OLD NEWS

POTTER WASPS MAKING POTS by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/ymx3jtpj>
There is an insect – a female potter wasp, to be exact – that carefully constructs tiny mud pots (1/4″-3/4″) that look as if they were built on a potter’s wheel. She collects soil, mixes it with saliva, and with her mandibles and legs and creates a jug-like pot on a plant, twig or structure. She then lays one egg inside the pot, attaching it to the inner surface by a thread. The potter wasp then finds, stings and paralyzes (but doesn’t kill) a number of caterpillars, bringing them one by one to the pot and placing them inside it. She then seals the pot with mud. Because they are still alive, the caterpillars won’t decompose and will provide the wasp larva that hatches out of the egg with meals until it metamorphoses into a pupa and then emerges as an adult wasp and chews her way out of the pot.
Potter wasps are considered beneficial as they are pollinators (adults drink nectar), pest controllers and rarely sting humans. The most common species of potter wasp in New England is the Fraternal Potter Wasp, Eumenes fraternus. _NaturallyCurious

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DEFINITELY
<https://tinyurl.com/yb753rf9> _DavidShrigley

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640-YeAR-LONG JOHN CAGE PIECE CHANGES CHORD!
<https://tinyurl.com/f88t8879>
Big news for experimental-music fans: John Cage‘s 1985 piece Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible), which has been playing on an organ in the Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany, since September 5, 2001, made an exceedingly rare chord change on Wednesday. The work is now about 4 percent done. (It’s set to conclude in 2640.) More than 150 people apparently showed up for this, the 17th chord change over the past quarter-century. John Darnielle, who makes music under the name the Mountain Goats, stopped by in 2013 and wrote that it was “honestly one of the sweetest, most unusual musical experiences I’ve ever had.” The next chord change is slated for October 5, 2027. Let’s meet there. _Andrew Russeth_artnet

