OUTRAGE:Disney to Remake Yellow Submarine

Original artwork by designer Heinz Edelmann
for "Inside the Yellow Submarine"

Article

I just found out that Robert Zemeckis is going to create a 3-D remake of Yellow Submarine in the style of his new Jim Carrey animated film, A Christmas Carol, via Disney. I have a diatribe ready to burst forth from my lips, but the outrage keeps it from doing so. Therefore, I will keep this brief. As a huge Beatles fan, I will say that this is commercial perversion at it's most absolute perverse. The original film was purposefully made in a style of animation called "limited animation," and as a partial snub to the cinematically "realistic" and commercially dominant Disney style of animation at the time (hence, the Mickey Mouse ears on some of the Blue Meanies). It was also a piece of American art history with its roots firmly planted in the Pop Art, Op Art, and Psychedelic Art movements, as well as certain graphic design groups at the time (e.g. Push Pin Studio). Its content decried hate, authoritarianism, commercialism, and the lack of imagination; and, praised values like love, freedom, community, spirituality, and imagination. Disney is about as commercial and authoritarian as it can get (constantly suing for every slight copyright infringement--particularly artists [See artist Roger Shimomura, for one example]; and designing soundtracks and merchandise well before films are released). I could go on and on, but I won't. 3-D animation defeats the whole point of the style of the film. Maybe Zemeckis will cast Jim Carrey as the voice of the head Blue Meanie to help meet the tastes of an progressively numb public that requires more and more stimuli just to accept a movie's story. Outrageous.

Here's what Yellow Submarine might look like in the near future:

Daniel Edwards is At it Again

Click on the photo for story....

Daniel Edwards' sculpture of Angelina Jolie, "Landmark for Breastfeeding," goes on display next month at the Mainsite Contemporary Art Museum.

It's About Time

The Obamas plan to diversify and update the current White House Art Collection and it is about time. This is a welcome change in my opinion. The White House is the home of the person who is supposed to be President of ALL the American people. The current collection doesn't really reflect that given the portraits of ex-Presidents and First Ladies as well as a taste for very safe, conservative art. It is nice to have a couple of people who appreciate modern and contemporary art and art created by people of other ethnic groups. Here is the current collection and a statement by ex-curator of the collection, Rex Scouten.

ART CLASSIC #7Farrah Fawcett:The Actress, Artist, and InspirationB. February 2, 1947; D. June 25, 2009

Farrah Fawcett died last week and was buried Tuesday. Most articles have focused on her obvious sex appeal, but Farrah and the other Angels as well as Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman and Lindsay Wagner in The Bionic Woman were very formative role models as a girl in the seventies without liberated parents. Farrah was the face of the Angels, a group of smart, liberated, and powerful women who solved crime and put bad guys in jail. They and the other two I mentioned gave me a belief that women could in fact, do anything that men can do. I realize it was cheesy television, but to a six or seven year-old it wasn't. Farrah also went on to act in films like the TV movies Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White, The Burning Bed, Nazi Hunter: The Beate Klarsfeld Story, and Extremities. Margaret Bourke-White was an adventurous female photographer in the 30s and 40s who took the famous photo of the men at the fence at the liberation of Buchenwald. In The Burning Bed, she fixes her abusive husband's wagon by burning down the house with him in it. In Nazi Hunter, she "plays real-life Beate Klarsfeld, a German Protestant housewife who, with the help of her Jewish law-student husband, Serge, began an unrelenting campaign after World War II to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, most of which is centered on Klaus Barbie." (1) And in Extremities, she turns the tables on her would-be rapist. No other Angel consistently chose powerful women as her characters of choice. In a world of Lifetime TV (as I call it, Victim Television) that romanticizes women in their socialized victim role, she raised the bar for female empowerment and her characters refused to be victims.

