Art



This last week it has been my very great privilege to have experienced two extraordinarily moving works of art. The first was Bill Viola‘s heart-wrenching ‘Ocean Without a Shore’, a new permanent acquisition of the National Gallery of Victoria. Sadly, it is a large installation piece which you must visit in person to fully embrace. The next time you come to Melbourne, I’ll take you there.

The second is a little more modest but just as poignant, and was created by some dude who goes by the name of Colorpulse (and Melody Sheep). I am proud to be able to share it with you here on The Cow.




If ever anyone had any doubts that copylefting can create truly moving experiences and must be allowed and encouraged as a valid form of expression, let this wonderful observation serve as an example.

The surface of the Earth
Is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we’ve waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting

Carl Sagan, we miss you.

Well it’s that time of year again Acowlytes, and as the world (quite inevitably) starts to become jaded by International Talk Like a Pirate Day, those of us who were pirates long before the fad came along, and will be pirates long after it fades, raise a cup o’ grog and drink to the the spirit unfettered minds and uncluttered horizons.

This year on The Cow I aim to repurpose ITLAPD into something a little more meaningful – a celebration of free thinking and provocation in the face of parochialism and institutionalization. Herewith on each ITLAPD The Cow will acknowledge someone who, in some manner or other, fearlessly challenges the status quo and questions authority after the fashion of a true pirate.

To kick off, since we’ve just been talking about the Cartrain/Damien Hirst wrangle, we tip our hat to the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop and its mouthpiece Red Rag To A Bull who describes itself as:

…a radical institution dedicated to the pursuit of “FREEDOM, TRUTH and JUSTICE in the art world and BEYOND”, and overblown statements. It was founded by a cartel of rich and powerful light industrialists in the depths of the bleak winter of 2009 when the world was on the brink of total financial collapse.

Red Rag To A Bull and L-13 have been champions to Cartrain over the last year, running their Street Urchins Art Appeal in order to raise enough money to reimburse him for the cash that Hirst’s original legal action cost. They did this by creating and selling meta-parodies of Cartrain’s parodies of Hirst’s work. You gotta love that endless spiral of iteration and self-referentialism.



L-13 also produce some rather remarkable work in their own right. This will come as no surprise to anyone who recognizes Jimmy Cauty as the name behind them. Cauty is perhaps better known for being one half of the KLF, and later, with Alex Paterson, as The Orb – the architects of the Ambient House genre.

With L-13 and RRTAB, Cauty continues to sock it to the narrow-minded, the clueless and the haughty in the manner they truly deserve. A recent Red Rag To A Bull manifesto says in part:

Unlike Cartrain and his gallery we are not intimidated by lawyers, and if an injunction is issued we will simply ignore it on the grounds of freedom of expression. We also operate a ‘copyright out of control’ policy which in our world makes us immune from prosecution…

If they aren’t the words of a true pirate, I’m handing in my wooden leg. So, here’s to you, James Cauty and crew. May your seas always be calm and your powder dry.

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(I’m posting this early Acowlytes, because on the 19th the full Curse of the Black Cow takes hold and there’s no telling how much sense anything will make for the day. If ever you wanted to Ride the Mad Cow, that’s truly the time to do it).

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The art world has never really been known for being sensible, but there is a feud going on at the moment in England that must surely rank as one of the most petty and unfathomable squabbles since my school days when Charlie Peerbohm poured green paint on Debbie McMahon’s fingerpainting in first grade. Synopsizing: last year, a 17 year old street artist named Cartrain made a number of satirical collage portraits of the much more famous artist Damien Hirst using copies of some of Hirst’s own images. Hirst took exception to this for reasons unknown and, using his considerable fortune, pulled legal muscle on Cartrain to force him to hand over the portraits (so that they might be disposed of) along with £195 in compensation (the amount of money that Cartrain allegedly made from selling them).

Considering that Damien Hirst is one of the most commercially successful plunderers of popular culture of all time, this seems churlish at best, and downright petulant otherwise.

I’ve never been a great fan of Hirst’s creations. In my view he’s just fine art’s version of a shock jock; he creates things that are supposed to put people’s noses out of joint under the pretense of making insightful or droll commentary. I could never quite put my finger on why his efforts annoyed me so much until one day, after getting brain freeze from a slushy whilst watching the sharks at Sydney Aquarium, it came to me: Damien Hirst’s art has no sense of humour. It is po-faced pretension of the most vacuous kind. And I think Hirst quite possibly believes that he really is saying something profound. This latest episode has pretty much confirmed my suspicions.

Cartrain, on the other hand, is my kinda guy. He does have a sense of humour and he makes interesting and provocative social commentary. He’s not an artistic genius, perhaps, and owes more than a little to Banksy, but heck, he’s a teenager after all – he’s got plenty of years ahead of him to develop. The portrait of Mr Hirst that you see reproduced above, is one by Cartrain that has escaped the iron clutch of Hirst’s moneyed henchmen and, via the blog of art commentator Jonathan Jones, found its way to teh internets. ((As anyone with an ounce of insight would have realised was quite inevitable given the circumstances. Hirst’s attempt to quash dissemination of the portraits looks all the more silly for his failure to understand their ultimate cultural context.)) Its sarcastic caricature of Hirst is surely well within the purview of artistic witticism. I believe the confiscated portraits are in the same vein.

But the thing that has really enamored me of Cartrain is the revenge that he he has wrought upon Hirst. In July this year, Cartrain visited the Tate Britain and stole a box of pencils from Hirst’s intellectually vapid installation Pharmacy which is on display there. He then created a mock ransom note demanding return of his portraits in exchange for the pencils. The note stated that failure to comply would result in the pencils being ‘sharpened’. Most anyone would consider that fairly amusing – this is not the mindset of a vicious person – but not Hirst, apparently. As one of the wealthiest artists of all time he looks sulky and pathetic as he stands on his assertion that his intellectual property rights have been violated.

