the Vienna Secession

cameratruck!

“To try and understand nature we have to be like her. And if we wish to take her portrait, we need a camera that is also like her: big, very big and always moving.
But since a camera like this does not exist, we had to build it ourselves.
This is the cameratruck project.”
The cameratruck is bounding through spain as we speak, taking giant pinhole negatives (about 3 meters wide!) as it navigates the treacherous roadways and ecstatic views. I can’t wait to see what it comes up with, and I love the pseudo clunky spy element involved. As you can see, this giant truck has a tiny window inconspicuously drilled in its side, which enables it to make all of enormous images. How impractical! How marvelous!

rocket men

Rocketships plummeting to the ground and leaving their remains unburied in a forlorn corner of the world... this photo essay seems like my dream topic for photography. Kazakhstan is the unlikely home to many completed Russian and Soviet space escapades, due to its geographical bearing, and likely its remoteness. They are left where they “land” (read: crash) and picked away at by local farmers and villagers, and for the most part left to rot. There is a lot of concern over the cancer causing elements left to deteriorate along with the rockets themselves, but in typical Russian fashion, no one seems overly motivated to deal with the problem.
The extreme value shift in these expensive machines is riveting; pre take-off, they are multi-million (or billion) dollar investments, guarded carefully by the Russian government and symbols of Russia’s continuing dream to ascend the top of the world ladder in space exploration. Post-mission they are disregarded, steaming heaps of trash that this same government can not even be bothered to come collect from its own neighbors. Its a reminder of the expendability of nearly everything in modern society, and ultimately ironic that these intricate, technically complex beasts are laid to rest near the villages where life is as simple as it has been for hundreds of years. Well, except for the fact that they have to wheel their carts around new road blocks their former government has thrown down from the sky. So, postmodern elements of society exist everywhere, I suppose.

claustrophilic

My father lived on a boat for a big part of my childhood, a fact on which I blame my love for tiny, cozy little spaces. There is a deep comfort to be found in being tucked away down in a little burrow-like hobbit hole, where everything is dark and woody, and rocking slowly on the calm waves of the night time. I feel as though no one can find me there, and I can while away the hours reading, snacking, napping, lounging...I guess this is revealing my anti-social tendencies more than I anticipated.
I can’t help but wonder if these tiny houses might not be able to offer me that same feeling of sanctuary, but this time in my own back yard (if I had one). Or maybe we could just move into one entirely, and jettison all of our unwieldy furniture and possessions. I’m not sure if it would work the same way as the boat, since it does not offer the freedom of taking off into the morning light, headed for anywhere. But they are darn cute anyway.

model behavior

off to California for a week, but I'll leave you with this great article about Olivo Barbieri's aerial photographs. You won't believe it, but they're real! Of actual places and not models!

death of a modernist dream

“...design has become, more often than not, a badge of mediocrity. The old Modernist dream of good design standing for rationality and human values has been flipped. Today, good design is little more than a cosmetic agent, an obscuring agent. When I see my favorite sandwich bar introduce a slick new fascia and smart window decals, a little wave of disappointment runs through me. You don’t see the work of sign writers any more; it’s hard to find handmade signs and ramshackle window displays. The urban environment is now over-designed. It's all too branded, too inhuman.”
While I agree that many shoddy businesses hide themselves behind slick graphics, I bristle at the broad claim of good design being little more than an obscuring agent in contemporary culture. Perhaps the definition of “good design” needs to be modified, because it seems now clear that the Modernist dream was just that–a dream–and not a sufficiently thought out starting point for all design endevours. I think it is very reactive thinking to assume that contemporary nomenclature and design standards make it impossible for authenticity and creativity to thrive. In fact, a self-conscious clinging to the “olde-worlde” aesthetic is far more manipulative in the long run.

rot in peace

Here is a lovely photo-essay on different attitudes toward abandoned buildings, which brings to light a variety of approaches in dealing with structures that have been left to the elements. I’m mixed in my feelings about arrested decay, because it has a theme park quality to it, even though I agree that recognizable ruins are more fun to look at than buildings that have completely crumbled into their surroundings. The most provocative idea in the essay is Camilo José Vergara’s proposal to turn urban Detroit into a “ruins park,” where nature would return and reclaim the urban ring. I can imagine a stunning series of time-lapse images showing the bizarre intermediate stages of that return to nature.

best of all possible worlds?