One thing the reader may not know about Farrah is that she was an artist. (2) In 1999 she paired up with another artist, Keith Edmier, to embark on a very postmodern, post-Warhol project. (3) (4) She acted as his "muse" and he hers, and they made nude sculptures of one another. Her figure was in marble and his in bronze. The talent Farrah possessed in the handling of the material and in expressing her vision is undeniable.

Farrah working on her sculpture of Edmier.

Farrah Fawcett's sculpture of Keith Edmier

Detail of the sculpture of Edmier

She possessed enough talent to be recognized as an artist in an exhibit with Keith Edmier at the Andy Warhol Museum. (5)

Of course, what she is remembered for in the media and our pop culture world is her 70s bra-less-ness, her much-copied hairdo, and famous poster donning the childhood walls of men in their late 30s and early 40s today. She is a study in contrasts in our image-obsessed culture. Even today, after the age of women's liberation in which she burst into her fame, women are still noticed for their appearance, not for what they do or produce. Farrah Fawcett is remembered for her "Jiggle TV" role in Charlie's Angels, but not for the characteristics of the role of Jill Munroe. Fawcett's character in the show was a tough, karate-chopping gumshoe who was the most athletic, as well as giving back her time to coach a girl's basketball team during the early years of Title IX. (6)

Farrah is also remembered for playing "victims" in highly charged TV dramas--or at least, that's what the media would have you believe. The Burning Bed put Farrah back on the map in terms of notoriety. But, during the last week, clips from the film have been shown on various news outlets showing a bedraggled, worn-down, beaten and battered wife, not the woman who lit the match. Likewise, the clips shown from Extremities, (7) show a woman being overwhelmed by a would-be rapist, when the point of the film is that she captures and tortures him--particularly HIS extremity. This observation is also true of an image search for film stills on the internet. 99.9% of the images show a different picture of these two films' plots. What constitutes good acting for a woman is playing a character who is victimized, not triumphant or focused on strength, adventure, and justice.

Scene from The Burning Bed

Scene from the play, Extremities (7)

It's not very often that art actually has a measurable impact on life. A lot of attention was brought to the issues of domestic violence and rape due to Farrah's famous roles in the 1980s. The Burning Bed won top ratings in 1984, obviously demonstrating a resonance with society. (8)

I was very sad about Farrah's death this last week, not only because she was one of a few pivotal role models from my childhood TV viewing, but that she is being remembered for only the superficial things. It is typically American to celebrate form over substance. But, Farrah was a substantial individual even to the end of her life. The last part of her substance she decided to share with us was her battle with cancer. The documentary, Farrah's Story documented her struggles with the disease and its treatment, touching many people's lives in a REAL way. It is my hope that some day, when and if we become more enlightened and grown-up as a culture, that she will be remembered for this, giving young girls the dream of competency and capability, empowering women, and her personal artwork. Even if the culture never does, it is how I will remember her.

© Stephanie Lewis, 2009

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(1) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091616/plotsummary

(2) http://www.vanityfair.com/online/culture/2009/06/26/farrah-photos.html

(3) http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/06/when-farrah-met-lacma.html

(4) http://www.amazon.com/Keith-Edmier-Farrah-Fawcett-Recasting/dp/0847824403/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246589761&sr=8-1

(5) http://www.warhol.org/whats_on/pdfs/PR_Farrah_Fawcett_and_The_American _Supermarket.pdf

(6) http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/cor/coord/titleixstat.php

(7) Fawcett was also in the play, Extremities. http://www.gravitywavefilms.com/Photopage.html

(8) http://books.google.com/books?id=UkH-jS_VCtIC&pg=PA166&lpg=PA166&dq=%22the+Burning+Bed%22+%22nielsen+ratings%22&source=bl&ots=Kn65h5Nkjb&sig=SKo8Qx3rZa6X6Oyt8Biibjihowc&hl=en&ei=sjhOSp2qG4P2Nf6Yhe4D&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

Winners from the Spring Student Show -- 2009

This semester was a banner semester for my Introduction to Painting students. I had 10 students have 13 paintings win honorable mentions or better. Yea!

