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New Media vs Artists with Computers
Abigail Solomon Godeau
used wood burning stoves phil pa area
gloomy sunday
For [Georges] Nöel, the ground of his paintings was as elemental as a muddy battlefield strewn with detritus: a thick, mixed-media “magma-matter,” first made with cloth and paper and then with sand and pigment embedded in polyvinyl acetate, a surface embodying chemistry’s conquest of nature. Noël covered this ground with dense skeins of marks, signs, gouges and graffiti, a method that he soon began referring to with the term “palimpsests” -- a form that his then-wife and companion, the celebrated curator Margit Rowell, referred to as “a stratification of writings. . . that blend into a single cryptic text.”
Indeed, the palimpsest is “an exemplary pictorial metaphor” for the human subject itself. For what is the modern individual but a palimpsest, an imaginary unity constituted from uncertain layers of experience, feelings, memories, thoughts, sensations?
What the volume doesn’t do, perhaps surprisingly, is reprint some of the more famous tomes of that career — absent is that originary moment represented by the discipline-warping dissertation; the polemical essays that comprised Structural Anthropology; the UNESCO-sponsored Race and History; and the symphonic four-volume series of works on mythology published between 1964 and 1971, The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners, and The Naked Man.
Why the absences? The editor of the Pléiade Lévi-Strauss, Vincent Debaene, an assistant professor in the French department at Columbia, argues in his preface that the selections represent a double refusal: It avoided the production of a “too technical volume” but moreover avoided becoming another mythological reproduction of a “manifesto of structuralism.” A selection of texts that would have played into the latter tendency, Debaene wrote me by e-mail, “would have reduced Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism to an avant-garde which has now been passed over, and the volume would have just gathered the memories of a moment of ‘French Theory’ or of European thought –– and the native Indians would have just become what they were in 18th-century thought: some remote shadows, a conceptual tool to create a relativistic stance, a fiction which would have helped us to think of ourselves and of our present.”
In “Marvels of Modernism,” the latest installment, 10 photographers have translated the design elements of 12 postwar Modernist landscapes — kidney-shaped pools, Miró-esque reservoirs, boomerang curves, floating cantilevered decks and adventure playgrounds — for the 21st century. The exhibition, which opened Wednesday, will run through Jan. 4 and then travel to museums and botanical gardens. The sites were selected from the foundation’s annual “Landslide” list of endangered places and plants, which was culled from hundreds of nominees and then vetted by a panel of designers and preservationists.
“What we’re trying to do with the Cultural Landscape Foundation is to begin to get people to recognize that the American landscape is in fact a cultural institution worthy of celebration,” Mr. Birnbaum said. Featuring works like the daunting horizon of Boston City Hall Plaza, designed by I. M. Pei & Partners, and Dan Kiley’s orthogonal Miller Garden in Columbus, Ind., designated a national historic landmark in 2000, the disparate sites are linked by the civic ambition of those who designed them.
ill come back to this. A Wrench in the Machine for Living: Frank Gehry Comes to Brooklyn
By Charles Taylor
i find gehry pretty tedious but he is not representative of all artist/architects. certainly not koolhaas. taylor gets just about everything else wrong in this article.
barbara galucci achicitectonic photographs
at sleep away camp summer 63 i wrote the joke: meanwhile back at the ranch the lone ranger disguised as a pool table racked his balls. i found record here that the joke still exists.
the gobbler - the grooviest motel in wisconsin
via zoller
a stranger in my own home town
Local and federal officials on Tuesday announced plans for a 70-acre medical campus in the heart of New Orleans to replace two hospitals damaged during Hurricane Katrina, a $2 billion investment that supporters say will create thousands of jobs and begin to rebuild the city’s shattered health care system.
One of the hospitals, to be built by Louisiana State University, would replace the city’s landmark Charity Hospital, a lifeline for generations of the city’s poor, which has been vacant since the storm damaged its lower floors. The other would replace the vacant Department of Veterans Affairs hospital, also severely damaged by the flooding. The old hospitals and adjacent buildings will be abandoned under the plan, which officials here described as the foundation for a new economy for New Orleans, and the largest investment in the area since Katrina.
big crate
via vz
too brutal and just right brutal, robin hood gardens and park hill
Since summer, daylight has bathed the galleria of the new World Trade Center, pouring through the five-and-a-half-foot intervals between its rounded steel arches and creating a modernist version of the ancient, roofless hypostyle halls of Egypt.
Luminous Views, Soon to Be Lost, at Trade Center Galleria It is a vision that the architects never intended, since the galleria — an east-west passageway connecting the World Trade Center Transportation Hub to Battery Park City — is far below street level. Workers will soon lay down steel roof decking along 250 feet of the galleria, permanently cutting it off from the elements.
During the brief time it has been exposed to raking sunlight and softening clouds, the galleria has offered a life-size preview of the transportation hub itself — a preview that has surprised even the building’s chief architect, Santiago Calatrav
Since the architect Paul Rudolph’s death, in 1997, his reputation has undergone one of the most dramatic rehabilitations imaginable, and his brutalist, sometimes off-putting buildings—once criticized as the worst of high modernism’s excesses—are now recognized as some of the most expressive American architecture of the twentieth century. They are also some of the most threatened. In 2002, in an effort to honor Rudolph’s legacy and advocate for preserving his work, friends of the architect, including Ernst Wagner, established the Paul Rudolph Foundation. But since then, seven of his buildings have been demolished, and earlier this month, in the face of mounting criticism that the foundation has not helped halt the destruction, Wagner, in poor health, announced he would resign as president. “I felt like Don Quixote,” he says, sitting in his apartment in the Rudolph-designed townhouse on East 58th Street. “But what the hell can you do? You need someone like Jackie O. to raise a huge hurrah.”
