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Fritz Kahn’s Man As Industrial Palace.
Kahn’s modernist visualization of the digestive and respiratory system as “industrial palace,” really a chemical plant, was conceived in a period when the German chemical industry was the world’s most advanced.
Be sure to check out the larger version.
Is lazy reporting hurting the visual arts? Jonathan Jones argues that almost all reporting about art takes one of six forms: expensive art, graffiti, plagiarism, earth-shattering discoveries, and restoration. Looking back through kottke.org’s art tag page, I am guilty of linking to stories of all those types. Eep.
Hoax or art? Or both? Artist Xu Zhen climbed Mt. Everest and shaved off almost 2 meters of the top of the mountain, the literal peak of Everest, and is displaying it as art.
Audiences may not believe that this is real, which is similar to how people rarely question whether the height of Everest truly is 8848 meters. This relationship between belief and doubt has to deal with questions of standard, height, reality, and borders.
(via daily awesome)
Jessica Lagunas’ Return to Puberty, an artwork consisting of a “video close-up of my pubis in a static single shot, in which I depilate most of my pubic hair with a pair of tweezers continuously for one hour”. It’s like the female version of Empire. NSFW.
I’m intrigued by Marc Hedlund’s differentiation of Impressionist bloggers from Realist bloggers. My interpretation of this difference (which might not be what Marc meant by it) is that Realist blog posts are self-contained, -explanatory, and -evident entities while a post on an Impressionist blog serves to complement the whole, much like the dots making up a Seurat painting aren’t that interesting until you stand back to see the whole thing.
The downside for Impressionist blogs is that their individual posts don’t work that well outside of their intended context. If you run across a single post from an Impressionist blog in your River of News, a remixed Yahoo Pipes RSS feed, in del.icio.us, or an item in a Google search results set, it might not make a whole lot of sense. Impressionist blog posts are less likely to get Dugg or bookmarked in del.icio.us or linked around much at all. Fewer incoming links, big or small, to individual pages means fewer pageviews, which makes it more difficult to run an Impressionist blog as a business that relies on advertising revenue. If you look at most of the big blog sites, they’re all non-Impressionist blogs. All the sites whose posts are featured on the front page of Digg are non-Impressionist…those posts/articles are designed to float self-contained around the web. The blogosphere is dominated by non-Impressionist blogs and the sort of content they produce…which is sad for me because, like Marc, I value Impressionism in a weblog.
Tauba Auerbach: startling starting staring string sting sing sin in i. More of her typographic work here.
Photographs of girls with meat hair. No further description needed, I trust. See also the meat-themed art of Victoria Reynolds.
Update: More meat art from Pinar Yolacan. (thx, jen)
Metropolis magazine profile of designer/programmer/artist Jonathan Harris, creator of such projects as Word Count, Daylife Universe, 10x10, and Seed magazine’s Phylotaxis. More of Harris’ work is available on his web site.
The American Sign Language alphabet made from matchbooks…think of the matches as fingers.
Remember the Splasher/graffiti/defacing business from last week? The group of people collectively know as the Splasher is back with a manifesto: “if we did it, this is how it would’ve happened”. Not the most succinct, these art school revolutionaries.
A fellow named the Splasher has been splashing paint on street art around NYC over the past few months. Here’s some of his, er, work. Well-known street artist Shepard Fairey (the Splasher has targeted several of his pieces) opened a show last night in DUMBO and two guys tried to set off a homemade smoke bomb at the opening, leading to speculation that one (or both) of them was the Splasher. Gothamist has more. Jake Dobkin has photos from Fairey’s show, which looks pretty nice.
Update: The Brooklyn Paper is reporting that DJ 10 Fingers subdued the suspected Splasher before he could light his stink bomb. (No, seriously!) The would-be stink bomber is facing a possible 15 years in jail.
Regarding Eve Mosher’s project to draw a flood line around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, here are a couple of related projects. Ledia Carroll’s Restore Mission Lake Project outlined the shore of an historical lake which used to sit in the midst of San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood. Under The Level explores the possibility and consequences of Katrina-level flooding in NYC. (thx, kayte and dens)
Artist Eve Mosher is drawing a chalk line around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan that denotes the encroachment of the ocean if it were to rise 10 feet above the current sea level. There’s a web site for the project, including a progress blog. See also Flood Maps.
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