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Wladyslaw Strzeminski 1893 - 1952



In his theory of Unism Strzeminski defined painting as a constant of the artistic discourse and stated that what we can certainly say about a painting is that it is a flat canvas surface covered with paint and limited by a frame. Earlier, dualist art was based on the opposition between form itself and "elements alien to art" that were the source of meaning and expression. Dualism masked the purely formal aspect of art. According to Strzeminski the way to an art "authentic in its very essence" leads through the refusal of dualism to unism, a system that shows painting "such as it really is", in an anti-illusionist unity of form. Space, emotion, narration, and finally illusion should be eliminated from the work. Creation lies in successive reduction aiming towards the unity of a system that in its most extreme form leads to the objective unity of world and art. "Abstract painting does not take its formative means and systems from the outside" , wrote Strzeminski, "by mutually adapting the plastic system and visible nature, but from the inside, out of the laws of its own logic, through observation and the study of the phenomena that link all the elements of a painting, giving it unity and organic quality. Abstract concrete realist painting draws its elements from a concept of plastic art that has the realisation of the painting as its objective". (3)
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In its quest for the essence of art within a unified, rationalised system of form, Strzeminski's theory of Unism reached the limits of meaning. Defining the system itself as object, he absolutised its generic and consequently its artistic existence. The objective of a work of art, he wrote, is "absolute construction". Merging the conceptual absolutisation of art with the reification of artistic structure, Strzeminski seized the key problem of Constructivism - and involved himself in a modernist contradiction. Starting from a systematic interpretation of art as a sign, he went on to fuse the representer with the represented and undermined the notion of meaning realised by the symbolic structure. He transposed the discussion about painting as a form that participates in social communication into the realm of utopic considerations and proposed the utopia of an understanding situated outside the system - within the object. (4)

The painter who realised a Unistic painting ceased to be a cosmic medium mediating experiences. Instead he became the constructor of a reified world. Experience, which had hitherto been the groundwork of the creative process, was replaced by "mastery and systematic work" giving rise to the product - the result of constructive operations. This was the path chosen by Rodchenko and a group of Russian Productivists. Having realised the "last painting" they abandoned painting as such - and consequently reflection on form - and sought to find their place in industry as "engineers of production", rapidly becoming ideologists of political power. (5)

. Strzeminski, who did not renounce vision as means of communication, did not go as far. According to him, by losing its symbolic import the painting-object became something like a commodity - but without gaining a clear-cut utilitarian value. Insignificant in the world of signs, in the world of things the painting was an absurd object - an extreme situation, in which this object's purely theoretical status became apparent. It could undermine the entire concept of the painting brought forth by historical and artistic processes. By its extreme nature the Unist painting, as a thing-painting, "simply was". The fact of making apparent this state of being in painted paintings constituted the theoretical practice of the contemporary artist. In his practice as a painter and his strictly related practice of seeing Strzeminski tried to counter the idea of the end of art (presented repeateadly and in various version by Russian analysts of the revolutionary period and to overcome the avant-garde opposition between theory and practice.

Strzeminski belived that the specifitity of art, i.e. covering the surface of a canvas (painting) of situating a mass in space (sculpture) - its pictorial or scuptural character - is grounded in experimental practice. This consists of a permanent actualisation of the rules of vision extreme to all that is visible: rules shaped by the "consciousness of visual content" that developed alongside evolution and history. The history of vision and the corresponding pictorial practice were to reconcile the historic, objectified work with the conceptual absolutisation of art. Or, expressed in the categories used here: to reconcile the physiology of the eye and the abstract character of the mind.

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bikers apartment

bikers apt house


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cgm



simon linke


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american routes

brazillian hour

gd hour

the midnight special

mountain stage

pacific radio archives

roots music report

sunday baroque

woodsongs


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r4dio free 4msterd4m


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BF: What do you think of the Stones?

BD: What do I think of them? They're pretty much finished, aren't they?

BF: They had a gigantic tour last year. You call that finished?

