Category: [Art]

Max’s muesli

For someone who was apparently all over the late 60s art scene and a major part thereof, I’m surprised that I can’t remember ever having heard of Peter Max (who’s just left us aged 88) before now:

Max began his career in graphic design in the 1960s and his swirly, colorful, instantly recognizable designs epitomized the era’s “flower power” art. But thanks to his prolific output and fun, accessible style, Max’s work remained well known and popular well into the 21st century.
He described his own work as “always on the side of the peaceful nature. I don’t discuss in my paintings negative things, I don’t dwell on it in my mind and don’t dwell on it in my canvasses.”
Max was the official artist for the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Indianapolis 500, the World Cup, the World Series and many other events. His art appeared on a Boeing 777 airplane and a Norwegian Cruise Line ship. His portrait subjects ranged from US presidents to Taylor Swift.
But in his first flush of success in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his mural-like tableaus of flowers, the cosmos and cartoonish figures – all in vivid colors such as turquoise, orange and neon green – seemed to be everywhere. Dorm room walls were plastered with his posters. Household furnishings such as clocks and bedspreads sported his designs.
He even created covers for the Manhattan Yellow Pages, a business phone directory distributed to millions of people. Max himself was featured on the cover of Life magazine in 1969, his trademark dark, bushy mustache framing a hearty grin. […]
By the 1960s, Max’s bold, unique style was a hit with ad agencies, publications, the corporate world and in pop culture, leading to a booming commercial business. “My work was really, I would say, almost exploited,” he said. “It was on mugs, it was on bedsheets, it was on dresses, it was on silks and scarves and ties – 70 product lines.”

DJ Food has a bunch of Peter Max art at his blog, in which he describes Max as pushing himself as a brand and being “arguably better at it than Warhol”, which is quite an accolade in its way. And yet I still don’t remember ever hearing of him before now, and of the Max art on the DJ Food blog the only one I even vaguely recall seeing before is the Evergreen magazine cover (probably on Tumblr years ago). Anyway, John Coulthart has been reposting an assortment of Max-related stuff over on BS…

…and THIS, I must say, is what has me interested. Cos not only did he get his art on the packaging, he’s credited with “developing” the product itself, whatever that might mean. I don’t know what he actually had to do with that side of things, but I kind of love the idea of it anyway. Maybe Campbell’s should’ve got Warhol to do something like this for them…

More Samson Pollen

Found some more Samson Pollen art on Bluesky:

I am told this is a piece for Stag magazine in 1974 from a story called “We’re Trapped in an H-Bomb Fall Out Zone”, because of COURSE it is. Nice young people in a boat that’s run aground, but that’s the least of their problems, as you can see in the background. Maybe not as complex and detailed as the previous Pollens I’ve posted, but the bomb going off in the distance is kind of all you need, really…

Now here’s something a bit different, “The Man Who Hated Streetwalkers“, also for Stag magazine but from 1958, so a bit earlier in his career. The colour tone of the other Pollens I’ve posted so far has been kind of limited, which I presume was down to the limitations of colour printing technology at the time, and mostly reddish; here we’ve got Pollen essentially in b/w  but with blue accents throughout (and it’s not an action shot either, more a late Victorian gaslight night). It’s a lot colder picture, cos the people in it aren’t exactly in living colour (whereas in the other picture our human figures are recognisably flesh-coloured). Plus knowing the title makes the difference to how we look at it; it doesn’t matter with the first picture cos, you know, the BOMB is clearly evident in the background so you know those folks are fucked, but in this case it make a difference knowing this guy’s looking for something a bit… extra, and that scarf (Chekhov’s scarf?) will be involved somehow. I wonder about the beggar on the other side of the street… did they figure as a witness in the story or something? Whatever the case, I am again sure that both of these illustrations are far better than the texts they accompanied…

Those were some clean rats

This is one I’ve been meaning to post for ages but somehow haven’t got around to:

This is the American poster for the Australian film The Rats of Tobruk, which got a US release there some time in the 1950s, and evidently had to be retitled for Americans who might’ve mistaken it for a nature documentary… anyway, someone posted this on Bluesky, and they also posted this close-up of part of it:

That is… not the sort of thing that normally appears on film posters, is it? Especially not of THAT vintage. The big “UNCENSORED!” just makes it funnier somehow…

Now, I’ve never seen Rats of Tobruk, so I don’t actually know what’s going on with this scene; that’s a still from the film itself that I grabbed from IMDB, in which our bathing beauty is clearly not being menaced by another soldier so the poster lied to us there. Perhaps it actually is an important part of the film, rather than the poster artist just having a laugh. Maybe it’s a grand moment demonstrating that, although these men may have lived like rats, they practised hygiene like humans and insisted upon fighting Rommel with clean arseholes. Or maybe not.

