Bikini Kickboxer Art Commentary: Sports & Art

by Drew Martin
Back by popular demand....Bikini Kickboxer Art Commentary!



The original Bikini Kickboxer Art Commentary was part of the 2014 MoPA kickoff. Here it is on its own.

 

Must See Must Play at the Museum of the Moving Image

by Drew Martin

In a recent issue of Time Out New York there was a half-page article by Aaron Stern titled Indie Essentials: 25 Must-Play Video Games, which is the name of the exhibit he detailed at the Museum of the Moving Image. I loved Indie Game: the Movie so I was eager to see this exhibit. I went with my family today, and we stayed for a few hours.

I was immediately impressed by the museum with its hip curbside appeal. We entered through an atmospheric revolving door, which looked liked it housed a smoke machine, but we soon found out that was actually a busted steam valve at the entrance. (pictured left, bottom)

The museum is located in Astoria, Queens in a renovated film studio building. The fairly new expansion was designed by architect Thomas Leeser. It has got such a curvaceous, white-glowing lobby space that it was hard not to see the rip curl snowdrifts (from the recent winter storm) outside in their garden courtyard as part of the design.

The original studio was built in 1920 and turned out many features and short films, including The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930), the first two Marx Brothers films.

At the exhibit, my daughter got immersed in Braid, which is considered one of the most visually intriguing and well-designed games, while my two sons kept busy with Minecraft and many other games. Visitors can play all 25 games, on various devices, and Minecraft is even projected onto one huge wall of the space. One of the interesting aspects of the exhibit is that it does not seem weird in that setting to stand over someone's shoulder and watch him or her play the game because the visitor's participation in the games is part of the show.

The exhibit is up until March 2, and the permanent collection is also very entertaining and interactive. What my kids liked even more than Indie Essentials was an area with eight stop-animation camera-computer stations (pictured left, middle - my two older kids at work/play)

My daughter took off her Hey Chickadee Elemental Earrings and used them to craft a video about city sprites. My older son made an animation by moving loose change around one of the backgrounds, and my six year old made an animation of my keys sliding down a rainbow he flipped over like a slide. (pictured top - still)

The stations are intuitive, with simple controls, and you can email a link of your file(s) posted to the museum's site where you can download or directly post your creation to YouTube or Facebook. I downloaded two shorts I made with a chain from my press pass lanyard, spliced them together and added music. I did the same with my daughter's clips.

Click here to read my recent post regarding Indie Game: The Movie

Kicking off 2014 with a Little Help from Fiverr: Rapper + Bikini-Clad Kick-Boxer + ASL

by Drew Martin
Happy New Year everybody! I decided to kick off 2014 with a new video created with only $20 by assembling four $5 gigs from fiverr.com, which include introduction logo effects from Chennai, India, a rap song made just for the video, a bikini-clad kick-boxer, and American Sign Language. I cobbled together everything else.

A Year in Review: The Museum of Peripheral Art in 2013

The Legend of the Party Photographer and Tales from the Golden Era

by Drew Martin

If you like Photoshop mishaps and disasters but cannot remember a time before this image enhancement program was part of our lives at work and daily media consumption, then take a look at The Legend of the Party Photographer, one of six well-crafted short films that comprise Tales from the Golden Era.

Set in 1980s communist Romania, The Legend of the Party Photographer is about the old-school retouching of a black and white film print in order to make Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu taller than the visiting French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The party editors also want to add a hat to Ceausecu's bare head because they think it looks like he is saluting d'Estaing. In a hurried retouch without paying heed to the young photographer who wants to finish the picture, the image is whisked away and printed with a mistake that causes panic and a total recall.

Tales from the Golden Era is a brilliant film from 2009 that captures the absurdities and setting of this lost time and place behind the iron curtain, but it does so with such intelligence and wit that the director Cristian Mungiu serves us a very watchable film.

Low-Maintenance, Surreal, Glow-in-the-Dark Pets

by Drew Martin
The pets that have the best chance in our chaotic household are the ones that could basically survive without us. Our cat is doing well because we feed and love him, but with a water problem in the basement and a constant supply of fresh mice, he could actually live a long life without ever stepping outside.

I knew we were in trouble years ago when a neighbor gave us a big aquarium. Many fish later, and a brief phase with hermit crabs, the aquarium became a lonely place; until today. The aquarium belongs to my middle kid, my older son, Calder. This morning I was doing an art project with my youngest son. He diligently made Angry Birds with colorful sticks of Sculpey and I made the soft, fleshy creature from Salvador Dalí's Persistence of Memory using glow-in-the-dark Sculpey. Now, we only have to think of a name for him.

