Man in a Golden Helmet

For centuries, the Man With the Golden Helmet was treasured as a Rembrandt masterpiece. But there were questions. Something was wrong about the signature, and the paint was layered thicker than Rembrandt's normal style. In 1985, experts from the Rembrandt Research Project determined that it was not actually by Rembrandt, but was probably by one of his students. Marty O'Connor painted the Minifig in the Golden Helmet.

Time Transfixed

Belgian surrealist René Magritte painted Time Transfixed (here in LEGO by Uli Myer) in 1938 for his patron Edward James. In Magritte's description of the painting, he wrote "I decided to paint the image of a locomotive . . . In order for its mystery to be evoked, another immediately familiar image without mystery—the image of a dining room fireplace—was joined." Time Transfixed can be seen at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Art of War contest

You be the artist! The Art of War contest challenges you to depict a violent scene in an artistic and stylized way. The contest sponsors point you to the movie Hero as an example.

Architecture Studio

Set 21050, Architecture Studio is a new official LEGO set that encourages you to explore design and architecture. The fact that it uses all white bricks reminds me very much of Olafur Eliasson's Collectivity Project, that I'll have to feature here sometime soon. Anyway, LEGO is teaming up with Barnes & Noble bookstores for a series of launch events at 450 different bookstores this weekend. Follow the link to find an event near you. From the press release:

The LEGO Architecture Studio event will feature local architecture experts discussing and demonstrating the parameters and design process in architecture using LEGO bricks to educate and inspire the hands-on building that follows. Participants will have the opportunity to reference the LEGO 250 guide book, experiment and create original architectural designs with more than 1,200 monochromatic building pieces, and learn a few architectural concepts such as scale, mass and density, symmetry, modules and repetition, space and section and surface.

LEGO as Art, a paper by Roy Cook

Roy Cook is both a professor of philosophy who has done work on art and aesthetics and also an AFOL and former LEGO Ambassador. I've previously noted his Brothers-Brick essay on Flawed visions in defining LEGO as art. I've done some looking around and found the he subsequently wrote a longer piece LEGO as Art in which he further develops and expands upon the themes from the shorter Brothers-Brick essay. An excerpt from this paper appeared in the book the Cult of LEGO, but I highly recommend that you read the whole thing on the Twinlug site. It's not too long and very thought provoking. Some highlights:

Roy first raises the question of what is art. He dismisses what he calls the 'institutional definition' - that art is that which is accepted by museums and other institutions, or produced by 'legitimate' artists. He also dismisses identifying LEGO creations as art simply because they resemble recognized art forms of sculpture and mosaic. Instead he defines three criteria for a work be called 'art.' It must have some form, that is, there must be some excellence of technique in the creation. It must have some content, it must convey some message or depict some emotion (though this content may be very hard to define, and this is complicated by the fact that a message involves both the sender and receiver, and so the creator of the artwork may be expressing a message that the viewer may not get). It must also have some context, that is, it must relate to some larger artistic movement and understanding. It is this last criterion that is the most problematic, in that we don't have a real mental framework to evaluate LEGO creations as artworks in relation to others. He notes that this is true of all new artistic forms. If you were to make a painting, we could relate this to the context of other paintings. But when photography was first developed some people rejected it as art because of lack of context. He notes that the same was true of film and the novel when they appeared, and now is true of 'LEGO art'.

Roy also notes the barriers to acceptance because LEGO is a toy. Most people do not have a mental framework to evaluate LEGO as art, but they do have a framework to evaluate it as a toy. And therefore they may be dismissive of the possibility of LEGO art in general. I've noted this, for instance, in a New York Times review of a Nathan Sawaya show. The reviewer was very dismissive of the show simply on the basis of the medium, and never really evaluated the works themselves.