BD: Oh yeah, you mean Steel Wheels. I'm not saying they don't keep going, but they need Bill. Without him they're a funk band. They'll be the real Rolling Stones when they get Bill back.

BF: Bob, you're stuck in the 80's.

BD: I know. I'm trying to break free.

BF: Do you really think the Stones are finished?


BD: Of course not, They're far from finished. The Rolling Stones are truly the greatest rock and roll band in the world and always will be. The last too. Everything that came after them, metal, rap, punk, new wave, pop-rock, you name it .... you can trace it all back to the Rolling Stones. They were the first and the last and no one's ever done it better.

BF: This Dream of You has this wonderful South of the Border feel, but at the same time, I detect echoes of Sam Cooke, the Coasters, the Brill Building, and Phil Spector. Were those records from the 50's and 60's important to you? Did you try to capture some of that flavor in This Dream of You?

BD: Those fifties and sixties records were definitely important. That might have been the last great age of real music. Since then or maybe the seventies it's all been people playing computers. Sam Cooke, the Coasters, Phil Spector, all that music was great but it didn't exactly break into my consciousness.

Back then I was listening to Son House, Leadbelly, the Carter family, Memphis Minnie and death romance ballads. As far as songwriting, I wanted to write songs like Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson. Timeless and eternal. Only a few of those radio ballads still hold up and most of them have Doc Pomus' hand in them. Spanish Harlem, Save the Last Dance for Me, Little Sister ... a few others. Those were fantastic songs. Doc was a soulful cat. If you said there was a little bit of him in This Dream of You I would take it as a compliment.


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10 designer-ly twitses

via afc
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sigfried giedion space, time and architecture

mcluhan in space

frederic jameson future city


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Peter Zumthor, a 65-year-old Swiss architect known for buildings in spectacular alpine settings that mix spare, powerfully elemental forms with a rich range of materials and sly accommodations of history, will on Monday be named the winner of the 2009 Pritzker Prize, the field's top honor.

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new riverfront park for jersey city


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your favorite artist. popularity contest or marketing research?


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sublation


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artopia

For your amusement, please note that the cover price of ARTnews then was all of $1.25. (This was, believe it or not, the Artforum of its time.) The full-color cover is a detail from Benjamin West's Death of Gen. Wolfe, 1770. The first three pages have full-page ads for Liquitex, Christie's ("Fine Pictures by Old Masters") and Aquatec; the back cover was an ad for Grumbacher paints. Obviously, advertisers knew or were led to believe that ARTnews was read by a large number of working artists.

Even in 1967 there were discreetly placed but timely ads from galleries whose artists were anointed by articles in the same issue. (But not by the some would say too proper Betty Parsons.) Which came first, the ads or the articles? Well, the exposure afforded by a magazine article should at least be thanked. And an ad is always the best way.

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kodakgirl records nyc graffiti / nyt slideshow


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In his response, Prince, a renowned appropriation artist who frequently uses others’ imagery in his work, argued that the photographs in Yes Rasta are not “‘strikingly original’ or ‘distinctive’ in nature”, and that his “transformative” uses of the photographs were “done in good faith and reflect established artistic practices”. Prince’s answer furthermore stated that his appropriation, which he claims is sanctioned under fair use, “poses no harm to the value of such photographs and any market value relating to the photographs has… been enhanced rather than decreased”. Lawyers for Prince and Rizzoli declined to comment, and Gagosian’s representation did not return phone calls. Prince was sued in the 1980s for copyright infringement related to another photographer’s work; the lawsuit, lodged by Garry Gross, was reportedly settled out of court.

