Photo: Dan Kitwood, Getty Images
Just flipping through the new issue of National Geographic. With a photo like this, it's hard to resist the temptation to turn one's blog into a Pinterest clone. This photo was taken during vodun celebrations in Benin--the sequined celebrants have close ties to the Yoruba culture in Nigeria.
You can find a whole gallery of images of these costumes in action at the Baltimore Sun.
Oy yoy yoy. I'm seriously rusty at this blogging stuff. I decided to take some time off from Extreme Craft when Ramona was born back in January. A week after the baby was born, my wife broke her knee, and things got pretty hairy around chez Extreme Craft.
I'm happy to report that almost ten months later, things have returned to "the new normal". We have a happy, healthy little person that just started crawling last week. Fatherhood has been an amazing adventure that transcends all of the cliches that get batted around.
One of the fun things about having a helpless little baby is dressing it up funny... which we've done both for Halloween and our own amusement. When Ramona was born, my friend Annamaria gave her a great Mexican folk dress. With a minimum of effort, we transformed her into baby Frida.
For Halloween last week, my wife slaved over a Marie Antoinette costume for months on end. The dress is immaculate, and the wig is just as good. The biggest question we've gotten is how we keep the wig on a squirmy baby. The answer is that she knows she is a star with the wig on. She kept it on for a full hour once.
It's past Halloween, but you might want to check out the post that Claire and I did for Etsy.com last week about last minute costumes... featuring a guest appearance from Ramona.
Blog psychology is tough. I've been planning so many big blowout mega-posts that I've psyched myself out. So... baby steps. I've got a lot to share from the past ten months.
Huzzah! The project that my wife Claire and I have been working on for nine months has come to fruition! Maybe I'm not releasing a song about her like Jay-Z, but I couldn't be happier to have a 6 pound 14.5 oz baby daughter. Her name is Ramona Lua Joyce Johnson, and we welcomed her into this world at 2:32 AM this morning.
She's already doing some serious daddy-daughter bonding. She napped her way through the NCAA BCS championship football game on my chest. She shares her mother's uncanny ability to be lulled to sleep by the ol' pigskin. Stay tuned for more adventures of Ramona the baby. As you might guess, she's already been the recipient of some pretty amazing crafty gifts.
I'm in the middle of writing a paper that I'm presenting at the NCECA ceramics conference in March about performance art in the ceramics world. There's a lot more than you'd think--particularly if you expand the parameters a little bit. Probably the most famous is a piece called Changes that James Melchert did back in 1972 where he had ten people dunk their head in slip and contemplate the world for an hour while the slip dried and cracked. That's all well and good, but there is a lot of work that involves deviance, humor, and even blowing shit up.
I had the most delightful conversation today with Victor Spinski, who I've always known for his trompe l'oeil ceramics work. Spinkski is a consummate craftsman. He knows his materials, knows his processes, knows his decals and knows his china paint. He's not afraid to pour hundreds of hours into a piece, because he knows his efforts will pay off. For some reason, I've always gravitated to Spinski's work a little more than artists like Richard Shaw and Marilyn Levine, who are also amazing.
Actually, today I figured out why I'm so attracted to Spinski's work. It's because there's a mischevious, mischevious soul behind it. When Spinski met Clayton Bailey in the '70s, a new height was set for the lunacy bar. More on that in a moment.
One of the great things about Spinksi's work is that it didn't live in a vacuum. He told me a story about a piece that he had done... a trompe l'oeil ceramic cardboard box filled with highly detailed ceramic garbage. A Wall Street exec bought the piece from a gallery for a bunch of money and kept it on his desk. The brother must have shared a cleaning lady with Joseph Beuys, because he got to work one day, and the cleaning lady had thrown it out. This led him to roll up his french cuffs and dumpster dive to retrieve his beloved art. Supposedly, the dude's boss (and in Spinski's telling, bosses' boss) walked by the dumpster and gave him a highly disapproving look.
An even better story is the story of his garbage can. 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 had obviously had a pretty rough night of partying) picked up the piece and tried to get the lid off. When he couldn't get the lid off, 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.
