Create Dangerously

by Drew Martin
I recently watched an online lecture by Edwidge Danticat titled: Create Dangerously - The Immigrant Artist at Work. She expresses that writers belong to their readers and are honorary citizens of the countries where they are read and that self doubt is part of the acclimatization of every immigrant, which is the staple for artists. "The immigrant artist shares with all other artists a desire to remake the world even if the world is full of xenophobia, sexism, racism and just plain meanness." It is not a delicate lecture. She begins with the execution of two young talented Haitian men: "Their blood on the wall was the collaborative work of a dictator and henchmen." She speaks of the need for convincing each other in extreme conditions that art can be created, finding a balance between silence and art. She speaks of Albert Camus - creating with a sense of political responsibility and a revolt against silence. Danticat questions how writers and artists find each other in dangerous times; when reading and writing is an act of disobedience. She says "What joins writers, is that somewhere, if not now, someone might risk his or her life to read us." She quotes Osip Mandelshtam, the Russian poet and essayist: "Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed."

Butterflies on My Mind

by Drew Martin

Butterflies have been on my mind. It started with a documentary about a woodworker who used butterfly dovetails and with images of an installation of butterfly cut-outs by my friend Kirk Maxson (pictured - left). Yesterday I drew a butterfly hanging sets of her wings out to dry and I just woke up from a peculiar dream about a butterfly. I was visiting a couple in Piermont, New York. The husband had just invented illuminated clothes hangers for dark closets, which could be disassembled and used as shoelaces for runners. They looked particularly similar to the clear noodles I ate last night, but with a red glow. I was there for an experiment: to transfer my mind to a butterfly. I was reluctant to do so and thought, "Who will take care of my body while I am away?" When I entered the room for the procedure, I was surprised. In place of a surgical suite, there was a dining room with tables of well-dressed guests waiting to witness this. There was a table for me to lie on and some kind of apparatus to monitor me. I needed some time to think about this so I excused myself and left for the bathroom. I closed the door and woke up in my bed at home.

The Compleat Sculptor

by Drew Martin

One of my favorite escapes in New York is to go the basement of The Compleat Sculptor, Inc. at 90 Vandam Street between Hudson Street and Greenwich Street in SoHo. It is only a couple blocks from me but it feels like a world away. The above-ground store has traditional sculpting supplies and modern casting materials for the "Sculptor, Prop Maker, Prototype Maker, Conservator, Police/FBI/Law Enforcer, Model Maker, Restorer, Architect, Body Caster, Display/Window Designer, 3D Mosaicist, Scenic Artist, Fine Art Student, Archaeologist, Special Effects Artist, Mold-Maker..." The basement is a cavernous open space with stone and wood from all over the world. Sometimes I go there to buy sculpting tools or large boxes of air-drying clay. My favorite corner of their cellar is the 99-cent/pound pot-luck bin where you can find abandoned stone fragments such as my favorite piece "Cantaloupe" (pictured left). This is a roll-up-one's-sleeves artist's place that offers classes in stone carving, clay sculpture, portrait drawing and mold making. Click here to see someone at work in one of the studio spaces.

The History of Light

by Drew Martin

Even though we can see starlight from billions of years ago, light is fresh: we can create it with chemical, nuclear and mechanical means. With the quest for fire, humans discovered a powerful combination of heat and light. The electric lightbulb lit up civilization around 1880. Motion pictures were first projected in 1895. The first installation of a neon sign was 1912, the same year as the first red-green electric traffic light. In Times Square, the first large electric billboard was installed in 1917 and the first running electric display was installed in 1928. The first television screen was created in 1923 and the first LCD computer monitor was developed in 1972. When I think about light, I wonder just how long plain light will last in its simplest use - to illuminate, and how it will be replaced by informational light. Could, for example, headlights of cars contain signatures that would provide law enforcement with registration information, car-make and driver identification that could be picked up by a scanner. For that matter, could headlights even project images, like a drive-in-movie-for-one. Likewise, could street lamps also project or relay information about lost cats, garbage pickup, and parking. Light has always been a key to our existence but now it is a valuable resource for energy and information. 