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/yyt2dak4> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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HOW DOES IT FEEL? PETER SAVILLE’S COLOR CODE by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/53jzdj6m>
I’m not sure I have anything to say about them yet, but I’ve been looking at Peter Saville’s color code from his New Order album covers, which he developed with Brett Wickens.
<https://tinyurl.com/2utsrb3y>
The outer two rows of the color wheel on the back of Power, Corruption & Lies is the key to deciphering the one- or tw0-color blocks that represent both the numbers 1-9 and the alphabet. It’s clearer, perhaps, in the cover for the 12″ release of Blue Monday, that the design is based on a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk, but this reference is already lost in some design discussions.
<https://tinyurl.com/2s4esh9v>
The code on PC&L just says FACT75, the Factory Records release number, but the wraparound code on Blue Monday says more, I guess, and with spacers, is more legible: FAC73 BLUE MONDAY AND on the front, and THE BEACH NEW ORDER on the back.
One thing that struck me while looking around is the album covers as artifacts vs images, the physical album in MoMA’s collection, for example, or the collectible copies on discogs, vs Wikipedia <https://tinyurl.com/zatpnyu5> . Colors fade or change over time, which makes reading the squares more or less difficult, or rather, which changes the information being communicated.
<https://tinyurl.com/mwrpn657>
One thing I love is that a 21-year old jpg mathmandan took at the Design Museum’s Peter Saville Show <https://tinyurl.com/yjzf6p65> in 2003 is still on flickr. It shows a hand-drawn diagram of the color code, and though the colors themselves don’t seem to match, they’ve each been translated, encoded into their CYMK values for offset printing.
“At the time I was interested in the juxtaposition of historical culture and modern technological culture, and I was interested in the idea of what did history look like when it came up on a retrieval system on a computer screen, and I wanted to juxtapose the kind of hieroglyphics of technology with historical classicism.” Is a quote attributed to Peter Saville in a deleted blogpost from 2007, which until now only survived in a 2021 post on Dennis Cooper’s blog. It does sound like it benefits from some retrospection.
<https://tinyurl.com/9vydw8fv>
This feels like the right spot to include the original 1983 music video for Blue Monday, which looks like history, the news, and the band members pulled up on a computer screen. The aesthetics of this video feel like they have a lot of resonances, if not references, to Gerhard Richter works, which I’m not going to get into just now.
<https://tinyurl.com/2792zx37>
The Wikipedia page<https://tinyurl.com/yc26rd75> for the song says the video includes clips from Close Encounters of The Third Kind (1977), which I am going to get into just now. Because the synthesizer-linked light board used to communicate with the aliens in a “jam session” was premised on a language of color and sound. I geeked out about it in 2011, when I resolved to recreate it [looks around fifteen years later, glad to not have to store it, at least].
And speaking of Wikipedia, it was the lowkey dismissive vibe of this line that made me diverge from my previous research subject, to spend a moment with Saville’s iconic and influential design and code: “Derived from the public domain image File:Fantin-Latour Basket of roses 1890.jpg <https://tinyurl.com/4262dp9h> , with the minor addition of some squares in the corner. Therefore, this image is in the public domain.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2ax2b2rp>
I can’t find the clips from Close Encounters yet. I realize I’m much more familiar with the video for the Quincy Jones 1988 remix of Blue Monday <https://tinyurl.com/ycx5xzev> , which includes William Wegman’s Weimaraners intercut with flipbook animations by Robert Breer.
<https://tinyurl.com/ycx5xzev>
I didn’t know the Blue Monday Official Lyric Video, which encodes the whole song in Saville’s code, and which was released with the Power, Corruption & Lies Definitive Edition in 2020, at all.
<https://tinyurl.com/b5u8xh7c>
In 1983 New Order’s Bernard Sumner produced another Factory release, Section 25’s From The Hip (1984). “The band name and/or album title are spelled out” on the cover using Saville’s same color code on the tops of ten painted poles on a craggy hillside. The bars on the back don’t obviously map to Saville’s colors. On a day Google stops returning offsite search results as a default, it’s Wikipedia’s “and/or” that gets me, an indifference to the extremely elaborately produced information lost with a shrug as contemporary modern technological culture consumes historical modern technological culture.
<https://tinyurl.com/5a77b4t6>
I’m surprised at this point to find there’s not a font, but Mathew Lodge has created savillecode.com, <https://tinyurl.com/57hcmdem> a website for encoding text into Saville’s color code. _greg.org

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ODILON REDON, BUDDHA, C. 1906-07
<https://tinyurl.com/4y32whks>
Odilon Redon, Buddha, 1904
<https://tinyurl.com/3kpdck23> _MichaelLobel

