Jan Lenica

Just stumbled onto this Polish animator. He’s brilliant — the missing link between Max Ernst and Terry Gilliam. Read more about him here.

Here’s Labyrinth (1/2)

And Labyrinth (2/2)

Doodle Scrawled Four Years Ago Predicts the Future

Given the weirdness of the past couple of weeks, the temp art I did while wiling away the hours at WaMu now seems downright prescient. Go figure.

Links (6/6/08)

My regular culling from the internets:

I think we’ve all felt like this sometimes at the office.

Holy crap! The thing people will do for attention. Some guy in China, in commemoration of the Beijing Olympics, stuck 2008 needles in his head.

Werner Herzog is my hero. Check out this bizarre interview he had with Defamer.

Seven gestures that could, just could, get you killed abroad.

Anthony Lane from the New Yorker articulates why I don’t like Sex and the City.

Someone called “The Decapitator” is lopping off the heads of billboard ads and replacing them with bloody stumps. Bloody good work, I say.

Cheap renders of a cool idea for L.A. — The Hollywood Freeway Central Park. Basically, they would cover a stretch of the 101 Hollywood freeway, which is already below grade, with a park.

Top 10 scientists that almost killed themselves for science.[h/t Ted]

And then there’s this trailer for a Korean film called The Good, The Bad, and The Weird.[h/t Joan]

There’s an interesting article about the failed fascist coup against FDR in 1933. I referenced previous here regarding Hitchcock’s WWII era flick Saboteur.

And speaking of that, Behold! Stalin’s crazy attempt at recreating a breed of half-man/half-ape for crude industrial work.

Temp Art

A few years ago after graduating from CalArts with yet another master’s degree, I was faced with the yawning terror of making ends meet. I applied to a temporary employment agency and I landed in a mail room in the Reconstructive Loan department in a processing center for Washington Mutual in Chatsworth, California.

My job could have been performed by a well-trained chimpanzee. I was a temporary worker, replaceable at the drop of the hat. The office space was the sort of generic gray cubicled affair one usually associates with the bottom end of the white-collar employment. My co-workers seemed beaten down and tired. And though I really only had three hours worth of work, I was obliged to be there for a full eight. I had to fill the void somehow.

So I did Temp Art.

The rules of Temp Art I worked out my first day on the job and are as the follows:
1. One piece of art a day.
2. All materials used for Temp Art must be found at work.
3. All art must be created during company time. (So I would be paid to do my art.)

During my three months there, I produced about 60 drawings of varying size. I worked in private, and as far as I know my superiors never caught on to my strange project. You can see more pics of temp art here at Flickr.

This Week’s Links

My weekly culling from the internets:

Super cool video filled with 80static logos.

This news story is just three shades of wrong.

And speaking of wrong, a conceptual artist in Yale is making “art” out of her own self-induced miscarriages. My first thought was “Ick.” My second was “ick.” My third was “I’m surprised she didn’t go to CalArts.” I’m so bored of this kind of shock identity politics art. It’s suffocating dead end that art still hasn’t found its way out of. Besides, it’s totally a rip off of my portrait of McGeorge Bundy done with my own snot.

[UPDATE] Turns out this whole thing was (thankfully) a hoax. Rest assured, if she went to CalArts, she would have done it for real.

[UPDATE 2] Or maybe Yale’s statement is a hoax. This whole thing is giving me a headache. Where’s Stabby when you need him?

And speaking of conceptual artists, in the 90s a couple of Russian conceptual artists decided to make the most unappealing music possible based on polls. The results you can read more about and listen to here.

More about conceptual artists or a sort: Jenna Jameson declares that her upcoming flick Zombie Strippers, is an anti-Bush movie. That might sway me to see it. Y’know, for the political subtext.

Crematrix

One way I’m keeping post-graduation ennui/angst away is seeing a mess of flicks. Two films I saw on concurrent days were box office blockbuster Matrix Reloaded and art film blockbuster Cremaster 3. Both films are epic spectacles with huge budgets, fantastic sets, and striking imagery. They also feature plot lines that are opaque and that require one to have seen the previous installments to get what was going on. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I found I was getting the two movies confused. So I made this easy-to-use table to help those in similar situations.

MATRIX	CREMASTER 3
Features a protagonist called “The One”	Features a protagonist called “The Apprentice”
Features a bad guy who is an architect	Features a bad guy who is an architect
Features a key scene that takes place in an art deco restaurant high up in a skyscraper	Features a key scene that takes place in an art deco restaurant high up in a skyscraper
Features a bunch of goons in suits harkening back to the 1950s	Features a bunch of goons in suits harkening back to the 1940s
Features an a couple bad guys in white who can go through walls	Features Richard Serra (who plays a bad guy) dressed in black who throws molten vaseline at a wall
Features an epic car chase scene	Features an epic demolition derby in the lobby of the Chrysler Building
Protagonist wear a cool black clothes	Protagonist wears a cool pink kilt
Features an extended rave scene	Features an extended mosh pit scene
Features 100 Hugo Weaving clones in shades	Features 100 Dancing girls in sheep outfits
Protagonist has a portal hole in the back of his head	Protagonist has ambiguous gentialia which looks remarkably like the portal hole in the back of Neo’s head
Protagonist can fly	Protagonist can shit teeth out of his distended asshole
About a half hour too long	About a half hour too long