"Look I can too." Photo by Joe Wallace

I recently traveled to Spain where I had the pleasure of re-visiting a favorite museum, the Reina Sofia, in Madrid. I trekked to the museum district for what I believe are two must-see works—Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and Salvador Dali’s Muchacha en la Ventana. It has been my experience that even if art museum visitors don’t understand what a piece means, most can at least appreciate what great works like these mean to art history or to an artist’s career. For me, taking pleasure in the viewing experience of these paintings comes very easily as well. Guernica’s scale alone (over 25 feet wide and 11 feet tall) begs for a few extra minutes of consideration, not to mention its iconic, violently contortioned figures and the work’s importance to Spanish history. I enjoy Muchacha more for its peaceful, contemplative nature but also because of a personal memory I associate with the work—a reproduction was sent to me from my brother while he lived in Spain. (The painting’s ‘girl’ is Dali’s sister.)

Salvador Dali, "Muchacha en la Ventana", 1925

What made my museum experience particularly memorable this time around was not my enjoyment of these two works, but instead how disturbed and confused I felt after seeing another work—a film by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali called Un Chien Andalou (which you can view here—warning, please view it before showing your kids). It was bizarre and crazy and I didn’t want to understand it. Though my museum companion explained that it was a Surrealist masterpiece and pivotal film studied and known by any film buff, I didn’t and wouldn’t like it. Even after I learned that its shocking opening sequence—a man slicing open a woman’s eyeball with a razor blade—is one of the most recognized moments in film history, it did not matter, I could not take pleasure in this piece. All I could do was reluctantly appreciate it for its place in film history and its creators’ reputed genius. Because this visit left me feeling unusually more out-of-touch with the art than other visits, I was determined to find a reason to like Un Chien.

Still from "Un Chien Andalou", 1928. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Surprisingly, it took three minutes of research on the trusty web to find that 1) my uncomfortable response was exactly what Bunuel and Dali intended for me (according to Roger Ebert and many other critics) and 2) my aesthetic interests in other art works can be loosely connected right back to this very film. In my defense of #1, I am aware of the Surrealist affinity for shock and non-sense, but the required 15+ minutes of weirdness made possible by the film medium (versus the limited seconds I would have to spend with surrealist paintings to “see” it in full) made this work seem particularly off the wall—sorry for being slow to figure that out, Mr. Ebert. And in regard to #2, please allow me a quick ‘degrees of separation’ exercise. Un Chien has been (more than) rumored to have influenced David Lynch, the director of the Twin Peaks series and several cult classic movies. David Lynch’s Blue Velvet directly influenced Gregory Crewdson, a photographer of large-scale, highly orchestrated, strange and dream-like images. Crewdson was a major interest of mine during my undergraduate study of photography and inspired the aesthetic of many of my projects, including my thesis show. And there you have it, a reason for me to be thankful for Un Chien Andalou. It seems the IMA can claim similar thankfulness, as it boasts Crewdson’s Untitled (1998) in its collection.

Gregory Crewdson, "Untitled", 1998. From the IMA collection.

So, I’ll charge you with the same task I assigned to myself—the next time you stumble on a piece of art that offends, frightens, discourages, enrages, or plain annoys you, try not to dismiss it. Instead, let it be that much more of an inspiration to find a reason to relate to it. You might find that you can alter your entire experience of it.

Just days before the opening of the exhibition “Kodachrome Culture: The American Tourist in Europe,” Kodak announced that it would discontinue Kodachrome film.

First Polaroid, now this?!

The slide film, known for its rich colors and clarity, has been available commercially since 1935. It now accounts for less than 1% of Kodak’s still-film sales. You’ve probably seen this famous Kodachrome portrait:

Sharbat Gula, Afghan Girl, 1984. © Steve McCurry

The problem is, Kodachrome must be processed by a method so complex that only one lab in America is still certified by Kodak to handle the film: Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas. Dwayne’s said on its site that they would continue processing Kodachrome through the end of next year. Renowned photographer and Kodachrome lover Eric Meola seems to think the transition was inevitable:

Before digital, Kodak was already shifting gears–moving away from the boundaries of KODACHROME (long lab times, fewer labs, a more environmentally friendly, as well as constrained, chemistry)

Promised Land, © Eric Meola

Kodak said that it expects the current supply of Kodachrome to last until the fall. However, if what happened with Polaroid film was any indication, it will probably linger around longer than that.

