Just saw The Artist. It reminds me of what was lost when sound came into the movies. Filmmakers achieved an amazing level of visual sophistication and power before sound, and it took years — some would say decades — to regain the artistic momentum stopped dead by sounds’ enormous technical overhead. Indeed, there is an argument that the artistic requirements of building movies around dialogue are inherently at odds with realizing their full visual potential. That’s a bit overstated, but there’s a point to it. If The Artist, produced when filmmakers are basically amateurs in the art of silent movies,
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Book Review: African Signs
African Signs, by Rob Floor, Gert van Zanten andPaul Faber, KIT Publishers, 208 pages, 2010. ISBN 978-9-4602-2080-7. Soft cover $45 Every once in a while those of us who don’t often make it to Africa have an opportunity to glimpse the continent’s extraordinary commercial visual culture. As recently as this summer vibrant examples of hand-painted movie posters from the 1980s and ‘90s were on view at the Chicago Cultural Center, which also mounted a show in 1996 of elaborate decorated coffins from Ghana. Both genres have books devoted to the, African hair salon and barber shop signs, meanwhile, were featured
Continue readingReview: Brooklyn Storefronts
Brooklyn Storefronts by Paul Lacy My rating: 5 of 5 stars A lovely collection of artistic shop signs, tastefully photographed and displayed. View all my reviews
Continue readingBook Review: Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern
Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, essay by Pamela Kort. Michael Werner Gallery, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-8850-1381-1. Paperback $55 Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern images of unexcelled symbolic intensity marked him as one of the most creative German artists of the mid-20th Century, but also an artist whose weirdly eroticized work was unlikely to be found on gallery walls in his own time. He was also hugely eccentric, putting in time as both a charlatan occultist and a mental patient, according to Pamela Kort’s essay in the recently published catalog for the exhibit From Barefoot Prophet to Avant-Garde Artist at Michael Werner Gallery in New York. His serious
Continue readingReview: Julius Shulman: Chicago Mid-Century Modernism
Julius Shulman: Chicago Mid-Century Modernism by Gary Gand My rating: 4 of 5 stars I grew up in a suburb where the kinds of houses described in this book provided welcome variation from the dominant ranches, colonials and split levels. (Indeed, I grew up visiting one of the houses featured in the book.) These buildings grasped at the actual promise of suburban living that, through lack of imagination, was thoroughly obscured where I typically commonly spent my childhood days. They were invariably set on heavily wooded lots. Their flat roofs and wide expanses of glass facing the trees meant they
Continue readingJacksonville Attractions
Jacksonville, Florida, like many southern cities, is a treasure trove of roadside art
Continue readingReview: John Martin
John Martin by Martin Myrone My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was awed by the ultra-detailed epic paintings by John Martin I had seen at the Tate and the Smithsonian. The ridiculous level of detail and the apocalyptic imagery oscillate between brilliance and kitsch. This book, tied to an exhibition I’d dearly love to see, tries to explain why. It turns out there was more to Martin than meets the eye. Click here to see images of Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Upon Gibeon. View all my reviews
Continue readingReview: Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography
Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography by Errol Morris My rating: 5 of 5 stars Errol Morris brings the same brilliant curiosity to this book about the nature of photographs as he does to his films. To appreciate this book you need to care deeply about photography, but if you do you likely will. View all my reviews
Continue readingNew Topographics
New Topographics by Britt Salvesen My rating: 5 of 5 stars This catalog from a reprise of a 1975 photography exhibit at Eastman House includes some of my long-standing favorite photographers, Stephen Shore and the Bechers, plus some others that are growing on me. The show was not well-received when first mounted but proved to be extremely influential in the rise of deadpan landscape photography. View all my reviews
Continue readingWoody Allen’s Lifestyles of the Rich
Saw Midnight in Paris last night. (The next youngest person in the theater was probably three times my daughter’s age, at least.) It was a good one — Owen Wilson did a creditable job as Woody Allen’s mouthpiece, and the modernist name dropping worked well. But more than anything the movie, especially the present-day sequences, reminded me that Allen’s most enduring concern — more than his neuroses or intellectual/anti-intellectual pretensions, urbanophilia, May-September romanticism or even humor — is illustrating the lifestyles of the very rich. That first struck me with Hannah and Her Sisters, but with each movie, good, bad
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