celandine designblog

Julian Beever - 'Push the Boat Out'

A serious fan of visual quirkiness will quite likely be charmed by Julian Beever’s sidewalk illusions. They are pavement chalk drawings with a 3D twist, pulling the concrete open to reveal hidden underground swimming pools, giant lobsters or butterflies, or precarious plummeting city scapes. The drawings are done in perspective, so they only ‘work’ from one viewpoint – looked at from another angle they appear strangely distorted. But their full effect is stunning – I would love to see one live.

You can see a number of the images here, at the artist’s website, and youtube provides a bunch of videos showing the working process. Some of these were commissioned as advertising work, and they feature names of companies or products – an ephemeral commercial, perhaps, but one your potential clients are unlikely to ever forget.

There are a few more artists out there that make amazing 3D illusions – Edgar Mueller, for one, works at an amazing scale – but there is something about Beever’s pieces that works for me in a very intimate way. It isn’t just the ‘cleverness’ of the trick – it’s an image that seems to say something, there is a little story in there that isn’t always simply visual, or simply commercial. On the imaginary scales of artistic judgment in terms of ‘vapid’ versus ‘deep’, I’d vote ‘deep’ on Beever’s entire approach – I realise this is a difficult position to defend, one way or another, but in the end it comes down to a personal choice. Most of the time I’m too cynical anyway.

Julian Beever - Feeding the Fish

Speaking of dimensions, I went to the movies recently and was ushered into a 6D Theatre. Yup, six. Now I know that string theory is currently allowing for the possibility of up to 11 spatial dimensions, but I thought this stuff was still under construction, as it were – never realised that movie theatres have moved so far away from the traditional dimensional norms of 3 + 1….. Still, in essence I applaud this brave breach of the ‘fourth wall‘ – the more directions we have to move in, the more scope for our creativity to go crazy. One reason why I always loved swimming – it gives you an additional direction to move in.

We seem to have strong positive reactions towards a sense of depth and space emulated in two dimensions – after all, the discovery of linear perspective was probably the greatest single leap art ever made. And web design that incorporates 3D elements smoothly into itself is undoubtedly visually effective. (Here is a link to The Eco Zoo – a radical example of how magical 3D can really be). Now, you don’t necessarily need to build your own 3D engine like ROXIK did, but if you do you can make mega-cool things like this too!!! But even if you’re working on a perfectly ordinary webpage, and using nothing fancier than good old CSS, try to make something float above your main sheet – give it a little depth, go beyond a regular bevel and put in something that looks…. grabable. It will draw the eye.

Julian Beever - Butterfly

I’ve made a little three-dimensional navigation thingy (you can look at it here) which I still haven’t found a practical application for, but had a great time writing and assembling. It isn’t the most SEO-friendly thing you’ve ever seen in your life, but as long as it came with an alternative navigation bar and a proper site map, I think it could make a pretty focal point for a charming little website. If I ever make a whole site around it I’ll be sure to let you all know! I’m also hoping that the new version of the Celandine website will be up soon, as I’m slowly running out of tweaks.

Until then I’ll go gaze at a few more Julian Beever drawings, marvel at the skill, wonder what it would be like to walk into one on my local street, and hope it isn’t raining wherever he decides to conjure up his next creation. I guess in art, just like in life, it’s all about the Point of View.

spring grove - anke vera zink (germany)

Why visit a gallery when you could be sleeping in one?

The Fox Hotel in Copenhagen, Denmark, has 61 rooms - each individually designed by one of the 21 international graphics design artists that collaborated on this combination of accommodation and art.

