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In August 1970, Forcade undertook another high-profile caper. Warner Brothers was filming a movie entitled Medicine Ball Caravan, that chronicled the adventures of a tribe of hippies—including ex-Merry Prankster Wavy Gravy and his Hog Farm commune—as they made their way cross-country to attend the Isle of Wight rock festival in England. Forçade intercepted the caravan near Boulder. In his Cadillac limousine (now painted a militaristic olive drab) was a wide assortment of fireworks and smoke-bombs. In his entourage was one of the Yippies' most provocative characters, David Peel—the group's official songster, whose John Lennon-produced album The Pope Smokes Dope was an underground classic then being banned all over the world (and who took his name from his habit of smoking banana peels). Peel's incessant taunting of the caravan leaders as whores for Warner Brothers finally brought the situation to violence. The camp boss pulled a knife on Peel; then Forçade (decked out like a frontiersman in a fringed leather jacket with a skull-and-crossbones button reading "The American Revolution") jumped the boss from behind. The whole episode was caught on film—and used in the movie. While Forçade claimed his aim had been to expose the caravan as corporate exploitation of the counter-culture, rumors circulated that he had actually been in Warner Brothers' pay—to provide some on-camera violence and publicity. Others claimed he was piggy-backing a big cross-country marijuana run on the caravan.

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play plax toys by patrick rylands for trendon

ortega tortilla

play plax via vz
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party.jpg


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muntzed


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the breaking of a weather underground


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degas




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l'homme



For the buyers and their representatives, the Giacometti sale was probably a once in a lifetime opportunity. The sculpture is considered to be one of the most important by the 20th-century Swiss artist.

There was a genuine sense of anticipation in the auction room. Not only could you smell the expensive perfumes and colognes, you could smell the money. Interest in the sculpture was clear from the start with bids being shouted before the auctioneer had even had chance to ask for them. "On your marks, get set, I'm going to start at £9m," said auctioneer Henry Wyndham.

"£12m," came the first bid. "That's my kind of price," said Wyndham.

The figure then rattled up quickly, ping-ponging around the room. In total there were 10 bidders but it came down to two telephone bidders from the mid-£30m mark onwards. When it went from £47m to £50m in a giant leap – what's £3m after all – there were gasps. When the hammer went down, there was loud applause.

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The Bauhaus was more than just an idea, of course, it was an actual institution. That institution’s historical background figures in each of these accounts -- to a point. In general, however, what strikes me is how bloodless most descriptions of the Bauhaus are. History appears more or less the way it did at the MoMA show, as a timeline outside the galleries; that is, as ornament, not as integral to understanding the meaning of the artwork. To truly recover the spark of relevance of Bauhaus practice, you need to thoroughly dig into what happened in Germany in the years 1919-1933 -- to put the history back into art history, so to speak.

Four giant facts that loomed over the founding of the Bauhaus in 1919:

* World War I, 1914-1918. The War killed some two million Germans, and left Germany’s economy -- then the world’s second largest -- in shambles. The conflict had begun in 1914 with substantial working-class support, on all sides. It ended with German soldiers in revolt against their officers, and a deep hatred of the leaders who had initiated the hostilities. Many Bauhaus students were veterans of the war. Walter Gropius, its first director, served on the Western Front, was wounded, and won two Iron Crosses.

* The Russian Revolution of 1917. Growing out of war fatigue, a successful Marxist-led revolution on Germany’s doorstep overthrew a much-loathed Czar and replaced him, for heroic moments, with history’s most far-ranging experiment in worker-run government (soon to be strangled by civil war and reaction). The Russian example ignited a wide-spread enthusiasm for social experiment and revolutionary politics, in Germany and elsewhere.

* The German Revolution of 1918. In November, the discredited German Kaiser fled the country; the German Empire became the German Republic. Inspired by the October Revolution, the next months saw power pass over into a woolly collection of grassroots workers and soldiers councils across the country. Authority was soon consolidated, however, in a National Assembly dominated by the disastrously centrist German Social Democratic Party (SPD), socialist in name, but in practice bent on placating a still-monarchist right-wing. The workers council movement, however, persisted -- and was wildly influential with artists; Gropius became head of the architect-led Working Council on the Arts in February 1919, which issued an "Appeal to the Artists of All Countries."

* Months of civil war between a still-monarchist right and a socialist-inspired left in 1918-1919. The police and army were so penetrated by radical agitation that the SPD government fell back on the "Freikorps," irregulars formed from the rump of the German officer corps, to maintain order. In January 1919, a rebellion in Berlin, the "Spartacus Uprising," ended with the murder of the left’s most popular speaker, Karl Liebknecht, and its most capable thinker, Rosa Luxemburg. In February, Freikorps troops used artillery and mass arrests to crush the workers movement in Bremen, on the northwest coast, and the Ruhr, in the west, then went into central Germany to liquidate various organs of popular power. In March, there was another upheaval in Berlin. In April, Bavaria declared itself an independent "Soviet Republic" under workers rule, and was violently put down (becoming subsequently the cradle of Nazism).

These were the cheerful headlines that formed the backdrop for the birth of the Bauhaus. Imagine: Walter Gropius issued the Bauhaus Manifesto in April 1919, when the hope in the new ultra-democratic structures was still running hot, when the post-war economic chaos was acute, when class war was an inescapable fact -- Weimar, where the Bauhaus was to have its home, had recently been sealed off for a radius of 10 kilometers by the government, to secure it against the left!

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samoayoko


samoa yoko
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old chum


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the craftsman builder


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rip torn and norman mailer - the infamous "maidstone" brawl - uncut!

via revel in ny
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todays chicken and the egg question:

hand crafted chicken coops by drew waters -or- mountain arks

a justin find
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heavy weave paintings of dani marti


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As the days remain short and post-holiday gloom sets in, we wanted to spread some cheer from our latest trip to the archives. Any creative rut can be cured by a quick dive into historic printed ephemera. The Museum Archives are quite extensive, and we’ll often use their finding aids before beginning on new exhibition or advertising projects. Recently we all took a trip to the archives to look through our department’s files Below is a small sampling of work created in the 1960s by design legend Ivan Chermayeff and his firm Chermayeff & Geismar.



via reference library
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cigburn


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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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