cover photo



blog archive

main site

artwork

bio






Schwarz



View current page
...more recent posts

Grande Cretto Nero, Alberto Burri


[
link] [2 comments]

OCTOBER 115 Industrial Painting's Utopias: Lucio Fontana's “Expectations” Anthony White


[link] [1 comment]

The turning point in Pollock’s career was the mid-1940s. Two significant events occurred in 1945: his marriage to fellow artist Lee Krasner and their move to a house in the countryside in East Hampton. It was in the studio that they set up in the barn that Pollock first began pouring paint, either straight out of the can or with sticks and hardened brushes, directly onto a canvas placed on the floor. In an interview he justified his unusual method of painting by saying that ‘the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture’.1 Pollock felt that his painting technique reflected not only the ‘inner world’ of the unconscious but also the cultural experience of the time he was living in.2 Unexpectedly, to express these things, he felt compelled to move away from figurative art. As he remarked in 1949: ‘I try to stay away from any recognisable image; if it creeps in, I try to do away with it . . . to let the painting come through. I don't let the image carry the painting . . . It's extra cargo and unnecessary.’3 It was important that the meaning of the art work should not be carried by any recognisable image, as this was something extraneous to the medium of painting itself: ‘Experience of our age in terms of painting – not an illustration of but the equivalent: concentrated, fluid.’4 To express the modern age, painting would have to be equal to that age – not to illustrate it through an image but to participate in the intensity and fluidity of modern society through the very manner in which the painting was produced.

Although Pollock rejected many of the traditional methods of artistic control over his painting, preferring to pour, dribble, fling and pool paint onto the canvas, the effect is often staggering and incredibly beautiful. In the ‘classic’ pictures of the period 1947–50, such as One: Number 31, 1950 the black, white, brown, and blue-green arcs of flung paint on unprimed canvas seem to cartwheel before the viewer’s eyes in a majestic dance of colour. Neither a nihilistic statement nor a ‘paint pot flung in the public's face,’ Pollock used the effects of gravity, liquidity of materials, and the collisions between paint and canvas to show the viewer how oil paint behaves when it is pooled, what enamel looks like when it is thrown onto different kinds of surfaces – either dry paint, wet paint or unprimed canvas. Similarly, in his smaller scale enamel on paper works, such as Number 12, 1949 we are directly confronted by the vivid, shiny physicality of the enamel, as well as the extraordinary effects of puckering, marbling, puddling and interlacing of paint in all its raw beauty. In other words, he allowed the materials to speak their own language. As the traces of gravity, liquidity, and fortuitous occurrences appear to have taken place with a minimum intervention of the artist, the painting has what Pollock claimed it should: ‘a life of its own.’5
anthony white
[link] [add a comment]

pop panel


[link] [add a comment]

nowottny sightings: robot baby


[link] [1 comment]

History hints that this downturn could change our tastes. Homes built in the 1940s and '50s, for example, were usually smaller and simpler than large, frilly Victorians that had been in style before the Great Depression and World War II. Materials remained scarce for years after the war, and returning veterans, boosted by mortgage assistance provided under the GI Bill of Rights of 1944, bought Levittowns full of simple new houses as quickly as they could be made.

[link] [1 comment]

brion n bill

PE and RS


[link] [add a comment]

burroughs shotgun paintings


[link] [5 comments]

NO FUN

rip ron ashton


[link] [3 comments]

perforated wood samples


[link] [13 comments]

The pain of layoffs notwithstanding, the design world could stand to come down a notch or two — and might actually find a new sense of relevance in the process. That was the case during the Great Depression, when an early wave of modernism flourished in the United States, partly because it efficiently addressed the middle-class need for a pared-down life without servants and other Victorian trappings.

“American designers took the Depression as a call to arms,” said Kristina Wilson, author of “Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression” and an assistant professor of art history at Clark University. “It was a chance to make good on the Modernist promise to make affordable, intelligent design for a broad audience.”