Crystal Bridges Reveals Modernist Works

Article

Photo Source

Some Poignant Images From the Past:Visual Lessons for Today

In the current economy, George Grosz's (1893 - 1959) drawings become more and more relevant (click on the images for larger versions):

The Capitalist


Greed
"Let those who can swim, swim, and whoever is too weak sinks."

Greed 2


Dining


The Homeless
"Getting By"

The Homeless 2
"Careful. Don't Trip"

From The Guardian

My Life in Art: The Day Bourgeois Moved Me to Tears

Now That's a LiteBrite Design!

Ye Olde LiteBrite

Link

Yes, Gen-Xers, this is made with the principles from the one and only LiteBrite of yore.

The Saddest Day: Paul Newman Dies

Link

He was a god among men.

Controversy in Germany

I especially like the combination of medieval and caricature style.

Drawing the Line

I'm completely in favor of legislation like this. Cruelty to animals in order to create "art" is unacceptable; in fact, cruelty to animals and ART are antithetical to each other. Perhaps some serial killers see their acts as art. That doesn't make it so.

This past year an artist named Guillermo Vargas placed and tied up a starving dog in his "exhibit."

Here is a video with some pictures. Outrageous. One has to wonder about the people passively observing the animal as part of this demented spectacle. It's always the question--who's worse, the sinners of OMISSION, or the sinners of COMMISSION.

News

I was one of 88 out of 320 total artists whose work was selected for the 2009 Arkansas Artist Engagement Calendar sponsored by the Governor's Mansion Association. Here is the work selected:

The Dogmatist, linocut, 2005
(Click for larger image.)

Fisk to Appeal Order on Art Collection

Article.

Followup to Who Says There's No Gender ProgrammingBlog Entry

Previous Post

Here are some links about the history of gender identity and color:

Princeton Report on Knowledge
Color Matters
How Stuff Works

As an artist and someone interested in art history, I've often wondered what role these two paintings played in the development of the pink-for-girls, blue-for-boys phenomenon:

Jonathan Buttall: The Blue Boy (c 1770)
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88)
oil on canvas, 70 5/8 x 48 3/4 inches

Sarah Barrett Moulton: Pinkie (1794)

Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830)

oil on canvas, 58 1/4 x 40 1/4 inches

History of Blue Boy:

"The best known painting at the Huntington, Gainsborough's The Blue Boy, portrays Jonathan Buttall, the son of a successful hardware merchant, who was a close friend of the artist. The work was executed during Gainsborough's extended stay in Bath before he finally settled in London in 1774. The artist has dressed the young man in a costume dating from about 140 years before the portrait was painted. This type of costume was familiar through the portraits of the great Flemish painter, Anthony van Dyck (1559-1641), who was resident in England during the early 17th century. Gainsborough greatly admired the work of Van Dyck and seems to have conceived The Blue Boy as an act of homage to that master. Mr. Huntington purchased the painting along with Gainsborough's The Cottage Door and Reynolds's Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse from the Duke of Westminster." (1)

History of Pinkie:

"Pinkie, facing The Blue Boy in the Main Gallery of the museum and often paired with it in popular esteem, is by Thomas Lawrence, one of the great portrait painters of his generation. It was painted about 25 years after Gainsborough's masterpiece and had no association with that work until they both were displayed in the Huntington in the late 1920s. Executed when the artist was only 25 and shortly after his election to the Royal Academy, Pinkie is an extraordinarily fresh and lively performance with the sitter standing on a hill, her dress blown by the wind. The movement of her dress in conjunction with her frank gaze gives a sense of immediacy to the composition and expresses the animation of the sitter. The young girl was the daughter of a wealthy plantation family in Jamaica, who came to England for her education. Called "Pinkie" by her grandmother who commissioned the portrait, she was only eleven when her likeness was taken. Sadly, Sarah died within a few months of the portrait's completion, probably of tuberculosis. Her younger brother Edward was the father of the poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Pinkie was the last painting purchased by Mr. Huntington, who did not live to see it installed in the house." (1)