The National Geographic Museum will open a sentimental tribute to the film today in Washington, D.C. Nat Geo’s photographers began using Kodachrome in the 1930s, describing the film as ‘a photographic medium that changed the way we document the world.’

Kodachrome photo from Flickr user hz536n

Paul Simon, any final words?

World Graphic Design Day is celebrated on April 27, the anniversary of the founding of Icograda, the world body for graphic design, in 1963. It is a day to celebrate the profession of graphic and communication design. The day has been celebrated since 1995.

Now if we could only abolish Comic Sans! But since we can’t, you should do yourself a favor and meet film director Gary Hustwit (Helvetica) and see his latest documentary, Objectified, which is a film about the creative process of product design. It is at the Toby here at the IMA on May 14th 2009! The film features designers who shape our manufactured environment and our interfaces with mass-produced objects including the people behind IKEA furniture and the iPod. Click here to read more about the event. Hope to see you there!

I get in the design groove by listening to music, and this seems to be all too fitting. Dert’s CMYK ep should help you get those creative graphic design juices flowing. Pay as you please… dope indeed.

Download audio file (02-magenta.mp3)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Summer Nights 2008

Now it’s time to mark your calendars for season #34 of Summer Nights, June 5-August 28. As one of the few art museums in the country with an amphitheater, the IMA offers a unique movie-going experience. All you need is a blanket, some friends and a picnic basket full of goodies. And, by popular demand, another special midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show is in the works.

VOTE NOW! Below are four categories of films. Vote for your favorite film in each of the categories as often as you like. Polls close at noon on February 25, and results, including the full Summer Nights schedule, will be announced in March on the IMA Blog.

VOTING IS NOW CLOSED.
STAY TUNED TO THE IMA BLOG FOR OFFICIAL RESULTS IN MARCH!

*Licensing fees and restrictions may prohibit certain selections from being screened. However, the IMA will do all that is possible to secure and show all winning films.

There are actually more than 10 reasons to visit

What, you haven’t been to the IMA’s new Tobias Theater yet? Consider this your personal invitation…along with ten good reasons to get thee to The Toby to catch a film in the next two weeks:

1. To be surprised: Little Fugitive, a black-and-white beauty made in 1953, is probably a film you’ve never heard of. Let that be a good thing. This 80-minute indie gem is about a boy who runs away to Coney Island. Think of it as Leave It To Beaver infused with art, subtlety, and cinematography to die for. Sneak away and see it at The Toby Tuesday, December 30.
2. The sound rocks: As the museum’s senior AV technician, sound hound Chris Cruz made sure the sound system in The Toby is top notch. Three refrigerator-sized speakers lurk behind the movie screen to give you blasts of aural delight.

3. Because Johnny Depp is the new Santa Claus: To cut the sugar that often accompanies the holidays, we’ve picked out two moody Depp films and are running them back-to-back as part of IMA’s One-Two Punch series. Find out which films and when.

4. To escape your mother-in-law: Had enough family time? Sneak off to The Toby for the dazzling animation of Princess Mononoke the day after Christmas, or see Clint Eastwood turn the western on its head in Unforgiven on Jan. 2.
5. To escape economic woes: According to financial and historical gurus, movie attendance surges during troubled times. What are you waiting for?
6. You can come in your PJs: I will admit you free to any Toby film if you come in your pajamas. At The Toby, you can lounge around AND fathom the images on a 15’ x 30’ screen. Netflix, schmetflix.
7. To canoodle in the balcony or the ComfySacks: We won’t stop you and your honey from holding hands up in The Toby balcony or on the massive red bean bags down near the screen.
8. Beverages are for sale: Wine or beer (for the appropriately aged) are available from the stylin’ Toby concession counter.
9. You’re independent: You could go to Kerasotes or United Artists, but seeing a film at The Toby contributes to the local economy.
10. Because you can also visit the galleries: The visual art just won’t quit at IMA. Before or after the cinema washes over you, you can be transported to Ming-dynasty China in the Power & Glory exhibition, check out the new minimalist exhibition in the Forefront gallery, or ponder the wintry landscape through the veil of Maya Lin’s Above and Below installation on the IMA’s second floor galleries.

