Cover of "19 Pictures, 22 Recipes" by Paola Ferrario.

Mainstream cookbooks tend to present a particular style of photography: food spreads done up like the models of fashion magazines. Stylized still lifes, cropped, color saturated, and Photoshopped look too perfect to be true, or sometimes even to be edible. Yet glossy pictures are said to make the best cookbooks and in turn make cookbooks best-sellers. With her new publication 19 Pictures, 22 Recipes, Italy-born photographer and former Guggenheim fellow Paola Ferrario is bucking this trend; she has forgone pictures of food altogether in favor of found photographs of people and landscapes.

Recipe for Bruscitt, excerpt: "...If details were rendered we would see the heaviness and roughness of coats, the ages of shoes and hats, and the stains on beards."

Ferrario began writing 19 Pictures, 22 Recipes in 1994, but had until recently been unable to find a publisher. “Many people and agents said that it would be hard to sell because bookstores and sites would not know how to categorize it,” she explained in a recent email. “So finally, in 2010, I decided to self-publish.” Nineteen photographs purchased from flea markets and antique shops around the globe are each paired with a recipe (many of which belong to Ferrario’s family), a short text, an analysis, and a personal memoir and/or hypothetical narrative.

Ferrario’s musings on photography are as delightfully straightforward as her recipes, which include Cime di Rapa (broccoli rabe), Pasta with Tomatoes & Basil, Strange Rice, and Perfect Steak. Cheese with Pears requires little more than an appetite for both ingredients. To this the artist links a photograph of a young man standing in a “horrendous” pose (which she compares to a Giacometti sculpture) and in what she considers to be a dreadful composition. What can this photograph teach us about cooking? “This is not quite a recipe,” Ferrario explains, ”more an exercise in taste.”

Cime di Rapa is paired with an image that could have easily been part of Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives; you get the sense that food was hard to come by for his subjects. With this and other photographs calling to mind the Great Depression, 19 Pictures, 22 Recipes doesn’t always inspire one to cook, yet it’s still incredibly charming.

Recipe for Gravlax, excerpt: "In a perfect world social awareness would prevent politically incorrect seductions, but we are flesh, eyes and keepers of imperfect desires and the world of the beautiful boy can easily plant longing in our hearts...."

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Step 1 – Measure
Begin by taking the measurements of yourself and someone else (this could be your artistic collaborator, your lover, someone you dislike, your dog, etc.). For both you and your partner, measure height, weight and age. Next, subtract the other persons’ measurements from your measurements. Write down the results. Example: Person A is 150 lbs. and person B is 175 lbs. 
175 – 150 = 25 lbs.

Step 2 – Find your Material: Difference in Height and Weight
Next, find one material that exactly matches the constraints of your difference in height and weight. Depending on how drastic your difference is, the ideal material could vary between something very light, heavy, large or small. Whether it is wood, sand, metal, plaster, feathers, etc. your material should be chosen based on how precisely it fits into the constraint of your difference in height and weight. The form is up to you and could be dependent on your choice of material (a pile, a sphere, a cube, etc.) Example: A difference in height of 12″ and a difference in weight of 3 lbs. might result in a cube of solid wood.

Step 3 – Find your Material: Difference in Age
Next, find an object or material that exactly matches the constraints of your difference in age. The material or object should be representative of time and duration in some form, whether abstract or literal. This could be something as simple as a wristwatch, a digital clock or a calendar. Or it could be something less literal; a material that represents time more metaphorically, such as a pile of sand. As with your difference in height and weight, your material will be dependent on the vastness of your difference in age. A one-year age difference would produce drastically different results and materials from a ten-minute age difference.

Step 4 – Display
Once you have found or fabricated your objects, you will choose how to display them. If they are small enough, you can place them on a pedestal or shelf. If they are larger, you may choose to place them directly on the floor. Now take a step back and try to think of a good title for your piece. Never underestimate the power of a good title.

Kienholz and his team installing "Five Car Stud" in the parking lot of Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles. © Kienholz, photographs by John Romeyn, Bob Bucknam, Malcolm Lublinder, and Adam Avila, 1971.

