category: art
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)”
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.
Kaldron Lettriste Pages – A site with links to all things Lettrisme, or Lettrism, the French Avant-Garde Film and Visual Poetry movement often associated with the French Revolutionary Student Movement of 1968, but influencing other forms of art and poetry in Europe and Latin America up to the present.
From the Wikipedia article on Lettrism:
Lettrism (also referred to as Letterism) was an artistic style pursuing the hyper-minimalist refinement of art to its simplest and purest form. According to Jean-Paul Curtay in La Poesie Lettriste (Paris 1974), it was created in 1942 in Romania by Isidore Isou, when he was only sixteen years old. Lettrism was a response to what the Lettrists saw as Andr? Breton’s control of Surrealism, as well as an attempt to make poetry more popular. The Lettrists worked in a variety of forms including sound as well as graphic arts involving letters. Isou noted that Dadaism had chiseled art down to the word, while Lettrism was intended to refine it to the letter (hence its name). While Dada took art to a simple and implausible form, Lettrism aimed to refine it even more to its initial form. The stark simplicity of Lettrist art, while still very much abstract, stood in contrast to the sometimes meandering Surrealist movement; but both shared their roots in Dada.
K.C. Cole has a good article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Why editors must dare to be dumb, about how science editors tend to be uncomfortable with advanced science topics they do not understand. What it boils down to, in Cole’s opinion, is a fundamental discomfort with uncertainty and senselessness:
In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks. A mathematician once told me he thought this was the reason young mathematicians make the big discoveries. Math can be hard, he said, even for the biggest brains around. Mathematicians may spend hours just trying to figure out a line of equations. All the while, they feel dumb and inadequate. Then one day, these young mathematicians become established, become professors, acquire secretaries and offices. They don’t want to feel stupid anymore. And they stop doing great work.
In a way, you can’t really blame either scientists or editors for backing off. Stumbling around in the dark can be dangerous. “By its very nature, the edge of knowledge is at the same time the edge of ignorance,” is how one cosmologist put it. “Many who have visited it have been cut and bloodied by the experience.”
…
So what is it about science that makes them [editors] uneasy? Surely it is more than the obvious fact that it’s hard to understand things that aren’t (yet) understood. In science it can be just as hard to understand what is understood. Relativity and quantum mechanics have been around for nearly a century, yet they remain confusing in some sense even to those who understand these theories well. We know they’re correct because they’ve been tested so thoroughly in so many ways. But they still don’t make sense.
On the other hand, why should they? Humans evolved to procreate, eat, and avoid getting eaten. The fact that we have learned to understand what atoms are all about or what the universe was doing back to a nanosecond after its birth is literally unbelievable. But the universe doesn’t care what we can or cannot believe. It doesn’t speak our language, so there’s no reason it should “make sense.”
That’s why science depends on evidence.
…
Science is also innately uncertain. What makes science strong is that these uncertainties are out there in the open, spelled out and quantified.
Embrace uncertainty, in science, in art and in life. As the Talking Heads sang, stop making sense.
Visual Complexity — information has never looked so good.
Beautiful visualizations by Benjamin Fry: “There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are continually changing. My research focuses on developing approaches to such data, in particular, the human genome.”
Artnet.com Magazine Reviews Peter Greenaway’s curatorial project, Flying over Water, installed at the Fundacio Joan Miró in Barcelona, March 6-June 1, 1997. Icarus hits the big time.
