If you’re in the East Village area of NYC between today and November 16, you might want to stop by Giant Robot. They’re celebrating their newly opened gallery with an exhibit featuring work by James Kochalka, Adrian Tomme and Jeffrey Brown. Should have some badass stuff on display.
With the cultural fascination that Mexico has with masked men fighting evil, why is it that they aren’t a bigger comic book market for companies like MArvel and DC? Logically, this market should dwarf the US since they don’t seem to have any problems with the concept of grown-ups wearing spandex and beating the snot out of each other. I suppose it could be a racial thing, what with there not being that many - if any - prominent Mexican superheroes, but then Wolverine being Canadian certainly never seemed to hurt his popularity here in the states. Either way, the whole luchador culture is one that’s endlessly fascinating to me, and I love seeing things like this. Equator Books in Venice, CA is currently running an exhibit of luchador photos in their gallery until December 1, 2005. I can’t seem to find anything indicating that they’re planning to publish them in book form, but I’d be shocked if that wasn’t in the works.
I can’t imagine it was too comfortable working in the temperature that must have been needed in order to complete a1,000 pound butter scuplture of Yoda and Darth Vader. Can’t argue with the end result, however. Even if Yoda does seem a little vacant and soulless, the sculptor managed to perfectly capture the buttery essence of Vader.
Thanks to Dan’s link to TIME’s piece on the Nintendo Revolution (and I agree, the Revolution looks like it’s gonna be amazing), I stumbled across this killer photo essay on street art. This is the sort of thing I always wanted to do, but I never seemed to be able to get the courage up to go out and tag public property. In a lot of ways the art and artists presented in this piece seem to epitomize the evolution of traditional graffiti art, focusing less on tags and more on actually recreating and reinventing their various canvases. The trompe l’oeil pieces are particularly striking, IMO.
I’m not a huge Lichtenstein fan myself, but that doesn’t mean I want to see the guy’s legacy destroyed by a nutjob.
She faces charges of causing grave property damage - a crime that carries a punishment of up to five years in prison.
The woman said she slashed the painting because she believed it was a forgery - a claim denied by the exhibition’s curator, Rudolf Sagmeister.
Mr Sagmeister, who organised the exhibition called Roy Lichtenstein: Classic of the New, said the painting could be restored.
Coop is currently in the process of showing readers his, well, artistic process via his blog. It’s really quite interesting to not only see how he works, but at what scale he works as well. I don’t know why, since I’ve seen some of his pieces before, but I always think he’s working at a smaller size than what’s shown here. I also never knew that the man was colorblind, which makes his final pieces that much more amazing since his sense of color design is a huge part of what attracts me to his work in the first place.
Remember, this is Coop, so that means naked women boobies. It may not be safe for your workplace surfing.
I can understand why DC and Time Warner would be annoyed at this sort of exhibit - nobody wants to see their company’s characters lampooned or otherwise distorted by other artists - but I’m not sure that busting out the legal action is the best move. Artists have co-opted pop culture images and icons into their own work for years, not to produce their own comics, TV shows or anything like that, but for political statements and the like. I don’t see this exhibit being any different and, while I’m not impressed by the quality of the work itself, I’d hate to see future artists shy away from using similar themes and techniques in their work.
D.C. Comics has hit a Chelsea art dealer with a “cease & desist” letter for exhibiting Mark Chamberlain’s watercolors on a “gay Batman” theme. The works, which were exhibited at Kathleen Cullen Fine Art this spring (where they found ready buyers at prices starting at $200), include images of Batman and Robin exchanging a kiss, a watercolor titled Robin’s Baby Pictures depicting the Boy Wonder’s cute rear end, and a rendering of the Caped Crusader, sans shirt but otherwise in costume, striking a languorous pose. “D.C. Comics wants me to hand over all unsold work and invoices for the sold work,” exclaimed dealer Kathleen Cullen (the gallery was formerly named Artek Contemporaries). “I’ve spent the last two weeks of my life consulting lawyers!” (Some works are also posted on Artnet, which has received a similar letter.)
The use by fine artists of mass-market and commercial cartoon imagery goes back decades — both Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol were pursued by photographers for copyright violations (the artists tended to settle), and Jeff Koons famously litigated the String of Puppies case all the way to the Supreme Court (he lost). The Walt Disney Co. brought an infringement suit against Dennis Oppenheim for using small statuettes of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in his sculpture Virus, with mixed results — the artist was forbidden to sell the work but allowed to exhibit it. Karen Finley’s 1999 book, Pooh Unplugged, a rather scatological version of the children’s classic, forestalled a similar lawsuit by labeling the publication “a parody” on its cover. The issue is a hot one — more recently, artists including Tom Sachs and Damien Loeb have been touched by copyright (and trademark) disputes. Stay tuned.
Found on ArtNet via boingboing.
While Erni Colón is referenced by his work at HArvey comics in this article, I’ll always remember him fondly as the artist on DC’s “Amethyst”. I’m not sure how old he is at this point, but he’s still turning out the work apparently, this time with a comic available at a small museum in Oyster Bay.
Colón and his wife, writer and editor Ruth Ashby, collaborated on A Spy for General Washington, which had its official launch at the museum yesterday at a signing in the middle of a daylong encampment by Revolutionary War British re-enactors.
“I thought it would be a good idea to have a comic book because children usually get pretty bored in museums pretty quickly,” Colón said.
The product has been available for several months in the museum gift shop for $4 and has already been given to some school groups. “It’s great,” executive director Sarah Abruzzi said. “It makes it so much more accessible for the kids.”