And now, in what must be one of the most egregious over-reactions of the decade, the situation has escalated to the point where the police have arrested Cartrain over the stunt, and he has been charged with £10,000,000.00 for ‘damages’ and a further £500,000.00 for theft. ((Cartrain’s father was also arrested, on suspicion of ‘harbouring’ the pencils.)) Translating into American money, that’s over $17 million dollars worth of charges for a box of pencils. ((And I bet the security guard who was on duty that day would have been a lot more attentive if he’d realised he was guarding pencils with that kind of pedigree…))

This whole debacle reminds me of nothing so much as the Metallica/Napster affair in 2000, and Lars Ulrich’s indignant posturing over the ‘damage’ that file sharing was doing to the band’s sales. The outcome of that particular episode was that Ulrich came out looking like an ass and nothing changed except for Napster getting shafted. Metallica certainly isn’t hanging out at the soup kitchen as a result. Similarly, it’s difficult to comprehend Hirst’s disproportionately vehement reaction to Cartrain’s satirical jibe. What the hell does he care? It’s not like he’s going broke anytime soon.

Maybe it’s simply that Cartrain’s portraits are just a little bit too incisive, and the emperor doesn’t like everyone seeing right through his clothes to his cubic zirconia-encrusted skeleton…

One of my favoured blog visits is Matt’s Musings, where artist and machinima magician Matt Kelland muses often on things that pin the Interest-O-Meter. Recently, after having indulged in the old internet meme of ‘Making Your Own Record Cover’, Matt was musing about whether designers might find themselves eventually replaced by some kind of quasi-random system for generating ‘artwork’.

If you’ve not played the Record Cover Game game it goes like this:

1: Go here, to get a random image – picture #3, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

2: Go here to get a random Wikipedia article – this will be the name of your artist.

3: Go here to get a random quote, the last four or five words of which will be the name of your album.

Combine the ingredients in a photo editing app such as Photoshop, and voila! – Instant Design Skillz and a new Number One with a Bullet!

Here’s a nifty example which I just made according to those rules:


No Matter How Slow - A New Hit!



Cool! Not something I’d pick up in a record shop, probably, but you never know – I’m pretty fond of Arab Pop…

But as I mentioned to Matt, my feeling is that designers are safe for a while yet. Even in the ‘Mafitah al-Janan’ effort above (which in my opinion would have been rejected by all but the most feeble of A&R people) I’ve employed at least a little discrimination… it’s hard not to want to use at least some slightly tasteful fonts and a complementary colour scheme.

I told Matt that I was skeptical of much true artistic merit in the Record Cover Game – the dice are far too loaded. Using the above rules, you get offered a generally high standard of images, excellent quotes and the possibility of some unusual and meaningful parings – the path to this point has been well-and-truly paved by creative people. Next, stir in a little of your own artiness (even the tiniest amount…) and, well, it’s not unreasonable to expect a half-decent outcome. But, I speculated, what if you truly randomize the process. What if you try and take out any innate taste? Do you still come up with anything you’d want to display on your cd shelf? And I spun up a few examples which I posted in Matt’s comments.

They were SO terrible, in fact, that I actually started having fun… so now, in true TCA fashion, I’m reinventing the Record Cover Meme.

Acowlytes! This is your quest: go now and make the very WORST record cover you can. A cover that would ensure your future as a designer was well and truly dead, buried and pissed upon.

These are the NEW rules:

1: Go here, to get a random image. Image #3 – no matter what it is – will be your album cover.

2: Go here to get a random website – the first 3 or 4 words of the first link on the page is the name of your band.

3: Go here to get a random clich̩ Рthe third one on the list is the name of your album.

4: Arrange the elements in a photo editing app such as Photoshop according to the following restrictions: try to pick a random font and a random colour for each of the titles (how you opt to do this is up to you, but I trust you to play fair and try and be as truly random as possible).

5: You must put your artist name along the TOP of the image, and your album name along the BOTTOM. No creative placement allowed!

Maybe you’ll arrive at something as appalling appealing as this:


Qatsi!



Or this:


7Clarinets



I certainly hope so. Put it where we can see it and post a link in Comments. Let’s show Matt what kind of world we’d have without anyone at the design controls…†

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† In fact, these monstrosities are frighteningly similar to the kinds of ‘artwork’ you see in those annoying leaflets people shove under your front door. Coincidence?

BTW – I totally swear I made those two bad ‘covers’ using the rules outlined above – the way the title in the second one interacted with the text on the image was entirely random. Sometimes random can be mighty entertaining.

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I’ve been crazy busy this last week on my new project in LA, so not much time for The Cow, nor visiting you good folks. But a brief moment of respite today allows me to bring to you some more artwork. Not mine this time, but instead, some of the lovely cyanotypes that Violet Towne has been making.

Cyanotypes

(Click on the image and type ‘N’ for Next or ‘P’ for Previous. All pics copyright, please ask before using.)

I’m working on a new project with my images, this time an animation called Microspore. I wanted to post the moving version up for you to see, but no matter what I do I can’t get it to look presentable, and the full file at proper resolution is far too big for web streaming. Teh internets are cool, but still w-a-a-a-a-y too slow for serious stuff.

Anyways, here are some stills from the film. You’ll have to imagine that you’re looking through a microscope at little critters drifting slowly past.

Microspore 1

Microspore 2

Microspore 3

Microspore 4

Microspore 5

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