Saturday, May 19, 2012

30 Things "The Scream" is screaming, 11 (Is This Art?)

PT Dilloway knows his superheroes, but not his artists' media; his aghast (I assume) comment about whether artists were allowed to create things using crayon on cardboard and still call it "art" and get some rich idiot to pay $119,900,000 for it ignores such famous artists as Christian Faur, who not only once was predicted to handily beat the Yankees in the World Series but who also works in the "crayon" medium, devising a color alphabet to make poem-pictures that do something about semiotics.

I don't know what semiotics is, so let's move on to what Faur does in his "Crayon Series."  From his site:



For this body of work I have assembled more than 100,000 hand cast crayons of varying colors and shades to produce a body of work that, to the best of my knowledge, is unlike anything done before in art. 

These individual "pixels" of wax are precisely stacked into specific locations inside of wooden frames to produce a new art form that uniquely balances the qualities of both photography and sculpture. Further, I have developed a mapping system that translates the English alphabet into 26 discrete colors and I use these crayon "fonts" to add words and language to each of the pieces in the show. 

The product is a series of photorealistic landscapes and figurative images that are formed at the surface of the thousands of tightly packed crayon tips. The imagery that makes up this new body tends to focus on isolated elements represented as children, barns, water towers, etc. within indeterminate landscapes, which are intended to reference the individual crayon whose solitary existence, like that of the individual element, is rendered obsolete in the amalgamate. 

The direct representation of language in each piece further imbues the works with meaning and brings an aspect of color into each composition reminiscent of DNA coding. The alphabetic key at the lower left of each panel allows the viewer to interpret the individual words written throughout the various panels.

I believe that means that Christian Faur created life via a set of Crayolas.  He probably had that cool 128-crayon pack with the sharpener.  My mom would never get that one for us, although once she got me a 64-pack that opened its top like a mouth and so I drew robot arms and a face on it and used to have conversations with it in my mind:

Me:  Hi, Robot! How's your day?

Robot:  Apparently not as pathetic as yours.  You're talking to a cardboard box.

Me:  I need friends.

Good times.  Good times.    Here's something from Christian Faur:




That's called Umbilical SkyThe rest of his stuff is really worth checking out at his site.

Here's today's caption, because, remember, some dumb guy paid $119,900,000 to buy a poorly-drawn cardboard box.

Where did I lose my hairpiece?
Previous:

Caption 10


3 comments:

Lara Schiffbauer said...

To make sure I understand, that's tips of crayons making a mosaic? That is truly fascinating. Thanks for the RT yesterday. :)

Andrew Leon said...

That looks rather like a Lite-Brite picture. Just with some wrong pegs stuck in. And I'm not going to decipher that.

PT Dilloway said...

Boy I hope he never leaves that out in the sun.