“Ms. Aniston relies on her wholesome appeal as a walking vanilla milkshake to emerge from the movie relatively unscathed.”

Zing!

Andy Warhol poses with Basquiat. Image copyright Raphael Thomas

Like most of us, I usually check out the reviews before I hit the movie theater, but this time I missed reading up before I saw Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, directed by Tamra Davis. When I came across the New York Times’s review of the film by critic Stephen Holden a day later, I felt he and I had seen two completely different movies. It’s true that in general I tend to agree with the Times’s A.O.Scott, and not so much with Holden, but this time I was entirely baffled by his assessment.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, In Italian, 1983. Image via Brooklyn Museum

Basquiat is my favorite painter from that white-hot period in late 70’s through 80’s New York that also blessed the art world with Julian Schnabel (who bloviates at great length about his “friend” Basquiat, whom he seemed to regard more as a competitor and  frenemy), Francesco Clemente, Robert Longo, and Keith Haring, among others.

While it was a treat to view so much of Basquiat’s work gathered together, the film paints a one-sided portrait of the artist that neglects to include a clear or complete enough picture of the culture of New York City at the time, so critical to Basquiat’s work, sketching it out in a few broad strokes at the beginning instead. Holden maintains that the film “…places Basquiat’s art in a cultural context with an enthusiasm and zest that make the many pictures shown come blazingly alive.” Really? Not nearly. The pictures blaze on their own, but the movie smokes without ever catching fire.

Music, art, street culture, and night club life were so intertwined at that time it’s impossible to separate the influence of one upon the other, and the film hits upon that point briefly, but inexplicably didn’t include interviews with so many of the other main players on the scene who weren’t visual artists. Where are the voices of Debbie Harry, Madonna, David Byrne? Fab Five Freddy gets a lot of screen time, and he’s insightful and funny, but he’s not enough.

Basquiat at Area, via New York Times

New York nightclub culture was at its most vivid, colorful, and alive during that era, and while there is some limited footage shot at the nightclub Area, we don’t get to see any of the other stops on a typical club kid’s night, like the Mudd Club, Danceteria, or CBGB’s, or much discussion of how this energy fed into work being produced across a spectrum of disciplines then.

Save for Hilton Kramer’s scathing (and, coming from him, entirely predictable) comment “[Basquiat’s] contribution to art is so miniscule as to be nil”, the film provides few opposing viewpoints. Surely some of Basquiat’s contemporaries besides Schnabel, who made his own movie on the subject in 2000, had something to say about him, his work, his fame? Where are they? Painter Kenny Scharf makes a brief appearance but says little of interest. Where are the voices from the era’s well-known street graffiti artists (which is how Basquiat famously got his start, as SAMO) as a counterpoint to the low/high balance Basquiat struck in his canvases? I left Film Forum feeling cheated; with such a rich topic and wealth of visual material to draw from, the movie could have been vastly wider and deeper—could have been so much better.

It’s a critic’s job to dig deeply enough to identify and articulate all the areas of potential weakness in whatever material he/she is reviewing. For Stephen Holden to say that this film places Basquiat’s art in the appropriate cultural context, when it barely started to do so and left the job messily and frustratingly incomplete, is negligent on the critic’s part.

Check out Cynthia Fuch’s excellent review of the movie here, and Amy Taubin’s on Artforum here.

Image via AP

I really wish I could see this artwork in person: Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, rendered in gemstones, Chelsea’s wedding gift from the country of Vietnam. (Maybe I should start checking Katonah yard sales this fall.) This has to be even better up close than the U.N. portrait rugs.

Renewing New York State license plates online gives drivers a clear visual of their options for the appearance of the new plates. Keep the old number and blue and white plate ($130), opt for the new gold plates with a new number (add $25) or go for the gold but keep your old alpha-numeric string (add $45). I like the gold plates; the stark simplicity is more appealing than the fussy landscape trying to add some interest at the top of the former design. The “new” look is a throwback to NYS tags from the 1970’s, when I learned to drive, though the first license plate with a gold background debuted in 1962. My dad always held on to one plate for his collection hanging on the garage wall, and told the DMV he lost the other when it was time to exchange old plates for new.

I was surprised that I was willing to pay a little more for nostalgia, because mostly I agree with Diana Vreeland: I loathe nostalgia. In that case, why not keep the old plate number while I’m at it? Hardly a momentous decision but it was past midnight and I was already tired of thinking about the whole thing so I flipped a coin and allowed random chance to make the decision. It came down heavily on the side of nostalgia: gold plate, old number.

I finalized the transaction, then savored the Dept. of Motor Vehicle’s automatically-generated email response, below. Why should email be any different than actually going to the DMV, where you also will not receive a response? Some experiences generate no nostalgia at all.

Photo: KCIvey, http://bit.ly/d2y1F6

At the Hallmark store, June reliably means dads, grads, and weddings. In my case that’s two out of three (I did get married one June, and I just graduated from an MFA program, but my dad isn’t around anymore to present with an unlovely tie). To the short list of June’s notable events I propose one that deserves its own celebratory greeting card: the arrival of sour cherries. There is no year-round availability for these ruby beauties; they have a heartbreakingly brief season. By early July you can find them only in the freezer case. When I spy sour cherries at the greenmarket, as if under a spell I mumble, “Pie,” and automatically buy two and a half pounds. And where there’s cherries, there’s pits. Here’s where the design gadgets come in.