You can’t select a specific room to stay in (the logistical problems would be immense) but you can list a number of your favourites and the hotel will try to accommodate you if they can. There is also a wonderful ‘Tour de Fox’ offer, which lets you have a three-night stay in the hotel and sleep in a different room each night – again, at arrival you can ask if your favourites are available and if they are – you can have them!!

king's court 2 - birgit amadori (germany)

People are very different in their travel preferences – some insist on a luxurious stay and others don’t care where they lay their head, as long as they’re free to roam around the foreign city from morning to night. But if there is one thing that all hotel rooms share – be they silk and plush or threadbare linen and no heating – they all look painfully impersonal. Everything about a hotel room screams ‘you are only a visitor here. this space is sterilized for you, it will be sterilized for the next one that comes along. you are a number in a long faceless line.’ Some friends have told me they enjoy that impersonal, detached feeling hotel rooms provide – others say it makes them feel uneasy. I personally find hotel rooms ringing hollow somehow – I don’t dislike them, but I always wish there was….. There was something there.

japanese garden - tokidoki (italy)

…and, there I go!! There is definitely something here. Some of the rooms I find charming, some are utterly beautiful, some too minimalistic or too rich in tone or too maniacal for my taste - but each by each and all put together give a beautiful background to the idea of a trip to Copenhagen. And while most remarkable hotels in the world tend to come with remarkable prices attached, you can stay at Fox for about 60 euro per person, if you choose your timing well.

I have to confess I spent ages browsing through the site, enlarging the room images and trying to imagine what it would feel like to spend a night in each one…. To fall asleep and to wake up inside a painting. Nothing else has ever made me particularly wish to visit Copenhagen.

sleep well - geneviève gauckler (france)

Along a similar line of thought, you can always take lodging in Ljubljana, Slovenia in Celica - which is an old prison revamped into a youth hostel, with the first floor cells transformed into cute little rooms and – again – individually designed by young artists. Each still has its original cell door, avec bars and all, so if you ever wondered what it would be like to sleep in a prison cell…… Here’s a way to get only the positive side of that experience. Although the room design is not quite as visually lavish and snazzy as Fox, the idea is brilliant – and I quite fancy cell 107….. Be sure to look at the panoramic view – it gives a much better sense of space than the individual photographs.

The Fox hotel piqued my interest so much that I actually started shopping around for flights etc for a weekend in Copenhagen this spring/ autumn. If the nefarious visa regime doesn’t thwart my ingenious plans – I’m there. Can’t wait to wake up with the faeries.

banksy - apache with pink bow

‘When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised God doesn’t work that way, so I stole one and prayed for forgiveness.’ – Emo Philips (quoted on the manifesto page of banksy’s (official?) site)

I’d love to run across a real banksy rat while I’m strolling around London sometime. The rats I suppose are a nod to Blek le Rat, banksy’s role model and famous predecessor – a French stencil artist born in 1952 under the name of Xavier Prou. As opposed to Prou, we don’t know the name banksy’s mamma gave him when he came into the world – speculations abound but we would not dream of dealing in those. His art is simple but sharp – a form of visual witticism, a stencil quip, if you will. A maid lifting the ‘curtain’ of the wall and sweeping garbage under it, two English bobbies kissing on a street corner, an ATM holding a little girl in the air with a robotic arm. Or a Star Wars AT AT walker standing in front of a little AT ST walker and saying ‘I am your father.’ And rats – lots of little rats – parachuting down from upper floors, carrying little picket signs with cute little inscriptions along the lines of ‘you lose’, or ’so little to say… and so much time’.

banksy - exterior paint specialist

‘Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.’ – Banksy

The style I quite like – representations are simplified to the highest degree that still allows them to appear lifelike – like photographs manipulated in Photoshop to consist of only black or white surfaces, reduced in detail to the extreme but still maintaining a sense of photorealism from the original image. The realistic quality of the images accentuates the points they try to make – in my case at least it increases my capability of empathising with the image. And the quotes I’ve read which are attributed to the man (it’s a little hard to trust any source when we’re talking about a man with no face and no name – how does one confirm anything?? But there is a type of quote I feel goes with the images, and so I choose to believe that they both come from the same man – and one day no doubt we will know his name) make me like him more – they are branded by a charmingly direct no-nonsense approach to life and art, coupled with a healthy dose of skewed angle of perception. And I always was a sucker for the non-status quo……… Who was it that said once, that the difference between the old and the young is not in years, but in the fact that the young struggle to overthrow the status quo, while the old struggle to preserve it – and it is by this measure that the age of men is calculated more accurately than by years alone? It is a quote, or a paraphrase I suppose – I just can’t remember whence I came upon it. But banksy’s work resonates with the idea – he is by this definition certainly one of the Young.

