With Software, Artists Put Yet Another Spin on the Presidential Debates

By BEN SISARIO

Published: October 6, 2008,

NY Times

For the audience who watched the first presidential debate from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston last month, no post-debate analysis was necessary.

As the candidates spoke, brightly colored columns of type floated across the screen, zipped from side to side and broke apart to form complex shapes, like molecular models. All the data you could imagine about the conversation, and more — from how many times the candidates used the word “finance” to their favorite pronouns — were instantly collated and shuffled. It could have been a hyper-detailed PowerPoint presentation.

The visuals were the work of Sosolimited, three young media artists who present live “remixes” of the debates between Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama, using software they wrote to rearrange and display information culled directly from the broadcast. They are on a short tour to remix the broadcasts of the two remaining debates, coming to the Art Directors Club in Manhattan on Tuesday and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington on Oct. 15.

For the members of Sosolimited, their remix, called “ReConstitution 2008,” is an act both of political engagement and mischief, examining the language of politics while gently mocking its repetitious nature with a kind of scorecard.

“In a sports broadcast, there’s the idea of the playback, where these statistics are flashed up on the screen,” said Eric Gunther, 30. “We do a similar thing here, but more along the lines of language. You’re watching these words getting cataloged as they’re coming out of their mouths.”

Mr. Gunther and his colleagues, John Rothenberg and Justin Manor, are graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and work at the same Boston design firm, where they create what they call dynamic interactive installations for museums and corporate clients. Others might call it magic: For a Beatles-theme bar at the Mirage in Las Vegas (where Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles show, “Love,” plays), they created an interactive display that allows patrons to draw light patterns on their tables.

“When our clients come to us,” said Mr. Manor, 30, “that’s how they see us: O.K., you guys are the geeky M.I.T. magicians who make the impossible happen.”

The members of Sosolimited perform around Boston as high-tech D.J.’s, mixing visuals with music, and four years ago they came up with the idea of doing instant data analysis on the Bush-Kerry debates, likening their work to an instantaneous version of interactive infographics on the Web. “It maintains the immediacy of TV,” Mr. Gunther said.

It caught on, and for the current election cycle they have overhauled their software for an array of new tricks, like displaying antonyms of the words the candidates say. (“General Petraeus” becomes “Specific Petraeus.”) They often alter or remove one visual element of the broadcast while keeping others intact, making animated silhouettes of the candidates, for instance, to draw attention to their body language. Other times they are more playful, turning the candidates’ heads into sky-blue bubbles that move around the screen.

The members say they are nonpartisan.

“We don’t approach this show with a specific bias, other than that we want to present the underlying information,” said Mr. Rothenberg, 29. “If there’s any real attitude behind it, it’s about exposing you to what’s beyond the media, stripping away the production that goes into politics.”

David Henry, director of programs at the Institute of Contemporary Art, said the performance exposed layers of media between the viewer and the candidates, like CNN’s graphic that showed how Democrats, Republicans and independents in the audience reacted to each candidate’s words.

“On CNN there’s already a kind of manipulation,” Mr. Henry said. “Sosolimited are drawing your attention to it, and doing more so.”

Sosolimited’s sophisticated programming begins with low technology: the broadcast’s closed caption feed. From it words are sorted and rearranged, guided by their computer to follow certain words and phrases.

“We have a list of topics and keywords that we expect the candidates to talk about that was culled from their Web sites,” Mr. Rothenberg said. “Then we look at all the instances of a keyword, like health care, jobs, weapons. And spending — spending was a big one in the first debate.”

While performing, the members of the group appear in black suits and black sunglasses. They said their intention was to look like omniscient news anchors, but with the shades they look more like secret agents or spies.

“It’s a little bit of a clue to the audience about our mischievousness,” Mr. Gunther said. “It’s saying that yes, the stakes are high, and this is a serious subject matter. But we’re still going to have a little fun.”

