Gothic Boxwood Miniatures.

Pure amazement and awe here. If you have the chance to take this in, take it!

Gothic Boxwood Miniatures.

Gothic Boxwood Miniatures.

In the video, Pete Dandridge, conservator and administrator in the Department of Objects Conservation, reveals the wizardry behind the creation of a miniature boxwood prayer bead. Through his collaboration with Lisa Ellis—conservator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Art Gallery of Ontario—the techniques of the 16th-century carvers are fully understood for the first time.

Produced in conjunction with the exhibition Small Wonders: Gothic Boxwood Miniatures, on view at The Met Cloisters from February 22 through May 21, 2017.

Featured Object:
Prayer bead with the Adoration of the Magi and the Crucifixion, early 16th century. Netherlandish. Boxwood, Open: 4 1/2 x 3 1/4 x 1 1/8 in. (11.2 × 8.1 × 2.7 cm); Closed: 2 3/8 x 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 in. (5.8 x 5.5 x 5.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.475)

 

That’s not all! There’s a virtual reality tour of these tiny wonders, too.

In Small Wonders: The VR Experience, now at Met Cloisters in New York City, visitors are presented with one of these boxwood carvings—created some 500 years ago by an unknown artist—that is blown up to a much larger proportion. It can be exploded and collapsed, and participants are free to walk in and around it. The incredibly small details are now large enough that viewers can see just how this artwork, which depicts Heaven and Hell, was carved and assembled into a sphere that opens like a locket.

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/small-wonders * Small Wonders: The VR experience.

Cool Stuff Friday.

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Spirited Away. Chihiro eats an onigiri.

If you’ve never been to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, out in the Western suburbs of Tokyo, now would be a good time to plan your trip. The museum is planning an upcoming, year-long special exhibition that will focus on the many food-related scenes from all of Studio Ghibli films.

Meals and food play an incredibly important role in almost every Studio Ghibli film. In Laputa, Pazu splits his egg on bread in half and shares it with Sheeta. By doing so, the two become closer. In Spirited Away, Chihiro eats an onigiri and gains the courage to face her uphill struggle. In Howl’s Moving Castle, the characters become like family when they surround a dinner table over a meal of eggs and bacon.

Taberu wo kaku (which roughly translates to Drawing Eating) begins May 27, 2017 and will be on view through May 2018 so you’ll have plenty of time to see it. The exhibition will be largely separated into 2 sections – one on eating and one on cooking – and will detail the many ways Studio Ghibli animators brought their foods to life.

Via Spoon & Tamago.

Designer Mark Noad.

Designer Mark Noad.

The triggering of Article 50 last week means that Brexit is a certainty – and that the UK will need a new passport. Luckily last week also saw the judging for our unofficial Brexit passport design competition… here is a look at the nine proposals shortlisted by our judges.

We received over 200 entries from 34 different countries. The youngest entrant was 12 years old and the oldest was 83. Most submissions were from architects and designers but there were also entries from non-designers, students, retired people and unemployed people. Below are the nine designs that most impressed our judges ahead of the announcement of the winner on 11 April: [Click on over to see all the finalists, or watch the video below.]

Images are by Achilleas Souras and Alessandro Paderni.

Images are by Achilleas Souras and Alessandro Paderni.

Images are by Achilleas Souras and Alessandro Paderni.

Images are by Achilleas Souras and Alessandro Paderni.

Artist Achilleas Souras used hundreds of discarded life jackets to assemble an igloo for Moroso’s SOS Save Our Souls installation at Milan design week.

The 16-year-old, who has already shown a similar igloo at the Maritime Museum of Barcelona, used jackets collected from the shores of Lesbos – the Greek island that has become a regular landing place for refugees entering Europe.

While his first igloo used 52 jackets, his SOS Save Our Souls structure is made from 1,000 abandoned garments. Souras cut and folded the jackets to resemble blocks of ice before assembling them together.

The resulting waterproof structure is intended as both a shelter and a welcome point for arriving migrants.

“The refugee crisis was simply a set of numbers on the news,” said the artist, who was born in London and now resides in Barcelona.

“But when I picked a jacket up, it stopped being just material. When you hold the jacket in your hand and you smell the sea, you look at things through a different prism and you realise that every jacket represents a human life.”