“All the ghosts are assembling for the party.” That’s what Claire Danes says in the movie The Hours, when her mother, played by Meryl Streep, throws a dinner that brings artists and intellectuals bubbling up from the not-so-distant past.  It’s also how art in Los Angeles feels right now. Pacific Standard Time (PST), a year-long, 10 million dollar Getty-funded initiative to probe L.A. art from 1945-80, just got underway. More than sixty cultural institutions are staging exhibitions, and the ghosts are assembling.  Some of them, of course—like John Baldessari or Ed Ruscha—were never really gone. History’s kept them constantly at L.A.’s forefront.  But even they have works that have rarely been seen and, perhaps, poorly documented. That’s PST’s goal: to preserve parts of SoCal art history that seemed about to fall through the cracks.

Edward Kienholz, "Five Car Stud," 1969–72. © Kienholz. Collection of Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Sakura, Japan. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA and The Pace Gallery, New York.

One exhibition that opened at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) two weeks ago features a work that did fall through the cracks. It’s an installation by assemblage king Ed Kienholz, the artist who co-founded the now-iconic Ferus Gallery and had an infamous inability to keep his indignation in check (once, he took an axe to an airline desk after baggage handlers broke his Tiffany lamp). This work, made between 1969-72, never showed in L.A. LACMA curator Maurice Tuchman did his best to get it on display, but Kienholz had caused enough trouble with his 1966 retrospective, which was almost shut down due to the sculpted copulating couple in the installation Back Seat Dodge. The museum didn’t give him another chance to provoke.

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One of the most undeniably thrilling things about the web today is the endless opportunity it affords for interacting with complete strangers. One downside is that it’s often pretty difficult to tell whether that stranger is a human or a robot, particularly when those online interactions are limited strictly to text, as they often are. People fall in love with robots on dating sites all the time, or have eleven-hour conversations with chatbots on Instant Messenger. In an art context, the history of bots goes back as far as the theatrical automata of Leonardo Do Vinci up to recent blogs by Cory Arcangel, one of which endlessly apologizes for not posting enough. To help prevent you from neglecting your blogging duties, we’re going to show you how to make your very own blogging robot.

The first thing you will need for this tutorial is a data stream. A database of information or a good API is key to the creation of a good bot. Without the data that represents the way our robot will think, we are at a total loss. This tutorial will use YouTube as a data stream aka our robot’s range of interest.

Our robot will be a Tumblr blog that celebrates the popular internet meme of “planking.” The methodologies introduced in this tutorial can be applied to make a variety of other robots or blogs, thematically. This tutorial assumes you’re on Mac OS X and will require the use of a plain text editor (we’re big fans of TextMate, TextWrangler, or Smultron).

First, lets take a look at the YouTube Data API. For our purposes, the usage of this API will be very straightforward. To retrieve a series of videos from YouTube’s Data API, we must simply send a request to a URL.

https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos

Entering the above URL into your browser will return a large amount of XML from YouTube. While this is a whole lot of data, it is useless for us in its current state because we are not specifying what we want. To specify a search term from YouTube and narrow down our results, we’ll have to add some parameters to our query. You can add a parameter to a URL by appending a question mark, followed by the parameter itself. Let’s start by asking for JSON instead of XML. We prefer working with JSON because it’s lightweight and has become much more popular than XML in open source circles in the last few years. You can read more about JSON at http://json.org. Our URL that asks for a JSON response now looks like this:

https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?alt=json

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Ambrose at work...

This week’s column follows up on last week’s post and features part two of my interview with Adam Weiler of Ambrose, an atypical after school club in Holland, Michigan. If you haven’t already, check them out. You may even want to try the Makers Dozen to go….

Joe Fusaro: So what does a typical afternoon at Ambrose involve? What’s an after school session like for you and the students?

Adam Weiler: Students trickle in after school. We have healthy snacks available for them to munch on and at 3:30 we start community time where students and leaders tell their best and worst parts of the previous week (dubbed “Happies & Crappies”). The first Thursday of the month we’re joined by a guest artist who kicks off a collaborative project based on a process and we like to have them join in on “Happies & Crappies” too. After this we invite the guest artist to share their story, portfolio, and some lessons learned along the way (including the importance of the business side of art). The meat of the workshops are hands on projects focusing on the processes the visiting artist is known for… Brainstorming. Design Thinking. Graphic or Product Design. Paper Cutting. Typography. Drawing. Photography, etc. We try to do a short 1 hour project and exploration to get a taste of a process and then the following weeks we execute a larger group project based on that process around a theme.

Adam Weiler working with young artists at Ambrose.

JF: Do you have a favorite part when it comes to working on this project?

