Sculpture Podcast

Happy holidays to all my visitors. Please be sure to visit the new StudioCodex.com podcast for tips on how to view sculpture.

A directory of videos

Studio Codex Expands
We promised you more ways to learn about art and get your creative juices going, and we hope you find that the learning materials we've developed do just that. In this blog we send you links to learning materials that build your art knowledge. Here are brief introductions to the podcasts and videos we've uploaded so far.

This video focuses on one work by Vincent vanGogh--his Bedroom at Arles. It uses techniques that help you understand and appreciate the painting, and also gives you a useful format for applying to all other artworks. This approach is termed Form and Content, which breaks artworks into their basic art components, and shows how to derive meanings and messages from them. It also gives useful background information that helps you see what things in the artist may have shaped his intentions.




It's always useful to understand the cultural context during which an art object was made, since the artist who created it was a product of his or her culture. That's why knowing something about the time's important religious, philosophical, political, and historical figures and values often helps us understand what the artist was communicating. This video is about ancient Rome and one of her great leaders Julius Caesar.



Why Go to a Museum is a basic introduction to visiting museums and galleries. It's useful to anyone who wants to learn how to enjoy the many wonderful experiences art museums have to offer.


This video focuses on one work by Leonardo da Vinci--the only one to be found in America--The Portrait of Ginevra deBenci at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. To practice developing your discerning eye, first look at the questions asked about the video. Then view the video to find the answers. This can be the same technique you use in amy museum or gallery, and sharpens your looking and helping you to engage more fully with any work of art.


An audio version of these videos will be available on iTunes soon. If you would like to download a copy of these videos for your iPod or Sony PSP, please visit video.google.com Keyword: StudioCodex.com

Changes at StudioCodex

Exciting things are happening at Studio Codex.com! We're in the process of broadcasting podcasts on topics that you're sure to be interested in. Look for podcasts that give you helpful information that helps you build your art knowledge, or are meant to get your creative juices flowing. Sometimes the programs will tell you about historical figures who played an important role in art's cultural context, or give you insights into the ideas, meanings, and messages of great works of art, or show you techniques artists use to create their artwork. There will also be special podcasts about actual art projects you can do yourself.

We'd be happy to get your input about our new adventure, and should you try one of our art projects, be sure to send us a digital copy that we can post (with your permission).

We'll be adding a link to this blog, so keep coming back and checking out art info your can make mobile.

studiocodex.com

What is Truth? Some Thoughts on the Inca Child Sacrifices

A few days ago I noticed an article about Inca child sacrifices. The lengths people go to interact with forces beyond their comprehension always fascinate me. Compared to these Pre-Columbian peoples’ practices, our society’s contacts with the supernatural appear feeble, confused and insincere. This is perhaps because a lot of natural phenomena isn’t beyond our comprehension at all—we have science. Science explains these things to us, and then we put that knowledge into practice controlling our environment with technology. Science and technology have combined to strip us of our pathways to wonder about the mysteries of the world. Add materialism to the mix, that obsession with wealth and possessions, and we see why we have lost our mystical direction. Instead, we drift into neo-paganism, become born-again Celts, and sects set up meeting houses in strip malls.

The article reported that researchers used samples of the sacrificed children’s hair to show they had been ritually “fattened up” for one year before the final Capacocha ceremony. Evidence from archaeology and Spanish chronicles tell us these children were part of the Inca worship of their powerful mountain gods, usually after some disastrous event like an earthquake, drought or epidemic. The chosen child was considered a deity and was forever immortalized. After meeting with the Inca emperor, a procession of priests, chiefs and family members would accompany the holy child on a trek up a sacred mountain, as close to the heavens as the Inca could get. At a shrine on the summit the final rituals would take place, including wrapping the child in ceremonial clothing, placing offerings of gold and silver, and feeding the child chicha to ease their death by strangulation or extreme exposure to the elements. This was sacred activity, done with deep homage, intense faith, and utmost reverence. It was the most sacred of all Inca rituals.

Of course we are repulsed by such sacrifices. Infanticide is not a practice in America, but at least once a week we hear about a child dying because of some mentally ill lunatic, violent criminal, or a deviant child predator. Indeed infanticide is a form of population control or economic necessity in places like China and India.

Our confused thinking about this story comes from cultural relativism, that is, our tendency to view the practices of others in terms of our OWN culture, not theirs. It is a remnant of ethnocentrism, the belief that our culture is superior to anybody else’s. This cocktail of narrow-minded cultural relativism, ethnocentrism, and materialism is a brew that’s bound to distort. Proof can be found in the Physorg.com site’s article. After the article’s title, Inca Sacrifices Were “Fattened Up” First, come the sponsored links of ads from Google. The Google bots grabbed some key words on the web page and offered viewers

Low GI Diet Information
I Lost 41 lbs in 60 Days
10 Rules of Fat Loss

For a small amount I can “lose 9 lbs. every 11 Days” if I “learn these 10 Rules.” Materialism at its best. I can pay money to lose the weight I gained by spending money on junk food that I was enticed to eat by watching commercials on late-night TV.

