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OTHER children had teddy bears and dolls; but Karlheinz Stockhausen had a little wooden hammer. As he toddled round the run-down family farm in the hills near Cologne, he would hit things with it to see what sound they made. Each note, he established young, sent him a different message. No plink or plunk was quite the same as any other.
Most folk at his premières in the 1950s and 1960s might have wished he had never discovered that. Each Stockhausen piece was a shock to the system. It was not just that he had decided tonality was dead; Schoenberg's 12-note serialism had already made dissonance routine. It was not just that he thought “intensive measuring and counting” the key to music's future; Stravinsky had got there long before him. It was that Stockhausen kept on looking for, and finding, sounds never heard before. He made a formula out of the individuality of notes—their particular pitch, timbre and duration, and whether they were soft as a leaf or knocked your hat off—and revelled in it in the most alarming way.
new @ ubu
Art of Field Recording: Volume I : 50 Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum
Ike Turner, whose role as one of rock's critical architects was overshadowed by his ogrelike image as the man who brutally abused former wife and icon Tina Turner, died Wednesday at his home in suburban San Diego. He was 76.
not gordon matta-clark at gav-bro
Just as there is more to art than pretty pictures, there is more to art books than gorgeous illustrations. When the art and architecture critics of The New York Times were asked to choose their favorite books of 2007, their selections included a collection of essays on the museum in the age of globalization, two pessimistic studies of the modern city, a volume of poetry and an anthology of ugliness. But rest assured: the list still includes plenty of provocative, powerful and just plain knockout pictures, from Rembrandt's soulful noses to Martín Ramírez's visionary paintings.
This is not design as feckless consumerist novelty. This is design as lightweight sheet metal and welding. Catenaries, stampings, pressings. And more welding. It's not highfalutin' theory, it's horny-handed practice. It's Jean Prouvé at The Design Museum: the first exhibition of this singular individual with a line so hard it makes Le Corbusier appear an effeminate dilettante. This is what industrial design was meant to be: tough and uncompromising.
There is a marvellous photograph of Prouvé and his family on holiday in the Fifties. They are all on board a rugged American jeep, beaming as if demented with pleasure. Strapped to the sides of the four-wheel-drive, a forest of metal tent poles. Working in metal and designing light, portable structures or rational furniture was Prouvé's lifelong vocation, as inflexible as his material. He liked to be photographed not only with cars but also with lathes and, naturally, welding tools.
Never mind that there is a nagging question about the links between Prouvé's version of Modernism and the energetically exported cultural colonialism that got the French into so much trouble in the twilight of their imperium, at home and abroad Prouvé furnished the institutions of state. In 1931 the Societe des Ateliers Jean Prouvé made, for example, the furniture for the University of Nancy. In 1939 he designed portable barracks for the French army. Readers of Tintin in Tibet (1960) will be familiar with Prouvé's 'Visiteur' chair (1948). In 1967 he was credited as 'ingenieur' on de Mailly's and Depusse's Tour Nobel at La Defense, France's first commercial high rise: he designed its ambitious metal curtain wall. In 1971 Prouvé was on the jury that chose Richard Rogers' metal design for the Centre Pompidou.
But Mr. Reynolds' time has come. Dozens of his hippie houses are recognized today as the ultimate in recycling — for using garbage as insulation within their walls.
All of this is told in the documentary feature film Garbage Warrior, which played at this fall's Vancouver International Film Festival. And his house designs are shown in the timely exhibition 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas at Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture, which documents architectural responses to 1970s oil crisis.
Soon after the newly minted architect moved from Ohio to the sunny southwest, Mr. Reynolds tried embedding discarded car tires in walls; the rubber proved a more efficient insulator than straw. He soon found an even better insulation material: polycarbonate water bottles. Emptied of Evian, they are laid empty and capped, in rows like wine bottles, their ends sealed in wet concrete that forms walls.
For a warm but high-altitude climate like New Mexico's, these bottle walls provide all the insulation needed. The designer then experimented with bottles filled with water that would soak up solar heat during the day, then radiate it back out during cool desert nights.
When some of his increasingly well-heeled clients objected to the use of plastic in their walls, he substituted multi-coloured glass bottles lifted from landfills. The walls glow like stained glass windows, and their reuse saves the energy that would have been expended to melt them down for recycling.
After years of reading puff pieces about the coming of the "Hypersonic Soundbeam," a device designed to send targeted blasts of sound waves that can be heard only be selected recipients in an audio environment, it has apparently made its debut in the public sphere, right here in New York. As part of a billboard marketing campaign for a television show.
