Brain Dettmer

Altered Books & Maps: speak for themselves...

Hare Die

The Astounding Problem of Andrew Novick

Currently on exhibition at The Lab gallery in Colorado:

"The Astounding Problem of Andrew Novick features the overwhelming and unusual collections of an eccentric individual who does not consider himself an artist. In total, Andrew Novick estimates he has over a hundred collections: Barbie dolls of every variety, Chihuahua figurines, clown paintings, anything related to teeth or braces. The truth is he has far more things than will or can ever be organized into a “collection.” Inside his home and in his rented storage space he has stacks, piles and boxes of answering machine cassette tapes full of incoming phone messages, more answering machine cassette tapes with recordings of recording almost every conversation he has ever had with a telemarketer, jars ripe with formaldehyde-free dead animals, uncommon foods and more.

Andrew Novick’s ambiguous status as a collector/artist/hoarder is not just about his unique personality. It tells us something about our time. He is a product of the DIY generation and indie culture. This generation believes a creative life is passion and entertainment; something you share with your friends over beers, not necessarily your profession. Though he would never put it this way, he is a legacy of the 1960s belief that “everyone is an artist.” His pursuits are an outgrowth of the diffusion of the definition of artist over the last 40 years.

Finally -- crucially -- he is also a consumer, a wholly modern person, who buys and stores shit just like the rest of us. The astounding problem of Andrew Novick is not his problem. It is ours."

A SELECTION OF ANDREW'S STUFF

The Bob Newhart Ticket Stub 2003
Jar of Cereal Dust - 10 Years of "Work"
Chihuahua Cookie Jar
Clown Sake Set
Li'l Fawn - Plush
Chihuahua Drawing (Print)
Chihuahua Munny by Dea
Mr. Mouthy Mouth
Huge Stack of Games
Goose Head in Jar
Manequin Head with Braces
Glittery Orange Marshmallow Fish Bait
Meat Markers
Red Fawn Statue
Wood Meat Ball Mold
Porcelain Coffee Pot
Fawn Salt&Pepper Shakers
Flocked Fawn

» video tour of exhibition with Andrew Novick

» view photo album of (lots of but not all of) Andrew's stuff

» view photo album of opening night

» audio clips from telemarketer conversations 1 2 3 4 5

» see a list of all of Andrew's stuff

Suzanne Tresiter

From my favorite art blog Beautiful Decay:

"They’re ink drawings transcribing the front page of daily newspapers into Alchemical style manuscripts.

These are so detailed and fun to read, it makes me wonder if papers wouldn't be so doomed if they started printing in this format. These works do embellish the prophetic magic-wordiness of the daily."

Undersea Volcano!

6 miles from the southwest coast off the main island of Tongatapu — an area where up to 36 undersea volcanoes are clustered, a volcano erupted undersea and you better believe people drove their boats right up in there for a better look. Luckily, none of the nearby islands are in danger. The footage and pictures taken of this incredible geological event are both harrowing and other-worldly:

Staircases and Crime Scenes

The photography of Maria Levitsky:

I would guess that this artist is from New Hampshire based upon some of the titles of her photographs, irregardless, according to her website, she has an upcoming exhibit in NYC at Deborah Berke and Partners Architecture studio.

Of particular interest to me are her collections of staircases (all man-made: some indoors and some outdoors) crime scenes (a collection of photographs recovered from a fire at a police precinct: so eerie and intriguing), and large structures (also very creepy feeling to this collection, as if these photos just appeared in a darkroom somewhere after developing themselves out of necessity).

The composition of her work is breathtaking, amazing lighting and perfect balance of grays, enjoy.

Staircases:























Stairs, N.H. (2001)




























Shoes on Stairs (Invisible Ascending) (2000)























Stairs, Dijon 2 (2004)

Crime Scenes: Pay attention to all of the detective's scribblings around the border of the photographs; e.g. "NO BLOOD", "Militia Hideout", "Fell through roof", "Insurance Investigation"
































Crime Scene 10 (2004)































Crime Scene 4 (2004)

Large Structures:























Tree Shadow (2002)
























Thunderbolt, Coney Island (2001)

The Fuc.king King

Americana musiconimist:

Keynesian Beauty Contest

A particularly apropos application of game theory by renowned economist Keynes:

A Keynesian beauty contest is a concept developed by John Maynard Keynes and introduced in Chapter 12 of his work, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (1936), to explain price fluctuations in equity markets. Keynes described the action of rational agents in a market using an analogy based on a fictional newspaper contest, in which entrants are asked to choose a set of six faces from photographs of women that were the "most beautiful". Those who picked the most popular face are then eligible for a prize.

