Overthinkers who live in and around New York City should make a point of riding the Q train from Brooklyn into Manhattan the next time they want to see something amazingly cool. (No, I’m not talking about the waterfalls. Those were lame, and are gone now anyway as far as I know. This is way better.)
If you look to the right as the train sails through the abandoned Myrtle Avenue subway station, you will see a Yakov Smirnoff joke about Cinema:
It’s brief abstract film animated by the motion of the train itself. It works on the same principle as the 19th century zoetrope, except instead of spinning a drum you just sit back and let the train do the work. (Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what a zoetrope is — if google hadn’t come through for me, I had planned to write “one of those old timey spin-the-wheel-and-look-through-the-slot dealies.”)
What I like about the Masstransiscope is that you’re suddenly confronted with a piece of art while you’re inhabiting the least artistic space imaginable. It also helps that it’s a film. Usually when we see public art, it’s a statue. A statue isn’t something that commands urgent attention. You look at it for a while, you get bored, you stop looking, you wonder what you’ll have for lunch, you look again… as a result, there’s nothing particularly odd about ignoring the statues and murals that decorate so many of our public spaces. Even if you went to a museum for the specific purpose of seeing statues, you’re going to spend a more time ignoring any given individual piece of art than you will spend paying attention to it. But we are NOT used to ignoring moving pictures. (At least not yet, although in the post-Tivo era that may be changing.) When we go to a movie, we keep our eyes glued to the screen for the whole duration. If we look down even for a second, that second of film will be gone, and we won’t get it back.
Add to this the fact that we spend most of our time on the subway zoning out and not paying attention to anything. So when you pass the Masstransiscope, you’re suddenly shocked out of this listless commuter-state into an incredibly active perception of this miniscule blip of beauty… and then it’s gone. Like Keyser Soze. Or, you know, a psychadelic jellyfish.
Anyway, it’s really worth seeing it for yourself if you can. You might want to do this sooner rather than later. There’s no plan to take it down, but it spent most of the last 20 years under an impenetrable coat of graffiti, and it probably won’t be long before it gets tagged back out of existence.
More on the project and it’s creator, Bill Brand, can be found here.
The title here is taken from a recent post by mlawski on the difference between [Strong Female] Characters and [Strong Characters], Female. The image is a painting by the French artist Louis-Leopold Boilly, which (according to the exhibit guide at the museum I saw it in) is a symbolic representation of “the phallic mother.”
Overthinking It bids a fond farewell to Robert Rauschenberg, who passed away last Monday at the age of 82.
Honestly, his stuff isn’t so much to my taste. But there’s no denying that he was an important guy. You’ve got to imagine that overthinkingit’s de jure favorite artist/mancrush/obscure object of desire/fetish object Matthew Barney’s style would have been a lot different if Rauschenberg hadn’t cranked out this bad boy
in 1959.
BY THE WAY
One of Rauschenberg’s main teachers was Josef Albers, whose paintings mostly look like this.
Which just goes to show: either Rauschenberg paid NO damn attention in class, or Albers couldn’t teach.
No sooner did I finish my weeklong series on Rambo than I came across this little corner of the blogosphere, and I think it, as much as anything else, helps me clarify why I bothered to do a weeklong series on Rambo.
