{ Yves Klein, Empreinte du fond d’une baignoire vide don’t l’eau avait été colorée de vermillion, COS 2, 1960 | Yves Klein Archives | Continue reading }

‘As I lay stretched upon the beach of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue sky, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.’ –Yves Klein

Who is Yves Klein, and what’s the story behind his unearthly color? Lolling on a beach in 1947, a teenage Klein carved up the universe of art between him and two friends. Painter Arman Fernandez chose earth, Claude Pascal words, while Klein claimed the sky. (…)

Klein’s first public exhibit in 1954 featured monochrome canvases in several shades—orange, pink, yellow as well as blue—but the audience’s placid reception enraged him, as if it were “a new kind of bright, abstract interior decoration,” as Weitermeier puts it. Klein’s response was to double down exclusively on what he considered the world’s most limitless, enveloping color: blue [International Klein Blue].

With the help of Parisian paint dealer Edouard Adam, he suspended pure ultramarine pigment—the most-prized blue of the medieval period— in a synthetic resin called Rhodopas, which didn’t dull the pigment’s luminosity like traditional linseed oil suspensions. Their much-vaunted patent didn’t apply to the color proper, but rather protected Klein’s works made with the paint, which involved rolling naked ladies in the new hue and transferring their body-images to canvas.

Invitees to two simultaneous 1957 exhibits received an blue-drenched postcard in the mail, complete with an IKB postage stamp actually canceled by the French postal service (an authentic touch Klein probably bribed his postman for).

{ Print | Continue reading }

Photograph of a performance by Yves Klein at Rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, October 1960, by Harry Shunk

In one of the best-known photographs in art, the French artist Yves Klein projects himself confidently into space, seemingly as heavenbound as a Titian angel, while all unawares the banal figure of a cyclist goes about his earthbound business. The irony of Le saut dans le vide (Leap into the void, 1960) is that an image so faithful to Klein’s artistic quest should be a fake, a confection manufactured in the darkroom by him and the photographer who took the shot, Harry Shunk.

Klein’s performance, staged for a one-off newspaper he was planning, involved the taking of two pictures. First, Shunk photographed the street empty of all save the cyclist. Then Klein, a keen exponent of judo, climbed to the top of a wall and dived off it a dozen times — onto a pile of mats assembled by the members of his judo school across the road. The two elements were then melded to create the desired illusion.

The image, which has had a lasting influence on performance art, was expressive of Klein’s intent to explore the metaphorical void central to his work, a neutral zone free of prior prejudices. It was also a criticism of Nasa’s space travel plans, for Klein the ultimate folly of an over-materialistic world. Yet though the montage was executed under his direction, the presence of Shunk — who became a rather forgotten figure — should not be ignored.

{ The Times | Continue reading }

Just ask yourself: Which colour do you prefer ? Have you always preferred it, or did your preference change ? Can you tell why you prefer pink to, let’s say, yellow ? If you have no answer to these questions, you may wonder what’s so interesting about colour preferences. And if you have no answer, or no interest in the questions, it’s perhaps because they are not very well shaped.

Let’s first agree that color preference is an important aspect of human behavior. It influences a large number of decisions people make on a daily basis, including the clothes and make up they wear, the way they decorate their homes, the artifacts they buy or create, to name but a few examples. What is more interesting is that color is, in some sense, a superficial quality that seldom influences the practical function of artifacts. What’s more interesting for psychologists, is that we still know very little on which factors actually determine these preferences. We still don’t have a good grasp on what they are, and how to capture them descriptively: some studies have reported universal preferences (for blue rather than red); others. for highly saturated colors ; some, finally, stress cultural and individual differences.

The problem may be that testing for colour preferences has something to do with colour perception, colour labeling and cultural associations - and all these problems are hard to disconnect. Elderly people for instance tend to change their colour preferences, but this may have to do with visual impairement. (…)

Another theory suggests that women, as caregivers who need to be particularly sensitive to, say, a child flushed with fever, have developed a sensitivity to reddish changes in skin color, a skill that enhances their abilities as the “emphathizer.”

Other arguments for innate colour preferences come from animal studies - with some recent surprising discoveries.  Animal colour preferences from sexual or social contexts are assumed to have arisen owing to preferences for specific kinds of food, representing a sort of sensory bias.

{ Cognition and Culture | Continue reading }

photo { Tim Barber }

{ 1. Linnea Strid | 2. Amanda Lepore by David LaChapelle }

quote { When the Key to Good Genetics Research Isn’t in the Genes | Newsweek | full story }

What they found was that (…) every neuron reacts differently to the same input. (…) This all makes a lot of sense, because in this way, each neuron looks at the same stimulus from a slightly different perspective, enhancing the amount of information the animal can get from a single stimulus. From the point of view of information coding, this is an advantage, that comes with a disadvantage: some neurons will create ‘phantom’ information, information that isn’t there. (…)

I’ve been thinking about the conundrum of ‘noise in the brain’ before and it has been very suggestive to argue that the variability in neural activity is not just random, pernicious noise but has some functional significance–a significance which we don’t quite understand, yet.

The results by Padmanabhan and Urban provide further evidence that the highly variable activity of neurons is not ‘noise’ in a complex system, but actively generated by the brain not only to increase information capacity, but also to behave unpredictably, creatively and spontaneously in an unpredictable, dangerous and competitive world.

