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Hervé This – Art et Science (photo: Wired)

Morgan Meis and Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set, Palate or Palette? The like problems behind molecular gastronomy and modern artmaking.:

“Contemporary art has an uneasy relationship to form. Sure, art is all about form. But what materials are we forming, and what are the models and traditions by which we are forming them? The sculptor Richard Serra, for instance, is fascinated by the properties of iron and steel. He recognizes that industrial materials are as much a part of our “natural” world as anything else. Serra loves to experiment with such materials, to find out what they can do and how they make us feel. He accepts the fact that we do not live primarily among plants and earth. We live in a world that has been manufactured, and Serra wants to manipulate the formal properties of that manufactured world. He hurled balls of molten lead at gallery walls and, more recently, twisted sheets of steel into elegant spirals. He was using the matter and the technologies available to persons of our time. He is not trying to represent the natural world — he is trying to create new forms in a post-natural environment in which artifice and nature are inextricably intertwined.

Likewise, Molecular Gastronomy has opened up an immense realm of formal experimentation. These experiments are not limited by the traditional boundaries as to what constitutes food and what you can do to it. Here is Hervé This:

In 2002, I introduced a formalism to describe, in a non-periodical manner, the organization of food space or different foodstuffs. All foods are complex disperse systems, also called “soft matter.” The simplest of these systems — formerly called colloidal — are well known: emulsions, foams, gels and so forth…But food needs more than interfaces to describe it; even a simple sauce such as a béarnaise consists of three phases: solid matter (microscopic egg-yolk aggregate) and a hydrophobic liquid (oil droplets) dispersed in a hydrophilic liquid (water).

(…)”

‘Everything is going to be allright’, 2007. 16mm film to HD video, 10’10”. Golf of Bothnia, Finland. Image by Ben Geraerts.

Metropolis M, Een gesprek met Guido van der Werve. De charme van een poëtische onliner:

“(…) Ik houd van simpele ideeën omdat ze altijd erg open zijn. Als je iets tot de kern terug kunt brengen, kunnen meer mensen zich ertoe verhouden. Terwijl veel kunstenaars juist bezig zijn met het omgekeerde, ze nemen een eenvoudig idee en maken het vervolgens complex. Uiteindelijk krijg je een soort kluwen waaruit niemand meer een uitweg weet. Van dit soort mystificatie in kunst houd ik niet. Je hebt veel mensen die goede dingen doen, gewoon op gevoel, maar vervolgens denken alles uit te moeten gaan leggen. Ik denk dat mijn werk iets meer benaderbaar is. Is nat het tegenovergestelde van droog?”

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set, Nobody’s a Critic. Or they’re at least terrified to be one:

“Criticism isn’t powerful anymore. It doesn’t drive anything, it doesn’t define what is good and bad in culture. Surely this has mostly to do with all the changes in the media landscape over the last few decades. Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There’s just more.

The word criticism has its root in the Greek word krinein, which means — in its most original sense — to divide or separate. It’s about sorting things out and making distinctions. Criticism is thus about doing something that is, in this era, almost impossible to do. It is difficult simply to keep up with the vast global cultural output, let alone to make determinations and judgments.

So the critic lives in terror and humiliation, without purpose, without audience, without platform. Newspaper book reviews are shutting down (as are the newspapers that used to house them). Magazines are less and less inclined to devote space or resources to traditional criticism. The blogosphere and social networking sites allow anyone to communicate tastes and opinions directly to those people with whom an outlook is already shared. Criticism is essentially bottom-up now, whereas it used to be practically the definition of top-down. The audience does not look to an external authority to find out what to think — it looks to itself.”

Gezicht op Amsterdam in vogelvlucht, 1538. Cornelis Anthonisz. (ca. 1505 – 1561). olieverf op paneel, 116 x 159 cm.

Amsterdams Historisch Museum, De oude meesters van de stad Amsterdam:

“De stad Amsterdam beschikt dankzij schenkingen, legaten en aankopen over een collectie van ruim 1.000 schilderijen, gedateerd vóór 1800. Het is een van de rijkste verzamelingen ter wereld, waarin zeventiende-eeuwse schilders zoals Rembrandt, Hals en Vermeer met hun beste werken zijn vertegenwoordigd. In een gloednieuwe catalogus zijn al deze werken verzameld. Op 8 juli werd deze catalogus samen met de webcatalogus gepubliceerd. Klik hier voor de catalogus online.”

Webcatalogus Amsterdams Historisch Museum

NYT Magazine, Figuring Marlene Dumas:

““I never learned to ride a bicycle, and it is too late now,” she told me with a hint of pride, before going on to list her other negative achievements. “I never learned to drive. I never learned to swim.” At 54, Dumas is a jovial and garrulous presence, with a tangle of blond curls and fair skin. She speaks English with a heavy accent, in a wheezing, thinned-out voice.

“I was so pleased when I read that Rossellini loved to lie in bed,” she continued, referring to the Italian filmmaker, a confirmed hypochondriac who, she discovered, would take to his bed for two or three days at a time, reading thick novels. “Now people do exercise, and they have hobbies, and they take holidays,” she said. “I am not one of those. I don’t go to a psychiatrist. I don’t go to a gym. I run away from my accountant, I run away from my dentist. They are all supposed to help you, but I like to stay in bed, where I have a chance to reflect, like Rossellini.””

