2004.11.22 10:06
Re: Painting....officialy completed?
I'm good at doing stuff that is virtually art. The way I see it, there's already enough reality in existence.
2004.11.22 10:48
Re: Painting....officialy completed?
It never occurred to me that contemporary art was in any way limited to painting and sculpture.
2004.11.23 17:12
Re: Painting....officialy completed?
There's (at least) a small party in Voodoo Valley Saturday evening, then it's probably moving downtown.
The Odds of Ottopia Desk starts production on schedule.
They're still all talking about the Otto, Gordon and Lafayette adventure on Quondam's 8th anniversary. Another Trumbauer Deconstruction Reenactment!
LEAVING OBSCURITY BEHIND
The 2005 Horace Trumbauer Architecture Fan Club Convention
beginning 28 December 2004
28 December 1868 birth of Horace Trumbauer
A Grand Social Spectacle
28 December 1931 birth of Guy Debord
2004.11.24 08:40
Re: Painting....officialy completed?
Tafuri must here be taken to task because he comes extremely close to the truth about Piranesi and his large plan of the Campo Marzio, but he then falls fatally short of seeing the truth. Tafuri is absolutely wrong when he states, "Piranesi did not possess the means for translating the dynamic interrelationships of this contradiction into form." In truth, Piranesi worked very hard to "translate" the opposite yet necessarily linked notions of life and death (rational and irrational) within his great plan, and I have substantially documented Piranesi's (metabolic operations) in "Eros et Thanatos Ichnographia Campus Martius". Stated briefly, Eros names the life instinct and Thanatos names the death instinct, and Piranesi carefully deliniates (between 1758-1762) both these "instincts" within the ancient city of Rome.
It is becoming more and more clear to me that any discussion of the rational and the irrational (in design and capitalism) tends to lead toward confusions unless they acceptingly incorporate the over riding creative-destructive nature of the metabolic (imagination).
excerpt Re: irrational architecture
Voodoo Valley separates Feltonville and Olney. More (Saturday night) shootings occur in Feltonville than in Olney.
Looks like "broken records personae" has run out of new material. Do they actually still sell Velveeta?
30 November 1994 suicide of Guy Debord (shot himself in the heart). Very Eros et Thanatos. Spectacular!
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2004.11.24 12:22
LEAVING OBSCURITY BEHIND
They're still all talking about the Otto, Gordon and Lafayette adventure on Quondam's 8th anniversary (online 21 November 1996). Another Trumbauer Deconstruction Reenactment!
LEAVING OBSCURITY BEHIND
The 2005 Horace Trumbauer Architecture Fan Club Convention
beginning 28 December 2004
28 December 1868 birth of Horace Trumbauer
A Grand Social Spectacle
28 December 1931 birth of Guy Debord
ending 17 January 2006
17 January 395 death of Theodosius
300th Anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin
The final paper of LEAVING OBSCURITY BEHIND might just be Debord's "De Spectaculis III".
30 November 1994 suicide of Guy Debord (shot himself in the heart). Very Eros et Thanatos.
2004.11.25 11:51
Re: Deconstruction? no, afterlife
more like tr[a]um bauer
maybe calendrical coincidence is a bore to some
papers of LEAVING OBSCURITY BEHIND
Reenactionary Bilocating Architecturism
Saint Catherine de Ricci and Louis I. Kahn
Nudist Camp at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Marcel Duchamp and C. Paul Jennewein
Learning From Lacunae
Gordon Matta-Clark
De Spectaculis II
Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus and John the Baptist Piranesi
The Promenade Architecturale Formula
Le Corbusier
The Marriage of Twisted and Columns
Eutropia and Pieter Pauwel Rubens
Pilgrimage, Reenactment and Tourism
Flavia Julia Helena Augusta
Here a Versailles, There a Versailles, Everywhere a Versailles Sigh
Marie Antoinette, Ludwig II, and Lucretia "Eva" Bishop Roberts Cromwell Stotesbury Dougherty
and maybe
De Spectaculis III
Guy Debord
Planning started almost a year ago.
virtual novel writing
2004. The Odds of Ottopia
2005. Leaving Obscurity Behind
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A Party of Renaissance Personalities
by Holland Cotter
New York Times Writer
PHILADELPHIA
Nut job. That was the word on Jacopo Pontormo, the finest religious painter in 16th-century Florence and guru of Mannerism, a late Renaissance style that crossed Michelangelo's pumped-up classicism with Raphael's skin-so-soft version.
Pontormo wasn't winsome nuts; he was spooky nuts. He lived alone in a room reached by a ladder that he could pull up after him. He was phobic about death. Mention the word and he fell apart. Excruciatingly self-obsessed, in the four years before he died, in 1556 or 1557, he kept a diary, often hour by hour, of every thought he had, every twinge of pain he felt, every morsel of food he ate. He was, in short, an exposed nerve for whom art provided the only protective covering.
That, at least, is the man described by the biographer Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary who admired Pontormo's talent but was confounded by his eccentricities. It is not necessarily the person we encounter in "Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence," an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that despite its modest size complicates the standard view of this amazing artist.
Modest means 13 paintings, more than half on loan from Europe, and 20 superb drawings, all but 4 from the Uffizi in Florence. Yet considering how little first-rank Mannerist work exists in American collections - Philadelphia has a lot with two Pontormo pictures, both on view - the show is something of an event. More important, it is a gripping art experience, visually and psychologically.