Kids Doing Cartwheels in Sri Lanka

by Drew Martin
In 2011, Katie Humphries, a New York-based photographer, asked me to speak to the students of her P.S. 3 after-school photography class about my UNDER THE HOOD: New York project that was displayed at the New York Public Library. I also spent some time discussing how I professionally use photography and showed the young students progress photos of many iconic buildings in New York and spoke about photoshoots, use of images in advertising and materials, and archiving. I was really impressed by Katie's commitment to this class. This is her nature and the direction of her creative energy. She recently returned from a trip Sri Lanka as part of The cARTwheel Initiative, a not-for-profit organization that travelled there to work with Tamil children in worn-torn regions. They created four art workshops (photography, painting and collage, graphic design, and music) in three schools: Mallavi Central College, Pandiyankulum, and Poonekary. The program included Tamil students between the ages of 10-17. The project culminated with a school community exhibition and a show in Colombo as well.

Origami May Save Your Life

by Drew Martin

I watched a fascinating documentary yesterday about origami: Between the Folds: Exploring Origami. The film is incredibly well constructed because of the way it takes you deeper and deeper into the world of origami. It starts off with representational origami and the realism achieved by origami artists such as Michael LaFosse, who is the only origami maker who also makes his own paper and he makes the paper with a piece in mind, i.e. double-sided black and yellow for a toucan. Then there is Dr. Robert J. Lang who holds two Caltech degrees and gave up a full-time gig at Caltech to pursue origami. As an art form, origami is unique; it is a metamorphic art, as opposed to additive or subtractive art. Its secrets and beauty are in the folding, which its followers explain is everywhere: the folding of fabric, sound waves, mountains, galaxies, DNA...everything. Some origami makers say it is improvisational like jazz, while others claim it is more like sonatas or fugues. Lang, who gives his work opus numbers, offers an analogy between music and the laws of paper, "What you can accomplish is strongly governed by mathematical laws of music; the harmonic ratios between the notes and rhythms." And this is where the documentary gets even more interesting. Anyone who is anyone in the origami world agrees, Akira Yoshizawa (1911-2005) was the master who took the basics of school-kid origami and made it an art form and a science. Dr. Thomas Hull, a mathematics professor at Merrimack College, speaks about math as all of its subjects together and says that origami exhibits this including: geometry, number theory, abstract algebra, linear algebra with matrices, and "weird-bizarre" geometry like geometry of the sphere. Dr. Erik Demaine is a 30-year-old professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the top origami theorist. He went to college at 12, got his bachelor's degree at 14 and his Ph.D. at 20, with his dissertation on computational origami. He joined the MIT faculty at that time and received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship "Genius Award" two years later in 2003. If you think folding paper is being taken too seriously, consider the practical applications: the airbag algorithm came from the design of artistic origami and origami design is being used in the space industry to engineer foldable satellite parts that can be packed into rockets and unfurled in space. Demaine also touches upon pharmaceutical applications - how proteins fold determine good health or disease and being able to create proteins with a certain fold would make it possible to target certain viruses.

The Emperor's Nude Tunick

by Drew Martin

I just watched Naked States, a documentary about Spencer Tunick, the photgrapher who made his name taking pictures of mass nudes in public. I have liked his work but had no idea who he was, I definitely did not expect the quirky New Yorker who was not quick to shed his own clothes when he ended up at a nudist beach in Sandy Hook, New Jersey. To fit in, he and his crew disrobed but he said it was too hard to concentrate on his work and he complained about a lack of pockets. Tunick's photos are beautifully still with bodies that seem to be in-between rest and death. He says his work has two sides: form and shape without fashion, and a reaction to war, terrorism and killing. For his first shoot with more than 1,000 people (gathered at a Phish concert) he photographed all the bodies lying down on an old Air Force runway that used to be home to fighter jets with nuclear capabilities. Now that Tunick is famous he can get whoever and however many people he wants to pose for him, but this documentary from 2000 is simply about a guy with an idea and a camera. It shows an unknown Tunick struggling to earn his recognition: driving across the country with his devoted girlfriend in a van to different shoots, trying to find models on the street like a guileless Greenpeace volunteer asking passersby to sign a petition. At a biker gathering an irate father tells him to F-off when he approaches his daughter. The amazing thing about the documentary is that it shows the cycle of participation. Some people are up for anything but for the most part the people he asks are bashful and reluctant but then speak about the experience as liberating and the awkward feeling of putting their clothes back on. One young woman in Fargo responds to his initial request, "Don't you know we are in North Dakota and we are very repressed." She talks to friends right afterwards. A guy is suspicious but a girl says that it must be as liberating as skinny dipping. The most moving subject is a young woman who is extremely shy about the offer and then after being photographed says she was raped six months prior to the shoot and that since the rape she had an invisible boundary around her. She says that Tunick's shoot was 90% of her therapy to feel "free to be me." Most of the bigger shoots seem completely chaotic and frustrating. At the time of the film, Tunick was arrested five times, three of those in New York. For a New York arrest shown in the beginning of the film, Tunick is charged with aiding and abetting disorderly conduct. The movie ends with the charges dropped and the triumph of a impressive solo show at the I-20 gallery.

