I await further elucidation tomorrow.

This thread is more or less directed to mamerro and sadly enough should interest less than a dozen more...as a reference for you few heres where it all began

...Many people concider those schematics, diagrams and illustrated 'how to' user manuals as a pop art thing. For the most part its because those kind of drawings are so close to comics easthetics and american hotdog mega fonts...stuff widely used and played the fuck out by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol

http://www.poster.net/lichtenstein-roy/lichtenstein-roy-whaam-b-2801611.jpg'>http://www.anthonymeierfinearts.com/inventory/images/warhol.jpg'>

I dunno if i ever told you this but popart grosses the fuck out of me...its the artsy product of a stupid subject in human history to begin with...a shit that someone stepped on and brought it on your floors house..but anyway, fuck this right now

My theory about these drawings is pretty much based on the fact that drawing to me is suposed to embody and carry messages that are hidden in first glance but still effective and powerfull.

In the pictures of christ and saints in general, during the byzantine empire, there are symbolisms and cliches used all the time but not spotted at once. All saints have:

-Big Eyes (they see everything)

-Small mouths (they dont talk much, they're humble, etc etc)

http://www.ocf.org/OrthodoxPage/icons/data/wetbeard.gif'>

You clearly see that those proportions are rather impossible, yet they're used to state an idea, make an impression and carry a solid message.

Its an exageration the artist makes in order to connect with the mind via visuals than just pleasure the iris like romans did by making a more human but fakely perfect figure:

http://www.adishakti.org/images/jesus_and_mother.jpg'>

Now, off the religious trip, i think that those 'how to' drawings use more or less the same techniques...although at first everything seems drawed out accuratelly and precise, resembling reality...you notice that in order to emphasize and make sense there arent many laws of nature left to be broken in those lines

If you watch the

animation that brought up the whole deal again under this perspective you can clearly see that even if the feeling is very scientific, accurate and naturalistic..the draw is pretty much pshychedelic to the bone...perspectives change all the time, parts fade in and out etc etc...imagine if you could see that 70 years ago...it wouldnt mean shit and you couldnt understand shit...its a drawing that serves function and an aesthetic value that comes from function...i love it.

So poorly written and illustrated, this is pretty much my theory on all that.

cheers

Awesome. There really is a very specific aesthetic these works give off, which are a direct result of their need to convey very specific practical information. I've always laughed at how axonometric perspectives, which are really weird and absolutely impossible modes of seeing things, are in fact used to make visual descriptions of how things function in real life. It's like looking at an object from several angles at once and getting a better look at its entirety... it's one step removed from looking at 3D objects with a 4D eye.

Now that you mention it, it is indeed VERY odd that it hasn't been twisted into some sort of fancy art movement, at least nothing beyond a handful of ventures. The whole prespective shift thing relates a lot to cubism, and the commercial tone relates to pop art (which I agree with you, I fucking hate it). Good. That means hipsters like you and I can feel all cool about being in the know, and if it ever gets big, we can be like "Yo, we we're rocking that shit before they were cool". It'll be our trucker hats.

And to get back to the awesomeness of technical drawing, here's a dope site. It even has a step-by-step demo on a 720-hour illustration project of a cruise ship cutaway.

http://www.khulsey.com/honda.jpeg'>

http://www.khulsey.com/engineongrid.jpeg'>

http://www.khulsey.com/tacoma.html'>

Keep in mind, these guys nowadays use a lot of CAD processes... this shit used to be done fully by hand with airbrushes. Just imagine how hard that must be, to get every single nut and bolt in the right position at the right angle... one slightly offset part could mean fucking up the entire illustration... it's insane.

http://www.kak.ru/images/archive/15/epica/EP14_29.jpg'>

Its insane indeed and that was a hell of a reply...the 4-d comment nails shit down...i have already made an animation using those techniques talking about dimensions and time..its based on a tesseract:idea:

Maybe i can shoot it to you over slsk one day.

fuck yeah. great thread. i'm a product designer so i encounter things that relate to this all the time. although i'm a designer and not an engineer, i do a lot of control drawings (front, side, top, back, cross-section views) for my product designs.

although doing these kinds of drawings is purely for providing exact detailed information, i definitely think they can be viewed as art. some people are so fucking nasty with these kinds of technical drawings it's mind boggling. and there IS an art to doing it in deciding how to lay out the page and what details require focus.

