stimulation

We can’t help but viewing 2011 in terms of artistic losses—from Lucian Freud and Cy Twombly [sigh!] to John Chamberlain and Helen Frankenthaler—and don’t even get us started on Hitch. This perspective makes our own 2011 highlight reel about as uplifting as the annual Academy Awards death montage, and so we defer to Mac Premo and Oliver Jeffers of The Daily. The video artists have whipped up this two-minute video recap of the biggest stories of 2011, from the January shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to the end of the Iraq War, all in a whimsical stop-motion style that recalls the interstitial programs of Sesame Street. Happy New Year!

Watch out, Tangerine Tango, there’s a new hue angling for the title of Color of the Year. Global paints and coatings giant AkzoNobel has crowned “Terracotta Rose” as the it-color of 2012. The Dutch multinational, which also does a brisk business in specialty chemicals, has selected the “blushing, lively, juicy red” for its versatility. “The radiant shade is the most important color for 2012 as it is at once whimsical and serious, dynamic and soft, perfect for a tiny accent or a feature wall,” notes AkzoNobel’s latest Color Futures booklet (downloadable as a PDF here), which highlights key trends that emerge from the company’s annual Color Convention. “A color that can be many things to many people reminds us not to look for simple solutions, but to open our minds to new ideas that are waiting to be discovered.” The selection of a warm and robust shade as AkzoNobel’s Color of the Year comes after a string of pale tones, including “a light, airy, citrus yellow” that helped to make 2011 more “illuminating, cheering, refreshing, and uplifting.”

Previously on UnBeige: Pantone Names ‘Tangerine Tango’ 2012 Color of the Year

“On when we’re off, screen savers are both hallucinatory napscapes and work-site facades. Though customizable, like icons and wallpapers, and comparable to other cubicle brighteners (potted plants, fluorescent stickies), they possess a distinct poetics. As boxed, watchable decor, where a fireplace or window might once have sufficed, they tend to emulate the mesmeric morphing and gelatinous luminosity of fish tanks, lava lamps, self-tilting wave tanks. (Cognate forms might include digital picture frames, dance-club visuals, the trompe l’oeil of Yule-log DVDs.) Whether ribbons of light that streak and fold, frantic zooms through a brick maze, or an inexorable volley into the Milky Way, the screen saver’s most insistent optical illusion is infinitude. Reaching beyond dead opaque surface and deadpan document glare—as if receding behind, sinking into the depths of true aliveness those occlude—its generous spaciousness seems to redeem work’s merely serial endlessness. The screen saver is comfort food for thought the way pop chaos theory is: it lets us believe we are more linked by the serendipities of a butterfly’s wings than by finance capitalism. As tasks await amid cascading windows or avalanching paper, the screen saver’s immersive depths unfurl the cosmic picture that keeps the job in perspective, outsourcing gripes to karma, converting tedium into trance. It acknowledges, and briefly gratifies, one’s drowsy desire for not-work.”

-Chinnie Ding exploring what screen savers tell us about our wishes, anxieties, and obsessions in the November/December issue of The Believer

(Photos: Christopher Burke, courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery)

What’s nine feet tall, twelve feet wide, and dangerously emotional? The face of King Kong, as depicted by Walton Ford in three massive new watercolors that will be unveiled this evening at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. The artist based the primate portraits on the 1933 monster adventure film starring a satin-draped, constantly screaming Fay Wray as Ann Darrow, who catches the eye of Skull Island’s mysterious gorilla-beast. “The Depression-era Kong was misshapen, not modeled on any living ape. He has an odd, ugly, shifting charisma like Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, or Bogart. Naturally his women screamed in terror,” says Ford in a statement issued by the gallery. “The grief of the original Kong is the grief of the unloved, and like Humbert Humbert or Frankenstein, the grief of the unlovable.”