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ONE PHOTO CHANGED ‘ODYSSEY’ ACTRESS SAMANTHA MORTON’S LIFE
<https://tinyurl.com/m9n8amn3>
Samantha Morton doesn’t get much screen time in “The Odyssey,” but her performance as a witch is transformative. That’s a theme in the British actress’s life: making an awful lot out of very little.
Morton was born in the industrial city of Nottingham in 1977 and almost immediately became a ward of the court. She spent her chaotic childhood bouncing between foster parents and social care facilities. Refuge arrived in the form of a group that provided theater training to working-class kids. Something proved appealing about pretending to be someone else.
Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.
And Morton’s talent proved otherworldly. She landed a few television roles in early adolescence, then, at age 16, moved herself to London. The actress quickly garnered acclaim from British critics and, as a 22-year-old, broke through with American audiences starring opposite Sean Penn in the 1999 Woody Allen film, “Sweet and Lowdown.”
<https://tinyurl.com/nhaubt73>
Her performance as a mute laundress earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. “Ms. Morton does this astonishingly well, mixing the baleful loneliness of Buster Keaton with a Harpo Marx sweetness,” critic Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times. “She gives the film’s most affecting performance without benefit of music or voice.”
The actress won similarly soaring praise for her work as the love interest of Billy Crudup’s heroin addict in “Jesus’ Son” and a grieving Irish mother in Jim Sheridan’s “In America.”
Again and again, Morton was cast in roles that showcased her capacity to transmit epochs of inner turmoil with an extended glance. In 2009 she made her directing debut with a television film about a girl in the British foster care system. She titled the film, loosely based on her own story, “The Unloved.”
So perhaps it was a no-brainer for Christopher Nolan to turn to Morton for his Circe, a role that required her to deliver a range of emotions within a tight window, from fear and terror to disgust and resignation. Her on-set performance, Nolan has noted, earned Morton an actual standing ovation from the cast and crew members who witnessed it.
We caught up with Morton, now a 49-year-old mother of three and artistic multi-hyphenate, to ask whether there was a work or art that changed her life.
Zooming in during a trip to France, she says she contemplated mentioning everything from writer Charles Bukowski to Pre-Raphaelite artists before homing in on a stunning, 40-year-old photograph by Nick Waplington.
<https://tinyurl.com/rsx8d58f>
Fans of Morton might recognize the photo, named “Untitled From the Series Living Room.” The 1986 image is the cover of the mesmerizing trip-pop record “Daffodils & Dirt,” which she and producer Richard Russell released two years ago.
The record itself emerged after Russell, who heard Morton speaking about her favorite music on the BBC, asked if he could simply sample her voice. After meeting, they developed a deeper connection, forming a band, Sam Morton, and delivering their debut, a dreamy chronicle of her difficult childhood.
“If tears could express our frustration, we’d cry without end,” she sings in one song on the album.
Morton had discovered Waplington’s picture years earlier, in 2002, when she was sifting through photo books at a book store. One picture immediately caught her eye: The image was taken on the street where she’d spent part of her childhood.
“So the probability of me being on that street 10 minutes later is a reality,” Morton says. “It’s not a ‘What if?’ I would have been on that street. I played outside all day, every day in the summer. And it’s one of the roughest [places] in the whole of the United Kingdom. Abject poverty. We’re talking about men suddenly unemployed who’ve worked in the mines.”
<<https://tinyurl.com/bdxd38vx>
The girl in the foreground of the photo captured her attention. Morton would have been 9 when Waplington took the photo. They could have been playmates. It could have been her. For “Daffodils & Dirt,” she asked the photographer if she could make a few small changes to the image: The license plate on the car, the sneakers on the man working on it, and the young girl’s T-shirt.
“When I did the film, ‘Jesus’ Son,’ I wore a T-shirt with a lion on it and that was my T-shirt from when I was a child,” said Morton. “We asked Nick if I could superimpose my T-shirt when I was a child onto the album cover, so the album cover is slightly different from the original artwork.”
Waplington’s photograph altered Morton’s understanding of art — and herself.
“I’d always associated art at that point with the Pre-Raphaelite movement or, you know, Goya or Matisse,” Morton says. “My brain hadn’t opened up at that point to say that my experience, what he’s photographing, is beautiful and it’s strong and it tells such an important story equivalent to a Vermeer. I realized my childhood can be art, too.”
By then she had been steadily working for years, but still felt like a kind of impostor, as if she didn’t belong.
“And that was when I realized I was relevant, that I had a voice,” Morton says. “It was almost like a full stop had happened. It’s everything, that photograph, because it changed my perception of who I was.”
<https://tinyurl.com/yc82rc8t> _ Geoff Edgers_WashingtonPost

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ALL YOU HATERS BE PLUCKING THE WINGS OF FAME
François-Guillaume Ménageot, Envy Plucking the Wings of Fame, 1806
<https://tinyurl.com/yhczes99> _JesseLocker