I actually have only one piece of "art" hanging in my apartment. it's an engineering drawing the factory did of a design i did for a bicycle my company is making. something about the drawing is just amazing. i guess it's partly because the original design was mine, so it's cool for me to see someone else with sick skills transform my sketches into an ill engineering drawing.

well i guess i'm slightly off your original topic, but it seems similar to me. dope thread.

http://i.myspace.com/23/32/1652332/7789784_l.jpg'>

Originally posted by iquit

 

I actually have only one piece of "art" hanging in my apartment. it's an engineering drawing the factory did of a design i did for a bicycle my company is making. something about the drawing is just amazing. i guess it's partly because the original design was mine, so it's cool for me to see someone else with sick skills transform my sketches into an ill engineering drawing.

 

well i guess i'm slightly off your original topic, but it seems similar to me. dope thread.

Not off topic at all, i'd love to see that piece you're talking about btw, hook it up !

On a sidenote, statistical graphs also have to deal with similar probems, leading into very interesting forms and ways to present an idea, a value...this is one of the sickest books i've ever come across. I highly recomend it.

http://www.kak.ru/images/archive/15/ierogliph/an1.jpg'>

That Tufte book fucking CRUSHES. I was an intern at a information design firm during my senior year of college and that was basically our Bible. SO fucking dope.

And yeah, I remember you telling me about that animation you made... always wanted to see it. It was in 3D StudioMax right? You can probably cop a Siwft 3D plugin and convert the movie to Flash, then post it. Yes, that would be the hotness.

One of the client projects I'm working on is a demo for an accounting software company, trying to describe in visual means how the user client software communicates with the company server, how it encrypts data, etc. It's a fun little project.

Iquit, I studied Industrial Design, I had to go through the whole product design training, it was fucking awesome... did the whole control drawings and drafting dilly. I've done some product work (footwear design), but I've since shifted more to the whole interactivity arena. I'd love to see your stuff.

All the art geeks come out of the woodwork. Awesome. There are about a thousand different threads you can pull out of this little bit right now, but the whole "possibility" of co-opting the technical aspect of drawing is what's really intriguing. Until these pieces stop serving an essentially capitalist-centered purpose (what amounts to a "look how well our shit is designed! Buy it instead of the other guy's!" statement), they will never make it into the aesthetic realm of "fine art."

Now, as pessimistic and desperately leftist as that may sound, there has always been that distinction between the technical and the aesthetic. Look at the shit that the early and mmiddle moderns were doing (as a weak example). Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" as well as Giacomo Balla's "Dinamismo di un cane al guinzoglio (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash)" both sought to transcend that 3D space via an aesthetic mode. Technical, yes, but if the technical was to be considered "art" then DaVinci's schematics from centuries before would have been more prized.

Shit, my wife's an art historian, I better talk to her....

If you really want to get tech (and confuse this whole thing even more), we can talk Fractals...

Originally posted by El Mamerro

 

And yeah, I remember you telling me about that animation you made... always wanted to see it. It was in 3D StudioMax right? You can probably cop a Siwft 3D plugin and convert the movie to Flash, then post it. Yes, that would be the hotness.

 

.

Not really, i did that years ago and just like now..i dunno shit about 3d studio max...the deal was that i made like 100 skecthes by hand to organise my stuff and then went to a good friend that is matrix status animator and hooked it up exactly as i planned...after i dropped that piece on an animation exhibition the cd with the original 3dMax files got lost...how nice..so no, all i got is an .avi, ha

Anyway, this thread is like old 12oz rockin convos, glad to see the carwreck comin correct and all the biatches absent

I got confused after the description of Greek homie and the saint. Sounds interesting, but I need clarity. What did that animation have to do with anything?(yea, I watched the whole thing.)Help!

