LESLIE RAGAN: CLOUDS AND STEAM

Leslie Darrell Ragan (1897-1972) painted heavy industrial equipment the way it might exist on Mt. Olympus. He enshrouded trucks and locomotives with swirling steam and glowing celestial clouds. He painted machinery and buildings at heroic angles and imbued them with an almost divine aura. Speeding trains became works of art under Ragan's inspired vision.





The following close-up from an original painting by Ragan demonstrates how he injected the full color spectrum into clouds that most other artists might simply depict as white with blue or gray shading.



Ragan was born in the small town of Woodbine Iowa where there was not much for a young boy to look at except sky and clouds. He went to the Cumming School of Art in Des Moines and then to the Art Institute in Chicago. After serving in the military, he became a successful illustrator in California. His strong style soon became unmistakeable. Clients were eager to see their mundane equipment or buildings transformed by Ragan's luminous vision. He specialized in travel posters and in calendars.


Whether he was painting heavy mechanical structures or light airy vapor, Ragan found a way to infuse his subjects with light and enchantment.




Tastes changed (along with modes of travel) and Ragan fell out of favor. Ragan may not qualify as one of the giants of illustration, but he was an artist with a strong, distinctive vision which transformed his subjects. The illustrator Fritz Eichenberg once mused, "what makes an artist create in his own particular style is an indefinable gift, almost a state of grace. Describe it and you are bound to miss its essence." I would not attempt to analyze why Ragan saw things the way he did, but the results are certainly worthy of our attention.

Obscene Art #3: For the Love of Flesh - Joel-Peter Witkin

The sad thing is that more and more, we are becoming disconnected with a sense of wonder, of mystery and destiny.

Joel-Peter Witkin

It isn't hard to think up something very deep and poetic concerning Witkin: through his imagery, we gain a greater understanding about human difference and tolerance, someone declares. Someone else seems to admire Witkin for nearly the opposite:
His arresting images show us our powerlessness in the face of madness, lust, disease and death.
The thing about Joel-Peter Witkin is that he shows people. And daringly so. The strangest people you have ever seen. In the strangest of poses. In the most surprizing situations. And, although his pictures are full (some say: overfilled) with references to art history, his merit seems to be above all related to this: showing.

How does he find his models? Some of them in the morgues, others, from ads. Ads like this one from 1989, looking for:

Pinheads, dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, pre-op transsexuals, bearded women, people with tails, horns, wings, reversed hands or feet, anyone born without arms, legs, eyes, breast, genitals, ears, nose, lips. All people with unusually large genitals. All manner of extreme visual perversion. Hermaphrodites and teratoids (alive and dead). Anyone bearing the wounds of Christ.(...) Anyone claiming to be God. God.

Someone states that seeing Witkin's works is like witnessing a brutal car crash. Indeed, we feel voyeuristic, as in, willing to witness obscenity. Being the good art amateurs we are, we look for justifications, just as we might look at the crash "from a distance", inquiring into the reactions of others, or the aesthetic vs. ethical aspects of the scene. We might even go so far as to declare the paintings a cry for tolerance. The question remains: how distant is this cry from the freak-shows history has known time and again? Isn't it just the curiosity of the crippled, the strange, the too-different? Seeing the world without its regular masks?
And if we are just part of a long line of curious onlookers, are we damned? As in, morally condemnable?
The concept of monster, which made a career during the Renaissance, comes from the Latin verb monere, to warn, and/or from the Greek root teras, meaning something both horrible and wonedrful.
Contrary to common belief, monsters weren't only associated with signs of evil events to come, but also, and quite frequently, with signs of devine power. The monster shows were often events where one would discover the many ways of divine creation. (Notice how words like "amazing" and "awesome" also have an ambiguous quality at their origin, but went the other way, becoming generally accepted as positive adjectives).
In this sense, what we see, through Joel-Peter Witkin's eyes, are monsters. They are the marvels.
They are the graces of a wonder-ful world.
Should we believe that Witkin is genuinely preoccupied with the people he photographs? Yes, there seems to be no doubt about it. He is deeply religious, but has found a home in the esoteric side of religion. And with it comes the love for the awesome, the excentric. And a fascination for, or empathy with, the humans within this underworld. He is interested in their stories, and openly declares that his art is "not intended to reveal what the individual subject chooses to hide but instead to make the hidden qualities more meaningful."
Meaningful they become. But what is their meaning? And does it not risk turning against those he claims to defend?


One of Witkin's many critics, Cintra Wilson, writes,

The work is beautiful enough to be "real art," but it is still an intellectually camouflaged, carny peep show of the most debased and obvious water. You can put as many flowery wreaths and as much gorgeous photo technique as you want around a dead baby, and it will be art, yes, but it is still a dead baby. It is still a sideshow for the morbidly curious, regardless of how much Witkin may drone on about the deeply religious quality of his work.
(...) The artists I respect get more irreverent with age while, at the same time, they humanize; they lighten up, they drop the old mask, they actually start to care about things more and open up a little, laughing about things they used to take to heart as deathly serious. They evolve -- for better or worse.

Then again - Francis Bacon, in that sense, did not evolve, did he?

(the first image is the portrait of Witkin by his wife, tattoo artist Cynthia Witkin)

Also check out one of the most recent of Witkin's albums:

Animal pleasures

Sensuality is a delicate game.

