The World Engine Magazine

Announcing the release of The World Engine Magazine, which will begin its much heralded launch online at http:'//www.worldenginemagazine.com next Friday.

The magazine will be a live-update online publication focusing on the integration of arts and culture and with innovations in technology, economics, and science.

It will have six active sections, including:

Features, which will outline the selected contributions from various areas of study. The first issue will include a much anticipated article on the influence of literature on economic perception by the Wall Street Journal's Senior Economics Editor Stephen Moore.

Interviews, which will include both published archives and video footage of viable contributors to the fields of art and culture. The magazine has the pleasure of interviewing Brian Froud, the acclaimed set designer and published illustrator, in its first issue.

Historical Influences, which pay homage to the masterminds of the past who were fundamental in creating new technologies and innovations in arts and culture. Morpheus, an online blogger specializing in the subject, will contribute an article on Windsor McKay, whom many consider the 'Father of Animation'.

Reviews, which will focus on traditional art, films, and literature that define the values of the magazine, will offer an introductory commentary by Yaron Brook, the President and Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, on the acclaimed novel 'Atlas Shrugged', which has recently shot to the top of amazon.com's bestseller's list.

Editorials, focusing on ideas of cultural relevance on the global scale and the interplay between fields of study in the industries.

Archives, including daily snapshots and comprehensive article search.

EDITOR'S LETTER:

It was the philosopher Ayn Rand who once said that, "Art is the barometer of a culture. It reflects the sum of a society’s deepest philosophical values: not its professed notions and slogans, but its actual view of man and of existence."
There seems to be a surprising general lack of relevant knowledge present in the artistic community. Enveloped in notions of theory and conceptualization, contemporary artists produce what they perceive to be evocative and politicized work, championing causes they often have little to no personal experience with. But ask one of them to draw a basic supply and demand curve, and you will likely be met with blank expressions and defensive exclamations. Judging by the collective shudders of MFA degree holders everywhere, supporting capitalistic notions is practically blasphemy in contemporary art circles.
In the economic downturn of the “Great Recession,” as it has been dubbed by global economists, traditional art has experienced a logical revival. In difficult economic times, those investors who are profitable enough to support commodities- those same MFA-holders seem to want to forget that art and cultural production are, in fact, commodities- are spending their money on work that has staying power.
So here comes the million-dollar-question: what, in the world of contemporary cultural production, has staying power? Here at The World Engine Magazine, we like to think that the key to answering this question lies in the integration of genius across multiple disciplines and a healthy respect for historical precedent. It was the Western philosopher George Santayana, who wisely said that, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." They are indeed.
We believe that identifying historical cultural innovators is as equally important as discovering new leaders in their respective fields, which is why our ‘Historical Influences’ section features articles on masterminds throughout the ages.
We acknowledge that the most brilliant creators in history often incorporated ideas from their advanced studies in other areas of knowledge. Da Vinci, Galileo, and Buckminster Fuller all respected and embraced integration between studies and technology to further their own influence therein. So we invite some of the most influential leaders in their fields to discuss their perception of culture in relation to their area of study. We are pleased to announce that the respected senior economics writer Stephen Moore from the Wall Street Journal will be contributing an article on the literary influences on economic perception.
And lastly, we perceive that the changing distribution of media will affect the ways in which magazines and articles are consumed. Embracing the global influence of the internet, The World Engine is an online magazine with printable archives. Unlimited by press deadlines and print schedules, however, we publish information as we receive it from our contributors, identifying with the demand for constant traffic on the information highway.
Catering to the discriminating Renaissance cultural consumer, The World Engine aims to distill the latest integrated information into a combined archive of the global intellectual capital, which will aid the absorption of information across our contemporary knowledge-filled experiences.
The fact is that art and culture, despite being commoditized, are crucial to an evolving and meaningful society. But when they become integrated into the fundamental development of ideas and technologies that are part of intellectual capital, their value increases substantially enough for them to become economically self-sufficient. And this creates cultural capital whose eventual value truly reflects our society.

