If you want more proof that physicists are the best sculptors working today, beyond the Large Hadron Collider about to come online in Switzerland, look no further than the Large Helical Device Project in Japan — click the pic to see a larger version:
Whatever this thing does, it does it beautifully.
The Centre Pompidou in Paris is currently showing an exhibit of the Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý. Here is the Pompidou’s introduction, illustrated with images I found online:
This is the first exhibition in France of the photographic work of the Czech artist Miroslav Tichý, now more than 80 years old. Only recently discovered, his work reveals the distinctive talent of a marginal and somewhat monomaniacal figure who steadfastly refused the social, political and personal values of the Communist period, form its beginning in 1948 to its end in the late 1980s.
Tichý took up photography in the mid-1950s, reinventing it as it were from scratch and building his own cameras and enlargers from shoe-boxes, tin cans, recycled glass and other waste materials.
His timeless and uncategorizable images, shot instinctively or carelessly on handmade cameras with makeshift optics, offer an extraordinary vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality, half real, half dream. Women on the TV screen : these are his single, obsessional subject.
Rescued from neglect by his neighbour, the film director Roman Buxbaum, in 1989, Tichý’s work was first shown at the Sevilla Biennale in 2004. This exhibition at the Centre Pompidou brings together a number of cameras and some hundred photographs, mostly from the Foundation Tichý Ocean.
Tichý made one of the all-time greatest comments about art (quoted here), which I’ve followed below with a photo of his that perfectly illustrates the idea:
Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.
What a great line: If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world.
Tichý’s comment about “blurs, spots and errors” reminded me of The Smudge, as described by Rebecca West in her epic masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, recounting her travels through (then) Yugoslavia in the late 1930s. West writes of Manichaeism and the concept of The Smudge, an idea that stain-happy me has embraced for years. So I went and searched through BLGF and compiled all of the “smudge” (1) and “The Smudge” (3) references, interspersed below with more Tichý images:
Thereafter the snow was so thick on the wooded hills that the tree-trunks were mere lines and the branches were finer than any lines drawn by a human hand. No detail was visible in the houses of the villages at the base of the hills. They were blocks of soft black shadow edges with the pure white fur of the snow on the roofs. Above the hills there was a layer of mist that drew a dull white smudge between this pure black-and-white world and the dark-grey sky. (BLGF p. 71)
Manichaeism – for these heresies might as well be grouped together under the name of their parent – represents the natural reaction of the earnest mind to a religion that has aged and hardened and committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is to pretend that all is now known, and there can now be laid down a system of rules go guarantee salvation. In its origin it was a reaction against the extreme fatalism of Zoroastrianism, which held that man’s destiny was decided by the stars, and that his only duty was to accomplish it in decorum. Passionately Mani created a myth that would show the universe as a field for moral effort: inspired by Christianity as it had passed through the filter of many Oriental minds and by a cosmology invented by an Aramaic astronomer, he imagined that there had been in the beginning of time a kingdom of light and a kingdom of darkness. This was the origin of the present world, which Mani very aptly called The Smudge. It became the duty of all men who were on the side of the light, which was identified with virtue and reason, to recover the particles of light that have become imprisoned in the substance of darkness, which was identified with vice and brutishness. (BLGF p. 171-172)
When the kingdom of darkness was existing side by side with the kingdom of light without any commixture, then it was committing no offence. That attitude can be traced in Radovan’s faithful reproduction of life’s imperfect forms, in Dostoievsky’s choice of abnormality as a subject. And there is yet another resemblance which is particularly apparent in the work of Radovan. The columns he carved with the representations of The Smudge are borne on the shoulders of those who are wholly of the darkness, Jews and Turks and pagans. It is put forward solidly and without sense of any embarrassment that there are those who are predestined to pain, contrary to the principles of human justice. Calvin admitted this with agony, but there is none here; and Dostoievsky never complains against the God who created the disordered universe he describes. This is perhaps because the Manichaeans, like the Greeks, did not regard God as the Creator, but as the Arranger, or even as the Divine Substance which had to be arranged. (BLGF p. 176)
In the belvedere Marmont must have found it difficult to keep his mind on his cards. In the end, we know, he threw them in and pushed back his chair and strolled away, to leave Dalmatia for ever. There was fault in him too. He was man also, he was a fusion of good and evil, of light and darkness. Therefore he did not want with his wholeness that there should be a victory of light; he preferred that darkness should continue to exist, and this universe, The Smudge, should not pass away…. The great men for whom humanity feels ecstatic love need not be good, nor even gifted; but they must display this fusion of light and darkness which is the essential human character; they must even promise, but a predominance of darkness, that the universe shall for ever persist in its imperfection. (BLGF p. 185)
I’m not really interested in the “good vs. evil” dichotomy, or religious interpretations of reality in general. My interest in smudges and stains is in their abject beauty, and in their being emblematic of uncertainty and things beyond our control. And not necessarily in a bad way, either, but often in a beautiful way, if we just retrain our perceptions to see the beauty in the unexpected, the translucent dream world between what we think we know and what we don’t know that we don’t know. Such is the zone that Tichý operates in.