The Pre-Columbian people struggled to make sense of their world, and deal with the harsh vicissitudes of life. To appease powerful forces they could not control, they offered to those forces the most precious things they had—their beautiful children.

The final proof that cultural relativism is solidly entrenched in our discourse comes at the end of the article where readers could leave a comment. This one was posted by “Truth.”

Mayan and Inca priests of those days were simply child predators and serial killers who were given a predators dream come true, namely power, authority and an endless supply of victims by a people who didn’t know any better. Thank God the Spanish wiped them out. Think about your child being given to the predator next door for a “religious sacrifice.”

Sounds like “Truth” learned his/her Pre-Columbian history by going to the movie Apocalypto, that Hollywood mishmash filled with enough gratuitous violence to appeal to today’s American culture. We might as well substitute the Inca for the Maya as mere thugs living a brutish existence. But what really got me was Truth’s comment, “Thank God the Spanish wiped them out.”

Thatta’ way, Truth, send in the Spanish, those most prolific serial killers who had an almost endless supply of victims. Through murder and disease, they indiscriminately killed an estimated 54 million people, or 80% of the Pre-Columbian population. And that’s the truth, Truth.

Now Banksy’s really made it in the art world. He’s been faked.

About a year ago the British tagger artist Banksy made a splash in L.A. that included a show of his work and a spree of spray-painted stencil tags in the usual gritty urban places. I wrote about the pink elephant and rat, two animals that played important roles in his visit. (See blog of 9-23-06.) Just recently, a whistleblower has outed a rat who may represent a pink elephant in the art and eBay scenes.

Banksy has used East London’s POW, Pictures on Walls, to publish prints of his work. Reading their FAQs tells us they are “a loose collection of alcoholics and show-offs,” just the edgy, nasty, anti-social bunch that would appeal to an artist who revels in anti-everything. Banksy’s frequently stenciled rat image signifies society’s outsiders who, looking in, want to expose everything that’s wrong, selfish, greedy, and decadent with our culture. But a whistleblower ratted on POW.

It seems unauthorized prints of Banksy’s work were being illegally and fraudulently sold on eBay, where not only were forged prints listed, but “shill” bids were put in that artificially increased the forgeries’ prices. To protect its buyers from such frauds, eBay’s rules have strong consequences, including account cancellation, forfeiture of fees, and referral to law enforcement. Between 25 and 100 people may have purchased the fake Banksy prints. How embarrassing for POW whose slangy policy says, “The manufacture and sale of prints on POW is in fact an extremely accountable process.” Yeah, right, this from a company that describes their facility as a “shit-hole” selling prints, “direct over the internet without the usual art world sham.”

So who’s the rat, and who’s the elephant here?

Is the “elephant in the room” that no one wants to confront eBay? By writing rules of enforcement about fraud, don’t they reveal there’s a scam problem? Is it the print studio POW who stressed they had been victims as well, yet seem to revel as the get-even outsiders who couldn’t “be embraced by the proper art world?”

And who’s the rat? The whistleblower who exposed the fraud in his or her own studio, or the selfish, greedy employees who made out by picking eBay buyers’ pockets? Or could it be Banksy, symbolized by the ever-vigilant, repugnant rat, whose art, one way or another, is still pointing out “what a horrible place the world its?”

Controversy at Tres Zapotes: The Olmec Head Caught in the Middle

I have a news alert out through Google for anything Olmec. Ever since the discovery of the enigmatic Cascajal tablet that most likely is proof that the Olmec had writing (See my blog of Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2006), I’ve been looking for news that Pre-Columbian scholars had cracked its code. So it was with great expectations that I opened my latest alert. High expectations were not a good thing that day. They only served to enrage me when I read the story.

A group of touring Afro-Americans from “a university on wheels” was raving about the great epiphany they experienced when they witnessed the famous Olmec monumental heads at the museum of Tres Zapotes, located in the Olmec heartland along Mexico’s Gulf Coast.

“Praise be to Allah!” the article began, for Allah had helped them reconnect with evidence that ancient Africans had not only discovered America, but had been instrumental in the development of an advanced civilization that the later Maya owed a debt to. It was just as their leader, the Honorable Elijah Mohammed, had revealed to them in his divine teachings.

This story is sad in so many ways. It is a litany of misunderstanding, ignorance, racial profiling, stereotyping, and rejection. It speaks of disingenuous leadership that fails to provide a sound foundation for the cultural identity of its community.

