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The paintings exhibited here in the gallery represent the first works in which Buren started using a pre-printed fabric to express his vision. Up until this point, the artist had been painting colored shapes, specifically stripes, on various fabrics and colored bed sheets. In September of 1965, while in a Parisian market, Buren found different kinds of commonly used pre-printed striped fabrics, including one with alternating white and colored stripes. Buren realized this was the perfect medium in which to create his work, reducing his paintings to their simplest visual and physical elements and ridding them of allusion or subjectivity. Each stripe has a standard width of 8.7cm and was limited to the colors green, yellow, blue, red, orange, brown, and black interspersed with equidistant white bands. Given these standardized limitations, Buren varied the size and proportion of the canvases. He would then apply white painted lines or scalloped patterning at the edges of these canvases to differentiate his work from a readymade. The artist was able to break down the paintings to the very basic components of the work – a partly painted surface, a support and its surroundings.
In 1844, the missionaries in Mangalore, who knew a little about weaving business, took the initiative and started a weaving industry to give employment. Local weavers were also employed to train young boys. The looms of Basel Mission at Mangalore were pioneering and it was because of master weaver, John Haller that Khaki got its global recognition.
However, there is an interesting reference to the birth of Khaki. Sir Henry Lumsden, who was stationed in India in 1846, dyed his cotton pajamas with a plant extract, mazari, to create a uniform more suitable to the climate than the traditional red felt issued at the time. Its tawny color, similar to the region's saffron dust, helped the clothing to blend in with sand. The term 'Khaki' comes from the Hindi and Urdu word for 'earth' or 'dust-coloured' .
Lumsden commanded a British army unit in the Punjab. The uniform at that time included resplendent white trousers worn with red tunics. He began wearing pajama bottoms, primarily to find a more comfortable alternative to the trousers in the tropical Punjab heat. The pajamas were of a lighter material and less tightly fitted.
To disguise them somewhat, he decided to colour them with a dye that would blend in with the local terrain. He decided to use mazari, a native plant. Lumsden soon realized that his new uniform has another advantage than just comfort. His new Khaki uniform trousers were more suitable in battle than the very conspicuous white pants and red tunic. There were real advantages to being able to blend in with the terrine.
John Haller, a trained European weaver, introduced in 1851 the first handloom with fly shelter cottage industry in Mangalore. He also invented new dyes and colour out of indigenous ingredients. The invention of Khaki dye is attributed to him.
Lord Robertson who visited the weaving establishment was recommended the newly invented Khaki for the British army uniform the world over. The factory was the most important work of the Basel Mission started in the district in 1865.
Haller set up a laboratory and began experimenting with methods for dyeing and weaving fabric. He began to market Khaki and eventually the fabric was adopted by the British Armed Services as the material for uniforms for their troops around the world. Haller expanded production by importing twenty-one looms from Europe, thus upgrading the weaving industry from a cottage industry to a small manufacturing industry.
He experimented with the sap of the bark of the semecarpus tree, and here found the colour that came to clothe the marching men of many nations.
More than four decades into his career Frederick Wiseman remains the most prominent invisible man of American documentary film. His movies offer no voice-over, no talking heads, no graphics or intertitles: in other words, none of the cues and signposts we have come to expect from nonfiction films. Mr. Wiseman, who turns 80 in January, has likened his approach, to “getting rid of the proscenium arch in the theater.” This dictum applies even when his subjects are on an actual stage, as in “La Comédie-Française,” his 1996 study of that venerable repertory company, and his latest film, “La Danse,” another French cultural immersion, this time with the Paris Opera Ballet.via kc
—until one audience member pointedly read out the advertised copy for the talk, which promised a discussion of the fate of modernism and modern art history. A round of applause followed. Krauss bit back by declaring that she wasn’t saying farewell to modernism just yet, and Bois admitted he didn’t believe in postmodernism. The fireworks finally arrived when someone from the Open University asked if the book was meant as a riposte to the OU’s own textbooks on twentieth-century art. Krauss tried to unravel their different understandings of modernism and theory and the implications of each for pedagogy but concluded: “Those OU books are inept and confusing, voilà!” The session finished up with an assessment of how important it is that the fab four are also critics. Krauss: “My conviction that Richard Serra is the greatest living artist affects my art history.” Bois gave an ironic thumbs-up to the audience—voilà indeed.
-y-a b "...irony is a crude tool." (pdf warning)
mid century modern diy furniture books at populuxe books
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things
Not everybody can live on a secluded parcel of land in the Hollywood Hills. But for a long time, Shulman's potent images helped convince Southern Californians that their goal should be to live in a single-family house with a private garden somewhere -- even if it were to be built by companies like the Irvine Corp. on property a lot more than two miles from Hollywood Boulevard.via things
For all those reasons, the documentary operates, however indirectly, as a long proof in support of what might be called Shulman's Law of Unintended Consequences.
Shulman's best photographs undoubtedly qualify as art. But he was very much an artist for hire, and his work was in nearly every case patently promotional, as he was happy to admit. What remains out there, waiting to be tackled, is the question of what, in the broadest sense, he was promoting -- and what the runaway success of that effort has meant for architecture and for Los Angeles.