This past year has been particularly heart-wrenching for Rudolph fans: While his most famous building, the A&A building at Yale University, was rededicated this month as Paul Rudolph Hall after a $126 million restoration, both the elegantly cantilevered Micheels House in Westport, Connecticut, and his Cerrito House in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, were torn down. And next year could be even worse, as at least ten more Rudolph buildings are under threat, including the Concourse Building in Singapore, the Blue Cross Blue Shield skyscraper in Boston, and his Orange County Government Center in Goshen. In Sarasota, Florida, the campaign to save Rudolph’s Riverview High School has stalled, and the Cohen House in nearby Siesta Key is now likely headed into foreclosure.
Let’s start at the end of one story, the story of the dump, with the view from way up on top of it.
Let’s start at the peak of what was once a steaming, stinking, seagull-infested mountain of trash, a peak that is now green, or greenish, or maybe more like a green-hued brown, the tall grasses having been recently mown by the sanitation workers still operating at Fresh Kills, on the western shore of Staten Island. Today the sun dries the once slime-covered slopes, as a few hawks circle in big, slow swoops and a jet makes a lazy approach to Newark, just across the Arthur Kill. The sky, when viewed from atop a twenty-story heap of slowly decomposing garbage—the so-called South Mound, a Tribeca-size drumlin surrounded by other trash mounds, some as long as a mile—is the kind of big blue that you expect to see somewhere else, like the middle of Missouri. It’s a great wide-open bowl, fringed with green hills (some real, some garbage-filled) that are some of the highest points on the Atlantic seaboard south of Maine. Meanwhile, at your feet, hook-shaped white plastic tubes vent methane, the gas that builds up naturally in a landfill, a by-product of refuse being slowly digested by underground bacteria. The hissing of landfill gas is soft and gentle, like the sound of a far-off mountain stream or the stove left on in your apartment.
But as you look a little longer, it’s definitely not a Missouri view, and the unmistakable landmarks come into focus: a tower on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, a span of the Outerbridge Crossing, and, on Coney Island, the very top of the parachute jump. In the foreground, trucks enter the landfill, climbing the mounds and dumping clean soil over not-so-clean soil. It’s all part of a radical plan to turn Fresh Kills landfill into Fresh Kills Park, with mountain bikers and kayakers and ballplayers sharing 2,315 acres of open space with restored maritime forests, with chestnut trees dotting dry prairies, with new or revived sweet-gum swamps, maybe a fox scooting through persimmon copses or a deer through a new birch thicket.
abandoned luncheonette
abandoned police station wtf
via zoller
timberframe cabin project via materialicious
I've started on a timberframed cabin project. I'm making the parts here in Nebraska, and hauling them out to some land in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Wyoming (about a mile from the Continental Divide near Encampment) where I will assemble them into a small cabin. The site is on the edge of the Medicine Bow National Forest, and has a small stream running across it. That cabin will be where I stay and keep my tools as I build a larger cabin over the next decade or so.the above quote was from when he was just getting started and now hes pretty well finished up the cabin, so you can review the whole construction process start to completion. well done. nice project.
must listen sunday evenings on wfmu radio 91.1 fm ~ streaming online ~ archived
gaylord fields from 5 - 7 pm
monica lynch from 7 - 9 pm
honorable mention: venerable music radio online stream 78 rpm era music 247
Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour examines the turmoil that surrounded the late-1960s variety show. With a young and brash stable of writers and performers, including Steve Martin and Rob Reiner, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour brought an edgy new brand of political comedy to the airwaves for three seasons. When they were fired in 1969, brothers Tom and Dick Smothers took their network, CBS, to court ... and won. This is the fascinating, true story as told by its key players, including the Smothers Brothers, show writers Rob Reiner and Mason William, performers Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Harry Belafonte, and former CBS executives.
Guitar evanglists, singing preachers and the like....
at the hound
the endangered french cafe
Shipping Container Steel Building - Plans & Manuals CD
Shaker Stove/Built-in Closet
Rendered by John W. Kelleher (artist), c. 1938
watercolor, graphite, and gouache on paper
overall: 27.8 x 20.6 cm (10 15/16 x 8 1/8 in.)
Original IAD Object: 68" high; 17" wide (closet)
Index of American Design
1943.8.13677
science class tables via workalicious
hendrix for everyone
and lou too
jinhua-architecture-park
The Fontainebleau was gutted to the studs, its 22-acre grounds completely redrawn. Developers added three upscale signature chefs' restaurants and an enormous new beachfront spa to accommodate 1,504 guest rooms -- just under half of them suites in two new towers. Each features granite counters, walk-in showers and separate jetted tubs, flat-screen TVs and even a new Apple computer. That last part is the centerpiece of the "paperless" hotel -- meaning all guest correspondence will be electronic.
New owner Jeffrey Soffer's team, which bought the property for $500 million and shelled out another $500 million in upgrades, is also opening Fontainebleaus in Las Vegas (fall 2009), Dubai and a fourth, to-be-named location.
Though they wanted a new identity, designers strove to retain architect Morris Lapidus' original vision. For example, Lapidus' affinity for circles is clear throughout the hotel's spacious hallways, where elaborate chandeliers by Ai WeiWei, a consultant for the Beijing Olympics' Bird's Nest main stadium, hang from high-ceiling insets.
The grand lobby's original white-and-black bow-tie floor pattern was recreated out of new materials, and its furrowed columns were preserved and refurbished.
So too was the Fontainebleau's famed "Staircase to Nowhere," which historically led to a small coat room just above the lobby. Belles and beaus would take an elevator up, check their coats and descend the stairs for a grand entrance. The coat check is gone -- not a terribly sensible feature in the tropics, anyway -- but the runway remains.
alan zweibel on lopate
left wing political graphics
45 Vintage ‘Space Age’ Illustrations
via zoller
frank lloyd wright an autobiography
rubble trench foundation
The desert offered a new challenge in materials. The architect's primary solution was "desert rubblestone wall" construction, usually shortened to "desert masonry." There are many ways of acheiving this, but all involved placing large stones into forms, then pouring concrete around the stones while leaving most of the face next to the form exposed. in the Bott house (S.404) wet sand was forced between form and stone surface before the concrete was poured. In the Austin house (S.345) crumpled newspaper was used instead of sand to keep stone faces from being covered with concrete. At Taliesin West, the mortar was allowed to seep around the edges of the stone face, and surplus was the chipped away to reveal the stone surface. Often, the stone was washed with acid to bring out its color.
The Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, has opted to court controversy with plans (to be announced at a 9 a.m. press conference today) that will plant a new 90,000-square-foot, Renzo Piano-designed building just west of Louis Kahn's 120,000-square-foot 1972 masterpiece.
SOLD!
105: Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Cow (Wallpaper)
Lot # 0105
Estimates: $3000 - $4000
Start Price: $1500
Sale Title: Post-War and Contemporary Art View entire catalog
Sale Location : Lambertville, New Jersey
Sale Date 9:00 AM PST - Nov 15th, 2008
Description Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Cow (Wallpaper), 1966;
Screenprint in colors (framed); From the edition of unknown size; Rubber stamp
signature in left margin; 41 3/4" x 27 3/4" (sight); Printer: Bill Miller's Wallpaper Studio, Inc., New York; Publisher: Factory Editions, New York for an exhibition at Leo
Castelli Gallery; Literature: F. & S. ll.11; Provenance: Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; Private Collection, New York
Hammer Price $4750
108: Mike Bidlo (American, b. 1954) Not Warhol (Cow Wallpaper)
Lot # 0108
Estimates: $1500 - $2000
Start Price: $750
Sale Title: Post-War and Contemporary Art View entire catalog
Sale Location : Lambertville, New Jersey
Sale Date 9:00 AM PST - Nov 15th, 2008
Description Mike Bidlo (American, b. 1954) Not Warhol (Cow Wallpaper), 1984;
Screenprint (framed); Signed; 42 1/4" x 33 3/8" (sight); Provenance: Private Collection, New York
Hammer Price $4500
LONDON: Recession. Depression. Slump. Crash. Whatever it's called, and however severe it turns out to be, the economic crisis is bound to affect design. The question is how? Judging by design's fate in past recessions, it will suffer in this one. Some designers' clients will go out of business, and others will cut costs. Research and development budgets will be slashed. Designers' jobs will be lost, and projects scrapped. But there may be positive consequences too. Design has always coped well with austerity, and is especially well-equipped to do so now.
Kusama is a Japanese artist, a brilliant obsessive. Her work has been well regarded in the U.S. since the heyday of pop art. Christopher Burge, Christie's chairman, who was conducting the auction, coaxed the bidding up past four million dollars.
"It took a while. But I got there," he told the room, all avuncular charm, as the bidding resumed. "Four million nine hundred thousand … Five million dollars." There was an outbreak of clapping. "Five million one!"
At this, the final bid, the clapping became tremendous. There was cheering, and somebody hollered "Woohoo!" Clapping signifies that an artist's auction record has been broken, here for a work by a living female artist. The room pulsated with relief.
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Kusama’s theme is repetition. Her ‘Air Mail Stickers’ [1962], consists of over 1,000 of the post office seals pasted onto a 181.6 x 171.5cm canvas. The inexactly-executed rows and columns in the piece - which forms part of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s permanent collection - create a dizzying trompe d’oeil. Like Kusama’s ‘Infinity Net’ and polka-dot-field work, ‘Air Mail Stickers’ anticipates Andy Warhol’s use of repetition. "After Warhol came to my ‘1,000 Boat’ show, he called to ask permission to use my patterns in his silkscreens," recounts Kusama from her Tokyo studio. "But I refused. I had been working with repetition for years by that time, ever since my 1959 exhibition at the Brata gallery." Kusama leans forward and smiles, "Warhol’s repetitions came from me - But my repetitions came from my childhood."
Can we think of the resuscitation of a particular architecture style as a lazarus taxon? The term (borrowed from the field of paleontology) describes an animal that disappears from the fossil record, only to reappear again. There are some well-known examples, such as the coelacanth and the ivory-billed woodpecker [this example is in dispute]. These animals were thought extinct, but were subsequently discovered in their respective habitats. There is plenty of scholarship out there that considers how a lazarus taxon can appear to come back from the dead.
Can we apply such an idea, especially when writing and studying architecture history? The example that comes to mind is Reyner Banham's inclusion of Russian constructivism and Italian futurism in his important Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960). Prior works, such as Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), and Henry Russell Hitchcock's Modern Architecture (also 1936) exclude Russian and Italian experiments in modernism from their own polemical narratives. Siegfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture (1941) does mention Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, but placing an image of Tatlin's Tower next to the lantern of Francesco Borromini's Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza suggests an unnatural interregnum.
Imagine a graph. This graph traces the historical trajectory of a particular art form. The y-axis could be a measure of something arbitrary, something like height, weight, volume, square footage, page length .... the list can go on for ever. The x-axis is time. And somewhere at the top right-hand corner of this matrix, the trajectory plateaus. It ceases to oscillate up and down. It just continues to move forward with no qualitative change.
This is an overtly simplistic historical model, a thumbnail sketch of a thumbnail sketch. It does, however, begin to capture a controversial and provocative idea brought to light in G.W.F. Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics (1832): that art has reached its end. Hegel's so-called "End of Art" thesis does not postulate an end to the making of art, but it does suggest that art has ceased to develop. The reason for this is complicated. It is related to Hegel's idea that as art develops from material to conceptual manifestations, it grows and declines. Like the graph mentioned above, it captures the idea that art not only has a history, but it is part of a historical process.