There was another story about the cafeteria at the college where Spinski taught. The food was typical, awful cafeteria food of the period, which got Spinski thinking about pranks he could pull on the cafeteria. He had some students "borrow" some diner-style coffee cups from the cafeteria, then he made up some ceramic lipstick print decals, which he then permanently fired onto the cups. The next day, Spinski and some students snuck the cups back into the cafeteria and onto the conveyor belt for the dishes. Apparently, the poor students who were trying to scrub the lipstick prints off of the cups caused a major disruption (and no small amount of delight on the part of the artist/pranksters).
One final prank that I'll mention involved a lecture that Spinski did with Clayton Bailey. The dastardly duo were presenting a lecture in a posh auditorium in Michigan on alternative fuels for kilns. Bailey has an um.... history of making up extravagant scientific theories and presentations, including one about "horse clay", a self-firing mixture of horse manure and clay that could be shaped, then simply lit on fire. The manure supposedly fired out and brought the clay up to a temperature sufficient to mature it. The horse clay was, of course, horseshit, but very entertaining horseshit.
Before their lecture, Bailey and Spinski mixed some clay with limburger cheese, rolled it into the shape of dog turds and let it mature in a nice, warm boiler room in the auditorium. They built a simple kiln out of bricks, then wired up some black powder (Spinski had worked with ordinance in the military) at the bottom. They then placed the ripe "turds" in the kiln, and Bailey proceeded to give a lecture about the pyroplastic properties of dog poop, warning that they could be dangerously unstable. With the flick of a switch, there was a huge explosion, and smelly fake dog shit rained down on the audience. Spinski and Bailey quickly covered themselves in fake blood, then wheeled Bailey out on a Gurney before somebody beat the shit out of them. They showed up bandaged and sporting some makeup black eyes at the party later that night, accepting the kind condolences of the others in attendance.
Does it seem to anybody else that the craft world is missing something today? All you whippersnappers with your unfired clay installations and video performance pieces need to kick it up a notch.
See you at NCECA in March!
Happy holidays, everybody! Sorry for the silence lately... big things have been cooking at chez Extreme Craft. Claire is 8.9 months pregnant, and the arrival of our new roommate could happen at any time. What could be so important that it drags me back to post on my dear, neglected blog?
Marzipan, of course! I just read a post on BoingBoing about the pork-y marzipan confection that you see above. Jonas Laberg created it out of TEN KILOGRAMS of marzipan... that's about 22 pounds to we 'Mericans who don't parlez-vous the metric system. The kicker is that Laberg made it for his (presumably) daughters, who are 5 and 7, but is thinking of not giving it to them because he thinks the thing is TOO EVIL! C'mon, Jonas! I grew up on a farm with all sorts of demonic animals (and baked goods), but I turned out FINE (insert crickets or needle scratch here).
This does remind me a little bit of Camille Allen, a woman who sculpts tiny, premature babies out of polymer clay. About seven years back, some asshole started sending around an email that claimed the babies were made out of MARZIPAN! Ms. Allen is still reeling from all of the visitors who come to her site expecting gruesome preemie confections. The first thing you see is a big disclaimer that lets you know in no uncertain terms that the babies are NOT made out of marzipan.
This is an open plea to Mr. Laberg to let those little girls appreciate the beauty of his labor. Christmas comes but once a year.
LINK via BoingBoing
TABLE TOP FOOD SHOTS from Tassos Boulmetis on Vimeo.
As a craft geek, I'm always interested in process. If you want to babysit me, just leave me with a marathon of one of those basic cable TV shows that take you on factory tours. I could watch twinkies being wrapped or paintballs being made alllllll day.
Today's New York Times had a great article on the art (and artifice) of tabletop food videography. I knew a lot of this stuff--I've even visited the studio of a master food photographer, but I instantly found myself in "How Stuff Works" mode. Substituting lard for ice cream to avoid melting under bright cameras? $500 custom-made silicone "ice" cubes? Fork glue? Hypodermic sauce dripping needles? Bring 'em on! Here's my favorite passage:
“Food has to be in motion to have character,” says Alex Fernbach, another Budin acolyte, who now works at Arf & Company, a studio in Hoboken, N.J. “It gives food a personality.”
