“Animal Logic: Photography and Installation by Richard Barnes presents a mid-career survey of the work of acclaimed New York and San Francisco-based photographer Richard Barnes. Barnes’s work looks critically at both the natural world and the ways in which we attempt to institutionalize and classify nature within museums.” (from the Cranbrook Art Museum website).

Richard Barnes statement about this series is… coming soon.

I first became aware of the Dioramas series via Modcult.

See more of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s dioramas on his officiel website. Artist’s statement:

“Upon first arriving in New York in 1974, I did the tourist thing. Eventually I visited the Natural History Museum, where I made a curious discovery: the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I’d found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.”

PBS website has a page about Hiroshi Sugimoto offering multiple videos, interviews, bio, slideshow, etc. He was featured in the episode “memory” during the third season of PBS’s ongoing series Art In The Twenty-First Century. You can watch the whole episode online.

Previously on Skandalon

Learn more about cabinet of curiousities. Think of them as antique tumblelogs.

Artist statement (here):

“Unabomber: Ted Kaczynski, our home grown philosopher/terrorist, serving life in prison for crimes either committed out of dedication to a cause, or madness or both, had not only been extracted from his rural home but the home itself has been incarcerated. The cabin was shipped across the country to be used as evidence in his trial. My work looks at historical and contemporary artifacts (in this case the cabin and its site), and using the imagery and methods of architecture /archaeology it attempts to bridge the gap between the banal and the extraordinary, the cult of celebrity and the seductiveness of the infamous. This work was exhibited at the Henry Urbach Gallery in New York in January 1999, traveled to the Triannual of Photography in Hamburg, Germany in May of 1999 and was the subject of a one person exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art in August of 2000.”

Cybernetic Serendipity was an exhibition curated by Jasia Reichardt at the ICA London from August 2nd to October 20th, 1968: “Computer graphics were exhibited for the first time in 1965 in Germany and in America. 1965 was also the year when plans were laid for a show that later came to be called «Cybernetic Serendipity,» and presented at the ICA in London in 1968. It was the first exhibition to attempt to demonstrate all aspects of computer-aided creative activity: art, music, poetry, dance, sculpture, animation. The principal idea was to examine the role of cybernetics in contemporary arts. The exhibition included robots, poetry, music and painting machines, as well as all sorts of works where chance was an important ingredient. It was an intellectual exercise that became a spectacular exhibition in the summer of 1968.” (read more). See the related Wikipedia entry.

About Medien Kunst Netz (Media Art Net): “Media art—by definition multimedia, time-based or process-oriented—cannot be sufficiently mediated in book form. Mainstream art and cultural mediation, still being primarily print-based, do little justice to its specificity. On the other hand, Net-based media have not yet been able to establish platforms that reach more than the usual circle of insiders. Introducing the range of topics related to media and art, «Media Art Net» thus aims at establishing an Internet structure that offers highly qualified content by granting free access at the same time.” (read more)

“An exhibition of 120 of Gustav Klimt’s lesser known erotic drawings was recently on view at the Maillol Museum in Paris. Apart from his extraordinary landscapes, atmospheric and almost spiritual, which were primarily vacation work painted during summers spent on the Attersee, the Viennese artist’s theme has always been La Femme. His women are often sumptuously attired and extravagantly decorated, or naked, sitting or standing coyly as are the three Gorgones from La frise Beethoven . However, in the Paris exhibition they were in various states of dress and undress, sprawled in armchairs and lying on the floor in every position both imaginable and unimaginable.” (read more: “Gustav Klimt: Erotic Drawings of Young Women” by Patricia Boccardo, June 27th, 2005)

“And then, suddenly, there’s Frame 16.

Out of nowhere. Nothing to prepare you for it in the previous exposures. Frame 16. One of the most enduring images of America from the mid-20th century, seeming to express in a single frame (a frame divided by frames) the hierarchy and separation imposed by race and gender.

It is Robert Frank’s “Trolley — New Orleans,” but less than an inch high, on one of the contact sheets that are part of the retrospective exhibition, “Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Sunday.” (read more)

“Robert Frank (born November 9, 1924), born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photographic book titled simply The Americans, was heavily influential in the post-war period, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider’s view of American society. Frank later expanded into film and video and experimented with compositing and manipulating photographs.” (Wikipedia).

Robert Frank’s book The Americans deeply influenced Robert Bergman’s work.

“It’s hard to believe there was a time when Gustav Klimt could be described as “little known,” as he was by an underwhelmed New Yorker art critic in 1959, who dismissed the fin de siècle Austrian painter’s first, posthumous U.S. solo show as a sentimental medley of “allegory, mild eroticism and good old German romanticism.” Klimt’s meteoric rise in popularity during the 1960s and 1970s owes much to the initial two certified stateside Klimtomaniacs: Neue Galerie cofounders Ronald Lauder and Serge Sabarsky, whose extensive collections are featured in this lovingly researched exhibition of paintings, drawings and ephemera. (It’s billed as the artist’s first American museum retrospective, though that promises more than the show delivers.) […]

As in Reclining Nude Facing Right (1912–13), a red-and-blue pencil sketch of a masturbating woman rendered in an undulating, electric lines, they convey a passion absent in, or excised from, his paintings.” (read more: “Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections” by Anne Wehr, Time Out New York, issue 642, Jan. 17-23, 2008).