Extreme Craft

Pulled Pork

My life is now completely complete.  Claire and I were just listening to the Jordan Jesse Go! podcast, where co-host Jesse Thorn (America's Radio Sweetheart) waxed rhapsodic about the Antiques Roadshow.  Jesse spent some time talking about the Roadshow's host, Mark L. Walberg, a.k.a. "the world's worst Mark Wahlberg".  Fortunately, the show doesn't linger on Mr. Walberg, choosing instead to focus on the appraisers (Jesse Thorn's calls his favorite appraiser "Antiques Roadshow F. Tompkins"). 

It's always interesting to watch the smug appraisees find out their "antique" is a Taiwanese knockoff.  It's also fun to watch the backwoods granny with the corncob pipe and the Monet painting triumph.

I agree with Jesse that this segment is quite possibly the greatest segment in the history of Antiques Roadshow.  A rather smug gentleman shows off his rare "animated" pull pig toy.  The fellow doesn't get his comeuppance, though.  His confidence in the awesomeness of his pig toy is rewarded by a $2000-$2500 appraisal for his $200 investment.

I'll let you marvel on your own.  Turn-of-the-century kids were SO LUCKY!  I would have traded my Stretch Armstrong AND my Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots for one of these.

LINK thanks JJGO!

Thought Tub

Artist Tom Gerhardt isn't going to sit around and let anybody hand him prepackaged music/culture/experiences.  He believes that people should be able to control their own experiences when it comes to creativity.

Enter THE MUD TUB.

Gerhardt created a computer interface that is a distant relative of the flashy computer interface they used in the movie "Minority Report" where data is projected in midair and manipulated by hand.  Gerhardt's innovation is to connect people with their data in a way that is elemental... not to mention squishy.  

His computer interface involves sensors that can "read" a pile of mud that users manipulate.  The sensors are connected to a computer and projector that beams an image directly onto the mud surface.  Check out some of the computer applications for a better idea.  It would seem that the possibilities are endless.  This might make paperwork a bit less tedious for me if I could simply fling little piles of mud around to form a spreadsheet.

Other Gerhardt inventions include a plate spinning(!) tool for deejays, a tetris/arm wrestling mashup and highly touchable electronic felt.  I wonder how long it will be before Apple tries to start selling packets of dehydrated mud for use with the iPad.

LINK via BoingBoing

Cast of Characters

Ooh...heirloom crafts, originally uploaded by Woof Nanny.

Thanks to my buddy Henry for letting me know about this amazing 1976 plaster casting advertisement. I'm not going to ask him what google search led him this way. You've probably already noticed the name of the company involved, "Heirloom Crafts". I can just imagine the reading of the will after the two models in the photo kick the bucket.

"And to you, my most beloved grandson, I hereby leave you my most treasured artwork, the shivering spray-painted greek lady from my mantel."

All snarkiness aside... helluva paintjob on that deer head!

Van Wildest

I can always count on my friends to flesh out a post... particularly when it involves custom vans.  Thanks go out to my pal Bob for his comment (check the previous post) about an amazing MOODY BLUES TRIBUTE CUSTOM VAN.  My pal Jesse also sent me a link to the amazing YouTube video above.  Things start to get especially spicy at the three minute mark when some amazing interiors coincide with a kickin' flute solo!

Speaking of Jesse..he's no slouch in the custom van department.  They often make cameo appearances in his amazing paintings.  Please don't let the crazy lady with the keg put a dent in this piece of modern art!  Check out some more paintings below!

LINK thanks Jesse!

Van Wilder

Custom Van - Love Jones

Oh yeah...before you start reading this, do yourself a favor and start playing the song I linked to above.  This is my first "audio-enhanced" piece.

I doubt anybody is going to be surprised by this...but I actually owned a custom van.  She was a 1976 Ford Chateau (for real! Ford would have a hard time marketing a car named "Chateau" in these economic times) that my old band bought for a trip to New York for the CMJ festival.  About 50 miles into the trip, the engine started making noises, and we found that all of the oil was leaking through a dried-up gasket.  I'm a little ashamed to say that we bought a couple of cases of oil and replenished the thirsty van with about a quart of oil every hour.  She never took another trip after we got her home.

I'll always remember her sweet captain's chairs and wealth of brown shag carpeting.  The custom van is truly a lost art.

Sadly, my van didn't have any airbrushed Star Wars-related art on the sides, but it did have one of those sweet, slightly futuristic, stripey paintjobs.

Photographer Joe Stevens has been documenting the few, the proud custom vans that still remain on the streets of San Francisco and the East Bay for the past few years.  His photographic series, Vans and the Places Where They Were, can be found online HERE.  Here's what Stevens has to say about his subject:

Vans and the places where they were documents surviving custom and conversion vans across the West and examines the dialogue which exists between a van’s design aesthetic and that of its surrounding environment. The project began in 1996 and currently consists of hundreds of images shot on 120 film.

