Thoughts On Paris

I spent last week in Paris.

If you ask me, it's a very introspective city for artists of all types. It's not just the fact that there are seemingly hundreds of museums, galleries and concert halls scattered across the city; it's the fact that people *talk* about art over lunches, dinners and coffees. (Well, at least the people I was hanging out with do.) But apart from that, it's a city that, over the centuries, was not just a mecca for artists and musicians, but also found itself at the center of many of the major turning points of artistic evolution. So suffice to say, there's a certain mystique here that you don't get in your typical American city.

The trend during much of the 20th-century was for artists and musicians to identify themselves very strongly with movements. Everyone was an 'ist' of sorts... a cubist, a surrealist, an abstract expressionist. Composers were serialists, brutalists, impressionists, minimalists. Where are the 'ists' now? Gone. Fallen out of favor with the idea of post-modernism; that we can freely mix and match styles and approaches at our whim... that we no longer have to belong to a school, that there no longer has to be a schism between academic and populist, Uptown and Downtown. But there's part of me that thinks that it certainly would have been nice to identify oneself with a movement. To, say, have a manifesto like the Futurists did, laying claim to an artistic identity. Maybe I'm romanticizing it; after all, my own music (and in fact my own cultural identity) is certainly a mix of various influences.

While we're at it, what happened to the idea of artists and musicians being aware of the social, political and aesthetic world that they live in, and responding to it through their art? Futurism was the celebration of speed; an artistic reaction to the emergence of a world where humans could suddenly travel great distances at great velocities via trains. Post-war expressionism emerged out of the horrors of the first World War, in which a newfound fear of death--by explosions tearing bodies apart, clouds of mustard gas, etc--manifested itself in the works produced. The last time I can think of an era manifesting itself in the works produced would have been the Vietnam War era, through protest songs and the like. That was 40 years ago. What happened to artists responding to the ages in which they live? Has this been killed by consumer culture?

I spent a full day at the Centre Pompidou, checking out their permanent collection, as well as shows of Calder and Kandinsky. The building itself is pretty photogenic. It gave me ample opportunity to play with my new Canon wide-angle lens (10-22mm). (I'm still new to wide-angle photography, so I'm still trying to figure out how to keep things visually interesting... heck, I'm still working on how not to underexpose all the images, as the wide angle allows so much light that it's throwing off my light meter.)

A funny thing seen inside one of the restroom stalls in the museum:

I immediately recognized this as a coy reference to Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain'--a seminal work of art, and one of his Readymades--a series of common, everyday objects that were placed in a museum to challenge the public's perception of what art is. I.e., if you stick a toilet in a museum and call it art, is it art?

I walked upstairs, and lo and behold, there was the original.

So now the question becomes, if you stick a reference to a work of art on a toilet, is the toilet now a clever bit of post-modern referential art? And does it challenge our perceptions of what a toilet is?

No. Not really.

My Favorite Album Covers

I'm starting the process of working with a graphic designer on the album art of Calling All Dawns, and so I figured this might be a good opportunity to organize my thoughts on just a few of my favorite album covers, especially as they might apply to my own album art design. You'll notice that, for the most part, they come from just a few bands and labels; that's because on the whole, there are certain elements that I am repeatedly drawn to, and certain things that I shy away from (for example, there are very few album covers that actually *show* the musicians, that I find interesting). And on the whole, many of the more unique bands maintain a consistency of brand image from album to album--so again and again, if I really like a band because of their pioneering qualities as artists, chances are I'll consistently like the decisions they make with regard to cover art.

Take Radiohead, for example:

Hail To The Thief is probably my all-time favorite album cover (despite being a rip-off of Paula Scher's work). First off, I like the hand-made feeling of it; the texture, the imperfect lines... It's abstract and compelling, and befits the haunting and moody qualities of their music beautifully. And likewise, it looks like 'real art'--if you didn't know anything about the product, you would be hard pressed to guess that it was an album cover. Similarly, OK Computer and Amnesiac remind me of Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko respectively.

All my life I've been drawn to ECM Records' New Music Series.

Again, they're very abstract covers; black and white photography, very understated images (yet rich and full of depth and detail). Occasionally they border on the sentimental and new-age, but on the whole they stand alone as works of art, and aren't terribly explicit about the music contained within (both traits that appeal to me).

This Modest Mouse cover is something I just stumbled across while researching this blog post, but I quite like it as well:

In addition to the understated color palette, I also like the unidentifiable image in the center (presumably it's Antarctica? Looks more like a rorschach blot to me). I also like the symmetry of the presentation; matter of fact, I tend to lean towards simple graphical images that are presented front and center (pretty much all my t-shirts sport graphics that follow that simple template).

Of all the Rolling Stones album covers out there, most of them are pretty hideous in my mind, but the one that I like is from their live album Flashpoint:

It's so simple. So powerful. The text setting (Helvetica?), the use of a regular-typeface followed by a bold one, the iconic imagery....it totally works for me.

