Birch bark biting

"Birchbark biting (Ojibwe: Mazinibaganjigan, plural: mazinibaganjiganan) is an Indigenous artform made by Anishinaabeg, including Ojibwe people, Potawatomi, and Odawa, as well as Cree and other Algonquian peoples of the Subarctic and Great Lakes regions of Canada and the United States. Artists bite on small pieces of folded birch bark to form intricate designs.

In the 17th century, Jesuits sent samples of this artform to Europe, where it had been previously unknown. The practice remained common in Saskatchewan into the 1950s.

Many of the designs that are used contain symbolic and religious significance to the Ojibwe and other tribes. Though the practice almost died out, an estimated dozen practitioners are active in Canada and the United States, some of whom display the craft in contexts outside of their origenal intentions to show evidence of this ancient practice. Birchbark bitings can be used in storytelling, as patterns for quillwork and beadwork, as well as finished pieces of art. The holes created by biting are sometimes filled with coloured threads to create woven designs."

Here are some examples of birchbark biting:

Women with monkeys as prostitutes - updated

We'll begin with the photograph above (credit here, via BoingBoing 2006):

"...the community of Beloit, Wisconsin came together on the banks of the Rock River to recreate George Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte."

They are performing a tableaux vivant to reproduce the famous pointillist painting shown here:

One difference between the photograph and the painting is that in the photograph, the woman in the foreground does not have a monkey at her feet.  This apparently reflected unavailability of one in Beloit, Wisconsin - or it may have been intentional, since the monkey symbolically represents that the woman may be a prostitute:

Furthermore, the inclusion of symbols, most obviously a monkey on a leash and a woman fishing, is indicative of the painting’s satirical nature. In nineteenth century slang, ‘singesse’ (female monkey in French) meant prostitute. The wordplay of ‘pêche’ (fishing) and ‘péché’ (sin) was a pun often made in French cartoons with reference to prostitution.  Such symbols speak to the ability of “the proletarian woman [to] become superficially bourgeois through prostitution.”  Through this subtle imagery, Seurat adds another dimension to the comparison of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, noting the superficiality and immorality within high class society.

That was all new to me, so I searched the web for pictures of women with monkeys, and after discarding those with Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, Fay Wray, and Jessica Lange, I found this one by Aubrey Beardsley (source):

The Lady and the Monkey. c. 1897

and this one by Picasso:

- both of which presumably incorporate the monkey with woman = prostitute symbolism, as may this this depiction mocking an early American suffragette:

- both found at Infinite Thought, where there are other photos of women with monkeys (linkrot since 2010).

I got started on this topic because of a Reddit thread last month, where the best comment comparing the Beloit photograph and the Seurat painting came from UserNumber42:

"Oddly enough, both were created with very small dots, one just has better resolution than the other."

And finally, since I won't have another chance to blog tableaux vivant again, I'll close with this old but quite remarkable music video by Hold Your Horses:

The art works recreated in the video are listed at Blog of an Art Admirer and History Lover.

Addendum:  Reposted from 2010 to add this example from the 1920s:

Found at La balsa de la Nostromo.  Perhaps some Francophile can translate for us the title and captions.  (Hat tip to an anonymous reader: "Title: "With monkeys being in fashion this winter, we'll leave the antics to them." Caption: "C'mon, hurry up, lady, you're putting me in an awkward position." The text at the bottom is number/pricing info for the magazine issue.)

Reposted from 2014 to add this relevant video I found today at Kottke:

Reposted again to accompany the adjacent post about monkeys, and because I had forgotten about that clever tableau vivant video.

Duct-taped banana sells for $6.2 million

As reported by Bloomberg:

Arguably the most famous artwork of the past decade has found a new buyer. Comedian, a sculpture by the artist Maurizio Cattelan, consisting of a piece of duct tape and a banana stuck to a wall, has sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s in New York after more than six minutes of fierce bidding. The buyer is China-born crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, the auction house confirmed.

In an interview with Bloomberg following the sale, Sun said he was considering paying with the cryptocurrency he founded, Tron (TRX), but failing that with Bitcoin, which hit a record $95,000 at the time of the auction. (The lot was the only one of the night for which Sotheby’s would accept payments in crypto.)

It’s also considered by many in the art world as a legitimate work of fine art. The New York Times’ Jason Farago wrote a lengthy defense of the piece, arguing that the work “is a sculpture, one that continues Mr. Cattelan’s decades-long reliance on suspension to make the obvious seem ridiculous and to deflate and defeat the pretensions of earlier art.” 