People Watching People Watching Art at MoMA

by Drew Martin
I was in midtown Manhattan on Friday, only a couple blocks from MoMA, so I thought I would stop by in the evening on my way home. I wanted to pick up some presents at their design store and I also want to take a picture of a David Hockney work in situ. I never found the Hockney I was looking for but that did not matter, MoMA was abuzz and dreamlike that evening. I took some B-roll anyway for a project I am thinking about, and upon review I really liked the footage so I decided to stitch the clips together and make a summary of my wandering through the galleries:

Kanye Kitsch and Surreal Czech Eroticism

by Drew Martin

Last night I had a dream that I attended a small-venue Katy Perry concert in New York City and was able to work my way up to the stage. The concert was a little edgy, which I thought was an artistic apology for the release of Prism; a schlocky let-down after her creative and crafty Teenage Dream. I awoke after the fourth song, and in my groggy transition I wondered if the pictures I took at the dream concert somehow made it back into reality. The funny thing is that even though the dream felt so real, there were dead-giveaway clues:  

1. My 73-year-old mom opened for Katy with a lengthy performance.

2. One of my friends who fell asleep at the concert became two-dimensional.

3. My camera was a small, hollow box made from a thin wire frame stretched with golden fabric.

Sometimes dreams can be approximated in movies and video. Kanye West's Bound 2 does this by remixing the absurd with reality. Earlier today I read Jerry Saltz's December 9 New York Magazine article Put Kanye in the Biennial: "Bound 2" and its crazy new kind of artistic self-awareness, in which he speaks about artists who try to communicate their sincerity but end up revealing how out-of-touch they are. Jeff Koons is put in West's camp, which is appropriate because of how they share a laughable arrival at porn through some personal artistic insight.

While Saltz mentions Bound 2 has been "ridiculed as clueless kitsch," I could not help to think of how it not only reminds me of the informed kitsch playfully handled by the Czech band Kill the Dandies in their video Everybody Calls Me an Angel but also how it makes use of wacky musical fragments. The difference is between soft pornography and surreal eroticism: West rides a topless Kim Kardashian on his motorcycle, Hank Manchini rides La Petite Sonja on a stuffed wild boar while he bites at an oversized mushroom. 

The Czech video came out a few years ago - I am thinking that maybe West smuggled some of Manchini's kitsch-inducing mushroom back in his luggage after shooting his Diamonds From Sierra Leone video on the streets of Prague at that time.

Hotel Room Art Project: The Artist is Present

by Drew Martin

On my recent Thanksgiving trip to Richmond, Virginia, I thought it would be wise to check my family of five into a hotel instead of invading my brother's house, where he lives with his family of five and was hosting my visiting parents. I got two connected rooms in a nice hotel with a beautiful view of the James River, but the space still felt impersonal so I came up with an art project to change the experience. I liked the idea of using the iron in the room because the simple domestic act of pressing clothes always makes me feel at home. Downtown Richmond is dead after business hours/during holidays but there was an open Rite Aid nearby, which is where I bought some white T-shirts. On the drive down I started thinking that such a project might develop so we made a stop at a road-side Staples for a pack of iron-transfer sheets. I used the hotel wi-fi to Google the images I wanted and tried to print them at the business center in the lobby but they only had a black-ink printer, so I asked my niece to print them in color.

When it all came together I had a one-of-a-kind Marina Abramović shirt. On the front is a picture of Abramović from The Artist is Present performance in which she sat still and silent, and stared at the faces of visitors, who sat across from her, one at a time. Abramović performed seven and a half hours a day for three months at MoMA.

I typically do not like symbols or faces on my shirts but I liked the idea of Abramović from this performance because it meant that I could sit at a table with someone and if I proved boring, he or she could just stare at my knock-off shirt for a knock-off performance. I also like what Abramović's title The Artist is Present meant to this small art project done to fill the void of what is missing in a hotel room. On the back of the shirt is a picture of Abramović and an exhibit visitor, and the text,

My artsy friends all went to see The Artist is Present with Marina Abramović and all I got was this crummy T-shirt. 

Propping Up Rembrandt in a Circa 1980 East German Film

by Drew Martin

I just finished watching Barbara starring Nina Hoss, in which she plays a doctor in 1980 East Germany who has been sent to a provincial hospital following her request to leave the communist state. In one scene, Hoss visits a colleague's lab where he draws her attention to a print of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp from 1632, which is housed in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague.

The colleague sets up the scene:

I'd like to go to The Hague. That's where the Rembrandt is. Didn't you notice anything? The painting. The man lying there is Aris Kindt. He's just been hanged for theft. It's Doctor Tulp giving the anatomy lesson.

They should have cut open the abdomen first.

But they dissected the left hand instead.

There's a mistake. The hand is wrong. It's the opposite one. It's the right hand and it's too large.

I don't think Rembrandt made a mistake. You see the atlas? It's an anatomy atlas. They're all staring at it. He is, he is, they all are. And the hand is painted like a depiction in the atlas. Rembrandt includes something that we can't see, only they can: the depiction of the hand. Due to this mistake we no longer look through the doctor's eyes. We see him, Aris Kindt. The victim. We are with him, not with them.

On The Moveable Fest website there is an interview with the director, Christian Petzold, about the meaning of this scene.

