hat tip cheseball for layout
art as criticism
modern sculpture
Hat tip D_MAGIK for the basic shape in this drawing. This was a failed experiment to see if treating the shape as a David Smith-like sculpture on a hillside would blunt its instant recognizability. Perhaps someone in the world has never seen Matt Groening's apelike character but then that person would have no referent of a "David Smith-like sculpture" either, and would simply see a curving line and a circle against a blue sky, casting an unexplained shadow.
about that new logo
Google recently switched their logo from a serif font to a creepily infantile sans-serif. They have kept their vaunted "minimal" search page design so the kindergarten logo really stands out now. It's as if the more monopolistic and world-straddling the company becomes, the more innocent-looking they want their "facing forward" page to be. At one point, as they gobbled up smaller companies, these subsidiary functions added more typography to the top of the search page. Then, a year or two ago, they scaled this verbiage back, as seen in the screen shot above.
random surfing
A friend asked recently if anyone still "surfs the web" now that all net-like activity takes place within one or two large gated communities. The question was related to the topic of Young People Not Having a Clue What the Surf Clubs of 2006-2010 Were Supposed to Be About.
Well, for an hour this morning, I did (surf the web).
Started with links to websites from my blog posts of two and three years ago (random link-rot checking), which led indirectly to:
* A PandaWhale "stash" telling us about lead and cadmium in Soylent (the powdered food that techie types are living on). Great clickbait but neither Panda nor its linkee Takepart say where the heavy metals are supposedly coming from! Isn't that the first question in anyone's mind? A press release from Soylent blames trace elements in the brown rice extract and an unusually stringent California labeling law.
* Another PandaWhale "stash" with a mind-shattering item on cutting soft cheese with dental floss. (Note that the name of the floss manufacturer is covered with white tape.) The source is a "life tip" from iPPINKA, a lifestyle accessory vendor that requires a login to browse its merchandise (see photo of keyboard brush at top).
*A list of companies that make bamboo bike frames. I can't find that link now but I remembered one of the company names, Bamboosero, pronounced BambooSERo. But is that SER as in sear or SER as in bear?
At this point it became too exhausting to continue web surfing.
painting thumbnails 3-4
Above: more thumbnails of paintings I've been doing using Linux MyPaint.
Was looking at Peter Halley's portfolio pages -- you click through dozens of his cell-and-conduit paintings, all roughly the same size thumbnails. It's an intriguing design exercise -- after so many years of production, there are hundreds of variations on the colors and basic shapes he employs. Halley wrote an essay in the '80s about Frank Stella and the simulacrum, arguing that Stella was neither the last formalist nor a "bureaucrat" but a post-modernist emerging early, in the 1960s. Halley's own career continued the logic of ironic serial production. He could even be said himself to have anticipated 3D printed canvases, since the actual objects he makes have a kind of chalky, plastic perfection. All those coats of acrylic could be passes of the print head, over and over until the surface is built up.
The ultimate logic of postmodern simulation would be to bypass the objects altogether and just have the digital archive of patterns. The art becomes more easily transmissible, gets out to more people, and doesn't add bulk matter to the universe.