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HF on ZH


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Theory and Design in the First Machine Age Reyner Banham


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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.

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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.

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"its about nothing..."


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modernism/modernity


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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...

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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".

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andy pool


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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.

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a change is gonna come

via lisa
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20 abandoned cities world wide

via zoller
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best grass roots container project to date by kathy tafel via justins materialicious


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rip yma sumac ( apparently not amy camus from long island after all )


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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.

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kapt kopter


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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.”

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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

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halloween divotional


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While Dan Rice slapped brushloads of rabbitskin glue onto the cotton duck canvas, further loads would slop down, warm and pungent, on his head and shoulders. Mark Rothko teetered on a ladder above, heavy as a bear and notoriously cackhanded, rushing his handiwork so that the two of them could cover the entire stretch of fabric before the size cooled. Moving on to another canvas almost nine feet high, the workers might swap places, with Rice getting to rain down on Rothko. The residues that ran off them as they showered afterwards would have been tinted maroon: as a personal variant on standard procedure, Rothko liked to feed pigments into the pan on the hot plate, as his sheets of glue dissolved. That way, the stretched canvas would have a character – a complexion, at least – from the very outset, even before the two of them applied similarly coloured resinous primers to support the upper layers of brushwork. A complexion, a disposition, a bias; this object that Rice had hammered together for him, out of wood and coarse cloth bought at an awnings supplier on the Bowery, would bristle with an inbuilt material resistance.

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Before Pop there was Abstract Expressionism. From September 26, 2008 to February 1, 2009 the Tate Modern in London will be presenting a major exhibition of the late work of Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko including, for the first time, 14 of his Seagram murals.

Achim Borchardt-Hume (curator of the Tate Modern's Rothko exhibition):

This is the first exhibition to examine Rothko's late work from 1958 to 1970 in greater depth... One of the highlights of this exhibition will be a large gallery dedicated to the Seagram murals bringing together for the first time 14 murals including Tate's nine murals - the first time ever since they left Rothko's studio really. This exhibition could only happen at the Tate in this current shape as Tate has nine of the Seagram murals which were specially selected by the artist and because of their condition are generally not lent... It's just because of the unique nature of this exhibition that we agreed to bring these works together so it will really happen once and that will be it." (http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/markrothko/exclusivevideo.shtm)

Mark Rothko's Seagram murals were originally commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram building in New York. But after Rothko visited the restaurant he backed out of the project, angrily commenting "Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine." (http://www.warholstars.org/abstractexpressionism/timeline/abstractexpressionism59.html)

The murals were eventually distributed to various museums. The Tate ended up with nine of them. They arrived at the Tate Gallery on February 25, 1970 - the same day that Rothko's body was found on the kitchen floor after he committed suicide. (http://www.warholstars.org/abstractexpressionism/timeline/mark_rothko.html)

Pop art, relying on figurative imagery, was the antithesis of Abstract Expressionism. Whereas Warhol often utilized "found" imagery in his paintings, Rothko used abstract forms and colour - although he denied being an "abstractionist" as recalled by Selden Rodman in his book Conversations with Artists.

Mark Rothko: "You might as well get one thing straight... I'm not an abstractionist."

Selden Rodman: "You're an abstractionist to me... You're a master of color harmonies and relationships on a monumental scale. Do you deny that?"

Mark Rothko: "I do. I'm not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else."

Selden Rodman: "Then what is it you're expressing?"

Mark Rothko: "I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on - and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!" (Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (NY: Capricorn Books, 1961) pp. 93-4)

Despite his denial of being an "abstractionist" Rothko and other Abstract Expressionists had fought hard over several decades for public acceptance of abstract art - through exhibitions, protests and writings. When Pop reared its figurative head in the early 60s, Rothko saw it as a step backward rather than forward. When Sidney Janis presented many of the Pop artists (including Andy Warhol) in his 1962 exhibition, "The New Realists," Rothko, along with Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston and Robert Motherwell, resigned from the gallery. Guston's daughter Musa Mayer recalled that "Overnight, it seemed, the art world changed. My father was in despair over the selling of art, over the slick, depersonalized gloss - not only of Pop Art, but of Minimalism as well - that was taking center stage in New York. Art was no longer struggle; art had become marketing." (http://www.warholstars.org/abstractexpressionism/timeline/abstractexpressionism62.html)