The Cloud

by Drew Martin
Walt Disney was restless in the afterlife. The Cloud was boring, but then it filled with digital information: articles, photos and movies. Walt, the omnivore that he is, devours all of it. One of his favorite things to watch is a performance by Lenka Klodová. In the piece, Lenka gives a survey of art with large, painted cardboard panels and her big, bare breasts. You never actually see Lenka topless because she stands behind the boards. To begin, Lenka holds up a large panel with a painting of Madonna/Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. Then she knocks out the head of the Christ child and substitutes his cherubic face with a round breast. The small crowd in the brick room cheers at the transformation of Christ from mere paper into living flesh. An old man with a scraggly beard raises his hands and shouts..."It's a miracle!" Lenka then holds up a still-life painting of a bowl overflowing with juicy fruits. She tosses aside two, flat apples and replaces them with her own ripe melons. Finally, (Walt's favorite part) Lenka holds up a huge panel with a painted Mickey Mouse, which is almost as tall as she is. Some viewers start singing M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E. Lenka punches out Mickey's eyes from behind and slips both breasts through the cardboard sockets. Walt admits, Mickey never looked so good.

The Cabbage

by Drew Martin

In my mid-twenties, I lived in Sudetenland where I used to ride the trolley buses. One day, I got on a full bus and a middle-aged woman squished next to me. She was curvy and carried heavy bags of produce. The doors closed and the bus rolled forward. Our backs were to each other and our bodies overlapped on one of our legs. Her calf muscle was strong and firm, and it pressed against my leg with a hidden desire. I stood still and enjoyed the sensation. We rode over a metal bridge above the Elbe and turned before a small basalt mountain where a fallout shelter had been prepared for the communist elite. That was a fading era: the Berlin Wall had been torn down a few years earlier and people were enjoying new freedoms, everyone except me. I was stuck in this backwards town in a bad marriage and all I had in this moment was the pressing leg of a stranger. The bus continued on and bounced and people's bodies jiggled. When we rounded a corner one way our legs would press harder and then on the opposite turn our calves would briefly disconnect but soon find each other again. Finally, the trolley bus slowed down before the main station. The doors opened and I turned as I got out to look as this companion's leg, only to find it had been a cabbage in her bag. 

Drawn to Landscape

by Drew Martin
I recently revisited the lecture Blind Landscape by Teresita Fernández, which she gave at Princeton in 2009. I watched it a couple years ago but was not stirred by it, so I watched it again and listened to it several times. I also checked out some more-recent online interviews with her in order to understand this artist who I have not met and whose work I have never seen in situ. Fernández is the first to point out: you need to see her work in person, but The Museum of Peripheral Art's raison d'être is to embrace the peripheral, mediated experience of the arts. Fernández is beyond accomplished: her work has been shown all over the world, her awards include the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship "Genius Award" (2005), and last year President Obama appointed her to the United States Commission of Fine Arts. Fernández calls herself a conceptual artist but I do not like that term (for her) because what she produces is really installation art. In keeping with her own label, however, it would be more appropriate to call her a conceptual landscape artist because her work is about the grandiosity of land (and sea) but is also intimately close to the composition and details of the whole. Not only does travel suit this very cultured and articulate artist, but I think Fernández really redefines what traveling as an artist can be - a constant, creative exchange with landscapes. Although people are not present in her work - they are integral to it as the viewer, mimicking the reality of our relationship with the land and architecture. Most artists from Miami - (now) based in Brooklyn would only trash-talk New Jersey to stake one's claim as a New Yorker but Fernández is territorial in the greatest sense - she explores her environment with a curious eye and an open mind. I was impressed when she spoke about some of the Garden State's points of interest: the other-worldly phosphorescence room at the Franklin Mineral Museum and the Great Falls of the Passaic River in Paterson. What I like most about Fernández is her interest in things such as the intentionally surface-burned houses of Naoshima, Japan (pictured left - bottom), which she calls big charcoal drawings, and the graphite mines of Borrowdale, England, where graphite has been used for ages to mark sheep, which she delights in calling animated drawings. Pictured left - top is Ring of Fire by Fernández.