banksy - 'I am your father'

‘You know what hip-hop has done with the word ‘nigger’ – I’m trying to do that with the word vandalism, bring it back.’ – Banksy

When we try to decide what is and isn’t art – or rather, what makes an artwork good or bad, what criteria do we use to reach a decision? One could be – ‘could I do this?’ Both in terms of execution and in terms of concept, some artwork clearly inspires a sense of ‘I couldn’t come up with this, I couldn’t make it look that good, it never would have dawned on me to put those elements together but now that I see them together they seem to come together in a perfect whole’. Then on the other hand, we have masterpieces like Martin Creed’s ‘Lights Going On and Off’, which inspire a profound sense of ‘yeah I could do that – and I could think of it too, except I’d think it’s lame’ – which, you have to admit, it is a little. So I’m a banksy fan – I like the snips of social criticism packed into punchy stencils, demonstrating both human charm and technical skill. So I name banksy Man of the Week （＾ヮ＾）

'Salad' by Till Nowak, from 'Will Work For Food'

I’ve been reading reviews of a brand new cookbook – ‘Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States’, by Chris Fair – a work concurrently tackling the apparently fundamentally diverse subjects of international relations and food preparation. Slight grammatical issues aside, (the recipe teaser page on the website contains, for instance, the following sentence: As elsewhere, feel free to remove the cinnamon stick, cloves and peppercorns before serving. I don’t both and nor do most folks I know cooking this stuff. Now it’s been a while since I’ve attended an English grammar class, but I’m pretty darned sure that ‘I don’t both’ don’t fit no grammar pattern recognizable to no English speaker), anyhow, these aside, the idea itself is one I applaud. The entire concept of eating another country’s food in order to identify more closely with the people of said country is one that seems wise and important to me. Also there is a ‘How Evil Are You’ test which you can take to prove yourself a cognoscente of unsavory historical figures’ favorite snacks. My result – not evil enough. Disappointing.

a work by chinese artist zhou wei hua

The whole thing really brings me to a question that seems absurd at first – how international are we, really? After centuries of autochthonous artistic tradition, nations are now blowing the boundaries of their art wide open. After a long tradition of developing their own, intimate, personal art worlds, artists are now exposed to a pandemonium of outside influences. Obviously one cannot claim that international exchange of artistic ideas was not previously possible – artists have always drawn influences from other artists. Now we’ve opened the flood gates – our New Age brings us the possibility to be intimately acquainted with the day-to-day development of art trends in China, Colombia or Saudi Arabia. Conceptual cross-fertilization is at an all-time high. But are we reading it right?

Take for instance ( – again – ) Murakami Haruki, Japanese novelist of pulsating world renown. The attraction of his works to his Japanese audience reportedly lies in their Western flavor – the music, the spaghetti, the hard boiled crime novel feel of the surrealist plots. On the other hand, his Western audience reports finding him appealing for his very otherness from that which is Western – for his Japaneseness, if you will. Now indubitably Murakami Haruki novels are marked by both Western and Japanese influences – but is it not odd that what his Japanese audience finds attractive about him and what his Western audience finds attractive about him are directly opposite things? Do we crave the Other for the Other’s sake, or are we speaking a Universal Language at last?

a work by chinese artist chen jing

Looking at the international design and art scene, I keep wondering – do we like foreign influences simply because they are far from that which we are used to – and therefore far from our emotional lexicon? We like them, perhaps, because we can interpret them in any way we like – since we really have no clue as to the interpretation intended by foreign artists, or the emotional anchors of their work to their national heritage. Something new and wonderous that comes from alien ground – perhaps it’s a greater challenge to produce something new and wondrous which is still tied to your own little local sense of self.

