Stuff and Moonshine

Got a new job, start on Monday. This means that when I had lunch with Mom yesterday I could tell her about being let go from the previous job without worrying her too much.

We went to the AGO. Turns out you can get a free pass for two adults through the Toronto Public Library site, although checking in goes somewhat more smoothly if you have a physical library card with you (I did not, and eventually had to log into the TPL site so they could check that my card number was the same as the one on the pass).

Lined up to spend sixty seconds in Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored installation Let’s Survive Forever, which lets you gaze at infinite reflections of yourself in a galaxy of stainless-steel orbs that sort of looks like the Sea of Holes sequence from Yellow Submarine.

Saw the Joyce Wieland retrospective, which was a bit overwhelming—Wieland did a lot of large-scale quilts and the like. Saw a video of an interview with Naoko Matsubara, a wood-cut artist with a dry sense of humour we both liked. Saw an exhibit of Latin American photography, mainly journalistic. The best item was the contact sheet for Graciela Iturbide’s Our Lady of the Iguanas, because you got to see all the other takes in which the subject is laughing or looking awkward or the iguanas are not in a dramatic enough pose.

ETA—Apparently Mom has a friend group who call themselves “The G7” (unclear if there are actually seven of them) and they do things together. Last month they tried playing croquet in a local park with the three remaining mallets from our family croquet set, and had a good enough time that they subsequently sourced a complete croquet set from the local freecycle group, but it’s been too hot and smoky to play.

So, the premise of this movie is that Tony is a passionate but supremely talentless artist who runs away to Paris where he somehow becomes the toast of the Rive Gauche and then accidentally becomes an art star when a famous art dealer (George Sanders) gets his worked mixed up with that of his friend Paul. Even before the latter happens, I think Tony’s popularity with the bohemians is supposed to be an emperor’s-new-clothes thing— but here’s the thing: his “bad” paintings really are more energetic and interesting then the movie’s “good” paintings.

Given that the movie ends with Paul making new paintings influenced by Tony’s style, and those paintings being acclaimed* maybe the point really is that it’s the synthesis of Tony’s enthusiasm and Paul’s skill that makes for great art. Apparently the movie was a favorite of many painters of the time, including Lucian Freud, and I’m curious to know how they interpreted it.

(also I’m pretty sure Tony had a green carnation in his lapel in one scene)

* Apparently all the paintings for this movie were done by the same artist, and the paintings seen at the end were taken from his most recent gallery exhibit.

ETA-- 

Apparently in 2002 the London Institute of Pataphysics reconstructed and exhibited all "Tony Hancock's" painting and sculptures from this movie.

Looks also like somebody did the same thing on a lesser scale and is trying to sell their copy of "Ducks In Flight."

In a variant on the three-busses-finally-all-show-up-at-once phenomenon, I suddenly have interviews for multiple possible jobs. Here’s hoping one pans out. I don’t know how I did at the one today— the interview part seemed to go well but the technical test was, afaict, the graphic-design version of the Kobayashi Maru. I hope my reaction was the correct one.

I really like the costumes Rita Farr and Madame Rouge have been wearing on the last few episodes of Doom Patrol. I can’t find online confirmation of it, or even anyone else asking the question, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the costume department has been looking at photos of Maya Deren and other women artists of her generation.

Speaking of, I was looking up Saul Steinberg, who I mostly know from his work in the New Yorker, and he was married to a painter named Hedda Sterne, whose reputation fell victim to the usual fate of painters who don’t work in one trademark style, or at least neatly-divisible pyramids, i.e. critics either ignored her or classed her with various art movements she didn’t embrace.

Anyone else having trouble logging into Tumblr? Or is it just because of my latest software patch?

ETA— Andrew suggested a cold restart and Tumblr is working for me now.

Today I read about 575 Wandsworth Road in south London. The owner was Khadambi Asalache, a Kenyan poet who bought the small house in the early 1980s as a fixer-upper, and ended up covering all interior surfaces with ornate fretwork he made from salvaged wood. https://vimeo.com/42393441

Also, sculptures/installations made from old windows, etc, and cityscapes made from cookies that gallery visitors then eat. 

A fascinating tale of emergent behaviours in Skyrim.

The power went out for a bit, before sundown but during a thunderstorm, and my spouse photographed me with my laptop looking like I’m casting/researching dire spells or something.


Also:

Yesterday I learnt about Roy Lichtenstein’s Mme. Cézanne, which pleases me more than his better-known works.

Timeline:
1870s-90s   Paul Cézanne does a lot of portraits of his wife, Marie-Hortense, despite apparently not liking her all that much.