A&E has placed a billboard (on Prince St. between Mulberry and Mott) that shoots sound waves designed to resonate against your head, giving the passerby a distinct feeling that the advertisement is arising from within their skull. The television show is is about ghosts, so that means this is a witty kind of progressive marketing stunt and not just totally fucking creepy, right?
art news flash: skulls are out spider webs are in
big wheel keep on turnin'
black plywood shingle house from:
arkinetia
via zoller
hardware store display
Two lavish new books, New York Noise: Art and Music From the New York Underground and No Wave, trace the highs and lows of this short-lived scene, proving along the way that downtown—conceptually speaking—was less about geography than the importance of staking out one's cultural identity and artistic autonomy.
*excludes the comics in low-scoring cartoon issue
If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What’s the Original?“I never associated advertisements with having an author.” a cute rejoinder but i find this quote a tad disingenuous. i wish prince was more articulate in his discussion of open source subjects and that as targets of assault advertising we in turn own it and freely repurpose it. back at ya!
By RANDY KENNEDY, NYT
Published: December 6, 2007
Since the late 1970s, when Richard Prince became known as a pioneer of appropriation art — photographing other photographs, usually from magazine ads, then enlarging and exhibiting them in galleries — the question has always hovered just outside the frames: What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?
Recently a successful commercial photographer from Chicago named Jim Krantz was in New York and paid a quick visit to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where Mr. Prince is having a well-regarded 30-year retrospective that continues through Jan. 9. But even before Mr. Krantz entered the museum’s spiral, he was stopped short by an image on a poster outside advertising the show, a rough-hewn close-up of a cowboy’s hat and outstretched arm.
Mr. Krantz knew it quite well. He had shot it in the late 1990s on a ranch in the small town of Albany, Tex., for a Marlboro advertisement. “Like anyone who knows his work,” Mr. Krantz said of his picture in a telephone interview, “it’s like seeing yourself in a mirror.” He did not investigate much further to see if any other photos hanging in the museum might be his own, but said of his visit that day, “When I left, I didn’t know if I should be proud, or if I looked like an idiot.”
When Mr. Prince started reshooting ads, first prosaic ones of fountain pens and furniture sets and then more traditionally striking ones like those for Marlboro, he said he was trying to get at something he could not get at by creating his own images. He once compared the effect to the funny way that “certain records sound better when someone on the radio station plays them, than when we’re home alone and play the same records ourselves.”
But he was not circumspect about what it meant or how it would be viewed. In a 1992 discussion at the Whitney Museum of American Art he said of rustling the Marlboro aesthetic: “No one was looking. This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.”
People might not have been looking at the time, when his art was not highly sought. But as his reputation and prices for his work rose steeply — one of the Marlboro pictures set an auction record for a photograph in 2005, selling for $1.2 million — they began to look, and Mr. Prince has spoken of receiving threats, some legal and some more physical in nature, from his unsuspecting lenders. He is said to have made a small payment in an out-of-court settlement with one photographer, Garry Gross, who took the original shot for one of Mr. Prince’s most notorious early borrowings, an image of a young unclothed Brooke Shields. (Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article, saying in an e-mail message only, “I never associated advertisements with having an author.”)
Mr. Krantz, who has shot ads for the United States Marine Corps and a long list of Fortune 500 companies including McDonald’s, Boeing and Federal Express, said he had no intention of seeking money from or suing Mr. Prince, whose borrowings seem to be protected by fair use exceptions to copyright law.
But with the exhibition now up at the Guggenheim — and the posters using his image on sale for $9.95 — he said he simply wanted viewers to know that “there are actually people behind these images, and I’m one of them.”
“I’m not a mean person, and I’m not a vindictive person,” he said. “I just want some recognition, and I want some understanding.”
Mr. Krantz, whose clients generally own the copyrights to his photos for them, said he had been aware for several years that his work had been lifted by Mr. Prince, along with that of several other photographers who have shot Marlboro ads. But he said he did not think much about it, and said he had never talked with other Marlboro photographers about the issue.
“If imitation is a form of flattery, then I will accept the compliment,” he said.
But on one occasion a woman active in the art world visited his studio in Chicago, and, seeing a print of one of his pictures, Mr. Krantz recalled, “she said, ‘Oh, Richard Prince has a photograph just like that!’” And in 2003 Mr. Prince’s version of an image that Mr. Krantz shot for Marlboro — showing a mounted cowboy approaching a calf stranded in the snow — sold for $332,300 at Christie’s. Although the shot was blown up to heroic proportions, “there’s not a pixel, there’s not a grain that’s different,” he said. And so Mr. Krantz, whose Marlboro ads now appear mostly in Europe and Asia, began to grow angry.
