The hack of black, Fidenza, NYC
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I love hacks.
Shortcuts.
Things that save time, especially when they’re clever.
A mistake… or an opportunity?
So maybe it’s not surprising I did a full dead complete utter stop when I saw this postcard from 1915:
G. L. Hanger, you clever bastard.
I love a good copy/hack, so I immediately wanted to create an NFT collection that is just a black square with various captions like “Hand over lens.” “A view of the eclipse.” “View of a hole.” “Black beetle.” “4am”
But I didn’t. I just nodded my head in appreciation.
This is, by far, the easiest way to create a postcard. A black rectangle with some text over it. Even better, it’s funny — and with laughter, a postcard sale.
I wish I knew more about Mr. Hanger, but I can find nothing on him.
As far as I can tell, the only thing that survives him on the internet is this postcard, shown only in one article.
That article is from the Public Domain Review, a not-for-profit online journal with “a focus on the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful” who “hope to provide an ever-growing cabinet of curiosities for the digital age.”
That’s where I stumbled on Precedents of the Unprecedented: Black Squares Before Malevich.
A clever square
Here’s the “The Black Square” by Kazimir Malevich — which a “plurality of art historians, curators, and critics refer to as one of the seminal works of modern art, and of abstract art in the Western painterly tradition generally.”
The crackles came with age. You can see in an older photo from a gallery the way it looked originally:
It started as a stage curtain in 1913 in the futurist opera Victory over the Sun ("The audience reacted negatively and even violently to the performance, as have some subsequent critics and historians”).
Years ago I hated modern art like this. “I don’t get it,” I would say. “It just seems like a bad joke at the expense of people who like the art.”
But now I love it.
Especially when it’s a bad joke.
A black square is so simple, so audacious. No really, it was so audacious he was jailed and threatened for it:
The government of Joseph Stalin turned against forms of abstraction, considering them a type of "bourgeois" art, that could not express social realities. As a consequence, many of his works were confiscated and he was banned from creating and exhibiting similar art.
In autumn 1930, he was arrested and interrogated by the KGB in Leningrad, accused of Polish espionage, and threatened with execution.
The black square became a kind of a logo for Malevich: “The Black Square became Malevich's motif, even his logo or trademark. In his later work, when he made a return to figurative paintings (often of peasants and workers), he signed many of them with a little black square.”
I also learned he paints like Abraham, who taught me to just layer on colors (or really, anything) until you get something you like (which for me, is never).
A little bonus to this technique: it exposed frauds and fakes, as paintings that didn’t use that technique were discarded as fraudulent.
What’s that in the background?
In the black and white studio photo I noticed something that caught my eye. It wasn’t quite as simple as the rest… it had a kind of kinetic motion, and reminded me of… well, I’ll show you what it reminded me of in a minute.
Zoom in a bit to see it:
Now, if you already know Russian art then you know what this is, because part of this series is the most expensive selling Russian art ever. But I didn’t know that, because I honestly know nothing about Russian art, and I’m just following my curiosity.
Which led me to Suprematist Composition (blue rectangle over the red beam):
Yum.
This painting sold for $85 million in 2018, the highest price paid for a work in the history of Russian art.
But it reminded me of…
Fidenza.
I love Fidenza. It’s a fine art NFT series based on an algorithm by Tyler Hobbes. It’s beautiful and flexible and kinetic and crazy expensive. I don’t own any, but it’s one of my life goals. 999 were created. Here are some examples showing how different they can be, yet clearly part of the same series:
Fidenza #313 (first one, top left) is one of the most expensive NFTs ever sold, $3.5m (1000 eth).
Memory is always different from reality. I’m gonna look again, are they as similar as I thought?
Yeah, they’re similar. There’s something about the movement — perhaps some kind of orbit — that reminds me of each other. The shapes. The angles. Even the colors are similar!
Okay, the similarities should probably have probably been the other way around (I should have thought of Malevich when seeing Fidenza!), and I blame the art school that I never went to. (Because even if I had went I wouldn’t have been paying attention.)
I need to see more Fidenza, and I found a site called Archipelago that made it easy to browse and I saw #479… man, I could stare at this for a long time. It’s like the thumbprint of the ocean.
Friggin beautiful.
I posted the comparison on twitter, because I’m trying to push myself to publish more:
And what do you know, Tyler Hobbs (who created Fidenza) liked it!
Which totally made my day.
You too, Emily.
But also Tyler.
What a world.
PS: This video on Tyler Hobbs deserves more than its 2,000 views. It’s gorgeous, for one, but also surprising — I didn’t expect to see Hobbs on a skateboard or riffing on the drums (that intro riff is fire). Now I want a black and white square shirt.
PPS: The arpeggio in the middle of the video… hit me and I used shazam (which I had almost forgotten about it and never used on a youtube until now) and violà: “Fearful Continuity” by Josh McCausland.
PPPS: From Tate Museum: Five ways to look at Malevich’s Black Square. This led me to a picture where Tate has partially reconstructed the old studio room. Next time I go to Tate it will be a different experience now that I know this!
PPPPS: Oh, Malevich also did the costume design for Victory in the Sun (”radical, anti-realist designs that combined volumetrically-shaped body coverings and shocking color schemes”). I really need to level up my style.
Winning Fights Will Ruin the Relationship
From Nedra Glover Tawwab:
A little secret from a therapist: In romantic relationships winning fights will ruin the relationship. Disagreements are about learning, listening, and understanding the needs and perspectives of your partner. Healthy fights end with a resolution, not with the feeling of victory. If you are arguing to be right, you're doing it wrong.
OB-4: The Magic Radio
The OB-4 boombox by the incredible teenage engineering is a marvel. It’s so fun — a minimalist design reminiscent of Dieter Rams, but far more playful.
OB–4 continuously memorizes everything you listen to on an endless looping tape. rewind, time-bend and loop at the flick of your fingertips. on purpose or by accident.
If you change the volume from your phone, the knob turns! It plays the radio with one button. It’s samples the radio into an ambient music mode. Mantras built in. Metronome. It’s quite impressive, and kinda silly, and while I’m certainly not gonna pay $650 for it, I did enjoy this 3 minute review by Derrick Gee on TikTok.
Worthless short-term band-aids
I’ve been working on a bad habit of mine: choosing the easy, short-term fix vs the hard, long-term one. The short-term fixes are so tempting… they’re quick, painless, and “resolve” things with minimal conflict. I choose it automatically. But before long, a similar problem just comes back again to haunt me.
Instead, I’ve been trying to purposefully chose the harder path — a path that involves more suffering up front for me, but fixes it for good.
Some questions I’ve been asking myself to uncover the long-term path:
“What uncomfortable thing can I do now to make things better for my future self?”
“Fast forward three years… why did this fail?”
“What would I do if it were easy?”
A glimpse: NYC
Emily and I arrived in NYC late… the only thing open and walkable was a $0.99 pizza spot. An unusually inclusive environment — transient people standing at the counter eating, goth kids laughing pouring parmesan, a couple making out in the brightly-lit corner, Emily with a big grin asking if it was okay to take a picture.
We grabbed a couple slices, walked outside, sat on the stoop. “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Emily said, “we’re eating a slice of real New York pizza on a real New York stoop!”
She snapped a picture of me. We took our customary eye-rolling selfie. A man picked through the garbage next to the curb, finding crusts and bringing them back to his stoop. A limo parked out front, the door opened and someone ran into the pizza shop.
“Do you want to blot your pizza with napkins?” Em asked, “it looks greasy.”
And that’s what I did while we sat and watched the cars pass, the delivery drivers stop to chat, the rats racing from shadow to shadow.
Until next time,
// Josh