In 2014, Italian artist Sven Sachsalber set out literally to find a needle in a haystack.
The performance, undertaken at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, was allotted two days. Amazingly, Sachsalber found the needle with a few hours to spare.
Now we need a new saying.
Inspired by his wife’s art studies, physicist David C. Roy turned his training to sculpture and began fashioning moving mechanisms of birch, not clocks themselves but clocklike in that they’re wound by hand and then run unpowered, sustaining their motion through escapements, suspended weights, and constant force springs.
“I saw it as another type of creative problem solving, not all that different from my advanced physics courses, but with a completely different goal,” he writes. “To this day, I find art and science to be closely linked.”
More on his website and YouTube channel.
French painter Joseph Ducreux (1735–1802) was fascinated with physiognomy, the notion that a person’s character is reflected in their outward appearance — and this led to some decidedly unconventional self-portraits.
At the same time, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783) was doing similar work in three dimensions.
By 1914 Frank Lloyd Wright had become one of America’s most influential architects. But that August a violent tragedy unfolded at his Midwestern residence and studio. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the shocking attack of Julian Carlton, which has been called “the most horrific single act of mass murder in Wisconsin history.”
We’ll also admire some helpful dogs and puzzle over some freezing heat.
Brazilian pianist João Carlos Martins won worldwide acclaim but had to retire in March 2019 after 24 surgeries could not relieve the pain caused by a degenerative disease and a series of accidents.
But designer Ubiratã Bizarro Costa proposed making some neoprene-covered bionic gloves that lift Martins’ fingers after they depress the keys, and by December they had perfected them.
“I might not recover the speed of the past,” Martins told the Associated Press. “I don’t know what result I will get. I’m starting over as though I were an 8-year-old learning.”
But his goal now is to play an entire Bach concert perfectly. “It could take one, two years. I will keep pushing until that happens. I won’t give up.”
Crop artist Stan Herd plants, mows, and plows land to create large-scale images visible from the air.
“All over the world farmers draw with the plough, harrow, and harvesting combine, and paint with the colors of their crops,” he says. He applies the same techniques to create portraits, still lifes, and (somewhat recursively) landscapes.
Arborsculptor Richard Reames created this living bench by training red alders into a congenial shape.
His monograph on tree trunk topiary is called How to Grow a Chair.
See A Natural Seat.
In January 1943, a brick “hive” was built around Michelangelo’s David to protect it from incendiary bombs.
Two and a half years later, preservationist Deane Keller wrote to his wife, “The bright spot yesterday was seeing Michelangelo’s David at length divested of its air raid protection. It was dusty and dirty but it was a great thrill.”
(From Ilaria Dagnini Brey, The Venus Fixers, 2010.)
histrion
n. an actor
marquisotte
v. to shave or trim (the beard) with exaggerated fastidiousness
renascible
adj. capable of being reborn
tropicopolitan
adj. inhabiting the tropics
Korean sculptor Yi Hwan-Kwon presents his subjects as they might appear in a distorted mirror, but he renders them as three-dimensional sculptures, giving a disorienting effect of skewed perspective even when they’re viewed normally.
(Thanks, Allen.)