Zuzana Štefková Lecture

I’m not a huge fan of political art in general (see previous post on Andrea Bowers), but somehow political art from other countries just seems more interesting. Perhaps it’s the realization that things abroad are generally worse than they are in the United States, where it seems artists are really pulling teeth to complain about the unfortunate lot of well-manicured women and welfare-bound families living under a poverty-line defined at a level higher than the median income of many European nations.
So at least Zuzana Štefková has the advantage of being one of the curators of the Center of Contemporary Arts in Prague. Her interest in developing shows about political art seems more justified, at least in the context of propaganda and political artistic statements in the Eastern Bloc.
Her talk focused more on the history of political art in the Czech Republic and identified important artists and shows in the last ten years. She pointed out that until as late as the late 1990s, political art remained fairly marginalized. In 2002, an exhibition curated by the Center for Contemporary arts titled ‘POLITIK-UM’ and displayed in the Prague Castle caused massive controversy when some of the work questioned the political regime at the time. A work titled ‘Pode Bal: Zimmer Frei’ (2002) especially caused political discomfort and caused both censorship and cancelation of some of the other works in the show. A common story, undoubtedly, but also one worth identifying in today’s perception of democracy and changing nations abroad.
Due to the debate accompanying ‘POLITIK-UM,’ a later show in 2006/2008 titled ‘CZECHPOINT’ premiered in obscure galleries across Prague. Štefková correctly identified that this in itself was a valiant political statement, and further identified how the two exhibits were fundamentally different. According to her analysis of the first show, the perception of political art was fundamentally more idealized, whereas the debate surrounding the second exhibition questioned the effectiveness of political art versus activism.
I mostly enjoyed her stories about the ways in which governments tend to overblow certain situations. When the two art students placed the fake bombs in the city, the over-reaction of the involved government hugely reminded me of the way that the Boston police force reacted to the led aliens distributed by the advertising agency for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force cartoon series. Although I don’t necessarily view this particular gesture as art, her description of the group that replaced the morning news with shots of nuclear explosions really questions the influence of the media in their distribution of information. Scannell actively discusses this in the article we read, and questions how viewers can be easily challenged and influenced by something as readily available and one-sided as radio and television.
Her work as a curator brings Štefková a unique perspective on how art is produced and sold in a gallery space, which lends itself interestingly to the production of political and activist art. Historically interesting and contemporarily relevant, the presentation she gave identified the role of such art abroad and in the global sphere.

Andrea Bowers Lecture

It’s a shame that someone so technically gifted reverts to such clichéd ideas and imagery in her work. Andrea Bowers creates several types of work, relying on drawings, video, and printmaking to further her support of feminism, labor unions, and open immigration.
She first embarked on a description of the work she was constructing around the activist Emma Goldman, a radical feminist at the turn of the century involved in distribution of contraception to women and ‘free love.’ She focuses on a series of love letters collected by the University of California-Berkeley, and painstakingly recreates sections of the letters in graphite, down to the tinting of the paper from age and other damage. Using the same mediums, she redraws photographs of Emma Goldman, presenting them actual size on larger sheets of white or light paper.
While I appreciate her aesthetic, her interest in a revolutionary anarchist feminist seems both outdated and overdone. Bowers speaks with evident passion about the life of this women, whose sexual affairs with a man named Ben Reitman generated a series of letters comprised of sexual themes interspersed with coded violence for their anarchist motives. I just seem to miss the purpose of her project- what is she looking to recreate in her process by piecing together these letters and images in graphite on paper?
Another project she designed was more conceptual; it involved a washing machine that dumped the dirty water it produced into the piping in the men’s room. Bowers seemed practically elated at this project, stating that it was one of her favorites.
Seriously? Lady, come on. We get it. Men suck and represent all of the oppression and torture that women have experienced and continue to experience in contemporary times. And by pointing out this disparage with dirty water, we are opening their eyes to the many injustices in the world. As opposed to say, actually excelling in the workforce or something. Please.
Then, in an a flowering example of artistic ignorance, she discussed a project she created in both the United States and in France where she took wrapping paper and printed existing campaign slogans on the sheets. I’m not going to waste my time outlining the theoretical issues with the piece, since it’s widely acceptable in contemporary artistic circles to critique economics and capitalism without being able to draw a simple supply and demand curve. In this particular project, however, her decision to use a medium other than graphite took away the only interesting element of her work; the technical eloquence she obviously possesses.
Perhaps, not all is lost, however. The last piece she talked about in my presence was based on the notion of ‘radical hospitality.’ She did drawings to accompany a video piece about a woman who spent over a year living in a Chicago church sanctuary in an effort to stall her deportation out of the United States. “What if hospitality was the way we handled our borders?” Bowers asked. The piece was eloquent in its simplicity, questioning the perceptions we have of people and their ability, or inability to move globally based on their political and economic involvement.
Andrea Bowers represents an unusual technical talent whose political obsession is a prime example of focusing on work whose subject matter has predominantly been explored by the art world. Her dedication to her subject matter professed the occasional glimmer of originality, however, which may add sophistication to her later work.

