Just a selection of this year’s creations. The last two pictures are the same eggs from front and from back.
©Charly, all rights reserved, click for full size.
©Charly, all rights reserved, click for full size.
©Charly, all rights reserved, click for full size.
©Charly, all rights reserved, click for full size.
Installation view of Indecline’s “The People’s Prison” (2018) at the Trump International Hotel & Tower (all photos by Jason Goodrich for Indecline and used with permission, unless indicated otherwise).
Robert Mueller may not have succeeded in bringing Donald Trump to justice yet, but for a fleeting few hours Friday night, the shadowy art collective Indecline did what millions of people in the US and beyond have dreamed of doing since November 2016: they put Trump behind bars.
It may not have been the actual maximum security prison of our collective dreams, but Indecline — most recently known for surreptitiously staging a graveyard at Trump’s Bedminister Golf Course, hanging a troupe of “Ku Klux Klowns,” and previously for planting naked Trump statues in multiple cities during the 2016 election — managed to stage a prison cell installation, dubbed “The People’s Prison,” in a suite on the third floor of the Trump International Hotel & Tower next to Columbus Circle. The work was installed in less than 24 hours, entirely undercover, and without the knowledge of hotel employees, who unwittingly helped carry all of the props and equipment to the room.
Installation view of Indecline’s “The People’s Prison” (2018) at the Trump International Hotel & Tower.
Surrounding the one-man prison cell were portraits rendered on American flags, burned and tattered at the edges, each illuminated with its own individual lamp. Indecline worked with 12 artists — including Molly Crabapple, Ann Lewis, LMNOPI, and the Panic Collective — to create the portraits of 12 artists and activists from across history, including Muhammad Ali, Leonard Peltier, Angela Davis, Hunter S. Thompson, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and even more contemporary figures like Erica Garner and Edward Snowden. Interviews with each of the portrait subjects played for the duration of the show over a background soundtrack of strangely relaxing ambient music.
All of the figures in the portraits, an Indecline spokesman told Hyperallergic, are “activists and fighters that we look up to. Activists that made a difference and made a good point. He has to sit here with the people who actually made a difference.” The spokesman continued: “Everyone on these walls fought to make this flag stand for something greater than it does currently under the Trump administration … they’re the ones who should be regarded as historical figures.”
Colloquial Czech does not distinguish between a foot and a leg. The word “noha” normally refers to the whole limb from the hips down. Medical terminology differs from this and the word “noha” means only the foot, and “dolní končetina” is used for the whole limb. Professor Kos has hammered this point home throughout multiple lectures and we were suspecting that if someone were to use the term “noha” in its colloquial sense during an exam, it would be an insta-fail.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Legs and feet are our means of movement, so they are very important. It is therefore important to look after them. Which, regarding the bones, means adequate exercise and not more than the body can handle.
What ordinary people do not usually know is that bones are not fixed structures. They are consumed from within and regrown throughout our lives. That way they can heal, but also change shape. That way they can also get injured in a rather peculiar fashion.
One of the stories Professor Kos was telling was a story of “march fractures”. Fresh army recruits, especially those from cities who were not accustomed to walking a lot, were often complaining about pains in their legs and feet bones after long marches. Initially they were deemed as pretenders becaue the x-rays looked normal, but some of them broke their legs when forced to go on. Then someone took a magnifying glass to an x-ray of the alleged pretenders legs and feet and noticed microscopic fractures developing before a clearly visible fracture occurred.
These are so-called fatigue fractures and they happen when a bone is deprived of nutrients. The bone continues to be consumed at a normal rate, but it does not manage to regrow back fast enough. Over time these tiny deficits accumulate and the bone starts to hurt and can even break.
A colleague of mine has developed just that in her foot during nordic walking strolls that were just a bit too much, too sudden and too long for her. It took a few weeks to develop and over a year to heal, with a surgery and a very long rehab being necessary.
Too much exercise is just as bad as none.
Coloured pencils on paper, 42×59 cm.
©Charly, all rights reserved, click for full size.
