5/26/2006

Ben Snead

24 comments:

Painter said...

Ben Snead @
Feature Inc.
530 W. 25th St.
New York, NY 10001

Sven said...

reminds me of a much tamer, simpler version of Pittman,
or a less garish version of Taaffe
some of the other ones on the website looked waay too close to Escher

on the whole kinda lacks balls?

by the way did anyone see the silke otto knapp show at gavin brown? I always get a weird vibe from his shows

amy boras said...

I can't figure this one out. I think this one has to be seen in the flesh, at least for me anyhow.

amy boras said...

I immediately thought of illuminated manuscripts. I think a lot of people look at Escher as a sort of trickster, just an optical illusionist and optical illusions aren't "real art".

no-where-man said...

hummm... P and D tablecloths.

bsch said...

Would make a nice carpet too.

flesheater99 said...

Escher wouldn't be having this. sorry. nothing 'wrong' with this painting per se but MC would be using this to do kneespins on. Philip Taffe would be in the dj booth playing the new Battles album. and I'd be chattin up Bridget Riley at the bar. "So what kinda stuff do you do?!?...really...oh that sounds really cool. Do you show around here?"

amy boras said...

I find that there is a lot of comparision to contemporary artists on this blog. What about digging a little deeper?

bsch said...

Morphological illustration combined with Pattern and Decoration. It makes for some pretty pictures. Is there something more to this? I can't see it.

bsch said...

Give me Walton Ford. Every picture tells a story, don't it?

zipthwung said...

i remember seeing his fish a while back and thinking that I like tesselations - I'm partial to arabic "allover" patterns - theres a new book out with a cd full of them I was going to order. The allover patterns do this thing where if you look at them long enough you see patterns within patterns, like seeing the vase and then the two heads in the standard pos-neg optical illusion.

So formally I dont see much, and conceptually i could go with an ecological systems thing but really they are banal.

So if we take them as banal abstractions, wouldnt they be better AS wallpaper instead of tastefull squares?

Escher illustrates perpective or mathematical ideas, and they are just more fun to look at. But Escher is pretty easy on the eyes - you get tired of it, come back to it and then get tired of it again. Nothing wrong with that. But some people got tired of it and thought they had outgrown it, I think. I never will - patterns are patterns - I just went through a Su Doku thing - there's a book int he bookstore on how to write a su doku generator - and theres a book "Goedel Escher Bach" - read it and you'll be ahead of me.

Fractals anyone?

jpegCritic said...

Fractals? How bout angelo filomeno?
Sorry to be negative, but this snead jpeg sucks
even as wallpaper. No design balance whatsoever.
I suggest ben study Owen Jones's grammar
of ornament for starters.. then at least his
language might have some grace to it.

no-where-man said...

carpet eh, worked for Schutz..

http://www.artproductionfund.org/AAS/authoring/press/schutz_pro.jpg

Sven said...

yeah whats up with successful artists giving a painting to rug reproductions?I've seen them also by Hernan Bas and Barnaby Furnas. I cant knock anyone for making an easy buck, but still, I'd think twice..

no-where-man said...

i love it !!! it shows what they are thinking about "art" at this point!!! put it in MoMA walk on it! who the fuck cares i make images show meth $

the center Kant not hold.

jpegCritic said...

The center can't hold when it comes to the gravitational force of merchandising in our universe, which is comprised only of capital. As artistic luminaries have more gravity, they make the best targets for capitalist co-option. Not that paintings don't participate in the same system... but merchandise seems at least one step too many divorced from the artistic project of fine art -- hedging more on name and marketability than on the merit of the design. And I've seen this merchandising trend happen even on the regional scale. Limited edition wallets, etc by relatively unknowns... Made not so the merchandise looks, feels, or performs all that great -- but made to make the buyer feel more special and the merchandiser more rich.

Not that its all that bad for anyone to make a buck... So why not open up rug-design and wallet-making to all artists, famous and non-famous (merit provided), so that we can all benefit in this complete subsumption of artistic urge to the black hole of capitalism -- This center, the only center that CAN hold.

no-where-man said...

works for Warhol not for Rothko

zipthwung said...

Well you can kustomize your sneakers, everyone is an artist.

THis painting would do well right in the window, like a puppy in a pet store. Or a Lichtenstein print with a pithy thought baloon. THought baloons have bubbles leading you from the head to the thought. Speech baloons have some kind of line leading you from the vicinity of the mouth to the words.

Merchanidsing is merchandising. You can make it into an art in the same way you can make anything into an art, but what does it change?

I went to a whole foods sponsored crunch fest and predictably there was trash everywhere, the music was bland on bland, and the hybrid SUV is the funniest idea to come out of the ecoverse in a while.

Not wallpaper, flypaper.

youth--less said...

For your eco -- you should have gone to the anarchist bookfair instead. Green anarchy. Everyone wearing recycled, riding bikes, eating vegan, no deodorant at all. Mmmm. yea. All kinds o music. Chatted w/ V Vale of Research Publications, what a polite anarchist he is...nice man. hero.

Good ideas are quite pungent. See Jerry on Harrell Fletcher.

Stelios Argiros said...

Nothing by Ben Snead at the Feature site turned me on. It's a little too aesthetic and pretty for me. Creating order out of the chaos of nature. Isn't that something we do normally? Why hit us over the head with it? I feel a lot more can be said about our relationship to nature than to create pretty little patterns out of them to hang em on our walls. A bit boring, sorry... The use of real animals would of been more interesting.

jpegCritic said...

I'd be better off having apple design my nikes" (if I had nikes) than myself...

no-where-man said...

i shit you not i was picking up a bag in the projects last night - was twisten one up on a mag. that i fliped thru and saw an add for the basquiat shoes, photo was Jean-Michel Basquiat in his studio, 1985. Photograph © Lizzie Himmel - NOW THATS product placment... - ~like rebock?~? - in the past has made me think of old women mall walking... i am acually considering rebock as a brand on my day off...

flesheater99 said...

what's worse is that whatever company putting those JMB shoes out has said that they're motive for making them is an "attempt to put art back out on the streets."

zipthwung said...

A bit of trivia - there is a prohibition in certain religions from painting the human figure.

Let there be locusts.

Daily.