It also means that adding information to a sensory stimulus may be a disadvantage in terms of information coding, but it wasn’t eliminated by evolution because it prevented animals from becoming too predictable - a classic cost/benefit trade-off.

{ Björn Brembs | Continue reading }

collage { John Stezaker, Untitled, 1977-8 }

{ The country’s first abortion ban based on the belief in fetal pain took effect this week in Nebraska. | Images: Illustrated Birth Control Manual, 1957 }

Colour does not exist. Not out in the world at any rate. All that exists in the world is a smooth continuum of light of different wavelengths. Colour is a construction of our brains. A lot is known about how the brain does this, beginning with complicated circuits in the retina itself.

Thanks to a new paper from Greg Field and colleagues we now have an even more detailed picture of how retinal circuits are wired to enable light to be categorized into different colours. This study illustrates a dramatic and fundamental principle of brain wiring – namely that cells that fire together, wire together.

{ Wiring the brain | Continue reading }

{ 1. Leo’s Costume Originals catalog, 1979 | 2. Tommaso Bonaventura’s portraits of Mao Zedong impersonators }

{ 1 | 2 }

{ Kate Bauman | Markus Hofer }

{ Michel Foucault, interview, 1982 | Continue reading }

{ Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 1888 }

{ Friedrich Nietzsche born October 15, 1844 | bio | Michel Foucault born October 15, 1926 | bio }

{ 1. Monica Cook | 2. Claudia Hirsch }

{ Richard Avedon, Stephanie Seymour, Model, New York City, 1992 | gelatin silver print, signed, numbered ‘5/5′ in pencil, copyright credit and reproduction title stamps (on the verso) 57¾ x 46in. (146.6 x 116.8cm.) | $182,500 | The stylist for this shoot was Polly Allen Mellon, the dress is by Comme des Garçons, Ms. Seymour’s hair is styled by Oribe, her make-up is by Kevin Aucoin. | Christie’s }

Seeing as how fashion month has just ended, I thought it would be appropriate to write about what a stylist’s role is on runway shows. On some shows, I merely choose shoes for the looks, and on others I am involved six months before the show, from creative conception to the completion of the show.

Stylists cover the gamut for a designer by bringing in an outside perspective and fashion expertise of what is relevant, irrelevant and “new.” Stylists are needed on a runway show to edit the looks, ensure the designer is showing the most innovative pieces from a collection and that the hair, makeup, and models are on target with everything else happening in the world of fashion. A great stylist can take inspiration from the designer and translate it into every element of the runway show, from the manicure to the music.

{ Sally Lyndley/Fashionista.com | Continue reading }

photo { Meadham Kirchhoff, Spring 2011 Ready-to-Wear }

bonus:

{ 1. unsourced | 2. Ignas Kozlovas }

{ 1. Joseph Jastrow’s Duck-Rabbit, 1899, based on drawing published in German humor magazine Fliegende Blatter, 1892 | 2. Taxidermed rabbit–duck | via Richard Wiseman }

I noticed a depiction of the famous “duck-rabbit” figure, described as an “illusion” and attributed to Wittgenstein (Malach, Levy, & Hasson, 2002).
 
Technically, the duck-rabbit figure is an ambiguous (or reversible, or bistable) figure, not an illusion (Peterson, Kihlstrom, Rose, & Glisky, 1992). The two classes of perceptual phenomena have quite different theoretical implications. From a constructivist point of view, many illusions illustrate the role of unconscious inferences in perception, while the ambiguous figures illustrate the role of expectations, world-knowledge, and the direction of attention (Long & Toppino, 2004).

For example, children tested on Easter Sunday are more likely to see the figure as a rabbit; if tested on a Sunday in October, they tend to see it as a duck or similar bird (Brugger & Brugger, 1993).

But the more important point of this letter concerns attribution: the duck-rabbit was “originally noted” not by Wittgenstein, but rather by the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow in 1899.

{ John F. Kihlstrom, | Continue reading }

{ The Emergency Room Format }

{ 1. 2029 | Thanks Daemian | 2. Mimi }

Losing weight can be described at its simplest as a matter of counting calories during the daytime. Consume fewer calories and burn more through activity and exercise, and you’re likely to lose weight. Eat more high-calorie foods and sit on the couch all day watching football, and you get the opposite effect. But according to a new study from University of Chicago Medical Center researchers, another number should be taken into account by dieters: hours of sleep. (…)

“If your goal is to lose fat, skipping sleep is like poking sticks in your bicycle wheels,” Penev said. “Cutting back on sleep, a behavior that is ubiquitous in modern society, appears to compromise efforts to lose fat through dieting. In our study it reduced fat loss by 55 percent.”

{ University of Chicago Medical Center | Continue reading }

artwork { Left: Robert Blake | Right: Katie Rhody | Nosh: Food Art Show curated by Kady Grant and Anthony Iacono, Opening Friday, October 8th, 7-10pm | Culture Fix, NYC }

{ James Rosenquist, Wild West World, 1996 | Related: Tennessee is one of four states, along with Arizona, Georgia and Virginia, that recently enacted laws explicitly allowing loaded guns in bars. | NY Times | full story }

related { What distinguishes groups like this one from a shooting club or re-enactment society is the prospect of actual bloodshed, which many Ohio Defense Force members see as real. As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side. Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs. | The Secret World of Extreme Militias | Time | full story }

{ depression press | more }