Josse Ford :: Art Journeys and Conversation ::

The Impossible Polaroid Project

New company breathes life and vision into our Polaroid memories...

As a child growing up in Australia in the 1970's my life was framed by polaroid moments. My Uncle worked as an engineer, traveling all over the world on big ocean-going cargo ships. Each time he visited us he brought many wild and exotic presents - many of them featuring the latest technology. His visits were a time of great excitement and heightened awareness of the joys of life.

Andy Warhol - "Jean-Michel Basquiat" 1982 - Polaroid

My greatest source of fascination was the polaroid camera he brought with him when he came to stay. It was a big clunky folding thing - but if felt like a doorway into a magical world - instant photographs. Somehow it seemed like a whole team of chemists and scientists were at work inside that little box!

Ever since then, the polaroid camera came to symbolize for me, and for many others, the synthesis of warm happy childhood moments, art, and technology before it became a data stream.

I love the analog qualities of film. It offers the opportunity of an infinity of variations not available to digital cameras. And the polaroid took that one step further by adding an element of immediacy. I don't think that any other camera captured so many "moments" in the lives of so many - each one a unique moment that could never be re-captured in the same way.

My artist friend and business partner Josse Ford expressed it perfectly when she said, "Polaroid captured 'moments of truth' whereas with digital photography we don't know what is real anymore". In each photo we could see the talent of the artist - it wasn't something that could be adjusted or photoshopped and made to lie. "Polaroid symbolizes our desire to return to a more honest world".

Artists everywhere embraced the polaroid. Names like Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and William Wegman to name but a few..

Polaroid was founded in the Boston area by the inventor Edwin Land who amassed a team of the best and brightest minds from MIT. It was the Google or Apple of its day. Think about that...

But as we now all know only too well Polaroid didn't change with the times. The company didn't adapt well to the world of video and then digital cameras. In 2001, it declared bankruptcy, and to the great sorrow of instant-film aficionados around the globe, stopped production of instant analog film in June 2008. A sad day....

So it was with great excitement that we recently happened upon "The Impossible Project" - a venture based in The Netherlands with a mission to bring back instant film:

"Impossible b.v. has been founded with the concrete aim to re-invent and re-start production of analog INTEGRAL FILM for vintage Polaroid cameras.."

Impossible b.v. embraces the philosophy of Edwin Land himself:

"Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible"

Don't you just LOVE that!

Further details from The Impossible Project website:

"Impossible b.v. has acquired the complete film production equipment in Enschede (NL) from Polaroid, has signed a 10-year lease agreement on the factory building; and has engaged the most experienced team of Integral Film experts worldwide.

The Impossible mission is NOT to re-build Polaroid Integral film but (with the help of strategic partners) to develop a new product with new characteristics, consisting of new optimised components, produced with a streamlined modern setup. An innovative and fresh analog material, sold under a new brand name that perfectly will match the global re-positioning of Integral Films."

One really special thing we can see is the great love that people have for this project. It symbolizes the desire that we all have to bring back infinite variations of light and creativity - unlimited and unconstrained by the quantization distortions of our current digital age.

Bravo to The Impossible Team!

LA Weekly Art show opening, January 10, 2008

Last weekend I went to the LA weekly art show "Some Paintings" at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. Featuring the work of over 70 living Los Angeles painters, curated by LA Weekly arts writer, Doug Harvey the exhibition was a huge success. Parking was a crazy experience for me. I'm used to zipping around Manhattan on the subway, not sitting in a long snaking traffic queue.

I didn't see a huge amount of art that resonated for me but there were some quite interesting landscapes by David Lloyd in the William Turner Gallery. The smooth lusciousness of the finish and the bright colors were gorgeous.

The event was packed with artists, their families and collectors. It was quite a feat in patience to see all the different exhibits.

Other pieces of art that i liked:

You can see the rest of the photos from the show here, in my photo albums.

As I left a performance piece was going on outside. The artists were jumping up and down on a car covered with a pile of rubbish, yelling and beating it with sticks. Perhaps a fitting tribute to the state of modern art today, just kidding :-)

Technorati Tags: art, art collectors

$135 Million dollars paid for Gustav Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

The NYT has an interesting article on the acquistion of a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer which was bought last month by the billionaire collector Ronald S. Lauder and is on display his Neue Galerie for German and Austrian art, on the Upper East Side, NYC.

"The art market operates according to its own logic, which may have nothing to do with the quality of the art. Value is not price — whether the issue is a Klimt, or a ballplayer, or a chief executive paid millions of dollars, who runs his company into the ground.

But Oscar Wilde had it right about cynics, price and value. It’s only natural to play the skeptic when the art world is a circus of profligacy, drunk with cash, and when dimwitted speculators make headlines, wasting fortunes on bad art. Who knows what the most money paid in private for a painting really is: maybe $135 million. For that amount, assuming it is what Mr. Lauder paid, his portrait of Adele, a hedonistic masterpiece, will be talked about in terms of how many lives might have been saved or how many lifted from poverty for this sum.

