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How the open-source movement in design is helping in places like Haiti.


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kevin morra carny diary blog / last entry over two years ago after getting laid off


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indexbindexa


hatch show prints nashville - large format carnival woodblock letterpress prints


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Tom Moody on Joseph Masheck on Josef Albers' Record Covers at Minus Space


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Narrating a Proto-Minimalist Misfire. Or Noland’s Largeness...

Thank you very much for the invitation to speak today and open your conference on space, time and movement: crucial problems in the modernist paintings of Kenneth Noland that I will speak about. It’s a great honor for me and a very daunting task. Daunting, because, well, Noland’s painting has a bad rep, is dismissed as Greenbergian, and as you can see from this installation shot from 1963 very much behaves as we think abstraction from the 50s and 60s should behave. His is a reduced and often, I think, quite stale looking vocabulary, with very little purchase on space –it's flat; time—it's instantaneous in the tradition of the symbol; and in terms of movement –not really much of that in evidence either. But these are crucial problems as I will argue, and what makes the task of argument all the more daunting is that in Noland’s painting space, time and movement strike a double register. They are literalized in one’s experience of the work, and also bring into focus questions of temporality and performatives: temporality being the heir of a long philosophical tradition and performatives being part of an attempt to think that legacy as an aesthetic suture [I’m glossing]. The fact that performatives “misfire” or are “pure acts” is part of this history, and a large part of my worry. You could call this my “performance anxiety” and you will see why this bad sexual humor is appropriate in a moment. The essay I present is part of a larger project on Modernist Abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s I am working on. I am interested in those artists usually dismissed as Greenbergian modernists. Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried are the art critics I am constantly working with and against. Fried being the key critic who implies the use of the term “misfire” in his essay “Art and Objecthood” which is a defense of modernism and polemic against minimalism, whose effects he calls “surefire”. [“Surefire” is a term Fried would have found in J.L. Austin’s Speech Act Theory, and you can see the traces of Fried’s first encounter with speech acts in his great essay Morris Louis, especially where he talks about Louis’s lostness.] The grip Greenberg’s and Fried’s criticism has on this moment in art is unlike the hold any other critics have on any other period. I love reading both of them and I hate the fact it is so difficult to find points on which I disagree with them absolutely. But I do find many points of difference and the moments of difference that count for me the most have emerged from looking at and responding to the painting they care most about and not from scrutinizing their texts which has been the usual course of attack for the past 40-50 years. In this regard I would call myself a close reader of painting. And I think Greenberg’s and Fried’s criticism falls short of what we call “close reading” today. In the 1950s and 1960s close reading was something associated with the formal literary criticism of the new critics. Today, close reading is something that has been carried to new heights, especially by the d-word – deconstruction—a word I don’t want to rehabilitate today; Im happy to simply use the phrase close reading which is where I take the greatest insights of Jacques Derrida’s and Paul de Man’s works to be focussed. Both de Man and Derrida use theory that is extant in the text’s they encounter; they do not apply theory. My own preference is for de Man’s version of close reading: he reads for tropes, tropological systems and their remainders. That’s what I do, and I think its a crucial step beyond the methodological quandaries current art history finds itself in, and I also think it is a political and ethical necessity today. [In terms of contemporary art history I would place T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death in this tradition, and describe it as a exemplary example of close reading.]
via dagley fb
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dark helmet imperial schwartzbier


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history of the mia/pow bracelets

The first bracelets were made by a Carol Bates, who now works for the Defense POW-Missing Persons Office. The bracelets come in various finishes and on each bracelet is engraved, at a minimum, the name, rank, service, loss date, and country of loss of a missing man from the Vietnam War. Here is Carol's article on the origin of the bracelets.
on returning them


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'nam zippos


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rick griffin book


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ph2009

The Zig-Zag man was brewing for a long time. We kept saying: "Should we do the Zig-Zag man or not?" Finally, we decided to do it. We had a good concert for Big Brother, so we did the poster, then we went and cleaned our studio out. We cleaned out any kind of seeds or pot. It was squeaky clean. We almost left town after we did the poster, but nothing happened. The police didn't say anything. Zig-Zag didn't say anything. We thought we were going to get a lawsuit, but we didn't. I read an article that said it was like a million-dollar ad campaign for Zig-Zag. They couldn't advertise to the potheads. But they got a million-dollar campaign for nothing from me and Kelley.

buy a hand bill at wolfgans vault
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boris groys everyone is an artist


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Naisho is married to the Eiffel Tower. She has a passion for inanimate objects, and her mission is to fight the stigma surrounding the disorder and create a global network of sufferers - like Amy, in love with a church organ, and Eija Riita, who married the Berlin Wall.

Don't miss this compelling documentary about "objectum sexual" disorder as the characters describe just what it's like to be in love with a highly public structure.

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When writer Michael Pollan decided to plant a garden, the result was an award-winning treatise on the borders between nature and contemporary life, the acclaimed bestseller Second Nature. Now Pollan turns his sharp insight to the craft of building, as he recounts the process of designing and constructing a small one-room structure on his rural Connecticut property — a place in which he hoped to read, write and daydream, built with his two own unhandy hands.