When titling the works, the artist borrowed Wray’s line, delivered behind shielded eyes to her human lover: “I don’t like to look at him, Jack.” Meanwhile, Ford’s monumental Kongs are impossible to look away from, with impeccably detailed faces contorted in varying combinations of anguish and fury. “These paintings are about Kong’s heartbreak,” says Ford. “I wanted to reveal the monster’s grief, his enormous sadness, the sorrow that the original Kong kept hidden from view.” The solo exhibition, on view through December 23 at Kasmin, also includes six new, monkey-laden meditations on a passage from the memoirs of John James Audobon. The colorful paintings bring to life an episode from the ornithologist’s childhood in which he watched one of his mother’s pet monkeys snuff out another one of her pets, a parrot. “This made,” wrote Audobon, “a very deep impression on my youthful mind.”

“I’m always looking for an unconventional way to do holiday,” Simon Doonan told us the other day. The famed window dresser and style authority, who holds the plum title of creative ambassador-at-large for Barneys New York, prides himself on “crafty ingenuity”—think Rudolph made from old Coke cans—and his latest project came with a high-tech twist. PayPal hired Doonan to whip up festive window displays for its pop-up “Shopping Showcase,” a ground-level space in New York where the online payments giant will show off its latest offerings to retailers beginning tonight. So how did he conquer the challenge of selling, well, selling? “After they called me, I was walking past an art supply store, and I saw these,” he said, holding up a posable wooden manikin. “I thought they would be a great way to represent the 100 million people that use PayPal. They’re zillions of these in different sizes in the windows. They’re chic, they’re connected, they’re flexible.”

After Doonan submitted his initial sketches (one is pictured above), the displays were fabricated on site. “That’s a tremendous advantage, because it allows you to keep running outside and seeing what everything’s actually going to look like,” explained Doonan, dressed in a snappy Thom Browne jacket in a shade that he described as “PayPal blue.” The company’s signature color is a key theme of the windows, which feature an industrious bunch of wooden people going about their seasonal preparations amidst a flurry of wintry tissue and tulle. “It’s a fantasy holiday vignette,” he said, standing in front of the largest window. “Buy your gifts, throw them all in a sleigh, and then haul them off through the snow.” For those eager to bring a bit of Doonan’s kooky approach to their own December decor, he recommends a trip to Home Depot for some chicken wire, which he used to make the PayPal wreath. “Chicken wire is such a versatile, incredible material,” he said. “Make yourself a chicken wire Christmas tree and then just start shoving things into it.”
Read more

An eight-foot-tall man returned from a swim on Tuesday morning in Siesta Key, Florida and was promptly detained by authorities. The 100-pound fellow, who resembles a giant Lego figurine, is made of fiberglass. The front of his green tank top reads “No Real Than You Are,” and the back is emblazoned with the number eight and “Ego Leonard,” the name of a Dutch artist whose creations have previously washed up on beaches in England and the Netherlands. “I am glad I crossed over. Although it was a hell of a swim,” wrote the artist, replying to an e-mail from a writer for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “Nice weather here and friendly people. I think I am gonna stay here for a while. A local sheriff escorted me to my new home.” According to a press release issued by the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office, “Mr. Leonard is being kept in a secure environment until his owner comes forward.” Lego is not amused. A spokeswoman for Legoland in Orlando told the Herald-Tribune that the Lego man is a counterfeit and not endorsed by Legoland. Meanwhile, the Sarasota Convention & Visitors Bureau is eager to keep him in town. “We were trying to spring him out of jail,” said Erin Duggan, communications director for the tourism bureau. “We had offered to give him a home at the visitors center, where people could come and have their pictures taken with him.”