The most popular American designer of that era was probably Russel Wright, who acted as the Depression’s Martha Stewart, turning out a warmed-up, affordable version of European modern furniture, tableware and linens for a new kind of informal home life. A bentwood armchair cost $19.95. “They were not just cheap, they were beautiful, and that was a powerful combination,” Ms. Wilson said.

Design tends to thrive in hard times. In the scarcity of the 1940s, Charles and Ray Eames produced furniture and other products of enduring appeal from cheap materials like plastic, resin and plywood, and Italian design flowered in the aftermath of World War II.

Will today’s designers rise to the occasion? “What designers do really well is work within constraints, work with what they have,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. “This might be the time when designers can really do their job, and do it in a humanistic spirit.”

In the lean years ahead, “there will be less design, but much better design,” Ms. Antonelli predicted.

[link] [4 comments]

stairporn - "hey man can i copy your site?"

uh, no.
[link] [add a comment]

when you got it...
...flaunt it.

thx lisa
[link] [add a comment]

The remark scribbled at the end of the production sheet said simply, “End of era.”

It was written shortly after the last piano roll came off the assembly line at QRS Music Technologies, 1026 Niagara St., at noon Wednesday.

The halt in production comes 108 years after the company was founded in Chicago, and 42 years since it moved to Buffalo. Rolls used in player pianos reached their peak in popularity in the early 20th century, when a roll of paper was able to reproduce music through perforations signifying notes played on the piano.

The company is now a leading manufacturer of digitized and computerized player-piano technology that runs on CDs.
thx vz
[link] [add a comment]

* I think it's funny there's someone out there bragging about "having Lester Bangs' copy of Metal Machine Music" and evidently paying big bucks for it. Lester owned over one hundred copies of MMM at the time of his death, including two copies I sold him when I ran into him on Astor Place where I was hawking promos a week before his death. Evidently someone is selling them for highly inflated prices as "Lester's personal copy". I'll bet all together he went through 2-300 copies (he was also always giving them away to folks who missed it the first time around in '75). A copy of MMM that wasn't owned by Lester is probably rarer than one that was.
(via johnny otis blue comedy albums)
[link] [add a comment]

Stax Records did not choose timid singers. The tour lineup was all belters — Redding, Sam & Dave, Eddie Floyd and Arthur Conley — who bounced percussive phrases off the band’s unswerving beat. They were R&B troupers from an era when performers didn’t need to lip-sync when they danced. The Stax singers commanded the stage with moves no choreographer taught them, and they didn’t rest until their audience became an ecstatic congregation.

[link] [add a comment]

what you get for 150k (will most likely have a wood burning stove)

[link] [8 comments]

?!

Like the Moondance Diner before it, another New York icon has been forsaken by New York and found love in another country.Kim's collection of videos is going to Sicily.
thx lisa
[link] [2 comments]

c1aac36d
c296c493
[link] [1 comment]

sifting sands of time and the danish light house

thx lisa
[link] [add a comment]

black paintings


[link] [add a comment]

fallout shelter handbook


[link] [add a comment]

When news emerged that a Mark Rothko exhibition was planned for Tate Modern this autumn, my heart soared. Rothko is one of the Brobdignagians of modern art, a gripping painter of big moments of transcendental abstraction. When it turned out that the Rothko show was going to concentrate on his late work, my heart slumped. The late work is so notoriously sombre and depressing that a show consisting of nothing else would surely make a perfect venue for a suicide convention. When I finally visited the exhibition, however, my heart soared again. What an intelligent and important attempt to see and understand Rothko differently. We really have been getting him wrong.

Rothko’s problem - the reason why he appears to have been so thoroughly misunderstood by posterity - is the dark myth that he allowed to emerge around him while he was alive and which overgrew his entire reputation after his suicide in 1970. This tremulous Rothko story line presents him as the Melancholy Martyr of Modernism, a deeply pessimistic presence whose painted fogs sag, paradoxically, with tons of heavyweight spirituality. Rothko’s paintings are almost invariably understood as religious art without the religion; Judaism without the Torah. At its most purple, the myth seems even to note an accord between these gloomy Turnerisms and the Holocaust. His suicide topped it all off splendidly.

