timeliness, objectivity and narrative

Building strong partnerships with leading museums and educational institutions around the world to help bring the iconography and language of modern art to the broader, internet dwelling public, the clearing house Artsy is wonderful resource for discovery and triangulation.

Learning enough to pique one’s curiosity to learn more about the inter- connectedness of the community and their contemporaries—through the lens of their portrait of Dorothea Lange, for example, whose evocative Migrant Mother (probably for most one of those archetypal images that we hold in the quiver of minds) captured while under commission for the American Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, but there’s really a more elusive, evasive quality in this photograph and its framer that settles after the initial, unmediated impression. The network of related artists—most of whom I’ve never heard of but seem quite worthy of further investigation—imparts context, but it’s really taking a step back, through biography and scrutiny, that helps to disabuse one—after a fashion—for what we as an audience might take for granted. I think I’d rather conflated Migrant Mother and the haunting blue-eyed Afghani girl from that National Geographic cover in my mind—making the Depression-era photograph colourized—perhaps because the identities of both subjects was once anonymous but are now identified: Florence Owen Thompson and Sharbat Gula. It takes a commitment on the part of the viewer, which is I suppose what powerful and memorable art demands, to see the humanising portrayals and to take something too away from the setting. Though history and poverty always best themselves, it is impossible to imagine the backdrop of abject poverty and starvation that the government attempted to stave off through resettlement and relocation. This scene also conjures up another one of Lange’s programs—documenting the forced internment of Japanese and other foreigners, which was suppressed at the time. I’ll be sure to visit this resource again to get my bearings and discover someone new.

gasworks gallery

The ever inquisitive Nag on the Lake has a nice vignette about the creative repurposing of the elegant, Victorian girders of the Pancras Gasholder to frame a nice park in London, which reminded me of the Gasometers we’ve encountered reinvented and venues for a wide variety of displays.

Not a meter but rather a container, like a water tower (which are also beautiful works of architecture), the function of these mammoth structures was to store a large volume of natural gas in situ ready for local use—to power gas lighting originally and then for heating. When more and more gasworks became redundant (though some are still in use in many areas for balancing pressure), municipalities faced challenges in reclaiming the real estate as the business was a dirty one but there are quite a few notable and creative solutions that incorporate the original casing, like apartment blocks in Vienna, or rather famously the Gasometer of Leipzig, which now hosts a visual panorama (das Panometer) that displays—across a huge canvas of some thirty meters by one hundred meters, the largest photographs in the world, accented by light and sound effects and sweeping vistas.

golden years

Though governments still will enunciate the fact that a huge class, cadre will reach retirement age all at once and stop contributing to state pension schemes and leave the labour force all at once—which is the greater threat to those funds solvency—it seems more convincing to instead raise a spectre that all can relate to, perhaps out of fear of derision should one group (to which a majority of officials surely belong) be made to bear the entire burden.

Increasing longevity is cited as the prevailing argument for raising the retirement age, and while many people are living much longer on average than the sixty-five years of age that was suggested in the late nineteenth century as a social safety net was stitched together, that milestone was understood as the threshold of feebleness and general uselessness and rather not as the mark whence one had contributed his or her share to the system and could enjoy the next third or more of his or her adult life in retirement. Notching up the age redefines sixty-seven or however much it climbs as the new redundancy and further fails to respect the fact that there are profound differences, dependent on one’s employer and career-path, in benefits and retirement packages. Those best equipped and willing to keep working are reaping those years of good custody and care, and those who continue working are the fittest among us to begin with. On the other hand, those compelled to keep up their jobs because their pensions would provide insufficient income or are just counting the days have not only been robbed of a sense of purpose, no reciprocity lays ahead. What do you think? Though the welfare and will may be there to increase our useful life-spans, it seems to come at the expense of our Golden Years.

go-pro or pencil-shavings

Researchers are exploiting the amazing properties of the recently discovered carbon-foil graphene to mimic the behaviour of tendons and muscles that can tense and relax at the slightest prompt, be it moisture, pressure or light.
Once these little works of origami were better understood, range of motion could be configured in such a way and programmed to demonstrate certain strengths and agilities. The elusive class of carbon—distinct from the graphite that’s in pencil lead and diamond, had been guessed at for many years and even predicted the material’s robustness but no one could imagine how one could sheer a surface layer so thin as to realise all those assets until Manchester physicists Andre Geim with associate Konstantin Novoselov applied some office tape to a pencil-sketch he’d been making, balled up the tape and rolled it in his fingers before tossing it into the waste bin. Prompted by his partner, Geim later retrieved the bit of cellophane tape—which is a pretty nifty job in materials engineering itself being pressure-sensitive and will produce x-rays if used in a vacuum—to discover that a layer of grapheme had been preserved. Together awarded the Noble Prize in 2010 for this discovery, a decade prior Geim, making him the only laureate to hold both honours, was presented with the Ig Noble for his study on levitating frogs with small magnets. Though this imaginative parody of the pomp and circumstance international committees whose recognition can take decades or more seems to suggest a certain dastardliness in the sciences and humanities, it is quite the opposite in nomination and presentation, crediting achievements that first make one laugh and then think.

trapper-keeper or mixed-media

The ever-brilliant and stunning Colossal curates a very fine exhibition the schematic and stratified collages of artist Augustine Kofie, whose exacting planar work evokes other assemblages and pastiches but harks back as well to an interesting but receding niche when what we call data occupied physical space and needed to be corralled and organised in particular ways. It’s the odd bird, I think, who harbours nostalgic feelings for carbon-paper and filing (though working for the American government, the paperless office is still in the future) but it is really poignant to study the architectural cross-sections of note-pads and linotype folders and wonder where the intersections between storage and figures now stand.