Freeze Frame Screen, the Shadow, Hot Heads Under Silent Wigs
{ Shigeo Fukuda, Lunch with a Helmet On, 1987 | 848 forks, knives, and spoons | video }
{ Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Dirty White Trash [With Gulls], 1998 | six months’ worth of the artists’ rubbish }
{ Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Real Life is Rubbish, 2002 | two separate piles of general household rubbish onto which a light is projected, creating a shadow self-portrait of Noble and Webster }
{ Tim Noble and Sue Webster, HE/SHE, 2003 }
{ Tim Noble and Sue Webster, HE/SHE (daylight view), 2003 }
June 14th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Fall guys tumble on the cutting room floor.
June 14th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
Spotted a few of these kinds of works in the MCA in Sydney not that long ago, pretty remarkable.
June 14th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
actually i think the correct quote for the tagline is “freezeframe screenkiss, hotheads…etc.”
June 14th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
Yes blindingstrobes (and Lang!)
It’s Bauhaus: ‘Freeze frame screen kiss hot heads under silent wigs, Fall guys tumble on the cutting room floor, She’s in parties…’
June 15th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
All creative. I’ve never seen such interesting work before.Thanks for these pics.
June 16th, 2007 at 6:08 am
Amazing! and insightful re “the human condition”
June 16th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Not sure I wholeheartedly believe this..with photoshop the way it is today…but I’d sure LIKE to! If it’s for real, it’s awesome.
Nancy
June 16th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
the best rubbish shadows i’ve ever seen
June 16th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
it reminds me the Exorcist poster
June 16th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
I don’t believe it. The light could be coming from behind the paper and a person was on the other side. That and the same male and female silhouettes are on each one. NOT REAL Look at her hair style in each picture and tell me that isn’t the same woman. Then explain to me how you got the same woman from all 3 sculptures. Nope sorry didn’t happen.
June 16th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
it is very hard to believe. i personally think they’re all fake. there is no way possible. look at the first one. how do you get a dirt bike from forks/spoons/knives?
June 16th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Photoshopped, obviously… and not very well, at that. I can’t believe all you fell for those… you can even clearly see that the 3rd last one could not possibly create that image of the woman sitting.
June 16th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
Shigeo Fukuda, Tim Noble and Sue Webster aren’t photoshop artists.
June 16th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Not necessarily photoshopped. I have been to an exhibition of similar works - not pictures, but the actual sculptures. If you can look closely and walk around it you can match up the outline of the sculpture to the shadow. Even if these pictures are fakes (I don’t think so), the technique is certainly not.
June 16th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
I suspect they do it by drawing an outline of the shadow they want, then pile up and glue or weld stuff together till the light is blocked out. Not all that amazing, but cute.
June 16th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
i agree, it’s bullshit. i could almost go for the basic shapes, but hair?. i don’t think so, also the motorcycle, just way to much detail in the shadow, for instance the wheel spokes. there is clearly nothing in the sculpture that would create even a few, let alone a fully round crisscross pattern.
June 17th, 2007 at 4:43 am
these aren’t fake. at all. the photos only show the detail in the shadow aspect of the scupltures but are pretty fuzzy when it comes to the junk piles. but they really are real. i was in a show with them and it made me feel pretty lazy when i saw their work next to mine.
June 17th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Sorry I don’t believe this either. The hair on the female(same one every time) is not realistic to see in the pile. It’s interesting but not believeable in a photo, in my humble opinion.
June 17th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
It is believable, all it requires is making slight adjustments to the pieces while projecting a light until one gets the image one wants… and the reason the same girl appears in 3 different photos is because she is Sue Webster. The shadows make images of the couple themself… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Noble_and_Sue_Webster
June 18th, 2007 at 12:38 am
theese are real.. I know for a fact. this isn’t a brand new art-technice, but a very interesting one..
George
the light comes from above, ofcorse you cant see it in the model from this angle.
Skizz
They use real things or people as models making the outlines then they come up with a theme, like the 2nd for example, garbage, mostly plastic containers. or like the last one, uses kitchen stuff, pots and pans and what not.
then they experiment with distance and layers and such until its perfect.
critical thinking is the way to go these days. but don’t scream fake until you can prove it. everything isn’t fake just yet..
June 18th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
similar concept to the work of my sculpture professor larry kagan http://www.arts.rpi.edu/~kagan/
June 19th, 2007 at 5:12 am
I like the one where they’re peeing
June 19th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
It’s a load of rubbish! Bud-um-tish!
June 19th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
I have seen quite a lot of Noble and Websters work and I can assure you it is not photoshopped.
June 19th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
I saw some of these at the Boston Museum. Great work. I just love that some of you think they’re fakes. I mean, really, who would fake a pile of trash casting a shadow?