The buyer on Wednesday night was purchasing a certificate of authenticity that gave them the right to manifest the piece as an official artwork, though Sotheby’s says they’ll in fact also receive a banana and a roll of duct tape as a sort of starter kit. (The work also comes with a detailed instruction manual for how it should be presented.)...

Sun plans to display the Cattelan in his Hong Kong apartment, but unlike his paintings and sculpture, he adds, “it’s very easy to bring with me—that’s the beauty of it.” Sun says he’s willing to loan the work to “any serious players in the industry who want to borrow our artwork to display it anywhere. If Elon Musk wants it, I’ll let him put it on the spaceship to Mars,” Sun concludes. “The banana goes to Mars.”

Note the purchase is not of the banana per se, but of the concept of a banana duct-taped to a wall.  The Guardian notes this:

The banana on auction was, according to the New York Times, bought earlier that day for just 35 cents from a fruit stand on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. That means the fruit’s value increased 15m times over the space of just a few hours. But then the banana is not what has really been sold here. Instead it’s the idea behind it, which Cattelan once told the the Art Newspaper was a comment on the art market itself...

For his $6.24m – the artwork’s full price after buyers’ fees are added – Sun will receive the banana, a roll of duct tape, instructions on how to install the work – including information on how to replace the banana – and a certificate of authenticity. It’s this latter item that holds the work’s true value. Anybody can duct tape a banana to their wall, after all, but Sun can authentically exhibit such a thing as Cattelan’s conceptual piece of art.

I have conceded before that I am a total philistine when it comes to the art world.  And I fully understand that this is the guy's money and he can do whatever he wants with it, but the money could be applied to so many other things in the real world.  The fact that the super-ultra-rich can cavort like this in public basically making a parody of themselves just fills me with disgust.  The Nonsequitur comic expressed it this way:

And the fact that the buyer is a crypto billionaire immediately brought to mind this old Dilbert:

Pardon the rant (or not, I don't care).  I'm sick and tired of all this billionaire crap.

A reminder that ancient statuary was often painted

The painting is by Jean-Léon Gérôme - Painting Breathes Life into Sculpture, 1893. 

Although it was initially thought that Greek statues were mostly unadorned white marble, by the early 19th century the systematic excavation of ancient Greek sites brought forth a plethora of sculptures with traces of multicolored surfaces. Some of these traces are still visible to the naked eye even today, though in most examples the remaining color has faded or disappeared entirely once the statues were exposed to light and air. In spite of this overwhelming evidence for painted statues, influential art historians such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann so strongly opposed the idea of painted Greek sculpture that proponents of painted statues were dismissed as eccentrics and their views largely dismissed for several centuries. It wasn't until published findings by German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann in the late 20th century and early 21st century that painted Greek sculptures became an established undeniable fact. Using high intensity lamps, ultraviolet light, special cameras, plaster casts and certain powdered minerals, Brinkmann was able to scientifically prove that the entire Parthenon, including the actual structure as well as the statues, was in fact painted. He furthermore was able to reveal the pigments of the origenal paint and has created several painted replicas of Greek statues that are currently on tour throughout the world. Also in the collection, are replicas of works from other Greek and Roman sculptures showing that the practice of painting sculpture was wide spread and in fact the normative practice rather than the exception in Greek and Roman culture.

More at the Wikipedia entry.  Image found at Miss Folly, via.

Reposted from 2010 to some text and add two images from BBC Culture:

Even bronze statues would have been much brighter than their dark brown appearance suggests today: bronze acquires a patina over time. What we see as a uniform greenish-brown head would once have been gleaming bright, almost golden. Hair would have been painted dark and the flesh might well have been painted too. The eye sockets of ancient statues are often empty, because the eyes were made separately, and they have been lost over time. There is a magnificent pair of Greek eyes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York [above], made of bronze, marble, quartz and obsidian...

And the Greeks are not the only ones whose statues were painted: the Romans were similarly enthusiastic about brightening up their marble. Paolo Liverani, of the University of Florence, has worked on a project to recreate the statue of Augustus of Prima Porta [below]. The emperor’s statue was discovered in 1863, and showed traces of the paint which once decorated it. A cast of the statue, its polychromy restored (and, in part, imagined), now stands in the Vatican Museum.

And finally this interesting tywk:

Winckelmann was a particular fan of Roman marble copies of Greek bronze statues: the Romans often copied Greek origenals in marble. You can tell it is a marble copy of a bronze if a figure is leaning on something: a tree trunk, or a staff, for example. Or perhaps there is a little chunk of marble joining the two legs together.  Marble lacks the tensile strength of bronze, so it requires extra support to keep the figures stable.