AW: Hands down it’s the relationships. With students – seeing them grow to connect with volunteers, community members and career pathways; and with staff – having a team that sees experiential education and the potential it has to change the world for the better.

JF: And where do you see Ambrose in a few years?

AW: Our goal is to do the best we can with what we’ve got. For now that means continuing the local work of building relationships with community partners, refining the curriculum and honing the business side of the program. We’ve figured out what it takes to make it happen full time for our community so that’s what we’re aiming for. When I dream about the future I think it’d be amazing to see Ambrose pop up elsewhere: groups of artist-educators from New York or Atlanta using the model to support local chapters. Kids all over the place getting pumped about design, problem solving, creativity and entrepreneurship. That’s a long way off…but one can dream.

Summer flew by, largely because I spent most of it taking courses in order to graduate in the Spring of 2012. But I can’t complain. I got to take a class on live image processing with the incredibly talented R. Luke Dubois. His deft treatment of code as a medium for art is astoundingly inspiring, but to be honest I had a difficult time keeping up with the material. On our last day of class he invited us to see Laurie Anderson perform live at the Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park Bandshell as part of the “Out of Doors” Series, but I had to pass in order to finish making a printed circuit board for another course.

Fashionably Late For The Relationship (1/8) from R. Luke DuBois on Vimeo.

I was having a hard time accepting the fact that I will be spending the next year staring at computer screens and burning my fingers hacking electronics in order to complete this degree. So I decided to take some time away from my work, with the excuse that I was going to research traditional performing arts before diving deep into the world of interactive media. The day I submitted my finals, I packed my bags, stowed my laptop safely inside my underwear cabinet, and jumped on the next plane to Asia.

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1.0. Open three windows in Google Chrome – one for Target.com, one for WalMart.com, and one for Google Shopping.

1.1. In each window, begin searching for turquoise and white products that are suitable for an airport, hotel, mall, bank, spa, or biennial lounge. “Aqua,” “Teal,” “Light Blue,” “Cyan,” “Robin Egg Blue,” “Aquamarine,” “Verdigris,” and “Electric Blue” can be useful search terms for yielding turquoise products as well.

1.2. Products should fulfill three main criteria – Synthetic. Futuristic. Soothing. Visit Hellblau for guidance.

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After a brief hiatus last month, we’re back with Episode 7 of “Fielding Practice” for Centerfield: Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports. This month, our roundtable gabfest includes panelists Richard Holland of Bad at Sports, artist Dan Gunn, Art21 Blog editor Claudine Isé, and is moderated by Bad at Sports’ Duncan MacKenzie. We discuss the issues brought up during The Dialogue: MCA Chicago’s Annual Conversation on Museums, Diversity, and Inclusion, a recent event at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art featuring a panel discussion between the MCA’s curator Naomi Beckwith, Chicago’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Michelle T. Boone, and YouTube sensation Hennessey Youngman a.k.a. artist Jayson Musson, creator of “Art Thoughtz.” Then, we move on for a drive-by tour of some of the fall openings that took place in Chicago on Friday, September 9th. As always, thanks for listening!

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Click here to listen.

Show Notes:

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Viewers looking at a painting from On Kawara's "Today Series."

As someone deeply invested in the art world, chances are you’ve found yourself playing art-guide to your friends or relatives on trips to the museum. And chances are, your friends or relatives will consistently praise the old Renaissance paintings, while drawing blank stares at anything modern. “What’s the big deal, I could do that?!”

The issue here, for some reason, is a matter of old-fashioned skill and labor (or lack thereof). Take On Kawara’s Today Series. At first glance, your friends or relatives will inevitably dismiss them (“why would anyone do that?”), but when you explain that Kawara painted the dates by hand without using a stencil they are immediately impressed. “Without a stencil?”

The artist’s labor has always been a precarious currency in the art market; occasionally exchanged for monies, other times for less tangible payments like publicity, access-to-networks or rare experiences. While there are always exceptions to any rule, the amount of labor expended has traditionally remained a mathematical measure of validity for the art objects that result.

