el laberinto

Cindy Sherman, Untitled 488 + 489, 1976 (via moma)

Filip Dujardin, Stone House, c. 2012

Carolee Scheemann, "Parts of a Body House" from Fantastic Architecture, c. 1969

Herbert Bayer (1900-85), Thumbs, 1932

Bayer, an "Austrian graphic designer, painter, photographer, sculptor, art director, environmental & interior designer, and Architect, was widely recognized as the last living member of the Bauhaus and was instrumental in the development of the Atlantic Richfield Company's corporate art collection until his death in 1985. He became interested in Walter Gropius's Bauhaus manifesto. After Bayer had studied for four years at the Bauhaus under such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy, Gropius appointed Bayer director of printing and advertising." He continued on to become an influential art director and artist in his own right. 

Tsunehisa Kimura, Visual Scandals by Photomontage, 1979 (via HatetheFuture; BLDGBLOG)

"A well-maintained copy of the 1979 book Tsunehisa Kumura's Visual Scandals by Photomontage, now out of print, popped up the other day in the CCA library, and many of the images are jaw-dropping. I photographed quite a few of the book's glossy pages—as the scanner system here doesn't really make sense to me—and I thought that three images, in particular, were of sufficient architectural interest to warrant posting. The artist—who passed away in 2008—was well-known for his startlingly realistic collages of urban scenes, often animated with a kind of end-of-the-world, scifi-inflected festivity. Impact craters in the centers of wrecked cities share chaotic page space with Dalí-esque visions of giant human breasts in the sky. Waterfalls scour sublime new cliffsides from the architectural canyons of Manhattan; modern tower blocks pitch and yaw atop aircraft carriers at sea; battleship gun turrets are cloned and repeated into Baroque stupas—cathedrals of artillery—along the empty roads of agrarian landscapes. For my money, these latter structures outdo Hans Hollein's Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape, with which they nonetheless share a certain tectonic similarity. Gunnery pagodas and blasted metropolitan cores meet surreal scenes of burning astronauts on the moon, while the neon lights of artificial volcanoes melt nameless city districts under radiative tides of surprise eruption. Apollo rockets are unearthed from Mesopotamian tombs in the shadow of Stone Age petroleum tanks. Tatlin's Tower stands proud in a junkyard, stuffed full of broken TVs. The Woolworth Building wakes up to find itself at the bottom of a cave, and there are construction sites everywhere. However, these are not the explicitly psychedelic photo-collages of someone like, say, James Koehnline, in which machine-mandalas and nude fakirs intermix with jungle leaves inside heavily tiled cosmic temples. They are more like diagnostic slices taken through a militarized imagination formed in the context of post-War Japan. In some ways, in fact, I'm reminded of an interview with Paul Virilio—which I also read here at the CCA—published in AA Files a few years back. There, Virilio quips that "The Second World War was my university," and he goes on to describe the various ways in which abandoned military fortifications and the total annihilation of once-thriving cities affected his ideas of what architecture should be. Tsunehisa Kumura's "visual scandals," I'd suggest, bring together a similarly rogue education—star pupils in a university of war—with a Ballardian afterglow, a nuclear flash from the Pacific Rim, delivering images of cities that escaped erasure by American bombs only to be buried under electronic goods of Japan's own making, sometimes literally faceless citizens staggering through landscapes no one ever thought the last century would bring."

International Klein Blue (IKB) by French artist Yves Klein (1928-62)

The first color I wish to explore is one of my favorites, due to both its historical / artistic conception and its hue. Klein and a series of chemists first created the color IKB in 1958, similar in many ways to Ultramarine ("beyond the sea"), as a unique artistic conception. Klein sought a blue that would appear as the same color in terms of intensity both when wet and dry achieved by suspending dry pigment in a clear synthetic resin, which he patented as such. However, their creation exists outside the gamut of regular computer displays, and so the photos are not as accurate as Klein would have desired, although this aspect enhances their appeal when seeing them in a gallery. In the 1950s and 1960s he experimented with both performance art and photomontage as well as monochrome, resulting in the creation of IKB. He died in 1962 of a heart attack. His legacy may very well live on as part of my art school.

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