Painter Eyes Hip-Hop’s Titans

Los Angeles Times

by Lynell George

August 31, 2008

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The Forum Gallery

STATURE: Hip-hop artist Kanye West is among the subjects of painter Alex Melamid, previously renowned as a conceptual art rebel in Soviet Russia. His large paintings of the rappers are cast in amber light, recalling the work of Old Masters.

From Soviet realism with a twist to portraits of American rap stars might seem something of a leap — but not necessarily for Alexander Melamid.

The Russian-born artist has often been interested in creating more than a bit of political havoc. Known for decades for work that was both bold commentary and incisive satire, Melamid and his creative partner, Vitaly Komar, were renowned as conceptual art rebels in Soviet Russia and were also considered to be the architects of the Soviet Realist Pop Art movement. But in 2003, Melamid parted ways not just with Komar but also, it seemed, with the international scene.

As it happened, Melamid had simply turned another creative corner. His son, Dan “The Man” Melamid, a video director, had introduced him to hip-hop’s royalty — literally. From 2003 to 2005, Melamid spent time with a dozen of the business’ most famous icons, including rappers Kanye West, 50 Cent, Lil Jon, Snoop Dogg and Reverend Run and entrepreneur Russell Simmons. During their sessions together he both photographed and drew them, providing the basis for what would become a new series of paintings.

“Holy Hip-Hop!” is the result of Melamid’s close study and conversations. The portraits — rendered larger than life and cast in an amber light that references the Old Masters — find the figures all about their business: on the telephone, at the computer, ready to take a meeting, poised for performance. They are decorated with the trappings, or iconography, of their time — diamonds, cellphones, designer watches and shoes. The show, which premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, is Melamid’s first solo exhibition and will be on view at the Forum Gallery in Los Angeles from Sept. 12 through Nov. 1.

– Lynell George

Great British Watercolors

By KAREN WILKIN

WSJ.com
August 2, 2008;

New Haven and New York

An English friend maintains that the British are not a visual people. “We like words,” he says, “and gardens. That’s why all those British conceptual artists who do things with trees and rocks are so popular. But what we’re really good at is language. Look at our novelists and poets.” He may have a point, but visitors to “Great British Watercolors From the Paul Mellon Collection,” at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Conn., through Aug. 17, may have reason to doubt his pronouncement.

Seen last year at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, and the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia, the exhibition was organized to honor Paul Mellon, the founder of the Yale Center, on the centennial of his birth (he died in 1999). Yet what the show really celebrates is not a connoisseur’s passion, nor even British mastery of a particular kind of painting, but the importance of English artists in transforming a medium once thought of as purely utilitarian into something appropriate to the demands of ambitious art — all in purely visual terms.

“Great British Watercolors” can be enjoyed simply as a miscellany of prime examples of the discipline. More than 80 works from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries provide a great deal to delight the eye. Some of the best-known British artists are represented: Richard Parkes Bonington, John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Girtin, Samuel Palmer and Joseph Mallord William Turner, for example, along with the satirist Thomas Rowlandson. But the Mellon collection is notably broad — only a fraction is represented in the exhibition — so the selection also pays homage to less familiar figures, known for their contribution to the evolution of the medium, artists such as Alexander Cozens, Cozens’s son John Robert, Paul Sandby and John Cotman. And there is a host of obscure but often gifted painters, including the irresistibly named Julius Caesar Ibbetson, Michael “Angelo” Rooker, and Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding; the last, christened in honor of the Flemish-born 17th-century master and the Boston-born 18th-century portrait painter, was clearly destined for his chosen profession.

The closest we get to the words and language my friend claims dominate the British consciousness are the works by William Blake and Edward Lear, both equally accomplished as artists and writers. The exhibition’s Blakes include several sheets from an illustrated version of Thomas Gray’s poems, prepared as a birthday gift for the wife of the neoclassical sculptor John Flaxman; Blake surrounded pages from a printed edition of the poems, pasted on larger sheets of paper, with sinuous images tenuously related to such themes as “The Progress of Poesy.” Lear is represented by two fluent records of his travels in Egypt and the Holy Land, one with color notes written in for future reference.

