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"Here's a neat idea for a new television series. Let's get the public to nominate the six vilest books in the English language and in the grand finale, they get to burn them live on camera. No, we haven't come to that yet, but later this year, Channel 4 is offering us the next best thing. Demolition is a four-part series that promises as its climax the total destruction of a major piece of architecture. Or as Nick Kent, the executive producer, puts it: 'The final night of the series will see a spectacular celebratory demolition of one of the nation's nastiest eyesores.'"
Two works of Steven Parrino shown recently in Europe (Milano, Italy and Dijon, France) bring back home thoughts on that 20th century thing called abstraction.
Blob Fuckhead Bubblegum, a big ball of pink painted canvas (100 yards) tightened with duct tape, and Aluminum Clouds (Crush), for Drella (by the way, kiss my ass you wigged corpse) or Lost Hope and the End of Painting, which consists of a number of small bundles of silver painted canvas also held together with duct tape, seem to be an appropriate response to today's confusing pluralism in the arts. Painted monochrome canvases unattached and rolled into bundles clenched with tape - look like what you would do if you wanted to throw away some large, failed paintings. Of course, Steven Parrino didn't get rid of them, he is showing them.
By taking his paintings off the stretcher, rolling them into balls and putting them onto the floor, he is redefining a debate on the conventions of painting and that affair of the integrity of the picture plane. By destroying the surface and the shape of his canvases, he makes his paintings become a kind of sculpture, or more exactly something that is "neither painting nor sculpture." Because of the radicality of his gesture, he also sends the old debate about flatness or the problem of the canvas's outer edge to the dustbin of history.
We know that painting will not die (Philip Taaffe) or that it already died and we can't get rid of its corpse (Sherrie Levine); Parrino himself poses the situation: why not engage in some necrophilia?"
Of course, unstretched material has been seen before (antiform, Support-Surface, Sam Gilliam and others), but here the violent and aggressive dislocation of the picture seems to mark for painting something close to the end of the road. Maybe the only way you can pay attention to the surface of the picture is by destroying it ("Everybody kills the thing he loves").
Parrino's aggressivity in his work and his titles should be welcomed at a time when contemporary art is attacked directly (by certain members of the Congress and Senate) or indirectly (The New York Times, "The Jabberwocky of Art Criticism." Sunday, October 23, 1995). Of course what is really under attack is precisely those progressive attitudes like Parrino's that tend to question the nature of art.
Olivier Mosset
BOMB Summer 1996, No. 56
2004 top ten
1 - wfmu top ten list
2 - andrea fraser from walter robinson's top ten list
3 - red states come out
4 - sherry levine continues to do mediocre work
5 - richard prince continues to do mediocre work (spot trend?)
6 - mediocre shipping container houses hit the nyc art scene and get a mediocre review in architects news paper
7 - frank lives in a drat hole on dave's page
8 - selma actually knows about art and architecture
9 - terminal five show from tom moody's top ten list
10 - my show of a ten year old piece (my first 1000 wrenches) in lori bortz's garage, a studio visit by bob nickas and palemale starts rebuilding his nest
addendum : bbca starts broadcasting trailer park boys south of the border
bootlegs
richard prince the second house
the science between earthquake and the sunami's landfall
clay house via houses of the future
relief housing
case study bird houses
thanks to linda
casa jobin
By JOAN LOWY
Scripps Howard News Service
December 28, 2004
- Bird lovers are worried that one of the world's most high profile construction projects - a 1,776-foot tall office tower being erected on the site of the former World Trade Center in New York - will turn out to be a giant death trap for birds.
The Freedom Tower is expected to be the world's tallest building when it opens in 2009. Plans call for the building to be enclosed in glass, wrapped on the outside with steel cables for support, and crowned with radio towers and wind turbines to supply electricity. Computer generated images on the Web site of the building's developer, Silverstein Properties, show a graceful, brightly illuminated skyscraper.
But scientists and bird enthusiasts say more than a billion birds are killed every year in the United States by slamming into windows or circling lights atop skyscrapers until they are so dazed and confused that they crash.
"Everything that could possibly be bad for birds about a building they are doing," said Rebecca Creshkoff, 47, an avid birdwatcher and member of New York City Audubon.
The Audubon Society and New York New Visions - a coalition of 21 architecture, planning, and design organizations that came together after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that destroyed the trade center to advise on the rebuilding of lower Manhattan - have warned the project's architects and Silverstein Properties that the new building could prove especially deadly for birds.
"We've made them aware of the problem," but developers "are not under any obligation" to adjust their projects for bird safety, said Margaret Helfand, an architect and founder of New York New Visions.
Janno Lieber, Silverstein Properties' project director, said the company has hired a bird consultant to assist in designing the tower.
"In addition to our broader environmental approach, we are investigating a number of strategies for making the new buildings at the World Trade Center bird-friendly," Lieber said in a brief statement supplied in response to an inquiry.
Construction of the project began this year. The first three years of work are expected to take place below ground.
The trade center towers, among the world's tallest buildings before their destruction, were also particularly dangerous for birds, Creshkoff said. After complaints from bird lovers, the Port Authority, which managed the buildings, helped reduce the problem by turning off lights atop the towers during spring and fall migrations, she said.
"I feel an obligation to do something because if you don't work to protect what you love, what meaning is there in life?" Creshkoff said.
On the Net: www.silversteinproperties.com
www.nycaudubon.org/home/
fmuers post top tens for two thousand and four
sound exchange (get yours)
death as metaphor
holy smokes bullwinkle! i got an air port connection waiting here at the ft lauderdale airport
Bisazza was established and maintains its headquarters in the northern Italian city of Vicenza, which Palladio also called home. Founded by Piero's father, Renato Bisazza, in 1956—a time when the fortuitous combination of craft tradition with postwar industrialization put Italy at the vanguard of contemporary design—the company developed mass-production processes that moved ancient Venetian glassmaking in the direction of a modern mosaic industry. In addition to classic glass mosaic mounted tesserae-style on paper or mesh, Bisazza produces specialty tiles like Oro, featuring 24-karat gold leaf sandwiched between vitreous layers, and Gemme, which incorporates avventurina, a synthetic stone developed in 17th-century Venice that creates a glittering, jewellike effect.
so-fla vernacular: trailer home w/ "florida room" addition
autopen
Dear a-matter reader: After exactly five years, a-matter is coming to an end as a successful project of Sedus Stoll AG. In concrete terms, this means that no new information will be published on this platform and that editorial work has stopped. a-matter, however, will continue to be available as a library. You will continue to be informed of architectural matters and projects concerning Sedus Stoll AG. The last update is given below.
"If you look back to the founding document of the 60's left, which was the Port Huron statement (also promulgated in Michigan), you will easily see that it was in essence a conservative manifesto. It spoke in vaguely Marxist terms of alienation, true, but it was reacting to bigness and anonymity and urbanization, and it betrayed a yearning for a lost agrarian simplicity. It forgot what Marx had said, about the dynamism of capitalism and ''the idiocy of rural life.'' Earlier 18th- and 19th-century American communards had often been fleeing or preparing for a coming Apocalypse, and their emulators in the 1960's and 1970's followed this trope as well, believing everything they read about the impending crash, or the exhaustion of the world's resources. The crazy lean-to of the Unabomber began to take dim shape at that period, even if many of the new pioneers were more affected by the work of the pacific Tolstoy or of C. Wright Mills (who used to recommend, if memory serves, that people should build their own cars as well as their own houses)."