I have been searching online for years for this story that’s been half-submerged in my memory, with no luck. The story concerns one Albert Einstein, a blind man, and a swan. I finally found it in an old journal entry dated June 8, 1985. The story is but a fragment that I cut out of a newspaper and saved. However, I have no idea which newspaper it came from, and I can’t find this exact version of the story anywhere: (more…)
Leave it to science to transform dada into data. A new study suggests that the experience of nonsense, “may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large,” according to a recent article in the New York Times, How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect.
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: (more…)
This is a nice composite image of John Cage cooking, from the excellent blog [2024: now long gone, replaced by a page in Russian] of the greatly named J. Henry Chunko [2024: here’s another, Chunko blog that’s still up an running, though not updated since 2007 and doesn’t seem to include any Cage material; oh well].
Mr. Chunko links to this post about a John Cage recording, Empty Words Part IV (1973-78). But I especially like the Lichtensteiger website [updated 2024] 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, and hope to never do so again.
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.