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RAISE A GLASS
<https://tinyurl.com/4vyuruhm>
Are they a jolly couple enjoying a quiet moment in their courtyard—or are they playing a drinking game that could lead to drunkenness and debauchery?
The return of a painted-out soldier to the middle of a 17th-century painting by the Dutch master Pieter de Hooch gives a new interpretation to the classic work, now on show at the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
When restorers set to work on A Man Smoking and a Woman Drinking in a Courtyard (around 1658-60) they were aware that a soldier sitting right at the heart of the painting had been painted out at some stage in its history. Another version of the painting, titled A Dutch Courtyard <https://tinyurl.com/y6eufdk5>
and held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, still contains this red-faced soldier.
So the Dutch restorers, Sabrina Meloni and Abbie Vandivere, decided for the first time to paint the soldier back on to the canvas at the Mauritshuis, using a technique that makes their work reversible.
“The men are challenging the woman to a drinking game—that is the subject of the painting," said Meloni in a press release. She adds, however, that discolouration of the rest of the painting affected the way they approached the work. “Over the past 360 years, the painting's pigments have partially discoloured. We therefore chose a more understated, less detailed depiction of the soldier [to help the figure blend in].”
The Dutch painting has been renamed Figures in a Courtyard <https://tinyurl.com/2hava4vn>
Judith Niessen, the head of collections and research at the Mauritshuis, explains how the restoration changes the way the painting can be read.
“With only the man and the woman at the table, the painting seems to be way more innocent than with the second man present," she says.
"Where she would be just drinking a glass of beer before, now it is much more obvious that they are playing a drinking game, where she is drinking the pass-glass and the two man are not. [It] is now much more moralistic, which was the intention of De Hooch."
<https://tinyurl.com/mrtptbwt> _Senay Boztas _ArtNewspaper

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MAYBE IT WILL HAPPEN TODAY
<https://tinyurl.com/53z7dedc> _MaybeItWillHappenToday

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BURIED FOR NOT BEING BRUEGHEL
<https://tinyurl.com/vfz2z6p9>
Anonymous was often a woman: so said Virginia Woolf. And so thought Cynthia Osiecki one day in 2022, when she chanced on an unattributed still life in the storage area of the National Museum of Norway in Oslo.
Osiecki had been studying the work of a renowned 17th-century Flemish artist, Clara Peeters, one of the earliest practitioners of still life painting. Works by Peeters hang in the Prado in Madrid, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
The Oslo painting, Still Life with Small Game and Grapes on a Gilded Tazza, was created around 1620 and features nine freshly dead birds, hazelnuts, apricots and a fly perched on a bunch of grapes. It had once been regarded as the work of a member of a famous family of Antwerp artists, Ambrosius Brueghel. But in the early 20th century the attribution was reassessed, and the work reclassified as being by “anonymous”. Since then it had mostly been consigned to storage.
Osiecki began to wonder whether the work – some details of which have been obscured by many layers of varnish – could be by Peeters, an enigmatic but prolific artist who pushed the boundaries of still life painting in the Northern European baroque period. Osiecki began to compare the work with other pieces by the painter, who is thought to have been born in Antwerp around 1594. “I looked at the panel the Oslo work is painted on, and discovered it was from a supplier Peeters often used,” she says. “Then I looked at other paintings by Peeters, and I noticed some of them had a tazza [a saucer-like dish on a pedestal] very similar to the one in the Oslo painting.” Osiecki noticed, too, similarities in the way the dead birds, the grapes and the hazelnuts were positioned in the composition.
One problem, though, was that Peeters was well known for signing her works, and the Oslo piece had no signature. But the panel had been damaged by woodworm, and the area eaten away was the bottom edge of the work – the very area where Peeters usually signed her pieces.
<https://tinyurl.com/4uders6x>
It seemed more and more likely that the painting was a work by Peeters – but a piece of the jigsaw was missing. Peeters is famous for including miniature self-portraits in her work, often reflections of herself in pewter or glass objects, or on shiny fruit or vegetables. “I could see a shape on some of the grapes, and on closer examination I realised they look like outlines of human figures,” says Osiecki. These might be the artist herself, and it could be that the image has been lost during conservation work.
Earlier this year the painting was officially reattributed to Peeters, and it will be one of the star exhibits in Woman Painter at the National Museum of Norway curated by Osiecki. The show features the work of female artists working across northern Europe and Italy between 1550 and 1650, with paintings by 19 artists including Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana and Judith Leyster, as well as Clara Peeters.
_Joanna Moorhead _GuardianUK