Modern architecture has often been cast as a strawman, a volitional agent that erased all sense of historical development of the art form. It was Norman Mailer, of all people, who cast the problem in such terms for a 1964 issue of The Architecture Forum. It is an idea that still resonates. Historian Mark Jarzombek problematizes this view in a 2007 article for Footprint, where he subjects architecture's modernity to a Hegelian crucible. Jarzombek writes:Architecture begins its life as a modern philosophical project by a series of alienations and forced detachments from its presumptive disciplinary realities, realities that have enclosed and trapped it, according to Hegel, in the narrow discourse of scholarship and ideology. Though freed to engage the philosophical, architecture is denied an ongoing role in the advancement of metaphysics, has its origins in a competing artistic medium, has a philosophical history that is not related to its empirical history, and, finally, becomes architecture at the very moment it becomes no longer relevant in the dialectic of History, namely in the shift from work to miracle. In other words, Hegel makes architecture into something one can call "not-architecture": not a real building, but an "enclosure", not an ancient building, but a "sculpture"; not a free standing production, but the appearance of one, and not a miracle of representation, but a labour that ends in a mere simulacrum (2007:35).
its only a shanty in old shanty town
paper doll
aint seen nothin
In Franklin, Hyde has found a subject to give canonical voice to his own beliefs. Despite Franklin’s notorious talents of self-promotion, he was explicit that his inventions were not and should not be his to claim as property. Offered an exclusive patent on the Franklin stove, he refused on the grounds that the invention was based on previous innovations — specifically, on theories of heat and matter articulated by Isaac Newton and the Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave. “That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others,” Franklin wrote in his “Autobiography,” “we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”copyleft
Of course, you might say, this was an easy position for Franklin to take: he was rich. People need their copyrights to live. But that’s exactly Hyde’s point: copyrights are utilitarian things. They generate money to pay a mortgage and buy groceries and continue working. Extended too far beyond their practical usefulness, copyrights not only contradict their original intent; they also wall creators off from the sources of their inventiveness. Genius, Hyde believes, needs to “tinker in a collective shop.”
karmann ghia magazine articles
thin wood stock for parquet floor ribbon edge detail
the longhorn ballroom dal tex
(file under beer barn)
House Industries Letters & Ligatures
via reference library
The name "Spork" is a blend of the words (sp)oon and f(ork) and has also been called the runcible spoon (mentioned by Edward Lear in his 1871 poem "The Owl and the Pussycat"). A spork is a eating utensil that can be used as both a spoon or a fork.more at spork wikipedia with addl links to : Spife, Splayd, Grapefruit spoon, Pastry fork, Runcible spoon and Knork
The celebrated British graffiti artist Banksy also parachuted into New Orleans, posting his light-hearted graphics at public spaces around the city. Call me cranky, but the one that remains, a silhouette of a girl with a wind-blown umbrella (off a salt container?) painted on the concrete levee, strikes me as a bit too blithe.
A local art vigilante, dubbed The Grey Ghost, seems to agree, for he has painted out most of the other Banksy graffiti, along with any other graffiti he can find, with swathes of neutral gray paint. The late Minimalist Donald Judd is said to have done the same thing when his building in SoHo was hit by graffiti.
The Stamford store is one of 12 Lord & Taylors designed by Andrew Geller, Loewy's in-house architect. Geller's grandson, Jake Gorst, met with the president of National Realty & Development Corp., John Orrico, in October, but failed to convince him to preserve the building. Orrico's letter to the state Historic Preservation Officer last summer said, "There is a small group that is opposing this project, and I believe that, in their effort to try to block us, they are using [the state historic preservation] office as a pawn."
The Keith Haring Foundation, Goldman Properties and Deitch Projects announce the recreation of Keith Haring’s celebrated Houston Street and Bowery mural. The mural became an instant downtown landmark after Keith painted it in the summer of 1982. The mural was up for only a few months in the summer of 1982 before it was painted out but its image remains imprinted in the memory of many people who were part of the downtown artist community in the early 1980s.
The mural is being repainted by Gotham Scenic using the extensive photographic documentation of the original work. The work will be unveiled on May 4, 2008 the day that would have been Keith Haring’s 50th Birthday.
the big schnabowski - doesnt he know that this project and the other decorating endeavours devalues his "A"rt? and the meier slagging, defensive much?
“Julian is an aesthetic omnivore,” said Dodie Kazanjian, who covers the art world for Vogue and is the director of Gallery Met at the Metropolitan Opera; she toured Chupi a few weeks ago. “Everything he touches becomes a Schnabel. So I looked at it” — Chupi, that is — “like another piece of art.”
But in the neighborhood, there are lingering resentments. “It’s woefully out of context and a monument to this guy’s ego,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, one of the neighborhood groups that fought to block Chupi’s construction. He has called the building “an exploded Malibu Barbie house.”
“The biggest thing we took away from all this,” he continued, “is that the system is somewhat broken. Developers have the opportunity to break the law and beat the clock on rezoning and the public has little recourse.” (In response, Brian Kelly, a musician and old friend of Mr. Schnabel’s who managed the project for the artist, said, “We played by the rules and didn’t seek any favors.”)
“Personally, I adore it,” said Paul Rudnick, the novelist and playwright, who lives across the street and watched the “landing” of Chupi with great interest. “It’s in the grand tradition of Manhattan white elephants, which make you wonder, Who lives there, and why? It’s already a landmark. And it’s much more in the tradition of the West Village, which is supposed to be outrageous and theatrical, than all those glass towers. When the transsexuals left it seems they were reincarnated as real estate,” said Mr. Rudnick mistily, referring to the professionals who used to line the streets here. “At least the Palazzo does them proud.”
living with plants via spirit surfers
A brief history of the "clenched fist" image
FEMA TRAILER A, B, C's
A) FEMA paid more than 2 billion on travel trailers for disaster relief after katrina and rita.
B) hundreds of gulf coast residents have filed law suits claiming that the trailers have made them sick due to high levels of formaldehyde.
C) FEMA is paying aprox 115 million a year to store 120,000 trailers at 21 locations. fema refused requests to deploy them after ike and they wont sell them despite having received numerous offers.
the hound remembers hank ballard
Also in the 1880's there was a family in Lower Manhattan who owned a lot of hotels. Each hotel was named after a son. Albert Pinkham Ryder, a famous painter, had the good fortune to be born to them and not many of the crazy artists in the HOTEL ALBERT realize it is named after him.
Artists, writers, filmers and rock groups on the way up stay at the CHELSEA HOTEL on West 23rd Street. The damaged and the losers on the way down stay at the ALBERT HOTEL on University Place in the Village. Chelsea is uppers; the Albert is downers. Coke in the penthouse; smack in the ghetto. I live a yo-yo life.
