beautiful things: the strange acessories and interiors of eunsuk hur

i honestly can’t figure out the context of this work (or, perhaps, its purpose), not least because the biography section of the site comes up with a blank page (always unhelpful).  but whatever hur’s work ‘is’, it is undoubtedly beautiful, which i do appreciate in and of itself.  i love the textures, but most of all i am enchanted by the blending of wearable and interior art – i’m fascinated by the confusion of the wearable/non-wearable divide.

and those 3-dimensional wallpapers are pretty damn stunning.  again, i’m not sure whether this is the purpose of the work, but i’m taking what i can get and running with it (though ‘nomadic wonderland’?  ‘nomadic’ is one of those generic ‘ethnic’ reference words which i’m really not sure can ever be applied ’well’ to an object or collection thereof.  it’s like calling something ‘tribal’; so generic it actually means nothing, but evocative of some romanticised ‘primative’, and thus culturally appropriatory none the less).

unfortunately the website is enough to drive a person crazy – particularly if one happens not to be possessed of the world’s speediest internet connection – waiting for every picture to load really kills the visual impact.  i know the theiving of images is a big concern for a lot of artists, and ostensibly flash prevents this – or at least makes it a little more complex – but i have to admit it’s not an argument that holds much water, to my mind.  the price for making people sit around and tap their fingers whilst waiting for your work to load is just too high; i’m pretty sure i stumbled across hur’s site on 3 separate occasions before i actually made it far enough through the frustration to see any beautiful photographs.

plus.  why refuse free press?  or: for more information refer to this article by asia-pacific artist hazel dooney.  it has some rather compelling arguments for making your images as thievable as possible (and simply watermarking obsessively).

 

what do you reckon?  better to control your images absolutely, or let people use them and just make sure anyone who sees it knows it’s yours?

wonderful assemblies: the secret museum, at observatory

image from the secret museum press release, by joanna ebenstein.

one of my biggest gripes with the city in which i live is our woeful excuse for a museum.  my issues are multifold: the collection on show is underwhelming and small, the curation is in popularist rather than informative style, and the space is awful (for example, they ran out of money during the construction of the children’s wing, and had to cut down on the size, thus rendering it just under the minimum height required for building the planned second story.  hence they have one level of exhbition space instead of the planned two.  it’s also designed to look like a rubix cube…but there are more than 6 colours involved.  my inner geek – always ready for action – gets particualrly pissed over this last point.  what kind of moron designs an educational building to look like an inaccurate maths puzzel?).  not to mention the fact that entry was prohibitavly expensive last time i checked (to pay for the building’s construction, says my cynical side), which is, i think, pretty much the most problematic policy you can come up with over a so-called ‘public’ building.

natural history museum lobby, london, by darrell godliman.

none of this would distress me as much, of course, if i hadn’t grown up with the old museum.  i understand that the space was smaller, not to mention that it did sort of take over the entire city library (thus rendering the books hard to house and even harder to access), and therefore finding some sort of new location was probably a good plan.  but being forced to witness the ‘upgrade’ of something gorgeous into something less…that’s always pretty awful.  plus the old museum was in that lovely victorian style.  glass cases, the orignal victorian window-boxes fitted out with animals displayed in elaborate origin-appropriate sets, wooden floors, high ceilings…it felt like a museum ought to feel.  mysterious, fascinating, and just spooky enough to give you a spinal shiver when you rounded a corner and came face to face with a partially-wrapped eqyptian mummy or diplodocus skelleton (something always leads me back to the dinosaur section - just the other day i was researching the megalodon – ie. possibly the most terrifying thing in the world: a giant, giant shark.  it could eat jaws and still have space for that oil rig with which bhp is so busy messing up the gulf of mexico).  i like that in a museum.  it’s a sort of visual/tactile onomattopea; the space makes you feel like its content.  history.  bones.  things so ancient it’s hard to wrap a tiny human life around them.

museum national d’histoire naturelle, paris, by richard ross.

the current exhibition at observatory, in new york, is a bit like that.  it’s called the secret museum, and it deals with quiet back rooms, childish skelletons (you know how enamoured the victorians were with preserving foetuses), wax medical models, all sorts of wunderkama and magic, with an edge of mortality and the deeply macarbre.  it’s run by a collection of intriguing individuals including joanna ebenstein, author of morbid anatomy, who is also the artist behind secret museum , “a photographic exhibition exploring the poetics of hidden, untouched and curious collections from around the world in photographs and artifacts.”  i really wish it and observatory were in my part of the world.  i would very much love to see this one (there’s even going to be some delightful sort of closing party over the weekend).  as it is i must, not for the first time, make do with a fantastic flickr set; which is, i feel compelled to say, probably not (like so much that goes on in museums, when you think about it) for the squeamish.

blog of the day

this is my new favourite:

Future of Fashion

it follows the work of four budding fashion designers from FIT, the fashion institute of technology (state university of new york), as they gear up for/try for a place in the annual (and highly competitive) BFA runway show.

by dani, from fof

i love behind the scenes shots; i never get over watching how other people work, the processes involved in both the conceptual and practical creation of art, the massive methodological variations involved in approaching similar problems.  where clothes are involved this last point is particularly engaging for me.  i have my own habits and methods of, say, pattern making, and it’s always exciting to see how other people do it, and to experiment with and be inspired by alternate methods.

by dani, from fof

making clothes is such hard work.  i don’t mean the physical process, so much – though obviously that can be exhaustingly time-consuming, at the very least – but the construction, imagination, the thought-process…  making clothes from scratch (ie, starting by creating the pattern itself) is essentially a different sort of engineering.  i doubt the similarities would occur to most people who’ve never done it – and certainly as a ‘feminine’ art (ie, aesthetically driven, ‘un-academic’, and often closer to a ‘craft’ [whatever that means]; certainly not a skillset attributed the same mental acuity people assume in an engineer) the making of clothes is relegated to the realm of hands-on-skill rather than complex thinking.  but if you consider it that’s really not an accurate designation, or at least not a complete one.  constructing clothing – properly – is just as complex as making a building.  it requires precise measurements and extreme attention to detail; sound mathematical skills; an in-depth understanding of structure, materials, and construction techniques; most of all a capacity to translate two-dimensional images not only into three-dimensional garments, but into separate two-dimensional pieces set to become garments, a form of spatial thinking that generally takes a lot of practice to perfect, even in people who’ve a natural ‘knack’ (spatial thinking, as a little trivia on the side, is also a mental function generally believed to be less present in females than males.  it’s one of the excuses people commonly give for girls getting lower marks in maths).

anyway.  my point is that i am really enjoying this blog.  and anybody interested in such things should really check it out.  it’s worth keeping track of.

beautiful things: marina bychkova

 

i love this photograph of marina bychkova and one of her creations (from cisley’s flick stream).  i am perpetually enchanted by images of artists  with their work, particularly when it is sculptural, or in 3 dimensions.

honestly i’ve always had mixed feelings about bychkova’s dolls; the craftspersonship is clearly phenomenal, and the way she joints her bodies, the range of movement she achieves…well, it’s quite breathtaking.  plus the costumes are nothing but stunning.  the faces, though…just…they’re not so much my thing.  sweet but not arresting.  something about the strong anime influences.  they look like drawings, not creatures – which is interesting, and they’re certainly very pretty – but they don’t speak to me.  it’s a personal preference thing.  they’re undeiniably beautiful just…well.

 

 however.  her work is certainly worth looking at, and if you do, you should also check out her blog to see the piece about how she made this marie-antoinette wig (behind-the-scenes shots!  hurrah!).  and there’s an audrey kawasaki picture in the background.