We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Eastside Projects is an artist-run space and public gallery in Birmingham, UK. The group commissions experimental contemporary art and hosts rad exhibitions as part of a project to serve the public good. Cool, no? The current exhibition is a collection of work by the London-based artist group known as hobbypopMUSEUM, who specialize in site-specific installations that combine sound, performance, film, and painting.

Eastside Projects has also released a bunch of awesome publications (above is an excerpt from Keith Wilson’s “What is Industry?”) including beautiful exhibition catalogs. Drop by if you’re lucky enough to be in the hood, or explore the website if you’re not. Either way, a productive experience.

Nichole van Beek’s gouache paintings are like Magic Eye images for grown-ups: they’re hypnotic, colorful, and contain promises of secret knowledge for those willing to put in the effort.

Van Beek is as much a sculptor as she is a painter, and her mixed-media installations are crafted with ingenuity (she enjoys making her own tools) and an eye for spareness from materials like driftwood, tape, yarn and grip-tape. Both the two-dimensional and three-dimensional brands of van Beek’s work will turn viewers googly-eyed, which is probably the point. She gives you full permission to stare.

Born in Japan and raised in Brazil, Chie Fueki is an artistic Vitamix of global influences. Working in mixed media, Fueki’s works are immaculately crafted and devilishly detailed (the above right image is a detail of the painting at left. Would you have guessed?)

Fueki also strays from the standard vocabulary of subjects and influences. To wit, hers include team sports, numbers, textiles, lacquerware and kimonos. Sometimes all in the same piece! Happily, the artist also dotes as much on her titles as on the paintings, giving them names like Significant Moment and Every Corner Runs Two Directions for added interpretive oomph. Like her work or hate it, you have to admit there’s nothing quite like it out there.

When was the last time you encountered a gigantic raw side of beef? How about an anatomically-correct side of beef hanging from a gallery ceiling by meat hooks? Such objects are part of Tamara Kostianovsky’s repertoire. Happily, the meat hunks are rendered in fabric, complete with frilly little ribbons of fat. Kostianovsky’s fabric meat project was titled “Actus Reus”, meaning “guilty act”. Fill in the blanks yourself.

Born in Jerusalem, the artist grew up in Buenos Aires and currently lives in New York. Her other endeavors include maps made of hair, sculptures made of clothing and hangers, a world map made of the artist’s own clothes with yarn and ink, and currently on view: “The Persistence of Agony”, an enormous sculpture of a bisected fin built from foam, wood and vinyl. Kostianovsky might not produce the sort of picture you’d hang above your mantle, but she certainly wins the award for most unpredictable.

The artist Petah Coyne refers to her sculptures as “girls”, and who’s to argue with her? At a given exhibition you’ll find the girls suspended from the ceiling or stationed on the floor, their anatomies formed of earth, trees, branches, roots, silk flowers, ribbons, wax, hair, chicken wire, plywood, rubber, tar, hay, sand, taxidermy and….other stuff. Lots of it.

The Oklahama City-born and NYC resident cites as her influences Dutch still lifes, baroque sculpture, her strict Catholic upbringing, Miss Havisham (from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. The artist engineers her sculptures to look delicate but they’re actually behemoths, weighing enough to crush a human if they fell from the ceiling. Some of them are layered in 75 coats of wax. Others resemble wedding dresses. You could easily stare at a Coyne sculpture for two hours and still not exhaust the interpretive possibilities of the work, which can’t be said for most contemporary sculpture—even the best of it.

Miss Manners, aka Judith Martin, began writing her syndicated column in 1978. Emily Post was penning etiquette advice as early as the 1920s. Both provided reliable guidelines on how to act politely in this complicated modern era––neither, unfortunately, had much of an interest in the contemporary art scene.

This is where I Like Your Work comes in. Art journal Paper Monument has produced a tiny (but information-dense) booklet with features from 38 artists, critics, curators and dealers on the “sometimes serious and sometimes ridiculous topic of manners in the art world.”

Tuck it in your own back pocket or slide it under the studio door of someone who really needs it.

“Will reality match up to the television fantasies this generation has been nursed on? These children are in a peculiar position; experience is exhausted in advance. There is little they have not seen or done or lived through, and yet this is second-hand experience.”

The year was 1956 and the blunting, desensitizing impact of TV was on the mind of art critic, psychoanalyst, and Maurice Sendak’s life partner for more than 50 years, Dr. Eugene D. Glynn. This fear of mass media’s ominous implications seemed to be melting brains everywhere in the 1950s, and it’s one that remains prevalent today—simply transposed to hand-wringing about kids growing up with constant access to the Internet. But Glynn’s casually brilliant essay, “Television and the American Character,” was different.