Pontormo was best known for the distinctive character of his religious painting, a blend of monumentality and emotional inwardness, which he also brought, in some measure, to many of his portraits. His younger contemporary and student, Agnolo Bronzino, learned much from him - their art is sometimes indistinguishable - but his strength lay in formal virtuosity, which he applied with particular audacity to portraiture. No wonder the salonlike room here of portraits by the two artists feels like an A-list party of exceptional personalities.
Among the guests for whom Pontormo is responsible, you'll encounter a pair of aristocratic young men in regulation art-world black, chatting about literature as they frostily scan the crowd. They ignore the shy, frizzy-haired kid in an ill-fitting pink coat beside them. He could be a prince or a court page new to the job. Either way, he looks, as Pontormo's subjects often do, tentative, between emotions, forever at an awkward age.
Across the room, a pensive woman, not young, watches over an equally pensive small child. What could their story be, you wonder, as a red-bearded, Lytton Strachey-ish cleric tries to catch your eye. He'd like to meet you; he'd like to meet anyone who might advance his churchly ambitions or share his taste for erotic poetry.
Finally there's that mystery man near the door, looking up as he absently sketches a woman's face on a scrap of paper. With his soft skin, plush lips and expression just on the edge of a frown, he's hard to read, a little secretive, maybe evasive, though he looks familiar. His face and the child's are a lot alike.
Some of these people we know by name; the identities of others we can only guess. All belong to the local elite, and at least a few to the Medici court. The mystery man is Alessandro de' Medici, the first duke of Florence, seen here both in a portrait owned by the Philadelphia Museum and in a head-shot oil study for a painting from the Art Institute of Chicago.
Alessandro, rumored to be the illegitimate child of a Medici pope, Clement VII, and a serving woman, possibly an African slave, ruled Florence only briefly. A voracious womanizer, he was killed during an assignation. He was succeeded by his cousin, Cosimo I, whose mother, Maria Salviati, took charge of the dead man's three young children. She is the older woman in Pontormo's portrait, probably shown with Alessandro's daughter, Giulia, through whom, it is possible, black African blood became part of the heritage of the most ambitious ruling houses of Europe.
No one fretted more about the prestige of the Medici name than Cosimo I. He was prepared to spend a mint on creating a dynastic advertising campaign through art, and specifically through portraiture. Pontormo's late approach to the genre, complex and empathetic, was not really suited to the task. Bronzino's work, with its machine-tooled balance of tact and novelty, refinement and corporate flair, was. And indeed, the difference between the two artists' views of the portrait - personal on the one hand, functional on the other - virtually defines the transformation suggested by the show's title. Unsurprisingly, Bronzino got the job.
Several of his people are, of course, at the Philadelphia party, too. Are they ever. One of them, a regal woman, a real madame-president type, sits center-stage in a scarlet gown with a tiny pet dog on her lap. She's sensational. For sheer shock value, though, no picture rivals Bronzino's image of a flush-faced teenage musician wearing next to nothing and suggestively fondling the bow of his viol.
In fact, this is his first portrait of Cosimo I, probably done on the eve of the duke's marriage. Intriguingly, the artist casts his new patron in the role of the beast-taming Orpheus, a mythological figure associated with marital fidelity but also, as the art historian Janet Cox-Rearick has noted, with homosexuality. Did Cosimo have some explaining to do to his new bride? Whatever, he liked the picture. Bronzino's career at court was secured, and the many portraits he went on to produce there represent Mannerism at its most polished and accessible.
Bronzino was a brilliant professional, a reliable showman who could be counted on to idealize even the least attractive client's features and then take decorative liberties with everything else: clothing, jewelry, furniture. He made the bourgeois rich look royal and smart. It was a winning game.
Pontormo, by contrast, was unreliable, mercurial and, one senses even without Vasari's description, emotion-driven and fundamentally private, which is not the same thing as crazy. All of this comes through in the 20 drawings that form the expressive soul of the Philadelphia show, organized by Carl Brandon Strehlke, adjunct curator of the museum's John. G. Johnson collection.
Only two are by Bronzino. And one of these is a black chalk portrait of Pontormo. The older artist was around 40 when the drawing was done. He is dressed in studio work clothes but conveys an air of patrician grace, an all-purpose effect Bronzino had more or less patented for court commissions. It's a good picture, crisply executed, minutely observed, if expressively noncommittal. It is also very different in every way from the drawings by Pontormo that surround it, among them two self-portraits.
The earlier one is dated 1525, when Pontormo was 31. He depicts himself almost full length reflected in a mirror. He stands in three-quarters profile, stripped to his underpants, a quizzical look on his face, and one hand, index finger extended, pointing straight out at the viewer, or, rather, at his reflected self. It's a witty, fantastically virtuosic and self-confident image. He not only draws like an angel, but he looks like a strapping young god, a Narcissus, a John the Baptist, a rap star playing to the camera. He's hot.
Then, from just a few years later, comes a self-image utterly unlike the first. Bust-length, it could even be of another person altogether, slight, androgynous, a bearded boy, his head tilted to one side, his features slack, his eyes unfocused, as if he were exhausted or ill or idiotic, a holy fool.
This is a study for the self-portrait that Pontormo inserted in one of his greatest religious paintings, the altarpiece of "The Deposition" in Santa Felicita in Florence. You can see it there still, and you won't forget it once you do, with its grieving figures in nursery-color clothes - pink and blue - floating like so many cushioning blankets around the dead Christ. And there's Pontormo's face, small and rapt, in the background. He's not really looking at what's going on, though. He's in his own world, where this and other things, tender, trivial and tremendous, are happening. In the drawings gathered in Philadelphia, you get a taste of that world, and of an artist who is perversely human and crazy like a saint.
"Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence" is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street, (215) 763-8100, through Feb. 13.
2004.11.26
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