video

Tyger

Posted by hil

Tyger from Guilherme Marcondes on Vimeo.

Tyger is a terrific short film directed by Guilherme Marcondes. While William Blake’s poem, The Tyger, was the starting point, it ‘doesn’t attempt to illustrate or pay homage to the original text’. Marcondes interprets the tiger as symbolizing ‘a hint of wonder along with a fear of progress. The tiger is as much dangerous as it is marvellous, and this ambiguity makes us avoid the pure romantic vision of society’.

The story is about relating city to jungle and people to animals, and it is achieved with a wonderful mixture of imagery – a great bunraku-style puppet tiger, used with black light technique; Sao Paulo’s urban landscape as a photographic setting; drawings with a lino-cut quality that morph people into animals, and order into chaos; and animated glowing lines that sprout and twine like jungle vegetation. The music is cool, too.

Joao Grembecki and Cia.Stomboli in Sao Paulo, Brazil, made the tiger, and the puppeteers are Joao Grembecki, Cassiano Reis and Fabio Oliveiro. The full credits are here.

Updated links 2015

Spitting Image puppets of Genesis

Posted by hil

GenesisSpeaking of the Man of Steel, here is a video of Land of Confusion, by Phil Collins and Genesis, from 1986.

Oh Superman where are you now
When everything’s gone wrong somehow
The Man of Steel, these men of power
Are losing control by the hour

As well as the music and the political nature of the song, it’s also interesting because it features puppets of the guys in the band, and a host of others – Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Thatcher, Gadafi, the Pope, Michael Jackson (still black!) and so on. The puppets are instantly recognizable as being made by Roger Law and Peter Fluck from Spitting Image, the renowned British satirical puppet TV show from 1984 to 1996’s, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the puppets in the video had been made firstly for Spitting Image episodes. Wikipedia has information about the song and the video.

I don’t see no lettuce!

Posted by hil

Last week my son and I cracked up when we happened across a video clip of Bud Light’s Real Men of Genius: Mr Giant Taco Salad Inventor (‘I don’t see no lettuce!’).

I had no idea it was part of a series of Bud Light commercials but yesterday my friend Amy serendipitously blogged about a collection of them. I just love them! (2015 updated link)

Elmgreen & Dragset’s ‘Dying’ Sparrow

Posted by hil

An exhibition by two Scandanavian artists, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, is causing a bit of a stir at London’s Tate Modern gallery this month. In an otherwise empty new gallery space 25 metres by 7 metres, a sparrow is trapped between the panes of a double-glazed window, apparently dying. The sparrow is, however, animatronic. It cost &pound12,000 and was made by Crawley Creatures, the company best known for the creatures in the BBC’s/ABC’s Walking with Dinosaurs series. The artists make a connection with the general demise of sparrows and that of London’s working class, though other interpretations have been made.

A selection of reviews
30 second video of the animatronic sparrow
Pictures 1, 2

The picture here is a woodcut from an early (1820 or so) chapbook, An Elegy on the Death and Burial of Cock Robin (York: J. Kendrew), reproduced in The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, by Iona and Peter Opie, (ISBN: 0 19 869112 2).

Who killed Cock robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
With my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.

Maybe he can’t afford to be so jaunty any more.

Ron Mueck’s Pregnant Woman sculpture

Posted by hil

One of the recent acquisitions at the National Gallery of Australia here in Canberra is a larger-than-life sculpture of a naked pregnant woman by Ron Mueck. Its an extraordinary thing: 2.5 metres tall, and so life-like in its attention to the minutest detail and colouring that you are compelled to get up close to look, and then suddenly feel as if you have got way too personal. Then again the woman seems entirely in her own world, feeling the enormity of pregnancy in every way, and as if nothing else can impinge on those sensations.

The gallery is also showing a video of the making of Pregnant Woman, which was very interesting to me as a maker. The sculpture is made of fibre glass and silicon, and the video shows the elaborate processes of mold making and casting that was involved. I’m not sure if the video being offered for sale at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, is the same, but it looks from the description as if it might be. One technique that I thought might prove useful is that shellac can be painted on a clay sculpture to prevent it drying out.

Here are some links to some collections of Ron Mueck’s amazing work: again, the sculptures are all superbly realistic except for some twist involving scale:

Dead Dad from the BBC’s The Saatchi Phenomenon . The figure is less than life-size in death.
Artmolds.com. Numerous works.
ABC’s Gateway to Arts and Culture: 49th Venice Biennale: Ron Mueck’s ‘Boy’. This includes a RealVideo walkaround of ‘Boy’ shot by Pollyanna Sutton.
Boy. A couple of pictures.
James Cohen Galleries. Numerous works pictured, and a collection of articles and reviews in pdf files.