I really enjoy powerful, bold, iconic imagery--but the problem is, this is somewhat at odds with what I said before, about liking abstract, nuanced, understated works of art. But I'm allowed to have more than one preference, correct? I think for Calling All Dawns, though, something more akin to the former (abstract works of art) is probably more what I'm going for.

Zero 7 has a couple winners. I like The Garden quite a bit; it appeals to the part of me that likes collages, like Rauschenberg's works. I also like the texture of the torn edges of the page; on the whole, I like graphics that carry implied textures and processes: for example, the feeling of cloth and paper, or the sensory act of tearing, stamping, searing, burning, sketching, and drawing. If you look at my Tin Works scoring portfolio and look at the brand that was created for me, the logo is slightly grainy and faded; like it had been applied with a rubber stamp. This was something I was quite insistent about; I wanted something with a strong sense of texture, and a feeling of hand application.

As for the When It Falls art, that appeals to a totally different (and totally inapplicable) pleasure center of my brain; the part of me that likes retro colors and images. Again, totally inapplicable to Calling All Dawns, but still something I enjoy quite a bit.

By far my favorite band growing up was Pink Floyd, and a number of their album covers are Hall Of Fame-worthy:

Again, these were bold, simple images. Not quite the textured works of art that I liked with Radiohead, but still simple, powerful and abstract. The Wall in particular was a teenage favorite; I was ridiculously obsessed with that album, especially the way it (and Dark Side Of The Moon, for that matter) was a musically unified concept album, that started and ended as an infinite loop. I was blown away by this concept, and lo and behold, fifteen years later when I go to release my own debut album, what do I go and do? Make a concept album that starts and ends as an infinite loop. Go figure.

Two of my favorite electronica albums are Verve Remixed 1 and 2:

Seriously cool album covers, but mostly because of the works of art that were created for them, that pretty much encapsulate the essence of the albums: that is, taking old jazz records and remixing them. Absolutely love the concept, but I'm hard pressed to find any similar approach for Calling All Dawns (nor do I plan on making my graphic designer create a sculptural work of art like that).

Finally, my all-time favorite band has two clear winners:

Let It Be is perhaps the only album cover that I like that features the band members. Why? Well, for one it's not one picture of the entire band together, but rather four GREAT portraits of the Fab Four, arranged in a simple, geometric layout. It comes at the end of their career, so it's rather fitting that the four are not shown together in a single frame; but at the same time, it brings a flood of nostalgia, of remembrance of the good times that we all had listening to their music on our old record players. This album cover probably violates the majority of artistic principals I have for the medium; but it just works so well and hits home in the context of the whole Beatles experience, and what it means to me.

And as for The White Album, it's simply beautiful. (The fading on the text is nice, too, though I'm not sure if that was a part of the original.) Simple, clean, and forceful.

Art Center's Graduate Showcase

We went to the Art Center College of Design's year-end graduate showcase last Friday night: me, my actress friend Jessica Quinn Donaghy, and my graphic designer girlfriend, who was an alum of the school (and former valedictorian, I might add). We spent three hours browsing through the portfolios of Art Center's graduate students--various disciplines on show included graphic design, motion graphics, transportation design, product design, environmental design, and many others.

I was most impressed by the environmental design work. This may be because my own particular design fetish has to do with furniture and interior design, but really, some of the work on hand was pretty phenomenal. One grad had an underwater theme to her work: lamps made up to look like jellyfish were suspended from the ceiling and attached to the wall.

The transportation design students were clearly very skilled, but after awhile I got tired of seeing The Car Of The Future everywhere I went. Perhaps if I understood the nuances of what made good trans-design, I would have a better appreciation for what I was looking at. Instead, it all looked like a bunch of car junkies wet dreams.

The product design room had some interesting work. This one in particular caught my eye, for obvious reasons:

It's an electric slide bass. There's a handle on the top of the neck with a clamp that presses against the strings. The bassist slides his or her hands back and forth to modulate the pitch. An interesting concept, except that it's completely counter-intuitive for any bassist to put his hand on the *top* of the neck. All bassists move around the neck with their left hand on the bottom--sort of akin to the motion of pumping a shotgun. Add to that the fact that if you have your hand above the neck, and slide the clamp all the way to the high register, you put your wrist in an extremely awkward, potentially painful position.

What ever happened to form follows function?

Takeshi Murakami Pt. 1: Louis Vuitton

I’m blogging again because it’s 3:00 AM, and I can’t sleep. Mostly album related issues, but I’ll get to that later….

In the meantime, I’m going to ramble about Takeshi Murakami, probably the most famous pop artist since Andy Warhol. The LA MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) is running a show of the Tokyo-based artists works, and it’s driving me nuts that I don’t have the time to just run downtown to go see it.

Murakami is the founder of the Superflat movement—which in essence is both a rebellion against the staid restraint of traditional Japanese art, as well as a celebration—and sometimes criticism—of contemporary Japanese pop culture. It’s a largely character-based movement—that is, much of the art deals with manga-inspired cartoon characters who require no more reason for existance than that they’re ridiculously cute.

