Crawl space

A number of art museums have encouraged artists to use their spaces as the background or content for their films (and others didn't). Probably the best known are the final of Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle shot in the Guggenheim and Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark filmed in the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum. 

Then the Louvre of all places got in on the game and commissioned Malaysian born Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang to make a film for them. Visage turned out to be the story of a Chinese filmmaker who goes to the Louvre to shoot a version of J-t-B’s head-hunter Salome. Tsai Ming-Liang uses the bowels of the Louvre to create a pretty believable abattoir with his lead crawling through the vents and sewer tunnels (usually restricted to the fire department) that are hidden behind the walls of the main galleries. 

That’s why one of Tsai Ming-Liang ‘s characters can appear through the skirting panels just nearby Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks. Gowns are by Christian Lacroix. 

Images: Through the skirting boards in Visage

asiL anoM

A while back we showed you a pic by Brian Joseph of crowds photographing the Mona Lisa. Here’s the view from the other side of the room from Flickr.

All a twitter

Tweeting an art work? You’ve got to be kidding. Well, no. Even though a tweet is only a maximum of 140 characters, Mario Klingemann managed to code (with that 140 characters) a series of polygons into a Voronoi Diagram ofthe Mona Lisa. The incredible thing to us is how little visual information you need to get the essential Mona Lisa image. Squinting helps but even without that we think most people would pick up this tweet as at least ‘school’ of Da Vinci. If you want to stare into the abyss and see how Klingemann does it, visit him here on Flickr.

Last Supper Light

Because we have spent so much of your time on versions of the Last Supper here is the real thing, albeit colonised by Peter Greenaway’s projection project.

Last (Last Supper) post

One of our readers has been fossicking around in the OTN archives and saw the post on variations on Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Wouldn’t you know it, there’s a web site devoted to the subject. If you need more of this sort of thing this is where to go. Thanks G.
Images: Top left, Lego (Bless them) right, Popeye. Bottom left, Robert Altman’s Mash, right - the ever subtle - Simpsons