He said that while he is primarily an advertising photographer, when he was growing up in Omaha, he did attend workshops with Ansel Adams. He studied graphic design and got into commercial photography, starting out in Omaha taking shots of toasters and pens and heating pads because that was where the work was. But he has long exhibited his own art photographs, recent examples of which show stark images of an empty prison as if seen through defaced or broken glass.
Mr. Krantz said he considered his ad work distinctive, not simply the kind of anonymous commercial imagery that he feels Mr. Prince considers it to be. “People hire me to do big American brands to help elevate their images to these kinds of iconic images,” he said.
He has considered trying to correspond with Mr. Prince to complain more directly but said he felt it would probably do no good.
“At this point it’s been done, and it’s out there,” he said. “My whole issue with this, truly, is attribution and recognition. It’s an unusual thing to see an artist who doesn’t create his own work, and I don’t understand the frenzy around it.”
He added: “If I italicized ‘Moby-Dick,’ then would it be my book? I don’t know. But I don’t think so.”
A tiny house with enormous glass walls sits on some of the priciest property in New Canaan, Conn. A town of 20,000, its proximity to New York City (about an hour's commute by train) continues to fuel a steady climb in local real-estate values. And with the current trend toward larger homes, many smaller ones face destruction—even gems.
Christened the "little jewel box" by its designer, Philip Johnson, and named after its original occupant, Alice Ball, the glass-walled house stands at the center of a controversy. But it's not simply a local controversy—it's one that touches not only New Canaan, but also many other upscale metropolitan suburbs. At stake could be the future of post-World War II architecture and the legacies of its architectural pioneers.
The Impasse
The Ball House, built in 1953 as a residence for a single woman, is a doll-sized home that the real-estate listing puts at 1,773 square feet, perched on a 2.2-acre tract of land. The one-story dwelling sports a flat roof and glass walls, all in keeping with its International Style.
The house, considered a fine example of Johnson's architectural skills, also comprises a diminishing commodity in New Canaan, where buildings designed by the Harvard Five (Johnson, Landis Gores, Eliot Noyes, Marcel Breuer and John Johansen) are falling under the wrecking ball.
A preservation group has found a new owner for one of the country's few remaining taverns, the DeJarnette Tavern, built c.1780 in Halifax County, Va.
Named after Daniel DeJarnette, son of a Revolutionary War captain, the building was a colorful stagecoach inn and watering hole. "The tavern is said to have attracted a fun-loving clientele, particularly those who enjoyed horseracing, card playing, and cockfighting," according to the National Register nomination, which APVA Preservation Virginia prepared.
The Oct. 15 sale transferred the dilapidated tavern to a Connecticut couple, Mark Hubina and his fiancee, Tania Bongiolatti. Using state historic tax credits, the owners plan to restore the 1,300-square-foot building to its Civil War appearance, APVA Preservation Virginia announced this week.
In 2001, APVA Preservation Virginia used money from its revolving fund program to rescue the building, listed on the National Register and a state landmark. DeJarnette's Tavern was priced at $29,000. The former state program, transferred to the nonprofit in 1999, is a $1.5 million fund to purchase endangered properties, find the right buyer, and place easements on the property before the sale.
Texas lost a mid-century modern house last month.
Once called the "Carousel House," the circular house in Meyerland was designed and built in 1964 by Robert Cohen, who constructed the house out of wood frames and steel.
In 1987, the elderly Cohens moved out, and the house remained empty until June 2004, when Texas lawyer John O'Quinn purchased it for his classic car collection's manager, Zev Isgur. After Isgur went to jail, the house was deserted.
Over the next two years, the house was neglected and subjected to roof leaks, vandalism, and furniture theft. For some reason, the house was never marketed publicly and in September 2007, a construction company called Granit builders purchased it with plans to build a new house in its location. The Carousel House was demolished on Nov. 20.
"The house was smashed to bits," says Ben Koush, president of HoustonMod, a nonprofit that advocates the preservation of modern architecture in Texas. "I cannot imagine how it could be salvaged at this point."
The house was destroyed despite efforts of preservationists and locals. "I think the perception of the expense of restoring it is one of the reasons it was demolished, but there's also just the fact that it was never offered for sale publicly," says Jason Smith, HoustonMod board member. "I think if we had been able to do a 'Mod of the Month’ open house, we may have been able to find a buyer."
post apocalyptic classics
"that guy who burns furniture" via adman