One has to wonder since the two pieces gained tremendous popularity after they were associated with one another in the 1920s. They were reproduced on just about anything one can imagine (coasters, posters, tins, etc.) and reproduced as figurines. In fact, my grandmother had both of them in 10 inch figurines on her dresser. I have no idea where she got them, but they were the most memorable thing about my grandmother's taste in art. Interestingly enough, the two pieces were featured prominently on the Cleavers' walls in the 50s television show Leave it to Beaver.The gender identity of pink and blue had inverted around this time. One has to wonder if this is a connection or just a coincidence.

It just seems strange to "color code" people.





(1) http://www.huntington.org/ArtDiv/HuntingGall.html

Who Says There's No Gender Programming?

Recently, I had the pleasure of judging the PhotoLucida Critical Mass photography competition for the fourth year in a row. I was notified yesterday that there are six finalists and they are asking for proposals from each to choose two top award winners. The award is having their work published.

Here are the remaining six. See what you think:

Beth Dow
Bill Sullivan
Jeong Mee Yoon
Joni Sternbach
Krista Steinke
Peter van Agtmael

If I could cast my vote for one of the finalists, it would be Jeong Mee Yoon. Her statement about life is intelligent, she reveals something about the reality of being human, and reveals the dark and insidious underbelly of gender-programming and our commodity culture. Here is her process:

"To make "The Pink and Blue Project" images, I visit the child's room, where I display and rearrange his/her colored accessories. I ask my models to pose for me with their pink or blue objects, in an effort to show the viewer the extent to which children and their parents, knowingly or unknowingly, are influenced by advertising and popular culture. I first lay out the larger items, blankets or coats, and then spread smaller articles on top of the clothes. This method references objects that are displayed in a museum collection. In some pictures, the children even look like dolls.

I use a 6x6 format Hasselblad camera because the square format enhances the effect of the many crowded objects on display. My photographs are taken with the smallest aperture, f-22, to get a hyper-realistic depiction of each object and person." (1)

Source for photos

I grew up as a tomboy. I liked what boys liked doing and played with boy toys. I always felt like there was a lot of pressure to not be myself. Jeong Mee Yoon's work validates my experience and now I know for sure there is a hell of a lot of pressure on children these days and it is reinforced through commodity culture. Thanks Jeong Mee.

(1) http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/19436/svas-jeongmee-yoon/

ART CLASSIC #6Inside-Out, Outside-In:The Self as Spectacle

"myspace"
Installation (1) on the University of Arkansas Union Courtyard
March 14 - April 5, 2008
by Kelsey Felthousen

Yesterday, I was driving to work and thinking about Americans' notions about privacy--how we put it all out there on myspace, Facebook, or even here on Blogger, etc. We're acclimated to talk shows where people spill their guts about extraordinarily personal things on television transmitted out to millions of strangers, not to mention "reality shows" that have been added to that mix as well. We're so comfortable or have been made to feel so comfortable at exposing ourselves, there's barely a peep from the culture in reaction to our government's surveillance of its own citizens.

Perhaps it was kismet, but after my morning drive, I arrived at my office where a colleague* had left a newspaper article (2) about Kelsey Felthousen's Master's Thesis Exhibition at the University of Arkansas. Kelsey describes her project as

“(dealing) with the notions of an overexposed, vulnerable society that…feels unprotected. When creating this work I chose to broach the subject of sacred/private space and how that space is being given away freely, without thought of the consequences.”

“Sacred Space, as defined in this exhibition, is the preciousness of close relationships and the privacy within our lives and homes. One need not search far for evidence of this exposure. It can be seen in all aspects of our society, from television programming to technology.” (3)

Of course, after my morning musings and reading the article, I HAD to go see the installation. It's imperative to see an art installation in person because they are time-limited and are meant to be experienced physically.