I am not embarrassed to admit that this, more or less, is how I too have always understood him. We all did. Being enveloped by Rothko’s glowing abstract sunsets is a thoroughly meditative and ecclesiastical experience. It will surprise nobody that he was often accused of Zen Buddhism. Rothko himself did nothing to correct such impressions. Notoriously secretive and reticent, he worked hard on his mystery. “There is more power in telling little than in telling all,” he lectured to the Pratt Institute in his final public address in 1958. There are no photographs of him at work. Nobody was ever allowed to watch him painting. You can count on one hand the number of interviews he gave.

Because Rothko gave so little away, even his studio assistants had no clear sense of his final intentions for the celebrated suite of claret-coloured murals commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York in 1958 that is now the focus of the Tate’s startling reexamination of his late work. The restaurant was housed in the most prestigious slab of spartan modernism on the Manhattan skyline: the newly built Seagram Building, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.

Rothko was initially flattered and delighted by the commission. But after a boisterous meal there with his wife, he decided abruptly that the glamorous food hall was unsuitable after all, withdrew from the commission and donated the paintings to the Tate, where they have since played a key role in the creation of the Rothko myth: the day they arrived was the day he committed suicide - February 25, 1970.

Rothko asked that the nine momentous murals he gave to the Tate be hung together in a single room. No other instructions were left. And the vague advice he passed on about the colour of the walls was thoroughly ambiguous. So the poor old Tate has spent 38 years struggling to honour his wishes without ever really knowing what those wishes were. In its various incarnations - first at Tate Britain, now at Tate Modern - the resulting Rothko room has tried out assorted combinations of wall colours and lighting. But the only consensus nervous curators were able to arrive at did not concern the arrangement but the meaning. Dark, grumpy, pessimistic, magnificent, the Tate’s Rothkos have always been presented to us as unavoidably tragic. Until now.

The show looks at the art Rothko produced in his final years, from 1958 to 1970. It is the first exhibition to focus exclusively on these late paintings, and the first to seek a fresh opinion of them. Put crudely, the show wants to rubbish the Rothko myth. And the chief reason it succeeds in doing so is because it proposes a new reading of the Four Seasons panels. To achieve this, the Tate’s pictures have been joined here by half a dozen loans from the same series borrowed from Washington and Japan. The result is a spectacular Rothko Super-Room that straddles the centre of the show and is, frankly, astonishing.

The reason no final arrangement for the Four Seasons project has come down to us is because there never was one. Rothko was a die-hard ditherer. We know the restaurant had space for only seven pictures, but he actually painted 30 of them, in a glorious ocean of linked variations. The nine Tate panels - those famously morose burgundy twilights in which Stonehenge shapes loom up fuzzily in a claret-coloured gloom - turn out to be curiously unrepresentative of the project as a whole. The loans from Washington and Japan are altogether brighter in tone and impact.

What’s more, the new circle of 15 pictures has been hung at the sort of height you would need to be at to clear a roomful of restaurant tables. Thus, all of a sudden, the doomy weightiness has been replaced by a rich set of soaring sensations. Maroons that had always seemed glum are suddenly plummy. Subtle effects of darkness have become subtle effects of light. And the suggestion made here that the entire scheme was, in fact, due to culminate in the brightest of the bright paintings completes a remarkable rereading. We have here a gorgeous restaurant decoration that appears, on this evidence, to be completely uninterested in the big truths of the cosmos.

If you are anything like me, you will keep returning to this dramatic rethink for further doses of revelation. The upside of Rothko’s chronic inability to make up his mind is the acres of room it leaves for reinterpretation. But my guess is that he withdrew from the Four Seasons commission not because the restaurant was an unsuitable venue, but because he could not decide what to put in it. The rest of the exhibition reinforces the impression that working in series served chiefly to multiply Rothko’s uncertainties.

[link] [add a comment]

ice ribbons on a metal fence

via zoller
[link] [add a comment]