Don't Be Scared

One of my very favorite designers from Brooklyn, Joshua Longo, recently got a gallery show at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.  I had included his work in my coverage of BKLYN DESIGNS one year, but he's got some new pieces now that I hadn't seen before.  Longo makes SCARY, SCARY MONSTERS!

There's also a really huge one at the Shelburne show that I guess is the carcass of a monster that met with an unfortunate accident:

It also appears that the Longoland website is up and running.  You should definitely go look around there.  His monsters are awesome.  There's a bunch of pictures of some of his older work that I'd not seen before, like this monster, which totally cracks me up:

I wasn't aware that Machos came in these colors, either:

Inbreeding, maybe.  

And I had seen this monster, Beau, before:

But I wasn't aware that it had such an ENORMOUS anus!

It must eat a lot.

©2008, Ryan Witte

Further Thoughts on a Thesis

I'm currently in the middle of William Labov's Sociolinguistic Patterns.  It occurred to me, especially since I'm talking about differences in architectural idiom from Maine to Florida, that linguistically, what I might be dealing with is akin to accents and dialects.  I'm not convinced that even if it is, that it's a methodological problem, but I had to consider it.  I still do believe that it's more complex than that, honestly.  I believe the expression of a residence is more complex than the equivalent of "I am a house, for such and such a type of person, with such and such a lifestyle."  Every occurrence of residential architecture could be a derivative of that statement.  It does nothing to illuminate the wild diversity of colonial American residential architectural forms.

I thought Labov's study would provide some great methodology for my exploration of differences in colonial American architecture.  What I've realized, though, is that although I adore the contrasts as one travels from north to south along the Atlantic coast, it's just WAY too much information.

Labov concentrates on very isolated groups of speakers: the community of Martha's Vineyard, the culture of New York City department stores.  It's wise.  I think I need to concentrate on one particular colony, one that shows a great diversity from county to county.  Virginia might be an option, but I think Pennsylvania might be more fruitful.  With Pennsylvania we have Federalism near Philadelphia, a strong Dutch population in the center, and Germans and other groups on the western end of the state.  It may provide a very controlled and illustrative collection of different cultures to work with, as their cultures were expressed in residential architecture.  The only thing I'd worry about is the effect of climate, because I'm not convinced the climate differs radically enough from the northern edge to the southern.

I may be able to cover two colonies that together display significantly different climates and sufficiently diverse cultures of settlers to work well in one study.  In any case, I think it might be unwise to look at the entire eastern seaboard.  Another idea may be to look at the very first settlements, regardless of where they appeared, but I suspect they'd be concentrated in very isolated geographic areas and would be unfortunately homogeneous in the origins of the settlers in an unhelpful way.

Does anyone work for a scholarship program?  Because I need to get this moving already, and without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it.

©2008, Ryan Witte

Out on the Streets

Well, it appears my time as keeper of Speaker has come to a close.  It's kind of sad.  I'll be a day or two late, but I have a pretty good idea of where I may leave it, and I'm not telling!

More and more it's coming to my attention that there's sort of a movement going.  I have no idea what to call it, but it's all about public art that may be discovered or not, but in the end, if it is discovered, brings joy to the unsuspecting.

For instance, this Little People project was recently brought to my attention.  Someone going by the name of Slinkachu has been putting these tiny pieces in random places around London.  I'm sure most of them are stepped on or otherwise destroyed.  Another large portion likely is never noticed by anyone.  But on the off chance that you did find one of these, I can't imagine the astonishment and amusement that would result from the experience, possibly even greater than it was for me to find that little painting.

Definitely go check out the blog, because the rest of them are pretty amazing, too.

There there's this absolutely brilliant street art by Joshua Allen Harris that looks like ordinary garbage until the subway goes by.

I really do respect what these artists are doing so much.  First of all, it's a completely selfless act of creating art that, by the very nature of its being public, precludes the possibility of it becoming commercialized.  Secondly, because at its heart, as I said before, it brings joy into the lives of ordinary people, who may never set foot in an art gallery, in unexpected and unpredictable ways.  It's one of the noblest achievements for a work of art, as far as I'm concerned, to make our world a more delightful place to live.

©2008, Ryan Witte