The Lineup: Close, Mr. Davie, but we’ve been doing a little “research” of our own and have uncovered quite a bit of dirt on this McMurphy fellow. Our current intelligence assumption is that Mr. McMulbry is actually a high-level actuary for a major American insurance company based either — depending upon who you believe — in Topeka, Kansas, Lincoln, Nebraska, or Forest Hills, New York, and we are following a lead that may place the suspect — correction, “artist” — in Cambria, California at some point between March 19, 1964 and October 29, 1998. The accused, I mean, the “artist” in question, Mr. Mulchin McMomprey, sometime in 1987, “went up river,” as they say in the insurance industry, launching his own Quixotic bid to eliminate risk (his italics) from the planet by embarking on a project he dubbed “Operation Christian Licorice.” I needn’t point out to you, sirs and madams, what a risk-free planet would mean to the insurance industry — let alone what “Christian licorice” would mean for the separation of church and state in this fair country; let’s just say that Mr. MacMumbly’s superiors were none too pleased to learn of his “plan,” and decided that it needed to be terminated. With extreme prejudice. Notice that I used the word “it”, as in the Plan, rather than Mr. McMurvin himself — these titans of industry were very careful not to suggest even a whiff of foul play. Be that as it may, play soon turned foul, and our scapegoat, I mean our hero, Mr. McMoisty, wisely (insanely) decided to “go underground” and pass himself off as a different person in a different occupation. And what occupation does a highly-placed insurance actuary choose if he wants to disappear from the world? Why, he becomes an “outsider artist,” of course. Oh, the things we’ve turned up in Cambria alone would make your skin crawl, ladies and gentlemen, laddies and lovelies. [see Appendix B.3i, "The Incident at Freestyle Flowers by Cindalee," for just one such harrowing account involving a massive order placed by the accused for hydrangeas, lillies, oleander leaves, hemlock, lilac, daisy, carnation, and acacia pollen that was supposed to be collected into giant bales and wrapped in acres of brown "military grade" corduroy fabric to be procured on spec from Betty's Fabrics of Santa Maria, California. Cindalee Freemason, the proprietress of Freestyle Flowers by Cindalee, immediately notified the authorities under the auspices of the USA Patriot Act, and that's how we picked up the putrid scent of Mr. McMurriver's trail, but his ultimate aim in procuring these items remains, at this time, a mystery even to our most senior and world-weary field agents.] Again, I use the term “outsider artist” loosely, in quotes, to demonstrate the indeterminate nature of this crime — correction, “career” — in the life of our protagonist, Mr. McMuffin. For instance, the term “artist” has itself undergone such a radical transformation since the mid-ninth century B.C., that in this day and age just about anyone with a staple gun, a spatula, and a fondness for tarantulas is labeled an “artist” by someone or other. So we’ll leave that alone for now and concentrate on the even more enigmatic word “outsider.” First our meth-addled chief investigators had to ask, “outside of what?”, to which one wag, now facing disciplinary charges, responded, “Outside the law.” He he he. But that’s neither here nor there (in fact, it’s both, but that’s another issue for another memo on another day by another investigator working for another agency representing another multinational conglomerate with another five hundred billion dollars at stake. But there’s one point that we must make clear right now: in the 1958 motion picture The Linup, starring Eli Wallach & Robert Keith (see film still at top of this memo), Mr. Wallach’s character is made to utter at one point, “When you live outside the law you have to eliminate dishonesty.” This surreal interpretation of planetary legalese was later and most cruelly transmogrified into the following by a minor troubadour by the name of Bob Dillon in a tune called “Absolutely, Sweet Meredith”: “But to live outside the law, you must be honest.” We believe it was this latter interpretation of the phrase that the agent in question was referring to in his most ill-conceived outburst, and again, I reiterate, disciplinary action is taking place as we write.). To get down to the brass tacks in this case, by putting Ms. Feemason into a variety of humiliating social circumstances at the suggestion of Scty. Rumpsfeld, we gleaned valuable information that allowed us to track Mr. McMuzzie’s trail to the Hobby Bunker, located at 22 Pleasant Street in Malden, Massachusetts 02148, where he may or may not have been masquerading as the proprietor, Matthew Murphy. [The Hobby Bunker address is an extremely important piece of the puzzle, because it corroborated another snippet of song lyric we found encoded in Cyrillic in one of Mr. McMurrple's old actuarial tables, a song by one Tim Bucklie (who we'd never heard of, but reports indicate he may have been a transsexual whose real name was Phyllis Davenport -- we're checking on this), called Pleasant Street: "All the stony people / Walking 'round in Christian licorice clothes / I can't hesitate / And I can't wait / For Pleasant Street" -- you see, there's the fateful phrase "Christian licorice," the name of Mr. McMulberry's great "Plan" for eliminating all risk on planet earth.] Our agents immediately infiltrated and ransacked the odious Pleasant Street establishment which glorified the basest gaming predilections of adolescent males, but we found not a trace of Mr. Murrian. However, we did find one important clue: stapled (again, how vile) to a bulletin board in the Hobby Bunker was a brownish post card featuring a painted representation of a man in a humiliating position, and at the bottom was the handwritten words “Martin McMurray,” and it advertised on the reverse a mysterious “solo exhibit” by the said Mr. McMurray occurring tonight on the opposite side of the country at a suspicious establishment called “Gallery 16” (our finest cryptanalysts are hashing this one right now in a mobile unite careening up I-5 near the San Joaquin valley town of Tipton, CA) in San Francisco, California. We strongly believe that the viper of our story, Mr. McMustard, may now be running scared and hiding behind the moniker “Martin McMurray,” and we may be able to finally apprehend him this evening. Needless to say, our agents will be out in force, and we’ve invited the public to attend and cheer us on, as we finally settle an old score and force Mr. McMumble to eat a little of his own Christian licorice and see how he likes the taste a life without risk and thus, cover your ears dear squeamish one, without the need for insurance. I hope to see you there in your finest lederhosen, kilts, and cornucopias.
Respectfully,
Agent Sam Samuel Sammy Samantha Samurai Gant
Director of Field Operations
Office of the Directorate of Insurance Liaison Commissariats
East Tumbler
Rockefeller Tar Pits
Bloomville
“The photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture.”