Yale Center for British Art

William Blake illustrated Thomas Gray’s poems — such as ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,’ above — as a gift for the wife of the sculptor John Flaxman.

The subtext of “Great British Watercolors” is a history of the medium itself, in terms of both its reputation among artists and its technical possibilities, during the crucial century spanned by the selections on view. While water-based paint has a long history in Britain — the lavish manuscripts produced by English and Irish medieval monasteries were illuminated with watercolor — the earliest works in the exhibition demonstrate that in the 18th century, the medium was subservient to drawing. Renderings of picturesque landscapes, towns and monuments, both at home and abroad, executed with meticulous line, are enlivened with tinted washes.

Against these sharply focused images, Alexander Cozens’s washy, direct “fantastic landscapes” signal the beginning of a new way of painting on paper. A theorist, painter and teacher, famous for advocating working from the imagination, rather than from observation, Cozens suggested inventing images through free association. He advised starting pictures by laying in broad, monochrome washes and than turning the “blot,” as he called it, into an ideal landscape. (There’s an echo of Leonardo da Vinci’s recommendation that artists study the stains on walls for inspiration.) Cozens’s work was crucial to the acceptance of watercolor painting as serious art.

The exhibition’s lively Gainsboroughs, their loose strokes and washes heightened with chalk, further advance the cause of watercolor as a responsive painting medium, rather than as an adjunct to line. These improvisational landscape fragments, punctuated with sketchy carts and country folk, are both demonstrations of virtuosity and embodiments of the cult of sensibility — feeling — that dominated Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and was mercilessly pilloried by Jane Austen.

Watercolor’s enhanced status was officially announced in 1804 with the first exhibition of the newly formed “Society of Painters in Water-Colours.” The exhibition makes clear the ambition of the society’s members. British watercolor painters used their portable, quick drying medium to address everything from domestic interiors and English beauty spots to still life and scenes of exotic travel. The best exploited the transparency of the medium to evoke the pale sun of an English spring, the cloudy skies of Northern Europe, the brilliance of the Mediterranean — and more, including the agonies of the Crimean War.

Constable and Turner are the stars of “Great British Watercolors,” their paintings tributes to the evocative power of pools of tone and subdued color. The Constables are sketchy studies, the Turners usually more finished, but both depend on rapid gestures, bold overlays, and, often, wiping or scraping. The luminosity and audacity of the Turners make their rather conventional subject matter irrelevant. A study of Crichton Castle, amid mountains, with a rainbow, is so apparently spontaneous that it’s like watching the artist at work.

In a sense, Turner’s whole career illustrates the thesis underlying “Great British Watercolors”: An accomplished recorder of notable places in Britain transformed himself into an internationally acclaimed painter of romantic, often fantastic, landscapes and seascapes. Until Sept. 21, that evolution can be traced in the retrospective “J.M.W. Turner” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There’s a splendid selection of Turner’s paintings, including a stellar group of his uninhibited watercolors, both public and private, many of them even more brilliant and remarkable than those in New Haven, good as they are. See both exhibitions and then try to decide if the British are better at words than images.

National Endowment for the Arts Announces New Artists In The Workforce Study

Study provides the first look at 21st century labor trends among working artists

For immediate release
June 12, 2008

Contact: Sally Gifford 202-682-5606 giffords@arts.gov

Washington, DC — Today, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announces the release of Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005, the first nationwide look at artists’ demographic and employment patterns in the 21st century. Artists in the Workforce analyzes working artist trends, gathering new statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau to provide a comprehensive overview of this workforce segment, its maturation over the past 30 years, along with detailed information on specific artist occupations.

“Artists now play a huge but mostly unrecognized role in the new American economy of the 21st century,” said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. “This report shows how important American artists are to both our nation’s cultural vitality and economic prosperity of our communities.”

