Posts from the ‘art’ Category

Feb 9

New Interview w/ Sculptor Kate MacDowell at Don’t Panic

Kate MacDowell does creepy, amazing things with porcelain. She’s one of my favorite contemporary artists, pulling myth and history into pieces about the natural world and human, animal, and plant life and death. Her pieces are jarring, but strangely beautiful, perhaps because they reflect her thoughts about the juxtaposition of humanity and the natural world–we are and aren’t of it, and our discomfort with it is one of the most bizarre things about us.

A brief excerpt:

You also have several pieces where bugs crawl on human organs and faces. What are the bugs doing there?

It varies; on my piece Buzz they are flies and represent the information overload we are bombarded with in the post-post-modern world, often leading to a form of paralysis. On other pieces, the insects are often bees, which I like to explore because of colony collapse disorder and their importance as pollinators. In general though, I like pointing out the ‘discomfort’ of our attempt at union with nature, and insects crawling on a face or tongue sometimes give viewers a visceral sense experience of this kind of discomfort.

Anyway, read the whole thing. It’s great.

Feb 7

6 Comments

As if I didn’t already love Guillermo Del Toro.

This profile cements the love. (I really really really wish he were still directing The Hobbit.) He loves monster and monster makeups the way Rick Baker does, the way Forrest Ackerman did, the way Tom Savini does, the way Lon Cheney Sr. did. But there’s more to him than just the horror fanboy, obviously. This rather hits it perfectly:

A del Toro monster is as connected to a succubus in a Fuseli painting as it is to the beast in “Predator.” His films remind you that looking at monsters is a centuries-old ritual—a way of understanding our own bodies through gorgeous images of deformation.

I’ve watched Del Toro’s movies again and again and again, marveling at the worlds he creates but especially at the creatures that inhabit them. They’re unlike anything else. Yet we know them like ourselves, in a strange way. They’re the insides out of us. This sort of explains why that’s so. Read read read.

Jan 6

What’s the difference between video games and art?

Maybe choice, or freedom from it? I feel this is the argument I have tried (as a lifelong gamer, mind you), and failed to make when having this debate before. As an artist, you’re imposing your vision on someone. Otherwise, why bother to make art? Why not just take a survey? The point is much better made over at The Millions today:

There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of music or a good novel “sweeps you along.” There’s a selflessness in it: not just the pleasure in pausing the parts of the brain that plan and calculate and select, but in the temporary surrender of investing in someone else’s choices. Good art can be where we go for humility: when we’re encouraged to treat each of our thoughts as worthy of being made public, it can be almost counter-cultural to admit, in the act of being swept along, that someone else is simply better at arranging the keys of a song or the twists of a book and making them look like fate.

Freedom from choice is a seductive way of thinking about art—and it’s at the heart of the debate over the cultural value of video games. Video games, for their cultural boosters, promise an art based on choice: an interactive art, possibly the first ever. For their detractors, “interactive art” is a contradiction in terms. Critics can point to video games’ narrative clichés or sloppy dialogue or a faith in violence as the answer to everything; but at base, they seem to be bothered by the idea of an art form that can be “played.” Choice is their bright line.

Read the really fascinating essay here.

Dec 22

4 Comments

Is Steve Martin skeeving you out lately? Me, too.

Skeeves. Claire Danes thinks so, too, clearly.

I was practically in love with Steve Martin back when he was singing and dancing and being hilarious and all life-partners with the adorable Bernadette Peters. Even after that, when he was writing little amusing, vaguely clever-even-if-they-tried-to-hard plays.

But now that he’s all trying to play like he’s in with the art scene but also hates the art scene (I guess?), and being kind of obsessed with women a third of his age, he just strikes me as icky and weird. This review is revealing:

The writing in the novel is by turns dull, flat, ugly, and inept. Especially grim are the passages when anyone says anything about art. For example: “However opposite these pictures were, they both worked as historical objects, and they worked as objects of beauty. While the Picasso was deep and serious, the Warhol was radiant and buoyant. The Picasso added up to the sum of its parts: artistic genius combined with powerful thought combined with prodigious skill combined with the guided hand equals masterpiece. The Warhol was more than the sum of its parts: silk-screen, photo image of popular actress, repetitive imagery, the unguided hand, equals . . . masterpiece.” This is so bad, so silly, that one must charitably wonder if Martin means it to be a parody; but what it most resembles is the writing of a college student hurriedly answering an exam question. No dealer or critic, no one who really knows or cares about the history of art and aesthetics, would spout such vacant nonsense. Martin writes of people who “talk art,” but no one in his book is actually capable of doing so, at least not in any interesting or arresting way.

I mean, seriously, I hope he’s trying to be funny, too. But it’s not a very dead-on parody in that case, is it? Some art people are certainly pretentious, but Christ, they’re pretentious in a way that tries to show how much they know about art, not how little.

Anyway, it’s just too bad for Steve Martin.

Nov 29

2 Comments

Today is just not a day that we should talk about.

So please enjoy some wonderful installation art by Chris Silva instead.

Nov 5

7 Comments

New Stuff to Smash Into

If only you could see things from my perspective, painting by Nimit Malavia

New Wigleaf story by Ryder Collins

PANK 5

Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance

Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary

My new story in Barrelhouse online (thanks, Dave!)

(I know, I know. I’m in two of these magazines and another one of these is my stories. But the thing is, all three of those stories are some of my best work. So I really think you should read it. I think you’d like it. And the rest is all good. PANK and Annalemma are always terrific, and from the few stories I’ve read in Annalemma so far and the list of contributors for PANK, I’d say they’re going to be terrific so get them now while you can!)

Oct 4

Chilly rainy days are made for reading stuff off of the internets.

Illustration by Matthew Lyons

Well, so says I. There are some excellent, thought-provoking types of things and also literary types of things on the intertubes these days, or so I have heard.

Like this.

And this.

And you should definitely read this, by Roxane Gay.

Also, have you read the new JMWW and the new decomP yet? Both fantastic, as always, as ever.

This may give you a little bit of hope.

And this may give you a little bit of happiness. Everyone’s favorite smartypants is now an HTMLGiant regular. I don’t always claim to understand everything going on in Kyle’s brilliant writings, but I love picking up the pieces and trying to make them into a prism, or a prison, or a bit of matter or antimatter, or just an anecdote or interesting tidbit or a kind of blind faith tied together with string and salt and something else altogether. Super excited to have him to read more of.

Sep 24

2 Comments

To Read Over the Weekend

It doesn’t feel very fall-ish today, what with it being a record high today in Washington, DC–98!–but hey, I still feeling curling up with some good writing this weekend anyway.

Here’s one you should check out: J.A. Tyler’s lovely story over at Annalemma. I don’t know which is more beautiful, the story or the artwork, but you should head over there and take in both.

Sep 13

1 Comment

Happy Birthday, Super Mario Bros.!

Cake by Artisan Cake Company

That’s right. Today is a very, very special day. Super Mario Bros. turns 25 years old. One quarter of a century of the most famous video game character ever.

As Luke Plunkett over at Kotaku notes:

It seems almost pointless marking the occasion with a round-up, or a few paragraphs outlining his importance to video games – and video gamers – because it’s Mario. He isn’t important to video games. He is video games.

So here’s to Super Mario Bros. (And the amazing peeps who made this Mario street art.) One of the first–and still one of the best–video games I ever played.

Sep 9

You Can See Inside of Me

You should REALLY check out Jason Freeny’s anatomical toy sculptures. Not to mention the rest of his art. Very, very cool shit to be found here.