1943            Erle Loran writes an academic work on Cezanne that focuses on the compositions alone, and includes a lot of black-and-white diagrams showing the outlines of the figures, plus arrows and A, B, C etc labels. Apparently this was a pretty standard Modernist critical technique. The text includes this statement: "this diagrammatic approach may seem coldly analytical to those who like vagueness and poetry in art criticism.”

1962a           Roy Lichtenstein reads the book and considers this such a hilariously oversimplified approach that he blows up two of the diagrams and includes them as paintings in his first exhibit.


1962b          Consternation! Uproar! Loran sues for plagiarism. Various people argue over whether Lichtenstein transformed the diagrams into art or just appropriated them. Lichtenstein insists that he didn’t transform the images and that that’s the whole point. Someone comments that this is more outrageous than Duchamp’s exhibition of a print of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and a salacious pun graffittied over it.

2020:           Me: “Well it was certainly riskier than LHOOQ -- making fun of an artist is way less dangerous than making fun of an art critic.”




There is an ASMR channel on Youtube that is just a guy with an Aussie accent whispering interesting facts about Australia, like how the voting system works or how to make fairy bread.

Actually I think there might be more than one.

 
I covered a styrofoam mannequin head I’d had for years with papier-mâché and painted it in a quasi-Futurist style. Question— should I put in an X or cross for the other eye, or leave the space blank?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/did-whitey-bulger-pull-off-the-isabella-stewart-gardner-museum-art-heist-for-the-ira? 

*Shrugs*—my guess is that if it’s been thirty years* since the theft and there’ve been no ransom demands, the paintings haven’t turned up on the black market, and no one’s responded to the offers of amnesty and a reward? Then the thieves weren’t professionals, they were obsessive art lovers who kept the paintings for themselves.

If this gets solved, it’ll be in ten or twenty years when some old guy dies of natural causes and the person who goes to clear out his apartment finds a dozen oil paintings hung up in his bedroom where he could look at them every day. Here’s hoping the person doesn’t assume the pictures are reproductions and throw them out—or then again, that may already have happened.


*I know the article suggests there’s an underground network that stashes stolen paintings until the heat is off, but if this is one of the most famed unsolved art heists of the twentieth century, a hundred years from now those paintings should still be identifiable enough to draw notice if anyone tries to fence them.

Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, just doing adorkable couple stuff-- “stuff” in this case being “painting sets for the Bolshoi.”

The Sprawling Obsessive Career of Fritz Lang “Film historian David Kalat once proposed rules for a Fritz Lang drinking game: Whenever a Lang film shows an angry mob or a woman in a nightgown, everybody takes a shot.” Angry mobs definitely, but in the movies I’ve seen I can only recall one scene of a woman in a nightgown.

While looking up the awesome stunt rider Dorothy Herbert (who I know from her role in The Mysterious Doctor Satan) I came across the also-awesome “proletarian art collectors” Dorothy and Herbert Vogel.

Watched the trailer for Stan and Ollie (2018) several times. I’m usually wary of fat suits for both aesthetic (they look unconvincing) and political (they’re arguably pretty close to wearing blackface) reasons; a portrayal of a historical figure whose appearance is sufficiently well-known to require make-up anyway? might be an edge case. OTOH I’m *really* impressed with Steve Coogan’s look as Stan Laurel – he’s got fewer prosthetics to hide behind (think they might have built out his ears) and he is absolutely nailing the eyes and mouth. What I’m saying is I still want to see this movie, though it looks to me as though they exaggerated tensions between the team in order to create a plot. 

Also, yesterday I learned that Jack Benny’s cameo in It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was originally written for Stan Laurel, which explains why the character wears a derby and drives a 1930s car (Laurel turned it down, having retired the act when Babe died).

There will be a protest outside the US Consulate in Toronto this coming Saturday (June 30); in the interests of honesty there will also be one on July 1 outside the Toronto Immigration Holding Centre (385 Rexdale Blvd, Etobicoke), which also holds child detainees. I’ll be at the former but doubt I’ll be able to get to the latter as it’s not quite as easily accessible by public transit (it's doable by my standards, but Andrew isn't up for anything that requires changing bus routes more than once).

I’ve been compulsively googling Erich Ohser/E. O Plauen since Friday, and have turned up these early cartoons (not sure if they’re part of a sequence or separate drawings on the same theme), as well as some adorable photos of him and his son. Damn the nazis.

On a lighter note, looking him up involved running several German-language websites through Google Translate, with somewhat quirky results. One description of Ohser’s physical appearance that I’m pretty sure meant to say something about "his ample figure" got rendered into English as "his cozy growth."

Huh. It looks as though someone’s doing a digital-streaming dramatization of Christie’s The Mysterious Mr Quin, except they’re kind of trying to go Sherlock, with a contemporary setting and a much younger Mr. Satterthwaite live-blogging events. Not entirely sure that’ll work, but you never know.