If you’ve already been to The Toby, please leave us your impressions and testimonies below.

The book Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thorton is another excellent find. “A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton’s entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture,” according to the book’s publisher. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s at the top of my wish-list. Read a review from The Washington Post.

Those are my two finds. I’m leaving the rest up to you. Your prime shopping date: Friday, December 5 – “First Friday” offers your best bet to buy art at the local galleries. Share your finds below…

Ask IMA CEO Maxwell Anderson about the price of freedom. He’ll tell you about the IMA’s successful challenge to a law passed by the Indiana legislature this year forcing any entity selling materials deemed “harmful to minors” to register with the State and pay a fee to do so. If Judge Sarah Evans Barker had not agreed with the IMA, Big Hat Books, and other plaintiffs and struck down the restrictive law, every school with a sex ed text book—or art museum gift shop with books featuring the nude form—would have had to pay up and be policed.

Ask Indianapolis educator Connie Heermann about the price of freedom. Connie is the Perry Township teacher suspended without pay for teaching the book The Freedom Writers Diary in her class last year without permission from the school board. The book, written by the students of California teacher Erin Gruwell, is a record of their daily lives, fraught with violence and racism. This work of non-fiction contains profanity and bloodshed–because that’s what these teens experienced.

Filmmaker Richard LaGravenese (Living Out Loud, Freedom Writers) turned the story of Erin Gruwell and herstudents into a film starring Hilary Swank. In a Huffington Post blog entry last month, LaGravenese makes a passionate defense of the liberty to learn.

In the spirit of the First Amendment, the IMA is hosts a screening of the film Freedom Writers and a post-film discussion with Connie Heermann. Come to the IMA August 21 at 6 pm to hear about an all-too-real struggle for free expression in Indiana. Dissenters welcome.

Who doesn’t love a kung fu panda? HI-YA! From cave paintings, frieze reliefs and spinning pottery attempting to convey motion, to the Victorian thaumatrope toy and the 1868 flip book, the development of animation has come a long way to reach a fully animated martial arts panda. This development urges us to think of animation as art, not just entertainment.

You may not first think of animation as a highly esteemed visual art form, but it certainly captures a large and important audience, along with highly talented creators, not to mention a hefty chunk of revenue. Possibly the first animated film, created in 1906 by American J. Stuart Blackton, was Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. The film tells the story of a cartoonist drawing faces on a chalkboard, with the faces coming to life. In the United States, animation began in the 1900s age of silent film with Bray Studios in New York City with characters like Felix the Cat, and moved into the Golden Age of Hollywood animation with Walt Disney’s many creations including Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop and Popeye. The 1950s through the 1980s brought the beginning of Saturday Morning Cartoons, perhaps the first visual art to which most children are exposed. Today, modern animation seems limitless with evolving computer technology, marked by the first fully computer generated feature film Toy Story. Animation now caters to adult audiences and appeals to the masses with niches such as Japanese Anime and stop motion animation like Wallace and Gromit. It is also incorporated into live action movies such as the Lord of the Rings series, blurring the lines between the two forms of cinema.

Animation comes with its share of sterotypes in America. Among them are a lack of being taken seriously and the opinion that animation is for kids. Actually, one might argue that the only difference between live cinema and an animated movie is the art of photography verses drawing, as Paul le Fou smartly pointed out on his blog Anima in 2007. It’s obvious that the business of animation is huge, and while I wasn’t able to track down what percentage of the movie industry is made up of animated films, a rush of other media outlets using animation come to mind – video and computer games, advertisements and all news outlets. Indiana even boasts its own animation genius Jim Davis, father of Garfield the cat.

Focusing on the science of animation, a local exhibition at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, called Animation, traces the process of creating a cartoon from storyboarding to design, voice recording and final editing with interactive features. The Cartoon Network brings the exhibit to life with characters from The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo and others. This one is sure to intrigue all ages.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art’s Friday night film series Summer Nights includes its own animation magic. Each film is preceded by a cartoon featuring one of your favorites (Mine? Pepe LePew!):

Gilda – Cartoon: Hare-Raising Hare
This is Spinal Tap – Cartoon: Rabbit’s Kin
The Goonies – Cartoon: Devil May Hare
Glory – Cartoon: Bunker Hill Bunny
The Rocky Horror Picture Show -
Cartoon: Water, Water Every Hare
The Mummy – Cartoon: The Rabbit of Seville
The Big Lebowski – Cartoon: Don’t Give Up the Sheep
Strangers on a Train – Cartoon: Baton Bunny
Devil in Blue Dress – Cartoon: Bugs & Thugs
Dr. Strangelove – Cartoon: Duck Amuck
Sholay – Cartoon: Ballot Box Bunny
Ghostbusters – Cartoon: Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, starring Daffy Duck
Click here for a full schedule of Summer Night films.

