Trash Art by Meika Jensen

Trash Takes Museums by Storm

Meika Jensen

Sustainability haunts every classroom in this country. Everyone, from those in accredited masters degree programs to kindergarten students, are discussing the issue and making changes both lifestyle and policy changes. The art community is no different.  Charged with showing the world a picture of itself, capturing the very essence of life, in a day and age plagued by waste and plastic it is no wonder that artists are turning to trash for inspiration.

A shiny chandelier is constructed of worn out kitchen pipes.  Children inspect sculptures of mythological horses crafted from plastic bottles. Disco balls made entirely of metal cans and shreds of paper towels.  All of these bits and scraps of trash and rubbish represent faces of a new movement that is taking place in at the forefront of the art world. The movement originates from deep inside the plastic arts community and is all about taking regular recyclable materials, as well as those that are reusable not but exactly recyclable, and turning them into functional everyday reproducible objects.

Stepping away from the idea that art should be made for art’s sake, these artists are spreading a greater global message - the ability to turn weaknesses into strengths by changing the aesthetics of ugly. The current driving idea in eco-art is that of transformation of trash into something functional as well as visually stunning.

Using trash in the material for art was a launch pad for the new artists. Today, people are not as shocked at this trend as they were at the beginning; artists have succeeded in incorporating repurposed materials into the acceptable realm of materials and concepts. Whether they are making a house out of bottles or calling a urinal a fountain, yesterday’s waste is tomorrow masters degree program fodder.   

More and more artists are preoccupied by the ecological impact of waste and the significance of a throw away culture. Artistic manifestos seem to make their way into the woods as well; since Thoreau wrote Walden and Native art broke into mainstream museums, artists have kept it on their radar.

The answer of the artistic community to the new wave of trash-art is a rather warm one. There are some traditional painters who cannot accept that a tree made of plastic has the same artistic value as a tree painted by Rembrandt, Degas, Monet or Mondrian. However, most artists themselves recognize the fact that today’s over-consumption model is not viable and needs a major redesign, continuing the tradition of portraiture and consumption wouldn’t be breaking any norms.

The future will probably see the most compelling pieces exposed somewhere in a museum buried in a landfill. Projects of this kind are already in place in San Diego, according to the University of California’s Institute of Research in the Arts. Other projects will probably be formatted as creative workshops and short-term expositions moving from one part of the country to another. The public seems to be the winner, as the new generation of artists who believe in recycling can serve as a moral model to the even younger generations who are sure to follow.

However, if art ever repeats itself, it is only in the sense that norms will be broken. Once trash art is ubiquitous, it will go the way of marble sculptures. 

Irma Haselberger

"Ethereal Graze"

Laura Lucía Ferrer Zamudio

Franz Jantzen

“Ghost Light (Loew’s Theater, Jersey City)” (2012)

Aerial Rites, Franz Jantzen: At Hemphill Fine Arts to March 10

By Louis Jacobson • February 3, 2012 • Washington City Paper

Franz Jantzen has one of the more interesting lives among Washington photographers. By day, he’s a collections manager of graphic arts at the Supreme Court. Until recently, he worked as a freelance darkroom printer for the Library of Congress, developing images from the library’s fabled archives, a gig that recently came to an end due to changing technology and demand.

Jantzen is also a fine-art photographer, one whose innovative—and painstaking—digital technique is currently on display at Hemphill Fine Arts.

I was first impressed by Jantzen’s space-bending approach in 2009, when one of his images was included in a group show at Hemphill. The 57-by-172-inch photograph portrayed a food-display table at a county fair. Rather than making a single photograph, Jantzen stitched together countless smaller ones to create the larger image.

But even more striking was the perspective: Viewers were able to scrutinize the finest details of the cornucopia as if they were hanging from the ceiling. At virtually any grid point in the photograph, you were looking straight down at the table; there was no foreshortening or subtle recession of the more distant edges.

Other artists, from David Hockney on, have toyed with stitching together many photographs into one. Today, Photoshop makes it easier than ever. But Jantzen’s use of the vertical perspective offers something bracingly new to this familiar approach.

It was so unusual that I felt compelled to ask Jantzen whether he had actually constructed some kind of apparatus to suspend his camera and move it around during the shoot. He said no. “I hold the camera out in front of me, arms more or less straight out, and aim it down,” he said. “With the camera essentially parallel to the floor, I would make a snapshot, move forward, and make another, move forward, make another, and so on, until I had gathered a straight-down view of every section of the floor.” He called it “just like a satellite mapping the earth’s surface.”

Maybe it was just the shock of the new, but none of the images from Jantzen’s current show pack quite the punch that the county-fair photograph did. Still, the solo exhibit includes a number of impressive works.

One image lingers lovingly over the floor of Loew’s Theater in Jersey City, where, according to legend, a young Frank Sinatra heard Bing Crosby in concert in March 1933 and decided to become a singer. The theater, now run hand-to-mouth by a nonprofit, shows its age in its tiniest details—worn velvet seats, heavily frayed floorboards. The most notable sign of life is the curlicue of electrical cord that meanders gracefully over the stage. Jantzen says the image took 95 hours to stitch together, and it shows.

Another image is far simpler, though still hardly straightforward—an image of a stump surrounded by grass. Seen from above, it could easily be an aerial photograph of a pool of polluted water; it takes a few glances to figure out exactly that it’s the remains of a tree.

