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An ongoing project of uploading pieces of the wealth of Situationist-related literature. Entire books, lengthy articles, excerpts from the journals Potlatch and Internationale Situationniste, and newspaper articles are just a few of the files to be found here.


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taint necessarily so


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yves' stuff


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"New Media vs Artists with Computers," vs "New Media Artists vs Artists with Computers,"


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happy friday the thirteenth mother fuckers


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nyt loft porn - 6.9 million dollar (+ deconstruction reno) , 7,200 sf top floor corner wooster/broome


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Burgoyne Diller: This is a mediocre show.” reads a typical lead in a Donald Judd review. From a craft stand point, most editors would take issue with this — readers aren’t told what kind of work he’s made, and Judd uses the passive voice — but I’ve been finding it enjoyable none the less going through a few valuable opinions without the flourishes of writing conventions.

I bring this up, because I purchased Donald Judd: The Complete Writings 1959-1975, recently, and within the first few pages came to the conclusion that the artist understands the rules of formalism better than virtually any critic working today. So far however, the most interesting passage comes from a piece in which he misses the point entirely.

Andy Warhol: It seems that the salient metaphysical question lately is “Why does Andy Warhol paint Campbell Soup cans?” The only available answer is “Why not?” The subject matter is a cause for both blame and excessive praise. Actually it is not very interesting to think about the reasons, since it is easy to imagine Warhol’s paintings without such subject matter, simply as “over-all” paintings of repeated elements. The novelty and absurdity of the repeated images of Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donahue and Cola-Cola bottles is not great. Although Warhol thought of using these subjects he certainly did not think of the format.
Certainly, these remarks stand in contrast to how we think about Warhol’s soup cans today, (which is described by wikipedia as commercialization and indiscriminate “sameness” of the modern era). I like the review though, because it seems such perfect record of the time. Of course, applying the metric of a Jackson Pollock/abstract expressionist “over-all” painting to that of Andy Warhol isn’t going to work, but it was so engrained in the way people thought about art that even those steeped in the art scene couldn’t step out of that way of thinking. I’ll note that later on in the review, Judd wrote he thought it was a bad idea to apply movement names such as “Pop”, “O.K.”, “Neo-Dada” to the work since the various artists falling under that category were too diverse. Technically speaking, he’s right, even if the Pop Art label ultimately stuck.
-afc
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hobo nickels

thx vz
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Duke Ellington & John Coltrane

In an article by Gene Lees in the monthly magazine, "Jazz," there is an intimation that Coltrane's playing may have "undergone another spurt of rapid evolution" as a result of this relatively brief association with Ellington. It is more than possible, for Duke's catalytic influence is unique in jazz. The one certainty is that there is warm, exciting music here which will pleasantly surprise Coltrane and Ellington fans both.

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Y-A B videos

pseudomorphism

w/ serra


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ts4

#4 No Title, acrylic on unprimed canvas, 70" x 72", 2008 Mark Dagley

nice new tapered stripe series from mark ca 2008


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art and objecthood


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Though it has not yet received the response it deserves, it so happens that the first seriously anti-Greenbergian account of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings has been offered by Rosalind Krauss in the last chapter of her most recent book, The Optical Unconscious.(3) (Tim Clark's impressive 1990 essay on Pollock paradoxically still depended upon Greenberg's formal reading and did not challenge it,(4) though that is not true of his most recent text, discussed below; as for Harold Rosenberg's bathos on the one hand and the heap of Jungian non-sense poured over Pollock on the other, I'd say that, excluding any consideration of formal issues, these texts epitomize the idealist conception of meaning to such an extent that their hoarse anti-Greenbergianism cannot be considered as serious.) Taking her lesson from the responses of Cy Twombly, Robert Morris, and Andy Warhol to Pollock's work, Krauss shows how those artists chose to underline in it the very aspects that Greenberg had decided to ignore: the fact that the drips were made on the floor, for example (that is, down to earth and away from the vertical plane of imaginary projection), and that in abandoning the brush Pollock had severed the bodily link between gesture and touch (that is, had said farewell, so to speak, to the autographic brushstroke that had marked the birth of the modernist tradition beginning with Impressionism). In short, as soon as Greenberg had firmly set his previously fluctuating interpretation in place (in the early fifties), he provided us with a sublimatory reading of Pollock's drip paintings, one that disregarded the artist's procedures and edited out anything too dangerously close to a scatological smearing of matter (no mention, for example, of the "heterogeneity of trash," to borrow Krauss's expression, that Pollock had "dumped" onto the surface of Full Fathom Five - nails, buttons, tacks, keys, coins, cigarettes, matches . . .). To be sure Greenberg had excuses - he had to deal with the Hollywoodian theatralization of "angst" by Rosenberg and company, and he obviously thought that portraying Pollock as Olympian would do the trick - but what I want to underscore here is the fact that the quintessential "formalist" critic had to blind himself to several important formal aspects of Pollock's art (arguably the most important ones) in order to maintain his fiction that the drip paintings were pure optical "mirages."