To me the heart of Roy's paper comes at the end. We need to develop the context to discuss LEGO art, and he asks a series of questions:

(a) Is LEGO art merely a sub-category of sculpture, oran independent art form?
(b) What, if anything, follows from the fact that LEGO is a mass art form (like comics, film, and television), that is, it is a medium that is easily accessed and understood by the general, untutored public?
(c) Does the modification of pieces, or the use of ‘clone’ bricks, inherently impede the artistic process?
(d) Are some building ‘themes’ within the LEGO community more conducive to creating art than others?
(e) What impact, if any, does the fact that LEGO is intended as a children’s toy have on the proper interpretion of LEGO artwork?

If I could be so bold to add a couple of questions of my own:
(f) What is the significance of the fact that any LEGO creation is a combination of many small pieces? Is there a relationship to other art forms like collage, pointillist paintings, mosaics or sculptures that are assemblages of found objects?
(g) Special pieces aside, LEGO is made up of a lot of right angles. Are there any particular challenges or opportunities for artistic expression that come from the geometric constraints of LEGO building?

What do you think? What are the rules for LEGO art? If anything, I hope that this blog can help spur that conversation.

Yellow

Nathan Sawaya's signature piece is probably his work Yellow. In his description he writes:

Probably my best-known piece. Yellow always draws a lot of attention on the gallery floor, from adults as well as children. Why? I think we grown-ups appreciate how cathartic 'opening oneself up to the world' can be for our souls. And the kids? Probably because yellow guts spilling onto the floor looks cool. For me, this piece is about the metamorphosis I have been through on my journeys.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

The Great Wave off Kanagawa is the most famous work by Japanese artist Hokusai, perhaps the most famous Japanese work overall. This is a woodblock print, where the image was carved out of a cherry wood plank, then ink is applied and it is pressed to paper. This image was made in the early 1830's as part of a series by Hokusai that all featured Mount Fuji, sometimes dominating the scene and others, as here, in the background. It falls into the genre of Japanese art called Ukiyo-e, or 'images of the floating world.' Here are LEGO renditions by Nathan Sawaya and Arthur Gugick.

Dispatchwork

German artist Jan Vormann started by fitting some LEGO bricks into a cracked wall while at an art festival in Bocchignano, Italy, and a movement was born. According to his manifesto ...

... Dispatchwork aims to seal fissures in broken walls worldwide, completing the material compilation in urban constructing and adding color to the urban greyscales, by inserting a very basic construction-material:Plastic Construction Bricks (PCBs)...
... Dispatchwork does not defy deterioration. Rather, it aims to emphasize transitoriness as a chance for the construction and reconstruction of our environments. Adapting to various cities, the project infiltrates walls of cultural heritage, historic facades, fortifications and yet many more less spectacular corners as a colorful repair of shabby walls within our shared spaces.
Dispatchwork contradicts and satirizes the superimposed seriosity of constructions in the cityscape. ... The project also aims to put the focus on the playful, hands-on aspects of creation in our daily lives, and further, on the possibilities for participation to construe and design our own reality.

In a very public and collaborative art project, Jan has traveled the world filling in gaps and cracks with LEGO bricks, often rebuilding crumbled sections of walls and buildings. In many places he has been invited by museums to organize workshops where he takes teams of kids of all ages out to bring color to their city. And he's inspired others. You can organize your own urban Legoization project. Check out his forum to meet up with others to gather in your city, with projects found on six different continents. Here are just four examples, from Tel Aviv, New York City, Berlin, and the Great Wall of China.

Lantern Festival in Nantou

I'm not sure whether to label Luis' Lantern Festival in Nantou as an original artwork or a LEGO rendition of something else. It's based on the logo of the annual Taiwan festival, but IMO it transcends the original to become something quite special. BTW, if you want to learn more about the Lantern Festival, check out my other blog GodBricks.

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn

Ai Weiwei is an iconoclastic artist from China. He took this quite literally in his 1995 performance piece, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, captured as a series of three photographs (here in LEGO by Michael Torres). I love the interplay of four different media here - a LEGO sculpture of a set of photographs of a performance involving pottery. Now to come full circle we really need to get Michael Torres to take a photo of himself dropping his LEGO model.