Latest news with #popart
CBC
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Every year, folks travel from far and wide watch this giant pencil get sharpened
John Higgins likes to think of the six-metre-tall pencil on his front lawn as a piece of pop art. "When you think of pop art, you think Andy Warhol or Claes Odenberg. I mean, these are these iconic artists. They take a simple object in bold shape and colours, and it's fascinating how humans relate to it, " he told As It Happens guest host Stephanie Skenderis. "That's exactly what this is." Once a year, the massive piece of pop art becomes an interactive community art installation. Hundreds — or sometimes even thousands — of people make their way to Higgins' house in Minneapolis to watch the giant pencil get sharpened with a giant pencil sharpener. "It's fun. It's joyful. There's no agenda. It's not a commercial event. There's not a ticket or anything," Higgins said. "But through word of mouth, I think, people come and they really have fun." The giant pencil was once a giant tree Saturday marked the fourth annual pencil sharpening event. But the sculpture's origins date back to 2017, when a sudden and powerful windstorm hit the city and ripped Higgins's beloved oak tree from his front lawn. The tree, he says, was about 180 years old. "It was very very hard to see that happen," he said. "Very sad, I'll say." He remembers the oak's severed trunk amid the storm's debris in the aftermath. "It looked very, you know, almost sinister — just marred wood at the top and looked, kind of, at night time, like a broken skeleton." So he and his wife, Amy Higgins, decided to turn it into art. They enlisted wood sculptor Curtis Ingvoldstad to transform it into a replica of a classic Trusty brand No. 2 pencil. "Why a pencil? Everybody uses a pencil," Amy said. "Everybody knows a pencil. You see it in school, you see it in people's work, or drawings, everything. So, it's just so accessible to everybody, I think, and can easily mean something, and everyone can make what they want of it." As soon as they conceived of the pencil, Higgins says they came up with the idea of sharpening it. So Ingvoldstead also crafted a to-scale pencil sharpener for the task. "It's about four feet large [and] weighs a hundred pounds," Higgins said. "We hoist that up, and turn it around a few times and the pencil gets sharpened." 'Life is too short' to miss the sharpening The first year they did this, Higgins said, a few hundred people showed up, mostly from the neighbourhood and surrounding area. But over the years, he says, it's grown through word of mouth and social media. Last year, he says about 1,000 people attended. This year, he estimates the crowd was in the multiple thousands, with people coming from out of state, and even other countries. Some people dressed as pencils or erasers. Two Swiss alphorn players provided part of the entertainment. The hosts commemorated a Minneapolis icon, the late music superstar Prince, by handing out purple pencils on what would have been his 67th birthday. Rachel Hyman said she flew from Chicago on Friday for the event, which a friend told her about. "Some man is sharpening a pencil on his lawn and this is what happens?" Hyman said Saturday while dressed in a pencil costume. "Yeah, I'm gonna be part of it. How can you not? Life is too short." A ritual sacrifice You may be wondering why a giant sculpture of a pencil would even need sharpening. Higgins says the tip, while not made of lead of granite, gets worn down by the weather throughout the year. But, mostly, he says, it's for the symbolism. "This is a community pencil. With the sharpening, there's a chance for, you know, renewal, a new beginning, a promise for writing another note," he said. "People love that message." With each sharpening, the pencil gets shorter and they lose a part of the artwork. Ingvoldstad, the sculptor, says that's the whole point. "Like any ritual, you've got to sacrifice something," Ingvoldstad said. "So we're sacrificing part of the monumentality of the pencil, so that we can give that to the audience that comes, and say, 'This is our offering to you, and in goodwill to all the things that you've done this year.'" So how many years until it's nothing but a little stub with a bright pink eraser? And what happens then? "We don't have answers to that, and we're fine with that," Higgins said. "But for today, for this moment, we're going to take what we have and make the most of it."
The Guardian
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Barry Fantoni obituary
It was the freezing winter of 1963 and snow was lying thick on the ground in London when Barry Fantoni, who has died aged 85 of a heart attack, came to fame by unveiling the Duke of Edinburgh in his underpants at the Woodstock gallery. The near lifesize image of Prince Philip in his smalls, surrounded by a kilt, a polo stick and items of naval uniform, in the style of a child's cut-out doll, caused a sensation after the show was reviewed by the art critic of the Daily Express. Within a week the entire collection of Baz's first one-man show had been sold to an American art dealer. The portrait, an early example of pop art, caught the eye of Richard Ingrams, one of the founders of Private Eye magazine, and opened the door for Baz's 47-year career at the satirical title, during which time he featured in all but 31 of the 1,278 issues. He was a cartoonist, illustrator and member of the jokes team, notably inventing – with Ingrams – the character of EJ Thribb, the magazine's teenage poet-in-residence. During the 60s, he was a face of swinging London – Paul McCartney, Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, Marianne Faithfull and Ralph Steadman would hang out at his home and studio in Clapham, south London. In 1966 he became the host of A Whole Scene Going, a BBC show intended to rival ITV's Ready Steady Go! (for which Baz had designed the set) and Melody Maker named him Top Male TV Celebrity that year. He had his own fanclub. Baz's instinctive understanding of popular culture as a working-class Londoner brought a new relevance to Private Eye, whose founders had met at public school. But he was sensitive to how he was seen and angrily denounced an early history of the magazine for portraying him as a 'Jewish sex-maniac and a half-wit' for highlighting his amorous pursuit of women at the office. By contrast, he never spared the subjects of his cartoons and always aimed to 'wound or mock' the 'miserably corrupt establishment' that were his primary targets. Cartooning was not what he wished to be remembered for, however. 