Fritz Haeg Lecture

There’s something to be said for an individual who perceives compost to be the metaphor for life; in his own words, Fritz Haeg talks endearingly about “all of the junk at the bottom making its way back to the top.” The architect-turned-landscape artist has a passion for gardening and finding ways of bringing people together to further their understanding of community and each other.
Beneath this apparently very hippie façade lies something more: an interest in combining physical living spaces with notions of virtual space, constantly activated and integrated. Referring once again to his favorite metaphor, Fritz Haeg mentions his fascination with what he identifies as privileged time versus junk time, or the question of what actually enriches the lives of the people involved. Noting his series of workshops titled “Sundown Salon,” where individuals gather for organized events like knitting and gardening, Haeg points out that during the time when the people are actually in-between sessions of scheduled activities, their philosophical discussions and emotional commitments are further strengthened. Or in another project, where he brings dancers into a museum in New York, encouraging the visitors to activate the space in a manner they haven’t experienced before. For Haeg, learning happens equally outside of the classroom.
He has a profound interest in Buckminster Fuller and geodesic domes, and has articulated a desire to find an intrinsically “gay architecture.” His talk repeatedly courted the question of what it means to remove the walls from a building and mesh its existence with the outdoor space. His own home in California, a geodesic dome set in a winding, lush garden, represents his struggles with finding such a space.
One of the most interesting projects he is continually involved in is something titled Edible Estates. With owner permission and involvement, Haeg redesigns suburban and urban lawns and transforms them into productive gardens. The space is both functional and attractive, puncturing the generic view of grass lawns and generating conversation about gardening and food production on an independent scale. This idea may not necessarily be that original; victory gardens during the Second World War and gardening in other parts of the world have existed for centuries, but the confrontation that happens in contemporary Americana when confronted with such modes of production is certainly an interesting one.
His urban garden in London embraces the question of culture and brings the project into the territory of international involvement. This strengthens Haeg’s outcome by introducing the collective interaction on a global scale and questions world perceptions of such practices, as opposed to rooting it all solely in the United States.
Haeg eloquently stated that for him, a good project ‘exists primarily in that moment of possibility and impossibility.” The conception and reworking of ideas seems fundamental to his work, focusing on the creation of projects before their actual construction. However one perceives the notion of conceptualization, Fritz Haeg’s projects have enough physical manifestation to withstand the argument of concept for concept’s sake.

