Haeckel

Ernst Haeckel is one of my favorite artists. I was supposed to do someone I didn't know about, but I didn't know anyone I didn't know about so I couldn't.

Haeckel was a biologist and artist who made prints of countless species and phyla of lifeforms.

"Kunstformen der Natur," or Art Forms in Nature is a series of prints each highlighting a particular phylum or class.



Antelopes



Turtles



Moths



Moss (this one is really close up)



Nudibranchs. Here is a real life one:



Orchids



Conifers



Haeckel made 100 of these in Art Forms in Nature, so I'm not going to show them all. But here are some more exotic ones:

Siphonophores



Box Jellyfish



Copepods (not so exotic, actually, they are apparently the most numerous animals on Earth)



Pitcher plants (an evil group of plants that eat people insects.



I think Haeckel deserves to be considered a great artist because of his

mastery of the art of symmetry:

Postmodern art: nihilistic or open-minded?

Postmodernism is a divisive topic.

Its critics say things like:

     “In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant" -David F. Wells

"Postmodernism has turned into this devil's vortex where no matter what you do, your neck will be turned and your face shoved into a foreign example, and worse, no matter what you say, despite the context, it will be considered a postmodern device. That's the danger of postmodernism: it poses itself as something that can't be trumped, something you can’t escape. It continually mocks your efforts for the sake of its name. I know even this will be seen as another postmodern bullet, and no matter what I say, critics and readers will be locked into how to lock me in.”  -Brian Celio

I ripped these straight out of goodreads. It wouldn't be hard to guess that Wells is a theology professor. Celio appears to be a complete non-person (he wrote one novel) but I like the quote so much that I couldn't help myself.

It's hard to tell sometimes whether something is pro-postmodernism or just subtly mocking it, so I did my best:

    “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to." -Jim Jarmusch

Now for the art!

Mathematics and Art

In the 70s, an area of mathematics called "catastrophe theory" was very popular. It turned out to be a fad, but it captured the imagination of the artist Salvador Dali.

There are 7 types of catastrophes: fold, cusp, swallowtail, butterfly, hyperbolic umbilic, eliptic umbilic and parabolic umbilic.



This is "The Swallow's Tail"


Nowadays (perhaps more accurately, ten years ago), the public seems to be enamored with fractals. Fractals are far less interesting and philosophically important than some would have you think, but fractal art can be very beautiful.





Johan Andersson's "'St Anthony and The Temptation of the Fractalic Mystical Daliphan" is an obvious pastiche of Salvador Dali's "The temptation of St. Anthony"



An obvious mathematical-artist is M.C. Escher. Here are a few of his lesser known pieces:

Untitled

I think that I should probably include a content warning of sorts for this post, because it's going to contain some somewhat graphic imagery.

Content Warning: contains images of animal abuse.












So I guess this is something that pisses me off? I think this stuff is obviously bad and if you support it you're a bad person. It's not even an argument.

I'm really hesitant to make art of this because 1) what message could art like this have but "factory farming is bad?" which is obvious to any person with an ounce of humanity and 2) depicting suffering of this magnitude is inherently gross.

So I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to say.