It also gives prop men a challenge. Like Ed Fountain, who builds food-tossing devices in a large, cluttered workshop in Mr. Schrom’s studio.
“We recently did a shot where this doughnut was tumbling through the air and through a curtain of sugar,” he said. As he spoke, he reached under a table and brought out a pair of matching, foot-and-a-half-long black catapults, powered by air cylinders, which he’d originally built for a Long John Silver’s commercial in which shrimp collided.
“I put the doughnut in here,” he says, pointing to the end of one catapult. “And I had it strike a paintbrush to get it tumbling. Then I connected it to a device that bumped a table and sent up the sugar right as the doughnut passed through.”
You could throw the doughnut by hand, he explained. But with a rig, as everyone in this industry calls these little Rube Goldbergs, you get the exact same results, over and over, which means fewer takes.
That's what I'm talkin' about! My wife asked if I could possibly imagine spending all of my time building contraptions like donut trebuchets. I had to honestly answer with an enthusiastic YES! Then she asked how a person even finds themself on career trajectory like that. I think I know the answer. ART SCHOOL!
SO. If you'd like to pull back the curtain on the food porn industry, read the whole article HERE. Your life will be completely complete when you learn about the proper way to photographically showcase a nugget of fried chicken or strands of gooey cheese. Let 'em fly!
This weekend marks the newest installment of Crafty Bastards, Washington D.C.'s aptly named festival of all things craft. I was fortunate enough to do a piece for the Washington City Paper/Crafty Bastards printed program on Ian Henderson, who is a jewelry artist that blows my mind....hard. Ian creates brooches, rings, necklaces and other pieces out of repurposed aluminum wire and the rubber insulation from the wire. He's inspired by the beautiful/protective armor worn by insects, crustaceans and other creepy crawlies.
The thing about Ian's Zoa Chimerum jewelry is that it's surprising in just about every way that it can possibly be. The pieces are all made to MOVE as the wearer moves. They're also intricately/obsessively craft. Did I mention that they're SOFT? Yup... what looks like a spiky exoskeleton is made out of soft rubber insulation. It's impossible not to touch them, flex them and play with them.
Here's a short excerpt from the interview. The entire interview can be found HERE.
Are there details of your work that casual viewers might miss?
The tactile quality. Most casual viewers do not pick up my jewelry unless I invite them to, because the pieces appear delicate and sharp. When they give in to my insistence and touch them, however, they discover that they are actually quite durable and soft. They are delighted to run their fingers along the flexible spines and feel them spring back into place…Visually, the details create the rhythm in the pieces, so while they are individually unremarkable, their relationship to one another is very important. In that way, the viewer might not notice all of the individual elements, but rather the way they harmonize with one another.
What can you tell us about the line between beauty and danger that your work explores?
It’s interesting that the things we are traditionally repulsed by, when viewed in great detail, have elements within them that to most eyes are extremely beautiful—for example, the compound eye of a butterfly, the delicate veining of a dragonfly’s wings, the curvature and fractal rhythms of an uncoiling fern. There’s a certain beauty in them, and I’m fascinated by the fact that these tiny, delicate things often have poisons, weaponry, or other offensive/defensive weapons that are disproportionately severe to the scale of the animal or plant. These are tiny, fragile things that are extremely vulnerable and can be destroyed almost unconsciously by the more lumbering, overt creatures of the earth. The only way for these delicate things to have any right to exist in this world is by being deadly to the larger creatures that live around them.
Check out Ian's website HERE
Check out the original interview HERE
Check out Crafty Bastards HERE
Would you like to know why I'm such a well-adjusted person? When I was little, my parents bought me the anatomically accurate "Joey" doll from All in the Family. Friends and family found it endlessly fascinating. I can't recall what the visual aids were in sex ed class in 5th grade...I'm guessing that it was some sort of filmstrip with an accompanying cassette soundtrack that beeped when you needed to advance the projector. By the time we were in high school, the local banker's wife took great delight in visiting the "adult skills" class with a huge glass penis that she used to demonstrate condom application.