June 19th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
They’re definitely not fake. They’ve even been featured at the Guggenheim:
http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/recent_acquisitions_sculpture/tim_noble_sue_webster.html
June 19th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
I saw some of these in person too and there was no screens, just the sculptures, light and solid walls. I stood there a good long while trying to find the “trick” and left in amazement. The concept alone left me happy and it doesn’t really matter how the artists made them but that they are charming, fun, smart works of art. Why so many cynics??!!
June 19th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
fake, very fake
June 19th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
lol @ the “thier fakes” i hate the way some people try to denounce things on the internet just to make themselves feel smart
June 19th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
This is even better than the Body Worlds exhibit I saw at the museum in Dallas i think. This is truly remarkable. And to the guy who said ” It’s a load of rubbish! Bud-um-tish!”, (scroll, the name is “bob”) i say you have no taste for art.
June 20th, 2007 at 12:59 am
The world is full of skeptics it seems…photoshop has left everyone in disbelief…even when some people can still create magic with their hands…
June 20th, 2007 at 4:44 am
Something that would calm all the “fake” comments would be if there were a short video where the camera moved from the perspective given above (or say in the He/She daylight photo) to the perspective of the light in the shadow pictures. The view from the spotlight photo would show the silhouette is the same as the shadow.
Creating these would probably be easy if done with the spot light. Hold something up to the pile of rubbish, look at the shadow, if it makes it look like a hat or a shoe or whatever, glue it there.
To the person saying it was fake because the shadows edges were too crisp (Ash), that would be true if the shadows were formed from an object in the distance. If you assume that the shadows are life size, then maybe they are too crisp. But you aren’t given any way to tell scale here. I’m guessing that the one with the couple sitting is only a couple of feet tall. So the junk is only about that far from the wall. And last time I checked, when something is that close, the shadow is pretty sharp. (You kind of have a sense of scale by looking at the bottle in the front of the sculpture. If that is less than a foot tall, then the shadow is at most 3 feet tall. I think it could be very sharp.)
June 20th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
In the second photo i can clearly see 3 light sources. 1 light hitting the art casting a shadow on the floor, another light not hitting the art casting a shadow on what is obviously the back of a pull down screen, and the third light lighting up the art to make it look like the art is the source of the couples shadow but part of this third lights shadow is shown on top of the couples shadow in the lower right of the shadow on the screen.
There are other ways than photoshop to make illusions.
Putting trash together to make solid shadows of people can be done, but i dont think it was done here.
Plus its easy to tell wich side of the screen the light is coming from.
June 20th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
I think that my favorite part of all of this isn’t the sculptures themselves, but rather the comments below. It’s an entertaining montage of…well, to sum:
Troll: lol fake
Person: No, they’re featured at (insert museum HERE, insert link HERE)
Troll B: Amazing what you can do with photoshop.
Person B: Er…you saw this link, right?
Troll C: So very fake.
Person C: Hey look, reputable sources! (insert link HERE)
June 20th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
There is a video for the motorcycle one. The light comes through from the top, so there’s no way one would be able to tell from the picture one way or the other if there was enough detail for spokes. Looks entirely plausible to me.
June 20th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Love these! I saw Real Life is Rubbish, and Dirty White Trash at the Indianapolis Museum of Art a couple of years ago. It was a lot of fun to try and figure out which piece of trash made the outline of the silhouettes. I realized that a lot of the rubbish is “extra” to make the rubbish itself a piece of art. There are things added that don’t add to the outline, but make the piles more interesting. I also thought it a great idea that the person viewing the piece can become part of it by stepping in front of the projecting light, as your shadow is then added to the shadows on the wall. If you ever get a chance to see their work it is totally worth it. The pictures do not begin to show how interesting the sculptures are in real life.
June 20th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
I saw this IRL and a lot of the instructors at SMFA feature this kinda of work in their classes when showing their students the infinite possibilities of sculpture. The pictures themselves are crappy, but the exhibits are real. Go see them for yourself and be amazed. Or look up the artist official web site and email them.
June 20th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
um, to all those people saying that these are backlit, take a second to read some of the comments, particularly Cody’s and then look more closely. in several of the pics you can clearly see that they’re being projected onto a solid wall, not a screen. i’m as skeptical as the next person, but you guys are driving me nuts with the knee-jerk “fake!” and “photoshop!” claims.
June 20th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
“The problem with the world, is that the stupid are cocksure, and the intelligent are full of doubt.” - Bertrand Russell.
No matter how strongly you believe these are fake, or how loudly you proclaim it, you’re still wrong. These are very much real.
You can remain arrogantly ignorant, OR, you can admit that even YOUR “infallible” senses can sometimes be fooled. And perhaps, you may even take this whole episode as a future reminder the next time you’re stubbornly convinced of your rightness.
