Engineer's Daughter

top works of art for valentine's day

Now that we're safely weeks past the silliness that is Valentine's Day (even though I had a thoroughly pleasant one thank you very much) I feel comfortable pointing to Jonathan Jones's wonderful collection of his favorite pieces of art that he assembled online for the dread holiday.  I felt instantly bolstered when I saw his opening image was Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Swing, pictured right and one of my favorite pieces in the Wallace Collection, i.e. the one where the dude is totally looking up the chick's skirt.  Jones elaborates on some of his other picks:

The romantic, the saucy and the disturbingly kinky are often hard to tell apart as my list gently illustrates. Rodin's great sculpture The Kiss will always be a universal icon of pure desire - a loved image of love - however many times it is reproduced, but it has a sting. It actually comes from Rodin's ambitious project The Gates of Hell, a tumultuous illustration of Dante's Inferno, and portrays the mortal sinners Francesca da Rimini and her lover. Rodin's depiction insists on the carnality of love. So do Hogarth's paired paintings Before and After.

The Hogarths genuinely made me blush.  Saucy indeed.  And I distinctly remember the first time I saw The Kiss in person at Tate Britain and just stood there stock still for a really long time lest I move and reveal how warm I was feeling.  Sometimes there's a good reason popular art is so popular.

rankin live! preview

Somewhere in my adult life I have developed an intense discomfort with having my picture taken, and I doubt I would be any more relaxed with a professional photographer more accustomed to shooting models and celebrities pointing his camera at me.  James Anthony recently experienced what it was like to work with the world-famous Rankin as the photographer preps for a project later this year called Rankin Live! in which he will shoot 1,000 British citizens and almost instantly exhibit the pictures, then give the proceeds from the sale of those portraits to charity.  Anthony lived to tell about what it was like to be in front of the intimidating piece of equipment you see in the picture here and the man who wields it:

I am nervous – to put it mildly – but Rankin is remarkably adept at putting me at ease. His sense of humour is, by all accounts, as quick as his eye for a good shot.

In Anthony's case the results are quite hot, and you can see for yourself in the gallery here.  I really do wonder how models do it sometimes, how they can smile so naturally and not look, as so often in my case, like a deer caught in headlights.  Maybe they just have a photographer who can make them laugh.

keep it under your hat

London fashion week, the most innovative and interesting of all the major fashion weeks, is currently in full swing, so what better time for a comprehensive new exhibition about hats to open at the V&A.  Curated by the one-and-only Stephen Jones, the show goes all the way back to an 1807 straw and silk bonnet and also includes such modern fantasias as Elsa Schiaparelli's famous shoe hat and Jones's own "Wash 'n' Go", pictured at right and in the online gallery here.  The V&A's fashion exhibits are legendary, but you definitely don't have to go to a museum to find style inspiration in London.  Just spend some time walking the streets.

everything must go: the yves saint laurent and pierre bergé art auction

It's the most glamorous kind of fairy tale.  Boy meets boy, they fall in love and then together they spend the next 50 years amassing one hell of an amazing art collection.  When Yves Saint Laurent died last June his longtime companion Pierre Bergé decided fairly quickly that he would put most of their art up for auction and split the proceeds between the Saint Laurent foundation and AIDS research.  Christie's will be conducting the sale in Paris next week, and Anthony Haden-Guest cataloged just a few of the highlights in his article for the Observer:

These will include paintings by Géricault, David and Ingres - but not the Goya of the boy in the red sash, which Bergé has donated to the Louvre. There are also works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Munch, Brancusi, Mondrian, Giacometti, Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Vuillard, Léger, Gris and Paul Klee, and terrific pieces of art deco by Jean Dunand, Eileen Gray and Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann. Then there are the Greek vases, the Qing dynasty bronzes, the icons, the Renaissance bronzes, the mirrors - without which Saint Laurent said a room was "dead" - and rock crystal pieces of a quality which he said was becoming hard to find because they were being used for rocketry.

