Extreme Craft

Canstruction 2005

Ah, November. Fallen leaves, football, Thanksgiving, and...CANSTRUCTION! Canstruction is an annual event sponsored by the Society of Design Administration where architects and designers compete to build towering objects out of cans to raise awareness of hunger. The cans are then donated to local food banks. Past winners of the competition are mind-blowing. Perkins+Will, the architecture firm where I work in Atlanta competed in our local Canstruction competition, where we placed a respectable second with our Mardi Gras mask. Here are the stats for our entry:

Kroger Vegetables: 900
LeSueur Peas: 400
Kroger Oysters: 80
Hunt's Tomato Paste: 30
Kroger Drink Aid Packets: 1500

That's a lot of green peas to stomach--but hopefully, the cans of oysters and packets of powdered drinks will help even things out. Check out this Flickr photo set that I created, with pictures of other entries, including a huge iPod, a toilet (with requisite toilet paper), Oscar the Grouch, and the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. Let's hope that the toilet entry included a lot of cans of corn.

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Disky Business

It probably comes as no surprise to most of you that I spent my Junior High years toiling in the geek rowing gallery. My family was pretty late hopping aboard the technology train, but they came through when they bought a Commodore 64 circa 1983. I spent a good deal of time making little pixel drawings and animations, learning BASIC, and tooling around with my 300 baud modem on "Bulletin Boards", a dial-up relative of the internet. The Commodore 64 lacked a hard drive, and got all of its information from those 5 1/4" floppy disks. I felt pretty smug that we had evolved from 8" floppy disks. Imagine my joy this morning when flipping through BoingBoing to find this picture of a table built with an original 26" diameter hard drive rescued from government surplus. I'm not sure what the capacity of that hard drive is, but you might just be able to squeeze the contacts on your cel phone onto it.

LINK via BoingBoing

Phoneblogging from the grocery store.

Phoneblogging from the grocery store.

Katamari (Damarcy) in the Hat

Katamari Damarcy is a massively addictive videogame that tends to turn non-gamers into glassy-eyed game slaves. It also has the tendency to to turn gamers into glassy-eyed craft slaves, churning out endless craft tributes to the game. I've seen cakes, models, sushi, beads, and rugs on various sites. Here's your chance to buy a lovely handcrafted Katamari Damarcy hat! Each hat is lovingly crocheted in lovely Cattletsburg, Kentucky. Jump on this while you still can!

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Blue Spruce

Urban Outfitters is the antithesis of Extreme Craft--a corporate vampire that finds out what the art-damaged fashion victims in Williamsburg are up to (mainly putting their iPods into huge Sport Walkmans) and serves it up to mall kids with A.D.D. that can't find their way past the Orange Julius to Hot Topic. Not that the perversity of offering Century-21 blazers with silkscreened Albrecht Dürer prints isn't amusing--I have to admit that I love browsing through the store. Every once in a while, though, they seem to hit one out of the park. This year, Urban Outfitters is offering a replica of Charlie Brown's pathetic Christmas tree:

Good Grief. Learn the true meaning of Christmas with Charlie Brown's classic pathetic Christmas tree. Leave it bare or dress it up all fancy. The tree is an exact replica of the tree from the famous cartoon, made of wire branches and plastic needles with a criss cross wooden base. The bendable branches allow you to make it look just how you want, super pathetic or just kind of pathetic. The tree comes with one red Christmas ball ornament. Plus the bendable branches make it possible to fold the tree entirely flat for easy storage during the non-yuletide times of the year.

God bless us all...every one.

LINK via BoingBoing via Productdose

Extreme Krafft

I just ran across this lovely Flickr image set from the opening of a new show entitled "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" at the Shooting Gallery in San Francisco. The show features paintings by Robert Williams, Collages, by Winston Smith (of Dead Kennedys album cover fame), photos by Eric Kroll, and ceramics by Charles Krafft. I've featured Krafft's work in Extreme Craft before, and this image set offers the most complete guide to his work that I have ever seen on the web. Better yet, get down to the Shooting Gallery, and check it out for yourself.