The First Stone Sculptures of Life

by Drew Martin

It has been relayed to me all of my life by art historians that Michelangelo found his human forms inside the blocks of marble and he merely released them. He died in 1564 and while fossils of bizarre creatures had been discovered for centuries, it was not for another 300 years that people started making sense of them. There is something very Michelangelo about fossilized plants and animals - hints of life trapped in stone/converted to stone. It is also quite mythological: Medusa-like. Two days ago, a neighbor and I were walking around an excavation across the street from my house. We live in northern New Jersey, which is full of glacial field stones. The deep dig turned up thousands of rocks, some the size of large cars. On the way out of the site, my neighbor saw a chunk of sandstone. He mentioned there would be fossils inside, perhaps a few shells, so he lifted it above his head and threw it down on the asphalt driveway. It split open to reveal the tail of some ancient creature, with a ribbed end. It was fascinating to witness and to contemplate this life form from a much earlier time and to imagine that the very land we stood on was once covered by the ocean.
Click here to see a video of the rock and fossil.

Possible Side Effects of Good Design

by Drew Martin

I just finished watching the Princeton University online lecture SIGNALS GraphicChipDesignKidd. Chip Kidd is an author, editor and graphic designer, best known for his book covers for Knopf where he has worked in design since 1986 and is now the associate art director. Kidd is a captivating, colorful and articulate speaker. This lecture is a must-see for graphic designers; he speaks about time and sequence, color crescendo, making typography "look like it is in denial," the fine line between minimalism and boredom, and most importantly figuring out your idea and concept before trying to make it look good or leading the project with style in mind. The six-finger image here is from the cover of Augusten Borroughs' Possible Side Effects. While discussing the approach for Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, he talks about incorporating 16th century Turkish court paintings and generalizes about such details, "We want to present them in a way that will provide them a narrative that is applicable and relative to what is going on in the book." Kidd taught Senior Graphic Design Portfolio at the School of Visual Arts in New York for six years and seems to have the best of both worlds - the tools computers can offer but also the skills of a hands-on, old-school designer.

Human Geography

by Drew Martin

Yesterday I watched the Princeton University online lecture Place, Art, and Self by Yi-Fu Tuan, who was introduced as a pioneer in human geography. He spoke about our spaces - natural (pristine nature), artificial (all architecture) and virtual (the space in art and music where we pause to rest to be nurtured). He differentiated the kinds of art -  photography is a very stabile space, while 'dutifully plodding through a novel' is too much like life, not a place to rest with one inconsequential incident after another, but added that even in a novel there are pages that work on our sensibility, making us aware of our presence and mood to which we may wish to return. Interestingly, he spoke about the nostalgia of (specifically) American men directed to the recent past and also about how home towns stunt growth and do not suffice for the mature human being. I think what Tuan considers with equal weight, physical and virtual spaces, are actually one in the same - we seek out environments that are manifestations of the space in our minds. Tuan said he has a desert personality and that people fall in love with a place in very much the same way they fall in love with others; affection for a place might be like a friendship that grows over time but it can also be love at first sight.

A Year in Review: The Museum of Peripheral Art in 2011

Click here for The Museum of Peripheral Art's 2010 Annual Review
Click here for The Museum of Peripheral Art's 2009 Annual Review