One of the most tragic effects of time and decline, in my opinion, is the loss of the fruits of a once thriving society. I feel more comfortable thinking of the passage of time as leading to progress—things getting better, safer, smarter, more interesting— as time goes on. Studying the growth, flowering, and eventual decline of any number of civilizations will quickly makes it clear that often, if not always eventually; this becomes no longer true.
Take a look at the difference in what is possible in building currently, as opposed to what was done in the past. We’re unable to create the vast, intricate marblework showcased in many centuries old buildings today, a fact that boggles my mind. That kind of material is just TOO expensive to be purchased, period. And that kind of skilled, manual labor has also risen so much in cost that it is also untenable for the contemporary builder. Isn’t that weird? We have these tabernacles around us today, in our great cities and used by contemporary citizens, which we no longer have the possibility to create.
Clearly changes in our value system have partially led to this predicament, and the individual is valued more highly, and rewarded more justly, for his contribution. The slave labor that made the pyramids possible is nothing to be proud of. But then again, in retrospect, it is all of human kind that is rewarded in the end by the undertaking of these vast projects. Our world would indeed be less grand without these ancient testaments.
Reflecting on that circumstance makes me much more afraid for the attrition of other kinds of current flowering in our society. What will we lose next? It makes me so uncomfortable to see that in order to make progress in our understanding of the value of the people in our society, we have had to leave some of our greatness behind.

breaking down

Keeping on my spectacle kick, there is some amazing photography out there of the process known as shipbreaking, where huge tankers and container ships are dismantled piece by piece, and somewhat left to rot, on giant sand tidal beds in developing nations. Bangledesh has the most famous shipbreaking yards, where men, women, and children spend about two months to reduce an entire cargo ship to small pieces of scrap, that are then recycled and sold in various other industries. The images are absolutely haunting and incredibly beautiful. Although Edward Burtynsky is probably the most famous photographer of this giant-scale process, although I think anyone would be hardpressed to take a bad photograph of such a dramatic scene. In fact, I rather prefer these images, which are perhaps more straight forward, but make it a bit easier to make out what is going on.
The ships are majestic and tragic, as they tower over the sand and the people, and are slowly picked away to nothing by both. I’m so impressed by their presence and stature that it is difficult to see them as relics resigned to the trash heap. I’m not sure what constitutes obsolesence in shipping, although I think it continues to have something to do with size. Now ships are being made that are too large to fit through the Panama canal (one of my TOP travel fantasy destinations, by the way), and they just power these beasts down around the horn.

beauty and the book

One of the most interesting projects of contemporary art is creating a certifiable, stop you-in-you-tracks spectacle. Now I’m not talking about a pee-on-a-crucifix kind of spectacle, which I think really just revels in shock value, but some kind of visual stimulation that truly causes the viewer to be disoriented, and to evaluate the world around him again in light of new, improbable circumstances. I’d love to spend my time creating art that speaks in this way, but am lacking something critical to achieve this goal—a great idea.
Matej Kren created a giant, cylindrical tower of thousands of books, which is currently on display at the Israel Museum. They are organized by tone and color so intricately, that seeing the photographs of so many of them stacked together is totally overwhelming. This grandeur of scale is a good first step in creating a spectacle, but I am really intrigued by the use of books in such a context as makes them utterly impossible to read. They still ‘read’ visually as books, but are useless as books. They are now blocks of color, pieces of foundation, towers to the ceiling. It is gratifying and disorienting to see them giving knowledge through an interaction so different from their intended purpose.

some bookcovers i think are particularly fabulous

...to give you something nice to look at for a change. If you disagree with me on any of these, I'd love to hear why.