“The refugees, the homeless, and the less privileged cannot be ‘out of sight, out of mind’ anymore,” added Souras, who hopes his igloos could eventually be used in rescue operations.

“These are global issues that affect us all, and we must try to solve them for everyone’s sake.”

You can see much more here.

The Hat’s Limitation.

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A collaborative project between architect Kosaku Matsumoto and Japan Braid Hat Mfg. Co., ltd.

Japan Braid Hat is known for making blade hats (or Sanada hat) woven with fabric tape and natural grass straw in a swirl-like pattern. Unlike hats made by sewing, they are woven seamlessly together and completely jointless. The hat has an elegant simplicity of shape and form that made feasible to increase the hat’s scale to the limit. How big can a hat really be?

The outcome of this experiment was a hat five times larger than the standard, stretching the technical limit of the craftsman, and extending the very definition of we can see as a hat. It has been expanded so much that the brim cannot bear its own weight, draping toward the ground to cascade and wrap the whole body of who wears it. Like a coat, a veil, or a small, sculptural tent, the hat gives various fluid impressions according to the way it is worn.

By challenging the very definition and the limitation of a hat, the work attempts to discover a scale of new functions and design possibilities in what we understand as a blade hat.

Photo by Nobutada OMOTE.

You can see much more at Kosaku Matsumoto. Via Spoon & Tamago.

Why Is It Always Women?

Francien Krieg.

Francien Krieg.

The Creators Project has a feature on artist Francien Krieg, who has a series of nudes of elderly women. Aging bodies are hardly anything new in art, but there’s always a fuss. Yes, we all get to see just how much sway aging and gravity have on our bodies, and experience the sad wistfulness in the remembrance of a young, limber body, when the days stretched in front of you seemed eternal. It doesn’t take long before your bits make a rush to hit the ground, and it can be a hell of a lot of work to stave that off for as long as possible. The portrayal of the bodies of old people often elicit a revulsion from those who are young, simply because it hasn’t occurred to them yet that, yeah, if you live long enough, that will happen to you too. I remember that shock happening to me, when in my teens, I had to help my great-grandmother get dressed. That was an eye-opener. Now I’m 59, and my arse is making every effort to fall down to the floor and stay there. I’m not quite ready to let that happen, so it’s an ongoing fight.

So, old bodies. I understand the reasons for depictions, even those done for short-term shock value. What I don’t understand is why it’s always women. Can we not get out from under the constant pressure of sexist judgment in old age? Do we need to be paraded for the “ohgods eeeeuuuw” crowd? Where are all the naked old men, who are also just as subject to gravity as us women. A pair of 80 year old testicles aren’t any more fun to contemplate than 80 year old breasts; and depending on the old man in question, he might have comparable breasts to an old woman’s. I think such portraiture is fine, but I would like to see men included, and I’d prefer to see people who were proud and confident in posing, despite their age.

You can read and see more here, NSFW.

Conservation Lab: Renaissance Cabinet.

French Renaissance Cabinet from Burgundy, dated 1580 (minor additions in late 1850s), from the J. Paul Getty Museum collection.

French Renaissance Cabinet from Burgundy, dated 1580 (minor additions in late 1850s), from the J. Paul Getty Museum collection.

Conservators look through microscopes to gather information about an object’s composition and construction—and on a regular day in the lab, knowing such things is an end unto itself. “It’s just interesting, that’s all,” one conservator once told me. When an object’s history is uncertain, however, those scientific results take on layers of meaning, each a potential bit of evidence that can help solve the mystery. In 2001, conservators at the J. Paul Getty Museum undertook a thorough reexamination of a massive French cabinet long believed to be a fake: a 19th century piece designed to resemble Renaissance-era handiwork. Zooming in on a single brass tack turned out to yield important clues as to the cabinet’s making, and helped prove its authenticity.