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On the other hand, this inattention to scale - so much at odds with both the aesthetics of Smith's intimate friend Barnett Newman (who never made a sketch for a painting) and that of the younger Minimalist sculptors for whom overscaling was a way of sidestepping the issue of formal complexity) - confirms that Smith was, as he said himself and as various authors in the catalogue report, a designer at heart (that is, one who believes in a kind of formal Esperanto that can be applied in every context - someone who, for instance, sees no fundamental difference between streamlining the profile of a two-inch cigarette lighter or a 100-story skyscraper).

"This ideal of the 'all-purpose' artist nicely coincided with the notion of the knowledgeable generalist that had been a part of Smith's Catholic upbringing," notes curator Robert Storr in the catalogue. It might also have led to a certain lack of focus, to dispersion and thus uncertainty. Indeed, to explain the stylistic eclecticism of his architecture and painting (much of which was uncovered for the first time in this exhibition) Smith spoke of his "Jesuit training," adding, "I always worked in someone else's style." The modesty of the statement is striking, especially in the Abstract Expressionist context of macho individualism; given Smith's existential doubts, which help account for the relative paucity of his production (compare his output, say, to that of Rothko), the confession produces a chord of sympathy. It should not be forgotten, by the way, that Smith's production as a sculptor, which remains his major achievement, began only late in his career. But the statement about his "Jesuit training" is even more remarkable for its stress on education. Smith was, by all accounts, a spectacular teacher, which might not be entirely unrelated to why so much on view here (particularly his architecture and painting) looks like student work. His desire to verify vague principles of design (learned from D'Arcy Thompson, from Wright, or during his brief study at the New Bauhaus in Chicago) is a characteristic example of the, in many ways, disabling pedagogical curiosity that inspired what is most dated in his production; but in the end, it might also be what is most interesting.

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BD RIP

I once described Blossom Dearie as "the hippest person in the world." It was a forgivable piece of hyperbole, though she was surely one of the strangest creatures in the world, a fey woman with a tiny, childlike voice and a hard-earned reputation for craziness who sang in a style precisely equidistant between jazz and cabaret, accompanying herself on the piano with supreme delicacy and finesse. She was also an exceptionally fine composer whose best songs, "I'm Shadowing You" and "Sweet Surprise" in particular, deserve to be much better known. Her long run at the now-defunct Danny's Skylight Room, which lasted into the twenty-first century, gave those not yet born when the New York cabaret scene was at its height a chance to know something of what it was like.
i picked up on bd watching steve allens afternoon variety show. made for some real good daytime tv in the 60s-70s and a talent tip worth keeping for a lifetime.


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Hundreds of buildings commissioned by the Works Progress Administration and Roosevelt’s other “alphabet” agencies are being demolished or threatened with destruction, mourned or fought over by small groups of citizens in a new national movement to save the architecture of the New Deal. In July, at the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico, a dozen buildings built in the Spanish Revival style in the 1930s, including murals with Native American themes, were bulldozed. In Chicago, architectural historians have joined with residents of Lathrop Homes — riverfront rows of historic brick public housing — to try to persuade the Chicago Housing Authority not to raze the complex. In Cotton County, Okla., a ruined gymnasium has only holes where windows used to be. Across the country, schools, auditoriums and community centers of the era are headed for the wrecking ball.

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1556jpgFRENCH Side table with trapezoidal top covered in black laminate, on compass-shaped legs. 22" x 17 3/4" x 17 3/4" $800 - $1,200
we went and checked out the showroom display of furniture at ragos next modern auction. this is a no reserve auction but they wont take below 1/2 the minimum estimate price. which sounds reasonable. highlights were :

some of phillip lloyd powels liquidated estate items. what appears to be a funky eclectic collection of built-ins he incorporated into his place.

free edge tables with wrought iron legs

a handsom woodgrain formica samson berman extention table with three leaves

POUL KJAERHOLM / RUD. RASMUSSENS Douglas fir and enameled steel desk with single drawer.

a george nelson fireplace set

described as birdcage chairs

FREDERICK WEINBERG Black enameled metal bar

design research bench

a whole mess of harry bertoia chrome side chairs


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5 x 45s fridays #2


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lets get mick ronson into the rr hall of fame. vote now.

via vz
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One night in Mexico, in Manzanillo, I took some acid and I threw the I Ching,” Ken Kesey says in Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Kesey continued: “The great thing about the I Ching is, it never sends you Valentines, it slaps you in the face when you need it.”

Kesey always was attuned to bad rumblings in the cosmos. So are Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan, the editors of “Toward 2012.” Their anthology of New Age essays is organized around the notion that, not to put too fine a point on it, the world as we know it might end on Dec. 21, 2012. Talk about a slap in the face.
thx robin
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Is This the Art World’s Own Ponzi Scheme?

The wheels of justice have been slowly grinding away in the Salander bankruptcy case. Last week, Josh Baer reported that art world figures were appearing before a grand jury. Today, Bloomberg follows up with essentially the same story but some details on the bankruptcy.

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bowling alone


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weeks A frame


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radiator heat


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