Here are a group of my stain maps that wallow in and play with The Smudge in a non-dialectic way.
Friday, August 22nd, 2008 - 5:18pm |
Exibitions + Uncategorized + art + photos + quotes + stains |
Comments (1) Another interesting thing I saw at Stanford’s art museum, <a href=”http://museum.stanford.edu/news_room/NewOrleans.html”>Spared from the Storm: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art</a>:
Image: Joseph Cornell (U.S.A., 1903–1972), Radar Astronomy, 1952–56, mixed media
Note how ol’ Uncle Joe applies his signature to the back of the box: reversed. It looks like he painted his signature on thin vellum and, when dry, glued it face down, leaving the signature reversed when viewed from behind, but “right reading” if viewed from the front of the box and you could actually see through the back of the box to see the signture.
Here mashed together are two details from paintings I saw last week at the small exhibition at
Stanford’s art museum, Spared from the Storm: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art:
Raoul Dufy (France, 1877–1953), Window at Nice, 1923, detail
Right: Jackson Pollock (U.S.A., 1912–1956), Composition (White, Black, Blue and Red on White), 1948, detail
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 - 12:50am |
John Cage + Jurisichism + art + chance/random + music |
Comments (2) 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.
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 “brief list of works of art, music and film inspired by, or associated with, Walser”, but that alone ought to keep me far too busy being Walserbusy.
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….
This image of “Nano-Explosions” won first prize in at the November 2007 Materials Research Society (MRS) “Science As Art” competition.
“Nano-Explosions Color-enhanced scanning electron micrograph of an overflowed electrodeposited magnetic nanowire array (CoFeB), where the template has been subsequently completely etched. It’s a reminder that nanoscale research can have unpredicted consequences at a high level. (Image: Fanny Beron, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Canada)”
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 - 2:20pm |
art + disasters + other worlds + phenomena + science |
Comments (0) 
The fiction featured in the August 6, 2007 issue of the New Yorker, So It Is in Life, is by Daniil Kharms, a Russian author with a short, hard life extinguished under Stalin in 1942. His work, just now published in English for the first time, has drawn critical comparisons to Beckett, Camus, and Ionesco. Wrote Kharms in 1937: “I am interested only in nonsense, only in that which has no practical meaning.”
Here is the editor’s introduction to the short short stories published in the New Yorker:
Born in St. Petersburg in 1905, Daniil Kharms was one of the founders, in 1928, of OBERIU, or Association of Real Art, an avant-garde group of writers and artists who embraced the ideas of the Futurists and believed that art should operate outside the rules of logic. In his lifetime, Kharms produced several works for children, but his writing for adults was not published. In 1931, Kharms was charged with anti-Soviet activities and briefly exiled from Leningrad. In 1941, he was arrested by the N.K.V.D. for making “defeatist statements”; sentenced to incarceration in the psychiatric ward of a prison hospital, he died of starvation the following year, during the siege of Leningrad. It wasn’t until the late nineteen-seventies that Kharms’s playful and poetic work began to appear in mainstream publications in Russia. Several books followed, as did festivals in Kharms’s honor and critical comparisons to Beckett, Camus, and Ionesco. The following texts have never been published in English.