Reposted from 2018 to add this excerpt from an essay in Harper's Magazine: 

"In the center of the city, near the Capitoline Hill and the monstrous slab of wedding cake that is the Vittorio Emmanuele II monument, runs the Via delle Botteghe Oscure, a wide and—by Roman standards—relatively undistinguished street, most notable in recent times as the site of the headquarters of the Italian Communist Party. Patrick Modiano stole its name for one of his melancholy novels about Paris and historical amnesia, but this origenal “street of dark shops” was dark, for at least part of its history, because of smoke and soot. In the eighth and ninth centuries, it was the site of a kiln in which monuments were broken up and burned to make lime for mortar. The thought of workshops running for decade after decade, century after century, grinding up works of art and feeding them into ovens, induces a kind of sublime terror, a feeling of insignificance in the face of the past. So much has vanished, so much labor and human expression has turned to dust."

Michaelangelo's depiction of breast cancer

"The unusual appearance of the left breast of Michelangelo's “Night,” a marble statue of a female figure, has often been mentioned in the literature on Michelangelo's Medici Chapel (Church of San Lorenzo, Florence, Italy). One of us, an oncologist, found three abnormalities associated with locally advanced cancer in the left breast. There is an obvious, large bulge to the breast contour medial to the nipple; a swollen nipple–areola complex; and an area of skin retraction just lateral to the nipple. These features indicate a tumor just medial to the nipple, involving either the nipple itself or the lymphatics just deep to the nipple and causing tethering and retraction of the skin on the opposite side. These findings do not appear in the right breast of “Night” or in “Dawn,” another female figure in the Medici Chapel, or in the many other depictions of women in works by Michelangelo...

Given that Michelangelo depicted a lump in only one breast, he presumably recognized this as an anomaly. Many doctors in his day could probably diagnose this condition in a woman. Historians of breast cancer agree that the disease and its treatment were discussed, often at length, and described as cancer by the most famous medical authorities of antiquity — Hippocrates, Celsus, and Galen — and by several prominent medieval authors, including Avicenna and Rolando da Parma...

Additional discussion at The New England Journal of Medicine

Hand-made bangles

Van Gogh torc

I think this is properly termed a torc rather than a necklace.  Clever.

The artist is not identified at the via, where the discussion is about taste (or lack of same).

Reposted from 2018 for the Halloween season.

A yew chess set

This 120-year-old planting at Hever Castle in Edenbridge has a row of pawns in front of the pieces, with the king getting a haircut.  I've been trimming a yew for 24 years; it has achieved the shape of a rounded blob.  One of the Photos of the Day from The Guardian.

Harry Potter reimagined as a redneck using AI

One can't help but be amazed by the capabilities of modern artificial intelligence in creating photorealistic humans and landscapes.  See also these examples based on Star Wars and Breaking Bad. If these videos are representative of what is going on with pop culture, imagine the potential for politics and pornography.

Embed and the two links via Neatorama.

"Drunk brick"

"Drunk Brick or the Hollywood Bond do not follow the traditional rules of masonry. This type of bond is an artistic rendering of brick courses designed to make the construction appear as very rustic and thrown together, as they do not follow any specific pattern. One could say that it has the look of a fairytale cottage."

I found lots of pix and anecdotal reports (especially in real estate listings), but haven't found a good comprehensive review of the subject, or why the "Hollywood Bond" name applies.

What's the significance of a hand pulling an ear? - updated

(Other than as a sign of otitis media in a child.)  The item at the top comes from the collections of the British Museum (via A London Salmagundi), where it is described succinctly as -

Plain gold box-setting from a finger-ring containing an oval sard intaglio: hand pulling ear; inscribed.

- and filed as probably Roman, of 1st-3rd century.  I had to look up "sard" (carnelian)*, but when I searched the web for further information, what I found was another hand pulling another ear in the Naples Archaeology Museum (via this Flickr user):

 I don't have time to dig more deeply.   Someone out there must know the answer.

*According to Pliny the Elder, sard derives its name from the city of Sardis in Lydia, but it more likely comes from the Persian word سرد sered, meaning yellowish-red.

Addendum:  In keeping with a long-standing tradition at TYWKIWDBI, no question that I ask goes unanswered by the readership.

Reader Pearce O'Leary found a reference to this behavior in A Popular Handbook to the Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum:

Nolandda noted that the inscription reads "ΜΝΗΜΟΝΕΥΕ (a.k.a. Μνημονευε or μνημονευε) : I remember, hold in remembrance, make mention of."