June 21st, 2007 at 2:41 am
It’s just as bed to scream fake without knowing the facts as it is to fall for some stupid email scam and forward it to all your friends without making sure it’s true.
Get the facts before you spout off that something is real OR fake.
June 21st, 2007 at 6:29 am
I cant believe Ive never seen anything of similar principle before.. I love the depth of the creation procedure, (the thought that these guys are committing such time and skill..) coupled with its eventual simplicity of just switching on a light for the final effect…I think its utterly brilliant and I’d love to see an exhibition in UK asap!!! Well done…
June 21st, 2007 at 6:32 am
Oh, to anyone who thinks these are fake….
If you’r that peturbed and cannot actually see from these pictures that they are real…
Do your own version smartass!! ;)
June 21st, 2007 at 8:23 am
All the people decrying these as fakes need to go back to youtube, where cries of `fake’ are required for every single video posted.
June 21st, 2007 at 9:02 am
I’ve seen some of these shadow sculptures at the the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. They’re extraordinary and, obviously, since I’ve seen them in person, real.
June 21st, 2007 at 10:03 am
オモシロス ﾜﾛｽﾜﾛｽｗｗ
June 21st, 2007 at 11:48 am
Iv’e been doing some simular work, but different… more abstract. My son asked if I could make shapes that looked like things (objects) “Yes” I said. So to all you nay sayers, sorry to say but if it’s not real it could be done relatively easily. In the one that looks like the same couple I’m pretty sure it is, just shot from a different angle. A lot of the stuff I do looks like it has to be edited, but I edit nothing, not even a crop. Think about it, if the shape they get doesn’t look right, they just nudge and move the stuff around until they get what they want, no errasors necassary. It’s real, I’m positive, and glad it’s not the same as my stuff.
June 21st, 2007 at 11:50 am
It’s real and spectacular. Hats off!
June 21st, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Is it just me, or do the two people in HE/SHE appear to be taking a leak….
I think the art style is amazing. I want to believe it is legitimately being created, so I will. But what is artistic about two people taking a whizz?
June 22nd, 2007 at 3:35 am
I’ve seen Tourtu Cous done some brilliant bizarre art, but this is amazing.
June 22nd, 2007 at 8:33 am
マジスゲー！
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:58 pm
It’s pathetic, why be concerned whether a simple picture is real or not? If it looks good, why not just accept it’s beauty? There’s no point in being concerned with a physical appearance in the first place; a photograph fades, a sculpture erodes, a face or body dies, but a soul if one truely exists, is eternal.
June 26th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Fake! you can’t see the spot lights + there clearly fake!!!
July 5th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
dey r simply awesum!
July 8th, 2007 at 10:00 am
They’re real. For the people at the top who said “it’s the same woman” it’s supposed to be the say woman!!! Read the caption.
These are the funniest comments I have seen for awhile. It’s hilarious! Can some of you people just accept that they are real or if not that just accept them as very creative art.
July 8th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
I thought these were so cool, that I tried to make one myself! It didn’t turn out as well though, you can’t put much detail into something much smaller. Seeing as all I had to work with was silicone as a bind, I ended up having to sit with each piece balancing it while it dried. :P
My mother posted a pic on her blog:
http://nicolerae365.blogspot.com/2007/07/shadow-art.html
July 9th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
I think its real, but even if it weren’t it is a cool expression. Furthermore I totally agree with ン when he said, マジスゲー！, ya know?
July 18th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
It’s a trip to me that almost all of the comments on this blog are related to the fakeness or authenticity of these pieces. Why are we all so interested? Why can’t we believe this can be done, when humans have flown to the moon, and project our voices and images all over the world via satellite? I wonder, instead, why more people don’t comment upon the artistic merit/impact/believability of this work. After all, it’s art, is it not? That said, my first impression is that it seems…a little gimmicky. But hey, the gimmick clearly works. People are talking about it. More power to the artists.
July 19th, 2007 at 9:47 am
It’s an amazing technical feat, but gimmicky.
July 20th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
I love the work of Fred Eerdekens, artist who plays with light and shadows in a very elegant and simplistic way, to give sens to a magma of clothing, metal, clouds. He uses very simple elements of design, and yet it has a strong impact. Playing with our expectations of what an object can and/or cannot do, artists can impress us. In his work, shadows of objects turn into words, it is beautiful, check it out!
Shadow of Objects at:
http://architectradure.blogspot.com/2006/11/shadows-of-objects.html
Also a very fun project, the shadow monsters created by Philip Worthington at the RCA. You play with your hands, their shadows transforms into monster on a projector screen. Awesome!
Shadow Monsters at:
http://architectradure.blogspot.com/2007/05/shadow-monsters.html
July 31st, 2007 at 5:04 pm
What matters not is if you think these are real or not… By deciding whether or not this is real is ruining the beauty for yourself.
