The
ceramics world lost one of its great heroes today. Victor Spinski
passed away. He was full of mischief, skill and skewed wisdom... maybe
not in equal parts.
I wrote about an interview I did with Victor last year in Extreme Craft... you can find that piece HERE. After the interview, Victor sent me some amazing slides that he took of one of his best pranks. An animated GIF of the event is above, and the details, excerpted from my earlier piece, are below.
Supposedly, back in the '70s, a collector
bought a trompe l'oeil garbage can from a sold out show, then requested
that Spinski make some changes to the piece. Spinski agreed, but as he
drove the piece from Manhattan back to his studio in
Delaware, he started to chafe at the request. He had some issues with
his local sanitation company, so he did what any sane person would do.
He decided to put the piece out with that night's trash.
Spinski hid out with a camera behind a bush and waited for the garbage
truck to arrive. When it finally did, a sanitation worker (who according
to Victor looked like he had a pretty rough night of partying) picked
up the piece and tried to get the lid off. The lid shattered on the
ground, but somehow, this didn't register, and he started whacking it
against the corner of the garbage truck until the whole thing shattered,
which sobered him up real quick.
Spinski got some classic
photos of the whole thing, and the story ended like many of the stories I
heard from him... with Victor making a quick exit before somebody beat
the shit out of him.
Here is an animated GIF that I made of the
sequence of photos Victor took from the bushes. He's definitely going
to be missed... but maybe not by this particular sanitation worker.
First, in the UK, The Guardian's magazine The Observer ran an amazing four-page article on The Baroness. I was fortunate enough to be interviewed for the article about her... and I even rated a mention in the sidebar, along with Betsy Greer, another close personal friend of Extreme Craft.
The Baroness also has a new Etsy store, where you can purchase her detourned ceramic objects. Reportedly, she has one of the biggest ceramic decal collections in the world. Keep an eye on the Etsy shop and her blog to see how they get used.
She's also curated a show at the Ink'd Gallery in Brighton called Renegade Potters and Extreme Craft that features a group of likeminded subversive crafters including Dan Baldwin and Paul Scott.
The Baroness' newest creation is a mosaic elephant that will accompany 199 other elephants that will take to the streets of London for The Elephant Parade this summer. The parade is similar to projects like Chicago's cows that have popped up all over the U.S. True to form, the Baroness is collaborating with Nick Reynolds of music group Alabama 3 (Sopranos theme song anyone?). The mosaic elephant will call attention to the plight of Indian elephants, whose population has dwindled from over 200,000 to less than 30,000 today.
Beneath the beautiful tiled exterior, an elephant skull will be peeking out. Like everything the Baroness touches, I'm sure Phoolan (that's the elephant's name) will be gorgeous, luring viewers in for a closer look at the seductive surface, then clobbering them over the head with a message they need to hear.
Stay tuned to The Baroness Carrie von Reichardt's blog for more details and video updates. I'll post an image when Phoolan is installed!
In addition to living in earthquake country, I happen to live in Humboldt County, the capitol of pot culture in the U.S. It seems like every month or so, MSNBC, Fox or the LA Times puts out an article or segment whipping the public into a frenzy about grow houses and Mexican drug gangs that are out to behead innocent grannies. One "documentary" actually followed a DEA agent through a National Park as he talked about the drug gangs. When he stumbled onto a grow site, he actually pointed to a tortilla wrapper and a sexy Mexican novella as evidence that MS 13 is out to grow jazz tea and hunt your grandmother with their machetes.
What these articles never seem to do is focus on the POSITIVE. I'm not just talking about the increased availability of tasty baked goods and chocolate in our area.
What Humboldt county DOES have is a bunch of amazing glass artists. The need for smoking accessories brings out the artistic (and entrepreneurial) side of many of our residents.
I honestly had no idea that there was such a large subculture of glass artists focusing on stretching the boundaries of glass pipes, but it doesn't surprise me. The above YouTube clip is a trailer for a forthcoming documentary about pipe culture by M. Slinger called Degenerate Art: The Art and Culture of Glass Pipes. Holocaust-insensitive title aside, the scene seems to be ripe for some documentation, and perhaps some appreciation from the rest of the art and craft world.
As you might guess, function is somewhat arbitrary in many of the pieces that come out of this scene. An $8,000 glass pipe is really no different than what ceramic artists have been doing with teapots for years. Nobody is going to brew up a steaming pot of tea in a Sergei Isupov teapot, so the lack of functional use shouldn't be a deal-breaker.
In fact, the function of these pipes is mostly metaphorical. Slinger and his fellow glass artists are philosophical when it comes to function....as they have to be so as not to end up like Tommy Chong. The pipes will be displayed and treasured by collectors, monuments to human creation...and the impulse to change the situation one's situation is in.
A few years back, many of the glass artists featured in the documentary came together in Arcata, the town next to me, to work on a gigantic collaborative pipe sculpture. The creation of the "sculpture" is documented on Slinger's website, thataintart.com.
Lots of the work that comes out of this network of artists is free of day-glo head shop kitsch, but some of the artists take kitschy psychedelic imagery and warp it back on itself. Many of the artists profiled in the documentary have been showing their work together in fine art galleries, inviting both the scrutiny and increased attention that broader exposure can bring. It seems like some of the artists actually know their way around an artist statement!
The quasi-legal nature of their art is all part of the fun. I can't wait to see the artists talk about their run-ins with the law in the documentary. Slinger and Co. have also started a book imprint called Grit City that sells beautiful monographs about their art. Their first book was entitled "Smoked", and it has already sold out. A second volume of "Smoked" will be coming out this summer.