Mammero, never had a clue you possesed so much insight and know-how into the world of art, culture and associated computer programs.

Tesseract knows his stuff for certain....good to read something that has substance.

I disagree somewhat with the statements concerning PoP art. The art itself is created to be aesthetically pleasing and bring to mind associations between image and that which is tangible in the real world.

Doesn't looking at a painting or a piece of fine art accomplish the same goals?

Anything has the potential to be recognized as a piece of art when looked at from the right angle or when focus is paid to a certain angle, view, or portion of any given object or form. This is what Warhol and Lichtenstein were so good at. They could focus upon the something either in it's entirity(sp) or just a portion and amplify the message or idea behind it. The problem though is that most would assume that mounting a box of Captain crunch in a gallery would afford it "pop" status" but there's always something missing much like someone who baked a picture perfect pie that has no flavor.

Sorry if I was talking out of my ass but it's been days since I actually got in the mix with a discussion of this sort.

good thread. i saw a thing on dennis hopper tongith..i think it was on 60 minutes. hopper has a big keith herring and a giant basquiat in his house...

I actually took the time to read the post's in this thread, and found it to be well worth it. Its kind of a downer that more threads like this cant be found on the site, quantity over quality I suppose.

Bump 4 tha asian pic it funny how the gus back hair matches the 2 white things on his clothing

Originally posted by LENS

Mammero, never had a clue you possesed so much insight and know-how into the world of art, culture and associated computer programs.

Tesseract knows his stuff for certain....good to read something that has substance.

 

Somtimes, i realise its been too fuckin long since we were having threads like these on the reg..and browner, mamerro, beardo and lots of others where murdering shit...lots of photoshop, photographs and awesome geek talk...

As far as pop art goes, my main problem is that i need art to serve a higher purpose than just be pleasing to the eye. Dont get me wrong, i enjoy and fully respect the difficulty and freshness of creating a dope image but to me there must be more.

I supose lots of ads could be concidered art but i aint really down with using media to impress over a product or even more, nothing....I dunno if i'm clear here but lets just say that Bauhaus is 100 times more important to me as an art movement than pop art. Same goes with music, theres a difference bewteen a really catchy song that has stupid lyrics but you still like it and a dope song with lyrics that kill you mind...

i hope i'm explaining this well

Tesser, I hear you on that.... oddly enough it's from the other end of the tunnel. That is, a solely aesthetic image that serves no purpose other than to be beautiful is where I'm coming from. That elusive Truth in Art might only be able to be found when something is based in a bare aesthetics... but that's a whole different topic.

When you get into the political aspects of pop art, it IS an aesthetic movement: just one that decides to turn capitalism on its ear and invert the whole power structure that a commodity-based economy creates. "Finding beauty in the hideous" so to speak. And, unfortunately "post-"modern as this sounds, there really is nothing new left to do... even back in the 80s (think of the gallery scene in Style Wars: "There havent been any new movements since Pop") the well was running dry. So now, in our "post-"modern, advanced capitalist world, we're left to admire the work that is essentially created by that system instead of creating from a system that we despise.

That's messy, sorry, it's still early.

I'm on the fence about pop art as "good" (oh jesus, what did I just say?). We can't look at it ahistorically... that is to say, we can't look at it through a 21st century lens. The reason we thing that shit's all played out is because it was THAT influencial to spawn countless initators and, that's right, become a commodity; that means death. Haring wasn't Pop until he was dead and every-fucking-thing he did was sold and turned into product... and I still find it hard to say he's a pop artist... hell, he was a graffiti writer just like us.

I could go on forever with this shit though and the only way to have any semblance of a progressive conversation is to all sit down in a pub somewhere.... who's buying? (Plane tickets I mean.....)

Keep the knowledge coming....