Typically, I write my "Art Classics" about works from relatively near and distant art history. But, I think I'll preempt art history on this one and say this is an instant Art Classic and will probably be so in the future.




Images from Kelsey Felthousen's Exhibition

First, it is a privilege and a pleasure to view such a cutting-edge, intellectually-stimulating, and culturally relevant work of contemporary art. It is an oasis in the desert that is the dearth of such works in Northwest Arkansas.

Kelsey Felthousen (right)

What I respond to most are the layers of experience embodied in the work. First, it is both installation and performance art (4). Installation is already part sculpture, so one could say there are three immediate layers perceived. The piece is constructed of a central area that is a wood-framed square with the siding for the "house" on the inside. There is a door to enter the "garden" on this "inside" area where there is no roof. Tulips and pansies comprise the garden. The "rooms" of the "house" are outside this square exposed to the elements splayed out on the four sides on various floor substrates in a cloverleaf pattern. The rooms are comprised of variously familiar and comfortable furnishings and knick-knacks that make a "house" a "home." But this "home" is decidedly uncomfortable and vulnerable. It's as if Jeff Goldblum sent a normal house through his infamous teleporting machine and once again, point B came out as something quite unexpected.

The piece is present and massive like sculpture but open to the point of encouraging almost socially inappropriate interaction. There's a natural hesitancy in most people when it comes to entering strangers' homes, but this stranger has opened her house and the exhibition goers react accordingly. On the evening of the reception on March 28, snacks were placed in the "kitchen" and "living room" of this "house". One could see the body language of exhibition goers quickly transform to extremely casual mode. They sat on the furniture, ate her food, looked through her cabinets, used her microwave, entered her garden, and used her barbeque pit to cook. Social boundaries had clearly broken down in a matter of seconds.

My favorite view of the installation is the view through the kitchen window. As with many homes, you expect to see a garden and you do. However, this garden is enclosed and the area is in shade. The siding of the "house" can bee seen from that window as well, creating cognitive dissonance. At once, the viewer thinks that he or she is looking into a room and into a garden outside. There is no roof to this room and it is not really a garden. It is theater, theater in which one has no real inkling of the character or identity of the "actor" -- sort of like myspace®. (5)


Typically, houses represent the self as symbols. This fact has been true historically in art, literature, psychology, and even religion. (6) People in normal houses keep the inside enclosed and private, and decorate the outside of their houses to create a veneer of normalcy to the outside world. In the case of this installation, the garden is protected and the resident's private effects are exposed to inspection and scrutiny. It's not until one enters the garden and stands inside that one realizes that the private self is no better protected as there is no roof. Privacy has become an illusion. The self as represented by the house becomes an illusion, a theatrical performance, and a dance between vulnerability and invulnerability; and indeed, a dance with the devil, and as compelling as any Magritte (7) painting.

View of the gallery part of the installation

As I said earlier, there are many layers of experience to this installation. The second layer takes place in the Fine Arts Gallery inside the Fine Arts Building. There is another living area set up in the empty gallery facing what appears to be a television but is a giant computer monitor broadcasting the University of Arkansas Central Quad webcam that is trained on Kelsey's installation. Visitors eat snacks off of a coffee table and can sit at a desk or sit on a couch or chair and view the installation in real time on the large screen. The self thereby becomes a spectacle, and the viewers in the gallery, voyeurs. We have been acclimated to this role for quite some time since the advent of television. "Reality" television makes us even more comfortable with our inner voyeurs. At least some sort of relationship between the artist and the viewing public is encouraged at the physical site of the installation, but this is lost through the physical and digital distancing of the computer monitor. It was not as astounding to see individuals in the gallery as comfortable with boundary-breaking as the visitors to the physical site were because we are so familiar with this scene.

