I've written about Jonathon Keats on Extreme Craft before...chiefly his "Agrifolk in America" project, whereby he "farmed" art by providing drawing implements to 50 trees on a Christmas tree farm in Georgia. Since then, he's stayed busy engineering God in a petri dish, designing a ouija voting booth, choreographing a ballet for honeybees and creating a porn theater for houseplants.
Adam Gopnik just wrote a great New Yorker article about Jonathon's houseplant porn theater, which was installed at the AC Institute in Chelsea. Gopnik came about as close as anyone has been able to come to describing what Keats does when he called him a "poet of ideas".
College of the Redwoods is extremely pleased to be bringing Jonathon to Eureka for a visiting artist lecture at the Accident Gallery at 210 C Street. The lecture will be free and open to the public and start at 8:00. If you're up in Eureka, stop by for an evening of conversation with one of America's greatest living art treasures.... your houseplants will thank you for attending.
Taxidermy has certainly provided some good times on Extreme Craft. From the albino squirrel heaven in Madison Wisconsin to Jeanettee's taxidermy, who will make a tasteful pillow from your departed pet, taxidermy still has the power to shock, awe, delight and amuse.
When I visited Philadelphia back in February, the kind students at the Tyler School of Art realized that my trip wouldn't be complete without a visit to the Wagner Free Institute Museum in North Philly, a stone's throw away from the Temple campus.
A trip to the Free Museum (which was originally a part of Philadelphia's library system) is a step back in time. The museum opened in 1855 as a service to the city of Philadelphia, and was upgraded and reshaped in 1891. Amazingly, the museum is little-changed since then. The museum if full of gorgeous display cases chock full of specimens, ranging from a draft horse skeleton to a taxidermy bird called "The Cock of the Rock". Even the museum's auditorium is unchanged. You can attend lectures on scientific topics while sitting on beautiful, squeaky, uncomfortable seats.
Even though I live on the other side of the country, I signed up for their email list. I was delighted when I got an email today advertising their upcoming lecture about the History of Taxidermy by Dr. Pat Morris of London University:
"What makes taxidermy so interesting?
Whether encountering thousands of specimens at a museum like the Wagner
Institute or just a few in a hunter's trophy collection, viewing
taxidermy can be captivating. Taxidermy historian, Dr. Pat
Morris, will explain why people find the display of mounted animals to
be so fascinating. Dr. Morris is a leading British mammal ecologist who
has been researching the history of taxidermy as a lifelong hobby. He
has traveled through most of Europe and the USA, seeking out interesting
taxidermy specimens and stories.
His presentation will consider
taxidermy from its roots as a business in the 19th century, reviewing
the history of preserved animals, and attempts to find the oldest
surviving specimens. Dr. Morris will also explore the diverse and
amusing uses of taxidermy - including major museum exhibits, stuffed
pets, hunting trophies, animal furniture, and squirrels playing cards. "
The lecture will be on Wednesday, April 7th at 5:30 PM. What could be better than learning about taxidermy in a place that's only slightly less glorious than the Bass Pro shop? You should also check out the Institute's Flickr page.
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.
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.
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.
I've been doing a bunch of things while on hiatus from Extreme Craft. First and foremost, Claire and I have been working on the Victorian house that we bought back in August. In the back of my mind, I knew how much time and energy it would take, but I somehow still managed to underestimate it.
In addition to the house, we've been maintaining a blog for Readymade magazine called "Keeping Up With the Johnsons". In the blog, we give a blow-by blow of finding the house, finding the courage to buy the house, finding the patience to deal with knuckleheaded lenders, the vision we have for our living space, and the sheer elbow grease it has taken to achieve it.
I've been waiting for ages to put up a post on the blog about all of the crazy wallpaper we found when we started tearing through 100-plus years of accumulation. Just follow the link to Keeping up with the Johnsons, and you can join me in my wallpaper reverie. Even though there are some fabulous indie wallpaper producers out there, the fact is that they just don't make wallpaper like they used to. The bottom layers we found were all hand-printed with delicate colors and metallic inks...and extreme craft that's been lost to the ages.
So what if Project Runway is sucking this season. So what if they threw out all of the weirdos in the first few episodes and pushed the designers to make safe clothing (while telling them not to). So what if the corporate sponsorships have been put into overdrive? We're all waiting for a Snuggie-sponsored challenge. So what. I'm still watching, like the dutiful sheep I am.
If you hadn't heard, The Weinstein company (PR's parent company) just announced they would develop a video game with Atari that will debut on Nintendo's Wii next spring.
