Far from being an irrelevant product of a bygone era, the hand-made object is set to return to the fold of consumer goods with force, indeed in many ways it already has, and its significance is only growing. While we live in an age of mass reproduction, we are also in a transitional societal phase, and the uniform, endlessly reproduced status quo brought about by mechanisation is giving way to the personalized, the fragmented and the tribalized. The hand-made object responds to the need of the individual in the current age to express an identity; the individual no longer finding any identification within the large and uniform context of public culture. With electric media we find ourselves more and more connected to each other and to our objects, and find that we are forced to demand an accounting of where every item in our lives has come from and where it is going. The hand-made object is a reaction against the dehumanising effects of mechanisation, a mode of operation that now appears terribly outmoded and doomed to obsolescence.
Thoughts On: Gursky at Southbank Centre
On April 8th I took a visit to the Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre to check out the Andreas Gursky exhibition that was running from the 25th of January until the 22nd of April. Being generally unfamiliar with Gursky's work but finding some of it of a certain appeal, I entered the exhibition with little in the way of expectations. The exhibition covered some four decades worth of work by Gursky, whose signature style is perhaps his monumental photographs: a distant viewpoint of large structures or crowds of people at massive size, teaming with detail and clarity. Incidentally, that last bit is the first thing I want to talk about.
Thoughts On: Nature Morte at the Guildhall Art Gallery
Saturday morning I hopped over to the Guildhall Art Gallery to take a look at the Nature Morte exhibition. The exhibition is premised on illustrating the genre of still life as it has been reinvigorated by artists of the 21st century. In practice I found there was a mix of traditional and conventional still life paintings alongside the contemporary and more thought-provoking pieces.
Sci-Fi in Comics: Transmetropolitan and Hard Boiled
Back in around mid-December of last year I read through Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson and Hard Boiled by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow. Transmetropolitan is a comic book series from the late nineties and early noughties (it ran from 1997 through 2002) and Lust for Life collects issues 4 through 12 into a single edition. I dived into it without really realising all this, thinking that it was a single graphic novel and that I was starting at the beginning (oh well). There are some ten volumes (collected editions) of Transmetropolitan, so what I read is admittedly simply a slice of what forms the 'complete work'. Hard Boiled is a three-issue comic book that ran in the early nineties (from 1990 through 1992) and is collected in a single volume. Needless to say I was able to get a hold of and read the entirety of Hard Boiled.
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Both Transmetropolitan and Hard Boiled present sort of retro-futurist visions, that is ideas of the future that remain very rooted in the present. Hard Boiled is more cyberpunk in its aesthetic, with a narrow scope and middle America focus that makes it feel like the premise of a Philip K. Dick short story, while Transmetropolitan is more expansive and transhumanist. Reading them one after the other it was impossible to not compare and contrast their styles and their different approaches to portraying the future. Further, I was primarily interested in their stylistic conventions, the language of comics that they employed, and how these methods were put to work for storytelling. Herein follows a few of my thoughts.
The Incredible Non-Informational Art of Daniel Zeller
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| Delusional Encapsulation, Graphite on Paper, 22 x 30", 2014, Daniel Zeller [Source] |
What's Good About All the Stars Video?
Released on February 6, 2018 was the music video for Kendrick Lamar & SZA's All the Stars, directed by Dave Meyers & the little homies. Done as part of an album of music inspired by the film Black Panther, it could be seen as simply a piece of marketing trying to cloak itself in cultural relevance. However, the very existence of Black Panther is culturally relevant and in contrast to essentially all prior Marvel films it has something to achieve besides get people excited for the next film. And the video for All the Stars is absolutely something in its own right.
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