Category:
Art
Zarh H. Pritchard (1866-1956) is a little-remembered artistic pioneer of the 20th century. (There's not even a wikipedia page about him!) His claim to fame is that he was the first artist to paint underwater.
Pritchard would descend to the ocean floor in a diving suit and then paint using waterproof paints on a lambskin canvas soaked in oil. An article in the
Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (June 18, 1922) provides more details about the process:
It was in Tahiti [1904] that he first decided to make a try at painting pictures in the realm of Neptune and the lair of the mermaids. For the experiment he prepared a waterproof canvas and had his colors ground extra thick.
His first descent was for a distance of about 65 feet. At the end of about a half an hour cold and fatigue forced him to return to the surface. Later, as he became more adapted to his new environment, he was able to stay longer. He now works at depths varying from 16 to 50 feet. He can work at any depth to which a diver can descend.
When he starts to work he is clad in the customary diving costume with leaded shoes, air hose and signal ropes. He descends slowly through the water and after reconnoitering the territory in which he is going to paint selects a comfortable rock. He then pulls the signal rope and his easel and box of colors are lowered to him. He blocks in his outlines, lays his tints and finishes the picture roughly.
Some of Pritchard's underwater works are below. They sold quite well. The Prince of Monaco, who was a respected oceanographer in addition to being royalty, was a big fan and bought many of them.
Read more about Pritchard here.
From db-artmag.com:
Around twenty-five years previously: a person wears a white helmet that is submarine-like in the way it extends to the front and back. His entire head disappears into the futurist capsule; only the title betrays what is happening inside it. The TV Helmet of 1967 is a technical device that isolates the user while imbedding him or her in an endless web of information: closed off against the outside world, the wearer is completely focused on the screen before his or her eyes. This work by Walter Pichler doesn't merely formally anticipate the cyber glasses developed decades later. He also articulated questions of content in relation to the media experience long before the "virtual world" was even discovered. Pichler called his invention a Portable Living Room, and this is usually interpreted as scathing sarcasm. When at least the tube is on in the living room, then we can easily do without varnished cabinets and potted violets, the title seems to say.
Read more here.
Residents of Campbelltown, Australia woke on Sunday to find that someone (presumably teenagers) had stacked shopping carts from local stores into a big pyramid outside the train station. This has sparked a debate in the town about the definition of art. Specifically, is the shopping cart pyramid art, or just vandalism? The mayor of Campbelltown, for one, feels that shopping carts (or shopping trolleys, as they say down there) have no legitimate place in art. Carts, he says, "are only to be used to carry groceries from the shops to your car." Links:
Macarthur Chronicle,
Facebook.
Artist
Kourtney Keller offers the following explanation of what's going on in her video:
The subject of JEWEL SPEW is literally saturated with light…so much so that it endlessly sprays out of her in the form of light beams and jewel plumes. Likewise, her environment is saturated with jewels and she is choking on them. In the futile act of trying to shake them off, she activates the possibility that her predicament is terminal...
the subject of JEWEL SPEW is caught in a hypnotic video loop of spewing bling. She is not only surrounded by what is afflicting her, but appears contagious.
Thanks to the stellar research powers of Alex B., we now have the complete set of these oddball Freudian prompts.
Click on the image to enlarge.
From the
artist's description:
A long piece of rope represents three dimensionally a series of waves floating in space, as well as producing sounds from the physical action of their movement: the rope which creates the volume also simultaneously creates the sound by cutting through the air, making up a single element.
Depending on how we may act in front of it, according to the number of observers and their movements, it will pass from a steady line without sound to chaotic shapes of irregular sounds (the more movement there is around the installation) through the different phases of sinusoidal waves and harmonic sounds.
It's kind of hypnotic, but I kept wondering what happens if the rope breaks. (via
coilhouse)
Here's more art from Art Domantay (the guy who did the
chocolate toilet). This piece is called "See Man". It was exhibited at
The Project in the Fall 2002. It consists of "Invisible Man model toy, artist's semen, refrigeration unit."
I can't see any invisible man model toy -- must be because it's invisible! Which reduces this exhibit to being this guy's semen in a refrigerator. It would never have occurred to me to call this art. But then, I'm no art critic, so what do I know. I'm just a guy who posts random stuff on Weird Universe.
Edit: After posting this, it occurred to me that the joke is probably that he gets people to peer into the refrigerator looking for the invisible man, but they're really just staring at his man juice. i.e. Do you see the man? Yes I See Man! -- Maybe it is brilliant in its own twisted way.
William P. Harrison was a professor of dentistry at the University of Southern California between 1929 and 1963. He had an unusual way of teaching dentistry skills. He made his students create tiny wax carvings. He figured that if the students had the manual dexterity to make a good miniature carving, they also would have the skill to be a good dentist. Over the years, he amassed a collection of hundreds of wax carvings made by his students. I have no idea what became of them all. It's the kind of thing I'd like to see in a museum, if they were on display. Some text and images below, and
more info here:
1955 image of one of Harrison's students making a carving.
Belgian artist Wim DeIvoye has an installation he calls
"Cloaca." Food goes in one end, gets processed in various ways, and comes out at the other end as poop — or something closely resembling poop. He's got various versions of this thing: the mini cloaca, personal cloaca, cloaca professional, etc. The version shown here is the "Cloaca New & Improved." It's been displayed at museums throughout Europe.
Retired teacher Geoff Ostling is covered in tattoos by Australian artist eX de Medici. He likes them so much that he wants them to be preserved for posterity. So he's bequeathed his skin to the National Gallery in Canberra so that after he's dead it can be tanned and hung on the wall for everyone to see. The Gallery hasn't accepted it yet, and Ostling realizes the bequest is controversial, but he thinks the controversy is
a result of people being overly squeamish:
What are the ethical problems with the display of human skins? Is it because a beautiful tattooed human skin may force people to confront their own mortality? That we all will die one day and none of us really knows what will happen after we die. Is this the big problem that makes some people shiver? I see the tanning of my skin and donating it to the Gallery as being no different to allowing the transplant of my heart or my lungs if they will save another person's life. The skin is the largest organ of the body.
Images via
zimbio.com