"The game will largely follow of the format of the TV show, with players
competing as aspiring fashion designers and presented with different
challenges as they create designs and outfit models with hair, makeup
and accessories. Players can then become the model and strut their
creations down the runway using the Wii Balance Board or take on the
role of a fashion photographer and document their designs."
I can't wait to see my fellow computer geeks outfitting their models in virtual sweatpants and three wolf shirts.
By the way...has anybody else noticed that Michael Kors and Spencer Pratt are basically the same guy separated by thirty years? Kors has even been copying Spencer's flesh-colored beard lately. I'm just sayin'.
The corporate giants of the world are learning to get along with the genius designers of the world. Last month, Rob Walker wrote about No Mas, a plucky little company that made badass retro T-shirts from a design that Cassius Clay sported back in the 60's. No Mas was threatened by Muhammed Ali's licensing goons, but eventually came to an agreement that let the company officially license the shirts.
Now, Lucasfilm has given the licensing nod to something that Extreme Craft wrote about way back in April....THE TAUNTAUN SLEEPING BAG WILL SOON BE A REALITY! The sleeping bag originally started as an elaborate April Fool's joke, but ThinkGeek soon found out that the Star Wars-themed sleeping bags were what the world has been waiting for. Here are the specs from Think Geek's website:
Classic Star Wars sleeping bag simulates the warmth of a Tauntaun carcass
Built-in embroidered Tauntaun head pillow
Plush Lightsaber zipper pull
Great for playing pretend "Save Luke from the Wampa" games
Teach your children about the best Star Wars movie ever
Fully Licensed Lucasfilm™ Collectable
Enough room for adults, plenty of space for kids
100% Polyester construction, Machine washable
Bag Dimensions - 33" x 67" (not including head pillow or legs)
Start making some babies to fit in those sleeping bags, everybody!
I'm working my way through Deyan Sudjic's new book The Language of Things right now. It's a powerful examination of how we choose to relate to the objects in our lives. I'm a big fan of gadgets, but I'm also a fan of well-made objects that we can form lasting relationships with. The creative reusers among us know that the two impulses are not incompatible. Remember that bondi blue iMac that you swore allegiance to ten years ago? It's been gathering dust in your closet for eight years?
Mac users have been repurposing their computers for years...most notably, the original generation of Macs make excellent "Macquarium" fish tanks. An eBay user is now selling his original iMac, which has been reborn as a hamster cage. I know there's a joke in there somewhere about the wheel that powers this thing. Does Apple still make a computer that is big enough to be reconfigured into something besides a tie tack or cufflinks?
I can attest to the sheer brutish durability of the El Camino, one of the most functional (and unfairly maligned) cars ever to come out of Detroit. My father had a series of three of them in the late 70's and early 80's. He'd buy a crummy one for a few hundred dollars, then add another hundred thousand or so miles to it before junking it. That said, the El Camino wasn't exactly a paragon of green technology (except for Bill Clinton's, which reportedly had AstroTurf in the back).
Enter Tom Leitschuh, a tinkerer extraordinaire who brought his El Camino into the modern era:
Leitschuh, an electronics controls engineer and owner of TDL Electronics,
got to work. The project went pretty quickly, taking about 200 hours of
his time over the course of six weeks. He got some help with donations
from QuickCable
and some hired hands to help with welding and fabrication. The tab came
to roughly $30,000, which included the cost of the car and a
transmission rebuild. The lion’s share of the bill went to the 46
lithium-ferrite phosphate batteries that cost him $18,000. They’re
located over the front and rear axles. Because Leitschuh yanked the
engine, radiator and other archaic equipment, the weight penalty for
the batteries is just 750 pounds.
Perhaps Leitschuh could one-up Bill Clinton by planting some real turf in the bed of his Green Camino.
My last Craigslist post yielded some interesting feedback...but none as interesting as the link my pal Henry sent me to itemnotasdescribed.com, a repository for all of those puzzling free Craigslist postings in the world. According to the site, these postings are (mostly) born of optimism and generosity. Surely SOMEONE can use that broken garden gnome or algae-filled broken hot tub. Other posts are clearly just people trying to trick somebody into hauling away their junk that would be too expensive to send to the landfill.
The little gem pictured above is something else entirely....a papier mache boot with a detailed map of middle earth painstakingly painted on it. Of course it's from San Francisco:
Handpainted Middle Earth map on papier mache boot, circa 1979. I’d like
this to go to a teacher or someone who will use it for educational
purposes, perhaps a library or non-profit that encourages reading.
Itemnotasdescribed.com breaks down the post almost word-by-word in an attempt to figure out the motivations of somebody who has kept an item like this around since 1979. I think most Extreme Craft readers would hold this dear in hopes that it would someday guide them to the fires of Mordor.
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.
