Ryoji Ikeda: Data Jockey

Once again, the Park Avenue Armory makes the most of its vast drill hall for a commissioned work of art. In ‘Transfinite,’ Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda programs data from sources such as NASA and the Human Genome Project to create a mesmerizing, immersive, “visual and sonic environment …” Hey isn’t that what they used to call a sound & light show? Read more here.










The black, white, and gray of the Ikeda installation felt even more stark to me, having come directly from a very lively and colorful kids’ art show.
'French Toast' was one of the visual-pun sculptures fifth graders created.


Fourth graders all made collage self portraits
ala Stephen Kroninger.
There was a ‘sonic’ element to this art show too. I got to hear the school band perform a few numbers. They did an excellent rendition of Mercy, Mercy, Mercy. (Link is for the Cannonball Adderley original.)

Cool Collage: Vintage Refrigerator

Reading a refrigerator is usually a semiotic/archeological affair that involves decoding brands of gourmet mustard and carbon dating takeout containers. Well, here’s a fridge you can read without even opening it.

Up for auction next month is a circa 1960 classic GE model, plastered with some 50 years of bumper stickers. Daniel Donnelly, the Alexandria, Virginia furniture dealer and architectural salvager, admits that its intrinsic value might not measure up to its size, but he just couldn’t resist the "liberal-minded" monolith. He described its original home just as you would imagine it—mid-century Knoll, Eames, and Danish furniture, and packed with accumulated artifacts from the family's years of foreign travel.

Up with People!

And yes, it works! Also in this auction is a great assortment of Steve Frykholm posters for Herman Miller.

Desktop Diaries, Digital Collages

BUTTERFLY & RAIN
Antique endpapers, 'Existentialism and Human Emotions', 'An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law', vintage butterfly-wing pendant, vintage camera, blue sign reflected in the rain.


In the summer of 2009, I started posting digital collages on a blog that I kept just for myself as a journal, called Desktop Diaries. They basically consisted of images that piled up on my computer’s desktop.

Description on the site:
As a graphic designer, artist, and collagist, my screen, at any given moment is a mélange of personal photos, assorted reference, spreadsheets, infographics, news sites and whatever essential item I might be watching on eBay. All sense of scale is lost as details can be huge, and sweeping vistas can be reduced to thumbnails. The collagist in me does not see the individual images, but rather the patchwork as a whole. And then I just have to grab that image. After all, these particular juxtapositions may never occur again. It’s not about Photoshop effects for me. I see the elements as I would pieces of found paper or ephemera--the edge of a window is just the digital equivalent of a torn edge of paper. The blurriness of an enlarged image is “found” texture. My desktop background with its floating folders often becomes an element as well. That is the origin

There haven’t been any new ones in a while--All My Eyes takes enough time. Here’s a selection of the over 50 posted.

IS MY TURBAN DISTURBIN’?
Ethnic woven textile, vintage quilt, K.O. Munson “sketch pad” pin-up calendar page, chemistry set, graffitied priority mail sticker


PYRITE EYES
Eye studies by Carrache, pyrite, vintage drawer liner in an antique dresser.


MOTH ON WHITE SHOULDERS
Vintage box of White Shoulders, moth on the screen at night, fresh-picked wild roses, vintage vase.


PIECE FULL & AMETHYST
Antique color chart, marbled endpaper of an old book, mod fabric, vintage textile swatch book, black and red scarf, combs, "Piece Full," book about japanese Boro textiles, mushroom textile, detail of a mod print slip, antique swatch book, print of an amethyst crystal.


MAX HUBER & BOOTS
Book cover, Max Huber Progetti Grafici 1936-1981; riding boots; Lichtenberg figure.


DARLING & BABIES
Pages from a German art calendar; package of plastic toy babies; title sequence from Darling, the 1965 John Schlesinger film with Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey; incredible ring with a flower of gemstones including turquoise, pearl, amethyst, and onyx.


HAMMERED & HAIRNET
Vestry seal of the Parish of St. Pancras, hairnet envelope, hammered silver modernist ashtray.


TAKE FIVE
Fragments of antique book bindings, TITA candy wrapper from Argentina, match book from Cafe Loup, card from Jenny Holtzer retrospective at the Whitney "GOOD DEEDS EVENTUALLY ARE REWARDED", diploma seal, ethnic textile, found handwritten type, Japanese cookbook, postcard of Gaudi staircase, vintage fabric, 3-d puzzle pieces illustration, wrought iron gate, Agam silk screen.


VENUS & DANSK
As soon as I scanned a page from an old collage journal (lower left quadrant: red foil, Venus de Milo), I just had to start combining it with other images--like the graphic candelabra by Dansk, and the rust cover of an old Russian book with a lovely little silhouette. The vertical stripes on the upper left is a photo of old painted paper.

Finding Colos

The internet, by rendering envelopes and paper datebooks obsolete, has, in effect, eliminated entire categories of creative expression--namely envelope art (see 'mail art') and collage diaries. Ironically, it is thanks to the internet that a master of those art forms, is being rescued from obscurity.

