Arts & Architecture was a great arts/architecture/music/culture magazine published in the United States from 1945-1967. The magazine always had a great cover that reflected the art and design aesthetics fo the era, and now you can see images of all the covers together on the Arts & Architecture website. Here is a taste:
But that’s not all. You can click on every cover and download a PDF with excerpts from each issue.
Thanks to Grain Edit, a cool blog devoted to art and design from the same era as these magazines, for steering me to them.
The Flog is a great art blog published by a French artist named Fette that covers the L.A. art scene in extensive, photographic detail. Says the site:
Fette is a french visual artist who currently lives in Los Angeles. She started The Flog in April 2005 as a way to connect with the city’s flourishing art scene and to promote the work of the artists working here. Since then, the site has been featured in the LA Times, Artkrush, ArtReview, Flavorpill, K10K, The Art Dump, Art Forum and is regularly linked by galleries and artists. In October 2006, she opened fette’s gallery, an independent space for contemporary art here in Los Angeles. Through exhibitions, film projections and performances, this new laboratory for the arts generates new dialogues between artists working outside of the city, and artists working in the realm of california.
It may be the cliché of the moment, but I just got a new iPhone yesterday, and it’s a really great device.
I snapped the pic below with the iPhone, then used the great Wordpress for iPhone app to write and publish the whole post directly from the phone — very simple and intuitive. Only the links in this post did I have to add later on the Mac, as the Wordpress App doesn’t have an easy way to add links — yet — and the iPhone has no cut-and-paste — also “yet”.
All-in-all, this phone is light years ahead of my old Treo, and I wouldn’t bet on Palm and Sprint surviving a whole lot longer. I will be posting many more “field reports” posts from this phone. Perhaps, eventually, I could even do a Stains Across America project.
Here I am in the studio in front of Mare aux Songes (“Pond of Dreams”). The Mare aux Songes, on the island of Mauritius, the most important archeological site of dodo skeletons. Just me and the dodo, baby, living the dream.
Found this a couple days ago at the Sacramento Zoo — click to see a larger version:
The kind of beauty that capital improvement campaigns, sadly, usually replace. I should have offered to buy them a new sign if I can have the old one. Maybe I will.
Chris King is a writer and musician living in St. Louis, a city born at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Chris has a thing for confluences, both literal and metaphoric — thus the theme of his blog, Confluence City. This fascination with confluences is something we have in common, as you’d probably guess by looking at my work, which at its most basic level is a confluence of word + image.
I don’t know Chris, have never met him. He just emailed me out of the blue a couple hours ago to introduce himself and to say that we share an affinity for Robert Walser. Another confluence. And an influence.
He and I also share a trait of writing things down in notebooks and any scrap of paper at hand, which, as professional musician, he used to do in between gigs in notebooks he dubbed “gigbooks”. In The Chatter of the Soul, he elaborates:
As long as I can remember, I have been writing down fetching things people say. My personal hell would be me clutching my pants pockets for eternity and finding no pen or paper, while fascinating folks are saying unforgettable things that all of us are bound to forget, if someone doesn’t write them down, now. In my crowds, that was always me.
…On my own time and dime, I rather like to drink carefully-made beer and wine, and fellowship with friends with amply-stocked minds and souls. When this was a rock and roll road show, we were forever traveling between gigs. The notebooks I kept in those days were known (in the beginning, officially, complete with roman-numeraled dog-latin names) as “gig books.”… And when [these days] I take the time to type up my notes after a night out, I still think of them as gigbook poems.
Gigbook poems are not for everyone. Often I have been told, “I guess you had to be there.” But I think they capture the chatter of the soul. They strike me like little luminescent winks of actual people enacting their lives, in the middle of it and making it all up as they go along.
Yes! There is often gold in the most seemingly trivial of overheard utterances, which have long formed one of the sources of the texts I develop in my work (see #4 on the About the Work page of my site). I think Chris, as a “real” writer and journalist (and judging by his comment above), is probably more reportorial and factual than I am, or, to put it a better way, more inclined toward narrative; I’m usually pulling paragraphs apart and looking for different ways to scramble meaning. My version of his gigbooks are the Snarkbooks, which are not so much “the chatter of the soul”, but just the chatter, period.