August 10th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
LAME SHIT!
August 19th, 2007 at 7:41 am
SO AWFUL!!!!!!!
August 21st, 2007 at 12:15 pm
If you don’t think it’s real just check them out @: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Noble_and_Sue_Webster
August 24th, 2007 at 10:39 am
I saw them at the summer exhibition at the royal academy of arts.
They’re amazing.
October 3rd, 2007 at 6:23 pm
For all you skeptics… I consider myself a Photoshop Wizzard and I took a good hard look at these. My conclusion, is that these are authentic. Once you’ve isolated key convergent points within the trash or other materials, you can easily see what parts of the pile is generating the appropriate shadow image. Quite remarkable.
I am now speculating how it was planned….either casting super bright light against a physical shape to aid the construction process, or using a computer to plot various convergent points within 3 dimensional space (like designing the interior of a car). From there, you can scale the plotted dimentions and build a floor plan then match other points for the Y and Z coordinates. If someone did this all by hand / eye…even more amazing.
Awsome work.
You can see some of my Photoshop work at: http://creativedetailer.com/retouch.php
DCA
October 4th, 2007 at 8:49 am
Yay, a new gimmick! Well executed, but gimmicky, nonetheless.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:39 am
never seen anything quite like them
awesome!
October 6th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
This is fake… The actual shadow images come from projections behind the screen and not from the objects in front of it. Look at the second image (Dirty White Trash); you can see shadows at the front, for example under the two birds. If the image on the screen was made by projecting light on to that trash there would not be shadows under those birds…
October 6th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Artistic though…
October 7th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
the ones who think that the shadow stuff is photoshopped are wrong.
sorry but you are not as clever as you think !
because i’ve seen them with my very own eyes in an exhibition in new york, in Whitney Musuem.
October 8th, 2007 at 3:16 am
Saw this work at the Serpentine Gallery in London, 2003, in an exhibition called Play. You can walk around it and disrupt the light source. It’s for real, for real.
October 12th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Anyone who thinks these are fake is paying a great compliment to the artists but making himself look like a dumbass.
October 20th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
The people claiming that these are projected from behind are baffoons!
The shadows are on SOLID walls.
The so called shadows on the floor infont (the ones that are meant to prove it’s back lit) are a bloody REFLECTION of the real shadow cast by the sculpture.
Polished floors are very common in art galleries where these genuine sculpture are found. If any of the fake claimers educated them selves by seeing these things in reality then they would realise this.
Or maybe they look at themselves in the mirror and think “fake, it’s obviously just a projection”
November 15th, 2007 at 2:47 am
TO ANYONE WHO IS DUMB ENOUGH TO THINK THIS IS FAKE SUCH AS THE PEOPLE BELOW WHO COMMENTED ABOUT HOW SURE THEY ARE THAT THIS IS NOT REAL:
You all need to look at this fucking book: Masters of Deception and find the fucking artist on page 95-113 (Shigeo Fukuda, who also has VIDEO documentation on line of some of his sculptures: search YouTube for “Shigeo Fukuda”)
Once you have looked at the videos and book, come back here and talk again about how BAD the photoshop trickery is, loser!
December 20th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
i luv it
February 3rd, 2008 at 11:29 am
Now this is garbage made into art. Unlike ‘Piss on Christ’ which has made art into garbage.
February 6th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
I saw “Real Life Is Rubbish” in person at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I was walking through the museum and was joking that some kids were tired and sitting on the bench based on the shadow. Then, I saw the artwork. This is awesome!
March 23rd, 2008 at 9:27 pm
well they are reall if you want book sources (always more reliable these days) then look up “masters of deception” by seckel or Apocalypse by the royal art academy or “Art tomorrow” by edward lucie-smith. these pics and more are in the books and state what shows they are from and everything.
April 22nd, 2008 at 12:32 pm
that is so freakin nasty
April 22nd, 2008 at 3:53 pm
For anyone who worries that these have been ’shopped, take it from me, these are legit. I got to see one of Noble & Webster’s pieces at the Shirleys’ in Seattle. It was two piles of garbage that rotated slowly, and every two minute cycle, the shadows cast on the wall would transform to those of two faces that turned slightly to kiss. It blew my mind. Tore me between inspiration and wanting to quit art. The shadow pieces are bitchin’ and not technologically altered to appear “real”.
July 24th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
very strong impression
July 25th, 2008 at 3:33 am
This is fantastic of art!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
July 25th, 2008 at 4:50 am
John Lewis [a department store in the UK] must have used these guys for their recent adverts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g24W5pPsBts
July 26th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
they are real just done so well they look impossible…DUH!!!!!!!!!!!!
July 26th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
that shows how good they are
July 28th, 2008 at 6:31 am
Awesome creation!!!
very creative!!!
January 14th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
I hope all is going well