I'm riffing on prehistoric art over at Baroque Potion.

There aren't many genuinely free-form radio stations left in the country.  I have the good fortune to live in listening distance of two, but you're probably not so lucky.

If you're a music geek, I suggest that you tune in, NOW, to KUSF, which the way things are going is about to be one of the deceased freeform stations.  A nationwide simulcast / death watch is going on. Because the University of San Francisco kicked all of the students out and sold the license to a commercial broadcaster.  A shame. It was a great station, and a far better (and cheaper) investment of  someone's donations California's tax dollars than the $350,00 annual Los Angeles calligraphy budget, in that, you know, it actually trained engineers and radio voice talent, for approximately no money at all.

If you're a music geek cynic, you'll mourn. If you're an optimist, you'll listen and hope. Either way, go to this site and listen now. Trust me, it's better than the pap Clear Channel's offering.

If you can't find the simulcast on the KUSF site, google WXYC, WFMU, or WXDU, all of which are running it.

Here's a devastating cutdown for Andrew Sullivan's poll on the "the smuggest, most pretentious pop song in history."  Smugness and pretension being traits Sullivan embodies all too well.

Sullivan is simply pandering to his new audience of leftists who claim Sullivan as "my favorite conservative blogger," precisely because he hasn't written a conservative word since 2004.  He understands quite well that Merle Haggard was having fun when he sang "Okie from Muskogee," and on his more lucid days (Sullivan, who divides his time between the District of Columbia and the gay beach resort of Provincetown Massachusetts, has never understood middle America too well) might even perceive that Haggard's audience in the 1960s was in on the joke.

Of course, he didn't take on Haggard's far better, funnier (and smugger, more pretentious) song, "The Fightin' Side of Me," because Sullivan, who advocated the most bloodthirsty tortures, praised Guantanamo, and boosted the Iraq war up until the very day George W. Bush came out in favor of a constitutional amendment to prohibit same sex marriage, would have difficulty dealing with complaints about "switchin' sides" and "some squirrelly guy who claims that he just don't believe in fightin'".

The Fightin' Side of Me:

Following up on his administration's Mars Rover project, Italian aesthete and PM-in-decline Silvio Berlusconi has taken it upon himself to declare lodestones aweigh:

Government officials confirmed today, however, that a valuable statue of the god Mars, on loan to the prime minister's office, had been fitted with an artificial penis. The original was chipped off at some stage in its long life, beginning in AD175.

…along with a new hand for an accompanying statue of the goddess Venus, it had cost the Italian taxpayer €70,000.

That's one way to address Italy's deficit.  With astonishing foresight, he provided that each new member be "attached to the original with a magnetic system".

Write your own joke.

For my part, a clerihew will do:

He felt less than martial
Because he was partial.
But then Berluscon',
Restored his omaccion'!

Venus and Mars, Photograph: Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images

Vladimir Putin Action Comics!

Note that the middle panel is an homage to Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel, a subversive from a country where being a subversive artist is actually dangerous, rather than a cocktail party pose as it is in Hyde Park.

Plenty more here.

Hat tip: Angus.

Many great songwriters haven't produced three songs so good in a career.

This is my favorite interpretation of "Funny How Time Slips Away," by Al Green:

I trust you had a productive day.

This is genuinely subversive art:

To me it doesn't matter that Serrano, when he shot the insipidly stupid Piss Christ, intended, in his low cunning way, to provoke controversy, and perhaps even thought among Roman Catholics and the Orthodox about the practice of using cruciform sculptures to invoke the Deity, while Rachel Stieringer was just playing a stupid Facebook joke.

Serrano sought to get rich from his photograph, and he succeeded.  It was a commercial effort from start to finish, produced on the understanding that museums, and millionaires, will buy anything that halfwit art critics tell them is important because it's transgressive.

Rachel Stieringer, on the other hand, created her art, which is a thousand times more transgressive than anything Andres Serrano ever dreamed of, with no hope of commercial gain.  She's suffering for her art.  And she will continue to suffer.

I pass no judgment on whether Rachel Stieringer should be jailed for her art.  I leave that judgment to the viewer, and to posterity.

Thanks to Reid Sartin for the pointer.

I think I've got everyone here covered except Ezra. Shhhhhh! Don't tell them, it will ruin the surprise.