After a few economic disasters I had to move to the Albert with my main woman Valerie Herouvis. Fluxus Jerry Benjamin, Bruce the Jeweler, Mad Marie, Rene Ricard, Diane DiPrima, Louise the Lesbian, Maggie Morphine, Suzy Sniff and Yoko Ono.... We all knew each other from the streets and Max's Kansas City restaurant. Some people got so fucked up the "Albert" is on the way UP for them. Einstein wasn't kidding when he thought up the theory of relativity. We never could have had the Twentieth Century without it.
modern home philadelphia
Abramovic – plus hunky sculptor boyfriend – lived in a huge, virtually empty loft, the sole furnishings being a dining table and chairs in the very centre of the room and a spindly old stereo from the 1960s. The space was probably a hundred feet on either side – ‘major real estate, of course’, as Sontag proudly explained to me. (She loved using Vanity Fair-ish clichés.) She and Abramovic smothered one another in hugs and kisses. I meanwhile blanched in fright: I’d just caught sight of two of the other guests, who, alarmingly enough, turned out to be Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. Reed (O great rock god of my twenties) stood morosely by himself, humming, doing little dance steps and playing air guitar. Periodically he glared at everyone – including me – with apparent hatred. Anderson – elfin spikes of hair perfectly gelled – was chatting up an Italian man from the Guggenheim, the man’s trophy wife and the freakish-looking lead singer from the cult art-pop duo Fischerspooner. The last-mentioned had just come back from performing at the Pompidou Centre and wore booties and tights, a psychedelic shawl and a thing like a codpiece. He could have played Osric in a postmodern Hamlet. He was accompanied by a bruiser with a goatee – roadie or boyfriend, it wasn’t clear – and emitted girlish little squeals when our first course, a foul-smelling durian fruit just shipped in from Malaysia, made its way to the table.
Everyone crowded into their seats: despite the vast size of the room, we were an intime gathering. Yet it wouldn’t be quite right merely to say that everyone ignored me. As a non-artist and non-celebrity, I was so ‘not there’, it seemed – so cognitively unassimilable – I wasn’t even registered enough to be ignored. I sat at one end of the table like a piece of anti-matter. I didn’t exchange a word the whole night with Lou Reed, who sat kitty-corner across from me. He remained silent and surly. Everyone else gabbled happily on, however, about how they loved to trash hotels when they were younger and how incompetent everybody was at the Pompidou. ‘At my show I had to explain things to them a thousand times. They just don’t know how to do a major retrospective.’
True, Sontag tried briefly to call the group’s attention to me (with the soul-destroying words, ‘Terry is an English professor’); and Abramovic kindly gave me a little place card to write my name on. But otherwise I might as well not have been born. My one conversational gambit failed dismally: when I asked the man from the Guggenheim, to my right, what his books were about, he regarded me disdainfully and began, ‘I am famous for – ,’ then caught himself. He decided to be more circumspect – he was the ‘world’s leading expert on Arte Povera’ – but then turned his back on me for the next two hours. At one point I thought I saw Laurie Anderson, at the other end of the table, trying to get my attention: she was smiling sweetly in my direction, as if to undo my pathetic isolation. I smiled in gratitude in return and held up my little place card so she would at least know my name. Annoyed, she gestured back impatiently, with a sharp downward flick of her index finger: she wanted me to pass the wine bottle. I was reduced to a pair of disembodied hands – like the ones that come out of the walls and give people drinks in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.
Sontag gave up trying to include me and after a while seemed herself to recede curiously into the background. Maybe she was already starting to get sick again; she seemed oddly undone. Through much of the conversation (dominated by glammy Osric) she looked tired and bored, almost sleepy. She did not react when I finally decided to leave – on my own – just after coffee had been served. I thanked Marina Abramovic, who led me to the grungy metal staircase that went down to the street and back to the world of the Little People. Turning round one last time, I saw Sontag still slumped in her seat, as if she’d fallen into a trance, or somehow just caved in. She’d clearly forgotten all about me.
credit crunch crushes MoMA’s houses of the future
Over the next 15 years, FBI agents closely tracked the grand and mundane aspects of the acclaimed novelist's life, according to previously confidential government files. Agents questioned his friends, scoured his passport file, thumbed through his best-selling books and circulated his photo among informants. They kept records on his appearances at writers conferences, talk shows and peace rallies. They noted the volume of envelopes in his mailbox and jotted down who received his Christmas cards. They posed as his friend, chatted with his father and more than once knocked on his door disguised as deliverymen.
Then the agents headed back to the office to file multiple copies of long reports stamped CLASSIFIED and SECRET and SUBV. CONTROL, apparently referring to a program to watch suspected subversives.
jersey city pride
Lopate: Not to get us too depressed, but can we talk about ground zero?
Huxtable: The first piece I wrote predicted what was going to happen. People thought I was clairvoyant. No, I’d just been watching the city for a long time. We all knew! The strange thing that came along was this small group of bereaved families, who really knew how to operate, and who did not speak for the rest of the group at all, but who began to roll over the politicians.
If there’s anything a politician will roll over for, it’s this kind of grief. After all the good things they vetoed or interfered with, cultural institutions like the Freedom museum because they were worried something unpatriotic might be exhibited there, they now have this memorial, and nobody has any concept how overscaled it is. A huge memorial, and these profit-making towers. Daniel Libeskind’s original architectural inspiration has been stripped away, and the developer, Larry Silverstein, got everything he wanted.
It is a horrible failure, as far as I’m concerned. We missed the chance to make a 21st-century Rockefeller Center.
a certain apartment on a certain bucks county farm
earth pigments
English Heritage yesterday announced a grant to save arguably the most horrible building it has ever attempted to rescue, the sprawling Victorian hulk of Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, which housed the equally ramshackle geniuses who broke Germany's second world war codes.
"English Heritage isn't only concerned with great architectural set-pieces," its chief executive, Simon Thurley, said, announcing a £330,000 grant for urgent repairs, one of the largest such grants ever made by the organisation, on what he called "a fascinating group of buildings".
