art

The Other Vitruvian Man

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

The Vitruvian Man is a world-famous drawing that depicts a male figure in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart and simultaneously inscribed in a circle and a square. The drawing is attributed as a creation of Leonardo da Vinci. However, a researcher named Claudio Sgarbi, has found some evidence to debate the drawing’s origin. Sgarbi checked out Ten Books on Architecture, and found a figure that’s remarkably similar to da Vinci’s The Vitruvian Man. In a volume of academic papers to be published this winter by the Italian publisher Marsilio, he proposes that the author of the drawing was a young architect named Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara:

What little is known about Giacomo Andrea derives primarily from a remark made in On Divine Proportion (1498), by Luca Pacioli, who described him as both a dear friend of Leonardo’s and an expert on Vitruvius. Leonardo himself records in his notes having had dinner with Giacomo Andrea in 1490, the year Leonardo is thought to have drawn Vitruvian Man. And elsewhere Leonardo mentions “Giacomo Andrea’s Vitruvius”—a direct reference, Sgarbi believes, to the Ferrara manuscript.

Sgarbi’s hunch is that Leonardo and Giacomo Andrea collaborated on their drawings, but few traces of Giacomo Andrea survive, and unearthing more, enough to make Sgarbi’s case definitively, may take years. Still, scholars already find it intriguing. The French historian Pierre Gros, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Vitruvius, says he considers the idea “seductive and convincing.”

One of the few other known references to Giacomo Andrea concerns his death. In 1499 the French occupied Milan, where he and Leonardo had lived since the 1480s. Already admired internationally, Leonardo established cordial relations with the French and safely fled the city. But Giacomo Andrea wasn’t so lucky. He apparently stayed on as a kind of resistance fighter, and the French captured, hanged and quartered him the following year. “Because of his loyalty to the Duke of Milan,” Sgarbi says, “Giacomo Andrea was erased from history”—as was his Vitruvian Man.

Read more in Toby Lester’s piece “The Other Vitruvian Man” in Smithsonian Magazine.

Brooklyn’s Rube Goldberg Master

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Joseph Herscher builds Rube Goldberg machines for fun (though not for a living). The New York Times profiles the artist, who explains that his goal is to try “to make it as absurd and useless as possible” to do very simple tasks via his amazing contraptions.

The project is also an attempt to inject larger meaning into a form he already loves. Four years ago, with no particular training in sculpture or mechanical engineering, Mr. Herscher built his first Rube Goldberg machine in the living room of the large house in Auckland, New Zealand, where he lived. Like his current projects, it was constructed mainly out of recycled materials and dollar-store finds, like Solo cups and paper-towel tubes. The result was a massively complex installation with an elementary school mad-genius aesthetic: balls rolled through tubes, bounced and dropped from one platform to another. A teakettle filled a plastic cup with water until it tripped a lever. Whirling sledgehammers slapped the balls forward until a final hammer swung down and smashed a Cadbury Creme Egg into a satisfying splat of chocolate ooze.

This is the Creme Egg in action (Joseph spent seven months on this project!):

Click over to the NYT article to see a video of his new contraption, the “Page Turner” in action. Pretty cool stuff. I wonder how many broken vases he went through before he got it right.

Ansel Adams and Group f/64

readingbyeugene 2 Comments

On November 15, 1932, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, eleven photographers announced themselves as Group f/64: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston.

The name f/64 derives from the smallest aperture available in large-format view cameras at the time, and it signaled the group’s belief that photographs should celebrate, rather than disguise, the medium’s capacity to present the world “as it is.” As Edward Weston phrased it, “The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.”

The group’s effort to present the camera’s “vision” as clearly as possible included advocating the use of aperture f/64 in order to achieve the greatest depth of field possible, thus allowing for the entire scene photographed to be sharp and in focus (by comparison, modern day lenses for SLR cameras usually taper off at f/22 or f/32 aperture).

Following is the manifesto of Group f/64:

The name of this Group is derived from a diaphragm number of the photographic lens. It signifies to a large extent the qualities of clearness and definition of the photographic image which is an important element in the work of members of this Group.

The chief object of the Group is to present in frequent shows what it considers the best contemporary photography of the West; in addition to the showing of the work of its members, it will include prints from other photographers who evidence tendencies in their work similar to that of the Group.

Group f/64 is not pretending to cover the entire of photography or to indicate through its selection of members any deprecating opinion of the photographers who are not included in its shows. There are great number of serious workers in photography whose style and technique does not relate to the metier of the Group.

Group f/64 limits its members and invitational names to those workers who are striving to define photography as an art form by simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods. The Group will show no work at any time that does not conform to its standards of pure photography. Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form. The production of the “Pictorialist,” on the other hand, indicates a devotion to principles of art which are directly related to painting and the graphic arts.