On the other hand, as we start to live inside our machines, work day to day with colleagues half across the globe, and keep our eye on all international news, slowly we are forming ourselves into trans-nationals – building bit by bit that international heritage. I’ll be excited to see where art and design goes in the next decade – will we reach out further afield, or will we retract a little and sink more comfortably into our traditional selves?

opake tullumbe (i dalje žele moju smrt) - Marina Marković

A small exhibition showing drawings and watercolors (peppered with puffy lollypop stickers and a doll’s leg or two) by the young Serbian artist Marina Marković opened the other day in one of the galleries of the Belgrade ‘Student City’ complex. Now due to unforeseen and most tragic circumstances I managed to miss the said opening (though I have it on good authority that actual turkish sweets – drowned in sugary syrup – were handed out for general consumption by the gallery visitors), but I dropped by the next day to look at the work.

I liked the line of the drawings, I loved the soft use of watercolors. I generally like the combination of watercolor and pen, it gives that nice soft, washed-out, filmy feel to the drawings… The colors were shades of purple, blue and pink. The motions and expressions were well captured. Visually I’d say the whole thing was interesting. The problems I encountered had more to do with the concept.

Yoshitomo Nara - Harmless Kitty

Funny thing this cross cultural exchange that the global village has brought to us. On the one hand, I’m happy to see Japanese influences in Serbian modern art. On the other, I can’t help but wonder whether we would all manage to squeeze a little more creative individuality out of the depths of our little artistic souls if we weren’t constantly peeking over the fence into other people’s art worlds. Take the evil turkish sweets for instance – the execution might not be identical, but the imagery of cutesy yet cranky children morphing into kitties and bunnies is a very Japanese thing, and they’ve really cornered the market on it, so to speak. We’ve got Yoshitomo Nara and his angry children glaring off the canvas with unsettling stares, Aya Takano with her pasty little pastel nymphs floating knickerless through the urban jungle, Chiho Aoshima’s willowy round-eyed girls morphing with (you got it!) bunnies, foliage and cityscapes. So I’d say that whole kowai/kawaii thing has pretty much been done now.

Chiho Aoshima - City Glow

Of course one of the main points of all the arts is intertextuality. Some of the best works of art are created as a reaction or commentary to great works that came before. The great thing about a real work of art is that it provokes a reaction – a contemplation of a new point of view. This contemplation can produce quality art, without doubt. The problem, however, comes when the contemplation bit is fast-forwarded, or taken out of the equation. When exposed to a work born of a different culture - grown in a different climate, if you will – a young artist can easily flow to the conclusion along the lines of ‘Oooh, that’s pretty! I know – I’ll do that!’ Just make it a little different, and there you go – presto inspiration, presto enlightenment – exhibition halls here we come.

I don’t want to be unfair to murderously evil turkish sweets and imply that the artist’s sentiment is not genuine. But I have to say that the choice of topics – with the possible exception of anorexia which the artist has personal experience with, and is thus rendered an acceptable subject – shows a certain new-age laziness. The treatment of subjects along the lines of McDonalds, Nike, Always and Durex, along with anorexia and bulimia, has in some critical texts been termed ‘a most intimate observation of consumption and consumerism’ - but I would be sorely tempted to brand it with a stamp of ‘lazy thinking’.

From the title of the exhibition, I was hoping that ‘Mean Turkish sweets (still seek my death)’ would present work that would feel more personal.