Sir Francis Richards, chairman of the Bletchley Park Trust, said: "It is hideous, but one can develop a fondness for the place. This grant comes in the nick of time; the roof is at its last gasp."
lot of 970 steam paving machine images on ebay
hollis frampton preview
mary heilmann club chairs
frank stella untitled 1956 mix
Rothko was trying to revive the idea central to modernism - that art can shatter our assumptions. His Seagram murals remain the most challenging art in Tate Modern - because they demand your time, emotion, thought and commitment, only to throw these things back in your face, confronting the mind with a wall, a terminal chamber.
not pollock
not pollock
marilyn
cow
not cow
And architecture had Eliel and Eero Saarinen, the Finnish father-son duo who revolutionized the way people thought about buildings in the Modernist boom after World War II. Their plans for nine buildings at Drake University, which borrowed more elements from boxy factories than columned academia, identified the school as "a forward-looking, modern university that was committed to innovative design," according to Maura Lyons, who curated a new show about the architects that opens next weekend in the Anderson Gallery.
The first time I met Enzo Mari, he was giving a talk at the Serpentine Gallery in London. It turned out to be more of a rant, as the great Italian designer railed scornfully against his pet hates. Design - dead. Architecture - dead too. Western civilization - ditto. Spotting the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas among the audience, he denounced him as "a pornographic window dresser."
Afterward I asked Mari if there was any aspect of contemporary life that pleased him. A lengthy silence followed, until he said: "Bread and terrorism." Why terrorism? "Why not?" snorted Mari. "People think it's bad, but if they thought about it, they'd realize it isn't all bad. It changes things."
If Brad Cloepfil's new Museum of Arts and Design were simply another white box for art, it would be just plain mean not to give it a decent grade. It's humanly scaled, nicely detailed, and allows light to flutter into the galleries through strategically placed horizontal and vertical slits. Visitors get intimate bird's-eye views of Central Park and Columbus Circle, along with congenial spaces to contemplate art. It's a conscientious if unspectacular effort.
Yet it's impossible to forget that this decorous little tower was once something flamboyant, fun, and maybe even a little foolish, a swinging '60s art museum designed by Edward Durell Stone for the eccentric heir to the A&P fortune, Huntington Hartford.
Cloepfil and his team at Allied Works Architecture literally wrapped their new museum around the concrete bones of Stone's white marble folly. But they failed to exorcise its ghosts, and now they hover in eternal reproach. It feels as if all the idiosyncrasies were focus-grouped out of the place.
barny is a nasty little shit. just like his dad
Thirty years ago photography was art if it was black and white. Color pictures were tacky and cheap, the stuff of cigarette ads and snapshot albums. So in 1976, when William Eggleston had a solo show of full-color snapshotlike photographs at the august Museum of Modern Art, critics squawked.you know there are two schools of thought on this.
Shirley concurs. “He calls me up every now and then, asks how I’m doing, and I say, ‘Good,’” she says, fond but firm. She is pleased to own an Eggleston photograph at home and proud of his success, but, like the Lamp’s regulars, her feelings for her famous neighbor are complicated. “I like Bill, but he can’t come in here. Will you be sure and tell him I said hello?”his "pub crawl" documentary stranded in canton is excerpted here on you tube.
enjoy more of his work at eggleston trust website
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As I made my way through the 152 booths, I thought about the moment in Titanic when the designer of the doomed luxury liner warns Kate Winslet to find a lifeboat because "all this will be at the bottom of the Atlantic." When I tried this idea out on attendees, several said I was "a buzzkill." I asked, "Isn’t the buzz already beginning to disappear?"moo moo >squeeeek clank< (sound of barn door closing)
If the art economy is as bad as it looks -- if worse comes to worst -- 40 to 50 New York galleries will close. Around the same number of European galleries will, too. An art magazine will cease publishing. A major fair will call it quits -- possibly the Armory Show, because so many dealers hate the conditions on the piers, or maybe Art Basel Miami Beach, because although it’s fun, it’s also ridiculous. Museums will cancel shows because they can’t raise funds. Art advisers will be out of work. Alternative spaces will become more important for shaping the discourse, although they’ll have a hard time making ends meet.
As for artists, too many have been getting away with murder, making questionable or derivative work and selling it for inflated prices. They will either lower their prices or stop selling. Many younger artists who made a killing will be forgotten quickly. Others will be seen mainly as relics of a time when marketability equaled likability. Many of the hot Chinese artists, most of whom are only nth-generation photo-realists, will fall by the wayside, having stuck collectors with a lot of junk.
Rothko No.43 (mauve) fails to sell
"crepuscular atmosphere"
malevich sold for record $60 million
HF on ZH
Theory and Design in the First Machine Age Reyner Banham
HF: Well look, I think avant-garde culture historically needed a fairly confident bourgeoisie--not just to shock--but there was a way in which the bourgeoisie wanted to be tested too, wanted to see its values worked out another way.
BC: As Gombrich said they wanted a 'crunchy diet'.
HF: (Laughs) I think, you know, the classical idea of the avant-garde that we have now, of these extraordinary movements in Paris, they required a bourgeoisie that was informed enough to press them--the artists. I think there was a way in which a version of this relation is all that's needed. That's what I don't see. It doesn't come from the States, it doesn't come from a few rich people. I think there is enormous withdrawal from contemporary culture, just in general, for all kinds of reasons in the States. So those old conditions of avant-garde culture have to be replaced by other ones. Whatever the other conditions are they're never particularly happy--there's too much state; not enough; too much private interest; not enough. These are all in there by default. By default of a self-critical bourgeoisie.
PS: Presumably we're talking about a notion of the avant-garde. Something that one wants to bring with this notion is the idea of political change. Not simply a new set of artists who happen to be the ones who get discussed in all the articles for a while. You want something that's more 'radical' for want of a better word.
HF: Yeah. The avant-garde, again, is this term that in the past articulated the artistic and the political. I don't think that necessarily you go seek out the political in this neighbourhood or that province. I don't think it's ready-made in any community. I think sometimes it happens in form. I'm modernist enough to believe that you can still be political within the materiality of your own work.
PS: Well in a sense it has to be in terms of art practice, that's what it must be surely. Otherwise it's just politics layered on.