Numbering almost two million, artists are one of the largest classes of workers in the nation, only slightly smaller than the U.S. military’s active-duty and reserve personnel (2.2 million). Artists now represent 1.4 percent of the U.S. labor force. While Artists in the Workforce is not an economic impact study, it does report the average income of various artist categories. Based on those statistics, artists earn an aggregate income of approximately $70 billion annually. The study compares artists with the labor force in general, reporting on factors such as geographic distribution, racial, ethnic, and gender composition, employment status, age, and education level. Among the key findings:

Demographic trends

• Between 1970 and 1990, the number of artists more than doubled, from 737,000 to 1.7 million – a much larger percentage gain than for the labor force as a whole. Between 1990 and 2005, the growth of artists slowed to a 16 percent rate, about the same as for the overall labor force.
• Women remain underrepresented in several artist occupations. Men outnumber women in architecture, announcing, music, production, and photography. Women outnumber men in the fields of dance, design, and writing.
• Like the larger labor force, the artist population is becoming more diverse. The proportion of Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian artists grew from about nine percent of artists in 1990 to almost 15 percent by 2005.

Geographic distribution

• Opportunities for artistic employment are greater in metropolitan areas. More than one-fifth of all U.S. artists live in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington, and Boston. Half of all artists live in 30 metropolitan areas.
• Unique regional concentrations emerge. New Mexico has the highest share of fine artists, Vermont has the highest proportion of writers, and Tennessee, the highest proportion of musicians.

Employment and income

• Artists are entrepreneurial – 3.5 times more likely to be self-employed.
• Artists are underemployed – one-third of artists work for only part of the year.
• Artists generally earn less than workers with similar education levels. The median income from all sources in 2005 was $34,800 for artists, higher than the $30,100 median for the total labor force, and lower than the $43,200 for all professionals.

Education level

• Artists are more educated. Artists are twice as likely to have a college degree as other U.S. workers.
• The share of degree-holding artists rose between 1990 and 2005.
• Among artist occupations with the highest educational attainment levels are architects, writers, and producers.

In addition, the report profiles 11 artist occupations, including actors; announcers; architects; art directors, fine artists and animators; dancers and choreographers; designers; entertainers and performers; musicians; photographers; producers and directors; writers and authors. Each occupation profile describes key characteristics such as median age and income, and includes data on employment sectors, such as non-profit, business, or self-employed. Artists in the Workforce also features 60 supporting tables with detailed information about artists by state, region, and metropolitan areas, gender, racial, and ethnic designations, and other categories.

“This report brings cohesion to a large, diverse, and important constituency served by the NEA,” said Sunil Iyengar, NEA Director of Research and Analysis. “It recognizes artists as a distinct and dynamic component of the total labor force.”

Artists in the Workforce assembled data from primary sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau’s 1990 and 2000 decennial censuses and the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) averages for 2003-2005. This report is the first attempt to study artists by using ACS data. The study focuses on Americans who named an artist occupation as their primary job. It is estimated that 300,000 Americans have secondary employment as artists.

NEA Office of Research and Analysis
Artists in the Workforce is the latest offering from the NEA Office of Research and Analysis, which has conducted authoritative and comprehensive research on artist workforce patterns and other subjects for more than 30 years. The NEA Research Division issues periodic research reports and briefs on significant topics affecting artists and arts organizations. Artists in the Workforce and other reports are available in print and electronic form in the Research section of the NEA website, www.arts.gov.

About the National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the Arts Endowment is the largest annual national funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases.

A Canvas of Wood, Chain Saws as Brushes

Chris Becker for The New York Times

By KATIE ZEZIMA

Published: July 23, 2008

HANCOCK, Me. — Ray Murphy’s art is dirty, dangerous and very, very loud.

Using only a chain saw, Mr. Murphy creates animals and figures from huge tree trunks and meticulously carves numbers on toothpicks and Popsicle sticks. When he is finished, so is the piece — he refuses to sand, varnish or paint anything he makes.

“I am a sawyer, period. I use chain saws and refuse to pick up carving tools,” said Mr. Murphy, 65. “Real chain saw art is done with a chain saw.”

And for $10, anyone can see him make that art.

