Category: Art

Review: public phenomena

public phenomena by Temporary Services My rating: 5 of 5 stars A cool little art book about the everyday, and mostly inadvertent, aesthetic experiences that turn up as people attempt to the adapt the urban environment to their needs (and occasionally as the urban environment adapts to people). Photos range around the world showing everything from post-snowstorm parking blockades in Chicago to makeshift barriers in Ljubjana to ghost houses all over. The book itself is a form of the adaptation it celebrates. Taking note of the aesthetic content hidden in plain view by the side of the road is a

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Book Review: South African Township Barbershops and Salons

South African Township Barbershops and Salons, Simon Weller, Mark Batty Publisher, 128 pages, 2011. ISBN 978-1-935613-04-6. Hard cover $27.95 If African Signs, with its minimal text but rich collection of photographs, provides a window to African vernacular culture, South African Township Barbershops & Salons passes through that window to provide something of an inside tour. Simon Weller, a professional photographer, not only document numerous advertising signs but also spent time with the hair cutters and their customers as well as several sign painters. He aims not just to show the art but also the culture in which the art is

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The Beauty of Silence

Just saw The Artist. It reminds me of what was lost when sound came into the movies. Filmmakers achieved an amazing level of visual sophistication and power before sound, and it took years — some would say decades — to regain the artistic momentum stopped dead by sounds’ enormous technical overhead. Indeed, there is an argument that the artistic requirements of building movies around dialogue are inherently at odds with realizing their full visual potential. That’s a bit overstated, but there’s a point to it. If The Artist, produced when filmmakers are basically amateurs in the art of silent movies,

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Book Review: African Signs

African Signs, by Rob Floor, Gert van Zanten andPaul Faber, KIT Publishers, 208 pages, 2010. ISBN 978-9-4602-2080-7. Soft cover $45 Every once in a while those of us who don’t often make it to Africa have an opportunity to glimpse the continent’s extraordinary commercial visual culture. As recently as this summer vibrant examples of hand-painted movie posters from the 1980s and ‘90s were on view at the Chicago Cultural Center, which also mounted a show in 1996 of elaborate decorated coffins from Ghana. Both genres have books devoted to the, African hair salon and barber shop signs, meanwhile, were featured

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Book Review: Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern

Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, essay by Pamela Kort. Michael Werner Gallery, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-8850-1381-1. Paperback $55 Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern images of unexcelled symbolic intensity marked him as one of the most creative German artists of the mid-20th Century, but also an artist whose weirdly eroticized work was unlikely to be found on gallery walls in his own time. He was also hugely eccentric, putting in time as both a charlatan occultist and a mental patient, according to Pamela Kort’s essay in the recently published catalog for the exhibit From Barefoot Prophet to Avant-Garde Artist at Michael Werner Gallery in New York. His serious

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