In a telephone conversation, Cariou, who is based in Paris, bridled at the claim that Prince only used a small portion of his Yes Rasta photographs. “In my lawyer’s opinion and others’ opinion, this case goes way beyond fair use,” he said. “They used 30 pictures of mine. If you’ve seen the ‘Canal Zone’ book, it starts with Rasta, it ends with Rasta—it is the centrality of it, there is no question.” According to Cariou, the suit has now advanced to the discovery phase, during which his lawyer will try to ascertain how much money the defendants earned from the paintings, among other matters. Gagosian’s filing states that eight paintings from the series were sold, and Cariou says they were priced between $1.5m and $3m each. To Cariou, the defendants’ response has been “extremely arrogant”, particularly the claim that his work is not distinctive or original.
sounds like theyre building the settlement and legal fees into the sales prices of the prince paintings. thats not consistent with appropriational economy. thats just fat cats playing games.


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"the thing" bank


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Indianapolis shotgun house five thousand dollars

thx justin
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BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE

Le Corbusier: A Life
by Nicholas Fox Weber
Knopf, 821 pp., $45.00

The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as Lecturer
by Tim Benton
Birkhäuser, 247 pp., $99.00 (to be published in May)

The Villas of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, 1920–1930
by Tim Benton
Birkhäuser, 272 pp., $69.95

Le Corbusier and the Maisons Jaoul
by Caroline Maniaque Benton
Princeton Architectural Press, 175 pp., $40.00

Le Corbusier and Britain: An Anthology
edited by Irena Murray and Julian Osley
RIBA Trust/Routledge, 344 pp., $62.95

Le Corbusier Le Grand
edited by Phaidon editors, with an introduction by Jean-Louis Cohen and
chapter introductions by Tim Benton
Phaidon, 768 pp., $200.00

Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture
an exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, February 19–May 24,
2009
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Alexander von Vegesack, Stanislaus von
Moos, Arthur Rüegg, and Mateo Kries.
Vitra Design Museum/NAI/RIBA Trust, 398 pp., $168.00

Le Corbusier and the Occult
by J.K. Birksted
MIT Press, 405 pp., $44.95


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allison arieff has a fluff column in the NYT (by design opinion blog) allowing the extended design community (including designer, manufacturer, retailer, advertising and news media) to wiggle out of a history of championing design irresponsibility. again the column is B.S. but the COMMENTERS (the consumers) GET IT (heres just one):

Our consumer-driven society is precisely why “toothbrushes can’t be designed to last longer”–if they do, then the manufacturers don’t make money on us buying new ones every few months.

That downturn in endurability is something that’s happened, visibly, within the past two generations. I’m thirty-five, and my mother had small appliances–a sewing machine, an electric mixer, things of that nature–which lasted for twenty or more years. The sewing machine, in fact, lasted so long that when it finally broke, they hadn’t been making replacement parts for years. Even early lightbulbs would burn virtually indefinitely, rather than going dark after a few hundred hours. Very few modern appliances have that kind of shelf life, and from a manufacturing point of view, that’s a design feature, not a flaw.

The idea of “heirloom design” is obviously a winning one, but my fear is that a toothbrush designed to last won’t find its way onto the shelves, and if it does, it’ll be a specialty item that costs three times as much as the competition. Even in good economic times, that’s daunting.

I don’t know if America’s come far enough for that paradigm shift, the one where we fall away from being conspicuous consumers. I certainly hope so; the result would be better for us and for the world. But we’ve proven to have embarrassingly short memories in the aftermath of previous economic woes, and I’m afraid that we’ll return to laissez les bon temps roulez at the slightest opportunity.
read all 68 of 'em. most express their disgust. i smell consumer revolution in the air. i wonder if the NYT is rethinking this comments feature thing yet...


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40/4 chair $109.95


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"Hiccup, burp, cha cha cha" Just forgot the rest of the joke.
ok this joke research is going nowhere


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nice to see "Adjustable Wall Bra" by Vito Acconci (, plaster, steel, canvas, electrical lightbulbs, and audio equipment) has found a home in Bade Stageberg Cox's Art Cave. sure wish archinect had bothered to credit all of the artists in the architectural showcase posting. about the Stones.


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k14941


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Test Cell

testcelm

Will Chicago tear down this Mies van der Rohe building?


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