HF: Yeah, like it's illustrational. There's a lot of problems: there's theory illustration, there's political expressionism. There's lots of problematic formulations it seems to me right now. Maybe the pressure to form all these things together in work that is also innovative in its own terms is too much to ask.
BC: The grand unification theory of the avant-garde.
HF: I don't think that's a grand theory--it can't be guessed beforehand, I think it happens.
PS: But that's a very different position from a modernist position of De Stijil or some sort of group like that, where they're trying to make the future happen in a certain way.
HF: No, that's beyond us, thank God.
BC: You're talking about the rediscovery of past artworks. I think there's an industry about destroying people's reputations, but even just re-readings. One is constantly surprised though by the facts. I remember finding out that Jackson Pollock's tutor was Thomas Hart Benton. Early on you'll see Pollock making these big floats for political demonstrations with stereotypical capitalist effigies. Then again you have this thing that when the state did intervene in the arts in America with the WPA, that gave rise to this massive grouping which was then again taken up by the state through the Congress for Cultural Freedom and all that: it was done twice. Is that what you long for?
HF: (Laughs) Not exactly. I don't see the early work of Pollock as that divorced from the later work. For me there's not a huge divide between those moments in Pollock. There is a moment where the political, the aesthetic and the institutional come together in the work. It's obviously canonical, classical now, but there's a way in which Pollock really knew where painting was at that moment. He saw that innovation in form could also be political in the sense that there was still enough of a structure to old ideas of painting that if they were messed with, that would have political ramifications. I think it did, liberating ones at least. That's an example, obviously a very privileged one, but I don't think it's unique and I don't think it will never come again.
BC: It's fundamentally presented as some kind of aesthetic leap, as if it's some sort of scientific breakthrough. If you look at his work, OK he does break, but he's also coming back to something, it's still drawing.
HF: But not at that time. Smithson is another example of a person who 'leapt' in this league, gathered up all these different forces in ways that could not be expected. Those are two heroic examples, I think you could find humble ones too.
LF: The thing about photography and the use of attempts at justification through the use of a painterly language: Pollock talking about drawing or anything else can be as much about a sense of justification--in the same way that photography went through, and still is.
BC: But it's also very, very hyped. That film he made, the Time magazine article. And it's the same with Duchamp and the urinal: who took the photograph?--Stieglitz. Who's show was it?--Stieglitz's, he put up the money. Duchamp even wrote the 'scandalous' article. What did he set up afterwards? The Société Anonyme--taking all that money from little old ladies and ambassador's wives (laughter). I'm not condemning it, don't get me wrong, I'm drooling with jealousy. But there has to be these readings too.
HF: (Laughs) Oh sure.
BC: Lets not get too romantic about it.
HF: Oh I'm not romantic about it at all. That's what I meant about my longing for a proper bourgeoisie. It may sound absolutely perverse but...
PS: It's like Hegel's master slave dialectic, you need a bogeyman to have an avant-garde.
BC: Well look at those Yves Klein photographs, the ones with the naked women and that extraordinary audience.
HF: Yeah, there was a great moment when Benjamin Buchloch, in October, a long time ago, reproduced the image of Klein's audience with Malevitch and Lissitzky and students headed to Moscow, and this very different sense of a practice collective etc. His whole deal, Benjamin's, was a before and after: this is real collectivity and this is spectacle. But there's a way in which this is true. That's his story--of massive precipitous decline, you know. I think the other way is to see other possibilities. I think it's important to be grim, as grim as possible, but there's always possibilities.
PS: Because if there weren't presumably culture really would be sewn up by the powers at be.
HF: Yeah and we can all go home.
frank stella 1958
In sum, if Beckett made us “wait for Godot” in his 1956 U.S. premiere, Stella made us wait breathlessly for his next chess move after Morro Castle. We propose that the stakes were much higher than deciding whether Stella best fit the Greenbergian or Minimalist camp. There was, we believe, another layer that Stella could not himself confront at the time. He took us to the edge of a dark abyss. And then he recoiled. What would soon emerge were works that offered more “certitude and joy” — paintings more Matisse than Beckett in feeling. But what a magnificent moment of black doubt Stella shared with us in 1958.
"its about nothing..."
RK: I hate visual culture.
SR: You hate visual culture?
RK: In fact, October magazine, which I coedit and cofounded in 1976, recently did a special issue that was an attack on the visual culture project. Like cultural studies, visual culture is aimed at what we could call pejoratively, abusively, deskilling. Part of that project is to attack the very idea of disciplines which are bound to knowing how to do something, certain skills. Obviously, in French literature you would to be able to read French very well, not just modern French but Medieval French. In art history there are also skills, like connoiseurship, and at least some slight knowledge of conservation.
Once you decide, as does cultural studies, that these disciplines themselves are retrograde, you are bound to attack them in the name of a kind of super discipline for which the original model was comparative literature. When complit started, it required more rather than fewer skills. But when it began to be the center of what now is called theory, it increasingly became an enterprise in which all works are read in English (including the theoretical texts themselves), and it is now a very different project from the original one. And out of that project of comparative literature has come cultural studies which is involved in an attack one disciplines and therefore what I believe to be a massive deskilling of student. I think ultimately (and this is the really paranoid part of it) that many university administrations would like to get rid of the departments. The separate faculties in universities have a great deal of power which the administration would like to usurp.
SR: Well, I understand that a university might want to undermine the power of individual departments to better control them, but I don't really see how that works. It seems to me that most of these changes are being driven by faculty, not the administration.
RK: Although I'm certainly not talking about Harvard, administrations are often very happy to form "programs," like a program in cultural studies, or women's studies. Now you generally think those programs come from the left of the spectrum of possibilities, but they're not always from the left; they're also, as in Medieval studies, from the right. Such programs are not part of the faculty structure, and when the administration pushes to have faculty members head these study programs, those appointments often fall between the faculty or even outside it completely. Then those budgets and those people become directly beholden to the administration. We tend to think of it as a good thing, that it's about a radicalization of the disciplines, that it's been about getting rid of the apparatus that has been the intellectual support for various authoritarian projects. I think that is a self-defeating fiction and I think that it's dangerous.
