Art + Architecture + Design
Politics
Berlin Alternative Art Spaces; The Artist-run Scene
Apr 18th
As if you needed any more reasons to visit Berlin this summer, Artkrush has just posted a link-filled guide to the alternative scene:
"As alternatives to the white cube, artists reconfigure buildings such as abandoned butcher shops and bombed-out department stores. The new After the Butcher project turns a former meat-processing plant into a space for site-specific installations, while the artists of super bien! host exhibitions in a glass greenhouse. General Public animates a derelict building with shows, film screenings, and performances, and the collective Chaos Computer Club set up an interactive LED display in the windows of an empty office building, enabling passersby to generate light shows with their cell phones. Far more common, however, is for artists to open project spaces in their spare bedrooms; Croy Nielsen, for example, is an exhibition venue in an expansive apartment in Prenzlauer Berg."
via Artkrush
J. Prévert – Le Discours Sur La Paix – Speech on Peace
Apr 17th
Vers la fin d’un discours extrêmement important
le grand homme d’Etat trébuchant
sur une belle phrase creuse
tombe dedans
et désemparé la bouche grande ouverte
haletant
montre les dents
et la carie dentaire de ses pacifiques raisonnements
met à vif le nerf de la guerre
la délicate question d’argent.
(Near the end of an extremely important discourse
the great man of state
tumbling on a beautiful hollow phrase
falls over it
and undone with gaping mouth
shows his teeth
and the dental decay of his peaceful reasoning
exposes the nerve of war
the delicate question of money)
The 1970 Los Angeles ‘Centers’ Concept Plan
Apr 6th
"Many say Los Angeles is a city that grew without any rational planning. In reality the planning was there — but much of the best planning never quite materialized. A perfect example is the 1970 Concept Los Angeles plan — a vision of what the city could have looked like and now a history lesson for planners. For the first time, it is available in digital format for free download on Planetizen…
"Know as the "centers concept", the main idea was bold and simple: concentrate high density development in a few established activity centers, connect these areas with rapid transit, and leave low-density areas alone.
"Fast forward to today, and planners and concerned residents in Los Angeles (and other cities around the country) continue to advocate for what is now called "transit-oriented" development to accommodate the continued growth of the Los Angeles region. While terms such as "mixed-use" and "ped shed" aren’t explicitly used in the plan – the core ideas are very much present. Public-private partnerships, open space preservation, and housing choices also are advocated in the concept plan. Indeed, the entire document echoes many of the core principles of the modern day smart growth movement. However, this was during a time when cities were still seen as symbols of futuristic progress — an outlook much different than today’s romanticism of the cities of the past.
"Yet, except for a few dense centers such as Warner Center in the San Fernando Valley, the "centers concept" of the 1970s has left little impact on land use and transportation in Los Angeles.
"So what happened?"
Click HERE to find out.
-from Planetizen
via ArchNewsNow-Newsletter
Real Estate Roller Coaster
Apr 5th
If any of you out there are still wondering if we are nearing the top of the housing market, here is a little something to help convince you. This little movie has taken average US home price data, adjusted for inflation, and plotted it to an actual roller coaster graphic.
Of course, you’ll only be swayed by this if you trust things like numbers, statistics, and historical precident: http://one.revver.com/watch/223100/flv/affiliate/79294
via information aesthetics
Link http://www.speculativebubble.com/videos/real-estate-roller-coaster.php
U.S. to “Take Out” 7 Countries in 5 Years: Gen. Wesley Clark
Apr 4th
Don’t waste your time on conspiracy theory sites. The truth is far more frightening. Do you believe Gen. Wesley Clark?
"About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”
"So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!” "
LINK Democracy Now! HERE
The Paintings Are Alive; A Manifesto by Daniel Mendel-Black
Mar 26th
I’ve been wanting to post this manifesto for weeks. The riff off David Salle’s "The Paintings Are Dead" is implicit and hilarious. And the paintings are some of the best of the year. Nice work, Daniel.
The Paintings Are Alive – Daniel Mendel-Black
1. The paintings are not dead. They do not celebrate ruin, they are what is still standing after the necrophiliac bloodbath, they are just as alive as everything else culture tries to destroy.
2. In horror movies like Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive (1974) or John Carpenter’s answer to Ronald Reagan’s death culture, They Live (1988), it is much more thrilling when things are alive that shouldn’t be.
3. These paintings are meant to convey unstable, collapsing spaces whose highly charged and perilous depths beg for empathy, even if they are images one might want to think twice before entering.
4. My intention is that the paintings are totally unapologetic, and, yet, their outcome is undeniably fragile. Chance is a major factor. Each painting is really only an accumulation of possible events. It’s hard, for that reason, to take full credit for their final outcome. My only honest claim is to invent the set of circumstances that ultimately allows the painting to happen.
5. The paintings are vertical like figures. There is something very human about being able to put your arms around something very intense.
6. These paintings are reconceived in terms of the larger cultural spectacle without allegory, or any idea that looks backwards for its own relevance. I want them to be the symbolic language object come-to-life, the way it is impossible to ignore something that stirs in the ashes, not dead, but rising from the death of everything that has been poisoned and made extinct around it.