Murakami Takashi - 272

The Occident just loves the Orient. And of all the Orient, we seem to love Japan with most fervour. Western writers, artists and intellectuals have been drawing inspirations from Japan for centuries – Vincent van Gogh and Mary Cassatt were both fascinated by ukiyoe prints, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound and Bertold Brecht all showed great interest in Japanese culture. Some theories indicate that James Joyce’s famous, impenetrable ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ structurally echoes the noh play Kakitsubata (杜若), which was translated roughly into English by Pound in 1916 and therefore would have been accessible to Joyce, though there is little mention of it in most of the annotations/ explanations attached to this opaque novel.

The term ‘Japonisme’ (meaning Western fascination with Japanese culture) was coined by the French art critic Philippe Burty in 1872, but unlike many others remains a current trend – not only is our consumer market flooded with aibo, pokemon, hello kitty, gundam and yu-gi-oh, but our high culture pays serious homage to Japanese artists – Murakami Haruki’s novels are translated into dozens of European languages, and Murakami Takashi’s paintings and sculptures fetch auction prices that climb into millions (I especially liked a short article in The Gawker entitled ‘Jack-Off Sculpture Sells For $15 Million‘, about the sale of Murakami’s sculpture ‘My Lonesome Cowboy. To the sculpture’s defense, I was lucky enough to see the original in Tokyo back in 2001 and I have to say it is a thing of beauty… :)

What is it, though, that we love so much about Japanese visual arts? Is it the marked ‘alien’ feel of something that obviously did not originate from within the Western civilisation? Is it the opaque, clean cuteness – prettiness – of Japanese art and design that leaves any hope of gleaning the meaning behind the work in the realm of pure wishful thinking? Is it because the works seem to revel in their own apparent lack of depth? I seem to remember an anecdote about Murakami Haruki attending a lecture at the faculty of literature of some US university, where the professor was asking his students to give their understanding of the symbolic meaning of the vanishing elephant in Murakami’s story ‘The Elephant Vanishes’. Before the students could voice their interpretations, Murakami said ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but the vanishing elephant had no symbolic meaning. It was merely an elephant. That vanished.’ or something to that effect. Upon the professor’s insistance that surely this image must be symbolic, Murakami responded with a laconic phrase – ‘Sometimes an elephant is just an elephant.’

Murakami Takashi - 'Eye Love' for Louis Vuitton, acrylic on canvas, 2004

Now this is a major difference between a Japanese artist and a Western one (if you will forgive a gross generalisation) – where all our artists wish to imbue additional levels of meaning and depth even to works that almost evidently have none – here is a man trying earnestly to deny that his highly surreal work has any depth at all. Now if we put aside our skeptical wondering about whether this apparent shallowness – flatness (Murakami Takashi had a famous exhibition entitled Super-Flat – flatness is practically his signature characteristic) – is merely a cover screen for more shalowness and flatness, we are still left with the question – why are we so drawn to this approach?

Leaving Murakami Haruki aside for a moment (as I can never shake the sneaking suspicion that he is – as Oscar Wilde would quaintly put it – a Sphinx Without a Secret), Murakami Takashi’s success is intuitively logical to me. His work is full of dichotomy. It is cute and a little scary. It is both friendly and manic. It is high art produced in a factory. It seems simple, but employs sophisticated and ancient artistic techniques. (Though most of his work is done in a recognisable acrylic cartoon style, Murakami majored in Nihonga – traditional 19th century Japanese art styles – at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, and the works from his student days (difficult to dig up on the Web – it’s all round eyes and mushrooms with teeth now) show both talent and skill in traditional art forms) His work is highly commercialised (keychain, postcard, signed print anyone? I’ve got all of the above in my collection) and yet the feeling lingers on that the meaning of the work is not trivialised by this multiplication – possibly even its meaning grows deeper with it – or am I just getting sucked into the trap…….?

Rabbit - the original Jeff Koons version, not the Mark Leckey knock-off

Mark Leckey won this year’s Turner Prize, an award granted every winter to artists deemed most influential or progressive in the preceeding year. It is a well-known and much-discussed fact that the Turner Prize, named after Joseph Mallord William Turner – a delightful British artist who invented impressionism before impressionism had been invented – has been steadily turning in the past years towards the conceptual arts, and its reputation is each year anew subjected to a crossfire of criticism and disdain.