A naïve strategy would be to choose the six faces that, in the opinion of the entrant, are the most beautiful. A more sophisticated contest entrant, wishing to maximize his chances of winning a prize, would think about what the majority perception of beauty is, and then make a selection based on some inference from his knowledge of public perceptions. This can be carried one step further to take into account the fact that other entrants would also be making their decision based on knowledge of public perceptions. Thus the strategy can be extended to the next order, and the next, and so on, at each level attempting to predict the eventual outcome of the process based on the reasoning of other rational agents.

“It is not a case of choosing those [faces] which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.” (Keynes, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, 1936).

Keynes believed that similar behavior was at work within the stock market. This would have people pricing shares not based on what they thought their fundamental value was, but rather based on what they think everyone else thinks their value was, or what everybody else would predict the average assessment of value was.

die romantische Stimmungslandschaft (notion of a landscape full of romantic feeling)

Caspar David Freidrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840): the Great 19th Century German Romantic Landscape Painter...

He was born in the Swedish Pomeranian town of Greifswald, where he began his studies in art as a youth. Later, he studied in Copenhagen until 1798, before settling in Dresden. He came of age during a period when, across Europe, a growing disillusionment with materialistic society was giving rise to a new appreciation of spirituality. This shift in ideals was often expressed through a reevaluation of the natural world, as artists such as Friedrich sought to depict nature as a "divine creation, to be set against the artifice of human civilization".

He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's work characteristically sets the human element in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension". Friedrich’s work brought him renown early in his career, and contemporaries such as the French sculptor David d'Angers (1788–1856) spoke of him as a man who had discovered "the tragedy of landscape". Nevertheless, his work fell from favour during his later years, and he died in obscurity, and in the words of the art historian Philip Miller, "half mad".

Friedrich said, "The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead."

He often used the landscape to express religious themes. During his time, most of the best-known paintings were viewed as expressions of a religious mysticism
Expansive skies, storms, mist, forests, ruins and crosses bearing witness to the presence of God are frequent elements in Friedrich's landscapes. Though death finds symbolic expression in boats that move away from shore—a Charon-like motif—and in the poplar tree, it is referenced more directly in paintings like The Abbey in the Oakwood (1808–10), in which monks carry a coffin past an open grave, toward a cross, and through the portal of a church in ruins.

As Germany moved towards modernization in the late 19th century, a new sense of urgency characterized its art, and Friedrich’s contemplative depictions of stillness came to be seen as the products of a bygone age. The early 20th century brought a renewed appreciation of his work, beginning in 1906 with an exhibition of thirty-two of his paintings and sculptures in Berlin. By the 1920s his paintings had been discovered by the Expressionists, and in the 1930s and early 1940s Surrealists and Existentialists frequently drew ideas from his work. The rise of Nazism in the early 1930s again saw a resurgence in Friedrich's popularity, but this was followed by a sharp decline as his paintings were, by association with the Nazi movement, misinterpreted as having a nationalistic aspect. It was not until the late 1970s that Friedrich regained his reputation as an icon of the German Romantic movement and a painter of international importance.


- The Monk by The Sea (1809)


- The Tree of Crows (1822)


- Fog (1807)


- The Giant Mountains (1830-1835)
a reunion with the spiritual self through the contemplation of nature.


- View of the Baltic (1820-1825)


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Interior Dictation of Landscape (Tom Clark on Friedrich; from Vanitas Magizine):

He avoided Goethe's invitations to come to Weimar and work together on a collaboration
He was too busy collaborating with certain beings
inside him
whose commands he found so much more compelling
they came alive
during his solitary strolls into the countryside at dawn or just after moonrise
his favorite time
during which he often paused to sketch
a group of trees a cloud a boulder a row of dunes or a tuft of grass
at their urging
Every true work of art (he wrote) is conceived in a sacred hour
and born
from an inner impulse of the heart

As he grew older depression distanced him more
and more
from the world of men
I have to be
on my own
and I have to know I am on my own
so that I can give myself up to what is around me
he wrote
in declining an invitation to tour the Alps
with a Russian poet
who admired his paintings
I have to unite with my clouds and rocks
I have to unite with everything around me
in order to be what I am

When the mineral world dissolves into the cosmic flux
the animal and vegetable worlds will have been long gone
but the beings who existed inside Friedrich and dictated his landscapes
will still be carving vast silences out of elemental gulfs

He had a special interest in the moon
He used to say
that if after death men were transported to another place
then he would prefer one less terrestrial than lunar
in order to allow the beings inside him to feel at home
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Vanitas expounded (i.e. What's that latin for?):

In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic still life painting commonly executed by Northern European painters in Flanders and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The term vanitas itself refers to the arts, learning and time. The word is Latin, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity. Ecclesiastes 1:2 from the Bible is often quoted in conjunction with this term. The Vulgate (Latin translation of the Bible) renders the verse as Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. The verse is translated as Vanity of vanities; all is vanity by the King James Version of the Bible, and Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless by the New International Version of the Bible.

