Stray Hawkeye

Pretty cool effect that’s something like a flip book animation married to ghosting effects of a bad tv showing quick action in sports.

On the drive home from work, I saw a Honda Civic with the following on a bumper sticker:

Think about honking

if you [heart] conceptual art

I think in terms of flair which defines my neighborhood (Uptown), that may well take the top spot.  It knocks off the previous favorite, which I saw briefly after moving here, which was on an old VW bus and said something to the effect of:

Zero to sixty

in about twelve and a half minutes

I heard a while back (about a year ago, because, yes, I am about that far behind on some of the things I’ve been meaning to blog about) that Intermedia Arts, a local arts group/space/organization, was closing it’s gallery and laying off all of it’s full time staff because they, and the arts in general, were being hit particularly hard by the recession, and it was the only way to stay afloat.  From their website, it looks like they’re back in their space and hosting things again (admittedly I haven’t followed it all that closely), but I would tend to imagine selling art and managing galleries still isn’t exactly a booming enterprise as the moment, and that both artists and galleries are probably still squeezed pretty tightly.

Another fairly visible symptom of the recession that I’ve noticed is that there are lots more empty store fronts than usual.  Businesses close, and they leave their spaces empty, and it takes a bit longer for property owners to find someone else to rent the space.

So, putting two and two together, there are empty store fronts that look vacant and depressing, seem to be magnets for graffiti, and which are drawing no rent, and you have galleries closing and artists with no places (or less visible places at least) to sell their work or get it in front of people.  So, the free idea for this week is to set up some sort of organization / program to connect property owners and artist to display works in the front windows of empty store fronts until the space gets rented again.

Here’s a few reasons why I think this particular match up would work well for everyone.  First from the artists’ perspective:

• Your work is put in a place people are used to looking at to buy things and it gets it in front of people who may not generally go to galleries.  It’s not only a sales outlet, it’s advertising.
• In this idea, there wouldn’t be any active curator working at the store, just a locked store front with art in the windows and number to call if you wanted to buy something, or an email address, so the fees/commissions would be notably less than you would usually pay to galleries.  Also with the cheaper space and more of, there would be potential for many more artists to get exposure than usual.

From the property owner’s perspective:

• Though the rent may be notably less than if you had an actual tenant / business, it’s some income.  If the group that organizes this is set up as a charitable organization, you may be able to write off some of the difference for reduced rent (not sure about that part, but I would imagine).
• It keeps people looking at your space, noticing it, and thinking of it as a place where people sell stuff.  Again, basically free advertising.
• Reduced graffiti.  This one takes slightly more explaining.  From what I’ve seen, totally empty / basically abandoned store fronts get tagged pretty quickly.  Ones with “For Rent” signs get it slightly more slowly, but not much.  Murals almost never get tagged.  My guess is that this is because most people who tag and do graffiti on other people’s property think of themselves as artists (I think of them as jackasses, but that’s a topic for another day), and/or they have some resentment against corporations and/or they see it as much more justifiable to tag something that’s just a blank space than something that’s already decorated in some artful way.  So, my guess is that while abandoned looking store fronts get tagged in a hurry (making the property look worse, incurring costs for clean up, and making it harder to find a new tenant, because who wants to rent a place that looks like it gets tagged all the time / is in a rough neighborhood), ones that have art in the front of them, especially art from local, community artists, would get tagged much, much less.

Additional benefits / reasons these groups should love each other:

• Artist looking for a place to show their work will probably be much more flexible in lease dates.  If the property finds a tenant while there’s art in the windows, the art can be moved out and the new tenant in on basically no notice at all, especially if one art organization manages this for lots of artists and lots of spaces.  In effect the property owners don’t have to worry about losing any potential tenants.
• Without anyone being at the storefront on a regular basis, you might think theft would be a problem. However, I would have a hard time imagining it being too big of a problem, because unlike commodities such as TVs or cell phones or whatever, art’s pretty unique, and it would be hard to get any money out of reselling it without being detected.  Which means theft isn’t very profitable.  A good chunk of the worth of art is identifying who made it, and doing so is basically turning yourself in. And again, you have the fact that I would think most thieves would think it’s more justifiable to steal from a large corporation / store / chain than from a local artist who may well be just as financially hard up as they are.  Plus, if you rotate things through fairly often (once a week maybe, which would still be practically no labor cost), the space will still seem active.  Plus, if people get used to looking at it to see what’s new, people will look more, and probably report a broken window or other damage pretty quickly (another bonus for the property owner – casual strangers watching out for your store).  You could also have a very simple / cheap (maybe even fake for the deterrent factor) security camera pointed at the front window.
• The other obvious use along these lines would be advertising, but there’s lots of reasons this is better.  Basically this part ties back to the graffiti argument.  The only things that get vandalized faster than abandoned store fronts are Bebe ads.  Put some ads in an empty store front and it will look like a 3 year old playing with MS Paint in about 5 minutes.  The property owner might make a couple of bucks off the ads, but they’ll have a much higher liability for having to clean up graffiti later.  Beyond that, who wants to advertise their product in an empty store front?  Doesn’t really give the impression that most advertisers  want to get across about their product.  And, again, people tend to (at least consciously) tune out ads and/or purposely ignore them, where as art that’s new on a weekly basis would draw attention (I think).

Really, all you would need to get this going would be one or two people with a phone and the numbers of some local artists (or galleries that have artists they’re turning down) and some local property owners (and those number are already in lots of the store fronts).  The artists get exposure and potential sales, the landlords get at least some rent they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten and get it on a very flexible basis.  I would think there could be very low overhead / middleman costs, especially if a group like Intermedia Arts, or the Walker, or MIA (would seem to fit perfectly with their “Foot in the Door 4” exhibit), or MNartists.org, or Artspace were the ones to set it up, with a relatively low commission being charged on each work sold.

There could definitely be things I’m missing here as I’m neither a property owner nor involved in the business of selling art, but it seems like a win-win for everyone involved to me.  And really, it could be done any time, it just seems like there’s a lot more opportunity and need on both sides of the deal when the economy’s down.

Pleasantly trippy, though simple, Lego illusion.

Cute and clever diorama and detail (via The Brothers Brick).

Using Legos to mend walls.

Lego candles.

An absolutely enormous / insane (read: awesome) Lego aircraft carrier.

Nathan Sawaya makes all sorts of amazing Lego sculptures / art (found via Makezine).

A great/bad pun in Lego:

Attack of the Second Amendment from Jesus Diaz on Vimeo. Via Gizmodo.

On the slightly more serious side, here‘s a really interesting story from The New York Times about Lego as a company and the changes they’ve made and where they’re heading (via Kottke).  As much as I fully realize that things like that have to happen to keep the company afloat, it kind of makes me sick too.  I’ve bought Legos for birthdays and Christmas in recent years and each time it seems like they get more and more expensive, with almost no really little sets, and they’re so specialized that it’s hard to build much out of them aside from what’s on the front of the box.

I remember quite fondly Lego sets I had when I was little (okay, I still have some of them) that came with multiple sets of instructions for things to make out of them, and also had things pictured on the box that you could make which there weren’t instructions for, just to get the creative juices flowing a little more.

I sort of credit the old Lego sets with a lot of the way I look at thing (perhaps I had this view before I got Legos, and they just happened to fit in well, who knows).  Mostly, putting pieces together, taking things apart and rebuilding them, just seeing how things work, and being willing to mess with them a little.  I often explain my interest in computer programming in these terms – programming is Legos for adults.  (Legos are Legos for adults too, but we’re going for a metaphor here people.)  In programming, especially object oriented programming, you have all these different pieces you have to fit together and line up just right, and when you do, you have built a new toy to play with from the parts you had.  And you can combine them in all sorts of ways, and swap out pieces here and there, and build whole new things no one else has thought of yet.  And when you’re done, you can reuse it all and not have a mess.  And the building that happens is a mix of building with your hands, and planning it out in your head as you go, and adjusting as you run into problems.  In an overblown metaphoracal sense, Legos are life.

So, in closing, here’s a great, very simple Lego ad campaign (via Swiss Miss) that’s the way I like to remember them.