(via)

The Telectroscope, tot 15 juni in Londen (Tower Bridge) en NYC (Brooklyn Bridge).

Paul St. George, The Telectroscope:

“Hardly anyone knows that a secret tunnel runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. In May 2008, more than a century after it was begun, the tunnel has finally been completed. An extraordinary optical device called a Telectroscope has been installed at both ends which miraculously allows people to see right through the Earth from London to New York and vice versa.”

Zie ook: BBC, ‘Tunnel’ links New York to London.

Mended Spiderweb #19 (Laundry Line) – Cibachrome, 30 x 20 inches, 1998

Nina Katchadourian, The Mended Spiderweb series:

“The Mended Spiderweb series came about during a six-week period in June and July in 1998 which I spent on Pörtö. In the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread. All of the patches were made by inserting segments one at a time directly into the web. Sometimes the thread was starched, which made it stiffer and easier to work with. The short threads were held in place by the stickiness of the spider web itself; longer threads were reinforced by dipping the tips into white glue. I fixed the holes in the web until it was fully repaired, or until it could no longer bear the weight of the thread. In the process, I often caused further damage when the tweezers got tangled in the web or when my hands brushed up against it by accident.”

(Via 3QD.)

Martijn Hendriks, Give Us Today Our Daily Terror. Still. (2008 – ongoing).

Martijn Hendriks, Give Us Today Our Daily Terror:

“Exact copy of Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds from which all birds have been removed. Single channel video, color, 119 minutes.”

(via)

Marcel van Eeden, Untitled, 2007/2008. Oil on canvas. 60x80cm. (MVE01-846)

Galerie ZINK: Sensational. New way to paint – Marcel van Eeden. Berlin 22.03.2008 – 15.05.2008. (Via chmkoome’s Blog.) Meer Van Eeden.

Tarkovsky, by Nathan Dunne (editor)

Creative Review Blog, Andrei Tarkovsky: Film and Painting:

“Over a 25 year period, Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky made just seven feature films and three student shorts, yet his cinematic work stands out as one of the most significant contributions to moving image history. In films such as Solaris, Mirror and Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky dealt thematically with the notion of memory, childhood and dreams and became a master of the long, unedited shot and distinct formalistic approach to filmmaking. Many studies of his work have also observed the links between his films and the visual arts. Black Dog Publishing is behind a new, comprehensive volume dedicated to his life’s work and we have an exclusive extract to present here on the CR blog. The following essay, by Mikhail Romadin (the art director on Solaris), looks at the relationship between Tarkovsky’s films and painting”

(Via Coudal.)

Zombie Last Supper

Popped Culture, Suddenly Last Supper:

“There’s nothing like a couple thousand years of of repetition and an iconic painting by an Old Master to get story to get lodged inside the heads of the creators of pop culture. Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th century depiction of Jesus announcing that one of his 12 disciples would betray him is so iconic that it has been co-opted by those wishing to give weight to their parodies, tributes and caricatures. What I find interesting is who gets portrayed as Christ and who gets to be his Judas.”

David Horvitz, Things for sale that I will mail you:

“If you give me $1,999 I will take a ferry from Spain to Morocco. I will mail you a photograph of the port in Spain looking out at sea from a Spanish mailbox. I will then mail you a photograph of the port in Morocco looking out at sea from a Moroccan mailbox. You can glue the backs together when you get both of them and it will be like a three dimensional view.”

David Horvitz

Chris Jordan – Plastic Bottles, 2007. 60×120″. Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes. Detail at actual size.

Martin Kippenberger: Drei Häuser mit Schlitzen (Jüdische Grundschule). Aanwinsten

Trouw, Stedelijk Museum – De jacht op werk met eeuwigheidswaarde:

“Het verhaal over de aankoop van het werk van Kippenberger (1953-1997) vertelt in een notendop hoe Van Tuyl probeert om van het Stedelijk weer een toonaangevend museum te maken met een topcollectie en spraakmakende exposities, waar alle belangrijke musea in de wereld graag mee willen samenwerken. Of zoals hij zelf graag formuleert: „Ik ben een voetbaltrainer die het Stedelijk wil terugbrengen in de Champions League, de Europa Cup.” Ooit was het Stedelijk een wereldspeler, maar de world league acht Van Tuyl vooralsnog te hoog gegrepen. „We moeten wel realistisch blijven.””

Rosemarie Orwin (www.modelled.me.uk).

Daily Telegraph, The art of sitting still:

“Rosemarie Orwin drags the hair off her face and ties it up, revealing wonderful cheek bones and a long, graceful neck. As she discusses this morning’s poses with Neil Drury, the art tutor, she prepares to loosen the ties around her robe. Life models don’t like to undress in front of their class – it would ‘sexualise’ what they do. It would turn them into strippers. They prefer to undress behind a screen and reappear in a robe. Towelling, usually.”

Installation of the exhibition, January 2008

The Daily Telegraph, The South Bank Show: you can’t please everyone:

“Did he wonder whether he was exploiting the painter Francis Bacon by showing him drunk? ‘But we were both drunk! Plastered. By the end of the day the room was spinning. We had started drinking at 9am when he came out with Bollinger, then we carried on drinking and filming over lunch and into the evening. But curiously I was asking things that were OK. I looked like, well, what I looked like, but I thought keep it in, keep it in.’”

Feltron 2007 Annual Report