Scottunder

Madagascar: Carnet de Voyage

A carnet de voyage is a travel diary, which forms the framework for this beautifully made, Oscar-nominated animated short by Bastien Dubois. We get to look into the journal of Dubois's trip to Madagascar, including a trek to a remote village where our white adventurer gets to observe famadihana, the Malagasy "turning of the bones" ritual, in which family members rewrap the bodies of their departed relatives in a festival of music and dancing.

I especially like the various animation styles used throughout, including what looks like rotoscoping.

Exit through the Gift Shop

The two best lines in the remarkable documentary Exit through the Gift Shop come near the end. Ostensibly about the street artist Bansky, the movie follows Thierry Guetta, an awkward vintage clothing store owner who first transforms into an obsessive videographer of L.A. street artists (including Shepard Fairey), and then becomes the artist Mr Brainwash, overnight becoming as successful as the artists he imitates.

Guetta's footage documents guerrilla artists as they create large and elaborate public artworks under cover of night while they dodge the police (or not). Later, we see these same artists' work become valuable commodities, as it moves from concrete walls on the street to hang on the walls in art galleries.

Much of their work repurposes and juxtaposes pop culture imagery and is thus (like the abstract expressionism in My Kid Could Paint That) highly imitatable. Thus, parts of this movie reinforce the idea that the art itself is less important than the story behind the art and the artist -- but Mr Brainwash's work, which has no history, still manages to sell for absurd prices to an art-buying public eager to catch (or invest in) the latest wave.

This presents a number of difficult questions: Does Guetta make art, or does it just look like art? What's the difference? Is Banksy (whose identity is not revealed) directing Guetta? Is the movie a hoax?

So, the two best lines are... well, I'll leave Banksy's excellent last line a mystery, but I'll repeat what his colleague Steve Lazarides says, since it's been widely quoted:

"I think the joke is on... I don’t know who the joke is on, really. I don’t even know if there is a joke."

Type the Sky

The artist and photographer Lisa Rienermann created a beautiful alphabet called Type the Sky from the negative space created by city skylines. As the GOOD Magazine blog suggests, all we have to do is look up!

 

 

Sapsucker tracks

Random photo: this is a tree in my front yard that I can't identify. The holes are from a red-headed red-breasted sapsucker (at least, that's what I normally see poking holes in my trees) (Thanks for the correction -- I totally knew that).

I'm told the technique involves drilling the holes to cause the sap to run, then returning a short time later to feast on the insects that show up. You can see the holes that have healed above the fresh holes.

Rothko Chapel

I spent a few days in Houston recently, and took advantage of some free time to visit the Rothko Chapel.

Located in a pleasant park, with a couple large-scale sculptures nearby (including Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk), the gallery is a windowless stone building that presents a little more like a fort than a chapel from the outside, but the interior is extremely churchlike, with diminished natural lighting and wooden benches. I was alone except for a curator who accompanied me inside and read her book off to one side.

The interior is octagonal, with fourteen large black paintings on the whitewalls: three triptychs on the front and wing walls, and one each on the rear and angled walls. The paintings are all black but some contain a tint of reddish or magenta color; some have borders of a slightly different quality of black. The benches are arranged in a square, with a few yoga mats with zafus scattered about.

I had come directly from my flight, so I removed my shoes and jacket, sat cross-legged on a zafu, and let it all sink in, noticing how the colors slowly changed as my eyes became accustomed and began to discern detail. I sat near the main wall looking out at the room for a time, then turned around and faced the main triptych from up close. Twenty minutes or so later I left.

The thought that stays with me is not so much about the experience of visiting, which was well worth the effort, but the vision of Mark Rothko (and the trust of his backers, the de Menils) who enabled such an unusual and powerful space to be built.

(These photos were taken from their website, as photography is not allowed.)

Feltron 2010 Annual Report

Nicholas Felton is a talented New York-based graphic designer who, since 2005, has turned the mundane statistics of his year into a series of annual reports that are beautiful and entertaining.

This year, he memorialized his father using 4348 records, from the record of his father's birth in 1896 to a dentist appointment in 2010, including tickets, passports, calendars, and more. It's all presented in a thoughtful format that somehow makes the stoory of his life more remarkable. 

(found on Kottke.org)