When J. Paul Getty purchased the cabinet in 1971 for $1,700, curators warned against the acquisition. The cabinet’s pristine condition aroused suspicions, as did the coating of colored wax on its surface, which suggested someone had tried to make it appear older than it was. Experts concluded that the piece was likely produced in the 19th century, when Renaissance-style furniture was all the rage among American industrialist tycoons—prompting many fakes to voyage across the Atlantic. Even the cabinet’s excessively florid style worked against it: “A present-day tendency to associate heavy forms, sharp carving and dense decorative detail with neo-Renaissance cabinetry perhaps explains why further suspicions arose. The decoration almost suggests 19th century horror vacui,” noted curator Jack Hinton and conservator Arlen Heginbotham in a 2006 article about the object.

Heginbotham looked past all that noisy decoration and zeroed in on the science. Dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, showed that the oak tree used in the object’s construction was harvested in the mid-1570s, and the surface wood and interior silk lining were carbon dated to the 15th and 16th centuries. Conservators then focused on the brass tacks used to attach the silk lining, whose appearance under the microscope—centuries later—would determine the date of their making.

You can see and read much more about this at The Creators Project.

A Few Words from Alan Cumming…

#ArtAgainstHate PLEASE SHARE by reposting, or volunteer if you would like to partake in this project. Help build a community with us by raising awareness of the bullying this administration is enabling. Find empowerment in the words they call you. In these chaotic times it’s easy to lose grasp of hope for this troubled country. Yet if we open our hearts and our minds to the lush array of souls and energy that surround us every day we can find common ground. And if we advocate others to try their best to learn just one positive thing about that person who may seem so alien on the surface, perhaps we all will discover that beneath the masks that we hide behind are actually more similarities than differences. And one by one, may we shed these words of hate that are spawned by fear of the unknown. #Model: @alancummingsnaps #Photographers: @StevenTrumon & @GINGERB3ARDMAN #MAKEUP: @makeupartbynoel #Retouch Collab: @shinehorovits #ArtistsAgainstTyranny #SpreadTheWord #LoveTrumpsHate #AmericaTheBeautiful #UnitedNotDivided

A post shared by Alan Cumming (@alancummingsnaps) on

#ArtAgainstHate PLEASE SHARE by reposting, or volunteer if you would like to partake in this project. Help build a community with us by raising awareness of the bullying this administration is enabling. Find empowerment in the words they call you. In these chaotic times it’s easy to lose grasp of hope for this troubled country. Yet if we open our hearts and our minds to the lush array of souls and energy that surround us every day we can find common ground. And if we advocate others to try their best to learn just one positive thing about that person who may seem so alien on the surface, perhaps we all will discover that beneath the mask we hide behind are actually more similarities than differences. And one by one, may we shed these words of hate that are spawned by fear of the unknown.

Source.

Looking for Knives.

Morissa Maltz.

Morissa Maltz.

Visiting Hot Springs, Arkansas is like walking into the past. A city stuck in time, it’s known as much for its history and naturally heated springs buildings as its mix of 1800s architecture and Art Deco—structures that are slowly crumbling yet still magical. One of the city’s iconic buildings, the gigantic and once abandoned Majestic Hotel, was recently demolished. A week before its dismantling, however, artist and filmmaker Morissa Maltz shot a video inside the hotel. Equal parts documentary, performance art piece, and music video for Dyan’s “Looking for Knives,” it is the final document of a space that held huge amounts of history.

In “Looking for Knives,” Maltz’s camera drifts through the hotels innards. Though The Majestic suffered a fire in 2014, the video focuses instead on paint peeling off walls and floors turning into dirt. Inspired by female artists like Pipilotti Rist, Francesca Woodman, and Maya Deren, for whom the body expresses emotion inside a space, Maltz also performs in the video, moving through the hotel’s crumbling corridors and interacting with its surfaces.

A lovely, haunting video and song. You can read and see more at The Creators Project.

The War Over the Blackest Black.

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^That is Vantablack, a ferocious matte black which absorbs 99.96% of the light that hits it, and no matter what’s underneath Vantablack, it looks flat and completely empty. Vantablack was extremely exciting in artist’s circles when the news first broke, but it had barely broken before Anish Kapoor brokered an exclusivity deal. That didn’t go down well among artists. The world’s blackest black, and only available to one artist? Stuart Semple, another British artist, fought back with the World’s Pinkest Pink, and the Most Glittery Glitter, available to everyone except Kapoor. Now Semple has come out with Black 2.0, his answer to Vantablack 2.0:

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Before anyone starts scratching their heads over this, wondering WTF, yes, artists are rather obsessed with black, and in particular, a matte black which will eat light. It’s a thing, what can I say?
Black 2.0 is available to all, except Kapoor.