Like Warhol, his work is a marriage of fine art and commerce—and one of the most noticeable unions of these concepts is his design of a Louis Vuitton handbag (which sells for a mere $1520). Murakami goes one step further with the partnership, however, and actually created a little animated film to promote the product:



What I love about it in particular (being a musician) is the soundtrack, a song by a great J-Pop artist called Fantastic Plastic Machine. J-Pop is a particular interest of mine, just because I find it so much more creative than American pop (which for various reasons—cough Clear Channel cough American Idol cough hip-hop culture cough—has become image driven and homogenized). Some of my favorite artists (including previously-blogged-about Cornelius) all come from the trendy Shibuya district of Tokyo, and FPM belongs to this Shibuya-kei movement.

What’s particularly ingenious about this music, though, is that it seems to be a reinvention of a concept in German avant-garde concert music of the 1910s called klangfarbenmelodie, which translated, means ‘tone color melody.’ That technique, pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern (who, along with Alban Berg, comprise the Second Viennese School) is the utilization of tone color as a new element to the progression of a melody. So for example, instead of having a melody played by just one instrument, these guys would break up the melody amongst different instruments in the orchestra, so that each note was sounded with a different tone color. Fantastic Plastic Machine has done this here as well—although the melody and chords would fit very handily with one instrument, the main riff is broken up into various combinations of acoustic guitar strums (going forwards and backwards), keyboards, pizzicato strings, filtered synths, and weird honking sounds. It’s mesmerizing, and works really well with the schizophrenic nature of Murakami’s visuals.

Oh, and guess what the name of the song is? “Different Colors.” How appropriate, both to Murakami AND klangfarbenmelodie.

And in other news, the reason I’ve got insomnia is because I spent much of today thinking over the comments that I’ve gotten from various people I played my most recent album draft for—and I’ve realized that there comes a time when an artist simply needs to stop collecting feedback, and just does what they want to do. And so even though there were some valid suggestions that came from my friends and colleagues in the past couple weeks, I’ve nevertheless reached a point where I’m comfortable with my material, and can confidently move forward with it. And truthfully, one could workshop something forever, and each time someone will have something new to say. It has to stop somewhere! More than anything else, this is telling in that I’ve finally reached a total comfort point with all my material. Next stop: Abbey Road.

Reinventing The Japanese Kokeshi Doll

I was never one to play with dolls, but these little things have been coming up a lot, recently, so I figured it was worth blogging about.

Kokeshi dolls are simple, wooden dolls that date back to 1830s Japan. They were carved out of a single piece of wood, given an elongated shape with exaggerated head and no arms or legs, and painted with various faces and outfits.
Well, gamers out there will notice some similarities between the Kokeshi and the Mii avatars that one creates for the Nintendo Wii. That's because it was revealed by legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario, Zelda, etc.) at last year's Game Developers Conference that the Kokeshi were indeed the inspiration for these customized avatars. Here's the Mii of yours truly.

Coming up this weekend, however, is a very cool modern reinvention of this cultural tradition. Subtext, a gallery in San Diego, has invited 75 contemporary artists to reinterpret the Kokeshi doll. Among them are some of my favorites: there's Audrey Kawasaki, whom I've mentioned before in this blog. There's also Brandi Milne, a similarly art-nouveau-inspired illustrator and artist, whose captivating style blends a lot of the Asian fantasy elements that I love, with a touch of the 70s psychedelia I grew up with (definitely worth checking her out). And there's also Julie West, whom I hadn't heard of until I found out about this show, but whose works evoke in me a sort of cartoon-nostalgia that I can't quite place--I look forward to learning more about her.

Alas, if I lived in San Diego (and if I weren't under so much pressure to finish my album these days!) I would be there in a heartbeat.

Audrey Kawasaki at Nucleus Gallery

I just got back from a gallery opening of a new favorite artist of mine, Audrey Kawasaki. She's an LA local and relatively young--late twenties, I believe--but already she's turning heads in the art world. She was featured in this past month's Australian issue of Vogue, and her work is in ridiculously high demand. She's definitely a rising star...and you can see for yourself why.

Here's an example of her stunning work. It's entitled 'Mizuame,' and as you can see, it's influenced by Art Nouveau and Japanese manga. But it's so incredibly sensual that it grabs me on a primal level. Most of the time, when I engage with art, I put on my art-history-minor analytical-contextualist hat and grapple with it intellectually. Here, I'm fully cognizant of why it resonates with me (childhood of love of Japanese anime, collegiete love of Art Nouveau and Viennese Secessionism)--yet I love it anyway. The beauty, the eroticism, the ephemerality....simply awesome.

I dragged my friends with me a full two hours before the show opened so that I could be one of the first in line to grab one of the prints she was releasing tonight. I came away with two purchases, which I will post here in due time. I'm sure this won't be the last time I blog about her.