7. The idea of painting as an ahistorical symbol, standing outside of time and thus able to comment on painting as a whole, can only exist if history is not dead. You can’t have it both ways.
8. Today’s Neo-classical worshipers of objectivity can keep their eternal, loveless vigil over the history of abstraction for themselves. Beauty is not something deep-frozen and passive in a sacred vitrine, like the antagonist’s collection of virgin corpses in a horror movie. I want these paintings to demand one’s attention like an intelligent consciousness alien to one’s own.
9. Ugly painting is not more democratic and humanist than any other kind of painting. Any argument that makes its claim of being radical solely by way of taste can only do so by means of outdated social theories that willfully ignore the singularly enfranchised sensibility that mainly supports such art. These paintings are meant to be flawed perfectly like anything else one would want to grow to love.
10. I want my paintings to be dramatic. These paintings are made with the belief that deep down inside we must know that nothing but death stands still. The transcendental object love of the exterminating angel is over-rated. For me, it seems that any idea of drama in abstract painting would want to embrace the potential vertigo such painting offers.
11. I am drawn to extreme contrasts, often contradictory, like, for example, the polarity between innocence and brutality, discord and balance, insides hung out, the guttural and rational, or the sympathetic dissonance of super high- and low-registers in bands like the Melvins or Thrones.
12. These paintings are meant to challenge the basic psychoanalytical faults underlying our most trusted mythologies — as an affirmation of the idea that concepts always already contain their own opposite counter-meaning. In order to lend significance to their own point of view, the ideologue must love their enemy as much, if not more, than they love themselves, which is a self-hating principal. These paintings have no ideology.
13. I am interested in representing the collapsing and derelict sense of form that is particularly characteristic of the dilapidation of fixed structures and its correlation in the larger cultural debate — underscored by our ongoing national political crisis of conscience — around the fundamental dysfunction and fragility of the belief systems we most freely subscribe to.
Biofuel and Health Foods are Killing Orang Utans: Extinct in Five Years?
Mar 26th
A shocking UN report details how the booming palm oil industry is wiping out one of man’s closest relatives as its forest habitat disappears. David Smith asks if it’s too late to save them
The Orang Utan, one of man’s closest and most enigmatic cousins, could be virtually extinct within five years after it was discovered that the animal’s rainforest habitat is being destroyed even more rapidly than had been predicted.
A United Nations report has found that illegal logging and fires have been overtaken as the primary cause of deforestation by a huge expansion of oil palm plantations, which are racing to meet soaring demand from Western food manufacturers and the European Union’s zeal for biofuels.
via The Observer
Heartfield versus Hitler: Hitler was No Surprise
Mar 23rd
"Willett’s book Heartfield versus Hitler is an absolute refutation to the many who attempted to excuse their tolerance and/or support of Hitler’s rise to power with the disingenuous claim:
‘We did not know.’
As Heartfield’s images from the 1930s make clear, Hitler’s character and intentions were far from secret."
Link: John Heartfield.
Left, Hitler erzahlt Marchen
Hitler tells us a scary bedtime story
"Zu Hilfe, zu Hilfe, ich bin eingekreist!"
Help! Help! I’m surrounded via ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".
and Wit
Nausea, Cinema, and Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”
Mar 22nd
I’m feeling a little meloncholoy this evening and this struck a chord. Not to put too fine a point on it, but few moments in cinema have proved more poignant, or more nauseating than these from Chaplin’s "The Great Dictator":
Planet of Slums by Mike Davis
Mar 22nd
We’ve been fans of Mike Davis since his "City of Quartz" days. His new book, "Planet of Slums" appears to be no less insightful. Here he is in an interview with BLDGBLOG:
"Well, I don’t actually believe in the notion of overpopulation – particularly as it’s now become clear that the most extreme projections of human population growth just aren’t coming to pass. Probably for the last ten or fifteen years, demographers have been steadily reducing their projections.
The paramount question is not whether the population has grown too large, but: how do you square the circle between, on the one hand, social justice with some kind of equitable right to a decent standard of living, and, on the other, environmental sustainability? There aren’t too many people in the world – but there is, obviously, over-consumption of non-renewable resources on a planetary scale. Of course, the way to square that circle – the solution to the problem – is the city itself. Cities that are truly urban are the most environmentally efficient systems that we have ever created for living together and working with nature. The particular genius of the city is its ability to provide high standards of living through public luxury and public space, and to satisfy needs that can never be meet by the suburban private consumption model.
Having said that, the problem of urbanization in the world today is that it’s not urbanism in the classic sense. The real challenge is to make cities better as cities. I think Planet of Slums addresses the reality that every complaint made by sociologists in the 1950s and 60s about American suburbia is now true on an exponentially increased scale with poor cities: all the problems with sprawl, all the problems with an increasing amount of time and resources tied up in commutes to work, all the problems with environmental pollution, all the problems with the lack of traditional urban apparatuses of leisure, recreation, social services and so on.
read the rest of this great interview HERE
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