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At the booth of Pan American Art Gallery in Dallas were some Silver Clouds by William Cannings, clearly based on the ones Andy Warhol made in 1966. Instead of being filled with helium, Cannings’ clouds are made of metal and hang on wires. Gallery director Cris Worley explained that Cannings, an Englishman who now lives in Lubbock, makes the things out of "inflated aluminum" -- welding together sheets of metal, heating the resulting object in a kiln and then inflating it. The clouds are $750 each.
After learning of HUD's request in the early 1970s, Thomas Konen, an alumnus of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, informed the school and wrote a proposal for the project with Dr. Daniel Savitsky, professor emeritus of ocean engineering.
"[HUD] wanted to limit it to a university rather than contract it out to some company," said Savitsky, who accredits much of the planning and success of the "Big John" project to Konen, who has since passed away.
Over the five-year operation, the 44 fully functional toilets [four on each floor] were flushed in cycles by a computer system in order to determine the effect that the different combinations would have on the centralized drainage system.
"We would sometimes flush them all at once," recalls Savitsky. "We called it the 'Royal Flush.' "
the nyt discovers rat rods
a while back i heard someone compare the younger rockabilly scene to renaissance fair drag. i have to agree that the whole fantasy lifestyle concept thing is pretty silly. they also missed the point that barn paint (the rusty deterioriated paint condition that the host car was found in) is the real deal and that matt black primer is a distant second in paint choices.
hat tip to adman
HOPE, Ark. (AP) -- Nearly 10,000 emergency housing trailers that were intended to be sent to the Gulf Coast to help Hurricane Katrina victims have been freed up for other uses.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency parked the trailers at Hope Municipal Airport in the months following the hurricane. The agency came under criticism when the trailers sat empty.
FEMA officials said that regulations against placing the homes in flood plains prevented their use on the Gulf Coast.
On Friday, Congress approved a homeland security spending bill that included a provision allowing FEMA to sell or donate the trailers to municipalities, nonprofit groups or American Indian tribes.
Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., said he would prefer that the homes had gone to hurricane victims as originally intended, but selling or donating them to cities or community groups was better than letting them sit unused.
''Allowing the homes to sit and deteriorate at the airport is an abuse of taxpayer funding and should not be an option,'' Pryor said in a statement.
Pryor and Rep. Mike Ross, D-Ark., sponsored the measures in their respective chambers before the provision went to a conference committee. Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., added the option to convey the trailers to Indian tribes to house the homeless.
''I am proud that the 9,778 fully furnished manufactured homes sitting in Hope, Arkansas, may finally be put to good use,'' Ross said. ''These are the kind of commonsense solutions the American taxpayers expect and deserve.''
FEMA was directed to work with the Department of Interior to transfer the trailers to tribes, depending on need.
Indian housing has been a problem for decades. According to a 2003 survey, an estimated 200,000 housing units are needed immediately in Indian country and approximately 90,000 Indian families are homeless or ''under-housed.''
The Homeland Security Department's inspector general has said that U.S. taxpayers could be stuck with a maintenance bill of nearly $47 million a year for thousands of trailers that sit parked at sites around the country.
the boxing mirror
john zorn: genius grant
its in alphabetical order so youll have to scroll (but you knew that). the summer of the first year i moved to new york city (82?) i saw zorn perform several times. he was using (playing) various duck-calls blown in to a shallow bowl of water seated at a card table. GENIUS!! seriously.
the next year we started an east village gallery at 104 e10th st. i comissioned a show called "works in concrete" that was devoted to visual writing or concrete poetry work on paper. it included a whole bunch of people related to the local avant garde film scene. some nyu film students we knew took classes with abigail child whos extended crowd included word and concrete poets henry hill, chas burnstein, etc. also zorn, who was a fave for film soundtrack purposes. we included a bunch of his xerox street advert show flyers done in the ransom note cut and paste stye. Genius!
1) didnt we determine mr hirst intentionally botched the pickling process to make it rot on purpose a la' "bad boy"?
