viz.

Libraries of Health and Complete Antique, Brian Dettmer.

H/T to Brian Gatten, Lauren Gantz and NPR

In honor of World Book Day (March 3--but it's not too late to celebrate!) NPR's visual culture blog, The Picture Show, featured work by Atlanta artist Brian Dettmer. Dettmer takes vintage books and carves them into sculptures that, as Mito Habe-Evans explains, "[deconstruct] the linear narrative determined by the structure of the book" and open the door for new interpretations. In giving new life to a supposedly dying medium, Dettmer's sculptures make an argument about the cultural space of physical books, now and in the future.

An image series of Real Dolls from photographer Zackary Canepari's blog

No, this isn't a photo-essay about the box of human heads found on a Southwest Airlines flight last June.  But it's still a bit creepy.  The ominous and evocative image above is from series of photos by Zackary Canepari, documenting the construction of Real Dolls - anatomically correct mannequins that run about $6,000 for those in the market.  Not safe for work content after the jump.

Image Credit: Jason Freeny Moist Productions

Elieen's viz. post from a few weeks ago on Justine Cooper's photo-documentation of the American Museum of Natural History in New York has been bouncing around in my head ever since.  It (re)kindled a long-standing interest I've had in both natural history museums and slightly morbid kinds of art.  In both digital images and sculpture, artist Jason Freeny invests familiar children's toys with anatomical interiors, suggesting an inner life/death that both unsettles and intrigues.

This summer I taught a rhetoric course that focused on the idea of a University. The course used Cardinal Newman's nineteenth-century treatise as a jumping off point but also looking at other ways a university might define itself as an institution. One of the more interesting discussions in class was one in which we investigated the relationship between art and the university...

The University of Texas, our home institution and object of study, has an archive (describing itself as a "world-renowned cultural institution") that not only houses important pieces of visual, textual, and performing art but also has its own galleries to put these objects on display. The building itself was recently renovated, and the atriums converted into "galleries" themselves that display the Center's significant collections on etched glass windows:

In my rhetoric course, I ask students to find and bring in examples of protests. This week, one of my students brought in a news story about a man (Graziano Cecchini) who poured red dye into the Trevi fountain in Italy.

Because the purpose of memorials is to represent and remember a person or event, they make arguments. Once there is representation, there is argument. It's also clear that memorials make arguments because people get very excited about how and where someone or something is represented. That’s why the rebuilding of the Twin Towers site is still being discussed. This sort of passionate argument about memorials is also seen in University of Texas at Austin's statue situation.