Paintings executed in the vanitas style are meant as a reminder of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, encouraging a sombre world view.

Common vanitas symbols include skulls, which are a reminder of the certainty of death; rotten fruit, which symbolizes decay like ageing; bubbles, which symbolize the brevity of life and suddenness of death; smoke, watches, and hourglasses, which symbolize the brevity of life; and musical instruments, which symbolize brevity and the ephemeral nature of life.

Oh! Hey! Stripped-down Soul Beauty

The Enigmatic Lee Moses on his Bad Girl, ostensibly so bad that she warranted two sides of a single and a follow-up, She's A Bad Girl. Well I for one am grateful for her obstinate disobedience if it led to this raw, perspiring Memphis soul power house jam (from his album "Time and Place" released by the New Jersey All Platinum imprint, Maple):

Weird Science Science - The Antology

Alex Wild is a photographer who specializes in insect photography. His website truly is extraordinary and his assiduous documentation of ants is incredibly extensive. This ant's pollinating!
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We have so much to learn from the social behavior of diminutive species.

The Virtues of Ants: The individual benefiting from group cooperation, symbiotically interacting with our ecosystem , patience, self-sacrifice, adaptability.

Human traffic congestion issues solved by observing ants sophisticated travel flow algorithims and bio-social systems of cooperation? Sure, why not.

"One dominating factor in human traffic is egoism. Drivers optimize their own travel time, without taking much care about others. This leads to phantom traffic jams which occur without any obvious reason. Ants, on the other hand, are not egoistic."

Exhaustive Book Review of The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, discusses fascinating aspects of ant life

You should really read the review, but i know you won't:

"Parallels between the ants and ourselves are striking for the light they shed on the nature of everyday human experiences. Some ants get forced into low-status jobs and are prevented from becoming upwardly mobile by other members of the colony. Garbage dump workers, for example, are confined to their humble and dangerous task of removing rubbish from the nest by other ants who respond aggressively to the odors that linger on the garbage workers' bodies."

"Some of the most fascinating insights into ants have come from researchers who measure the amount of carbon dioxide given off by colonies. This is rather like measuring the respiration rate in humans in that it gives an indication of the amount of work the superorganism is doing. The researchers discovered (perhaps unsurprisingly) that colonies experiencing internal conflict between individuals seeking to become reproductively dominant produce more CO2 than do tranquil colonies where the social order is long established. But extraordinarily, they also discovered that about three hours after removing a queen ant, the CO2 emissions from a colony drop. "Removing the queen thus has a clear effect on worker behavior, apparently reducing their inclination to work for the colony," the researchers concluded. While it's dangerous to anthropomorphize, it seems that ants may have their periods of mourning just as we humans do when a great leader passes from us."

"The means that ants use to find their way in the world are fascinating. It has recently been found that ant explorers count their steps to determine where they are in relation to home. This remarkable ability was discovered by researchers who lengthened the legs of ants by attaching stilts to them. The stilt-walking ants, they observed, became lost on their way home to the nest at a distance proportionate to the length of their stilts."

"Pheromone trails are laid by ants as they travel, and along well-used routes these trails take on the characteristics of a superhighway. From an ant's perspective, they are three-dimensional tunnels perhaps a centimeter wide that lead to food, a garbage dump, or home. If you wipe your finger across the trail of ants raiding your sugar bowl, you can demonstrate how important the pheromone trail is: as the ants reach the spot where your finger erased their trail they will become confused and turn back or wander. The chemicals used to mark such trails are extraordinarily potent. Just one milligram of the trail pheromone used by some species of attine ants to guide workers to leaf-cutting sites is enough to lay an ant superhighway sixty times around the earth."

"Some ant species do not have queen ants in the strict sense. Instead, worker ants (which are all female) that have mated with a male ant become the dominant reproductive individuals. These are the gamergates, or "married workers," and their sex life can be brutal. In one species the gamergates venture outside of the nest to attract a male, engage him in copulation, then carry him into the nest before snipping off his genitals and throwing away the rest of his body. The severed genitals continue to inseminate the gamergate for up to an hour, after which they too are discarded. The fertilized gamergates then vie for dominance, causing disruptive conflict in the nest. Sometimes an oligarchy of gamergates is established, but in other instances a single gamergate triumphs. You might think that such an established gamergate would watch the colony carefully for signs of emerging rivals, but this is not the case. Instead it's the worker ants that do so by taking a keen interest in the sexual status of their sisters. If they sense that one is becoming a sexually active gamergate, they will turn on her, either assaulting her or watching carefully until she produces eggs, which they promptly consume. It's intriguing that the sterile workers play the role of monitoring and regulating the sexual life of the colony. In a stretch of the imagination, I can see parallels between this behavior and the role of policing and censuring the sex lives of the rich and famous that gossip magazines play in our own society."

