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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > October > 06
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
‘Hi, How Are You Are You?’ artist Daniel Johnston gets an iPhone app
In a case of technology imitating art, the bipolar singer-songwriter and artist Daniel Johnston — legendary in Austin for, among other creations, his ‘Hi, How Are You?’ mural near the UT campus — now has a iPhone app that’s been created based on music and visual art.
Johnston’s quirky cartoon creatures inhabit a virtual world — the game is actually called ‘Hi, How Are You?’ — and as a player sets out to battle the devil-as-frog enemy, Johnston’s quirky folk music plays.
Read American-Statesman tech culture writer Omar Gallaga’s blog note on the game.
‘Hi, How Are You?’ was developed by Austin-based game creators Peter Franco and Steve Broumly of DrFunFun.
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Wednesday: It’s arts and crafts night on PBS
Need some free recession-ready arts programming?
Wednesday, it’s arts and crafts night on PBS with the premiere of two series, ‘Art:21: Art in the Twenty-First Century’ and ‘Craft in America.’ And Tuesday you can preview an episode of ‘Art 21’ for free at Arthouse at 6 p.m.
‘Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century,’ a four-part series
9 p.m. Wednesdays, Oct. 7-28
PBS
‘Craft in America: Origins and Process’
7 p.m. tonight
PBS
‘Program Three: Transformations,’ a screening and discussion
When: 6 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Arthouse, 700 Congress Ave.
Cost: Free
Information: 453-5312, www.arthousetexas.org
Perhaps what makes ‘Art:21’ the documentary series about contemporary visual art, such a pleasure is its directness.
No voiceovers or talking head experts interfere with the Peabody Award-winning series, which begins its fifth season Wednesday. Instead, artists speak directly and do so from their studios or homes or wherever they happen to be making art. And that gives “Art: 21” a certain intimacy and accessibility that’s not always the case with the contemporary art world that love to throw an impenetrable wall between it and an audience.
Each one-hour episode is organized around a theme. This season it’s “Compassion,” “Fantasy,” “Transformation” and “Systems”. But don’t let those organizing rubrics cloud your viewing too much.
More importantly, backgrounds and influences are learned and the series gives a peek into how an artist makes choices about what he or she creates - or doesn’t create — reveals much more.
This season we see South African artist William Kentridge apply his hand-drawn animation techniques to his first-ever design for an opera set. Provocateur Jeff Koons reveals the factory-style art-making method he uses employing a plethora of assistants. Cindy Sherman continues to morph into other characters for her photographs, but takes things to a new tragic level. And Chinese artist Cao Fei speaks through her virtual reality avatar.
Getting a glimpse the artists at work, making creative choices and speaking frankly makes “Art21” like a casual, friendly encounter with some of the most innovate and original thinkers of our times.
Image: Yinka Shonibare MBE. ‘How to Blow up Two Heads at Once (Ladies),’ 2006. © Yinka Shonibare, MBE, courtesy the artist, James Cohan Gallery, New York
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‘Marjorie Moore: Labyrinth’
Austin artist Marjorie Moore has always blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction, truth and imagination, the past and the present, the natural world and the supernatural imagination.
Now, in an exhibit at Texas State University-San Marcos, Moore riffs on the long history of scientific and botanical illustration with a series of multimedia drawings.
For centuries artists sought to define, categorize and organize the natural world through meticulous drawings. After all, if humankind could identify everything in the wild, then the wild wouldn’t be so wild - and dangerous. Hence, nature drawing became one of the longest threads in the history of art and the history of science, always entwining the two.
For “Labyrinth,” Moore tapped Texas State University’s entomology collection as a point of origin to create her own version of a wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonder, the 19th-century precursor to today’s modern museum. Wunderkammers were part scientific display and part circus sideshow. And in Moore’s wunderkammer, categories are questioned, and the boundaries between science, popular culture and art are eroded.
Is this today’s natural world we’re looking at in Moore’s work, or is this some imagined future of plant and animal life? Moore combines found vintage scientific and storybook images with her collection of toys and nature specimens to produce a blended narrative of the past and the future of the natural world.
‘Marjorie Moore: Labyrinth’
When: 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays-Friday, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through Oct. 22
Where: Gallery II, Mitte Art Building, Sessom and Comanche streets, Texas State University, San Marcos
Free
Image: ‘Pond Collection #15’
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