Coulthart vs. AI

There was an interesting interview with John Coulthart a couple of weeks ago, where he says some things about AI I thought were worth preserving here:

We’re still waiting for all these developments to settle down so it’s foolish to try and prognosticate too much but it’s obvious that much of the argument in favour of AI art has been lost. The term “slop” became widespread at such a speed that it’s going to be difficult for the slop merchants to popularise their products in any other way, although I’m sure they’ll continue to make the attempt. I also think getting anyone to respect AI art will be very difficult. […]
On a more abstract level it’s been interesting seeing how quickly so much AI art has achieved a kind of mannerist sameness, a digital mulch that makes so much of the stuff look as though it’s extruded from the same pipe. “Slop” is very apt in this context. […] The slop machines don’t know about this because they don’t know what art is, and neither, it seems, do the engineers who program them. They’re asking people to accept the replacement of boundless human creativity with the world’s most expensive clip-art generator.

I think that last line is the real killer here, plus he’s equally dead on about that sort of sameness AI has attained. Which isn’t really surprising, though, cos AI was bound to feed off its own productions along with all the other stuff on the Internet it devours to make those productions in the first place… it’s not so much how quickly the term “slop” caught on so much as it is how quickly it became slop that is surprising.

Magic über alles?

It appears the Nazis weren’t the only Germans deploying occult powers and dark forces in wartime; evidently the Germans were being accused of that during the original world war… For some reason this put me in mind of Dion Fortune, who “defended” Britain with her own occult powers in the second war, but I discovered she took a more practical role in the first one by joining the Women’s Land Army; given how much havoc the Liftwaffe would cause during the Blitz (including damage to Fortune’s own group’s headquarters in London), I suspect she would’ve been a lot more useful doing that again…

Ars gratia AI?

I neglected to note the other day the funniest story I’ve heard from the art world in ages: a man, one Graham Granger, a student at University of Alaska Fairbanks, randomly went into an art gallery, and took offence at one of the exhibits, which was a series of Polaroids made by another student in response to suffering “AI psychosis” after using a chatbot as his therapist. Granger took such offence at this AI art thing that he STARTED EATING IT. Apparently this wall of Polaroids contained 16o images and he managed to wipe out 57 of them before finally being dragged. And now there’s an interview with him (“CW” is the interviewer):

CW: So your act wasn’t premeditated?
GG: No, I didn’t know about the exhibit before that day. And then I saw the AI piece and it was just—as an artist myself, it was insulting to see something of such little effort alongside all these beautiful pieces in the gallery. It shouldn’t be acceptable for this “art,” if you will, to be put alongside these real great pieces. It’s art that has zero substance. Not zero substance; I mean it’s a very personal work, right? It’s art that takes away from its own substance by not being made by the artist himself. […]
CW: What are your personal thoughts on AI, specifically in art?
GG: I think artificial intelligence is a very valuable tool. I think that it has no place in the arts. It takes away a lot of the human effort that makes art. If art cannot be improved upon by criticism, it’s hard to call it art. And there is an argument to be made that you can criticize your AI art by changing the prompts and generating more images to pick from, but that work doesn’t compare to the criticisms that a real piece of art would receive if you critique it.
CW: So your main problem with it is that it doesn’t process criticism?
GG: It’s not the only problem. There’s a whole host of things. It depends on your definition of art. I say AI isn’t art. I know a lot of people who would agree with me. I don’t think there’s any perfect argument that can be made for this, because no matter what you say somebody will come up with a counterpoint because at its core art is subjective.
However, the process by which art is made is oftentimes more important than the finished product, and if the process of making your art is just typing a prompt in, it just takes away from the accomplishments of other talented artists. And it really hurts the practice of art by commercializing that finished product.
CW: Do you have any qualms about the fact that AI art is made by scraping other artists?
GG: Yeah, I mean, that’s part of why I spat it out, because AI chews up and spits out art made by other people.
CW: So during your demonstration, you didn’t swallow any of the exhibit?
GG: I swallowed some of it. I had really been spitting it out near the end. I didn’t want to make too much of a mess, but I also didn’t want to have to spit it out in the back of a police car.

