I asked Jules (age 4) what we were doing in this drawing, and he said, “Eating porridge.” (Like The Three Bears, duh.) It was later pointed out to me that the drawing bore some resemblance to Vincent Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.
Af Klint vs. Du Bois
Visiting the gigantic Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim yesterday afternoon, I couldn’t help but think of W.E.B. Dubois’s hand-drawn infographics…
Winning numbers
Posada/Grosz
At the Mexic-Arte Museum this afternoon I came across this 1905 broadsheet with José Guadalupe Posada woodcuts. The skull in the bowtie immediately reminded me of the creepy capitalists in George Grosz’s work. (See the detail below from his 1921 drawing, I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me from Being the Master.)
The world keeps showing me these pictures
I become a little possessed when I read Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. Weschler finds threads between images and shows those images in juxtaposition. Once you start looking this way, you start seeing convergences everywhere.
Books — especially hardcovers that lie flat on a table — are the perfect medium to show such juxtapositions. The pages face each other, like a showdown. The gutter in the middle is a natural break that makes the argument. When you close the book, the images press up against each other.
These are just three random books I happen to have read this week. But after reading them, I’ve noticed a change in my noticing. Some detector has been tripped.
In just the past 24 hours, I took these 3 photos with my cameraphone:
Some juxtapositions are uncanny, some a little farfetched. It’s easy to get carried away. “Sometimes I think I may be getting a little ahead of myself,” Weschler writes, “but the world does keep showing me these pictures.”