Some of Jantzen’s finest works are meditations on art itself. Using a slightly different technique—one in which he stitches together images taken straight ahead rather than straight down—Jantzen photographs a Cézanne painting in a jumbled style that winkingly suggests cubism. In the same fractured style, he photographs a stack of packing boxes turned into art by Warhol. (The small sign that reads “Please do not touch the art” is a nice grace note.)

Most strikingly, Jantzen records a decaying display in the somewhat grimy front window of a wedding photographer’s shop, echoing Walker Evans’ famous image of photographs lining the front window of a portrait studio. In Jantzen’s version, though, the top row of color photographs in the display are in fine shape, while the lower rows devolve into an eerie, blue chemical mess overlain with ghostly human forms. One can’t help but wonder why the wedding photographer let his window display go for so long, but we’re fortunate that Jantzen stumbled into it and rescued the odd tableau from obscurity.

Fred Herzog: Philosophy of photography

 "Content cannot be manufactured, in my opinion. That which I can find is better than that which you can make. That which we find, the work and the use of the people out there, it’s natural, that’s what ordinary people do, that interests me."

Found on onlinebrowsing        (a rich resource for artists)

Kaufmann’s Posographe

Kaufmann’s Posographe
An instrument for calculating aperture and exposure time when taking photographs in any possible situation. For outdoors, it includes settings with values like “Snowy scene”, “Greenery with expanse of water”, or “Very narrow old street”, “Cloudy and somber”, “Blue with white clouds”, or “Purest blue”.
More info here.

Return of the Darkroom

NHPR – Word of Mouth - Segment – January 25, 2011

The mass market for film has dwindled in the digital age, but renewed interest in the tangible, nostalgic qualities of old formats may keep shutterbugs snapping film for years to come.

Darmstadt Madonna, Hans Holbein the Younger

Almost 500 years ago, Hans Holbein the Younger (*1497 Augsburg – 1543 London) created his masterpiece "The Madonna With the Family of Mayor Meyer" (the so-called "Darmstadt Madonna") in Basel. The panel, which is often compared to Raphael's Sistine Madonna, gained global renown for its long and complex origination, Holbein's ingenious and daring visual ideas as well as its highly unusual later fate.

American Suburb X

Founded in 2008, AMERICAN SUBURB X / ASX is an ever-growing archive and fiercely edited look at photography’s massively relevant past, dramatically shifting present and rapidly unfolding future. Our mission is to provide and provoke, to educate and titillate those who are obsessed with photography, its culture and all of its beautiful moving parts.
With over 140,000 visitors a month, 750,000 monthly page views and 35,000 Fans on Facebook, ASX is becoming the destination on the web for global fans of photography.

Publish Post

Nacho Ormaechea

Untitled-5

Untitled-13

Untitled-18

Untitled-26

Nacho Ormaecher
Spanish Art Director and Designer subscriber to Parisian cafés in recent years.
Freelance and proud of it, I use my independence to promote the tailor-made and to go along with any project from A to Z. I love the dialogue and exchange to find out what is the identity of a project and, when I have doubts, I always know whom to ask, I lead a network of creative people who complement my skills: architect, printers, editor, webmaster...

Mandelblub

Geeky Math Equation Creates Beautiful 3-D World

THE VISUAL TELLING OF STORIES

THE VISUAL TELLING OF STORIES

Welcome to Chris Mullen's website, The Visual Telling of Stories. You can go to the main gate or shuffle about in the Samplers till you get some hang of the place. It was started in 1996. Material is added every day. It is far bigger than you could ever imagine. I don't blame you for backing out, with a polite cough. I'll never know.

Photoseed

Étude, 1896 by Paul Bergon from Photoseed

Bringing to Light the Growth and Artistic Vision of 19th & 20th Century Photography

SLICEDSOUP

Extrusion Map-69, 2010, Douglas Prince
I've been fortunate to have some work from "Extrusion Maps" added to SLICEDSOUP, a curated collection of art discovered online:

http://www.slicedsoup.org/

David Prifti

© David Prifti, 2009, Hannah, Assabet

David Prifti, who died on November 21st, was a photographer and teacher who for the past 15 years embraced the earliest techniques of photography. Using the traditional wet plate collodion process, which was developed in the 1850’s, David made photographs of contemporary sitters and subjects that are tinged with a sweet and haunting sense of nostalgia.

Because the wet collodion process requires exposures from 30 seconds to 2 minutes time it provides powerful opportunities for a deep inspection and engagement. “My interest lies in the power of a photograph to describe my subject clearly and with power,” Prifti once wrote. “What begins with my interest in the physical appearance of the subject, develops into an evolving exploration of the sitter and myself.”

John Currin

Thanksgiving by John Currin, 2003, The Tate Collection, London.

John Currin's artwork brings to mind the naturally lit rooms of Vermeer and the realistic, beautiful, yet often grotesque figures of Odd Nerdrum. What I see here are three women, obviously related, preparing a huge turkey for Thanksgiving, but the turkey is really the star. It is impossibly fat and huge, I have a hard time believing they will be able to fit it into an oven.

Happy Thanksgiving. Your Daily Art

“Surrealismus in Paris” at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Basel

La poupée by Hans Bellmer, painted wood, papier-mâché, mixed media, 1935/36, 61×170×51 cm, courtesy Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, photo © Collection Centre Pompidou/Vertrieb RMN/Georges Meguerditchian/ProLitteris.

visit  WURZELTOD  for review and more information

Francesca Woodman

Francesca Woodman in her studio, Pilgrim Mills, Providence, RI,1976, click on image to animate, Douglas D. Prince

Lytro

Camera of the Future of the Camera

Lori Nix

"Library",  2007,  Lori Nix