The members of Group f/64 believe that photography, as an art form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself.

As far as the how the group acquired its name, the story isn’t 100% clear. Per Wikipedia:

There is some difference of opinion about how the group was named. Van Dyke recalled that he first suggested the name “US 256”, which was then the commonly-used Uniform System designation for a very small aperture stop on a camera lens. According to Van Dyke, Adams thought the name would be confusing to the public, and Adams suggested “f/64”, which was a corresponding aperture setting for the focal system that was gaining popularity. However, in an interview in 1975 Holder recalled that he and Van Dyke thought up the name during a ferry ride from Oakland to San Francisco.

The history of the group is fascinating. And while we may agree that Ansel Adam’s photograph has withstood the test of time as some of the best landscape photography the world has ever seen, the group’s definition of pure photography as defined by “possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form” would face opposition from many modern-day photographers. That’s because the process of choosing aperture, composition, ISO, and so on may considered an artistic process. If I choose to shoot a long exposure of a waterfall in the daytime, have I misrepresented reality? If your eyes can’t envision a blurring of water but the camera can, am I deceiver the viewer? While there are technical points that one must understand as a photographer, the actual application of the technical process process is unique.

Airline Safety Pamphlets as Art

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Avi Steinberg’s post “The Unlikely Event” at The Paris Review is fantastic. He analyzes the relationship between airline safety cards and art:

The best airline-safety-card artists know how to amplify these details without creating too much noise. They are, after all, artists. They work within and bend the conventions of their form by playing with allusions to earlier work. Take, for example, a current US Airways safety card that portrays the conventional water flotation scene. We see a beautiful woman, with lush red hair, floating effortlessly, gazing ahead in an attitude of easeful melancholy. The airline artist has recruited Dante Rossetti’s 1877 Mary Magdalene, with perhaps an ironic nod to Botticelli’s Venus, as the heroine of our worst-case scenario. Thus the “fallen woman” motif is reimagined in the most urgent terms: this airline Magdalene is a woman who has quite literally fallen. And this is where we find her, floating in limbo, clutching a lily-white life preserver to her breast (instead of a vase, as in the 1877 portrait). Like Rossetti’s romantic Pre-Raphaelite Magdalene, this woman’s lowly state serves only to magnify her elemental beauty. Here she is, Our Lady of the Plane Crash. “I will make you fishers of men,” says the Christ. “We will rescue you in any corner of the globe,” says a Pan Am safety card. The fallen woman will not remain cast away forever—and, if we follow her lead, the artist assures us, neither will we. It is a pretty vision of earthly salvation.

My favorite part is this bit about the AeroMexico safety card that resembles René Magritte’s The Son of Man:

The artist behind a current AeroMexico safety card is not convinced. In an echo of The Son of Man, the 1964 painting by Belgian Surrealist René Magritte, the AeroMexico man is rendered in realistic detail—from rolled up sleeves to tousled hair—all of which is, however, a set up for the darkly comic punch line: the man has no face. This bit of surrealistic surgery, more than the yellow life preserver, is what we remember. It is plain to us that this creepily inanimate son of man is, in struggling to preserve his life, in some sense already dead.

Click through to see the whole post and the accompanying images.

Modernist Cuisine, or the Art and Science of Cooking

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Earlier this year, Modernist Cuisine was published, much to the fanfare of those who love to cook (and design aficionados). With a list price of $625 (though you can buy it on Amazon for the bargain price of $450), this six-volume, 2,400 page set reveals the art and science of cooking.

Last month, one of the authors of the book, Nathan Myhrvold (CEO and a founder of Intellectual Ventures, a firm dedicated to creating and investing in inventions) sat down with Edge.org and explained the premise of the book, who would want to read it, and offered a few thoughts on the publishing industry.

Cooking obeys the laws of physics, in particular chemistry. Yet it is quite possible to cook without understanding it. You can cook better if you do understand what is going on, particularly if you want to deviate from the ways that people have cooked before. If you want to follow a recipe exactly, slavishly, what the hell, you can do it without understanding it. As a rote automaton, you can say, “yes, I mixed this, I cook at this temperature” and so forth. But if you want to do something really different, if you want to go color outside the lines, if you want to go outside of the recipe, it helps if you have some intuition as to how things work.

For this book, we set out to describe the science of cooking — and do so in a very visual way. Other people like Harold McGee, in 1984, wrote a book called On Food and Cooking, which is a seminal work that started a whole trend of people explaining the science of cooking to both average people and chefs. Therefore we were not the first, but we decided that we would have a more visual description. We would first explain how traditional cooking actually works and then use that as a springboard to talk about more modern cooking techniques and how you can use them.