In yet another layer, one realizes from watching the monitor in the gallery, that the webcam is also seen by anyone who encounters it. Also, in a more disturbing twist, the University webcam is fully controllable by those people. So, as one watches the monitor, one is watching a watcher who is a stranger. This stranger may just center the installation and watch it from a distance, they may zoom in on her "bedroom", or they may even focus the webcam on an individual as they walk by and "follow" them while they are doing so. The webcam is not fixed or controlled by one director but is essentially a production of many strangers who are essentially as voyeuristic as the people in the gallery. The irony is this aspect of watching the watchers--essentially making us all spectacles. And that seems to be the nature of modern life--so many people have abdicated their privacy and made themselves spectacles that we all become part of the "show."

The performance art aspect of this show is the fact that Kelsey lives in her installation--submitting herself to the intrusions and glances. A lot of individuals do this in day to day life with little thought to the consequences. She therefore becomes exposed to the elements and what would normally be unwanted behaviors and gestures.

I said earlier that myspace was intellectually-stimulating and culturally-relevant. To me, these are two very important qualities to qualify a work as an art classic. The layers of complexity and even humor make this piece intellectually-stimulating. It is a very difficult thing for an artist to hit the sweet spot in terms of timing in a culture, and Kelsey does it with smarts and gusto. She reveals something about us as human beings in the here and now as a world moves from a culture that sees to one that is seen and dare I say, with a dash of beauty, my other criteria for an art classic. I am going to watch her career and would encourage others to do so. This is not the last we'll see of Kelsey Felthousen.

© Stephanie Lewis, 2008

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* Special thanks to Eric Smith who gave me the article on Kelsey yesterday. Eric and I have been on the same creative wavelength for 13 years now and he is a wealth of information that I cherish.


(1) http://www.artlex.com
(2) http://www.nwarktimes.com/nwat/News/63540
(3) http://art.uark.edu/fineartsgallery/?p=45 ; Kelsey says that two of her big influences are Ann Hamilton and Vito Acconci.
(4) "Art in which works in any of a variety of media are executed premeditated before a live audience. Although this might appear to be theater, theatrical performances present illusions of events, while performance art presents actual events as art. One of the things setting postmodernism apart from modernism is its acceptance of aspects of theater. Performance elements surfaced in a number of conceptual art movements of the 1960s, including: Fluxus, Happenings, body art, process art, street works, etc. The 1980s saw the emergence of performance artists like David Byrne (American) and Laurie Anderson (American, 1947-), who had each been students of visual art, but whose work gradually incorporated voice, music, costumes, projected image, stage lighting, etc. " (http://www.artlex.com ; definition of "performance art")
(5) http://www.myspace.com
(6) In psychology, there is a projective test in which patients are asked to draw a house, a tree, and a person. Once analyzed, these images will reveal personal information about the patient. For instance, drawing a pronounced knothole in a tree often reflects trauma. If the windows of the house are missing or covered, there is an issue with boundaries and privacy. In religion--Christianity for example-- Jesus compares the spiritual self to a house on rock or a house on sand, and that is one of many religious examples across religions.
(7) http://www.magritte.com/

The Studio is Finally Finished!

I began work on the studio last March. I first had to resurface the deck that is above the workshop that came with the house. I had to make sure it was waterproofed most of all. Of course, I had never resurfaced a deck before so that was a learning experience. Then, I began the process of remodeling the workshop into an art studio -- again, never doing any of this before. So between working full-time, getting married, having a honeymoon and reception, being in a marriage with a stepson, it's finally finished! Here are two slideshows of the process....



Studio Renovation : North End View





Studio Renovation : South End View

Get Smart Out June 20

I, for one, am looking forward to this one. How can it go wrong with Terence Stamp, Steve Carell, and Alan Arkin?

Mythmaking with George W. Bush

con·fab·u·la·tion (def.)
1. the act of confabulating; conversation; discussion.
2. Psychiatry. the replacement of a gap in a person's memory by a falsification that he or she believes to be true.