He discussed the form of television rather than the content, noting the ways in which television becomes an adult’s regressive substitute for a care-giving mother: “Warmth, sound, constancy, availability, a steady giving without ever a demand for return, the encouragement to complete passive surrender and envelopment—all this and active fantasy besides.” Too true, right? It’s a critique that surpasses the limited foresight afforded to the citizens of the 1950s about television’s complex destiny.

More than that, Glynn goes beyond the article’s initial concerns to embrace television’s potential as a positive social force, expanding horizons and destroying provincialism.

“Techniques will have to be worked out for educational television for showing, not a baseball game, but how to pitch a curveball; for sending its audience on nature hunts, into club activity, to the library for books. Being aware of the dependent relationship in its audience, television must look for ways to undo it—the problem of any teacher or parent.”

There’s a whole book full of essays penned by Glynn; ruminations on Norman Mailer, Lucas Samaras, developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, Michelangelo, the history of erotic art, and the ethics of exhibiting Jackson Pollock’s art therapy works (spoilers: it’s unethical). Desperate Necessity: Writings on Art and Psychoanalysis was published posthumously in 2008, liberating Glynn’s fascinating writings from the back issues of obscure art journals and painting a picture of a man who was always just a little bit out of step with his time, tackling social issues with a peculiarly frank clarity. The type of man who just might be the perfect spiritual match for Maurice Sendak.

After reading Desperate Necessity I was a little bit disappointed that “Gene” had never collaborated directly with Sendak. But maybe their whole lives together were a collaboration. Sendak, as a picture book artist, changed the way we thought about childhood. He embedded deep psychological issues under the alluring surface of art for the masses. Would it all have been the same without Eugene Glynn by his side?

“Experimental geography, like it sounds, is more experiment than answer,” begins Nato Thompson in Experimental Geography, a book produced in collaboration with the Independent Curators Network.

The field–which is still new and loosely defined– concerns the intersection of contemporary art and contemporary geography, and aims to reveal in interesting ways the fact that “we make the world and, in turn, the world makes us.”

It’s a useful thesis for our times and one with dizzying implications. Thompson’s book is dense with illuminating essays– one suggests that a tour bus is a mobile theater; another claims that reality television can provide a model for urban planning theory.

Then there are the images. In terms of sheer visual impact, Experimental Geography is like a portable museum survey. A silkscreened image from a forged passport shares space with a map of Boston evacuation routes; video stills show a fellow mounting a telephone booth, and a model of Constant Niewenhuys’s 1958 Yellow Sector from the New Babylon project gets a two-page spread.

Few projects attempt to change the way you navigate the physical world. Fewer still succeed. One can only wonder what would’ve happened had Max been armed with a copy of the book as he made his way out into the land of the Wild Things…

The Italian artist Andrea Mastrovito has dipped his fingers into a whole bunch of media (video collages, acrylic, an installation for Dior Homme) but is most famous for his work with cut paper. An exhibition last year at New York’s Foley Gallery featured works of delicate tissue-paper collage held together with pins, each depicting a dreamlike scenario in a muted, monochromatic palate.

The paper tableaux leapt from whales to toreadors to a squat Picasso-like painter at work in a surrealistic studio. It was an infrequent American outing for the artist, who divides his time between Bergamo, Italy and New York City. Be sure not to sleep on the next one.

I remember a few things from 6th grade science class. One, it was the first year in which we were permitted to dissect animals. The first animal we dissected was an earthworm. The next was a frog. The third was a fish. My fish–or rather, the fish assigned to my partner and me–turned out to be afflicted with a disease that turned its insides into spinach-colored mush. I quietly put down my scalpel, walked to the girl’s bathroom, and barfed. The teacher allowed me to sit out future dissections.

The second thing I remember is learning about Carl Linnaeus, also known as the father of taxonomy. Linnaeus was the country-born scientist responsible for constructing the foundations of modern taxonomy. His innovations allowed future scientists to classify the natural world with greater ease and efficiency. Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered Linnaeus the greatest man on earth.

From Linnaeus comes many things: our system of binomial nomenclature, the fact that we call ourselves “homo sapiens”, and now, this: an exhaustive taxonomy of graffiti courtesy of the Fondation Cartier. Explore the exhibition online and make your own conjectures about how the graffiti alphabet came to be– the compilation provides a fascinating account of public art and private mischief.