Not only have we written a book, but we have written a paper-based book — we don’t have an electronic edition. There are a couple of reasons for that. The first is that every task should have the best appropriate technology deployed behind it. If you want to deploy large, beautiful, high-resolution pictures to people in the world of cooking, there is no better platform in 2011 than a paper book.

This is an interesting perspective on the book. The mindset for publishing this book is similar to Steve Jobs’s thought process behind his products (When asked how much market research Apple did for the iPad, Jobs boldly answered: “None. It’s not the customers’ jobs to know what they want.”). Anyway, Myhrvold explains:

I’m not sure actually who is going to buy and read the book. We’ve created this without focus groups. There are two fundamental approaches you can take to designing a book or any product for that matter. You can run all kinds of focus groups and do market research and ask yourself, “what do people want?” There are a lot of very successful products that are made that way. Or you can say, “I’m going to follow my own curiosity and vision and make the book that I would love to have and hope someone agrees.” That is the algorithm that we took for this book.

On the remarkable effort to get this book completed:

At peak we had 36 people full time working on the book. We had about 18 for a period of 3.5 years overall. Now, that is wonderful and it has some issues. The wonderful part is that you benefit from everybody’s knowledge and you get pushed in ways that you wouldn’t have gotten pushed otherwise. There are lot of things where I would have said, “oh, forget it, we don’t need to do that,” but somebody else got excited about it and by the time I realized it, we had already done it.

The bad part is you have to negotiate things. You have to make decisions as a team. Somebody has to be Solomon and cut the baby sometimes and say, yes, that is enough. You may think that we didn’t have very many “No” decisions given that we have 2,400 pages. But in fact there was a ton of stuff we left out because I didn’t want to have 24,000 pages. Running a book project as a team is unusual and of course, it’s unheard of for novels.

On comparing publishing to various restaurants:

Producing the book is different. The world of publishing has been so oriented around inexpensive books, which is wonderful in many ways. It’s great that the world is focused on cheap things that you can sell to lots of people. But image a world of restaurants where the only restaurants were chain restaurants that were in malls, where Ruth’s Chris was the most high-end restaurant in the country? Not that Ruth’s Chris is bad. I go there and it’s a great thing. But Ruth’s Chris and PF Chang’s are not the sum total of the restaurant world.

But publishing executives want their books to be at best Ruth’s Chris. In fact, they would really prefer the Cheesecake Factory. So cookbooks are all made to be the Cheesecake Factory of restaurants. The Cheesecake Factory is great, I am not denigrating it. But it is wonderful that there is an El Bulli, that there is a Per Se, there is a Le Bernardin, a Daniel, that there’s a Momofuku, that there’s a variety of restaurants that in their own way, some very high end, some not particular expensive or high end, but it’s that cultural richness that makes the world of food fantastic.

I haven’t bought the book (nor can I afford to), but I find the purpose behind this book fascinating. Do read the whole conversation at Edge.org.

On the Origin of Spray Paint

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

The editors of New York Times Magazine unveiled a new section this weekend titled Who Made That?. And starting off this weekend, they dove into the origin of spray paint. Have you ever wondered who created spray paint?

The spray-paint can, however, has eminently practical origins. Ed Seymour, the proprietor of a Sycamore, Ill., paint company, was in search of an easy way to demonstrate his aluminum coating for painting radiators. His wife suggested a makeshift spray gun, like those used for deodorizers. And so, in 1949, Seymour mixed paint and aerosol in a can with a spray head. As it turned out, compressing paint in a can made for a nice finish.

Seymour’s humble creation quickly proved so popular that Seymour of Sycamore began customizing its own manufacturing equipment and eventually expanded into new businesses, including the auto and industrial-machine markets. Soon afterward, home-furnishing heavyweights like Rust-Oleum and Krylon jumped in. And by 1973, Big Spray was producing 270 million cans annually in the U.S., according to the Consumer Specialty Products Association. Last year, U.S. spray-paint manufacturers produced 412 million cans.

This is an interesting bit about European companies catering to spray can artists:

Companies like Montana, based in Spain; Molotow, based in Germany; and Ironlak, based in Australia, were pleased to associate with street artists. They offered professional-grade enhancements too, like different kinds of valves that emit different types of mists. (Some artists now complain that American alternatives are like buying a tube of paint with only one brush.) “The control you can get with the can, from the pressure, is phenomenal,” Gastman said.

Such innovation is not without blowback. Some spray writers dismiss the European brands as “fancy paint,” and in pursuit of lost authenticity, stick to Krylon, which is based in Ohio, and Rust-Oleum, which is located outside Chicago. “American writers really want to be loyal to Rusto,” Neelon said. “Rust-Oleum is like the Ford F-150 of spray paint. It’s the workingman’s paint.”