SR: It really surprises me to hear you say this, because when I think of your writing and the writing in October, it seems that your work may have fostered and supported many of these changes both in art history and even more broadly. This is why I was puzzled by your distaste for the "paranoid scenarios," which I had always thought you were instrumental in bringing to the discipline.
RK: I certainly have been involved in critiquing certain controlling ideas that have been the ways of forming objects of study. For example, the work I've done on Jackson Pollock has been involved in trying to show that to continue to think of Pollock as a biographically contained subject who is a volitional agent is a benighted idea. For me, the only way to think about Pollock is through the sort of force field that was warring over his interpretation. That's an example of a sort of "death of the author" theory, and that's not a "paranoid scenario."
When I say "paranoid scenario," I have certainly participated and even formented various ways of attacking what Michel Foucault called the unities of an epistemological field that work in terms of a set of unified objects. I believe that some of those unified objects dissolve as you begin to look at them. So it's not as though I'm resisting new departures in art historical method, but I suppose I feel very strongly that that kind of critique is powerful and productive when it's conducted within a discipline, when a discipline renews itself. So what I have against "visual studies" is the project of getting rid of the disciplines. People say "film studies, what's that?" or "art history, jene connais pas." That's just forgetting about the fact that there are certain skills involved in both the fabrications of certain objects and the unpacking of those objects.
SR: Well, I think it's important that you clarified the distinction between carrying out your critical project, or any critical project, within a discipline, as opposed to dismantling all the disciplines and regrouping them under a different rubric, like women's studies.
RK: I think a lot of first generation feminists are deeply disturbed that while they had certain skills and commitments to literary texts, they realize that their students and certainly the students of their students don't have the same knowledge or skills. And then these feminists are wondering what the point of the critique is anymore. So, this unease that I'm expressing is not unique to me or to a few people; I think it's fairly wide spread.
SR: I would contend that feeling is shared by students, too.
RK: I think that students are particularly bored by the "paranoid scenarios." I suppose Harvard students are really voracious for learning and the problem with "paranoid scenarios" is that once you've said it, it's very hard to develop very much. It just gets repetitive. I mean once you expose patriarchy then what? Any way, I know this is all very shocking stuff, but...
SR: Actually I don't think that it is very shocking, because the comment you just made about first generation feminists worrying that their students wouldn't have the tools or the commitment, but a feminist scenario, comes across a lot in your work. In terms of feminism, I'm thinking of your book on the photographer Cindy Sherman, because you not only identify the feminist scenario, what is being signified, but you ask how it's being signified...
Trustees at the Tate Gallery turned down 21 paintings by the American artist Mark Rothko in the late 1960s which could now be worth as much as $1 billion (£630 million), according to notes written by its late director. Rothko was in talks with Sir Norman Reid to bequeath 30 works to the London gallery, but in the end Tate took only nine, according to The Art Newspaper. Now it has emerged that the abstract artist, who painted vast canvases of reds, mauves, blacks and greys, "touched on the possibility of giving all the paintings to the Tate".
andy pool
Warhol understood that fame is a social fig leaf on personal vacuousness. Peyton thinks it is the fullness of being, showing how shallow her understanding of celebrity is compared to Warhol’s. His awareness that fame dies -- thus the fame of his death imagery -- was his way of debunking it. Peyton blindly embraces it, not knowing it is the kiss of death. Thus she is the victim of fame rather than its master, like Warhol. He made the famous jump through his photographic hoop, like animals in a circus, while Peyton adores and pets them, never realizing, as Warhol did, that they are beasts one doesn’t dare get close to. Peyton cozies up to her human subject matter, while Warhol coolly stares it down, for he knows that it is just another matter of social fact, and he knows its secret vulnerability.
a change is gonna come
via lisa
20 abandoned cities world wide
via zoller
best grass roots container project to date by kathy tafel via justins materialicious
rip yma sumac ( apparently not amy camus from long island after all )
If you liked WFMU's RNC Remix in 2004, you're going to love what we've got in store for Election Day. While our normal Tuesday programming airs online and over the airwaves, we'll be running a separate webstream to appease our most politically-obsessed listeners. WFMU's Electile Dysfunction '08 features political music, comedy, commentary, and audio art. And when the first polls close at 6pm, we'll bring you live election returns coverage hosted by Chris T., Billy Jam, Clay Pigeon, and Evan "Funk" Davies. The full schedule is after the jump.
kapt kopter
The cinder-block house, completed in 1959, was built on a steep hillside overlooking the Potomac River in McLean, Va. Its 2,500 square feet of living space are contained in a structure that appears solid from the front but on the inside reveals its spectacular view through 80 feet of floor-to-ceiling windows. By the time the Mardens reached old age (Luis died in 2003, and Ethel, now in her late 90s, lives in an assisted-care facility), the house was badly in need of repair. And, given its desirable site, it was a sitting duck for someone who wanted to tear it down.
But an unlikely white knight happened to live next door. James V. Kimsey, a philanthropist and the founding chairman of America Online, had recently completed an enormous and expensive house for himself — he refers to it wryly as “a monument to wretched excess” — when he bought the Mardens’ house in 2000. He had no interest in living in the diminutive structure but saw its potential as a guest house and a place for parties. “I thought of making alterations,” he recalled, “but people told me not to. It wouldn’t be a Frank Lloyd Wright house anymore, they said.”
Pollock and Placement
Recommended: Brian O'Doherty review of Victoria Newhouse's book on reading artworks through their surroundings, particularly how singular works look when placed in different museums. (Hat tip JWS.) Newhouse's test cases are the famous Laocoon-and-snakes statue, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and forty years of Pollock exhibitions.
The article seems especially germane to this post of Paddy Johnson's. An obviously fake Pollock (would he ever make dominant whitish lines that hesitant or obvious? no, he wouldn't) seems even faker with a self-professed hater of abstract art standing next to it, gesturing towards it like a carnival barker.
filed under: general - tom moody