This is amazing. Needless to say the “creator” of these pictures is… unconvinced, shall we say, by these arguments—obviously it was a very personal work for him—but when asked why he kept using AI for his art after his clearly negative experience with it he didn’t exactly offer an answer. You could, I suppose, see Granger’s act as a product of “AI psychosis” itself, but it’s one I’m rather more sympathetic to than the artist’s work… In any case, I feel that somewhere the ghost of Marcel Duchamp is looking at this situation and regretfully wishing he’d tried eating the actual Mona Lisa rather than just defacing a postcard of her…

Lyndwulf

John Coulthart features an interesting edition of Beowulf at his blog today, this being a 1939 edition illustrated by Lynd Ward…

I admittedly haven’t seen much of Ward’s stuff, and what I have seen has only been his b/w woodcuts; I think this is the first time I’ve seen him in colour. I should note I haven’t just nicked this from John’s blog post, cos he rarely if ever posts large versions of stuff; instead I nicked it directly from the Internet Archive scan of the book that he links to, whence I got larger versions of the colour illustrations. John also notes:

It’s also possible to read the poem itself, although I wouldn’t advise it with this translation by William Ellery Leonard, not when it begins so risibly with the words “What ho!” Beowulf famously opens with a declaration in Old English—”Hwæt!”—that bards would have shouted to gain the attention of their audience. The word doesn’t translate easily to contemporary English but it’s usually given as “Hear!” or “Listen!” Leonard’s “What ho!” is a phrase that belongs with Bertie Wooster.

Woof. The only W.E. Leonard work I’m otherwise familiar with is his translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, which I did not particularly like and I don’t think that was entirely Lucretius’ fault (even though I do find the whole concept of didactic verse of that sort frankly bizarre), I recall Leonard’s translation doing some contortions to the English language that were just… off-putting. Don’t think I’m into what I read of his Beowulf while getting these illustrations, either; keeping the appearance of the Anglo-Saxon verse with the caesura in the middle, but not the alliteration structure or the four-beat pattern (turning it into hexameters which I’ve never liked in English verse), and then making the line ends rhyme which English alliterative verse generally just didn’t do, all strikes me as a bit of a bastardisation. Still, the illustrations are pretty cracking, and I give you some of my favourites (click to enlarge, obviously):

Holy Mary, holy crap

This… intriguing statue of Mrs God was doing the rounds on Bluesky today, for reasons that I think are obvious. It was Greg’s repost of it, though, that got me thinking… and what it made me think was “Face? But isn’t that oval bit at the top meant to be the face?”… And ONLY THEN did it hit me, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more like a man in my life, if you know what I mean…

“Here’s a nice rich seam of blood…”

Something else I sighted on FB tonight:

An illustration by Harold Piffard (one of England’s first aviators as well) for a book called The Signors of the Night; The Story of Frá Giovanni, the Soldier-Monk of Venice; And of Others in the “Silent City” (whew) from 1899 by Max Pemberton, noted novelist of the day. This image struck me as, frankly, slightly alarming. Couldn’t quite work out why at first, but then I got the odd feeling the guy on the table wasn’t 100% dead… Anyway, in search of more information, I found a copy of the book on Internet Archive…

…Oooh, look, that picture! It’s actually the frontispiece for the book, what an interesting choice… what does the caption say… OH. OH FUCK. OH NO. CORPSE IS INDEED NOT CORPSE AFTER ALL. Goddamn, I was actually right about the feeling I got from the picture without the caption… cos the fellow doesn’t look particularly not dead to me, I just got that vibe for some reason. Did Fra Giovanni burst in to save this poor bastard from those cone-hatted murderers? And why do I also feel there’s something oddly anti-Semitic about them?