Emoji Art History: The Not So Serious Side Project (Part 1)

It began during finals week at the end of last semester while lying in bed unable to sleep. Deliriously I began recreating works of art with the Emoji app on my iPhone and posted 18 of the results on Instagram. I stopped for a month but kept thinking of new ones. Five weeks later with the new Postcard Collective Winter submission deadline looming, I revisited it. I settled on a form, deciding that I would simulate texting the artist at the top and include only the title of the artwork below. There are many limitations of Emoji - unfortunately there are not enough icons to create some of my favorite artworks (I am still wishing I could do more with Duchamp). Here are 28 in no particular order with a list of 15 others to attempt (coming soon).

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: David Hockney

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Walter De Maria

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Yves Klein (with a little help from a friend)

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Wayne Thiebaud

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Vincent van Gogh

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Sol LeWitt

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Sherrie Levine

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Roy Lichtenstein

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Robert Smithson

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Maurizio Cattelan

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Mark Di Suvero

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Marcel Duchamp

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: John Baldessari

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Jeff Koons

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Janine Antoni

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Henri Rousseau

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Grant Wood

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Georgia O'Keeffe

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Frida Kahlo

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Eleanor Antin

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Ed Ruscha

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Damien Hirst

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Christian Marclay (made while staring at Marclay during an artists' conversation at the Wexner Art Center last night)

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Andy Warhol

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Edvard Munch

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Maya Lin

Jacinda Russell, Emoji Art History: Tom Friedman

One of my favorite parts was pretending for a few brief minutes that I did indeed have all these artists as contacts in my phone.

Three Leaps, Three Voids

Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, 1960


Elijah Gowin from Epilogues 2, 2009


Dark Days Exhibition Announcement

c. 1978

It snowed/sleeted/hailed Friday (I stand corrected... Drew informed me that the correct terminology was graupel). Dreaming of swimming pools.... Since it is late fall, getting dark far too early with the time change, and bordering on winter, how about some black-and-white swimming pools? It helps imagining a combination of the previous IKB post with these images.


The only color photograph in the whole book (courtesy of Brent Cole = thank you!).




i seriously want this pool (except for the snakes undoubtedly basking in the sun on the boulders).


Nice burned in cloud of doom in the sky above.



Love how the diving board looks like a straw (and the "freeform" a bladder).


Just insert Yves Klein's Folding Screen seen in the previous post here.

A Little International Klein Blue to Start the Week

Thought I'd make this entry heavily blue since the next post will be overtly black and white (and you'll be wishing it was blue). Infinite thanks to Nick Jones for letting me borrow his Yves Klein catalog.



Yves Klein, Blue Terrestrial Globe, 1951



Yves Klein, Ex-voto Dedicated to Saint Rita of Cascia, 1961



Yves Klein, Folding Screen, 1957



Yves Klein, Assemblage of Used Paint Rollers, 1956-62



Yves Klein, Air Architecture, 1961

Yves Klein hated birds (yet imitated one convincingly in Leap into the Void)

Yesterday while sitting in the White House Cafe in New Harmony, IN where I went to pick up my artwork, I read Peter Schjeldahl's review on the Yves Klein retrospective currently on display at the Hirshhorn Museum. Klein has fascinated me since I saw another of his retrospectives at the Reina Sofia in Madrid in 1995. My Spanish was minimal and I didn't understand most of the text alongside the artworks so I came home and researched him extensively. I can't say I love his work but I do like his concepts - inventing International Klein Blue (IKB), serving blue cocktails at an opening that turned everyone's urine blue, convincing the post office to take one of his IKB stamps as an official way to send his announcements, using fire as a mode of making art, and the fine art of photo collage with his Leap into the Void.


Klein's Blue Monochrome, 1960

Schjeldahl writes: "He hated birds, he said, 'because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.'" That work being the sky... and to claim it as his own is one of the most egotistical statements I have read in a very long time. I keep thinking about the bird as interruption and can't help but feel that Klein missed the point.

Once when viewing James Turrell's sky space at the Live Oak Meeting House in Houston, TX, I saw an airplane and it's trail mark the perfect blue. I have never forgotten my friend Kelli's description of watching a balloon float by one evening while staring into the void. Those are the moments that make that artwork memorable when an entity that shouldn't be there momentarily makes an entrance.



I think John Baldessari, whose retrospective is currently on display on the West Coast, would agree.


John Baldessari's Bird, Airplane, Bird

The opposite effect can also occur when the sky is obliterated by the birds as seen in Lukas Felzmann's photographs.



I've always loved this image and for a very long time, it was my desktop wallpaper on my laptop. Then one day my hard drive crashed and I lost the name of the person who made it. It's title currently exists as "0019E95D.JPG" so if anyone ever sees it and can give me the full documentation, I would be grateful to give credit where it is due. This sky interruption reminded me of Kelli's visit to Turrell's piece yet also of another beautiful ending...



to the Truman Show. Both these images show the moments where truth becomes a facade. The balloon's shadow gives it away and Truman on his quest to sail into the horizon, ultimately ran into it with his sailboat. I would never claim the sky as my own creation or sign it as Klein did at the age of 19. I am far more interested in those "holes" that Klein despised.