Now, with the recent release of Vantablack 2.0, which is the world’s newest blackest black, Semple has released his own newest blackest black. Called Black 2.0, Semple calls it “the most pigmented, flattest, mattest, black acrylic paint in the world.” Much like Vantablack, it’s able to turn 3D surfaces into flat-looking holes, but it’s not quite got the staring-into-the-abyss qualities of the original. (Or the laser-eating capabilities of Vantablack 2.0, which the researchers at NanoSystem have said is “so black that our spectrometers can’t measure it!”)

You can read all about the blackest of black wars here.

Sunday Facepalm: Jesus’s Nets of Neo-Porn.

Then-Bishop Vincenzo Paglia appears in an "erotic" net in his cathedral mural clutching another semi-nude man.

Then-Bishop Vincenzo Paglia appears in an “erotic” net in his cathedral mural clutching another semi-nude man.

A mural in a cathedral-church has gotten much attention, of the “blasphemous, disgusting, and demonic” kind. It is deliberately erotic, which is what has so many uptight knickers in a knot. Why, you can even sort of see Jesus’s tarse, oh no! Naturally, this isn’t just about the mural, it’s about Paglia’s oh-so-debased nature in designing a sex-ed class which was decried as “thoroughly immoral,” “entirely inappropriate,” and “quite tragic.”

Personally, I don’t see a problem with depicting people in a body-based manner, we are our bodies after all. When it comes to Christian thought, the idea is that while people might strive to overcome their carnal nature, this doesn’t happen until after death, and you get to heaven or wherever, yada, yada. In that sense, the mural would be accurate. Anyroad, this is being dragged into the limelight again, because Paglia has been promoted in the church.

Paglia commissioned homosexual Argentinean Ricardo Cinalli to paint the cathedral mural in 2007. It depicts Jesus carrying nets to heaven filled with naked and semi-nude homosexuals, transsexuals, prostitutes, and drug dealers, jumbled together in erotic interactions.

[…]

Dr. Ward questioned Paglia’s recent appointments to influential posts within the Vatican given his artistic sensibilities.

“Given that Archbishop Paglia is in the net of erotic figures going to heaven, and given that he discussed every detail with the painter, the question has to be asked by parents worldwide why was this man put in charge of a prototype of sex education aimed at Catholic children throughout the world?” he said.

“Catholic parents must look at the scale of evil [that has infiltrated the Church at the highest levels]. They have to wake up to what is going on: It’s a moral nuclear wasteland,” he added.

Christine Vollmer, president of the Latin American Alliance for the Family as well as a founding member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, called the mural “disgusting.”

[…]

Wilson said it is “incomprehensible” that Pope Francis appointed Paglia not only as head of the Academy for Life but also as the Grand Chancellor of the Saint John Paul II Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family. She also called it “scandalous” that he was selected to oversee the launching of the Vatican sex-education course for teens, a course that she said is “repulsive and destructive to the innocence of children” as well as “contrary to the true teachings of the Catholic Church.”

[…]

Catholic artist and author Michael D. O’Brien criticized the mural for giving the viewer the “false message” that “all sexual activity, regardless of how depraved, is blessed by God.”

You can read much more here.

Wrap My Hijab!

Mona Haydar, a Syrian Muslim-American poet and activist, released her first-ever single and rap music video in honor of the world’s first-ever Muslim Women’s Day on Mar 27 … all while she’s pregnant.

Given the current rise of Islamophobia around the world, Haydar wanted to fight the hate. And what better way to do that than with music?

“This song is a party,” Haydar wrote in a Facebook post.

After the song went live, some people began shaming Haydar and the other hijabis in the video for having fun, as they sing and dance away.

“So even if you hate it – I still wrap my hijab!” the lyrics say in anticipation of the hateful remarks.

But, Haydar did not let the hate ruin the moment, and instead kept on celebrating.

You can read more here. I think it’s a grand song!