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CURL UP & DYE BOWDON, GA
<https://tinyurl.com/yea4en4c> _RuralIndexingProject

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149. GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, RANCHOS CHURCH by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/yzp799sj>
It looks like wet clay waiting to be shaped, like it would yield to a thumb pressed against it. The church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Ranchos de Taos dates back to the 1770s. 20th-century photographers Paul Strand and Ansel Adams made it famous, but it’s Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings that we most remember. O’Keeffe painted the church’s soft geometric masses using delicious color gradations with almost no hard edges. It seems one with the earth from which it rises.
The actual church’s adobe is made from earth, dried in the sun, with a coating of mud re-applied by hand every year to prevent it from deteriorating. A 1967 attempt at repair using more modern materials—cinderblock, hard plaster—nearly destroyed the church from damp trapped inside the walls, and the traditional earthen materials and techniques were restored. Today, in a celebrated annual summer ritual, the community manually re-applies adobe mud to the church. One deacon said of the project, “This church is very picky. She has a lot of needs. She requires certain things, and not everything works.”
O’Keeffe herself was famously reclusive, a protective guardian of her legacy who resisted assumptions about what her art “meant.” The artist whose distinct painterly vocabulary made her a star in her lifetime also required certain things—privacy, solitude, nature—and not everything worked for her. Both O’Keeffe and the church she painted demanded a certain way of being handled, of being seen.
<https://tinyurl.com/7aenuzks> -Ansel Adams_ _TheImpatientReader

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THE PHENAKISTOSCOPE —
a popular Victorian parlour toy,
generally marketed for children —
is widely considered to be among the earliest forms
of animation and the precursor to modern cinema
<https://tinyurl.com/4wp9tfnr> _PublicDomainReview

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THIEVES STEAL $4.6 MILLION IN ART FROM ITALIAN COMPANY
Thieves stole €4 million ($4.6 million) worth of art from Italian fuel distribution company Lilli Petroli in an overnight raid at the firm’s headquarters in Abruzzo. The Italian newspaper Il Messaggero reports that the thieves made off with roughly 30 artworks, all belonging to the company’s owner Mauro Lilli.
The art was on display in the building’s lobby and offices, and included bas-reliefs attributed to Pablo Picasso. Works by Italian artist Giacomo Manzù (including a 1,200-pound bronze sculpture of a ballerina), Bruno d’Arcevia, and Mario Moretto were also taken.
The thieves reportedly gained access to the building by using a Lilli Petroli truck and tearing down a large iron entrance gate using a cable. As per video surveillance records, approximately ten disguised individuals entered the building on the night of Monday, July 27, and spent eight hours emptying display cases and moving out large sculptures, before leaving around 6 a.m. “They made a mess of the premises,” Mauro Lilli, the company’s owner, told Il Mesaggero. “They spared nothing. They even took very heavy statues, weighing over a ton.” Lilli noted that the works were not insured.
Art theft expert Christopher Marinello, founder of Art Recovery International, told Ocula that this is unlikely. As the stolen works are easily identifiable, they will not fetch high prices after being stolen. “These are not top-tier works of art. It appears to me as some sort of revenge, more of an attack on the company or on Mauro Lilli himself,” said Marinello. _Artforum

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PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT.
A young African bullfrog fails to catch its prey.
<https://tinyurl.com/nzn8xhd8> _TheAtlantic