Art + Architecture + Design
Staff
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Homepage: http://www.bigfigdesigngroup.com
Posts by Staff
Web 2.0 in 5 Minutes by Michael Wesch
Feb 6th
Great for sparking some debate. We Saw this on Dennis Hollingsworth’s site and had to post it.
Walter Benjamin/Arcades/and Blogging
Feb 5th
"Like the railroad stations,
exhibition halls, and shopping arcades, the
‘despised , everyday’
weblogs easily adapt
themselves to the
contours
of everyday activity
and more or less comfortably
serve as literary and political
meeting places, akin to what
was once cafe culture.
Benjamin is anything but the slow
and methodical kind of scholar-creator.
On the contrary, Benjamin would have
loved the quick turn-around of reading
and writing made available and
instantly universally accessible as blogging.
Benjamin’s collecting of materials for the
Arcades project, like blogging,
pleasurably embraces reading
over the shoulders of other writer.
In turn, this action embraces the past,
as well as the future.
Walter Benjamin would have
loved blogging because of its
capability of embracing as
part of its mortar what society
considers trivial and unmentionable.
These innumerable details,
which constitute the names,
or at least the initials,
of every person who exists or
who has ever existed, embrace
what traditional journalism consigns
to ‘quaintness’ and the
‘human interest story.’
Walter Benjamin would have
understood that like the growing
masses of moviegoers of his time,
the thronging masses of bloggers
stand with insousciant
defiance towards the overall capitalist
conception of the function of
information and history."
Link: fait accompli: 11/30/2003 – 12/07/2003.
via: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".
and to us via the delicious! Theresa Duncan
What is it? @ IFC This Weekend
Feb 5th
We’ve seen the trailer, heard the reviews, but we’re still holding out judgement untill we can catch it during our wanderings.
"What is it?" is screening this weekend at the IFC Center in NYC if that’s where you happen to find yourself.
From the IFC site: "the adventures of a young man whose principal interests are snails, salt, a pipe and how to get home, as tormented by a hubristic racist inner psyche."
And According to Doug Harvey: "is something like a B-movie Matthew Barney film, only funnier."
Harvey is usually right. We can’t wait!
links:
http://www.ifccenter.com/event?eventid=999862
London Sewers and John Cage’s Dying Wish
Feb 5th
Yet more evidence that BLDGBLOG is the best blog on the internet today is this piece on the sewers of London and John Cage’s dying wish:
"Unreliable sources suggest that the earliest Victorian sewer engineers were also trained to make musical instruments: thus many storm drains beneath London are designed like saxophones, tubas, and flutes. Distant changes in air pressure cause the whole system to shudder, whistling subliminally on the edges of the wind, a soundtrack for the city so beautiful it’s often hypnotic. If you wait long enough in certain alleys in Soho, you’ll hear it, droning beneath the rustle of crisp bags and trash.
It is rumored that the final, dying words of composer John Cage were: “Make sure they play my London piece… You have to hear my London piece…” He was referring, many now believe, to a piece written for the subterranean saxophony of London’s sewers."
[Image: Tower of ladders and platforms, photographed by Siologen].
via BLDGBLOG
Fog/Kerouac/Desolation Angels
Feb 5th
Fog never lifted today, dammit!
"I called Han Shan in the fog – there was no answer -
The sound of silence
. . . - is all the instruction you’ll get."
- Jack Kerouac
Desolation Angels
via whiskey river
Jonas Mekas @ PS1 Feb 11th – April 16th, 2007
Feb 5th
As fans of all things Jonas, we are pleased to announce this upcoming exhibition of Jonas’ work at PS1. It opens next week and runs through mid-April.
No excuses; check it out!
Jonas Mekas: The Beauty of Friends Being Together Quartet
February 11 – April 16, 2007
(Long Island City, NY – January 31, 2007) P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is pleased to announce Jonas Mekas: The Beauty of Friends Being Together Quartet, an exhibition comprised of films and film stills by the celebrated artist. Mekas is considered an inventor of Diarist Cinema – an intimate first-person collision of poetry, fiction, documentary, and formal experimentation through which any autobiographical themes can be explored – and is also renowned for his extensive film archive. Such seminal and varied components of his oeuvre will be intimately presented in the Mini-Kunsthalle from February 11 through April 16, 2007.
and be sure to check out his daily films here
Transforming New York; Aitken, Jarmusch, Moore @ MoMA Tomorrow Night
Feb 5th
Tomorrow night in NYC, don’t miss the art-star, triple-play, event of the month:
Transforming New York: Music and Film at Night
Tuesday, February 6, 6:30 p.m.
Titus 2
In conjunction with Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers, a public art project presented by MoMA and Creative Time, Aitken, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth discuss the power of film, music, and nighttime to transform the city and its inhabitants.
Tickets ($10; members $8; students, seniors, and staff of other museums $5) can be purchased at the lobby information desk and the Film desk, or online at www.ticketweb.com.
Saul Bellow & Perfection; A False Premise
Feb 5th
Sam Tanenhaus has a wonderful article in Sunday’s NYT which we couldn’t agree with more. All too often art criticism employs an implicit standard [whos? from where?], a false one; a ‘straw-man’ as it were, usually set up with no intent other than to provide an impossible [useless] model from which to draw comparisons:
"Shortcomings, to be sure. But so what? Nature doesn’t owe us perfection. Novelists don’t either. Who among us would even recognize perfection if we saw it? In any event, applying critical methods, of whatever sort, seemed futile in the case of an author who, as Randall Jarrell once wrote of Walt Whitman, “is a world, a waste with, here and there, systems blazing at random out of the darkness” — those systems “as beautifully and astonishingly organized as the rings and satellites of Saturn.” "
OP ART @ SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT
Feb 5th
There is just no way we will be able to see this show, but I have not seen this piece by Bridget Riley in years and it just knocked me out. I’m not sure if the reason is due to the way it reproduces on the screen of my laptop, or if it is just the nostalgic response of a failed painter, but I’m just in love with this piece right now.
Be sure to check out the show if you are in Frankfurt this month…
 BRIDGET RILEY, BLAZE 4, 1963, Emulsion on board, 94,6×94,6 cm Courtesy Karsten Schubert, London, copyright 2007 Bridget Riley. All rights reserved |
 |
OP ART SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT |
The Power of Language to Change the World
Feb 2nd
"The Library is on Fire. These were the code words [during the German occupation of France] for a parachute drop to the Cereste maquis of the French Resistance — words that acquired a mysterious life when one of the containers exploded and set fire to the forest, alerting the Gestapo to the position of Rene Char’s group. The Frenchmen barely escaped with their lives. And the poet thought the fire was proof of the power of language to shape the world. ‘I believe in the magic and in the authority of words,’ he told his superiors in London, insisting the code be changed."
– Christopher Merrill.
Link: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".
via Wit
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