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.