SCAD Visual Resources Center

The National Gallery of Canada is doubling up with Damien Hirst in its search for identical twins who are willing to take part in a recreation of the artist’s 1992 performance Ingo, Torsten. Successful candidates will perform in conjunction with the NGC’s summer exhibition Pop Life: Art in a Material World, organized by Tate Modern and on view from June 11 to September 19, 2010.

In 1992, at the Cologne Unfair art fair, British artist Damien Hirst commissioned a set of identical twins named Ingo and Torsten to spend time sitting in front of his trademark spot paintings. Dressed in identical clothing, the twins could read, knit or even play chess, so long as their actions were alike. Titled after the twins, the performance was about surface appearances, individuality, and making a scene.

Now, in 2010, the NGC plans to re-stage this iconic performance and invites identical twins to take part in this recreation and to become works of art in their own right.

Applicant requirements
Twins must be aged 18 or over and identical in stature, height and appearance. During the performance, successful applicants must wear identical clothes and footwear, and have matching hairstyles and hair colour. Shifts for each performance will be four hours in length. Ideally, the twins will be able to commit to two to four shifts during the span of the exhibition.

How to apply
Twins are invited to apply by sending their name, contact information and two photographs of themselves – one full body shot and one headshot to twins@gallery.ca or by regular mail to: Twins Project, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1N 9N4. All applications must be received by May 7, 2010. Successful applicants will be notified by email.

Compensation
All participants will be compensated for their time and will also be presented with a photographic memento of their performance, signed by Damien Hirst. Please note that participants must pay for their own travel expenses to participate.

The Library of Congress has recently posted a collection of Vaudeville-era (c.1897-1920) silent films on YouTube:

Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment

The motion pictures in the Variety Stage collection include animal acts, burlesque, dance, comic sketches, dramatic excerpts, dramatic sketches, physical culture acts, and tableaus. The films represented date from copyrights of 1897 to 1920; the majority are drawn from the Library’s extensive Paper Print Collection. The remaining films were produced by Hans A. Spanuth in Chicago from 1919 to 1920 for the series “Spanuth’s Original Vod-A-Vil Movies.” These motion pictures present a rare animated record of vaudeville acts from the turn of the century. Although not actually filmed on a theatrical stage, they sought to recreate the atmosphere of a theater performance by showing the types of vaudeville acts and performers that were popular at the time.

The Van Gogh Letters Project is an online database of all 902 letters from and to Van Gogh.This database, which was established by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, includes original text, hyperlinked footnotes, facsimiles, translations, notes, and corresponding artworks.

From artforum.com:

“Floods have inundated Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House for the second time in twelve years, reports Jason Edward Kaufman in the Art Newspaper. The 1951 glass-and-steel modernist masterpiece, located sixty miles southwest of Chicago in Plano, Illinois, was breached by more than two feet of water on September 14, as record rainfall from tropical storm Lowell followed by the tail end of hurricane Ike caused the nearby Fox River to rise eight feet above normal, topping the five-foot columns on which the house rests and submerging the deck. “It’s an absolutely devastating scene,” said James Peters, president and chief executive of Landmarks Illinois, which manages and operates the house museum on behalf of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “We will need to raise funds to begin the clean-up process once the water subsides and to help cover the loss of tour revenue. At this point, we are fairly confident the 2008 tour season, which was scheduled to extend through November, is over,” he said. The two nonprofit organizations plan to assess the damage and begin discussions with insurers. The house last flooded in 1996 and was subsequently restored by van der Rohe’s grandson, Chicago architect Dirk Lohan.”

“Three years after Katrina I wanted to make a statement about the state of the clean-up operation.”

Image sets on Flickr
Image set from Banksy.co.uk

View 03: Egypt – Karnak. Great Statues., n.d., Goodyear. Brooklyn Museum Archives (S10|08 Karnak, image 9875).

The Smithsonian Institute, Powerhouse Museum (Sydney, Australia) and the Brooklyn Museum have all added photograph collections to Flickr.

The Smithsonian Institute Flickr collection includes a sample of more than 13 million images. Some come from outside sources in addition to those taken by Smithsonian staff, and represent a broad range of subjects and themes in the fields of art, history, culture, and science. Some of the collections include photos of artists, examples of early photography, photographs of scientist and inventors and events at the institute.

The Powerhouse Museum Flickr collection includes 450 images from the Tyrrell Collection which consists of 7903 glass plate negatives from the studios of Charles Kerry (1857-1928) and Henry King (1855-1923) who had two of Sydney’s principal photographic studios in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

And the Brooklyn Museum has several collections including an Egyptian lantern slide collection, Paris Exposition of 1900, and images from shows and competitions at the museum.

ARTstor has recently released a batch of nearly 4,000 images from the private image archive of Professors Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair (Boston College), Professor Walter B. Denny (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) of over 18,000 digital images of the art and architecture of Islam.

Denny’s primary field of teaching and research is the art and architecture of the Islamic world, in particular the artistic traditions of the Ottoman Turks, Islamic carpets and textiles, and issues of economics and patronage in Islamic art. Included are 350 images depicting “Islamic Customs and Religions,” almost 800 images from manuscripts, and over 1500 images of textiles, mostly from Turkey.

To find the collection in ARTstor, click on “ARTstor Collections” under the heading “Browse by collections” and select “Islamic Art and Architecture Collection (Sheila Blair, Jonathan Bloom, Walter Denny).” For more information about the collection check out the ARTstor blog or the Islamic Art and Architecture Collection (Sheila Blair, Jonathan Bloom, Walter Denny).

Image source: Men and Woman of Rank in Garden, detail, mid-18th century, painted ceramic from Iran. Musee du Louvre, Paris, France. SCAD Digital Image Database, http://did.scad.edu,

The Cooper-Hewitt Museum discover an unattributed drawing of a candelabrum in their collection to be the work of Michelangelo. Check out the article and video to find out more about the research done to determine the attribution.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Lever House, 1952, New York City, New York. Photograph by David Shankbone, 2007. (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lever_House_by_David_Shankbone.jpg)

Cool Hunting Video “The Lever House Art Collection” by Ami Kealoha, talks to the curator about the Lever House (New York City) commissioned lobby installations.

View video here.

Evaluation April 1-May 23, 2008
Exhibition June 27-August 10, 2008
www.brooklynmuseum.org/click

The Brooklyn Museum of art is inviting you to become part of the curatorial process for the new photography exhibition Click!. From April 1 – May 23, 2008, sign up to evaluate the entries, then check out the results between June 27-August 10, 2008.

The inspiration for this exhibition comes from the book The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki.

… James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click! explores whether Surowiecki’s premise can be applied to the visual arts—is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts?

So use your visual knowledge and be a part of the crowd-curated exhibition.