It’s hard to believe how many design variations exist for cherry pitters—devices meant to do one thing and one thing only. I am not road-testing these for actual ease of use; I’m more interested in the range of appearances at differing price points. All will get the job done, with varying levels of volume, speed, automation and efficiency—but the device itself should be beautiful, at least, if it’s going to languish 49 weeks a year taking up valuable space in your kitchen drawer or cabinet.

Photos via amazon.com

The Stainless Steel Cherry Pitter from KegWorks, $299, is not fooling around. This baby can handle a pound of cherries a minute. Its industrial appearance would blend perfectly with the Subzero/commercial stove aesthetic so prevalent in today’s luxury condo kitchens. And like that 8-burner stove, it will probably go unused 99% of the time. Now if you owned a cherry farm…

Confession: there was a silhouetted image of the Westmark Cherry Pitter, $62, available but I couldn’t resist the hokey charm of this ad. It is meant to handle 30 lbs. of cherries/hour, or half the more expensive KegWorks machine’s output. Its much lower price reflects this reduced volume as well as the percentage of plastic in its makeup. But its prosaic look won’t win it any design awards, and it’s hard to imagine someone buying this as a show-off gadget. Like trying to impress the neighbors with your new Kia.

This exceedingly simple hand-held device requires patience: it pits one cherry at a time, so speed of operation depends on the skill and patience of the cook. Part of the Swiss DallaPiazza’s company’s extensive line of kitchen wares, as a design object it scores high for its streamlined Midcentury gorgeousness. Definitely a show-off gadget, on a small scale. And the price isn’t bad, either: $15.

Apparently OXO needs to manufacture a Good Grips version of everything in the entire world, including this $12.50 cherry pitter. Promotional copy makes much of the plastic splatter shield that directs juices away from the work area. How much of a problem is a juicy work area, really, considering the nature of the task? Design improvement to be filed under dubious usefulness. The overall appearance of the thing is consistent with the rest of the Good Grips wares but for about the same price, the Dalla Piazza pitter provides a much more stylish option.

This HandHeld Cherry Pitter is the little gizmo that couldn’t. I mean, sure, it must get the pits out of the cherries—but what a design failure. It looks like a plucked chicken. Even the color of the plastic is just sad. But the price, $3, can’t be beat. Or….can it?

Photo: Angela Riechers

Here’s what I use. It costs less than one penny. If you want to get fancy you can straighten out one end and stick it in a wine cork to make a handle (you know, the cork that was in the bottle you used to roll out the piecrust). Design bonus: paper clips are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Pros: It takes up next to no space, can be made in under a minute and is disposable. Cons: it does not catch pits or redirect juices. Handles approximately 3 lbs. of cherries per hour unless the chef happens to be drinking the wine, in which case the process may take a bit longer.

Artists began using photographs as reference for painted portraits or sculptures almost immediately upon the discovery of the photographic process in the 19th century. However, it takes skill to translate the reference image into another medium so that it looks “real”—in other words, not like a reproduction of a reproduction, but like the person it was meant to represent. Tricky stuff.

In my just-completed MFA thesis about personal memorial objects, I spent a fair amount of time and grammar considering memorial portrait tattoos. They fascinate me on a number of levels, most notably that when the tattooist winds up his or her work and puts down the needle, very often the finished artwork does not look like the person it was intended to memorialize. It looks like a picture of the person: not the same thing. Despite our willingness to completely trust an image once conjured as if by magic from light and chemistry, and now made up of pixels, pictures lie and they always have. They capture a fleeting and completely uncharacteristic expression in that 1/1000 of a second shutter snap; the image distorts your face or your body. Sometimes you look better, sometimes worse. Photoshop, obviously, gives us even more and better ways to create a narrative/tell a lie, take your pick.

All of this was on my mind as I gazed at these portraits of past United Nations Presidents, on display at the U.N. Secretariat. Like a typical New Yorker, I have never been to most of the city’s tourist spots. (I visited the statue of Liberty for the first, and probably last, time a year ago, and then only because it was for a grad school assignment.) But some friends from San Francisco were in town for a few days this June; they called to say their 12-year-old son would love an architectural tour of the city, and would I mind taking him a few places?

The U.N. was on his list, and after passing through scary airport-level security—take off your jewelry and belt, X-ray your bags and yourself, no liquids allowed inside—we found ourselves in the very depressing, dilapidated and airport-like lobby of the Secretariat. The building has serious issues involving asbestos, lead paint, and structural problems requiring an estimated $1 billion to repair; but apparently no countries pay their U.N. dues and so things are quietly falling apart in the meantime. Access to every area but the lobby is restricted, so we consoled ourselves by looking at the art on exhibit. P.J. said to me, “This looks like a middle-school science fair!” He had a point; most of the art was amateurish, and the set up on movable display boards, accompanied by too much earnest text, didn’t help.

