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steinberg at the morgan


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marc newson gagoisian pieces


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This is the fertile territory explored by Professor David Edgerton of Imperial College in his new book, The Shock of the Old. In it he eviscerates our obsession with novelty. It's time, he argues, to look at the history of science and technology in a new way. It's blindingly obvious, really. Instead of recording the history of when devices and processes were invented or predicted, why not look at the way we really use things?

I find him in Buenos Aires for Christmas - he was born in Uruguay, of an English father and Argentine mother. He knows that Fray Bentos is a real place, not just a brand of corned beef. And not just a real place, but a remarkable example of 19th and 20th century industrialized food production whose scale and efficiency - without need even of refrigeration - rivals anything in the world today. Our shops are still full of such canned food, an alternative, older technology we never stop to think about.

We are both alive to the irony of the fact that, in an online age, we are talking to each other by telephone, a 19th century invention. I mention the fact that outside my window is an ancient wooden pole sprouting copper wires in a way the Victorians would have recognised, and that our words are passing through it. 'Ah yes,' he shoots back, 'But you'll find that the wires have changed, the exchanges are different. It's like today's airliners. They're no faster now than they were in the 1950s, but they're more efficient'.

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At the moment when Pablo Picasso shook up the art world in 1907 with his painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — considered to be the first Cubist painting — there was a contingent of Czech artists working in the French capital. A number of these Czech artists were ignited by the Spaniard's discoveries and quickly conveyed the movement eastward, turning Prague into Cubism's "second center." Then something remarkable happened: Czech artists translated the French-born style not only into paint and bronze, but also into brick, concrete and stone, creating the world's first — and only — Cubist buildings.

The exhibition introduces the primary players in Czech Cubist architecture, along with the best-known Cubist buildings, some lesser-known examples, and some designs that never made it off the drawing board. In the center of the room are architectural models of four choice buildings, and there is additionally a small selection of Cubist decorative art.

Leading the procession of Czech Cubist architects is Pavel Janák, who broke away from the established Mánes Association of Fine Artists to become a founding member in 1911 of the more avant-garde Group of Artists and start the magazine Artistic Monthly. His influential essay, "The Prism and the Pyramid," published the same year, is translated into English in the book accompanying the exhibition. Janák also holds the distinction of being the first to complete a Cubist building, the Jakubec house in the central Bohemian town of Ji?ín in 1912.

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