C'mon, Corning Glass Museum! C'mon, Pilchuck! It's time for you to ditch the second-rate Chihuly knock-offs and prove that you're down with some real glass art. What are you ashamed of? As for the rest of you.... it's time you stopped living like you did when you were in college. You know you can afford to ditch the crunched up beer can or hollowed-out apple and invest in some real functional art.
When I put up my post about Vodou flags, friend of Extreme Craft Susan Beal replied with this elegant voodoo doll on my Facebook account. If you win this auction, you can donate a big chunk of money to Haiti while acquiring a voodoo doll that you can have some REAL fun (and very little guilt) with.
After an exclusive deal with
devil, we are finally able to bring black magic into your very own
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Televangelist PAT ROBERTSON in a handheld figurine comprised of the
finest straw, cloth, and other organic natural materials!
Ever
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jab him in the crotch? Of course you have! Well then BID NOW to own
your very own pysical representation of the dark, dark soul of Pat
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I've been working on a paper about the use of craft as a "Trojan horse", and I ran across this great, literal use of the Trojan horse by students at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Back in March, art students at Tyler constructed four large cardboard horses, then sneakily delivered them to the other art schools in town. I was disappointed that the Tyler students didn't put on stripe-y shirts and berets and hide in the horse, but they DID leave a manifesto of sorts, declaring "war" on the other schools:
Oh snap! When I was an art student, the most worked up we ever got was when the gas station down the street raised their prices on malt liquor.
Responses from the other art schools were varied. Here's a pretty lame video response from students at Moore College of the arts...although I can totally appreciate their catty nitpicking of the Tyler students' design prowess.
University of the Arts actually RETALIATED against Tyler, although I understand it took them a week to deliver the cut off horse head back to Tyler. If they had shown some real initiative, I think they could have snuck the head into the bed of Tyler's Dean while they were sleeping.
I'm all for art students making things interesting. The other schools seemed to be talking big last Spring, but I'm unsure if anyone ever followed through. If anybody has updates, please email me!
I was working on my classes this morning while watching a taped rerun of last night's Saturday Night Live when this puppy came on. If only the rest of the crafts had a classy spokesperson (and spokesmodel) like PORCELAIN FOUNTAINS!!!! Marcel Duchamp is smiling to himself somewhere.
One of the things I most look forward to each week is the weekly photoblog posting from my friend Viktor from Atlanta. His blog, Nostalgia Migranta, showcases his amazing photographs elegantly, with a minimum of fuss. Viktor just forwarded me a mysterious photoblog post from a blog called cafedelunivers. This is some extreme craft. It's also not safe for work, so follow the link at your own peril.
The summer is drawing to a close. As great as it's been, with my trip to China, buying an awesome house and having time to decompress, I think I'm actually ready to shake the summer fog from my brain and get back to teaching. I've been neglecting my Extreme Craft duties as well. I'm always reminded of this when I check up on sites like what not to crochet, and one of my new favorites, Badder Homes and Gardens.
Badder Homes and Gardens is maintained by Nikki, Krista and Sarah, three whip-smart Texas gals whose motto is "even cynical bitches want their homes to look pretty". They've got a great collective eye for clever art and design, and a knack for describing beauty with bathroom humor, which is no easy feat.
As most Extreme Craft readers know, craft can be a dangerous, even life-threatening business. 55 year old Ellin Klor found this out the hard way when she was on the way to a knitting club meeting. Apparently, she was so jazzed to show her friends some new patterns that she bounded up the front stairs, knitting needles in hand. Unfortunately, Ms. Klor tripped, and one of the knitting needles (the actual remnant is pictured above) pierced her chest, lodged in her heart, and snapped off. She didn't even notice until she got into the house, where 911 was promptly called.
The trauma team at Stanford University Hospital successfully removed the (shockingly large gauge) needle from her heart, stitched her up and sent her home. Twelve days later, Klor woke up with a pain in her chest and shortness of breath, and got back in touch with her doctors. When she went back to the hospital, every test came back negative until a doctor noticed that one of her lymph nodes was swollen.
Klor was soon diagnosed with breast cancer, which she had successfully fought a decade earlier. Doctors actually think that the knitting needle incident saved her life, as the malignancy wouldn't have been caught until it started to spread. According to a Newsweek article, her line of thinking that got her past the breast cancer was something like "if a knitting needle through my heart isn't enought to kill me, there's no way that a little thing like cancer is going to get in my way."
20/20 ran a video piece about Ellin Klor last Sunday, and although they didn't provide embeddable video that I could directly put up, they do have an archive of the piece HERE.
If this isn't an argument for playing fast and loose with craft, I don't know what is. Don't be afraid to run with scissors (or bound up the stairs with knitting needles). It might just save your life.
That last post inspired me to catch up with What Not to Crochet, which I hadn't visited in a while. I wasn't disappointed (It's actually impossible to be disappointed with that site). Among the cranky musings about slankets and snuggies, eye melting swimwear and fashion world miscues, there was this photo of a crochet pattern book that shows how to make crochet Hummel figurines!
I'm sure your grandkids are just DYING for a crochet doll of a Bavarian farm girl being pecked at by ducks instead that copy of Grand Theft Auto they've been hinting at.
This body of work was created during a Summer 2010 residency at the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China. These porcelain vessels explore traditional Chinese iconography as refracted through a decidedly Western point of view.