I hope they have enough for all of my friends.

Via Wondermark, I discovered this delightful mix-up of art and TV geekery: artist Brandon Bird posts the work of numerous artists addressing a single theme. The theme? Each work is an artist's interpretation of the DirecTV program guide's one-sentence summary of an episode of Law & Order or one of its spin-offs. I like "The Wife of a Once-Popular Singer (Gary Busey) is Found Dead."

The notion reminds me of the dear-departed spamusement.

In the first post in this series, I discussed ways in which the space around a single figural sculpture becomes a tacit part of the artwork by virtue of the moving viewer's interpretive act.  In the second post, I considered how the spatial relationships among multiple figures in a more complex figural sculpture can provide interpretive clues and cues that lead to a rich understanding not only of the fiction's virtual space, but also of its mental, social, and emotional spaces.

Now I would like to consider immersion, which I will treat as a set of visual, spatial, and kinetic opportunities afforded the viewer of an artwork by virtue of its scale, situation, and referential complexity.  I will offer two examples, one which invites the interpreter to go around and upon and another which invites the interpreter to go within and beneath.

The first of these is the Great Stupa of Borobudur.  The 9th-century Buddhist worshiper approaching a typical stupa might expect from experience to find a large hemispherical or bell-shaped burial mound decorated with a modest array of symbols– abstract, floral, or figural– that stimulate and reinforce his worship by evoking key precepts.  What the reverent seeker would find instead, here in the hills northwest of Yogyakarta, is a semi-structured adventure in which the visitor selects his own path, undertakes various physical and mental challenges, and works his self-tailored way upward toward the climactic encounter where ascent gives way to transcendence.

Great Stupa of Borobodur (Wikimedia Commons)

Borobudur, aerial (Wikimedia Commons)

This man-made mountain (actually an augmented natural hill) consists of concentric rectilinear or circular terraces.  The lowest tier, three platforms making up a base, symbolizes the world of desires, that earthly and immanent realm through which the pilgrim has traveled to arrive at this destination.  The next five tiers represent the world of forms, an abstract and heady domain where concept and percept unite in art and action to induce the purposive wanderer to ponder.  Finally, the top three tiers– scarcely visible from the ground– introduce the worshiper into the world of formlessness, a cityscape of smaller stupas, each inhabited by a statue of the teaching Buddha.  Here, exploration inculcates the worshiper in the way of transcendence.

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In the previous post in this series, I considered how the pose and three-dimensionality of a figural sculpture support its interpretation.  I noted that representational sculptures reside at the intersection of what is actual and what is virtual.  Because it is there and we can regard it in many ways, a statue shows us part of a projected fictional world and implies or suggests even more, unrealized in the sculpture, about that world.  The artist leaves its underdetermined fictional details to the viewer's imagination.

I described how different vantages on Michelangelo's David yield somewhat different understandings of the figure, and I explained how Bernini later carried vantage-based variations to an energetic extreme in his own David.  From these observations and others, I drew a conclusion: although we typically think of movies in relation to photography and painting, film (like its cousin, theater) is more akin to sculpture.

Asserting a close kinship among sculpture, theater, and film raises issues of technology, so I would like to recommend a way of thinking about technology and to illustrate how it can inform the interpretation of art.

In 1346, King Edward III Plantagenet crossed the English Channel to assert his claims on France.  After startling victories in Caen and Crécy, he laid siege to Calais.  Caen had fallen in a day; Calais, at the urging of King Philip VI Valois, held out for nearly a year.

Resisting a siege is a nasty business, and under the persuasive weight of disease, starvation, and want, the people of Calais finally decided to negotiate.  Edward offered terms: he would show mercy and not sack the city in exchange for the lives of half a dozen of its most important citizens– an offer generous to the many but harsh to the few.  After months of deprivation, they could scarcely reject the terms. But who would rise to give his life?

A leader did step up, and then another and another until six had offered themselves: Eustache de Saint-Pierre, Jean d'Aire, Jacques de Wiessant, Pierre de Wiessant, Jean de Fiennes, and Andrieu d'Andres.  Several were among the city's wealthiest and most influential figures, and all understood in some measure that the privileges of reputation presuppose honor and civic duty. They would pay the price for the survival of Calais.