Each of the pieces in the New Yorker is only at most a handful of paragraphs long. Here is one of my favorite passages, written in 1932-33, which eloquently describes and issue I deal with all the time in my own work — remembering ideas long enough to get them down on paper:
I suddenly had the impression that I had forgotten something, some incident or important word.
I painstakingly tried to remember this word, and it seemed to me that it began with the letter “M.” No, no! Not with an “M” at all but with an “R.”
Reason? Rapture? Rectangle? Rib? Or: Mind? Misery? Matter?
I was making coffee and singing to myself all the words that started with “R.” Oh, what a tremendous number of words I made up beginning with the letter “R”! Perhaps among them was that one word, but I didn’t recognize it, taking it to be the same as all the others.
Then again, perhaps that word didn’t come up.
Notes the Wikipedia entry on Kharms (italics are mine):
In 1928, Daniil Kharms founded the avant-garde collective OBERIU, or Union of Real Art. He embraced the new movements of Russian Futurism laid out by his idols, Khlebnikov, Kazimir Malevich, and Igor Terentiev, among others. Their ideas served as a springboard. His aesthetic centered around a belief in the autonomy of art from real world rules and logic, and the intrinsic meaning to be found in objects and words outside of their practical function.
By the late 1920s, his antirational verse, nonlinear theatrical performances, and public displays of decadent and illogical behavior earned Kharms—who always dressed like an English dandy with a calabash pipe—the reputation of being a talented but highly eccentric “fool” or “crazy-man” in Leningrad cultural circles.
Notes the Wikipedia entry on the OBERIU group:
The great Russian artist Kazimir Malevich gave the OBERIU shelter in his newly created arts institute for a while, letting them rehearse in one of the auditoriums. It is reported that he said to the young “Oberiuty” (as they are called in Russian): “You are young trouble makers, and I am an old one. Let’s see what we can do.” Malevich also gifted a book of his own (”God Is Not Cast Down”) to one of the founders of OBERIU (Daniil Kharms), with the relevant inscription “Go and stop progress!”.
Go and stop progress! Beautiful.
Says adgoodness:
Marc Ecko wants to promote his roots and love for graffiti. Digital citylights are created that consists of an LCD and a bluetooth interface. People will get the possibility to access the citylight via bluetooth with their cell phones and spray their own graffiti with the cursor of their phone.
Click on the pic above to see a larger version.
NY Times review of a show at the Whitney of German artist Rudolf Stingel that sounds really great:
Mr. Stingel is also heir to the uses of chance and silence, or in his case emptiness, encouraged by the composer John Cage. This is perhaps clearest in an expanse of cream-colored wall-to-wall carpet that spent six months on the floor of Mr. Stingel’s studio accumulating footprints and splatters, flecks and stains of black paint. Covering an immense wall at the Whitney, it initially resembles a huge swath of ancient parchment. When you recognize it as carpet, the thick familiar texture and the random, delicacy of the marks can create an unusual spatial push-pull. Focus on the marks, and they float in a creamy space. Focus on the carpet, and you may feel that you are doing the floating, looking down on it from above.
…The implication is that artists in particular should do as little as possible. The sign of a successful artwork is its ability to derive the greatest effect from the least means. Another lesson to be extracted from this elegant show is the oxymoronic nature of the notion of “empty beauty” that has been bruited about extensively in the last decade. This show suggests that if art is empty, it is not beautiful and vice versa. If something is beautiful in any sustained way, it contains, at the least, an idea about beauty and usually much more. It is the result of something being worked on and worked out. Beauty is the state of operating at stunning efficiency, a triumph that can’t be empty. Mr. Stingel’s work makes this perfectly clear.
“Rudolf Stingel” is at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Oct. 14, 2007.
All images and other content on this site © 2008 Jay Jurisich, unless
quoted from other sources. All rights reserved.
Syndicate entries using
RSS and Comments (RSS).
