Art + Architecture + Design
Philosophy
à L’abri des Coups du Sort! – de Musset
Apr 30th
Information Sickness Cure: Explode the Continuum of History; Walter Benjamin’s Best
Apr 24th
"Beset with information sickness and time fever, our challenge is to explode the continuum of history, as Benjamin realized in his final and best thinking.
Empty, homogenous, uniform time must give way to the singularity of the non-exchangeable present. Historical progress is made of time, which has steadily become a monstrous materiality, ruling and measuring life. The ‘time’ of non-domestication, of non-time, will allow each moment to be full of awareness, feeling, wisdom, and re-enchantment. The true duration of things can be restored when time and the other mediations of the symbolic are put to flight.
Derrida, sworn enemy of such a possibility, grounds his refusal of a rupture on the nature and allegedly eternal existence of symbolic culture: history cannot end, because the constant play of symbolic movement cannot end. This auto-da-fé is a pledge against presence, authenticity, and all that is direct, embodied, particular, unique, and free. To be trapped in the symbolic is only our current condition, not an eternal sentence…."
Link: Insurgent Desire – The Modern Anti-World .
Via: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal". and WIT
How to Lift the Earth
Apr 22nd
Not sure just where the fulcrum would lie, but this is fun to think about, just in case we ever need to do a little planetary rearranging:
UPDATE: Somewhere along the line, we neglected to document the provenance of these images. They can be found in a terrific essay by Kircher scholar Michael John Gorman titled “Mathematics and Modesty in the Society of Jesus: The Problems of Cristoph Grienberger (1564-1636).” As it turns out, Greinberger himself calculated that “by means of no more than 24 wheels with toothed axes, the Earth’s globe, even if it were made entirely of gold, could be driven away from the centre [of the universe], by the force of only one Talent.”
via kirchersociety
Join the NY Media Elite – FREE!
Apr 22nd
This is just so much dorky goodness that I have to post the full entry. From Kottke.com:
I might be shooting myself in the foot by posting this, but the table of contents for the newest issue of the New Yorker is usually available on Sunday on newyorker.com, the day before the issue hits the newsstands and arrives in subscriber mailboxes. All you need to do is hack the URL of the TOC from the previous Monday. Here’s the URL for the April 23 TOC:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2007/04/23/toc_20070416
“2007/04/23″ is the date of the issue and “toc_20070416″ refers to the date of the posting. This then is the URL for the April 30 issue:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2007/04/30/toc_20070423
At right is the cover for tomorrow’s issue, which includes Adam Gopnik’s piece on the Virginia Tech shooting, a new piece by Atul Gawande, and Anthony Lane’s review of Hot Fuzz. Monday’s New Yorker on Sunday is usually only available to the select few of the Manhattan media elite who are sped their new issues hot off the presses. Now everyone can have a similar experience on the web.
Enjoy.
via kottke.org
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)
Alamo: A Radio Play by Rick Moody, with Miranda July and Ethan Hawke
Apr 15th
"In this radio drama, middle-aged, doctoral candidate Irving Paley is obsessed with a work of contemporary sculpture in downtown Manhattan, and the ways it affects those who pass by it regularly. On an answering machine he collects the stories of a range of New Yorkers, all of whom have some relationship to Alamo, aka “the Cube.” Over the course of an interview with a public radio reporter about the project, Paley reveals how the Cube has slowly consumed his life, while back at the sculpture, a mystery surrounding the artwork deepens."
You can find more on this one here http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/audio_library_2004.asp Be sure to check out the interview with Moody:
> You’ve recorded several of your short stories for the radio, with musicians and artists playing along. How do you imagine the experience of hearing these versions of the stories differs from reading them?
Well, I think literature really benefits from being performed. It makes the beauty of the language more apparent, and it makes an implied voice an actual instrument. I always feel like I understand literature better when I’ve heard it read aloud. For example, there’s a recording of James Joyce reading some of Finnegans Wake. That’s a very difficult book, but it sounds fabulous when Joyce reads from it.
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.
Twitter yourself Mad, or Watch Picasso on YouTube or MySpace
Mar 26th
Twitter is a great idea for those of us who feel the need to try every new communication idea. The basic principle seems to be that there is space in the continuum of–phone call, Email, Skype, AIM, and blog post–for a simple way to just hang a sign on the digital door to say, "Back in 5" or "Gone fishing" or even "Got an itch I need to scratch".
Yet I remain unconvinced. Most people I know are too busy to even stay current on Email. No way will friends ping Twitter to see if I’m at my desk. It reminds me of this film of Picasso drawing. Yes, it’s interesting…once. But I’m more interested in what he does than in how he does it. Is this too "destination is more important than the journey" for you?
watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vgAYTC9bRY
check his home page here: http://www.myspace.com/picassoart
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
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