In the age of automation, software tools, and outsourced development, how can any digital artist expect to be taken seriously, if the “labor” expended is a matter of keeping up a Tumblr blog or printing out and blowing up Photoshop gradients? Is there some kind of heroic equivalent to making digital images from scratch, “by hand” and “without stencils?” Look no further! In this tutorial we will be showing you how to create a Bitmap Image File (.bmp). A .bmp file, like any image file, is a matrix of pixels sized a particular width by a particular height. We will be creating our .bmp from scratch, by typing in machine code bit by bit. When one hears the term “machine code,” binary-code is likely the first thing that comes to mind. For this tutorial, however, we’ll be working in Hexadecimal. In order to write in Hex code you’ll need a hex editor. You can download Hex Fiend, a free and open source hex editor for MAC, here. (NOTE: Call us crazy, but we’re assuming you’re a MAC user. Don’t worry, the same principles apply to all platforms).

//Hexadecimal Numbers
Hexadecimal is base 16, this means it is a numerical system which uses 16 characters, 0 through 9 and A through F. We’ve put together a chart for you to use as a “cheat-sheet” until you get used to writing in hex.

If you were to continue adding to this chart, decimal 16 would be hexadecimal 10, 17 would be 11, 18 would be 12 and if we jumped a bit further, 26 would be hexadecimal 1A, 27 would be 1B, 28 would be 1C and so on. We’ll be converting larger numbers into hex a bit later on in this tutorial, when we set our .bmp’s width and height.

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Production of a Sol Lewitt wall drawing for the exhibition "Sol LeWitt: 2D+3D" at the Walker Art Center, November 18, 2010-April 24, 2011.

It’s a fact that artists have been more likely to steal than to share. Nevertheless, we are quickly reaching a cultural moment where appropriation will no longer be controversial or necessary. Since the early 1990′s, artists have been learning to take advantage of the the internet as an infrastructure designed primarily and fundamentally for the effortless and rapid distribution of informational content. It is conceivable that one day soon, there will no longer be questions about who has the authority to reproduce or distribute a work. Rather, those questions will center on whether or not distribution will even be necessary (at least in the traditional sense of one-to-many distribution, where the work is only publicly available at one place and at one time).

Recent shows such as Lauren Cornell’s Free or Karly Wildenhaus’ TWICE REMOVED highlight works characterized by their ability to be either freely dispersed, or to be anonymously produced, outsourced, crowdsourced, etc. Increasing mainstream recognition of collaborative image-making platforms such as Tumblr, Dump.fm or 4Chan show us that digital art-making can truly thrive without the validation of the usual institutional or financial channels. And because these un-professionally sanctioned arenas rely heavily on open inclusion and participation, there is a sense that anyone with a laptop, a taste for image-making, and a decent command of Adobe design software (and maybe also a little experience with HTML) can comfortably take on a digital arts practice. It’s true that it’s sometimes hard to distinguish a new media artist from a freelance designer/programmer. Both will often use the same tools, with a comparable degree of (usually self-taught) expertise. Indeed, it is almost inevitable that a new media artist will need to straddle the two creative spheres of commercial design and fine art proper at one point or another.

In her recent essay Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Martha Rosler takes a look at the increased intermingling of artists and professional “creatives” in contemporary society. She suggests that as artists become more integrated into the service and knowledge industries, they also become more domesticated, fulfilling a “professionalized function within an advanced service economy.”  Consequently, art becomes both more “professionalized” and more “democratized.” If anyone can do it, this must mean that it’s a career option. On an institutional level, there are already a large number of mechanisms in place to “teach” art-making to anyone interested. Online, there are even more. This is perhaps symptomatic of a larger trend within the emergence of the creative class; the belief that “creatives” are inherently capable of producing anything or perfecting any service; cooking, massage, web development, corporate design, feng shui, public sculpture. The ads for the Chicago-based apartment listing service Domu illustrate this ideal perfectly. Each character in the ad plays two roles; one infrastructural/industrial/professional, the other more “quirky”/liberated/expressive. For the creative class, there is time, room and permission for both lifestyles at once. Ultimately, we seem to be heading towards a world where we can all be civil engineers, yoga teachers, computer programmers, pastry chefs, and, of course, artists; all simultaneously and with ease.

But as compelling as her diagnoses are, Rosler’s observations do not account for the role of the amateur within the creative class, that hybridity of professionalism and hobbyism which empower the DIY nature of the creative. Furthermore, there is no discussion of the skill-(and file-) sharing, most strongly advocated by the open-source and free culture movements, that enables the individual production of goods and the idiosyncratic perfection of skills or services that characterize the “creative.” This leads us to the question: can these ideals of communal didactism be a signal of real resistance to the service economy, or are they just a sign of further complicity?

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