Of Peculiar Utility

I’d think virtually every artist’s path includes a bit of research in previous artists. Then there’s a time where that growing artist takes on elements of the previous artist and melds it into their own works. Some even start to extend the previous artist’s work with their own. Sometimes the connection is so strong that artists feel they understand the previous artist’s path enough to take it to where it needs to go. A lot of artists choose Abstract Expressionist artists for this. I even saw an article that engineers and scientists used Jackson Pollack as inspiration for a new 3D printing technique. I’d say it’s pretty common.

David Diao’s work is the first time I’ve seen the conversation between current and a previous artist unfold in what appears to be a more clinical fashion where the current artist’s work grows from the previous by being an analysis of what the other has done, as Diao has done with Barnett Newman.

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Certainly artists have done homages and created work that comments on the prior’s output. That appears not to be the case here. From the pieces provided in the links I found, the body of work looks to be almost infographical about Newman’s life and works. This also sort of rhymes with The Art of Noise’s Seduction of Claude Debussy. AoN leads us through Debussy’s life and samples his work to present it in their album. In both, we are offered only a small amount of the history and catalog to consider. We are to infer something about the work and gather our own thoughts about what is presented – obviously this fits in tightly with the Abstract Expressionist movement. 

When taking in the extent of the work presented, I think there’s a lot to consider here. Is it a ‘new’ sort of art that’s more storytelling than abstract art ever pretended to be? Is it more graphic design coming of age as a ‘fine art’? Is it neither? Both? The Hyperallergic article draws in a vast swathe of connecting thoughts that extends a potentiality of thoughts to consider. I can’t speak to the voracity of those aspects and details, as I did just a modicum of research myself. 

This all goes back to what I really wanted this site to do: present interesting artistic endeavors. In my mind, Diao’s work absolutely does present a cognitive workout for the viewer – only through time-tested flat art mediums rather than fancy tech-based processes. 

In the design world and in the engineering world renderings have been pushed to be as close to real as possible. A considerable amount of money and development has gone into honing the technology towards this pursuit. The results speak for themselves.

It’s fascinating that you can take this software, whose aim is photo-realism and turn it on its head to create some extraordinarily creative, otherworldly work. I suppose this follows in a similar vein with how auto-tune has gone from purely a product that aims to refine less than perfect singing to perfection to a device that offers greater albeit otherworldly creative output. 

[ab] normal project certainly has its foundation in the architectural realm – which is certainly cool and interesting. I’d like to see how much further taking rendering software into the more expressive, less grounded in realism world could end up creating more interesting pursuits of art. 

Special thanks to Arch Daily for the find!

To me, the real intriguing aspects of Alex Dodge‘s work come from the process of building the pieces. Design milk has done a nice overview of the methods Dodge uses, so I’ll let you swing over there to read more about it. The ‘tool chain’ Dodge uses is particularly exciting as it opens new avenues for conventional visual art.

There seems to be this canyon between digital and fine art that seems to be particularly unbridgeable. While many have tried, the worlds seem to be more like oil and water, resisting on a molecular level their bonding. Thinking more about how Dodge uses digital modeling as the sketch stage of the work, yet not letting it overpower represents a possible entry point in combining the two.

Further, the inclusion of CNC processes to develop the templates for what appears to be compiling and rendering the image in the real world is a great use of CNC abilities without the works exclaiming, “Hey I have a CNC router!”

All this points to a good series of examples where a multi-faceted integration of today’s technologies can potentially be used to create work that can portray a humanized interaction and perhaps help show a direction forward for fine art in the increasingly digital world.

I’m a sucker for process. I’m also a sucker for works that have certain emergent qualities to them. Wu Chi-Tsung has put together a series of rather amazing landscapes using analog collage techniques combined with traditional Chinese brush work (to be honest, I’m also a sucker for the later as well to the point where I seek out books on it whenever I get to China.)

To exactly lift the description of the process from the artist,”a form of ink painting collage…a conventional method, combines with wrinkled-texture cyanotype. Rice papers with photosensitive coating were wrinkled and exposed under sunlight to record the lighting and shading on the paper. A selection from dozens of pieces of cyanotype photographic paper was reorganized and edited before mounting on a canvas. The work is displayed in a style resembling Chinese Shan Shui and photomontage.”

I found an interview with Wu as well as his personal artwork site. While the collage works are great, there’s even better pieces in his portfolio.

While bearing slightest of connections, it reminds me of back in college when I was messing around with doing collage on photocopiers. Naturally, Wu’s process is much more vibrant and intensive. I kind of wish I could find more information about the process and ideally process pictures documenting their construction.

What I did find was another artist who produces works using the cyanotype process. The best part is the article goes into detail on how to actually operate the process. Of course, there’s other descriptions on how it works and how you can do it, too. Apparently, cyanotype is the process by which blueprints were made – beware, I recall those blueprints to be a pungent, ammonia-instilled affair.