There’s a few artists out there who make really cool 3D looking drawings with sidewalk chalk using perspective.  Here‘s a sampling of them, most of which seem to be by Julian Beever or Kurt Wenner.  Julian Beever also has an online portfolio here, and Kurt Wenner has one here (though it’s unfortunately flash).  Edgar Mueller also has some really cool bigger pieces- his site is here (a little hard to navigate, but worth it), and another small sampling of his work here.  There’s also a few by Manfred Stader here. Really cool stuff all around.

Here’s a CBS interview with Julian Beever about his work that gives some more details about it all:

Yep, it all washes away.  Sort of reminds me of Peter Donnelly.

Here’s a making of video for one of Julian Beever’s works:

And a making of for one of the Edgar Mueller ones:

And here‘s a youtube channel with a few more.

I wonder if there’s any time lapse videos out there of the works being slow washed and worn away?

Here’s another one for the list of people I want to be when I grow up:

I love how the mix of having to walk only on the smooth parts to keep from tamping down the rough parts, and having to work with some speed to do the whole thing before the tide comes in combine to turn making it into a form of dance.

Here’s another short news piece about him:

Watch CBS Videos Online

Two cool articles on the art of forming a glob of mud into a shiny polished ball called a “dorodango” (Japanese):

• This one is more of the philosophical / metaphorical side of it, and is a really good introduction.
• This one is about someone’s first attempt to actually make one.

Is there some specific art term for art that’s meant to be temporary / transient, like these or the sand paintings that Buddist monks do?

“We’re All Gonna Die” by Simon Hoegsberg (I have no idea how to make the oh in his last name an empty set symbol) is a stitched together panorama of pictures he took of people walking across a bridge.  It’s sort of cool because:

• It’s the only time I can think of where I’ve seen a really wide horizontal scrolling web page that actually seemed like a good design choice.
• The huge variety of people and dress.
• The varying degrees of recognition on the part of the subjects of the fact they were being photographed.

Admittedly, I tottally don’t get the title though.

Chris Jordan‘s work is pretty, but mostly really thought provoking.  He makes enormous images that are made up of tiny, tiny pictures or repeated patterns of what they are about (mostly consumerism).  For instance, one is a giant off white freckled field that, when you zoom in, “Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.”  Another looks like a woman’s chest (sort of NSFW, but not terribly), and is made up of Barbie dolls, captioned “Depicts 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006.  There’s also one of Abu Ghraib that’s definitely NSFW.

They’re sort of horrifying because they put the scale of consumerism and waste and excess into visual, impactful terms, though it does occasionally seem like the exact length of time / scale in some of them is rather arbitrary, though I’m not sure how you would come up with any better way to pick a scale. In a way, it sort of makes me think of the Vietnam memorial in Washington DC (“The Wall”).  It’s one of the most impactful war memorials out there, but at the same time, the only reason they could list all the names is because of the relatively few (hugely, profoundly relative terms there) Americans who died in Vietnam (a little over 58,000 in Vietnam, versus 400,000+ in WWII or the roughly 625,000 in the Civil War).

He has two series of them up so far – Running the Numbers and Running the Numbers II.

• Cool cake 1 – This piano cake is clever and looks pretty easy to make. (Via Craftzine)
• Cool cake 2 – This Van Gogh cake is quite a bit more advanced, but really cool.  If you click through that one to the cake maker’s (megpi) Flickr portfolio, she has all sort of other cool ones too.  I especially like this peacock cake with accompanying cupcakes, and this UFO one- the cow detail is awesome.
• And, a cute, non-traditional penguin pumpkin for Halloween. (Via Craftzine)

I… I… I don’t know what to excerpt.  Usually when I go to a site or a blog post or whatever and I find something I like, I grab a little quote or a picture or whatever to excerpt here, to show you how cool it is and prove that it’s worth clicking over to.  But,… what do I do when it’s all awesome?  When there’s just plain too much awesome to find a best one to excerpt?  I… I don’t know…

Now would probably be a reasonable time to explain what I’m talking about.