It’s inevitable. But ludicrous. The Met spent more than $45 million two years ago for a tiny Duccio “Madonna and Child” whose modesty seems its most endearing virtue. The tipping point between endearing and hedonistic is evidently somewhere around $100 million.

As for the border separating public interest from private enterprise, it has never been fixed. The Neue Galerie is Christie’s annex now, exhibiting paintings for sale ($15 general admission, no children under 12 allowed), whose display is also a public service.

Someday Adele will be seen for just what she is: beautiful, a gift to the city. And $135 million may even come to look like a bargain."

Technorati Tags: art, art collectors, art sales, nyc art

Einstein Finds Inspiration in the Music of Mozart

A recent issue of the New York Times featured an inspiring essay by Arthur. L. Miller about two giants of modern history......

Last year, the 100th anniversary of E=mc2 inspired an outburst of symposiums, concerts, essays and merchandise featuring Albert Einstein. This year, the same treatment is being given to another genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on Jan. 27, 250 years ago.

There is more to the dovetailing of these anniversaries than one might think.

Einstein once said that while Beethoven created his music, Mozart's "was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master." Einstein believed much the same of physics, that beyond observations and theory lay the music of the spheres — which, he wrote, revealed a "pre-established harmony" exhibiting stunning symmetries. The laws of nature, such as those of relativity theory, were waiting to be plucked out of the cosmos by someone with a sympathetic ear.

Thus it was less laborious calculation, but "pure thought" to which Einstein attributed his theories.

Einstein was fascinated by Mozart and sensed an affinity between their creative processes, as well as their histories.........

.....he (Einstein) wrote four papers that were destined to change the course of science and nations. His ideas on space and time grew in part from aesthetic discontent. It seemed to him that asymmetries in physics concealed essential beauties of nature; existing theories lacked the "architecture" and "inner unity" he found in the music of Bach and Mozart.

In his struggles with extremely complicated mathematics that led to the general theory of relativity of 1915, Einstein often turned for inspiration to the simple beauty of Mozart's music.

"Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music," recalled his older son, Hans Albert. "That would usually resolve all his difficulties."

In the end, Einstein felt that in his own field he had, like Mozart, succeeded in unraveling the complexity of the universe.

This story is a beautiful example of the power of art and music to uplift and inspire. It also reminds us of the compelling and potent connection between science, art, and music - that a holistic approach to living is what we humans need to prosper and achieve great things!

Read the Full NYTimes Essay...

Technorati Tags: art, art collectors, art resources, art techniques, spiritual art, writing

Destroying The National Parks

Yesterday's New York Times featured an interesting but very disturbing editorial on forthcoming policy decisions which may wind back the clock on America's National Park system.

Most of us think of America's national parks as everlasting places, parts of the bedrock of how we know our own country. But they are shaped and protected by an underlying body of legislation, which is distilled into a basic policy document that governs their operation. Over time, that document has slowly evolved, but it has always stayed true to the fundamental principle of leaving the parks unimpaired for future generations. That has meant, in part, sacrificing some of the ways we might use the parks today in order to protect them for tomorrow.

Recently, a secret draft revision of the national park system's basic management policy document has been circulating within the Interior Department. It was prepared, without consultation within the National Park Service, by Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior who once ran the Chamber of Commerce in Cody, Wyo., was a Congressional aide to Dick Cheney and has no park service experience.

Within national park circles, this rewrite of park rules has been met with profound dismay, for it essentially undermines the protected status of the national parks. The document makes it perfectly clear that this rewrite was not prompted by a compelling change in the park system's circumstances. It was prompted by a change in political circumstances - the opportunity to craft a vision of the national parks that suits the Bush administration.

Go To Full Article

We recently visited the Grey Towers Estate in Milford, PA. Now owned by the National Forest Service, it is the former home of Gifford Pinchot and his wife Cornelia.

He (Pinchot) is the "father" of conservation in the United States; his ideas about managing trees and forests as a renewable natural resource have been studied and adopted for over 100 years - not only in this country, but around the world.

In 1898, Pinchot was appointed head of the Division of Forestry within the Department of Agriculture, and met Theodore Roosevelt, who became an immediate close friend. In 1901, when Roosevelt became President, he and Pinchot set aside millions of acres of forest land which were to be protected under a program of scientific management.

Visiting Grey Towers, it was hard not to get a feeling for the achievements of this great man. When he and Roosevelt worked together to create the basis for the national Forest Service and National Park System they were creating a legacy for all americans and their children.