Over the course of the project the vans themselves have become more and more of a rarity. The reasons are as simple as rust and changing tastes; and as complex as government “cash for clunkers” initiatives encouraging more fuel-efficient transportation. Notably, at the same time these vans have been disappearing from our roads – film photography as a visual medium has also begun it’s slow death. Consequently the goal of the project is to one day shoot the last remaining van on the final frame of photographic film in existence. Then the project will be finished.

These once-proud monuments to all that was groovy were sometimes actually pretty great works of craftsmanship.  It took Stevens' isolated photos of the vans for me to consider them as design projects.  If only I could give my incoming Freshman art students some metal-flake paint and some masking tape, I could probably come away with some badassssssssss projects.  I just read that Jeff Koons is creating an art car that has been commissioned by BMW..... He'd probably do better to dig up an old Ford Chateau.

Speaking of which...I think that old van is still rusting away somewhere on my parents' farm.  Maybe I should rescue it and give it a sweet Sol LeWitt or Mark Rothko paint job.

LINK via BoingBoing

Give Up The Folk!

Do you have one of those friends who is both hypercreative and incredibly modest?  The problem with these types of friends is that you see them, hang out with them, but it's really, really hard to keep up with with their creative output.  My pal Clifton is just such a friend.  The problem is compounded by the fact that whatever he is up to creatively, it can't be put into a neat box. 

I'll hear one month that he's working with other graphic designers on information kiosks for small towns in Mississippi, then the next month he's teaching himself to write iPhone apps to pitch to traditional book publishers.  Fragments of some of his projects tend to pop up on his website, cliftonburt.com, which also serves as a repository for his world class musings on whatever strikes his fancy that day.   I hope I'm not making him sound frivolous...because he has more "game-changer" in his pinky toe than most people have in their whole body.

That's why it didn't surprise me that one of Clifton's new projects, FOLK OBJECT slipped under my radar until Design*Sponge wrote about it last week.  Doh!

Folk Object is a Clifton-curated Tumblr reliquary for..well...folk objects.  As he should, Clifton takes a broad view of what constitutes "folk".  On the Folk Object site, you've got your curious expressions of nationalist craft rubbing shoulders with album covers, high fashion and distillations of "folk" sensibility that range from psychedelic to dollar store.  Academically trained artists rub shoulders with craftspeople, designers and business people.  It's up to you, the viewer to juxtapose everything and sort it all out.

All of this is offered up without wry commentary or even justification.  In grand Tumblr style, viewers can register their approval or reblog the images.  Folk Object makes it apparent that the Esperanto-leaning utopian impulses that started developing early in the last century are continuing apace.  Objects in the "folk" vernacular have their own peculiar beauty and symbolism that is ripe for mashing up, reviving or exploiting. 

A visit to Folk Object leaves me both shaken and stirred.  I slap my forehead at the ways folk traditions are mined for their commercial potential and kitsch, but I'm also excited by the way their potency and shocked by their malleability.

I dare you to take a look through the pages of Folk Objects and walk through a thrift store without seeing the objects on the shelf anew.  Prepare to have your paradigm shifted.

LINK

Reel Architecture

I don't really have anything clever to say.  Sometimes an object just strikes my fancy the right way, like this sculpture from Cuban-born artist Alexandre Arrechea that is on display at the L.A. Municipal Art Gallery through mid-April.

LINK to Arrechea's website via C-Monster

Tool of the Man

One of my teaching duties (priveleges, really) at College of the Redwoods is teaching art history.  I was trained as a studio artist, but I took a ton of art history courses.  I had incredible art history professors who always exposed the seedy (and weird) underbelly of history to us, and I try to do the same for my students.

I've never felt so "plugged in" to art history as this moment.  A recent article in Britain's Daily Mail told of an ancient Roman "Swiss Army knife" that is made out of silver.  The utensil, which dates to between 200-300 AD, contains a spoon, fork, cutting blade, tiny spatula and a pick, which could have been used for getting snails out of their shells.

There's no way to prove the owner of this utensil was a man...but it has all of the hallmarks of a handy, but kind of unwieldy man gadget.  How cool did the original owner of this baby feel when he whipped out his go-go gadget multitool around the campfire?  

You can visit the tool for yourself at the newly revamped Roman and Greek galleries at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England.  Another place I can heartily recommend visiting is the Römisch-Germanisches (Roman-German) Museum in Cologne, Germany.  The museum in Cologne is stuffed with everyday domestic items that the Romans left behind in the year they spent colonizing the area that is now Germany.  You can see plenty of utensils, cooking pots, dice and other utilitarian objects that usually get left out of major museums.

 

To that end, one of my favorite examples of utilitarian art historical objects that I always show my students is the Ancient Greek potty training chair above.  Ceramic geeks love to call ceramic toilets and urinals "after-dinnerware".  You can find the original photo, which was taken at the Agora museum in Athens on BoingBoing.net.

SO.  Rest assured, fellow humans that the ancient Greeks and Romans shared your struggles with such everyday issues as potty training, and the gadget geeks were probably awaiting each new version of the ancient Swiss Army knife with the same anticipation that accompanied Apple's recent iPad announcement.

LINK via Gizmodo