February 2012
18 posts
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Constantine Cafavy
“The City”
You said: “I’ll go to another country, to another shore,
Find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
And my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Where I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
Where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them,...
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“I’ve spent a surprising amount of time on evangelical Christian blogs,...”
– The strangest bit from Alexandra Samuels’s article “Plug In Better: A Manifesto” for The Atlantic. Worth a read if you’re feeling internetwhelmed.
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WMMNA: In an interview for publik.dk, you said that there are many similarities between the way you live and work as artists and how an organic farmer live and work. Could you give us more details about this?
KULTIVATOR: When we came to live close to the farm, we discovered that both we as artists and the organic farmer were struggling with "companies", or enterprises, that are based on cultural resp., ecological calculations as well as the usual economical one, and that this sometimes clashes. For example, when the EU farm subsidies suddenly changes and the farm has to adapt (or just suffer), or the art money gets directed differently and we must adapt (or just suffer). We both have offices full of unwanted paperwork... And we both always go for this cultural and ecological conviction in the end anyway because it´s the only thing that makes sense. Since the reason that we are publicly funded must be that we take responsibility for those two things first.
Another parallel that we've talked about is like a shared frustration over being exclusive, when we rather would like to be accessible, mainstream, or whatever you call it. Like in the organic farm shop where people come from the city and they buy two peppers, and one small melon, instead of 10 kilos of potatoes. Or in a museum art show that only a certain small crowd visits. As if art and good food are luxury things, when they should belong to everybody.
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“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”
– Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought. 1975.
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“Too much of new media aesthetic practice apes the market, using the art object...”
– Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A user’s guide to digital arts, media, and cultures. MIT Press, 2000.
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“There is an inevitable hype cycle involved: after every great wave of public...”
– Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A user’s guide to digital arts, media, and cultures. MIT Press, 2000.
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“It is in the process of the use of the equipment that we must actually encounter...”
– Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 1975.
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“Infinitely tiny partitions of time contain the equivalent of what used to be...”
– Paul Virilio, in an interview with Jerome Sans in Flash Art 138 (Jan/Feb, 1988)
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NOWNESS: Tell us a secret about the art world.
DANIEL BIRNBAUM: Nothing is hidden.
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“Consider the command ‘snap to grid.’ It instructs the computer to take...”
– Peter Lunenfeld. Snap to Grid: A user’s guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures. MIT Press, 2000.
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“Ideal computers can be experienced when you write a small program. They seem to...”
– Jaron Lanier, You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. Penguin: 2010. 121-22.
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January 2012
29 posts
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Currently reading Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman and came across a beautiful passage about an afternoon spent at the Met:
One day next week, a rainy Thursday afternoon, he stood in a large room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Somewhere in the heights a workman was rattling the chain of a skylight. Happy people were worse off in their happiness in museums than anywhere else, he had...
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“Unlike most Americans, who speak as if they were sipping gruel, he chose his...”
– Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman
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“The real self, that is to say, is not in time. Really, we are not on the...”
– Julian Young, “Death and Transfiguration: Kant, Schopenhauer and Heidegger on the Sublime.” Inquiry, 2005. 139.
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WatchThursday 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...
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“I love my work— she’s the real deal […] She’s not as...”
– Jerry Saltz, on his wife & fellow art critic Roberta Smith
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“Art is the power to be able to embed thought in materials. For the poet, poetry...”
– Jerry Saltz
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“Fail for me, but fail flamboyantly. Don’t fail the way we’re doing...”
– Jerry Saltz, to curators and artists at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis
(On kind of a JS kick, please forgive me, I promise something else soon.)
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In 1933, renowned author F. Scott Fitzgerald ended a letter to his 11-year-old daughter, Scottie, with a list of things to worry about, not worry about, and simply think about. It read as follows:
Things to worry about: Worry about courage Worry about cleanliness Worry about efficiency Worry about horsemanship Things not to worry about: Don’t worry about popular opinion Don’t worry about dolls...
came twice, you thrice
dragonauttt:
i love school
i love learning
i love reading
i love writing
but
i just want to sink into a bog
while listening to “bill is dead” by the fall
YEP.
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“The art world had been academicized, and I’m afraid that we lost a...”
– Jerry Saltz, in his talk at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis in October 2010.
If nothing else, he’s a very entertaining speaker. “We are all dark, but splendid. You understand?”“
Watch on Youtube: Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3
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“The governing principle of the postindustrialist techno-scientific world is not the need to represent the representable, but rather the opposite principle. To turn away from this principle—that infinity is inherent in the very dialectic of search—is absurd, impractical, and reactionary. It is not up to the artist to reinstate a make-believe ‘reality’ which the drive toward knowledge,...
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“Mixing neo- or hyper-realistic motifs with lyrically abstract or conceptual ones on a single surface is saying that everything is equal because everything is easy to consume. It means establishing and ratifying new ‘taste.’ This ‘taste’ is not Taste. Eclecticism panders to the habits of magazine readers, to the needs of consumers of standard industrial imagery, to the sensibility of the...
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“Sublimity is no longer in art, but in speculation on art.”
– Jean-François Lyotard
“The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” trans. Lisa Liebmann, Geoffrey Bennington and Marian Hobson, The Inhuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991) 106.
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arty start
It’s been an arty start to the new year! I’m about to head back to Sweden for six months to finish my masters degree, so I wanted to take a moment to wrap up and list out the exhibitions I’ve seen in the past week:
Charline von Heyl at ICA, Philadelphia. Space Savers Project at Breadboard/EKG exhibition space, Phildelphia. Michael May, Dan Levenson, Todd Baldwin, and Michael Van...
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TK stupidity in The Believer
THE BELIEVER: As an artist, what are your feelings toward the internet?
TERENCE KOH: I want to fall in love with the internet, but I haven’t fallen in love with it yet, because I still have not given love on the internet.
THE BELIEVER: How would you describe the various tableaux that appear on your website? Is it important that they be seen online?
TERENCE KOH: It is about creating a new universe for the new children of art, because the new children understand the immediate access of online information, and I want to make this immediate information as emotional as I am capable of being, as a human being.
THE BELIEVER: What is your relationship to the internet?
TERENCE KOH: Emotional popularity contest.
THE BELIEVER: How has the internet affected your artwork?
TERENCE KOH: I want to be the first complete-continuity-stream artist of the twenty-first century.
WatchINCREDIBLE
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KAYLA GUTHRIE: How did you start writing about art?
CHRIS KRAUS: [...] I didn't really think very much about it, but obviously the way to describe something is just to say what it is and then say what it means to you. And that's basically the recipe for art writing: what is it, and what does it mean? I was certainly familiar with art writing done by poets over the years. Art in America had that wonderful tradition of hiring poets, and I went back and read criticism by people like the poet James Schuyler and his close friend, the painter Fairfield Porter, who wrote art criticism that is so graceful and immediate and complex. I love that. Frances Richards, who writes for Artforum, is another poet writing about art; there's a bracing, slap-in-the-face, shocking difference between that and writing by a professional critic. It's writing that perceives the work on the same plane as the visual artist, but articulates it in a different way. It's experiential.
December 2011
13 posts
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Contemporary Art in Philadelphia?
I am going to be spending New Years in Philly visiting some college friends, and looking to see some contemporary art. Other than the ICA, can anyone recommend good art spaces or galleries?
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