I read Swiss Miss, and a while ago I came across this post, and bookmarked it because I really liked it.  And then today, I clicked through to the site for the artist/designer that made it (Jennifer Daniel).  And… it’s all awesome, in so many ways.  So, let me try this again, maybe a bullet pointed list of why it’s all so awesome:

• There are visual puns, and playing with expected shapes, and just general cleverness without the sort of annoying “Look at me, I’m clever” kind of feel that sometimes gets.
• Almost everything on the page makes you look twice and then think.
• So I’m saying it both looks cool and makes you think, without being full of itself.  Which is painfully rare.
• It’s all really simple (or perhaps a better word is clean).
• Each one has it’s own little style that is cohesive to itself, and each one is a little different from each other one so they don’t get hackneyed, but they still all have this same sort of clean, witty, cool style to them, so they all sort of go together.
• There’s a joke all the way at the bottom, and a tiny bug that crawls around on the left hand side of the page, and even the URL and page title are funny.

The only downsides I can find:

• I’m baffled by the left navigation, so I’m not real sure how to find more awesome.
• It would seem some of it gets archived / taken down over time (I think I remember seeing a few other ones there a while ago) which means some of the awesome is hiding / gone away.

So, what I’m really saying here is, go look around, it’s worth the five or ten minutes.

Bonus:

So, I emailed Jennifer while I was writing this post, and she was nice enough to send me an alternate version (with a few extras) of one of my favorites (thanks Jennifer!!), so that’s going to be the excerpt.  And thus, in a maybe kind of sort of Stray Hawkeye exclusive, I present a case study in awesomeness:

Boob Slang

A short list of forms of awesomeness embodied in this:

• It takes a second to figure out what it’s about.
• It covers what would generally be viewed as a vulgar theme in a clean, straight forward manner and in a style that you would expect in a science poster on the wall of a high school classroom, which adds to the humor.
• The color complements the theme.
• I tend to think of myself as being quite up on vulgar slang, and there are a few in there I hadn’t heard before, including:
• Bottom row, third from the right.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at the Minnesota Twins baseball team the same way again, especially since next season they’re leaving the Metrodome and going topless.

I really like the work of Emma Hack.  So much so that I’m linking to her despite my hate of flash websites.

This is where I would usually post a sample image of her work, so you could get an idea of what it’s like, and decide if you want to spend 10 or 15 minutes browsing her site or just move on.  But, again, flash.

I really like the way that her work plays with things like objectification, perception, etc.  A few favorite collections:

• Wallpaper – NSFW (nakedness)
• Wallpaper 2 – also NSFW
• CowScape – suitable for work, and kind of funny

Not exactly “Home, Sweet Home” or 1 Corinthians 13 (the “love is patient, love is kind, blah blah blah” one), but I think I’d be more likely to hang these up in my home anyway.  More good ones here.

I have no idea if these things are any good at what they are, but I heard both the names lately and thought they were great names:

• The First Ammendment Art Gallery, an art gallery in north east Minneapolis (found via this article)
• Times New Viking, some band with a cool name that played in Loring Park recently

I made the usual rounds of the art fairs this weekend, and they’re just like I remembered.  Uptown’s expensive, crowded, and pretty.  Powderhorn is cool, laid-back, local, and affordable.  Loring Park is generally in between and where I ended up buying something.  Specifically a print of Broken Wing by Timothy Kobs.  I’m not usually one for fairy themed art, but I love the color and the mix of really pretty and really sad in it.  Just such a cool contrast and the little touch of red/orange on the wing really sets it off.  Also, talked briefly with artist and a woman with him at the booth, really nice people.

Other favorite art fair moment for the year.  While I was taking the art hop bus between Uptown and Powderhorn, there was a husband and wife with several small kids next to me.  From the bits of conversation I overheard, they were pretty obviously from the suburbs and not very familiar with the area.  As the bus turned right off of Lake onto Lyndale, the wife looked at the window and, with a chuckle, said, “The Smitten Kitten!  What a great name for a store!”   I’m pretty sure she was unaware of their line of business (NSFW), and given the age of the children she had with her, I refrained from informing her.