Emvergeoning

If you’re in Southtown this week, make sure to stop by Sala Diaz and check out Stevan Zivadinovic’s series of portraits: “Orson Welles vs. The Burning Dumpster.” Here’s Orson excised from a scene in Moby Dick.

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Susan Kare’s design work may look dated in this age of endless gradients, transparent drop shadows and candy-coated buttons, but she had an immeasurable impact on early computer-based graphic design. As the designer of many of the key icons and fonts on the early Macintosh operating system, as well as icons and other visual elements for Windows 3.0 and OS/2 Warp, pretty much anyone working on a graphical operating system in the eighties was looking at her designs day in and day out. Kare’s font Chicago was used as the default font for menus and dialogue boxes on the Mac OS up through System 7, and then was later revived for the early (pre-Photo) versions of the iPod. She even designed Clarus the Dogcow.

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Daniel Finkelstein discovers the real meaning behind the new Olympics logo…

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Looks like we’re in for another Ugly Olympics over this seizure inducing, 1980s regurgitative graphic design defect. Yuck. I think the running joke tends to halo around the price tag for this “design”, deflating the British economy of some 45 million euros or something comparable. Eegads, makes the Valero logo look like pan dulce in comparison. Who are they hiring to create these hideous emblems? Post-ictal, color blind, Euclidean embracing pangolins? Perhaps.

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A subtle and layered performance by one of America’s great performance artists (this is on the early ’80s sketch comedy show, Fridays):

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Just a short and sweet congratulations to curator/performance artist Leona Scull Hons for her recent award. Her inaugural, curatorial debut at Volitant “Take Me to Bed or Lose Me Forever” won best Group Show 2007. Congrats to all the artists as well as Volitant Gallery director and artist Xochi Solis! This show wouldn’t have been possible without all the helping hands at the gallery space. This year, the Austin Critics included lots of the Austin Chronicle entourage of critics as well as the Austin American Statesmen’ theater/visual arts writers. The list of awards looked exhausting but the breadth of arts that the critics covered was quite significant.

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The Team of Ray-gun, Eddie Rabbit, and Jay-Possum completed their first foray into the contemporary art world this morning with a completed 4×8 foot woodblock cutout print run over by a steamroller (albeit a small one) .  Take a look :

setting up for a print..the tension builds

and dissipates.  The first print of the Ray-rabbit-jay team.  *Note the fine Keep San Antonio Lame T-shirt.

just turn it sideways (white part down) in your mind, it’ll all make sense..

local rabbit hero (and EMVG co-host) Bunnyphonic, playing accordion on Gary Sweeneys Steamrolled woodcut.

the rest of the pie.

Gary Sweeney.

Alex Rubio had us humbled right tastefully.

sweenco.

art hero bunnyphonic.

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Local art staples like Chris Sauter and Richie Budd are capturing out-of-town attention. The perfumed Budd brings his Rube Goldberg contraptions to Priska C. Juschka Fine Art Gallery in New York city this month and Sauter’s silos popped up on I Heart Photograph last week…In other news, local performance provocateur, Jimmy Kuehnle {pronounced Keenly}, won a Fulbright free ride to Japan for a year. I hope the land of the Rising Sun is prepared for the wrath of inflatable wearables that Jimmy will unleash onto their unsuspecting landscapes. Mothra VS Jimmy coming to theaters in 2008…

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This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being: if he commits it and speaks with his being the basic word [I-You] to the form that appears, then the creative power is released and the work comes into being.

The deed involves a sacrifice and a risk. The sacrifice: infinite possibility is surrendered on the altar of the form; all that but a moment ago floated playfully through one’s perspective has to be exterminated; none of it may penetrate into the work; the exclusiveness of such a confrontation demands this. The risk: the basic word can only be spoken with one’s whole being; whoever commits himself may not hold back part of himself; and the work does not permit me, as a tree or man might, to seek relaxation in the It-world; it is imperious: if I do not serve it properly, it breaks, or it breaks me.

The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe; I can only actualize it. And yet I see it, radiant in the splendor of the confrontation, far more clearly than all clarity of the experienced world. Not as a thing among the “internal” things, not as a figment of the “imagination”, but as what is present. Tested for its objectivity, the form is not “there” at all; but what can equal its presence? And it is an actual relation: it acts on me as I act on it.

Such work is creation, inventing is finding. Forming is discovery. As I actualize it, I uncover. I lead the form across — into the world of It. The created work is a thing among things and can be experienced and described as an aggregate of qualities. But the receptive beholder may be bodily confronted now and again.

— Martin Buber (trans. Walter Kaufman),

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