Who Made That? is a series that I’m definitely going to be paying attention to.

###

Some food for thought: is graffiti created with spray paint considered art or vandalism? Sound off in the comments.


The Mona Lisa: 100 Year Anniversary of Its Theft

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

One hundred years ago today (August 21, 1911), it was a quiet Monday morning in Paris, France. The Louvre, arguably the world’s most famous art museum, was closed for the day. But three men were running away from the Louvre: Vincenzo Perugia and the brothers Vincenzo Lancelotti and Michele Lancelotti.

They had arrived to the Louvre on Sunday afternoon and managed to find a hiding space in a small storeroom near the Salon Carré, a gallery stuffed with Renaissance paintings. They spent the night. In the morning, wearing white workmen’s smocks, they had gone into the Salon Carré. They seized a small painting off the wall. Quickly, they ripped off its glass shadow box and frame and Perugia hid it under his clothes.

And so The Mona Lisa was stolen.

Remarkably, it took more than 24 hours for anyone to notice that the painting had been stolen. Granted, at the time, the Louvre had lax security and The Mona Lisa wasn’t even the most famous item in the museum.

My favourite piece of trivia about the theft: the artist Pablo Picasso was considered a suspect in the theft of the Mona Lisa; he was brought in for questioning but promptly released.

The Mona Lisa would not be found for 28 months. The best account I’ve read recounting the story of Mona Lisa’s theft is this brilliant, must-read piece in Vanity Fair.

Italo Calvino on Photography

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

I always find it fascinating when authors incorporate their academic thoughts into works of fiction.

I came across this this story by Italo Calvino titled “The Adventures of a Photographer,” found in his novel Difficult Loves. In it, we follow Antonino Paraggi, who is described as a non-photographer. Feeling isolated, he picks up the camera and begins to shoot. The story is short, and perhaps unrealistic (what of finding love through a model shoot?), but I wanted to highlight a couple of noteworthy passages.

Is it possible to use an extracurricular endeavor, such as photography, to discover ones faults, misgivings, and dissatisfactions in life? Calvino makes the case that it is so:

It must be said that his examination of photography to discover the causes of a private dissatisfaction—as of someone who feels excluded from something—was to a certain extent a trick Antonino played on himself, to avoid having to consider another, more evident, process that was separating him from his friends. What was happening was this: his acquaintances, of his age, were all getting married, one after another, and starting families, while Antonino remained a bachelor.

Have you encountered parents who become obsessed with photography because they think that if there’s a moment of their child’s life that they don’t capture, it will be lost forever?

Given the speed of growth, it becomes necessary to photograph the child often, because nothing is more fleeting and unmemorable than a six-month-old infant, soon deleted and replaced by one of eight months, and then one of a year; and all the perfection that, to the eyes of parents, a child of three may have reached cannot prevent its being destroyed by that of the four-year-old. The photograph album remains the only place where all these fleeting perfections are saved and juxtaposed, each aspiring to an incomparable absoluteness of its own.

Antonino’s argument here is interesting, but flawed:

For the person who wants to capture everything that passes before his eyes, the only coherent way to act is to snap at least one picture a minute, from the instant he opens his eyes in the morning to when he goes to sleep. This is the only way that the rolls of exposed film will represent a faithful diary of our days, with nothing left out. If I were to start taking pictures, I’d see this thing through, even if it meant losing my mind. But the rest of you still insist on making a choice. What sort of choice? A choice in the idyllic sense, apologetic, consolatory, at peace with nature, the fatherland, the family. Your choice isn’t only photographic; it is a choice of life, which leads you to exclude dramatic conflicts, the knots of contradiction, the great tensions of will, passion, aversion. So you think you are saving yourselves from madness, but you are falling into mediocrity, into hebetude.

I find it hard to believe that there is a person who wants to capture “everything” — that is impossible. Secondly, one would not use a still camera in this instance, but would shoot a film. On this topic, I highly suggest reading “While the Women Are Sleeping,” which I previously discussed here. The central obsession of shooting continuously in the two stories is very, perhaps eerily, similar.

And this is probably the best passage in the story. Can the photographed reality be better (i.e., more visually appealing, more engrossing, more ethereal, more subjective, etc.) than reality itself? I’ve previously noted, with my photography, that it’s often the case (because I sometimes envision a scene as I would like it to look, and complete my mental image in post-processing).

Photographed reality immediately takes on a nostalgic character, of joy fled on the wings of time, a commemorative quality, even if the picture was taken the day before yesterday. And the life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself. To believe that the snapshot is more true than the posed portrait is a prejudice…

###
Hat tip to @escapeintolife for posting a link to this story on Twitter.