Arnaud Desjardin
The Book on Books on Artists Books (2013)
The Book on Books on Artists’ Books is a bibliography of books, pamphlets and catalogues on artists’ books. It takes stock of a wide variety of publications on artists’ books since the early 1970s to draw attention to the kind of documentary trace of distribution, circulation and reception they represent. It aims to be a source book of exhibition catalogues, collection catalogues, monographs, dealership catalogues and other lists published to inform, promote, describe, show, distribute and circulate artists’ books.
Wolfgang Pauli
Hal Foster
The Return of the Real (1996)
Freud Museum
http://www.freud.org.uk/exhibitions/archive/
Where Art and Scientific/Psuchological theory coalesce
Exhibition Archive
Peter Lunenfeld
Snap to Grid (2000)
…maps out the trajectories that digital technologies have traced upon our cultural imaginary. His clear-eyed evaluation of new media includes an impassioned discussion–informed by the discourses of technology, aesthetics, and cultural theory–of the digital artists, designers, and makers who matter most. “Snap to grid” is a command that instructs the computer to take hand-drawn lines and plot them precisely in Cartesian space.
Matt Collishaw
The Baroque World of Rubens as a Kinetic Carousel of the Damned
***details
In a colossal carousel of horror, British artist Mat Collishaw and designer Sebastian Burdon reinterpreted the chaotic violence of Peter Paul Rubens’s 17th-century “Massacre of the Innocents” paintings as a 3D-printed zoetrope.
The kinetic sculpture called “All Things Fall” was unveiled last October in Collishaw’s Black Mirror exhibition at Galleria Borghese in Rome, and recently Burdon shared the sculpture in action on Vimeo.
According to Burdon, it “took about six months of work and involved creating over 350 character figures, environment elements and architecture.” Burdon has collaborated with Collishaw on giant zoetropes before, such as “The Garden of Unearthly Delights” with 200 figures inspired by the creepy mayhem of Victorian fairy paintings, shown at MAD Museum in 2011. The zoetrope, also something of a Victorian fascination after their contemporary cylinder shape was designed in the 1830s by William George Horner, is basically a sequence of spinning images that appear animated when turned.
The Garden of Unearthly Delights (2009)
reading continued…
The precision of 3D printing for designing zoetropes has been inspiring projects like John Edmark’s sculptures that appear kinetic when spun or placed under a strobe light, and other artists have experimented with the unsettling effect of the jerky zoetrope, such as Gregory Barsamian‘s surreal synchronized sculptures. “All Things Fall” is exceptionally disturbing since Rubens based his two paintings on the biblical Massacre of the Innocents, where Herod orders the mass murder of babies when he heard news of the birth of a future king (outside of the Gospel of Matthew, this incident appears to have no historical truth).
In the Rubens, your eye flits from one grotesque scene to the next, babies flying this way and that. In the zoetrope, soldiers fight with mothers for their infants, and men toss babies out of windows in a loop.
As a 3D printed sculpture, it lacks some of the finesse of the original Flemish Baroque, which was able to get by with the brutal chaos through beautiful brushwork. The zoetrope just reduces it to its violence over and over again, but it is creepily mesmerizing with its endless macabre turns.
Gregory Barsamian
http://www.leonardo.info/gallery/gallery343/barsamian2.html
Gregory Barsamian’s three-dimensional animated sculptures probe some of the fundamental dilemmas of human existence while celebrating the potency of dreams. Employing the 19th-century theory of the persistence of vision, Barsamian creates kinetic sculptural pieces that meld and metamorphose familiar objects in unexpected ways to suggest cinematic alternative realities. Using rotating mechanical armatures and synchronized strobe lights, Barsamian’s pieces transform simple animation into a boldly three-dimensional sculpture illusion — one that is also a kind of magical realism
Peter Paul Rubens
“The Massacre of the Innocents” (1611-12); oil on oak
Peter Paul Rubens
“The Massacre of the Innocents” (1638)