2) did we know about saatchis skinning and stuff job?
3) hirst the richest man in the uk?
But as a result of inadequate preservation efforts, time was not kind to the original, which slowly decomposed until its form changed, its skin grew deeply wrinkled, and the solution in the tank turned murky. (It didn’t help that the Saatchi Gallery added bleach to the solution, hastening the decay, staff members at Mr. Hirst’s studio said.) In 1993 Mr. Saatchi’s curators finally had the shark skinned and stretched the skin over a fiberglass mold.
“It didn’t look as frightening,’’ Mr. Hirst recalled. “You could tell it wasn’t real. It had no weight.’’
[...]
Mr. Hirst acknowledges that once the shark is replaced, art historians will argue that the piece cannot be considered the same artwork. “It’s a big dilemma,’’ he said. “Artists and conservators have different opinions about what’s important: the original artwork or the original intention. I come from a Conceptual art background, so I think it should be the intention. It’s the same piece. But the jury will be out for a long time to come.’’
teenage bob dylan tape surfaces with three songs
screwed in jersey city
After an arduous 21-month journey, the Mars rover Opportunity edged close enough to the rim of a large crater yesterday to send back its first photos of the bottom and rocky sides of the dramatic site. What they showed left researchers increasingly confident that their robotic explorer had reached a scientific gold mine that will dramatically increase their understanding of the planet's history.
NASA scientists said the rover came within about 15 feet of Victoria Crater's rim and was scheduled to climb over a small sand dune last night and stop right at the crater's edge.
pushpullbar2
is where i found this container house thread and this yellowstone river cabin thread.
Designer Ross Stevens needed a place to stay when he was working in the city, and came up with a site backed up to a sheer rock face that seemed impossible to build on. He stacked a couple of old shipping containers against the rock and his vision began to take shape. Now he has a stunning modern home featuring a designer look complete with a 40-foot waterfall, all on a shoestring budget.
from the fab prefab container bay message board
hows your bird?
did not reach minimum on this group of neptune crossing images
under-sink dishwasher
At the beginning of the 20th century, Black Tom was an island converted into a mile-long pier built on landfill that connected the area with the rest of Jersey City.
Its position, and the design of the courtyard itself, emerged from several days that Mr. Ando and Mr. Serra spent working together on a model of the building. But their accounts of that experience differ. Mr. Ando recalls that “we discussed the design of the architecture thoroughly together, without any compromising.”
Mr. Serra said: “I was able to tell Ando and prevail in terms of the kind of site that I needed, the kind of wall, the height of the wall I wanted, the design of the wall, the space I wanted, the kind of ground I wanted, where I wanted the windows, the length of the windows and the height of the elevation of the steps.” He added, “It was a real give and take.”
Whatever the case, Mr. Sugimoto was captivated, and he photographed the sculpture at dawn and at dusk for five days. “It was amazing,” he said. “Even though it was a small structure, if I moved just a few inches, the composition changed. I could come up with a hundred different compositions easily.”
Mr. Sugimoto gave the photographs serial numbers from his architecture series, and glimpses of Mr. Ando’s building are sometimes visible in the background. “But for some reason the sculpture dominated,” Mr. Sugimoto said. “In this case I think Ando lost and Serra wins. The sculpture looks more architectural to me than the architecture, so what’s the difference?”
Mr. Serra first saw the photographs of his work in the winter of 2004, at a private viewing at Mr. Sugimoto’s studio arranged by the Pulitzer Foundation. Mrs. Pulitzer and Matthias Waschek, the foundation’s director, had begun to plan a book of Mr. Sugimoto’s photographs and wanted Mr. Serra’s blessing if not his collaboration.
Accompanied by his wife, Clara, Mr. Serra began selecting photographs that he found “of interest” and arranged them in different sequences. But, Mr. Waschek recalled, he just as quickly backed off.
