New Acqusition--Mauricio Lazo photograph

Mauricio Lazo, El Diablito, photograph, 2009 (?)

I was at the Blaffer student show last night, and a group of junior photographers were selling prints. (The group calls itself Fourteen11 because there are 14 of them and they graduate in 2011.) Mauricio Lazo had a great piece in the show of photographed versions of loteria cards. And he was selling one of the prints at the Fourteen11 table.

Check out the Blaffer show--it's quite good.

Algorithm Art by Andrew Zukoski

Andrew Zukoski is (I assume) a student at Rice who has art up in the new student gallery on campus, the Matchbox Gallery. His work is electronic and time-based and is displayed on little video monitors. Here is an example (a video I took of one of the monitors):



The gallery was pretty dark to allow for maximum viewing pleasure. There were three small monitors on one side, and on the other side was a chalkboard that described (sort of) how these images worked.


Andrew Zukoski, Viral Ox Added installation detail, video and chalkboard, 2010

If I am reading this right, here's what I think Zukoski is doing. He has layers of images. Starting from a black screen (the "top" layer), each pixel will change color to the pixel underneath if certain conditions are met. So when we start with the top image (a black screen), the way it creeps outward shows the algorithm cycling through over and over. I suspect the algorithm looks at every visible pixel and then looks at the pixels underneath and/or adjacent to it, then decides whether to change the pixel to the one underneath.

This reminds me of the Game of Life. In this "game," grid locations (which can be pixels on a screen) are either on or off. As the game cycles through, they change state based on the on or off-ness of the adjacent grid locations. (The grid is Cartesian, so any "cell," as they call it in Life, has eight adjacent cells.) It turns out that you can create interesting forms that as the game cycles through, can give "birth" to other forms. This was invented as a mathematical exercise, not as an artform. But it is hard not to see Life as an artistic medium.

Why this needed to be explained on the chalkboard, I don't know. And mentioning that this type of  algorithm has been used to simulate physical and social phenomena seems trivial and irrelevant. What may have been more interesting would have been to know the actual rules for changing pixels.

New Acqusition--Gilbert Hernandez

Gilbert Hernandez, "The Laughing Sun" part 2, page 3, ink on paper, 1984

I started reading Love & Rockets with issue two. I had missed issue 1 somehow. I was blown away and an instant fan of Jaime Hernandez. Gilbert Hernandez seemed like the less interesting of the two brothers initially. But then in issue 3 (I think!) he started telling a story about Palomar, a small town in rural Mexico or Central America. (Later you learn that it is in a fictional Central American country, but that wasn't spelled out at first.)

The first few stories featured five teenage boys--Heraclio, Israel, Satch, Vicente and Jesus. As readers of Love & Rockets devoured each new issue, the story skipped ahead and we saw Heraclio suddenly as a young adult. And in "The Laughing Sun," all of the boys we had come to know were now men. Jesus is married and has a baby. On an especially hot day, he snaps, wrecks his house, and hurts his wide and baby (neither seriously, though). He then steals a car and heads up into the mountains. Heraclio convinces the sheriff that he can retrieve Jesus--he's afraid that there may be violence but he believes that if he can talk to Jesus, he can avoid it.

Heraclio calls up Vicente, Satch and Israel, all living in other towns now, and they set off on a tense journey filled with flashbacks. It's a great story, one of Gilbert's best. With the Palomar stories, Gilbert proved himself to be a great comics artist--one of the all time greats as far as I am concerned. I was thrilled to be able to buy this page.


Gilbert Hernandez, "The Laughing Sun" part 2, page 3, ink on paper, 1984

Here is the pages scanned as a color image. You can see Gilbert's paint-strokes in the solid black areas--he knew they would not be visible when the piece was reproduced. Otherwise the art is extremely clean (in the sense that it looks extremely close to the final printed page).

You Must See This Show

I reviewed the Maurizio Cattelan show over at 29-95.


Maurizio Cattelan, untitled, taxidermied horse, wood, paint, 2009

This is much creepier in the Menil--it's in a cramped dark room with Magritte paintings.

"Like Bricks of Wine"

Jim Woodring sketches in his Moleskine notebook.

Cody Ledvina & Matthew Rodriguez at Rudolph Projects

I have a new review up at 29-95. Please check it out. I was a little late off the starting line with this review, so if you are interested, check out the show as soon as possible. It closes March 6.

Here are some images from the show that didn't make it into the review.


Cody Ledvina installation view


Cody Ledvina, Looking at myself with a marriage hat, acrylic, sea sponge and mirror on wall, 2010


Cody Ledvina, What if you found this on the ground, acrylic, sea sponge and mirror on wall, 2010


Cody Ledvina, 100 Club Painting, acrylic, sea sponge and mirror on wall, 2010


Matthew Rodriguez, No Cop No Stop, silkscreen on paper, 2009


Matthew Rodriguez, Sesame Street Counting Song, acrylic on wood, 2009


Matthew Rodriguez, Toughest Neighborhood in San Francisco, baby shirts

Note on Conceptual Art

Conceptual Art by Tony Godfrey

I don't have much to say about this highly accessible book about the least accessible of artistic movements, conceptualism. If you have any familiarity with art from about 1960 to the present (with a little pre-history courtesy of Duchamp, Picabia, etc.), most of this won't be startlingly new. A few new details will be sketched in.

But where it excels is in discussing conceptualism outside the art capitals, particularly the work of Russian conceptualists. Godfrey points out just how different the basis for creating conceptual art was in the Soviet Union when compared to the West. There is a danger of seeing the Russians as heroically creating dematerialized art in the face of a totalitarian system, compared to decadent Westerners. It's an appealing vision of heroic victims. But that is unfair to the artists. Their work and its basis are too particular to be reduced this way. This is one area I want to learn more about--particular about the place of Russian conceptual artists in the broader stream of "unofficial" Russian culture of the 60s and 70s.

There are also good chapters on feminism and photography.