"The progress of ants from this relatively primitive state to the complexity of the most finely tuned superorganisms leaves no doubt that the progress of human evolution has largely followed a path taken by the ants tens of millions of years earlier. Beginning as simple hunter-gatherers, some ants have learned to herd and milk bugs, just as we milk cattle and sheep. There are ants that take slaves, ants that lay their eggs in the nests of foreign ants (much like cuckoos do among birds), leaving the upbringing of their young to others, and there are even ants that have discovered agriculture. These agricultural ants represent the highest level of ant civilization, yet it is not plants that they cultivate, but mushrooms. These mushroom farmers are known as attines, and they are found only in the New World. Widely known as leafcutter ants, they are doubtless familiar from wildlife documentaries. The attines, say Hölldobler and Wilson, are "Earth's ultimate superorganisms," and there is no doubt that their status is due to their agricultural economy, which they developed 50 to 60 million years before humans sowed the first seed. Indeed, it is in the changes wrought in attine societies by agriculture that the principal interest for the student of human societies lies. The most sophisticated of attine ant species has a single queen in a colony of millions of sterile workers that vary greatly in size and shape, the largest being two hundred times heavier than the smallest. In the case of the attines, however, the varying size classes have specific jobs to do. Some cut a piece from a leaf and drop it to the ground, while others carry the leaf fragment to a depot. From there others carry it to the nest, where smaller ants cut it into fragments. Then ants that are smaller still take these pieces and crush and mold them into pellets, which even smaller ants plant out with strands of fungus. Finally, the very smallest ants, known as minims, weed and tend the growing fungus bed. These minute and dedicated gardeners do get an occasional outing, however, for they are known to walk to where the leaves are being cut and hitch a ride back to the nest on a leaf fragment. Their purpose in doing this is to protect the carrier ants from parasitic flies that would otherwise attack them. Clearly, not only did the attines beat us to agriculture, but they exemplified the concept of the division of labor long before Adam Smith stated it. You may not believe it, but like the sailors of old the leafcutter ants "sing" as they work. Leaf-cutting is every bit as strenuous for the ants as hauling an anchor is for human beings, and their singing, which takes the form of stridulation (a sound created by the rubbing together of body parts), assists the ants in their work by imparting vibrations to the mandible that is cutting the leaf, enhancing its action in a manner akin to the way an electric knife helps us cut roasts. The leafcutters also use stridulation to cry for help, for example when workers are trapped in an underground cave-in. These cries for help soon prompt other ants to rush in and begin digging until they've reached their trapped sisters. The fungus farmed by the leafcutter ants grows in underground chambers whose temperature, humidity, and acidity are precisely regulated to optimize its growth. The fungus, which produces a tiny mushroom, grows nowhere else, and genetic studies reveal that various attine ant species have been cultivating the same fungus strain for millions of years. In truth, after tens of millions of years of coevolution such is their interdependence that the ants cannot live without the fungus, nor the fungus without the ants. The system is not perfect, however, for the ants' fungal gardens are occasionally devastated by pests. One of the worst is an invasive fungus known as Escovopsis, whose depredations can become so severe that the leafcutters must desert their hard-won gardens and start elsewhere anew. Often a colony so beset evicts a smaller attine colony, taking over the premises and enlarging them to suit. Fortunately, the ants possess a potent defense against this fungal weed that usually prevents its proliferation. Their fungicide is produced by a bacterium that is found only in pits located on specific parts of the ants' bodies, and that is known to exist nowhere else. These bacteria produce secretions that not only destroy the Escovopsis pest, but promote the growth of the fungus the ants wish to cultivate. Thus these special bacteria must be considered as comprising the third element in a triumvirate of coevolved organisms, whose fate is now so closely interwoven that they are utterly interdependent and form a single, functional whole. Humanity's dependence upon a few grains—principally wheat and rice—and the complete dependence on cultivated varieties of these plants by human farmers presents a similar symbiosis.""

So think twice before you temerariously squash these sophisticated critters.

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More Alex Wild:


An Australian seed-harvesting ant in the genus Meranoplus drags a seed back to her nest.








Mating Acropyga ants, the queen carrying a mealybug in her mandibles. Acropyga ants feed on secretions by root-feeding mealybugs, and the mealybugs depend on the ants for dispersal and protection. When young queen ants leave the nest to mate and start new colonies, they carry their nest-founding mealybug with them.







Ants as earthbound creatures are not ideal pollinators, but they can carry pollen over short distances.







Ant colonies maintain social cohesion through the frequent sharing of regurgitated liquid food. This activity is called trophallaxis, seen here among painted members of a laboratory study colony.



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And finally, My personal favorite parasitic-symbiotic-interspecial relationship: Zombie ants.