Mr. Serra said: “It’s his work, it’s not my work. It’s his idea of how to translate my sculpture into his work, it’s not my idea of how to translate my sculpture into his work, or how to translate my sculpture into photography, which I don’t do anyway.”
Mr. Serra did suggest a writer for the text to accompany the photographs in the book: Susan Sontag. “I wanted her to look at the photographs and look at the sculpture, and write something in relationship to the idea of photography in relation to sculpture in relation to architecture in relation to photography,” he said.
Mr. Sugimoto and Ms. Sontag were also friends, and she visited the Pulitzer Foundation. Because of her declining health, however, she was unable to write anything. She died in December 2004.
Mr. Sugimoto meanwhile had already asked Mr. Foer, whom he had met years earlier, to write the text. On his first visit to Mr. Sugimoto’s studio, Mr. Foer brought a copy of the book “A Convergence of Birds,” which he had edited, an anthology of original poetry and fiction inspired by the small dioramas of Joseph Cornell, and they had talked for hours.
“That was a major problem for me,” Mr. Sugimoto said, “Serra’s side pushing me to kick Jonathan out, and asking Susan Sontag to step in.”
Mr. Foer — who said that Mr. Sugimoto’s photography “makes me want to write a novel” — was eager to avoid any acrimony. “I would have chosen her over me,” he said.
Mrs. Pulitzer preferred not to have a critical text. “Our building has been described as a gesamtkunstwerk, and that’s what we hoped to create with the book: a kind of parallel creation, where the book itself, the photographs and the text were all works of art that reinforced each other.”
Later in 2004, Takaaki Matsumoto, a graphic designer in New York who specializes in fine art books and who has designed nearly all of Mr. Sugimoto’s books since the early 1990’s, began creating a sequence of the photographs. Mr. Foer began writing his prose poem, which loosely follows a man named Joe through his life, including falling in love with his wife, the birth of his child and his old age. The text corresponds to specific photographs, although the connections can be elusive, and the chronology is elliptical.
By contrast to the style of his novels, Mr. Foer’s language is spare, in response to the abstraction and minimalism of the photographs. “I wouldn’t have written that on my own, and I wouldn’t have written that for somebody else’s photographs or for other photographs of Hiroshi’s,” he explained.
Mr. Sugimoto traces that spareness to the lack of any human presence in his photographs, pointing especially to the appearance in the poem of a dog whose owner was mute, and who “never heard its name, so it didn’t have a name.” Many of the photographs were taken from a very low angle — a dog’s eye view, he said.
But Mr. Serra was less pleased with the text. He takes umbrage at the character’s being called Joe.
“Even though it’s supposed to be fictional, the guy is called Joe, and the sculpture is called Joe,” he said. “And the sculpture evolves out of the personal relationship over a 30-year period with somebody who is a close friend. And then we’re supposed to glean some understanding of who the man was or what the sculpture was? It evaded me.”
Mr. Foer never met Mr. Pulitzer, and he deliberately avoided going to St. Louis to see Mr. Serra’s sculpture. The journey “would have been belittling to the photographs,” he said. “The idea of having to see something in the flesh is in a way to demean them. The photographs are the flesh. They are the real thing.”
Mr. Serra disagrees, in a way. “I always think that photography in its essence robs something from sculpture,” he said. Sometimes, he allows, the interaction can be fruitful, but only if the artworks are seen as a series of responses rather than collaboration, a one-way conversation.
Based on the concept of a sponge, Holl’s brainchild attempts to reproduce the “porosity” of the marine body on a grand scale. Accordingly, his design includes five imposing openings that serve as main entrances, view corridors, and outdoor activity terraces. Other openings act as the building’s “lungs,” “bringing natural light in and moving air up.” These lungs include spacious common lounges that are specifically designed to encourage human interaction and, according to author Yehuda Safran, transform the building into “a social condenser in the true sense of the term.” The building’s surface is also saturated with windows, which accentuate the sponge motif.