No wonder the collection is expected to fetch a cool €300m even in these dire economic times.  You can see some of the pieces that will be featured in the auction here, including an obscenely desirable perfume bottle by Marcel Duchamp.

artists share their secret santas

I'm pretty cranky today, what with the whole having to be at work combined with general holiday malaise.  So my cold-hearted self is taking much pleasure in the off-kilter reinterpretations of Santa that a group of artists, musicians and comedians recently created at the Guardian's request and that have been posted in a gallery here.  Laura Barnett talked to the participants about their takes, including Gillian Wearing (pictured right):

When I was asked to make a Santa, I immediately thought of Andrew Mondia, the Santa who was sacked in November from Selfridges [for asking a woman to sit on his lap]. These kind of stories immediately bring a cartoon vision of events to mind. I wanted to create a seaside-type postcard image to illustrate the demise of Santa - Andrew being strangled by [model] Alena's tinsel. As we are in the throes of what could be one of the worst financial moments in history, I also think this image is the perfect credit-crunch Santa. I'm sure a lot of people would be wanting to hold on to that tinsel.

I think my favorite might be Isy Suttie's hilarious ham Santa, with the comedian looking like she's about to take a big ol' bite out of him.  The paper has also created a Flickr pool where I highly recommend posting your Santarchy pics, especially because it's looking a little sparse in there right now.  Merry Christmas, y'all!

fashion at the frieze

If I had gone to the Frieze Art Fair this year I suspect I would have spent the entire time sitting in the replica of Reykjavik bar Sirkus, drinking vodka with Adrian Searle and waiting for Bjork to show up (no word on if she actually did).  Plenty of other celebrities were in attendance, however, everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Charles Saatchi to George Michael.  Hadley Freeman reported on the people-watching:

'Who's here? Everyone!" chortles Roger Tatley, director of the gallery Hauser & Wirth, from within his bustling stand. The names being bandied around suggest he's right: Christina Aguilera is coming later! Dasha Zhukova has already been! Is that Roman Abramovich? No, but Kate Moss might turn up! Inside this white-tented temple to art, capitalism and celebrity, headlines about collapsing economies seem like ghosts from another world. Catalogues are filled with six-figure price tags and visitors stroll around in that art-world uniform perhaps best described as "discreet luxury": men in slick black suits or Prada cardigans, women in Jil Sander shift dresses and black Louboutin boots. Hermès and Bottega Veneta are the accessories labels of choice, and everyone, of course, is in black.

Hey if I had a ton of money I would dress in black Jil Sander all the time too.  Actually maybe more like Dries Van Noten and Three As Four and Martin Margiela.  Artist Grayson Perry, pictured above, rebelled against the unspoken dress code in his red pants, but otherwise you can see the many shades of Frieze noir in the online gallery here.

art for babies

Awesome book alert!  Taking into consideration research that shows newborn babies react favorably to black-and-white images, the new book Art for Baby collects some excellent two-tone images from contemporary art.  Julian Opie, pictured right, is featured, as well as the likes of Takashi Murakami, Kazimir Malevich and David Shrigley.  Proceeds from sales go to support Britain's National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and the book also includes a fold-out frieze to put on your little one's wall.  See more of the included artwork here.

tracey emin: 20 years

One of these years I will finally make it to the Edinburgh festival and spend a few weeks running around trying to see everything.  It's been over a decade since I was last in Scotland, and it's been almost that long since I first became acquainted with Tracey Emin's work when I saw her famously rumpled bed in the 1999 Turner Prize exhibition.  While the festival is pretty much wrapped up for this year, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art there in Edinburgh is still displaying Emin's first major retrospective until late fall.  Covering her 20 years of artistic practice, the show features the aforementioned My Bed as well as more recent work, all of it characterized by what even by American standards would be considered some major overshares about her life.  Jonathan Jones finds the whole thing completely discombobulating, but ultimately comes out in Emin's favor:

It's Not the Way I Want to Die is the title of a rickety wooden ruin of a seaside rollercoaster, the most poignant recent object here, redolent of decay and mortality. In the end, the most shocking thing about this exhibition isn't the abortions, or the rape, or the condoms - it's Emin's acknowledgment of the passage of time. We first knew her as a Young British Artist, and she is now the first of that generation to make the drab dawn of middle age a part of her work. Emin presents herself as an emotional artist, but her real strength is intellectual: she confuses art and life in a way that is profound, philosophical and has a core of greatness.

