viz.

Image Credit: Sandy Carson, taken from CultureMap Austin

For those of us interested in architectural sculpture, the last few months in Austin (especially on the UT campus) have felt like gifts from the art gods. I’ve already written about one exhibition (the recently-closed El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa show at the Blanton Museum of Art). This month ushered in a second sculptural exhibition. New York sculptor Diana Al-Hadid’s Suspended After Image, a site-specific installation at UT’s Visual Arts Center’s Vaulted Gallery, is a feat of texture and height. As a fantastic example of architectural art, Al-Hadid’s most recent work for the VAC asks viewers to circumambulate the sculpture and ponder the relationship between memory, built objects, and humanity.

While the google “street view” feature has certainly revolutionized the way we look at maps, they’re now taking that technology a step further – over the threshold and into buildings.  The “Art Project,” powered by Google, has partnered with museums all over the world to bring not just the art, but the museums themselves to your computer.

Image Credit: Eric Rice's Flickr

H/T : 2D Code Blog and Hampton for the QR reader demonstration

In anticipation of Viz Blog's upcoming collaboration with the DWRL Immersive Environments Group, I'm devoting this week's post to a bit of background on QR codes - two dimensional barcodes that can contain several different types of data: URLs, a limited number of plain text characters, phone numbers, or SMS. In the image above, Eric Rice's "nerdscaping" of his driveway has been captured from space by Google's satellite view. Although the code wasn't quite completed when the photograph was taken, Rice's project will inevitably be only one of many giant QR codes that will soon appear on satellite images. Driveways, yards, parking lots, and building rooftops are all spaces where these codes can be placed to embed information on specific locations in the real world.

Image Credit: "Freeze! Revisited" by Florian Jennet and Valentin Beinroth via todayandtomorrow.net

H/T to Ben Koch

Since the 1950s, the pop art movement has been challenging our ideas about mass-produced images and objects.  Particularly by manipulating context, pop artists identify and exploit cultural trends.  In a recent exhibition, two German artists explored the intersections of art, violence, and mistaken identities.

High Yellow by Ellsworth Kelly, courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art

This year, the Visual Rhetoric Workgroup has collaborated with the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin on the Steve in Action project. Steve in Action is a collaboration of individuals and institutions collectively exploring the value of social tagging to improve access to cultural heritage collections and engage audiences in new ways. (For more about the Steve in Action Project, see their web site.)

Image credit: legofesto via Boing Boing

John Jones sent along a link to this image, from the work of a photographer who documents events in the "war on terror" with Lego dioramas. (I have an earlier post on viz. on a somewhat similar subject, an artist who used Legos to create depictions of the Holocaust.)

Mexican-American artist Rene Alvarado currently has an exhibit at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts through November 12.

"Madonna and Two Horses"

Is this stuff cool, or what?

"Songbird"

If you go to the artist's website, you can see even more of his fantastic paintings -- and find out more about the artist, whom I'd never heard of before hearing of him on KUT a few days ago. On the website his work gets compared to Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo's, but I see similarities between Alvarado's work and a host of others. You can see the surrealist influence of Dali, without a doubt, and an almost Chagall-like dreaminess. Picasso is there as well. But what Alvarado brings to the table is a specifically Chicano approach to these surrealist landscapes. According to his site, he is concerned largely with the psychology of identity. His parents brought him to the States when he was 7, and it is through his art that Alvarado tells the story of creating a new life in West Texas.

Recurring images in his work are bulls, the sea, and the female form. In some paintings Alvarado seems to be asking us to contemplate the art of display, as his still lifes stare back, accusingly, at the viewer. In another eerie painting, all in red hues, three mysterious bird-like creatures look over the sculpture of a torso -- with a dolphin's head. I chose the two paintings here because they seem to represent two different directions Alvarado takes in his work: abstraction and portraiture. In the first, the Madonna's triangular form occupies most of the canvas, her dark head and halo standing out against the softer pastels. Within those pastels, horses and fish and faces lurk, swimming and whispering and standing alert. The triangle of the Madonna's form intersects with a second, shadow triangle, the base of which is the blue feathers behind the horses' heads. All these triangles -- not to mention the look of the Madonna's head -- bring to mind ancient Mesoamerican civilizations that this Madonna might have been a part of.

The second painting, "Songbird," doesn't beg for the same kind of symbolic unpacking. It's what Alvarado does with color here that's so interesting to me, the play of shade and light that makes the soft grey feathers on the bird stand out so strikingly against the woman's hair. On the right side of the painting we see the faint imprint of a flower shoot.

Alvarado has converted an old church in San Angelo into his studio, blending community, tradition, and functionality in practice as well as in his art. It may be well worth the 4 1/2 hour drive from Austin to see.

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:

Perhaps a good point of departure for a discussion of Women in Film would be the creator's earlier attempt to give us an overview of Women in Art:

Does high art create/communicate normative body structures or gender roles in the same way as popular culture?

I remember when I used to live in Portland in the late 90s, and I would see these stickers of Andre the Giant in all the bus stops. I never knew what they meant, but I liked them well enough to peel one off a bus stop wall and stick it on my bike.