A few weeks ago I came across some very cool original collages and drawings on eBay, attributed to “COLOS,” a mysterious, but familiar name from the past. Many were on envelopes and cleverly incorporated postge stamps, addresses, etc. When I saw among them a piece collaged with foreign currencies about the foreign exchange company Deak-Perera (another mysterious name from the past), I figured it had to be the illustrator whose name I’d heard occasionally at Fortune, many years ago.

Hungarian-born Colos (originally Francois Szalay) was a prolific editorial illustrator in the late 70s, early 80s Working in many media (painting, drawing, collage, etc.) and with a unique view of the world (he came to NYC via Paris via a Communist Gulag), he could always be counted on to come up with a solution when art directors were at a loss for ideas. By the mid 80s editorial illustration had moved in a different direction, and from time to time, I would overhear art directors on the phone, telling him that there was “nothing right now …” Colos died in 1989 at the age of 60.

Since I rarely see original works of art that are so affordable, I decided to buy a few. There were so many incredible pieces that it took me a few days to narrow down which ones to buy. Luckily, I was more decisive than usual and managed to snag a few when I did. Because a week later, wanting to introduce a friend to his work, I went back to eBay and his work was completely gone. I then found out that everything had been bought by a private collector.
In the mean time, illustrators Stephen Kroninger and Victor Juhaz, (whose work you’ve seen whether you know it or not) also found Colos on eBay. Here is the amazing account written by Victor Juhaz, who knew Colos, that Stephen posted on his Drawger blog, along with the images.

Colos was a fascinating person, probably one of the most fascinating I've known in my life, and like most Hungarians, very Magyar centric, ego driven, brilliant and utterly opinionated, and of course, right. Endless stories, all memorable and better than fiction. He was a young man around 19 when he found himself spending a number of years in the Communist prison system, the Gulag, working in coal mines. He was also pretty inflexible and combative when it came to dealing with art directors and didn't have all that much good to say about them and the restrictions placed on his points of view in his work. Considering how bright his star had shined in the 50's the 60's through the 70's, even into the 80's, near the end of his life he would confess to feeling at a sort of dead end with regard to how to deal with editorial interference and seemed to imply that he didn't see much future in his career. His uncompromising attitude to his work and how it was to be displayed in a perverse way worked against him in that he is pretty much unknown to present generation graphic artists and students, which is a true loss in terms of what his work has to offer. His work was almost always engaging because it was very smart, very funny in a satiric way; the collages beautifully composed and logical even as they could be wild.

He started a visual diary in 1976 that developed quite a notorious reputation because of the content matter. In 1986 a museum was offering to exhibit the diary but with certain content edited because of the potential offensiveness. Colos was adamant about how to exhibit the work and declined the museum's offer. "They either accept it as it is or go to hell." When I read that in a PRINT magazine feature on him and his envelope collages, it sounded just like him. "Bullshit" was another favorite phrase.

Coming out of the brutalities and intrigues of the Communist system he also seemed to have developed an adaptive, very self protective, way of presenting himself to the people he knew. The Colos I knew may not have necessarily been the Colos others knew. He was careful about how and what to reveal about himself. This realization came later after his passing, talking to friends and noticing that we all had parts of a story but never the whole. Even after we pieced our versions together, there was an uncertainty about whether it was complete or even misleading.

He once told me about standing on a corner in NYC near Carnegie Hall right next to Count Basie. He turned to the Count and said, "It is because of you that I have one kidney." Basie looked at him confused and asked him to explain. Colos went on to tell him what a great fan he was of Jazz and how he was listening to Basie records in his apartment when (somebody must have ratted him out) the secret police broke in, confiscated the music, and took him down to the station where he was beaten so badly that one of his kidneys was ruptured. Then it was off to prison/the Gulag(?) for subversive activities. Basie listened to this and when the story was finished, said to Colos, "Let me buy you a drink." So they went to a nearby bar and had a few and talked some more. You can't make this shit up. And he had tons of stories like this. Every so often I think of him and miss those lunchtime conversations we would have either in the NEW YORK TIMES cafeteria or at a favorite hangout, a Brazilian restaurant not far from the TIMES, where I would join my friend John Cayea, the art director for the Week-In-Review and another brilliant Hungarian artist illustrator, Istvan Ventilla and the Romanian illustrator Nicolai Ascui. Those get togethers were head spinning events- John and I would just sit back and listen to the world explained from an Eastern European, Iron Curtain survivor, viewpoint. Ventilla has since disappeared, without a trace; it's been a long time since anything has been heard from or about him.

To see more envelope pieces and in a larger size go to Stephen Kroninger’s post. The following images are diary pages. There’s a website for The Diary, where you can see many pages. You can also order Francois Szalay - COLOS, THE DIARY, 1976 from Amazon.

Class Photos: University of Iowa College of Dentistry

The University of Iowa has a vast and varied digital archive to explore. Included are over 80 years (1883-1967) of graduating-class photo boards from the College of Dentistry.

The early years, of course, have the most interesting boards, and not only for visual variety. I couldn’t help noticing a perplexing change in the number of women graduates over the years. During the first 40 years, 34 women earned degrees, with the classes of 1888 and 1902 graduating five women each. From 1925 through 1967, however, there were a total of seven female graduates--over the entire 42 years! I'm not quite sure which of those stats I find more surprising. Today, 40% of students at the College of Dentistry are women. Drill, baby, drill.