Sandro Botticelli, “The Birth of Venus,” tempera on canvas (c. 1486, via Wikimedia).
Egg tempera! A time honoured technique. Many artists have at least played with egg tempera, even if they later chose a more modern and convenient medium. Karen Chernick at Hyperallergic has an article on how to source the very best egg you can for making your paints.
…But there’s also a centuries-old artistic tradition of painting using the eggs themselves. Egg tempera was a ubiquitous technique during the early Italian Renaissance, when it was considered the standard for portable easel paintings. Botticelli, Raphael, and Andrew Wyeth all painted with tempera. Today, the quick-drying medium, which employs a 50/50 blend of egg yolk and color pigment, is mostly in use by a brave few contemporary practitioners (who must not mind the smell of aging eggs in the studio).
These seasoned artists know what to look for in the perfect paint-worthy egg. Some of them, such as Mary Frances Dondelinger, have been known to use hundreds of eggs a month. Others are regulars at particular farmers’ markets, or swear by a specific brand of store-bought eggs. Just in case you’re not able to raise your own hen (which most agree is the very best option), here’s your guide to sourcing the ideal egg, according to six contemporary egg tempera painters.
We do not celebrate any religious holiday, but they are a good excuse for my mom to go on a gingerbread-baking spree. They are beautiful and delicious, and each year she comes up with new designs and styles. I do not know how she does it.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Cy Twombly, “Untitled (Gaeta)” (1989), acrylic and tempera on paper mounted on wooden panel, 80 × 58 5/8 inches, Private Collection, © Cy Twombly Foundation. Courtesy Gagosian.
In her essay, “Cy was here: Cy’s up” (ArtForum, September 1994), Rosalind Krauss made this observation about Cy Twombly:
Twombly “misreads” Pollock’s mark as graffiti, as violent, as a type of antiform. And this misreading becomes the basis of all of Twombly’s work. Thus he cannot write “Virgil” on a painting and mean it straight. “Virgil” is there as something a bored or exasperated school-child would carve into a desktop, a form of sniggering, a type of retaliation against the teacher’s drone.
This reading of Twombly fits in with the commonplace critical narrative that the past is dead, and that it is only good for appropriation and ironic commentary but not much else. Krauss’s condescension towards Twombly is evident in her use of the descriptors, “bored or exasperated schoolchild.” In her neat hierarchical construction — a negative way of thinking that is recurrent in criticism and politics — Jackson Pollock resides at the top of the food chain while Twombly sits, at best, somewhere in the middle.
Krauss is not alone in her need to construct hierarchies. There are still lots of critics, curators, and artists content to ally themselves with established viewpoints as well as assert for the umpteenth time that painting and drawing are things that have been used up, that they are old threadbare coats that should been thrown out long ago. This is capitalist aesthetics in a nutshell — everything is disposable.
Cy Twombly: In Beauty It is Finished: Drawings 1951-2008 continues at Gagosian Gallery (522 West 21st Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through April 25.
John Yau has an excellent look at Cy Twombly and his work, well worth reading.
This first in a series of human anatomy sheets that I have drawn during my studies. As future biology teacher I had to acquire some basic knowledge about most of biology – sort of jack of all trades, master of none. However our class was one of the last where human anatomy was taught by a prominent Czech physician and scientist Profesor MuDr. Jaroslav Kos. He was eighty years old at that time and it was showing, however he still was formidable and very strict. I failed my first exam miserably, I do not even remember what the theme of the examination was. I think brain stem? Nevermind, it took me two attempts to pass and for the second attempt I really sat and learned latin like my life depended on it. He did not even let me finish on my second attempt and waved me away with top grade after I described how nervus olfactorius consists of multiple separated fila going straight through lamina cribosa directly into the bulbus olfactorius of the brain. I forgot most of my medical latin over time, but I still remember this.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
A fun fact about spine – the “S” shape of our spine and all accompanying problems it brings stem from the fact that it originally evolved for movement in water and later on land with lateral undulations, which was later yet modified for movement on land on all four with vertical undulations, which was even later modified for upright movement on hind limbs only. The spine was definitively not intelligently designed for vertical posture and load bearing. Evolution has done its best, but that is always “just enough”.