Dressed in simple robes, draped in nooses, and bearing the keys to the keep and gates– all in accord with Edward's instructions– they marched forth from their city in the hope that by sacrificing their lives, they would save their people.  (The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.  Remember.) Did they hesitate, think twice, reconsider? Did they waver in resolve or press stolidly onward? Were they enraged at the enemy, at humankind, at God? Did faith and faithful action steel them against encroaching fear and doubt?

As a matter of historical record, the six heroes were eventually spared in a display of magnanimity.  However, at the moment when they rose to the occasion and walked off toward the enemy's camp to face their doom, the six had no reason to suppose their lives were anything but forfeit.  And it is that moment of bittersweet hope and despair that Auguste Rodin chose to depict in his masterful bronze of 1889, The Burghers of Calais.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais

This work rather obviously participates in the same multi-perspectival dynamic that gave life to the statues mentioned above. Here, however, two differences appear, one physical and one thematic.  The physical difference is that this is a sculptural group rather than a single figure; the somatic complexity is much richer.  The viewer walking around this sculpture, moving toward it, or drawing away from it, will have the opportunity to notice many more changes in surface, shadow, and shape than even Bernini's David affords.

The idea of having multiple figures in a sculptural group is no novelty, though Rodin deploys the idea with sophistication.  What is perhaps more novel, or at least more typical of Rodin's culture and era than of earlier times, is the statue's exploration of psychology and emotion.  The thematic difference between Rodin's group and earlier sculptures is that the complexities of pose and spatial extension serve not so much to project an unsculpted fictional world around the figures, but rather to project a plurality of virtual mental worlds within or among the figures.

The statue does not imply or suggest what it might be like to depart besieged Calais and to march toward the encamped English.  Instead, it whispers, declares, and bellows what it might be like to ponder one's impending death and the seeming pointlessness of so many great, petty, proud, or pious achievements as one now prepares to march toward the moment of capitulation, humiliation, and negation.  Bernini invoked our imagination by showing us body and intentionality; Rodin invokes our imagination and empathy by showing us conflicted or decided minds, stable or wavering intentions, the threshold where prior dreams are dashed and a desperate hope in behalf of others takes their place.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, Jacques de Wiessant

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, Jean d'Aire

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, Andrieu d'Andres

The work invites empathy, analysis, and introspection by presenting unexpected or evocative details and juxtapositions to the exploratory viewer. From one vantage, it appears as if the six, as a cluster, are ambling toward their fate. From another, the group breaks into two as a leader in the front turns to encourage his companions in the back.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais

Still another vantage reveals that half of the group is headed in the wrong direction, one clutching his head in despair or disbelief, and two moving as one in rhymed poses as they retreat to his aid or exhortation.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais

The more a viewer explores and ponders the information this sculpture offers, the more the physical gives way to the mental. Historical imagination gives way to the presentation of concepts, assertions about human character, portrayals of vulnerability or resilience, considerations of individuality and community, and a host of other themes that speak to what it is to be fragile humans in a fragmented, fractious world.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais, Pierre de Wiessant

To put it in a more useful way, The Burghers of Calais is a technology that amplifies our powers of inspection, introspection, empathy, and intention by providing a rich occasion for their exercise.

What, after all, is a technology? What is the etymological "logic of art"? As a matter of cultural and linguistic habit, we use the term "technology" to refer to certain classes of gadgets, machinery, or manipulation. Turn to the "tech" section of any newsfeed, and it will be replete with discussions of 4G cell phones or particle accelerators or biomodification. But this way of using the term "technology" elides the point worth emphasizing.

I prefer to emphasize that technology always stands in a certain relation to the people who use it: technology is anything that amplifies what the human body can already do. A club amplifies the ability to punch. A gun amplifies the ability to throw. A telephone amplifies the ability to shout. A motor vehicle amplifies the ability to run. Clothing amplifies the protective and insulating qualities of skin. Architecture, oddly enough, is large, static, communal clothing. Telecast media amplify vision or audition. The hard drive and RAM of a computer amplify the ability to remember and to calculate. And so on.