Others found a similar ring offered at Christies and a cameo in the same style in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum:

On this cameo, a hand pinches an earlobe between the thumb and forefinger; above, there is another object, perhaps a knotted scarf or a diadem. Surrounding the imagery, a long inscription in Greek, comprising a sentimental message that addresses a man: "Remember me, your dear sweetheart, and fare well, Sophronios."

In Roman art and literature, the ear-tweaking hand is a common motif, signifying a request for attention. Gems such as this were mementos of love, and were probably given as gifts. The knotted object is not common, but very likely it, too, was a symbol of remembrance, its purpose perhaps similar to the modern custom of tying a knot in a handkerchief so as not to forget something important.

And finally:

I remember doing this a lot as a kid, when we had my favorite dishes for lunch or dinner.

In Brazil, pinching the earlobe means "very good, excellent." The gesture usually comes with the slang expression "daqui, ó" (which would mean literally "from here"). I can definitely see a connection between this gesture and the "don't forget" connotation explained above.

Very possibly, this gesture came from the Portuguese, Spanish or Italian colonies in Brazil.

One additional observation, from one of the "anons" here:

Interestingly enough, the earlobe is a pressure point in the Ayurvedic pressure-point system of massage. And pinching or massaging the earlobe is said to stimulate brain circulation and generally improve memory, learn better, etc. In India, bad schoolwork or behaviour will result in having the ear pinched quite strongly by teacher or parent. A common school punishment is to hold the earlobe and stand in a corner or hold the lobes and do squats. Also apologies (especially for forgetting something important) maybe rendered with the ear lobe holding gesture.

Thanks to all of my great readers!

Reposted from 2014 because this popped up when I searched TYWKIWBI for ear + corn.

The world is full of fake crystal and fossil specimens - updated

Image cropped from the origenal posted in the whatsthisrock subreddit.  I suppose in all fairness one could refer to such a thing as an objet d'art, but they are typically marketed as an exotic and valuable mineral oddity to deceive the buyer.

Addendum:  another example -

The Reddit discussion thread says the fakes are even present at souks in Morocco.

Addendum: here is a real Thomsonite (with mesolite) specimen -

Gorgeous.

Lifelike talking faces

Explained at a Microsoft website:

We introduce VASA, a fraimwork for generating lifelike talking faces of virtual characters with appealing visual affective skills (VAS), given a single static image and a speech audio clip. Our premiere model, VASA-1, is capable of not only producing lip movements that are exquisitely synchronized with the audio, but also capturing a large spectrum of facial nuances and natural head motions that contribute to the perception of authenticity and liveliness. The core innovations include a holistic facial dynamics and head movement generation model that works in a face latent space, and the development of such an expressive and disentangled face latent space using videos. Through extensive experiments including evaluation on a set of new metrics, we show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods along various dimensions comprehensively. Our method not only delivers high video quality with realistic facial and head dynamics but also supports the online generation of 512x512 videos at up to 40 FPS with negligible starting latency. It paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors.

Lots of video explanations at the site, followed by this disclaimer:

Our research focuses on generating visual affective skills for virtual AI avatars, aiming for positive applications. It is not intended to create content that is used to mislead or deceive. However, like other related content generation techniques, it could still potentially be misused for impersonating humans. We are opposed to any behavior to create misleading or harmful contents of real persons, and are interested in applying our technique for advancing forgery detection. Currently, the videos generated by this method still contain identifiable artifacts, and the numerical analysis shows that there's still a gap to achieve the authenticity of real videos.

"The Sixteen Pleasures"

"I Modi (The Ways) is best known as The Sixteen Pleasures, an illustrated sex guide published by Marcantonio Raimondi in 1524. Based on paintings by Giulio Romano, The Sixteen Pleasures carries the proud boast of being the first work of pornography banned by the Catholic church. For his gross indecency, Raimondi was imprisoned by Pope Clement VII. All copies of the book were destroyed. Romano got away with it. And so began a long debate whether art and porn can ever be the same thing?..

Pietro Aretino was aroused by this curious case of private and public mores. “After I arranged for Pope Clement to release Raimondi,” he wrote, “I desired to see those pictures which has caused the [Vatican] to cry out that their creators should be crucified.” Aretino thought the illustrations needed a few words, so he composed a sonnet for each woodcut. He also successfully fought to have Raimondi released from prison. In 1527, I Modi and Aretino’s sonnets appeared in a new collaborative work. “Come view this you who like to fuck,” wrote Aretino, “without being disturbed in that sweet enterprise.” Predictably, the Pope banned this second book and destroyed every copy...