This perhaps is understandable to a degree. The Turner Prize has brought us such unforgettable works of art as Martin Creed’s ‘Light Going On and Off’ (this is both the formal title, and the exaustive description of the work), Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed Avec Dirty Linen and Various Detritus’ – which was shockingly beaten to the Prize by Steve McQueen’s ‘Cameras Tied to Drum and Rolled Through Streets of Manhattan’, and Damien Hirst’s ‘Cow and Calf in Formaldehyde’.

This year, the Prize was so dull that even the Stuckist movement, whose traditional protests against the Turner have somewhat ironically become an integral part of its annual process, have decided to give it a miss this year on account of it being not worth the time of day. The winning work was a video retrospective of segments of popular culture that influenced the artist – including, reportedly, the Simpsons and Felix the Cat.

Now I was never one to claim I understand modern art as such, but recently I have begun to seriously lose the plot. My first fallacy seems to have been belief in the concept that a work of art needs to be somehow original. My second fallacy was the thought that art required some skill. Turner had skill. His art was not merely conceptual – it was actual. Take these two works – The Chancel and Crossing of Tintern Abbey, Looking towards the East Window – and Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour’s Mouth, created almost half a century later. Looking at the Snowstorm, you might dare say ‘heck, it’s just a fuzzy mush. I could do better’. But you probably won’t say the same for the Abbey. I wish I could draw like that.

left - Tintern Abbey, 1794; right - Snowstorm, 1842

My point is not that Turner’s work declined in his old age – au contraire, he got better. He started with realism, and then started deconstructing it until he singlehandedly invented impressionism, before the world was ready to call it a new art movement. My point is that Turner had earned his right to draw in fuzzy blotches. We all knew he’s not doing it because he can’t do any better.

My problem with conceptual art is not that it is pretentious and banal in the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ style (which a lot of the time it is) – my problem with it is that there doesn’t seem to be anything behind it. Art demands skill, and artists need to earn their right to put up an empty canvas and call it a masterpiece. You can’t just deliver your bag of dirty washing to the Tate Gallery and go around the other entrance to collect your £25,000 prize. It’s not just about the concept. It’s not just about the budget. There needs to be some skill involved.

details from John Galliano 2008 spring couture show

Most compliments I get regarding my choice of clothing are followed by a disclaimer. ‘Ooh, very interesting combination! I’d never wear anything like that though. But it looks great on you! ’ This might be explained away by the fact that I’m a firm believer in wearing patterns with patterns. Or the fact that no one has ever convinced me that stripy stockings don’t go with office skirt suits. In truth, I don’t mind the fact that most of my co-workers, family and friends think I dress like a mad woman. Looking bright is feeling bright, and the only way to fight off the ennui brought on by the general desaturation of the everyday world is to find a way to throw some sparkle into it. And preferably onto yourself, somehow.

Simplicity is often listed as a virtue of good design. Words like ‘clean’, ’sleek’ or ’sharp’ invoke positive mental imagery. Ornamentality today seems to have taken a step back in comparison to, say, the Baroque . Still I’d argue that from time to time we need a little bit of John Galliano, Murakami Takashi, or Pippi Longstocking. Sometimes we just need a little color.

pretty vs. pretty weird

I’m a prime example of a consumer ready to pay a hefty price margin for a beautiful product over a utilitarian-looking one. But beauty is not the category I’m trying to describe here – more a sort of… glorious visual insanity. If we use traditional japanese prints to demonstrate this subtle difference in a way we can all relate to – an image of three ladies in ornate kimonos relaxing in the garden could be considered beautiful, whereas two ladies and a gentleman in ornate kimonos battling a giant carp could be termed gloriously insane. That’s the kind of thing I’d like to see more of in design today – far left field. Visual surprise.