Anglina Gualdoni Review

Angelina Gualdoni’s paintings in her ‘Proposals for Remnants’ show at the Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago possess an evident juxtaposition between hazy diffused color and rigorous brushstroke. From small, tightly rendered compositions of abstract lines to watery, translucent canvases that stretch up to 61” by 73,” her images reflect both avant-garde approaches to brushwork and to the older traditions of Batik, watercolor, and ink blotting.
She is most successful with the paintings where the acrylic is given free range over the untreated canvas, resulting in gradations of color reminiscent of ink’s playful interaction with watercolor: a visual representation of liquid memory. The tentative motion inherent in the gentle dipping of an ink brush into water on canvas explodes from her images, engulfed in saturated color. In ‘Blush,’ the vibrant fuchsia treatment spills over the controlled application of oil paint in the foreground, creating the effect of looking, literally, through rose-colored glasses at a long distant past. The imagery is all in once familiar and generic, reflecting a common denominator that seems to belong to everybody and nobody all at once. The vague recognition of reality in her images is perhaps the most poignant moment; the paintings are held together by the cognitive point where abstraction and representational artistry intersect and force the viewer into an acknowledgement of time and space.
This creation of fantasy worlds in overwhelming color establishes a unique perspective of empty, abandoned spaces and the remembrance of those spaces. Certain elements stand out in sharper contrast and definition, while simultaneously remaining generally muted by the fog of color that pervades each image, tinting the canvas with the significance of each shade. Although not nearly as visually noticeable as ‘Blush,’ ‘March through April’ effectively conveys loss and abandonment with a subdued grayish green palette and wispy, spidery strokes purposefully placed within the confines of canvas. The vaguely recognizable objects in this painting- a rock-like structure, constructed webbing, an article of clothing- all add to the immediate question between ownership and generality.
It is difficult not to think of artists like Helen Frankenthaler when looking at some of these images, especially in reference to the untreated canvas and color fields of color eminent in Gualdoni’s work. Unlike her the much older Frankenthaler, however, Gualdoni focuses less on the sheer application of paint and more on the cohesiveness of her imagery, which retains so much of its original representational form.
Her smaller canvases are cramped and jumbled, despite using a similar technique of combining oil marks on a tinted backing. Because of the limited spacing and overwhelming vibrancy of the oil marks, the images lose much of the atmosphere present in their larger brethren. The wash of color gets lost underneath the more noticeable strokes. ‘Odds and Ends’ seems crushed into a corner, forced into a losing battle overwhelmed by the energetic application of strokes that find little balance in the composition. ‘Untitled’ falls flat both literally in its lack of texture and motion and in its flattened, dulled color choice. Even the oil strokes seem uncontrolled and sloppy, losing their intense consistency evident in the other pieces. Only ‘Untitled (Blue Somersaults)’ manages to engage the space in a novel and interesting way. It focuses on the movement and containment of the canvas size to establish a visually charged composition of black inky smears and concise lines in lighter oil.
Seemingly experimental, Gualdoni’s ‘Cosmic Painting’ incorporates metallic paint with splashes of wash to create a changing space filled with gradient and light. There is bravery in the piece, which seems like experimentation in texture and medium. In person, unfortunately, the metallic paint looks appliquéd, and the ink seems a bit too reminiscent of tie-die projects, creating a crafted canvas that possesses little of the punch packed by some of the other works.
‘Proposal for Remnants’ steers Gualdoni from the traditions of painting physical, abandoned spaces liking shopping malls and cityscapes abstracted by combinations of inky color and confident oil marks and into the exploration of human memory and vague recollection. It seems a fitting path, although the images in her current exhibition seem much more loosely constructed and enveloped in veils of color more overwhelming than her previous imagery.
Her work retains the most interest when the tightness of her technical renderings benefits from the implication of light and haze in the images, preserving an implication of vagueness and anonymity. And although her mystified abandoned malls possess a distinct charm, the idea is perhaps not as original as her current work, which embraces the necessary cloudiness that expands its interpretation by a larger audience.
Angelina Gualdoni seems to be one of the few contemporary artists with both a signature style and a willingness to experiment with her medium, a brave choice in an art world becoming more and more likely to move away from paint and canvas as the mediums for creating work. Her technical competence defines a structure in the work and her explorations and color and application delineate a practice with novelty in its imagery, if not necessarily its combination of media.

Upcoming Review!

Stay tuned for the upcoming review of the Angelina Gualdoni exhibit Proposal for Remnants at the Kavi Gupta gallery at 835 W. Washington Blvd in downtown Chicago.