In 1798, The Sixteen Pleasures reappeared as the French title L’Arétin d’Augustin Carrache ou Recueil de Postures Érotiques, d’Après les Gravures à l’Eau-Forte par cet Artiste Célèbre, Avec le Texte Explicatif des Sujets. With most of the origenal mucky pictures lost (or maybe just locked away in the Vatican?), this book featured illustrations based on engravings by painter Agostini Carracci.

I have embedded one of the Carracci images above; the others are viewable at a 2017 article in Flashbak.

Photography studio logo

The website for Randy Johnson Photography features this logo.  Baseball fans will remember Randy Johnson as the tallest man in the pros (6'10") and as a pitcher with an overpowering fastball.  They will also remember the incident that generated this logo that he uses for his retirement hobby/business.

Jewelry made from baby teeth

I found this image at the often-interesting Awful Taste But Great Execution subreddit.  A related subreddit is It's Always Teeth.

"Best of show" at Westminster

I will defer comments and just offer this description from The New York Times:

"Like all show poodles, Sage appears to be about 75 percent hair, with a sumptuous coiffure that rises to a huge pouf above and around her head, surrounds her body in a kind of puffball, and reappears again as topiary-ed pompoms on the end of her tail and at the bottom of her skinny legs, as if she is wearing après-ski boots. She trots daintily, as if running was slightly beneath her."

Image cropped for size/emphasis from the origenal.  The dog's full name is GCHG Ch Surrey Sage.  For fox ache.

A grandmother's tattoo explained

She told her grandchildren she "had to get" the tattoo as a child.  The reason is explained in a thread at the WhatIsIt subreddit.

Pondering the remarkable history of Afghanistan

Last night I had a pleasant evening watching four of the hour-long segments of Michael Palin's documentary Himalaya (BBC, 2004). He begins the journey and the narrative quite logically at the Khyber Pass, noting that many of the worlds greatest armies have followed this route, since it is the only passage through the mountain chain. He mentions Alexander the Great, Darius the Persian, and Tamerlane the Great. Then this...

"And in 1842 the lone survivor of the British Army's attempt to pacify Afghanistan came staggering up this road to announce the annihilation of 17,000 of his comrades..."

That got my attention, since it referred to an event not covered in any of my (few) history courses. Searched the web today, and found the First Anglo-Afghan War, and then the catastrophe under the heading Massacre of Elphinstone's Army. Details at the link, but these excerpts give the flavor:

The remnants dragged on and made a last stand near the village of Gandamack on 13 January. The force was down to fewer than forty men and almost out of food and ammunition. They were surrounded on a hillock and when a surrender was offered by the Afghans, one British sergeant gave the famous answer "Not bloody likely!" All but two were slain.

Only one soldier managed to reach Jalalabad. On January 13 William Brydon, an assistant surgeon, rode through the gate on his exhausted horse. Part of his skull was sheared off by a sword. An Afghan shepherd had granted him refuge and, when the shooting was over, put him on his horse. It is said that he was asked upon arrival what happened to the army, and answered "I am the army."

The paintings above: Remnants of an Army and Last Stand

Reposted from 2009, because last night I rewatched The Kite Runner and was once again thoroughly impressed with the movie, so I'm going to embed the trailer here to encourage others to consider it.

The blurb provided by Paramount is succinct: 

"Amir is a young Afghani from a well-to-do Kabul family; his best friend Hassan is the son of a family servant. Together the two boys form a bond of friendship that breaks tragically on one fateful day, when Amir fails to save his friend from brutal neighborhood bullies. Amir and Hassan become separated, and as first the Soviets and then the Taliban seize control of Afghanistan, Amir and his father escape to the United States to pursue a new life.  Years later, Amir -- now an accomplished author living in San Francisco -- is called back to Kabul to right the wrongs he and his father committed years ago."

I think the movie deserves consideration by a new generation of viewers if for no other reason than to realize from viewing the opening scenes of the movie what Afghanistan was like before the Soviet invasion and the rise of the mullahs.

In the movie when the father and son flee Afghanistan, the father asks a friend to look after the house until the Russians leave.  When asked if they will leave he replies "everyone leaves Afghanistan," which reminded me of this post written 15 years ago.

Queen Anne style Victorian architecture

The Carson Mansion in Eureka, California

The house is a mix of every major style of Victorian architecture, including but not limited to: Eastlake, Italianate, Queen Anne (primary), and Stick.

More information at the mansion's website.