There’s a feeling in this kind of activity though, a feeling of being in the zone, of appreciating what’s happening in the moment, that I think we’ve both tuned into in our own ways. John Cage summed this feeling up beautifully in the closing paragraph of his 1957 lecture, “Experimental Music“:
And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
Purposeful purposelessness is the best description I’ve ever heard for the function of an artist in society. And I love how Cage repeatedly in his writings throughout his life stressed the (curiosity) value of observing or creating situations and seeing what happens (getting “one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way”), as opposed to trying to impose a structure. I’ve always hated the phrase, “bringing order out of chaos”, as if the “ordered” system was inherently good and the “chaotic” system something to be avoided at all costs. If meaning is synonymous, or at least dependent upon, information, then a chaotic system, which has more potential, more possible outcomes, than an arbitrarily ordered system, must therefore be more “meaning-full“. Allowing an event to take place, to happen, does not mean, however, that it will always be 100% chaotic, and it’s much more interesting when a confluence of dynamic systems produces both chaotic and ordered eddies of information. How the “ordered” and the “chaotic” systems are arranged is, of course, a (by)product of uncertainty, so the beast feeds itself and the cycle continuously renews, like the water in a river you can never step in twice.
Yes, I’ve gone off on a tangent, and by now you’ve likely drowned in this river of metaphor, but isn’t a tangent but a confluence if you’re traveling in the opposite direction? Run the film of the tangent backwards, and you have a confluence.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan (p. 204), relates this anecdote about Apelles of Kos, a renowned ancient Greek painter from the 4th century BC:
Sextus Empiricus retold the story of Apelles the Painter, who, while doing a portrait of a horse, was attempting to depict the foam from the horse’s mouth. After trying very hard and making a mess, he gave up and, in irritation, took the sponge he used for cleaning his brush and threw it at the picture. Where the sponge hit, it left a perfect representation of the foam.
A beautiful case study in support of Taleb’s advice to “maximize the serendipity around you,” something I am always trying to tap into both in the visualization process (painting, drawing, making stains) and in the conceptualization process (making words, stringing words along, weaving and unweaving narrative threads).
Thanks Michael for sending me the book — it’s very interesting and, as you suspected, right up my alley.
A couple Crucible-dwelling metal/fire artists, Matisse and Roxie, have created a Flamethrower Shooting Gallery for this year’s Burning Man, which debuted recently at The Crucible’s Fire Arts Festival in Oakland, California.
Here’s a nice shot of the sooty aftermath:
Via Gizmodo, where they have more photos and a video posted.
Pardon my rusty Portuguese (ok, my non-existent Portuguese, which is even rustier), but I just discovered a great art blog, Gramatologia, published by the Brazilian artist Amir Brito Cadôr. Amir’s work and the work of other artists he features is predominantly text-based in many different languages, and the site is mostly visual, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t read Portuguese. Check it out.
Amir’s work is often caligraphic, and plays with type and alphabets. Here is a self-serving example of three randomly chosen pieces from his Livro dos Seres Imaginários (Book of the Imaginary Beings) that just happen to spell my name when combined in just the right way:
I’ve discovered a lot of interesting artists and work on Gramatologia that I had never heard of before, such as Jan Olof Mallander, whose work (another “J”..hmm… is this a pattern with me?) is at right. Here is a good bio on the Finnish artist, which leads off with this bit of inspiration:
In the winter of 1972-73, the Cheap Thrills Gallery , founded by Jan-Olof Mallander, was converted into a macrobiotic restaurant. For a few weeks, the gallery served the public vegetarian cuisine instead of art. The experiment was the forerunner of the first vegetarian restaurant in Finland. When Mallander, a macrobiotic himself, was some time later seen in a restaurant cutting up a juicy steak, he merely said: ” Know your enemy ..”
I was about to show more examples, but there is so much good work on Gramatologia, I’d be here all day, so just go check it out for yourself.
I rented a huge new studio in May, then spent the next six weeks painting the walls, painting out the dark blue carpet, building desks, tables and shelves, and basically transforming it into a great workspace. Here is a view of it – click on the photo to see a larger version:
This view from the stairs shows the main workspace, but the studio also has an office, a back room (the “cut and spray” room), a half-kitchen, and upstairs another room and a mezzanine for storage. After years in a series of cramped spaces, now I really have room to work, and ironically all the work I’m doing right now is small.