Top 5 of Culture

There's an intense feeling of weight involved in defining the paradigm of culture. I am an immigrant to the United States; therefore, my understanding of life and cultural memory outside of this country heavily taints what I perceive as tradition and identity. I have taken into account both contemporary and classic representations of the cultivated and the pop, focusing on people and concepts that redefined their sphere of influence. With those considerations, the Top 5 of Culture are:

5) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart:

There are few that would argue the importance of this late eighteenth century composer in both classical music and contemporary media. His contributions to the Classical genre included over 600 pieces, all of which exemplified his attention to detail and maturity of composition. Considered the quintessential baby genius, his music is still played by educated mothers to further the brain function and growth of their children during pregnancy.

Whatever your perception of Classical music, it undeniably remains the accepted genre for the descendants of European aristocracy and the American elite alike. Visit Ravinia of Highland Park, IL on a summer night highlighting any of the Classical composers and surround yourself with heirloom pearls, Brooks Brothers suiting, and elegant picnic settings, complete with bottles of Châeau Lafite Rothschild. And on a Mozart night you better get your tickets well ahead of time, or you certainly won't be able to acquire a seat to the coveted Pavillion, and will be delegated to the grass with others of similar misfortune. No individual can be accepted into the wings of Olympian society without a basic knowledge of Mozart’s work, or at least what he gleaned from watching Amadeus.

2) Titian:

Although da Vinci and Michelangelo are universal global staples, the reference of the upper class for classical art seems to be Tiziano Vecceli, one of the leading painters of the 16th century Italian Renaissance. While the Louvre supports 8.5 Million visitors a year, most of who persistently bustle in front of da Vinci’s infamous smiling lady, the Renaissance hall in the National Gallery of Scotland sees significantly fewer visitors at its crowning possession: Titian’s Venus Anadyomene.

The visitors that do stall in front of the painting, however, immediately reference the painter’s influence on Moreau and Velasquéz and his definitive style and choice of subject. The smugness in their tone acknowledges their awareness of the painting’s existence and its importance in the tradition of Western artistic culture.


3) Coco Chanel:

As much as we croon about the importance of not judging a book by its cover, the fact is that we all do precisely that. There’s a neurological response behind it; studies have shown that the manner in which we perceive individuals directly correlates to the reptilian brain and danger receptors within it.

Equally important, however, is the notion of couture and fashion in our conception of a person. As she pulled a pleated, woolen dress over my 5-year-old head, my grandmother would croon in her well-enunciated Muscovite accent, “We greet by appearance, and we salute by intelligence.” (Something is definitely lost in translation.)

And no individual was as fundamental to the notion of couture and the ready-made as Coco Chanel, the orphan turned celebrated French designer whose novel suiting jackets and slim dresses identified an oppositional culture in the 1920s and forever changed woman’s style. Any self-respecting department store has at least one section dedicated to one of Chanel’s many contributions to fragrance, clothing, and jewelry. The iconic pieces are synonymous with elegance, timelessness and culture.

2) Apple, Inc.:

Let’s face it; the company practically has the term coined. Buy any one of its ubiquitous music players, phones or shiny computers and you join a league of fans and followers who embrace, however warily, the notion of “Apple Culture.” Its legion of retail stores, ideally clean-cut apostles, and warehouse of products whose names are derived from their obvious function preceded by a lower-case letter “i,” all cater to the undeniably hip, the youthful, the individual. Possibly also spelled “iNdividual.”

In a growing world of accessible, easy-to-use technology, the innovative company, immediately recognized by its shiny fruity logo, lets everybody from major film producers to tentative grandmothers get in on the world of instant web access, video and photo sharing, and music interaction. And all you need is a pair of those iconic white ear buds to fit yourself into the lexicon of cool.

1) The Beatles:

The aforementioned grandmother told me how back in the USSR, ardent rock and roll fans in the 60s would sneak Beatles music into the country by imprinting them on X-Ray tape. And if that’s not enough to sell you on the power of the shaggy-haired British quartet, try dropping a “Hey, Jude” into a conversation and see what happens.

Your mother should know that their music has been featuring in countless motion pictures, commercials, and print references. Their Abbey Road album cover has been mimicked so many times that the inhabitants of the actual street in London have a decidedly nasty streak in attempting to run over tourists. And I don't want to spoil the party, but their musical talent and influence is still noticeable in musicians from Phish to David Bowie. Here comes the sun.