Ah, the sex-ed visual aid. Etsy is full of explicit crafts (like crocheted penis cat toys and penis "koozies" for keeping your drink cold). These things are great as conversation starters, but might not be so great for scale...and their functions might be a little confusing to youngsters. Today Salon.com offered up a great (NSFW) slideshow of sex-ed dolls and toys from around the world. The above photo comes from central China, where these dolls are used to teach children about secondary sex characteristics and where babies come from.
The blog Shanghaiist describes a scene from this particular classroom: "[The teacher] asked the class how sperm swims to find the egg, with her students replying by clasping their hands together and moving them in a side-to-side tadpole-like swimming motion."
Shudder...but when I think about it, my own experiences were no less weird. Here's a shout-out to my second grade teacher, Mrs. Crockett, who was an idealistic (I'm sad to say that I probably helped squash that idealism) young teacher who didn't want to crush anybody's creativity. I was allowed to make all of the drawings that I wanted of nude people as long as I called them "National Geographic people". I would kill to have some of those drawings now. Maybe a pube doll would have come in handy.
So check out the slideshow. Will you be using the crocheted amigurumi penis to tell your offspring about the birds and the bees? I'm glad that I have a few years to mull it over.
(NSFW) LINK
Greetings from Scotland! I'm still here, thanks to the wrath of Hurricane Irene (and quite possibly the ineptitude of United Airlines). It's been nice to have an extra week to dig a little deeper into Scottish culture (like the haggis burger I enjoyed at an Edinburgh Fringe Festival gig). Mike Press, who was the chair of the conference I spoke at, is an investor in a pretty extrordinary beer brewery here in Scotland called BREWDOG.
Brewdog don't fuck around. They are one of the participants in the global arms race to brew the world's strongest beer (read: highest alcohol content). Brewdog's End of History beer, which was released last year, clocked in at 55% alcohol. If that wasn't enough to put some hair on your chest, they released a limited edition flask stuffed inside of a taxidermied squirrel.
All of this is a roundabout way of introducing another squirrelly confection from the UK that showed up on BoingBoing this morning. The video (posted at the top) is a profile from the late 1960s of rogue British taxidermist Walter Potter, who spent his life as a professional taxidermist who specialized in stuffing cherished pets. On the side, though, Potter took armies of cute, dead tiny animals (including a horde of fluffy kittens) and created intricate dioramas, including toads playing leapfrog and a bunch of rat police raiding an animal gambling den (which can be glimpsed in the video).
Sadly, the collection was auctioned off piecemeal in 2003. Fortunately for us, the video lives on thanks to YouTube, and the work is occasionally displayed in exhibitions, including one last year at London's Museum of Everything. Would it surprise you that Damien Hirst is a big fan? I didn't think so.
One can only wonder if Walter Potter was as voracious a hunter of kittens and bunnies as John James Audbon was of birds.
If you'd like to relive an Extreme Craft classic about Albino Squirrel Heaven in Madison, Wisconsin, click HERE
LINK to Walter Potter video via BoingBoing
I love living here in Humboldt County. Every so often, a sign comes along that our community hasn't let go of some of the finer things in life. Over the past year, I've come to appreciate the art of macramé. It's enjoying a renaissance along with other fiber arts, and maybe it's time for it to be reexamined as a serious force and not just a cultural relic. Plenty of fashion designers are even using it as an element in their collections. Still, it's good to know that there is still unreconstructed Macramé out there. I just found this jewel in our local Craigslist:
Brand New Macrame Plant Hanger.
The majority of the color is Forest Green with a hint of minty green.
All the beads are wooden, some dark and others light.
There's a lot of knots here, hours and hours of work..........and string :-)
It hangs from very top to the bottom about 6.5 feet. It will hold a pot at least as big as 12 inches in diameter.
If you want to look in person we can arrange a place and time to met up.
Thanks
If you've got a plant that can deserves to be cradled in luxurious macramé, follow this LINK.