Misunderstanding and ignorance are two sides of the same coin. They are based on the inability or unwillingness to ask questions and test the answers. Cited again and again as proof of the African influence on the Olmecs is that the Olmec heads have thick lips and broad noses. Africans have thick lips and broad noses. The tourists are convinced--the Olmec trace their origins to Africa. Yet every day I see a Latino busboy in my local restaurant who, if wearing a ballplayer’s helmet, would look like an Olmec head.

This is not to say that African people NEVER traveled to the New World before Columbus. The coasts of Africa and Mexico are closer to each other than North America and Europe are. Surely seafarers and traders could have followed the ocean currents to the opposite shore. But to give possible seafarers credit for establishing the Olmec civilization is an insult to the indigenous people we know existed in the area for centuries before the Olmec flowering. In this sense, the proponents of this theory do reverse racial discrimination, being unwilling to credit these indigenous people with the capacity to form advanced societies complete with a complex social organization, monumental sculpture, architecture, and mathematics. Where, for example, do they show examples of the bar and dot numerical system being used in Africa? Why are there no monumental stone heads found in Africa? When will we see the scholarship that might also tie remote African ancestors to the ancient cultures in Cambodia and the Philippines, since their sculptures and facial features also share the thick lips and broad noses of the Africans? How would these people react to the idea that their accomplishments were not entirely their own, but were influence by African seamen?

We hear a lot today about stereotyping and racial profiling, and the accompanying outrage it evokes. But it seems that we have selective targets for our outrage, and African-Americans in Tres Zapotes aren’t in range.

Perhaps the saddest part of this whole story is the implied rejection of the wonderful traditional art and culture of the peoples of West Africa, that rich, fertile environment that brought forth the ancient tradition that was the true heartland of African-American culture. Rather than celebrating weak links to Olmec and ancient Egyptian civilizations (King Tut shown as black), why isn’t there a celebration of these profoundly spiritual, artistically rich, and culturally relevant West African peoples? How familiar are these African--American tourists with the history and art of Benin? The Bambara? The Yoruba? The Bakuba? Where are the African-American scholars and researchers who should be revealing the secrets of the Nok people, or excavating the ancient cities of Nubia? Why aren’t they working to understand the astonishing metal-working of the ancient Igbo-Ukwu people in Nigeria. This comment should spur their interest: “The high level of technical proficiency of artwork found at Igbo-Ukwu raised questions about its origins with some historians theorizing foreign influence or phantom voyagers.” Foreign influence and phantom voyagers in the African heartland? Why isn’t an Afro-American scholar pursuing this challenge to the creative and technical abilities of the indigenous Igbo-Ukwu people?

It isn’t because of lack of educational opportunities. Every black linebacker on Monday night football will proudly tell you what college or university he graduated from. Perhaps this sad state is the fault of the African-American community’s leadership which seems satisfied with smiling platitudes, as when the author of my offending article boasted that The Honorable Elijah Mohammed has also taught that the “Original man searched for trillions of years to find a mystery God.” Humm. Trillions?

So beware, you Bortox beauties with your luscious, inflated lips. You too could become another branch of the African diaspora.

Tears for the Mosque

A student came in before class last night and said, “Did you hear that they bombed a shrine in Iraq?” The question froze me in my tracks. We had just been discussing how Saddam Hussein placed troops, equipment and explosives next to the ziggurats of ancient Sumeria, knowing how the world cherished them. My worst fears flared at his question—was it the White Temple of Uruk? The ziggurat of Ur? Images of the blasted Buddha in Afghanistan as a pile of rubble flashed through my mind’s eye.

When he said it was the Shiite Muslim mosque that had already suffered the loss of its famous golden dome, I felt guilty that I was relieved. Why lash out at a mosque anyway? It sickened my heart because we seem to learn nothing from history. We universally scorn the ignorance we see in the errors of the past, so who are the people that continue to commit such shockingly ignorant acts?

Art history is full of evidence revealing the destruction possible by retribution and hatred. Whenever we study the Head of an Akkadian Ruler, the gouged eyes and scarred metal tell of moments when anger and vengeance left their mark on art. The revolting reprisals of Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar shock us today. They razed cities with fire or rerouted rivers and melted them. The destruction was brutal and staggering.

The British soldiers must have so much contempt and scorn for Egypt and her peoples’ accomplishments that they wantonly used the face of the sphinx for target practice. Was this a case of “my empire is bigger than yours?” How big is the British Empire today?

But there’s another equally destructive human characteristic that has done its share of devastation. It’s stupidity. Until the 17th century the world could see the incredibly beautiful Parthenon in Athens much like it existed when the Greeks built it around 450 bce. But in 1687 the Ottoman Turks cleverly used it as a gunpowder magazine and a stray Venetian mortar set it off.

Because there continue to be shocking, unthinkable stories assailing me every day, I find myself retreating more and more into the past. But obviously even in the past, there’s no escaping the ugliness that humans are capable of.