Any technology may be understood this way, and therefore anything that acts as a force multiplier on what humans in general can already do may be construed as a technology. What's more (and setting aside the mind/body problem), technologies may amplify not only the physical but also the mental. Formal logic is a conceptual technology that amplifies the ability to think systematically, to argue cogently, and to relate premises to inferences in a way that yields foreseeable material results from abstract plans. Language, one might say, is a distributive technology that amplifies the ability to define and organize human experience by engaging and uniting many people in ordered pursuit of those tasks.

So then, what of art? The fictional projection of possible worlds in text, paint, stone, metal, or light is a material technology that amplifies our ability to entertain and evaluate conditional counterfactuals. This, of course, is just a jargon-laden way of saying that representational books, movies, and art propose imaginary scenarios– in some respects like the actual world and in some respects different– and thereby provide a means for us to safely explore alternate paths of choice and action without the burden of non-fictional consequences. Vicarious experience, fantasy, imagination, escape– these are the crux, but they're complex notions best left for another post.

The key point is that we use technologies such as chiseling and bronze casting to make artworks, but an artwork is itself a technology by means of which we do something else. (Of course, it is a staple of aesthetics and art theory that a work becomes "art" at precisely the point where we abandon any notion of its utility. For reasons best deferred, I find that understanding of art inadequate, a historical curiosity of that stream of modernism that has its source in the Enlightenment.) But if the key question is how we are using art, then it is always already the case that the maker and the consumer of art are both embroiled in the creation and valuation of its meanings: active in some ways and passive in others, now resolute and now conflicted, egoistic but altruistic, insular or communal, in a grand negotiation of the terms of surrender and victory.

And if the consumer is always already as much a factor as the producer, then it just won't do to maintain that art is something that artists do for (or to) willing but passive recipients. It's not a question of whether the audience actively contributes to the art it finds enriching, but of how much, how well, and how.

At least we can all agree about the statues.

Figuratively speaking, I'd kill to have a monument like that in my yard, blotting out the sun, towering over the neighbors, reminding them of my oppressive majesty.  It seems that I'm not alone, and some would do it literally:  Dozens of ruthless African dictators can't be wrong.

North Korea may be poor, but it has no shortage of cheap labourers and architects. In fact, Kim Jong Il has been lending them out to build monuments, palaces—even football stadiums—for leaders across Africa. In return, he’s getting foreign cash: the construction projects may have earned the country US$160 million since 2000 alone, the South Korean news service Daily NK reported.

The countries where North Korea has found the most success are also places whose leaders can relate to a self-declared Supreme Leader like Kim Jong Il: Equatorial Guinea, Angola and Congo, all repeat customers, whose presidents came to power when Jimmy Carter was in office.

Now I'm no fancy critic, but I know what I like.  And what I like is gigantic statues depicting heroism, triumph, and moderate nudity.  To a man who has his own collection of North Korean art, every day must be like living as the hero of an Ayn Rand novel.

Poor Agostino di Duccio.  He had learned his craft under the most innovative and imaginatively expressive sculptural master of the quattrocento, Donatello.  But Agostino could not have been happy on the mountain in Carrara as he oversaw the quarrying of a shallow, broad block of marble some eighteen feet long.  Over the course of his career, Agostino had taken to bas-relief work of the sort one finds on the façade of a church or a palazzo.  He had created grand works in terra cotta, too, but clay is a thing far different from stone.

Nevertheless, here he was, perhaps because the elders in Florence had decided to make good on a fifty year old plan to erect a huge statue of Donatello's making on a buttress of the cathedral.  Then in his late 70s, Donatello was no longer in a position to give more than nominal attention to such a project.  To Agostino fell the labor.

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Fred Astaire, and our friend Windypundit, have said it was the Nicholas Brothers in Stormy Weather.  I beg to differ.

It was the Berry Brothers, perhaps not as technically perfect as the Nicholas Brothers (with whom they were rivals), but far more athletic, in the relatively obscure film Panama Hattie.  Feast your eyes and ears on this.

They're like Jedi in tophats, tails, and canes.

Anton Ukhanov presents this gallery of Russian airbrushed car art, from the "Aerography" auto show, taken at the Khodynka field in Moscow, June 19, 2010.

The word is … awesome!

The gallery features dozens of cars just as impressive.

Expect to read in coming months of an exodus of American rednecks, all applying for visas to Russia.  Clearly, we have an airbrush gap!

Iowahawk take note!

Found thanks to Tim Blair.