Mr. Murphy started a nightly chain-saw show last year, a 90-minute performance where he attacks pieces of wood with one of three chain saws. At each show he recruits a volunteer from the audience and makes him wear a belt with a wooden buckle, from which he carves something. So far everything has turned out fine.

The indoor show has an M.C. and is set to blaring music. Mr. Murphy works in a soundproof booth with clear plastic on one side; a suspended camera broadcasts close-up shots onto a projection screen. The chain saw comes precariously close to his long, wiry gray beard.

“It’s so unique that people don’t quite get it,” Mr. Murphy said.

His show comes as chain-saw carvings, and carvers are increasingly popular.

Jen Ruth, who books dozens of chain-saw artists at carving competitions across the country, said there were about 8,000 carvers nationwide.

“As an agent, I’ve seen a massive explosion in chain-saw art,” Ms. Ruth said. “A lot of people want to get into it because they think it’s cool and they’ll get rich real quick, which is not true.”

Most artists make their creations year-round and perform at competitions and fairs in the summer. But no one is doing the same thing as Mr. Murphy, Ms. Ruth said.

Mr. Murphy claims that he invented chain-saw art in 1953, when as an 11-year-old in a Wyoming logging family, he started carving animals from logs. He kept carving through his teenage years, in college, during stints at various logging companies and in the Forest Service, and ultimately at his own logging business.

Mr. Murphy and his wife settled in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In 1972 he bought an old Greyhound bus and hit the road, driving all over North America to make and sell his wares.

The front of the bus was a showroom; the back was a bunk; the chain saws were kept below. Mr. Murphy hooked a trailer holding logs to the back because not everywhere had an abundance of timber.

“There was a lean-to shade off to the side, and I set up work between the two doors. People went in the front door and out the back door,” Mr. Murphy said. “People knew who I was. In some backwoods places, people stopped me along the way to buy sculptures in the middle of the night, 3, 4 in the morning. It’s a strange thing.”

Mr. Murphy went on to fame, appearing on “Wide World of Sports” on ABC in 1982 and carving the alphabet into pencils at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum in Myrtle Beach, S.C. The museum still displays many of them, its archivist, Edward Meyer, said.

Mr. Murphy returned to the Black Hills in the early 1980s, but the area had become more commercial. He and his family decided to drive east to “wherever God takes us,” which was this town of 2,100 that serves as one of the gateways to Acadia National Park.

Business in Maine went well — so well, he said, that people bought his creations faster than he could make them. He socked away the money he made to fulfill his dream of performing with a chain saw every night.

He moved his shop from a side street to busy Route 1, and spent $250,000 building a theater for his shows. Rows of bleacher seating look onto Mr. Murphy’s plexiglass-covered stage.

“This is my dream,” Mr. Murphy said outside the bus, which now holds newspaper clippings, awards and other memorabilia from his carving career. As 7 p.m. — show time — approached, Mr. Murphy got antsy.

“Anyone here yet?” he asked.

So far this summer, attendance has been sparse, but the show goes on. On a recent Tuesday night, the Schaffers, a family from Virginia who know Mr. Murphy, stopped by to say hello and stayed for the show.

“The dude knows his stuff,” said Peter Schaffer, who attended with his sons, Jesse, 13, and Harris, 15, and his wife, Lindsay Harris.

Mr. Murphy got into the booth and started carving. Soon, a large log became a table and chairs, with a hamburger and fries atop the table. Then he meticulously tackled a piece of wood using a smaller chain saw, his face close. Out popped a small ladybug, which Mr. Murphy brought out and put on a dime.

The show continued for about an hour and a half, with Mr. Murphy carving initials on a nervous photographer’s belt buckle, a moon and a sign that said “the end.” The show was not his best, he said, because the sound system failed and he was a bit nervous about it.

Mr. Murphy is not worried about attendance, though. If last year is any indication, the crowds do not really start until mid-July, and at one 2007 show there were 50 people. But regardless of the number in the audience, Mr. Murphy will keep performing.

“It’s experimental, nobody’s done this before,” Mr. Murphy said. “I’m kind of one of them characters willing to step off the deep end of the plank and test the waters.”