Maybe it’s time American culture takes a cue from Japan and embraces the Kung Fu Panda with the respect he deserves.

TONIGHT: Catch the last night of The Animation Show, featuring new independent animation, at Key Cinemas Filmworks tonight at 7:00 pm and 8:30 pm. “This year Mike Judge has gathered together over two dozen of his favorite funny short films from around the world. It’s a ground breaking program of eye-popping adult animation from tomorrow’s next great animators. This isn’t a dirty “adults only” animation show, but the program does skew towards a mature audience with some explicit language and adult subject matter.”

In the comments on that last post Karen T discussed the importance of being able to make a 1:1 comparison between a radiograph and a painting, and then Christina responded with some first-hand experience with our new system. I confess, though: I cheated a bit and asked Christina to answer that question because, after all, Christina is an experienced paintings conservator here at the IMA, and I’m not.

Christina and I were talking about all of this when the Chief Conservator, David Miller, walked into the lab and joined the discussion (you can find out more about both of them on the Mainardi web page). To make a long story longer, the three of us decided to put together an example that illustrates how the new system handles the 1:1 comparison issue. So David and Christina printed out an image to demonstrate a 1:1 comparison of the radiograph and the painting. The photo above is of Christina holding a 13” x 19” print out of a radiograph of the IMA’s Edward Hopper’s 1943 painting Hotel Lobby. The painting was fully radiographed as part of a technical study of Hopper’s painting technique for an exhibition (and catalogue) opening at the IMA in August of 2008, called Edward Hopper; Paper to Paint, that explores the relationship of the artist’s drawings and studies to the finished painting.

Here you can see a close up of the 1:1 comparison. You’ll have to wait for the exhibition to open later this year to find out more about what was being looked at in this painting, but in the mean time have a look in the bottom right corner of the radiograph and you can see a piece of hardware that is helping to keep the painting’s stretcher in place.

In case you want to know, here’s a spec sheet on our new printer and here’s a spec sheet on the 13” x 19” photo paper we used. Finally, you can go here and here to see two documents that discuss the Print Permanence Ratings for this printer and paper combination. And, if your super geeky like me you can watch part 1 and part 2 of our printer in action. Weeee … watch it print!

In addition to the two images I’ve shown here, I’ve uploaded some more to my Flickr page that attempt to illustrate the printing process and to show our comparison in the gallery.

Beyond the 1:1 comparison issue, there are a couple of other things to consider when comparing the use of film radiographs to digital. A lot of paintings (and objects) are bigger than a single piece of film or photo paper. With film, conservators often trim and combine multiple sheets onto a light box so that the assembled radiograph can be compared to a painting. It seems logical that the exact same thing could be done with a print out, but we haven’t had a reason to try it yet. However, one of intriguing tools of CR is the ability to make enlargements of certain sections of radiographs. And, within these images you can make measurements and a variety of annotations. The image below illustrates some of these functions.

As for the other comments about the conservation of radiographic images, I’d like to say thanks, Alison, for keeping the CR topic close to the broader issues. I think it’s important to keep it in context and I certainly don’t mind at all if the discussion gets broadened to include the archiving and sharing of film-based radiographs (though I think we should draw the line and not include the whole topic of conservation documentation in the digital form in this post – we could be here for months if not years if we got started on that one!).

Taking this post off topic, I want to point out one of my favorite punk bands: the X-Ray Spex; it doesn’t get much better than Warrior in Woolworths, and besides what conservator wouldn’t like a lead singer named Poly Styrene.

Anyway, please feel free to add a thought, comment, or question. As I mentioned, we haven’t had this equipment for very long and though we’ve mastered some aspects of it, to some extant we’re still finding our way with it.