...I did some research in art history and many people are talking about the wrong arm [being dissected] and then I note this whole picture is made by Rembrandt in a time where the modern time starts and the modern time means [Rene] Descartes, Hadyn, all the new philosophy, Napoleon and the French revolution and at this time, the people said, we make the fate of our own. There is no God anymore. We heard that God is dead. And we can build up societies, we can build up democracy...And these guys [in] this Rembrandt picture are scientists and like Dr. Frankenstein, they want to rebuild their Gods. This is also a symbol for communism and for capitalism. But in this part, it’s communism. They want to build up a society and when you build up societies, the victims are everywhere. The blood is flowing because for them, society is a laboratorium. So they kill this man who’s a thief, they open his body — he stole three potatoes — because they need fresh flesh. They lost their empathy.

Click here to read the entire discussion - Interview: Christian Petzold on the Skillful Seduction of “Barbara”

Barbara is available for streaming on Netflix (with subtitles). Watch the trailer here:

Introverted Streakers and Extroverted Voyeurs

by Drew Martin

My family and friends know that I am a streaker, which means that I run every day, rain or shine, while traveling or sick in bed. The early morning runs in my northern clime are starting to become less inviting as it gets colder and darker, day by day. Soon there will be freezing rains, icy sleet, and blinding snow. The fair-weather folk will turn to treadmills or hibernate but the beauty of braving the elements is that you have a wonderful introverted experience and you take comfort in the warmth of your own body, the energy that moves you through the void, and the rhythm of your thoughts. It is very similar with artists, when favorable market conditions retreat, the distracting buzz of the artworld dies down, and there is a pause in the extroverted expectations that you turn yourself inside out with your work and promote yourself on the Internet like you are a circus coming to town; you are then left alone with your warm, creative mind, your busy hands, and the friendship of consistency. I liked looking at Andrew Wyeth’s calm pictures when I was a kid, probably because of what he liked about winter; that it shows the backbone of nature and an unhurried world. Pictured here is a detail of Wyeth’s Snowflakes from 1966.

Next in Line: Irina Rozovsky

by Drew Martin

I am passing a couple hours at the charming La Maison du Croque Monsieur on East 13^th Street in Manhattan, while I wait for a print job at East Side Copy, next door.  I thought I would explore the area and look for art spaces that might be open, but the job I am running requires a lot of attention so I am bouncing back and forth between the soft lighting and stressed walls of the café and the stark fluorescent lighting and messy counter of the copy shop.

Every time I pop back into the storefront, there are new people in line getting one-off jobs done. The last time I popped down there I bumped into a young photographer named Irina Rozovsky who was perfect binding a mock-up of a new book of photos she took in Cuba, which are really good. She let me have a look, and remarked that I am the first person to see it. I told her that I had hoped to see some art tonight and so I was happy she brought it to me. She told the guy behind the counter that she really liked the yellow rubbery glue they used for the spine. I mentioned it looked like something by Eva Hesse.

Pictured here is the first picture you see on Irina's website. Click here to see more >> www.irinar.com

Before and After Art

by Drew Martin
I used to think that artists, including me, simply pulled things out of the air and had the power to create movements that could change the world, but now I realize that art is simply one of many moving parts of a constantly changing world. Art is a synthesis of what comprises the creator’s trappings: physical environment, social mores, and past and current events. I also used to think that movements neatly ended like the sections of my collegiate Janson and Janson art history tome. But now I see how ideas are devoured like fallen prey: lioness ad agencies bite off choice parts, the rest is left for hyenas, and the worms.

I thought about a few specific examples of this system and focus here on three movements/styles: Pointillism, Surrealism, and De Stijl.

Pointillism was indeed a comment at the time of physics by Georges Seurat, but ancient world mosaics such as this Roman piece preceded this by more than a thousand years, and the style has worked its way into our everyday visual language as seen here with pixilated photographs. 

Salvador Dalí acknowledged his debt to Hieronymus Bosch, who was doing wackier shit than any of the surrealists 500 years before they were born.  We have always had surrealism with us, look at our mythologies, but what surrealism as a popular art movement did was open the floodgates for expressing weird juxtapositions.

And finally, Piet Mondrian, who was incredibly inventive, but with a Dutch environment full of colorful fields of flowers, leaded glass windows, and city maps, his style seems more obvious. That being said, his simple color field paintings have probably been more appropriated than any other artwork. Very specific references have been used in fashion, design, architecture, and even hair products.

The following is a summary by a bikini kickboxer:

OMG, Did She Just Call Her Twitter Twat?

by Drew Martin

My wife and I are now cruising through House of Cards on Netflix. Wow, it’s well done; great everything. And I thought I was not going to like it. While it is primarily about the politics of Washington there is so much more at play.

There are some fun media details, such as on-screen balloon texts between the main character, a congressman played by Kevin Spacey, and a reporter played by Kate Mara. Mara’s Zoe Barnes is a millennial blogger at the fictitious Washington Herald, but her ambitions are not always welcome. At one point an older, female colleague calls her Twitter Twat out of frustration.

What keeps the show feeling really fresh, however, are not new-media snaps but good-old-fashioned soliloquies by Spacey, which pulls the viewer into his two-faced world. The most shocking is during the church service for a teenage girl who died after she lost control of her car while texting that the Peachoid water tower, which she was driving by in her town, looks like a vagina. Spacey attends the service to work his politics and while giving a heart-wrenching speech about losing his father as a teenager, he makes a break to tell us he did not really care much for the man.