LINK via BoingBoing

Outside the Lines

I routinely start my day with a visit to the online news sites SALON.COM and SLATE.COM. Slate, in particular always offers up a wide array of articles about politics, history, pop culture, and ephemera. At least once a week, Slate offers up a slideshow, often dealing with art or architecture, so imagine how pleased I was when I found today's offering: a feature about Obsessive Drawing, the new show at the American Folk Museum. As somebody who is interested in craft, I think a lot about the nature of outsider art. I struggle with priveleging the so called "purity" of an outsider's vision, or even sticking them with the "outsider" tag. As I witnessed earlier in the year when I attended the Atlanta Folk Fest (or "faux"-lk fest, as I like to callit ), dealers tend to hype the disabilities and scandalous backstories of the artists to promote them. I'm as tittilated by a good story as the next man, and ultimately, I believe such information is valuable to the artwork, so I've come to the conclusion that an appreciation of "outsider" art is perfectly fine, as long as an attitude of curiosity and questioning is maintained. In the Slate article, author Francine Prose has this astute observation to offer about our quest for "pure" artistic vision:

The conception of the artist as the marginalized outsider-looking-in was once so common as to be a cliché but now has been mostly replaced by that of the artist as the ultimate insider: rich, famous, celebrated, and routinely invited to all the most glamorous openings and parties. Perhaps it's not coincidental that the surge of interest in naive art occurred during the 1980s and '90s, when a change in the art world challenged existing notions of what it meant to be an artist. A new generation of painters—Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Francesco Clemente, and so forth—showed us that artists could not only earn tons of money but could also be, in significant ways, indistinguishable from actual rich people. A wealthy collector could invite them to dinner, ply them with expensive brandy and cigars, and never fear that, like Jackson Pollock, they might upset the other guests by urinating in the fireplace. As creativity began to seem inextricably connected with notions of career, resale value, and the "hotness" of one's gallery, people began to wonder: Whatever happened to the idea that artists labored for the pure love of art and without an eye on the European market? What about purity and authenticity? Where do we seek the spiritual heir of Van Gogh and all those other despised geniuses suffering in poverty? Maybe it's that guy living in a shack with his mama, hallucinating wildly and covering every available surface with polka dots and bottle caps.

Kind of makes you wish that you were an insane, impoverished, crippled southerner stuck in the bottom of a well churning out some pure vision, doesn't it?

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McSweeney's #17

McSweeney's #17

I just got my hot little hands on the new issue of McSweeney's (www.mcsweeneys.net). It seems like Dave Eggers and the good folks at McSweeneys managed to find another way to raise the design bar. This issue comes disguised as a pile of junk mail. There are envelopes chock full-o-goodness, plus a few ersatz literary journals, and finally, a beautiful catalog for siamese twin clothing. If you're in San Francisco, drop by their Pirate Store, or if you're in New York, try the Superhero flavor in Williamsburg, or the Wunderkammer flavor in Park Slope.

Knitters Digest

Yesterday, I mused about the connections between ceramics, sex, and..um..certain digestive functions. I've been meaning to bring you a link to the knitted digestive system that showed up on Craftster a while back. HERE IT IS! Bigger, badder, and more digestive than ever. The mysterious creator, armatie, has created a mysteriously informative website for the digestive system, complete with PATTERN! Knitting and crocheting are a natural for connections to the body. A wise friend even told me that each stitch releases endorphins into the body. My ladyfriend Claire just bought a knitting machine, so creating a hundred stitches at once is going to have us giving backrubs to everybody like we were on ecstacy. Perhaps that's too much information. I hope we can program the punch cards on the knitting machine to spit out digestive tracts!

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Seminal Vessels

I must confess. Dirty dishes have ben on my mind lately. A few weeks before I heard about James Victore's exhibit, I picked up a copy of Paul Matthieu's excellent book, "Sex Pots: Eroticism in Ceramics". Maybe it's the scatalogical clay connection that keeps potters' minds securely in the gutter, but there's a long and venerable history of erotic pottery. From the greeks to Demi Moore's star turn in "Ghost", clay and debauchery are firmly intertwined. Matthieu's lavishly illustrated volume takes the reader on a tour of historical erotic pots, then confronts them with modern pots that explore bodies, hygiene, queer sexuality, and of course, scatology.

Ceramic vessels often provide surprises for the user--If you were drinking from a Greek Kylix, you might find a Satyr with a stiffy waving to you from the bottom of the cup when you finished. Porcelain vessels from occupied Japan often had a sneaky nude embedded in the bottom which were only visible when held up to the light. I often lash out against ceramacists for making crunchygranola work, but maybe a bit of "Who's Your Daddy" would help make the medicine go down. Especially since it seems that for ceramic artists, that medicine seems to be Viagra.

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