Actually, my beef with pop art isn't that it's just a good looking image with no higher purpose... it's exactly the opposite of that. I think it looks fucking hideous. I actually have some admiration for the founders and admit that it's a clever idea, but I just can't stand huge Lichtenstein paintings with halftone patterns or Warhols and their nasty colors, or Haring's stupid little stick figures (actually, there's something neat about Haring's style. I take that back.). Most of what I like about it is the fact that it all seems like a big joke on the art world and people in general, but I wouldn't hang it up in my room.

I am of course, referring to pop art as in the fine art movement, not pop art as in commercial design, which for some reason seems like what Tesser and LENS were getting at. I'm actually surprised at this comment:

Dont get me wrong, i enjoy and fully respect the difficulty and freshness of creating a dope image but to me there must be more.

...since in a sense it contradicts what we feel abot those technical illustrations up there. That "more" found in the technical illustrations is actually found within ourselves, when we come to observations and discoveries about the process that make it jump above the rest. But the artist himself had no pretentions about it having some sort of higher meaning beyond the function it serves.

Although i see where you're coming from i never bought the whole 'theres nothing new left to be done' theory...if you read essays from different eras theres always been that fear just before the new shit dropped and fooled everyone. Art is endless and repetitive...on this basis, the cliche 'art imitates life or vice versa' is really acurate. We, humans always experience, draw pleasure and pain from the same stuff since day1, love, hate, death...we're ruled by our emotions and some of us get intrigued to search those feelings deeper and have the talent, vision, creativity, call it whatever..to sum up all that stuff in an image, piece of marble, whatever. The biggest factor is always social and pollitic issues that affect each generation in a very particular way. For example, christian boltanski's works on the holocaust and hitlers germany is in my opinion the best analysis of the problem and up to date the most fair representation of what and how it happened. The dangers he seen years ago are now israelis biggest fault..they became what they fear and loathed the most.

Pop art came to glorify consumerism, i wont judge that nor diss those artists but i clearly state that its an issue that doesnt interest me at all. Furthermore, i see a matter of scale in all that...i think one should a always keep in balance the intentions of a whole movement...if bauhaus formed a revolution, pop art came to bring us nice t-shirts and cool things to decorate our walls...its kinda harsh but thats the way i see it.

Concerning art in general, i always group artists in two categories. In the first i put the people that have such a strong inner world and an undying desire to go deeper and deeper in it that they eventually create a whole world out of their obsessions, fixations and personal views. That could be bosch, escher, frida, van gogh and lots of others just to give a stigma.

In the second there are the people that draw inspiration from what happens around them, pollitical issues, social problems, behavioural patterns and pretty much the way the world moves at said time. Goya, Duchamp, rodin, boltanski, long and lots of others.

I aint the one to choose, diss, or slap labels and golden stars to some..but given that its what i do in life, i lean on the second group...that explains most of my views and ideas.

Originally posted by El Mamerro

...since in a sense it contradicts what we feel abot those technical illustrations up there. That "more" found in the technical illustrations is actually found within ourselves, when we come to observations and discoveries about the process that make it jump above the rest. But the artist himself had no pretentions about it having some sort of higher meaning beyond the function it serves.

The answer is right there, i always felt pop art doesnt serve function, its just eye candy, promotion....the illustartions we're talking about have a very precise reason for being, explaining how something works, and bring a solution to how by viewing an image you grasp a whole mechanisn and how it works...to me, thats where the beauty derives from and thats what makes it important

I think it's impossible to ignore subjectivity in this whole discussion. Obviously. And this is the central problem with all art theory.... how to NOT look at a painting (or an artist, or a movement) with some preconceived notions of "good" and "bad".

(A nice test of this is to go to a gallery or museum and listen for people to say the classic "I know what I like" or "I could do THAT!")

But again, we have to look at the direction of change... the way in which art evolves: either From product, or To product. I'm sure there's a few Marxist readings on art theory out there... someone can do the research... something by Terry Eagleton maybe? Definitely go read Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction first though.