By contrast, it seems that our leaders today are intent on dismantling anything remotely related to preserving the natural beauty of our planet. What is their plan I wonder? - to leave us with a legacy of indoor living under fluorescent lighting?

Mother nature seems to be having something to say about our treatment of her ocean and sky lately. I wonder how she will react to more carelessness in our national parks? Time to do everything we can as artists to record the beauty of our country while we still can!

Technorati Tags: art, writing

Lego Art Exhibition

I came across an interesting gallery exhibition called Art Craziest Nation - The Little Artists: (thanks to Art in Liverpool):

"The Little Artists (John Cake and Darren Neave) immortalize iconic artists and their artworks in un-manipulated Lego. In Art Craziest Nation they have curated and built their own mini-exhibition of modern art.

Cake & Neave have transformed themselves into two loveable, mischievous cartoon characters, The Little Artists. They exist in the realm of merchandise, between aggressively marketed children's culture like Pokemon and gallery gift shops, where art becomes a commodity: "We question what it means to be an artist in the current super-branded cultural climate."

Priding themselves on the integrity and accuracy of their hybrid artworks, their knowledge of Lego is comprehensive and respects its association with learning and creativity.

The Little Artists' ambition is to be considered great artists and win the Turner Prize.

Art Craziest Nation is a bustling gallery featuring an array of modern art masterpieces. Look out for Damien Hirst with his Shark Tank, Tracey Emin's infamous Bed and the transvestite, Turner Prize-winning potter Grayson Perry, and of
course the gallery shop."

Andy Wahol's Money

Technorati Tags: art, puppy

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts receives $100 million in paintings from collectors Frances and James McGlothlin

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts receives $100 million gift of 130 American paintings including some of my favorite painters: Whistler, Homer, Sargent, and Cassatt.

RICHMOND. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has received 130 American paintings, valued in excess of $100 million, from trustee Frances G. McGlothlin and her husband James W. McGlothlin, chairman and ceo of the Virginia-based financial services and industrial supply company United Co. and one of the US’s wealthiest individuals. The gift transforms the museum’s holdings of American art with oil paintings, watercolours, pastels, and sculptures by artists who include Whistler, Homer, Sargent, and Cassatt, among many others.

Technorati Tags: art, impressionist, art collectors

A Park Slope Memorial

I was touched by this memorial on 5th Avenue and Prospect Place in Brooklyn. What a beautiful way to commemorate the passing of a loved one in traumatic circumstances. Somehow I felt something of the person, Liz Padilla, and the ones who loved her.

“Vancouver Bay” has a new home

“Vancouver Bay” is off to a new home with Richard and Gloria Moylan of Park Slope. Painted on location in Vancouver BC the painting was sold at Josse's Open Studio this afternoon. The painting has travelled to several shows in its short life, including the Pastel National in Wichita where it was juried for Exhibition by Wolf Kahn.

Bon Voyage, Vancouver Bay!

Richard and Gloria Moylan with “Vancouver Bay” (and Josse!)

New York Times Champions The Drawing Center

Yesterday's New York Times featured an editorial which goes to the heart of America's foundations and the need to safeguard our cultural and spiritual freedoms. Speaking of a recent protest directed at an exhibit by The Drawing Center, The Times editor had this to say:

....in the past few weeks, we've watched a handful of vocal family members, who may not represent a majority of 9/11 families, change the dynamic at the World Trade Center site for the worse. They have begun a movement to “take back the memorial,” which means, in essence, eventually purging ground zero of its cultural partners, including the International Freedom Center.

This protest resulted in a shocking response in late June from Gov. George Pataki. He openly joined the criticism of one of those institutions - the Drawing Center - for an exhibition that it sponsored, in another part of town, that contains controversial images of 9/11 and America's role in the world. And he has called on all the cultural partners at ground zero for reassurances that their programs will harmonize with the concerns of this small group of family members.

The World Trade Center site is of enormous importance to all New Yorkers, to all Americans and to people around the planet who have united to fight the insidious forces that led to 9/11. Mr. Pataki's job is to represent all those deeply interested parties. By attempting to appease one small, vocal group of protesters who are unlikely to be appeased anyway, he is abrogating the rights of everyone else. And he runs the risk of turning ground zero into a place where we bury the freedoms that define this nation.

There must be no mistake about this. If the Drawing Center is forced to withdraw from ground zero rather than accept the censorship of exhibitions that are yet to be imagined, no other respectable arts institution will take its place.

We live in a time of great fear and great opportunity. With events like 9/11 and the recent London bombings, its natural to want protection. We give up some freedoms in order to have that protection, but where is the line?

The Drawing Center, like other great arts and cultural institutions, helps to keep freedom alive by featuring work that expresses different viewpoints on life - sometimes harmonious, sometimes disturbing, and sometimes breathtaking. If we take that away, or allow it to be diluted with fear, what's left?

Go to NY Times Editorial