From a distance, the row of U.N. presidential portraits was unremarkable, just tight renderings obviously based on photos, but as we got closer something about their texture seemed off; too matte and lumpy for paintings. Close inspection revealed that they were finely hand-knotted rugs, a gift from Iran to the U.N. It didn’t make them any better as artwork, but it reminded me once again of how much art in all mediums has come to rely upon photographs as a starting point, and how the results can be startling, but not always in a good way.

When I first moved to New York in 1984, I fancied myself street-smart. Wrong. The city was a darker, scarier, and more raw place than it is today, and it turned out I knew nothing about how things worked. Or perhaps I was just very young. In either case (and friends back me up on this) New York was a lot more perilous then, with fewer cops around, and trash pretty much every where you looked—some of it fascinating, and some of it on fire. I didn’t know why I felt compelled to pick up ripped passports, trampled photographs, blurred notes scrawled in Bic pen on the back of Marlboro and Parliament packages—but I did.

I made my collection of junk into a set of 100 2-sided collages, each about the size of a baseball card. I called the project 100 Fugitive Felons, after I saw a poster in the subway stating the NYPD was searching for just that many criminals on the lam. I felt like I was gathering evidence, might have crossed paths with some of these people; as if I was preserving some record of small scale despair. I was a historian of the city’s unknown, unwanted human flotsam, noticing and cataloging the ephemera left in their wake. I keep the set of collages in a black evidence binder; they remind me of mug shots, police blotters, other official record books.

I knew that the logical conclusion to the project would be to re-lose the felons: to take the collection to a grimy park somewhere or Madison Square Garden or Times Square, and just leave it behind, return it to time’s slipstream. Only I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So it sat around my studio; was photographed and exhibited a couple of times, was seen by some people. Last time I looked at it, I noticed that I only had 99 felons left. They are stored 4 to a binder page, and somewhere in the middle of the book was a page with one unoccupied slot.

One had escaped, been pilfered, gone missing in its travels. I couldn’t remember which felon was missing, and it disturbed me more than I’d care to admit that I had lost just that one. I tried to be zen about it. Did someone swipe it during a photo shoot? Did it fall out somewhere in my disorganized house? In any event, that day I also noticed the plastic binder pages were so old they had begun to destabilize and become sticky: I thought they were archival quality when I bought them but clearly they needed to be replaced. I stored the collages in 2 gallon-sized ziplock bags until I got around to ordering replacement pages.

Today, instead of starting a hideous project I never should have agreed to take on, I decided to procrastinate by refiling the felons back into the new pages. I had thrown them into the ziplock bags in a jumble, and it dawned on me that I’d never be able to put them back in their original order. Well, so what? Embrace the randomness of life. Love chaos. Wabi-sabi. I just began grabbing the cards and storing them away. Lo and behold: when I finished, I had 25 pages with 4 collages each. I had never lost one; it must have been slipped into a case with another, and since they’re 2-sided I never noticed. There is a lesson in there of some sort, I think it’s about the larger meaning of fugitive, but beyond that I have no clue.

If you would like to see more felons (though I haven’t scanned all 100—yet), visit my website, click on Portfolio, navigate to Personal Work and then to 100 Fugitive Felons. My new site—coming soon! will have more direct linkage-ability.

I really don’t have a good reason for posting this except that it popped up on Google image search (I was researching the previous entry about seed package art) and I found it pretty great, in that 60’s moptop kind of way.

How many bands and album covers from this era relied on art direction along the lines of: take confused/stoned band to location, shoot, done? Concept pretty spare. “OK lads. This time, in a greenhouse. Things are growing. Look meaningful.”

Or: “OK lads, by the water. Look meaningful.”

Or: “OK lads, just look meaningful. Don’t worry about the dead leaves…”

Image via http://www.thelabelman.com/

It’s been a long time since my last post and I hope I still have some readers left…maybe three or four? Excuses, excuses: I finished my thesis and graduated from the Design Criticism master’s degree program at the School of Visual Arts on May 14, and now that I’ve caught up on sleep and regenerated some brain cells (maybe three or four) I plan to post on a more regular basis in the weeks to come. You’ve been warned.

Anyway, I did manage to write this last week for the excellent idsgn.org. It was an idea proposed for an assignment given by Michael Bierut at DCrit, but somehow I ended up writing about album art instead for his class. The notion to write about seed package art stayed with me, though, and here it is just in time for spring.

When I stumbled across this great blog All My Eyes today and spotted a post about gorgeous Argentinean bus tickets, naturally I had to keep reading. I wasn’t disappointed.

I have a personal interest in tickets; my great-grandfather Ruben Harry Helsel invented more than 45 different ticket dispensing machines between 1917 and 1958.

Photo by Angela Riechers

His Takacheck (above) is still a familiar sight anywhere people need a civilized way to take a number and wait their turn. (I wrote about my great-grandfather for a design research class taught by Steve Heller as part of SVA’s DCrit MFA program; you can see the finished book here.)