The Last Supper, Photographed, at American University 2009
As part of a project that I had for a photography class I was taking last year, I chose to recreate 3 famous paintings as photos for a series. I rounded up my friends and I blurted out really basic instructions I had drawn up from studying Leonardo’s painting down the line to each person behind the table. From about 20-30 shots from differing angles, I added some light effects in Photoshop and this was the final print.
The above video was made by someone who calls themselves Ricardo Audobahn. It’s a pretty amazing feat considering the diversity of movies involved: anywhere from Citizen Kane to Freaks, and the fact that the words actually rhyme. Still in disbelief? Read the lyrics below:
Apparently someone’s been saving this embarassment of the MoMA for a rainy day.
In 1956 the Museum of Modern Art sent a letter to a certain Mr. Andy Warhol, gently letting him know that his sketch titled “Shoe” would not be accepted as a gift from the artist to the museum for placement in its permanent collection.
Now, I don’t want to be a snob, but it’s Andy Warhol, and although you do have limited gallery space, it is, again, Andy Warhol…. I’m sure they’ll take it next time.
1948
1959
1972
Advertising pioneer David Ogilvy in his book Confessions of an Advertising Man:
The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything.
My first encounter with James Ensor at the special exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
It’s hard to describe James Ensor as a painter. He was a member of the Belgian avant-gard, most prolific at the turn of the 19th century; he studied at prestigious art schools in France; he was dark, death obsessed, funny and insulting. Walking through the exhibit gives you a sense of his basic motifs and styles. Its not that he obviously matured and evolved as a painter, but his education from the École des Beaux-Arts nearly turned him into a much more generic painter at the time instead of the darkly comedic satirist that he is famous for becoming. Ensor wasn’t exactly an impressionist, but he painted through splotches and not the more simple inference of color and light through smaller brush strokes.
Much of his earlier work focused on basic scenes that one would expect from a painter at the time, depicting regular people on the street in their natural habitat, doing whatever it is they do. His subjects included two men slouched by a table in a drunken stupor on the street. One of his paintings which he constructed in an attempt to show off his education and traditional ability depicts a woman (modeled off of his sister) eating at a luxurious dining table adorned with every type of shiny glass surface one could image (the reflection of light meant to show-off his artistic eye).
Masks Mocking Death, 1888
In the late 1800’s that Ensor really created his own style and themes for his paintings, often focusing around masks, which his family sold in a shop under his studio. One of his most famous paintings, pictured left, depicts the character Death as a skeleton in the center, being teased by people in masks surrounding him. Ensor’s playfulness is obvious, the character usually reserved for paintings of fear and drama has been reduced to the butt of a joke by obnoxiously masked bullies. Its refreshing, even as Death is depicted as a dark and scary skeleton who looks as if he is attempting to hide behind an ironically white sheet and therefore is disarmed by Ensors other masked characters.
Skeletons Warming Themselves, 1889
The exhibit note’s Ensor’s penchant for inserting himself into his paintings, and one year later painted a few skeletons inhabiting his studio (and apparently his clothing) to warm themselves by his stove. Ensor references himself as the skeleton at the bottom of the painting under a cloth, his paint palette at his boots. There’s something very funny about the skulls, and its emphasized in the exhibit where there is a similar photograph of Ensor himself painting in this studio by the stove. The skulls look like dolls who have snuck into the real work and put on Ensor’s clothes, not to haunt or torment anyone, but to play house. These figures playing around Ensor’s studio are his muse, and he plays back with them with this painting.
After walking through most of the space, I started getting a feeling that the dates for all these paintings are very close, yet the man lived to be almost 90 (through two World Wars). The reason for this is because he was most prolific in the period before WWI, and subsequently receded into his more obvious ideas of satirizing current events.
The Banquet of the Starved, 1915
The above painting depicts cartoonishly painted men at a banquet table, as well as one of his earlier (and substantially more famous) paintings Two Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring at the Top as a metaphor for those fighting over food while the conquerors of Belgium eat like, well, conquerors. During WWI Ensor stayed in his native Belgium as the Germans invaded while the citizens suffered a food shortage.
While most of the pieces in MoMA’s exhibit came from abroad, there are a few notables missing, including his most famous Christ’s Entry into Brussels, for which his sketches are there to remind you what you’re missing. Other then that the exhibit is necessary and enjoyable coverage of an artist who is far too innovative and entertaining for him to be as little known as he is.
Co-founder of the Bauhaus movement, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy:
Designing is not a profession but an attitude. Design has many connotations. It is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. It is the intergration of technological, social, and economical requirements, biological necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume and space. Thinking in relationships.
I remember being surprised to see one of his pieces on permanent display at the MoMA in New York. The surprise came not at first sight but upon reading the small information card citing him as the creator through a rather innovative process for the time. That the small piece, a rectangle containing a few lines and boxes at dynamic angles, was made by Moholy-Nagy directly calling in the design to the press, without any direct visual exchange or proof between the designer and the producer.
Homegrown Infographics and the Internet
Infographics have become a candy on the internet. On social networking sites that drive traffic like digg and reddit, there’s bound to be a graphic representation of some story in a home grown chart or graph on any given day. With the emergence of this DIY infograph culture and popularity, its important to remain critical and make sure, are these graphics telling the whole story?
DIY design is a much discussed phenomena among professionally trained designers. It provides some of the more basic tools to the not-so-professionals, so they can flex their creative muscles and make funny t-shirts like the rest of us. But, the lack of formal training is a huge avenue for criticism. Thanks to the internet, transparency of information and the dissemination of people’s opinions and analysis is much more possible, and its not hard to see why infographics can apply to these causes. Where there’s someone willing to put up raw data, there’s someone else to synthesize it into an infographic of their own, and maybe even one more person to host it on their website for all the world to see. By the time that graphic gets to you, there’s a lot of people you as the viewer have to trust, if you’re going to take their synthesis seriously.
Formal education on visual information and graphics most always involves the work of Edward R. Tufte, a world renowned statistician, professor and author (and hater of PowerPoint). One of the most popular terms he has coined in criticism of contemporary info-graphics is the pervasive use of “chartjunk” which employs unnecessary embellishments to infographics that distract the viewer and take away the main things a graphic should be made up of: the information to be synthesized, and the graphic representation of it.
Good Magazine produces a series of incredibly popular infographics both in print and on their website. However popular, they often employ chartjunk embellishments in an effort to walk the line between eye-candy and staggaringly simply explanations of complex data sets. For example their infograph titled Transparency, Which Countries Eat the Most Meat employs mysterious gradients to already complicated iconographic equations on the right.
Here the gradient on the right could be taken as a practical element denoting special focus as part of the information synthesis, not just a decorative element.
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from → Commentary, Spotted Design