Ruth Kligman recalled that when she attempted to introduce Rothko to Warhol when she and Warhol ran into him on the street, Rothko walked away without saying a word. Warhol (via Pat Hackett) also recalled attending a party given by Yvonne Thomas, where Rothko was one of the guests during the early sixties. Marisol, who was with the same gallery as Warhol, brought both Warhol and Robert Indiana to the party. When they arrived Warhol overheard Rothko say to Thomas, "How could you let them in?" Thomas replied, "But what can I do? They came with Marisol." (http://www.warholstars.org/abstractexpressionism/timeline/abstractexpressionism63.html)

Despite their aesthetic differences, Warhol and Rothko do have one thing in common. They are the only American artists with paintings on the list of the "10 most expensive paintings sold at auction."

The Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern and the Warhol exhibition at the Hayward this autumn are both rare chances to see the work of two modern masters of their respective art movements - Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Both exhibitions are not to be missed. (Specific details of the Hayward's Warhol exhibition will be posted here when confirmed.)
via warhol stars
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inverted jenny

stamp


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Axis Company presents EAST 10TH STREET: SELF PORTRAIT WITH EMPTY HOUSE, a new play by and about Downtown performance icon Edgar Oliver and directed by Randy Sharp. This look at a life on the fringes of New York's Lower East Side comes on the heels of what could be Oliver's breakthrough role in the upcoming film from Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess, Gentlemen Broncos (opposite Sam Rockwell), as well as a national advertising campaign for mobile phones in Ireland that has become a cult phenomenon.

In EAST 10TH STREET: SELF PORTRAIT WITH EMPTY HOUSE, long-standing, downtown theatre icon Edgar Oliver takes the audience on a fantastic voyage through the strange rooms of the apartment house where he has lived since his first years in New York. Inhabiting the dark, mysterious halls of an East Village tenement building are a dwarf Cabalist, a possible Nazi, the landlord's former wet nurse who apparently lives in a nest of rags, and many other memorable persons. Edgar leads the audience up to the final room, his own, at the top of the derelict stairs, wherein lie the secrets of his own family and the unbelievable odyssey that brought him there. This incredible cast of characters illuminate the sad, funny, brilliant and deeply personal story.

Georgia native Edgar Oliver started performing in New York at the Pyramid in the mid-1980's alongside artists including Hapi Phace, Kenbra Pfahler, Samoa and playwright Kestutis Nakas. As a playwright, many of Oliver's plays have been staged at La MaMa and other downtown NYC theatres, including The Seven Year Vacation, The Poetry Killer, Hands in Wartime, Motel Blue 19, and Mosquito Succulence. As a stage actor, he has performed in countless plays including Edward II with Cliplight Theater, Marc Palmieri's Carl the Second, Lipsynka's Dial M for Model, and numerous productions at Axis including A Glance at New York (Edinburgh Festival & NYC), Julius Caesar, USS Frankenstein, Hospital, and Seven in One Blow. Edgar is also one of the most beloved story tellers at The Moth. His film roles include That's Beautiful Frank, Henry May Long (directed by Axis' Randy Sharp) and Gentlemen Broncos. His published works include A Portrait of New York by a Wanderer There, Summer and The Man Who Loved Plants (published by Panther Books).
via vz
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ELECTION NIGHT SPECIAL - SLEEPOVER AT STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE To mark the closing of the White House Redux exhibition, Storefront will hold an all-night election vigil in the gallery with live a large-screen CNN projection, 5 cable news channels, blogging stations and wi-fi for blog reading (and writing). The event, organized in association with Control Group, will continue until the 44th President of the United States is announced. Everyone welcome! Event begins 6pm. Drinks will be provided while they last - BYO food and sleeping bags. Coffee and croissants from Ceci Cela will be served at 7am.

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