The CCA’s exhibit is unique in its representation of Holl’s structure. Though glossy photographs of the building are printed on the museum walls, the CCA does not replicate the pompous, technical depictions presented in architecture magazines, which lavish Holl’s award-winning project with praise.
Instead, “Inside the Sponge” presents the residence from an insider’s perspective, provoking a somewhat anomalous response: laughter. A slew of student films and folders filled with accounts of pranks, comic strips from MIT’s student newspaper The Tech, and pictures of students’ favourite hide-outs show visitors that the avant-garde building remains, after all, an undergraduate dorm. And while the materials exposed in the solitary exhibition room – a baffling hodgepodge of binders and Simmons memorabilia – are limited in scope, the CCA offers an accessible gaze at the expensive building of an elite institution: a commendable exercise in demythification.
While critics questioned the conceptual unity of the building, “Inside the Sponge” reveals that students were busy shooting film clips, which ended with tongue-in-cheek equations such as “number of windows in Simmons Hall = 5.538 x 103 = a lot of little curtains.” Reflecting on the porosity of the building, a student in a lab coat who presents himself as Prof. Dan says, “Everywhere they can see outside, they can hear outside, but they can’t get outside…except through this door.” As a commentary on the project’s price tag, (a hefty $120-million, making it the most expensive residence hall ever built in the United States), Prof. Dan directs the viewer’s attention to “this amorphous blob of building’s ceilings,” telling us to observe them carefully as we are, after all, witnessing “several million dollars of ceiling.”
The description of student pranks is probably the most entertaining feature of the exhibit. The story of the “hack” who hung a banner onto the roof “adorned with [Simmon Hall’s] affectionate nickname ‘Waffle House’” is particularly amusing – as is the anecdote about a fleet of yellow rubber duckies’ sporadic nocturnal invasion of Dan Graham’s Yin Yang art installation pavilion.
is art a cat, dog or gym coach?
Art is often political when it doesn't seem political and not political when that's all it seems to be. Neither Andy Warhol nor Donald Judd made overtly political art. Yet both changed the way the world looks and the way we look at the world. That's because art creates new thought structures. Imagine all the thought structures that either would have never existed or gone undiscovered had all of Shakespeare been lost. Art does far more than only meet the eye. It is part of the biota of the world. It exists within a holistic system.
Those neo-Cartesians are aholistic. They are art world fundamentalists who fervently believe in their one theory and quote the same 17 texts by the same 17 authors (almost all of whom they have only read in translation) to repeatedly prove the same points. It's time for them to turn the page, clear out or concede that all art is a theory about the way art should look and that every painting ever made comments on and is a theory about all the paintings ever made. As Darwin said, "It's not the survival of the strongest or the most intelligent; it's the ones most adaptable to change."
The closest I've come to getting a handle on all this is something painter Eric Fischl has talked about. Imagine calling two pets, one a dog, the other a cat. Asking a dog to do something is an amazing experience. You say, "Come here, Fido," and Fido looks up, pads over, puts his head in your lap and wags his tail. You've had a direct communication with another species; you and Fido are sharing a common, fairly literal language. Now imagine saying, "Come here, Snowflake" to the cat. Snowflake might glance over, walk to a nearby table, rub it, lie down and look at you. There's nothing direct about this. Yet something gigantic and very much like art has happened. The cat has placed a third object between you and itself. In order to understand the cat you have to be able to grasp this nonlinear, indirect, holistic, circuitous communication. In short, art is a cat.
petit barn / i resisted but the inverted 18th-c empty gin bottle transom finally got me.
Steven McDonald of Redd Kross will stop by The Cherry Blossom Clinic (91.1 wfmu) this Saturday at 3 PM to spin some records and share some tales from his band's long and storied career. He'll be town with the rest of the famed psych/power-pop/glam/punk/bubblegum group's "Neurotica"-era lineup for some live dates. Sure to be a blast!
ric burns andy warhol / tonight and tomorrow night on 13 - doesnt promise to be the ultimate take on AW ~ but we will give it a try