Well, most fine art doesn't exist to serve a particlar concrete function as these drawings do, it's usually a vessel of meaning and ideas, which may vary endlessly. The meaning and idea of pop art isn't just eye candy, it's a statement about consumerism and mass-production (whether it's a glorification or not, I feel, remains a decision of the viewer, regardless of the artist's intentions). When you take a product or a commercial image and place it within a fine art context it raises all sorts of questions and dialogues that can lead to some very insightful conclusions about who we are as a society. I would say that's a strong purpose, and one that pop art does well. Again, it just looks fucking stupid to me.

Besides, Duchamp had already covered the basics with "Fountain". Warhol just expanded the idea onto the world of mass-production, but Duchamp had it down decades earlier... and much doper as well. The fucking urinal actually LOOKS cool.

Originally posted by Tesseract

...if bauhaus formed a revolution, pop art came to bring us nice t-shirts and cool things to decorate our walls...

Ha.. I totally agree though. This whole thing, I'm tring to be the good grad student and look at it pragmatically. Pop served its purpose and now it's gone and it's that transition that interests me most. In the U.S. at least, we can thank the 1980s for a lot.

But digressions aside... your "two types" idea in interesting and pretty functional now that I think about it. It mirrors the two great strains of the art world (a misnomer if there ever was one) perfectly. I think there's a lot more that should/can come out of this... it's good to see everyone getting their art on.

Originally posted by El Mamerro

Besides, Duchamp had already covered the basics with "Fountain". Warhol just expanded the idea onto the world of mass-production, but Duchamp had it down decades earlier... and much doper as well. The fucking urinal actually LOOKS cool.

Word, i didnt mean to say that everything must serve function..but none the less serve an idea, a whole situation...to me pop lacks essence, thats about it...and i agree with you on duchamp...on one hand he has the fountain where that whole point is being made and done with and on the other theres the large glass...a fuckin masterpiece with more. Lets not forget that duchamps biggest beef was with Courbet, that it marcels opinion just did shit to pleasure the eye.

carwreck, word

I STILL NEED CLARITY

i agree with tesser

I was in Art ap at my highschool for two years, and my teacher was also the art history teacher, that woman knew her stuff. I agree with tesser on all of this about pop and its meaning, or lack there of i should say. At the same time though I have a problem with it for the same reason Mams does as well. i cant stand the look of it. It doesnt even possess the aesthetics to me that Tess and Carwreck are givin it some credit for. I just dont see it there. Warhol was lazy as an artist, to me at least. and then some other things like Jasper Johns...i just dont like. There are a few things of his that i think are interesting, but again they seem to lack idea.

There is this one artist that i absolutely detest, I'm not sure if any of you have heard of him, Cy Twombly? At one of the local collections he has a building dedicated to him. It is absolutely horrible. I'm sure a lot of it has to do with conveying feeling from his childhood but that doesnt mean you have to make a canvas look like a chalkboard with big circular scribbles on it.

On the idea of proportions in art. Have any of you ever done any research on the golden ratio? It is more a mathematical principal but it is a naturally occuring ratio that shows up in a lot of art. It is supposedly the most aesthetically pleasing ratio of a line to use. (a+B)/a=a/b. Anywho, its in a lot of works, Dhali used it in his rendetion of the Last Supper. It also has interesting implications when doing facial proportions. If one were to break up the space between the eyes, hairline, lips, chin and nose into lines, by using the golden ratio, or phi, it ends up being closer to actual proportions then conventional standards for facial proportions.

I love technical drawings. I wish I had the patience to do such things. My cousin started to get into that sorta thing for a while. He was pretty good at it, but he lacks direction, and thus no more art for him...

Anywho, I never had the chance to be part of the old 12oz discussions on things, but I remember readin them avidly. Its good to actually be part of one now.

http://www.studio-international.co.uk/studio-images/Twombly/cy_twombly_gag%2017b.jpg'>

kinda cool...

http://www.epitaph.com/_lib/stream.php?f=E&A.jpg&p=/149/349/349_hi.jpg'>

I'm loving this guy's stuff. He's been doing all the recent RhymeSayers' albums. Hot shit.

bump, cus i wanna hear tesser and mams reply...