©Charly, all rights reserved.
This is a coloured sketch to one of my paintings. I cannot unfortunately make a picture of the final painting, because I gave it to my brother who now lives 400 km from me. All the paintings I gave him are at the moment not fulfilling their function, because my sister in law has stashed them away. They “do not fit with the color scheme of their new appartment” which I did not take kindly, because they could keep the paintings during the renovations in mind if they wanted to. Click for full size.
A bummer – I have just reminded myself that a lot of my sketches are ruined or damaged. A few years ago I was reconstructing the roof and the workers have moved my stuff around without heeding my instructions. The impromptu cover was also built sloppily and my warnings that I live in very windy area were dismissed as needles worrying of an amateur. Inevitably the drawings were stashed under the impromptu cover which got ripped off in a gust of wind. And rain poured on them. I only found out a few months after they left, when everything was mouldy.
It would take a lot of time to airbrush it in Photoshop, so some of the pictures will unfortunately have maps on them.
Lately, I’ve been working on the floor, so this is my fault, but slobbery dogs, aaaaauuuugh. One of the doors in my studio opens onto the lav, and the door was open. I go in for around 10 seconds, and Jayne promptly stands over the painting and drools. Now he’s sleeping the sleep of the innocent (What? I didn’t do anything! Why are you yelling? Can I have a treat?)
Foundation is a grid-less, sprawling medieval city building simulation with a heavy focus on organic development, monument construction and resource management.
The game features in-depth resource management akin to the Anno (Dawn of Discovery) series, expertly mixed with city building elements from Settlers, SimCity, and Pharaoh all topped with narrative encounters inspired by Crusader Kings II to create the ultimate medieval ant-farm simulation!
In this strategy city-builder economy simulation game, players must create a prosperous settlement as the newly appointed lord of a region untouched by man.
Setting to redefine the city-builder genre, Foundation puts the emphasis on the organic aspects of urbanism in the cities of old, powered by Polymorph Games’ in-house game engine, Hurricane, which allows for full mod support and is optimized for the thousands of moving parts that come with building humongous cities.
Among other things, the engine provides the player with robust building tools to create countless unique monuments that can then integrated into your settlement.
With medieval architecture and urbanism at the forefront of its design, Foundation’s vision is to allow players to recreate cities of that period as they envision them or even as they really were.
You can read and see more about Foundation at Medievalists, or just head straight to the Kickstarter, which has garnered much more than the initial ask.
One of the new Banksy murals in Midwood, Brooklyn. Benjamin Sutton.
Banksy’slatest series of interventions in the New York City streetscape continued apace today. This afternoon the artist revealed on Instagram that a mural in the Midwood section of Brooklyn that had come to widespread attention last week is in fact his doing.
The mural is a characteristically coy commentary on capitalism, although it is accompanied by a smaller piece that depicts a seal. The pair is located in Midwood, at Coney Island Avenue and Avenue I. The larger one features what looks like a real estate developer (equipped with both a briefcase and a hardhat) brandishing a whip in the shape a rising red line graph, while a procession of children, a woman, an elderly person, and a dog flee. Nearby, a smaller mural whose connection to the theme of gentrification is indecipherable, features a seal balancing a ball — formed by the unpainted circle where a sign used to hang — on its nose.
It’s always interesting, tracking Banksy, and this is no exception. Benjamin Sutton at Hyperallergic has the story.
The Great wall of Namib. © Paranyu Pithayarungsarit, Thailand, Shortlist, Open, Landscape & Nature (2018 Open competition), 2018 Sony World Photography Awards.
Oh, such amazing photography, glimpses of all the worlds within our world! I had to bookmark, because I have too much to do today and I have to be good and asleep early (5:30am wake up), but I’ll work my way through eventually. Have a wander and see wonders!
This was via Atlas Obscura, which highlighted twelve landscapes, including the one above.