Went to Copenhagen over the weekend and stumbled across some Shepherd Fairey murals. Other murals in the city were the subject of some recent controversy.
Oh no big deal. Just got published by BOMB Magazine.
(via BOMBLOG: The Phenomenological “Experience” of Carsten Höller by Jennifer Lindblad)
This looks like all my dreams, recently.
Thursday night I went to see Doug Ashford speak at Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm. Part of their lecture series “Abstract Possible: Stockholm Synergies,” Ashford spoke on his painting practice as well as his interest in the somewhat forgotten German art historian Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965), whose “Abstraction and Empathy” was highly influential for Paul Klee and Gilles Deleuze, among others.
I won’t attempt a synthesis of the lecture, but as Ashford is such a poetic speaker, I feel I should share a few poignant phrases from my notes:
- “Abstract imagination seeks to recover something lost.”
- “Abstraction can reconcile our apprehension of the outside world.”
- “Every abstraction points to yet another need for abstraction.”
- “Love can’t be helped, to the point of abandoning the real. It is an abstract condition.”
- “I want to understand an art that demands the rationalization of the everyday world, from the false security of progression, turning back to today.”
- “I began to make abstract paintings simply because I liked the way they looked. They looked like the failures of my life lit up by opportunity.”
Doug Ashford is an artist, teacher and writer. Since 1989 he has taught design, sculpture and theory at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where he is now Associate Professor. The collaboratively organized Interdisciplinary Seminar and Lecture Series at The Cooper Union continues to provide public platforms for rethinking art across media and discipline. Ashford’s principle art practice from 1982 to 1996 was as a member of Group Material, who collectively sought to transform the production, presentation and learning of contemporary culture through artistic intervention. Since those years he has gone on to make paintings, write and produce public projects, all engaged with the social imagination. His most recent dialogic project was Who Cares (Creative Time, 2006), a book built from a series of conversations between Ashford and an assembly of other cultural practitioners on public expression, ethics and beauty. His work with Group Material has been recently compiled in the book Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (Four Corners Books, 2010).