Earlier this year, IDEO announced the birth of its socially minded kid brother, IDEO.org. The global design consultancy launched the new organization, complete with teamwork-n’-rainbows-themed identity (pictured), with an eye to “spreading human-centered design throughout the social sector in order to improve the lives of people in low-income communities around the world and focus on challenges related to poverty,” and this week, IDEO.org announced its first crop of projects:

• New water models for Winrock International: IDEO.org is partnering with Winrock International to develop programs that allow for safe access to daily water needs, including drinking, sanitation, and agriculture. Traditionally, these have operated as siloed sources, and IDEO.org and Winrock will work together to help define and communicate a strategy to create working models for integrated, multiple-use water systems.
• Strategic opportunities with Rockefeller Foundation: IDEO.org and the Rockefeller Foundation will identify new intervention opportunities related to problems facing poor and vulnerable communities. IDEO.org will help Rockefeller Foundation understand the future and make decisions about how to invest in strategic areas.
• TEDx in a Box: The IDEO.org team will develop tools for organizers without access to technology to create TEDx experiences in informal settlements around the world.

Read more

“[Kevin] O’Callaghan began what he calls the ‘monster’ object phase of his career back in the early 1980s when he was an advertising major at the School of Visual Arts. Upon graduating he showed his work to Milton Glaser. Rather than carry a standard portfolio up the two flights to Glaser’s 32nd Street Manhattan studio, O’C (as I call him) decided to build a two-story portfolio case. ‘I was a little late,’ O’C recalled, ‘because my portfolio got stuck in the Midtown Tunnel.’ In fact, it was wedged against the roof, and O’C had to let some air out of the tires of his trailer to free it. Showing up tardy, O’C met the slightly annoyed Glaser, who stated he didn’t have much time, and asked ‘Where is the portfolio, anyway?’ O’C answered, ‘Look out the window.’ The portfolio was level with the second floor. O’C continues, ‘So he got on his intercom to tell everyone “go to the windows,” and just as he did that a reporter from People magazine, who heard about the Midtown Tunnel incident, came to write a story that appeared on two pages in the magazine.’ After this, O’C started getting an enormous amount of work.”

-Steven Heller in his foreword to Monumental: The Reimagined World of Kevin O’Callaghan (Abrams)

“It seems to me that the end of the Cold War produced a very important effect: the Internet. The Internet was released and realized because of the end of the Cold War—it was declassified. The Internet brought about a kind of extreme democratization of art. Now anybody, not just artists, can make photographs and videos and put them online, offering their videos and images to global audiences….So, what distinguishes a professional artist from everyone else? Today’s professional artists are those who reflect on and respond to the economic, political, and social conditions of contemporary image production.

The reaction to this new phenomenon—the extreme democratization of art production—still has to be defined. But the politicization of art is perhaps the only feasible response to the extreme democratization of image production, which is a huge de-legitimization of the art system as such. How can you legitimize your existence as a professional artist if everyone else is doing the same thing? That is a very difficult question.”

-Philosopher, art critic, and media theorist Boris Groys, interviewed by Judy Ditner in the exhibition catalogue for “Ostalgia,” on view through September 25 at the New Museum

Pictured: An untitled work from Sergey Zarva’s “Ogonyok” series, 2001. (Courtesy the artist and the New Museum)

Still looking for that perfect office-warming gift for Jill Abramson? Get a whiff of Tobias Wong‘s The Times of New York candle, now available (in a limited edition of 1,000) from New York-based boutique Project No. 8. Wong, who died last year at the age of 35, had proposed producing a candle with the fragrance of newsprint inspired by The New York Times but didn’t live to see the project realized. His friends and collaborators at Various Projects and Bondtoo got the job done, settling on notes of guaiacwood, cedar, musk, and spice. Meant to mimic the aroma of black ink on newsprint, the scent is described by its creators as “powdery” with “velvet nuance” (terms we often use to characterize charismatic Timesman David Carr!). The $65 candles come in white glass jars that are printed with “The Times of New York” in the Gray Lady’s signature blackletter. Meanwhile, we suggest following your nose to San Francisco, where SFMOMA has mounted the first in-depth museum presentation of Wong’s work. The exhibition is on view through July 24.