There is something about perversion that makes it aesthetically appealing.
This glass is made of cat hair.
This is part of a series of cups/glasses made of cat hair. They are incredibly attractive, soft and pleasant. Yet, at the same time, they are repulsive. They're unbearably close.
This game of closeness, this flirt with the uncomfortable distance when objects go out-of-focus, is what makes them so powerful.
Of course, they have an artistic predecessor: surrealist's Meret Oppenheim's Object, from 1936.
But this here is a different story. It is far from a heavy surrealist joke. The series, called Drink-me-by, has more to do with the transparence of a look, or the hesitating, ephemeral nature of our feeling-of-the-world. It is still a play with the senses, but it trusts us more as viewers (and as touchers).
The author, Verónica Fernandes, doesn't like the comparison. Object was not an inspiration, and for her, it belongs to a different language, a different way of looking at things. She says: "If we were to put it in cinematographic language, The Object is more like a cartoon, with its forms covered by fur. Drink-me-by is for me more like a film, as its very structure is made from the hair"
The cups differ as much as the cats :

There is even one you can actually drink from - or mistreat. It has a fine layer of silicone, giving it new qualities:

I had the great privilege of seeing these objects come to life. Their author has not exhibited them anywhere. She hasn't even thought about it - but if you know of a gallery that would be interested, please let me know. They definitely deserve to be seen outside of this modest virtual setting.

(all pictures of Drink-me-by are by José Miguel Soares)

Technorati: visual art, fine art, installation, art installation, art, contemporary art, vvoi

Michael Hutter and the sex of death

Michael Hutter is a painter, a visual artist in the classical meaning of the word. Some of his pieces seem combinations of Dali and Beksiński. Others are closer to sci-fi yet others seem games with painting conventions. Take his The Girl and Death (2005), echoing as if in a crazy mirror the romantic works of the likes of Munch or Schiele. This time, though, sexuality is present in a different, contemporary and self-ironic way:


And then, there are his erotic engravings, full of tension and strange perversions. Even the most innocently sexual scenes take place in somewhat creepy settings. The idyllic stories have dark backgrounds, as if innocence, here, was just a cover-up, a play-on-words.

(via)

Poetry, the internet, and the paradox of flash

Poetry on the internet is a delicate matter. More: poems are a delicate matter. They are fragile, require faith.
And the internet doesn't seem to have the required stillness that reading a poem might demand. But it has other advantages. And Born Magazine uses them, combining flash animation with poetry and music, turning poetry reading into a truly aesthetic experience, that is, speaking to the senses.
My problem with some of the works, as with Courtney Queeney's Origami, is that it could very easily be considered kitsch. And the problem is not with the poem, nor is it actually in the flash animation. It seems to be the combination of the two, which turns a pretty poem and a pretty animation into an all-too-sweet experience. Too much sugar.

But then, not all works are like that. Many are darker, more aggressive. Some are gloomy. But in all cases it seems the flash-maker really creates the poem. This goes further than classical "interpretation" of a play. The direct impact of sight and sound appears as much more potent than the subtile work of a poem. I need to digest a poem in order for it to have impact. But by the time I finish watching the animation, the story is over, my wave of emotions (or wavelet, in case of weaker works) has long gone, and there is no turning back. In some works you can stop and decide when to read, but the graphical side seems to take over.
But then, maybe that's the trick? I wouldn't go to a poetry page anyway, and here I am trying to go back to the poem to discover it without the all-too-clever animation. Paradox? Reverse psychology?

Technorati: net art, internet art, poetry, visual art, art, contemporary art, vvoi

Burden Fails: 220

220, F-Space, October 9, 1971: The Gallery was flooded with 12 inches of water. Three other people and I waded through the water and climbed onto 14 foot ladders, one ladder per person. After everyone was positioned, I dropped a 220 electric line into water. The piece lasted from midnight until dawn, about six hours. There was no audience except for the participants.
The piece was an experiment in what would happen. It was a kind of artificial "men in a life raft" situation. The thing I was attempting to set up was a hyped-up situation with high danger which would keep them awake, confessing, and talking, but it didn't, really. After about two-an-a-half hours everybody got really sleepy. They would kind of lean on their ladders by hooking their arms around, and go to sleep. It was surprising that anyone could sleep, but we all did intermittently. There was a circuit breaker outside the building and my wife came in at 6:00 in the morning and turned it off and opened the door. I think everyone enjoyed it in a weird sort of way. I think they had some of the feelings that I had had, you know? They felt kind of elated, like they had really done something.

- Chris Burden

quote from:

Human

Photo by Francine Gagnon.

Does anyone say he is his body, period?

What is it that makes the body such a scandal? Is it because bodies we see are not our bodies? Is it this un-identity, the fact that empathy seems like a childish dream, some sort of ridiculous belief? Is it that touching is losing my own touch? Listen to Wittgenstein: The truth is: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself.
So there is a basic egocentrism in our thinking about the body. In English, we say "take a walk in my shoes". Compare it to the Polish version: "put yourself into my skin". (Strange, how my skin seems to define me.) Is a racer without his car still a racer?
And that's where the fear of skin appears. And the obsession of skin. Its shapes, tones, actions.
How many skins can I have, how distant is this skin from mine, what can be done with this skin. Using it to re-create identity, as a toy, a scandal, or any other pretext. And we all do it - which is scary, and nice : feel the carress. It translates the other into what's yours.
And vice versa.

NB: Here is a short overview of body in contemporary art (in French)

Technorati: photography, erotic art, fine art, visual art, art, contemporary art, vvoi