I have a very strong recollection of a video that was running at the Turner show in which Emin talked about how every aspect of her life is her art, and how she is never not doing art.  With her trademark knowing smirk and commitment to brutal honesty she can be an easy target, but Charlotte Higgins says it's that way she tangles up her work and life that makes her so darn interesting:

Emin tends to get belittled, sometimes because her work is uneven - and sometimes because its material is dismissed as trivial or self-indulgent (a criticism that often, I believe, conceals a touch of misogyny). Today I found myself thinking it was high time we took her seriously.

It's true that Emin's individual pieces often don't do a lot for me, but taken as a whole her work stands as an extraordinary document of one woman's life as an artist in all of its complexity.  I'm so curious to see what she does during the next 20 years. 

snail space

When I'm traveling I love to wander around a city on foot and check out groovy architecture, so when I finally make it to Mexico City I'm going to do my darnedest to see architect Javier Senosiain's fantastical creations even if they're squirreled away in a private neighborhood.  Focusing on a kind of imaginative bioarchitecture that looks like the Mexican love child of Gaudí and Hundertwasser, Senosiain has created buildings in the shape of sea creatures (he lives in his own shark) and the god Quetzalcoatl.  Magalli Mayorga lives with her family in Senosiain's "Nautilus":

"The idea is that, just as a snail lives inside its shell, so our world is inside our house," Mayorga says of the ferroconcrete structure sprayed with polyurethane plastic foam, built for her family by Mexican architect Javier Senosiain. An admirer of Antoni Gaudí and Frank Lloyd Wright, he specialises in undulating, organic structures: "The concept of an organic habitat," he has written, "is the creation of spaces adapted to man that are also similar to a mother's bosom or an animal's lair."

The pictures of the Nautilus interior show an incredibly seductive space, all undulating surfaces and colored glass, with a garden in the living room and even space for a furry friend or two.  Total house porn.

fashion in the mirror at the photographers' gallery

Was a time not too long ago that I blogged extensively about fashion, read each new issue of Vogue cover-to-cover as soon as it arrived in my mailbox, kept a clip file of magazine pages that I found inspiring.  But all of that ceased quite suddenly about a year ago.  Don't get me wrong, I still adore fashion in general (Project Runway addicts, represent!) and especially love supporting local designers, but I was feeling oppressed by the constant onslaught of how-to-be-emaciated-and-Botoxed articles and the homogeneity of modern fashion photography in general.  Yet another image of models jumping or of broken-doll pose just wasn't doing it for me anymore.  The Photographers' Gallery in London currently has a show up called Fashion in the Mirror: Self-Reflection in Fashion Photography that displays some of the industry's attempts at self-reference from the past 60 years, for me a concept most perfectly embodied not in any photo but in Antonioni's marvelous 1966 film Blow-Up.  That's actually my favorite era for fashion photography, when both photographers and models seemed to be having some fun, or give me somethingly wickedly twisted from Helmut Lang or the perfect composition of Richard Avedon or Irving Penn.  Now I often feel like I'm missing out on an inside joke, which Adrian Searle also expresses in his review of the show:

In Steven Meisel's 2007 Vogue Italia series, Super Mods Enter Rehab, smacked-out-looking models are dragged along institutional corridors by aggressive orderlies, take therapeutic baths (though so zonked are they, they've forgotten to undress), hang out in their locked-ward dormitories, and generally do their careers no self-harm whatsoever. Previously, Meisel has had models play at Homeland Security narcs and terror suspects. I doubt these mockumentary images are intended as social commentary, or as a lacerating satire of the fashion industry's atmosphere of vacuous complicity. They are too much part of the game, too locked in the same hall of mirrors. Of course, staged and contrived situations are also real - in that something is always happening beyond the storyline and the set. Most of the photographers here just aren't interested enough, or clever enough, in getting to it.

Let us also not forget that these are predominantly male photographers shooting female models, which opens a whole other can of worms about the male gaze and woman as subject.  In the end, these pictures are just pushing product.