer Platon has a portfolio of photographs of members of the military and their families.

"The Machine, the Body and the City"

As indicated by its title, the exhibition at The Parrish Art Museum, traces the evolution of photography in the 20th and 21st centuries. The exhibition examines three prominent themes highlighted by the selection: depictions of the metropolis, modern machinery, and the human figure. A number of works highlight the relationship between photography and other art forms.

Among the photographers represented in the exhibition are Berenice Abbott, Eugène Atget, Lee Friedlander, Irving Penn, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sam Taylor-Wood, Andy Warhol, and Gary Winogrand.

Russian butts

Stephen Gill loves the beauty of the banal. For instance, he has produced a series on shopping carts, and photographed the back side of advertising billboards. For RUSSIAN WOMEN SMOKERS (2002) he focused on discarded Russian cigarette butts. We will never know who smoked these cigarettes; only the lipstick on the filter betrays that they were smoked by women. These vestiges stimulated Gill's imagination, something which he hopes to accomplish with the viewer too with this series. According to Gill, 'Cigarette butts tell you little, but they start a thought process that may possibly bring you out to a face rather than an object.'

via:Noorderlicht

'What If I Could Draw a Bird That Could Change the World?'

Selections Fall 2008 at The Drawing Center features the work of Viewing Program artist Kathleen Henderson. Using her chosen medium of oil stick on paper, the artist deploys a sparse, tense, and energetic line to make drawings that are at turns comic, perverse, poignant, and brutal. Henderson works with the radio on, the sounds of talking pundits and news stories filtering through her onto the page where ambiguous scenarios offer playful or possibly sinister interactions. By offering disquieting representations of patterns of human behavior, her work asks us to consider our own complicity in and capacity for violence as well as benevolence.

click on image to view writing

Black Monday

David Foster Wallace got it.

He got our culture. He laughed at it, sure, but not without a sense of outrage and a sense of sadness that made him stand apart from the knowing, ironic detachment that seems be the hallmark of our Gen X generation.

I wanted to interview David Foster Wallace about John McCain. He had written about McCain in the 2000 campaign. His essay was recently re-published in book form. It's called McCain's Promise. He writes about the dual nature of McCain's, well, McCain-ness. On the one hand, he's a man who, when tested, did something few of us will ever have to do or even contemplate: he chose to spend 5 years in a box, being tortured in Vietnam instead of taking up his captors' offer of early release. And yet, he can behave as ruthlessly as any other politician, perhaps hoping his history of being an honorable man will give him a pass.

David Foster Wallace captured that, and so much more in passages like this one:

"There are many elements of the MCain2000 campaign -- naming the bus "Straight Talk," the timely publication of Faith of My Fathers, the much-hyped "openness" and "spontaneity" of the Express's media salon, the message-disciplined way McCain thumps "Always. Tell you. The truth"--that indicate that some very shrewd, clever marketers are trying to market this candidate's rejection of shrewd, clever marketing. Is this bad? Or just confusing? ...the only thing you're certain to feel about John McCain's campaign is a very modern and American type of ambivalence, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe is bull****, that there's nothing left anywhere but sales and salesmen."

via:"I Will Miss David Foster Wallace"

Madeleine Brand (Host of NPR's Day to Day)

David Foster Wallace, died Friday night at his home in Claremont, Calif., at 46, an apparent suicide.

"Language as collage. Collage as language."

Of the hundreds of openings in New York City this fall, this one will be particularly distinctive. Because the artist is the pre-eminent American poet John Ashbery, making his solo debut as professional artist at 81, with a modest but polished exhibition of two dozen small collages.

A couple of them date from his college years in the 1940s. Most are from the 1970s and were recently rediscovered tucked away in a shoebox. “I lost those for a long time,” he says. “Quite a few others got thrown out.” Several more are hot off his apartment work table.

The show, which is at Tibor de Nagy Gallery on Fifth Avenue near 57th Street, carries a gentle charge of New York history. When the gallery first opened its doors a few blocks away in 1950, Mr. Ashbery, new to New York, was there for the inaugural party.

It was the place to be. With its air of new-generation chic, the gallery was one of the few where young artists dodging the shadow of Abstract Expressionism and poets doing strange things with language could meet as collaborators and friends.

link: "The Poetry of Scissors and Glue"

By Holland Cotter, The New York Times

exhibition link:

"John Ashbery Collages"

September 4th - October 4th

Tibor De Nagy Gallery

Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors

Drawing Babar at The Morgan Library and Museum, brings to life one of the most treasured children’s stories of all time—that of a baby elephant, cruelly orphaned, who has adventures in civilization and eventually returns to the forest to become king of all the elephants. On view are original illustrations and manuscript material from The Story of Babar the Little Elephant (1931), the first book by Jean de Brunhoff, and Babar’s Cousin: That Rascal Arthur (1946), the first book written and illustrated entirely by Laurent de Brunhoff, Jean’s son.

Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors September 19, 2008, through January 4, 2009

also check out:

FREEING THE ELEPHANTS What Babar brought.

By Adam Gopnik in The September 22nd issue of The New Yorker.

Wright on Time

There are two absent characters at the start of Craig Wright’s “Lady”: a dog (the title character), who loves to run, be called a good girl and eat Pop-Tarts, and a 40-ish politician, Graham, who is pro-Bush, pro-Cheney and pro-war. Only one of them is going to survive.

The tremendously moving “Lady,” about three childhood friends on a hunting trip, says much more about the nature of change and distance and truth.

Kenny is a stoner, the loving dog owner and family man who can’t quite believe his wife is dying of cancer. Kenny prefers illusion and has begun to confuse memories of movie scenes with those from his life.

Dyson is a married man who cheats, but on this day his mind is on his 18-year-old son, who has announced that he is going to join the Marines and fight in Iraq. He did this after hearing a speech by Dyson and Kenny’s old friend Graham.

When Graham makes his entrance, he radiates a disturbing, seemingly rational calm. The United States needs to be “in charge,” he says, because “at the party of the world, America is the designated driver.” Graham also lies blatantly, straight-faced, with a spooky, chilling certainty.

During George W. Bush’s two presidential terms, a lot of performers and filmmakers have ridiculed him and his staff, but his administration’s views have rarely been personified with such forthright precision.

via:THEATER REVIEW | 'LADY' "Chasing the Truth While Hunting for Game"

By Anita gates, The New York Times

“Lady” continues through Sept. 28 at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, 224 Waverly Place NYC

Marijuana may be something of a wonder drug

— though perhaps not in the way you might think.

Researchers in Italy and Britain have found that the main active ingredient in marijuana — tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC — and related compounds show promise as antibacterial agents, particularly against microbial strains that are already resistant to several classes of drugs.

It has been known for decades that Cannabis sativa has antibacterial properties. Experiments in the 1950s tested various marijuana preparations against skin and other infections, but researchers at the time had little understanding of marijuana’s chemical makeup.

The current research, by Giovanni Appendino of the University of the Eastern Piedmont and colleagues and published in The Journal of Natural Products, looked at the antibacterial activity of the five most common cannabinoids. All were effective against several common multiresistant bacterial strains, although, perhaps understandably, the researchers suggested that the nonpsychotropic cannabinoids might prove more promising for eventual use.

link: "Marijuana Ingredient May Fight Bacteria" By Henry Fountain, The New York Times

Photograph:Matthew Spiegelman

"Paired Things"

Who, who had only seen wings,

could extrapolate the

skinny sticks of things

birds use for land, the backward way they bend,

the silly way they stand?

And who, only studying

birdtracks in the sand,

could think those little forks

had decamped on the wind?

So many paired things seem odd.

Who ever would have dreamed

the broad winged raven of despair

would quit the air and go

bandylegged upon the ground,

a common crow?

"Paired Things" from Flamingo Watching © 1994 by Kay Ryan.

Bird. Photographs by Roni Horn. Steidl/Hauser & Wirth, 2008.

Out of Site

Invisibility devices, long the realm of science fiction and fantasy, have moved closer after scientists engineered a material that can bend visible light around objects.

The breakthrough could lead to systems for rendering anything from people to large objects, such as tanks and ships, invisible to the eye – although this is still years off.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, whose work is funded by the American military, have engineered materials that can control light’s direction of travel.

Underlying the work is the idea that bending visible light around an object will hide it.

Xiang Zhang, the leader of the researchers, said: “In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock.” An observer looking at the cloaked object would then see light from behind it – making it seem to disappear.

via: Times Online

Product Puns

B-SIDES: 'This is a project which questions the nature of everyday objects and how we interact with them. Small additions and subtractions convert simple objects into communicative tools. Transformed, these items also make a subtle statement about consumer culture. 'b-sides' comprises an ongoing series of modified objects (to date there are more than thirty), including vases with clamps, plug-in torches and wine bottles with integrated glasses. While most of these objects are conceptual explorations, some of the modified objects - buttons which speak, surprise matches and 'reduced' t-shirts - are intended for production. More than an exercise in design, 'b-sides' is as a proposal for how we might look differently at the unextraordinary bits and pieces we find around us.'

Meric Kara

Morandi at The Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, will present a comprehensive survey—the first in this country—of the career of Giorgio Morandi, one of the greatest 20th-century masters of still-life and landscape painting in the tradition of Chardin and Cézanne. The exhibition will present approximately 110 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings from his early “metaphysical” works to his late evanescent still lifes, culled mainly from Italian collections.

"The great simplicity of design that Morandi brought to his still life paintings was itself an invention of considerable originality, but it is the tonal purity and sheer painterly fluency of these pictures that makes them so irresistible. Morandi emptied his pictures of everything that might act as an obstacle to the purity and fluency that meant more to him than anything else."

Hilton Kramer

The New York Times, December 6, 1981 --