Invoking the titans of architecture, literature and philosophy, from Vitrivius to Thoreau, from the Chinese masters of feng shui to the revolutionary Frank Lloyd Wright, Pollan brilliantly chronicles a realm of blueprints, joints and trusses as he peers into the ephemeral nature of "houseness" itself. From the spark of an idea to the search for a perfect site to the raising of a ridgepole, Pollan revels in the infinitely detailed, complex process of creating a finished structure. At once superbly written, informative and enormously entertaining, A Place of My Own is for anyone who has ever wondered how the walls around us take shape--and how we might shape them ourselves.

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Stewart whole earth catalog Brand's New Book is a Must-Read


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sir john sloane the furniture of death


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my barn conversion

>>bump<<
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reference library been busy


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bridgejpg


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Adherents to these perspectives are known to have viewed as antagonistic the relationship between those behaviors devoted to the pursuit of desire and pleasure and those devoted to the provision of what is needed. If neo-structuralist thinkers like Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes are today largely remembered as theorists of pleasure and desire, it is because they challenged the utilitarian underpinnings of our common assumptions concerning these terms, teaching us not only to separate the vicissitudes of desire from the exigencies of mere need, but also to observe behind what we imagine to be our pleasures a jouissance whose most salient quality is its indifference, even hostility, to our personal well-being. From 1968 to the end of the 20th century, the influence of structuralist and post-structuralist thought (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard) exercised a significant influence on a wide range of professional (Herman Hertzberger, Bernard Tschumi, Jean Nouvel, Peter Eisenman) and critical (Massimo Cacciari, Manfredo Tafuri, K. Michael Hays, Anthony Vidler, Mark Wigley, Beatriz Colomina) practices in architecture. Although important differences can be observed between these various players in their various domains, a set of intellectual and ethical commitments can be said to characterize the corporate ethos that emerges from that diversity: an insistence on the autonomy and artificiality of all forms of social and cultural practice (an insistence typically, though not invariably, predicated on the assumption of a radical discontinuity separating the cognitive and symbolic capacities of humans from that of other animal species); a suspicion, allied with this notion of cultural autonomy, of every naturalist or necessitarian explanatory framework for describing the genesis of human pleasure and desire and those cultural activities associated with them (hence the celebration of the destructive and transgressive impulse at work in all forms of cultural sublimation, as against the interpretation of those forms as strategies of bio-cultural adaptation); and, finally, but perhaps most consequentially for our purposes, a resolute insistence on negation of the given as a precondition for the production of human significance (a negation typically conceived as involving the expurgation of all vital substance from those materials comprising the given).

The counter-vitalist ethos that underpins this constellation of commitments is aptly expressed in Jacques Derrida’s sympathetic assessment of the structuralist legacy, offered in an essay written in 1963, in which he links the revelation of structure to a certain de-animation of form: “The relief and design of structures appears more clearly when the content, which is the living energy of meaning, is neutralized. Somewhat like the architecture of an uninhabited or deserted city, reduced to its skeleton by some catastrophe of nature or art. A city no longer in-habited, not simply left behind, but haunted by meaning and culture.” The conception of architecture that these lines communicate follows a legacy that includes, alongside Hegel’s description of architecture’s original vocation as one of containing not the life but the death of the mind, Adolf Loos’s description of architecture as the precise inverse of a machine for living: “When walking through a wood, you find a rise in the ground, six feet long and three feet wide, heaped up in a rough pyramidal shape, then you turn serious, and something inside you says: someone lies buried here. There is architecture.”
hdm #30
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This equation of pleasure with the endless variety of city life is also central to the sensibility of European modernists, as we see in Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur, Gertrude Stein’s Parisian window shopper, André Breton’s surrealist vagrant, and André Gide’s “disponible” immoralist, all glutting themselves on the heterogeneity and intensity of urban sensation. A century of techno-logical advances has only increased the scope for open-ness and excess, until today we may experience a “global sublime,” a delirious expansion of self into Internet infinity. The 21st-century pleasure economy permits us to exceed ourselves—ecstatically, extravagantly, waste-fully—until, like Whitman, we are “multitudes.”

The popular rhetoric of sustainability, in contrast, is all about limits on freedom and the thwarting of desire: “conspicuous austerity,” “inconspicuous consumption,” “frugal chic,” “going on a spending fast,” “carborexics,” “energy anorexics.” The proliferating mots spell out the pleasures of a hunger artist writ small: the satisfaction of never forgetting one’s reusable shopping bag or failing to separate the brown glass from the green and the clear, the bio waste from the metal and plastic. Watch those paint drips, Mr. Pollock! Green parents now have an excuse for not taking their kids to Little League practice—the drive is bad for the planet—and green children can retaliate by chiding their elders for lolling in full bathtubs or leaving the engine idling in the pickup line. Such meanness has its pleasures no doubt, but they are far from the elation of unfettered self-expression, even among those of tamer tastes than the Marquis de Sade or Charles Manson.
from HDM vol 30: (sustainability) + pleasure
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charlotte perriand chalet meribel-les allues


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scott tallon walker goulding house


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mario botta riva san vitale


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art inc plexi-furniture

via sister slab
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