'If I could be honest I would put it at the bottom of the list,' he said when I interviewed him in 2009 and we became friends. He could discuss almost any subject and usually find a joke in it. Away from the Eye, Fantoni worked as a poet, a professional jazz player, a playwright, a painter, a gumshoe detective novelist and a reader of Chinese horoscopes. Poetry was his great passion. 'It is the key feature of my life, more than anything else, more than plays, more than the musicals, more than my jazz, more than Private Eye, more than painting, more than everything. It's the bedrock of my life.' He adopted the persona of Thribb for public poetry readings alongside Roger McGough, whom he had known since playing sax with McGough's band the Scaffold in 1967. Always opening with 'So farewell then' and usually including the line 'That was your catchphrase', Thribb's obituary poems could also be designed to wound or mock, Baz said. 'That's the thing about the catchphrase … that's what really sums you up and you weren't anything more than that.' For a time his own catchphrase was Little Man in a Little Box, the title of the pop song that Davies wrote for him, which he recorded in 1966 and would perform as a support act to the Spencer Davis Group. It was a reference to the age of television – ('You can turn me on, you can switch me off') – but it would be good Thribb material, following Baz's burial in Turin's monumental cemetery. He could find humour in death. It amused him that his mother had 'wryly noted' the irony in his father's death, also from a heart attack, while watching This Is Your Life. Baz was born in Epping, Essex, to where his mother had been evacuated from Stepney, east London, during the second world war. His Italian father, Peter (born Paolo) Fantoni, was an artist, and his Jewish mother, Sarah (known as Maxi, nee Deverell) was a musician, of French and Dutch extraction. Baz grew up in south London and painted landscapes from the roof of the family flat on Brixton Hill. He attended Archbishop Temple school before joining Camberwell School of Art on a scholarship before his 15th birthday. At 18 he was expelled for multiple misdemeanours, including depicting the staff naked in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec. While travelling in France, he contracted tuberculosis. Admitted to hospital on his return to London, he watched fellow patients dying on his ward. That experience, he later explained, was where his work drive came from. He resumed his education at the Slade School of Fine Art and then came the exhibition that brought him to the attention of Ingrams. He went on to have a further six solo exhibitions (including Caricatures by Barry Fantoni at the National Portrait Gallery in 2007) and five joint exhibitions with his father, and took part in 11 group shows. The Eye's fortnightly publishing rhythm allowed him multiple careers. From the mid-1960s he taught at Croydon College of Art, alongside Bridget Riley. He was a diary cartoonist (1983-90) and art critic (1973-77) for the Times, and his caricatures were a fixture in the Listener for 20 years (1968-88). He put on plays in Paris and London. But for Baz there was never enough time. On leaving the Eye in 2010, he told colleagues there was 'still so much else I've got left to do'. Depechism, an art movement which he founded in 2012 after moving to Calais, was emblematic of his need to produce work quickly. The Depechist 'manifesto' decreed that each painting must be completed within a time limit set by the length of the canvas. It seemed like an idea suited to the digital age, but Baz was making a protest, he said, against the 'Saatchiism and Serotaism' of the 'empty' arts establishment, from which he felt alienated. In the same year he published Harry Lipkin PI, a slick novel about 'the world's oldest private detective'. It was set in Miami, even though the author (who did not fly) had never visited the city. Baz married Tessa Reidy in 1972. They had separated by the time he met Katie Dominy, an art and design journalist and editor, who became his partner in 1996 and who survives him. In search of his Italian roots, in 2016 Baz moved with Katie to a riverside flat in Turin, where he produced two memoirs, A Whole Scene Going On (2019) and Breasts As Apples (2023), more pictures, short plays and a collection of brief poems, Poems You May Have Missed (2021), mimicking the style of famous poets. The Italian obsession with ice-cream and national tendency to talk noisily were things he complained of, often loudly and in public. In 2022 he spent months in hospital, critically ill with heart problems, but somehow he came back to life and returned to his projects. 'I have a huge pile of work ahead,' he told me in an email last month. However, in the time-honoured phrasing of Private Eye editors: 'That's enough Barry – Ed.' Barry Ernest Fantoni, artist and writer, born 28 February 1940; died 20 May 2025
Fast Company
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
Polaroid's tumblr-core MoMA collab turns your photos into works of art
Polaroid 's new collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MoMA) is designed to make your retro photos look like colorful works of pop art—and it feels like a flashback to 2014. The partnership includes two exclusive items: an $130 Polaroid camera and a separate $22 set of eight custom film frames. The camera itself is an analog instant camera—specifically, Polaroid's Now Generation 3 model—rendered in a bright blue housing, complete with the 'MoMA' wordmark in a lighter blue across the front. Included with the device are three neon, MoMA branded wrist straps to customize the look. Where the collaboration really shines is with its custom Polaroid film frames. The MoMA and Polaroid teams have designed 12 unique frames, each in high-octane color combinations like turquoise and bright red or lemon yellow and blue. Six of the frames feature the MoMA logo, while the other six come pre-captioned with quotes from artists including Carmen Herrera, Betye Saar, Meret Oppenheim, and Milton Glaser. You might receive a quote like, 'I am interested in restless ideas,' by An-My Lê, or 'If one truly loves nature, one finds beauty everywhere,' by Vincent Van Gogh. It's a cute, if corny, concept that feels like it would've gone instantly viral in Tumblr's hey-day of quote posting and aesthetic collages. According to a press release, the collab is intended to 'capture the ethos of those who dared to see the world differently and invite today's creatives to do the same.' For anyone who's interested in the camera but not the inspiring quotes, the device is also compatible with regular Polaroid i-Type film.