This storefront used to be a piano store, but my (very cool) landlord John dubbed it “A Mound of Space“, after seeing the Snarkbook drawing of that name. If there’s a better name for the studio, I’ve yet to find it.
Sam Goldenrule Jones writes and publishes several excellent blogs, including, Wandering with Robert Walser, “A project dedicated to Swiss author Robert Walser (1878-1956)”, a great writer I only recently discovered.
The fact that Walser was Swiss, ended up in an insane asylum, and wrote stories and articles in a fantastically small microscript handwriting, put me in mind of Adolf Wölfli. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of a famous Wölfli drawing (beating Warhol to Campbell’s Soup by four decades or so) with in image of Walser’s (described below) that I cribbed from Sam’s Flickr set of Walser images (apologies):
Here is Sam’s description of the Walser image:
An image of a notecard I purchased at the Museum Neuhaus in Biel, Switzerland, Walser’s birthplace. The legend says “Micrograme No. 147 (Autumn 1925); crayon, 20.5 x 13.2 cm (format original). Robert Walser-Archiv, Zurich. Copyright Carl Seelig-Siftung, Zurich. Museum Neuhaus, Biel. As I recall, the text consists of a review Walser wrote of the book that accompanied this publisher’s announcement.
These two images together remind me of a phrase that popped into my head the other day that is currently working its way through a Snarkbook and toward a drawing or painting: parallel marginalia.
Sam also turned me on to Words Without Borders, where he recently lead a “Walser month”, with a number of roundtable discussions. One in particular especially interests me, Walser and the Visual Arts, which currently only has Sam’s initial “
Ok, finally, a snippet of Walser, from one of my favorite stories, Kleist in Thun (a title also working its way through my “system”), where Walser imagines himself as the Prussian writer Heinrich von Kleist, during the spring and summer of 1802, in a villa on a small island in the Aar River near the town of Thun, Swizerland. Here is Walser delivering the weather report, the “emotional weather report” as Tom Waits later sang:
On rainy days it is terribly cold and void. The place shivers at him. The green shrubs whine and whimper and shed rain tears for some sun. Over the heads of the mountains drift monstrous dirty clouds like great impudent murderous hands over foreheads. The countryside seems to want to creep away and hide from this evil weather, to shrivel up. The lake is leaden and bleak, the language of the waves unkind. The storm wind, wailing like a weird admonition, can find no issue, crashes from one scarp to the next. It is dark here, and small, small. Everything is pressed right up against one’s nose. One would like to seize a sledgehammer and beat a way out of it all. Get away there, get away!
I love that about Walser, how everything in his prose is alive, sentient and full of its own desire, fellow-citizens with the protagonists and the other characters who people his places.
A nice composite image of John Cage cooking, from the excellent blog of the greatly named J. Henry Chunko:
Mr. Chunko links to this post about a recording of John Cage: Empty Words Part IV (1973-78). But I especially like the Lichtensteiger.de blog that he turned me on to, which has several pages of John Cage material. The recorded Cage readings that strike me in this hearing as unexpected cousins of Kurtz’s monologues in Apocalypse Now, two characters I’ve never connected before.
Great exhibition photo of work by Malevich in The Last Futurist Exhibition ‘0.10′, Petrograd, 1915, from a TateETC article:
Apparently this is the only surviving photo from the exhibition, in which 21 of the 39 Malevich works in the show can be seen. More about The Last Futurist Exhibition. And take a look in this book too.
Malevich’s title of the exhibition, 0.10, is an enigma. Most appearances of it online are in references to books that are hidden behind a veil of copyright — sure, I could hike to a library and spend all day looking up sources, but I prefer to hunt online. Various references to the title include 0.10; 0,10; 0-10; Zero – Ten; and my favorite, for obvious zenigmatic pun potential, the German version, “Null – Zehn”. Here is a book excerpt that refers to the “enigmatic title” of the exhibition, which claims it should be read to mean the same thing as the black squares, namely, “something like a first veil after Nothing”. Of course, that much is obvious to anybody….
