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20230726_111859.jpg
2023.07.26
[untitled]
2024.07.24
Don't Ask
image taken by Anna DiCicco
2001.07.24
Don't Tell
image taken by Anna DiCicco
2001.07.24
There are many that will, no doubt, disbelieve any gauge that attempts to relate specific historical events to specific points on the human body. The whole notion of a Timepiece of Humanity is admittedly unscientific, and attributing special significance to a diagram of circles and squares superimposed with a standing human figure is even suspicious. Without the gauge, however, the full extent of the metaphoric link between time and the human body, the essence of humanity, would be impossible to relate. The gauge is precisely that which transforms the human body into the Timepiece of Humanity, and, as a timepiece, the human body is capable of communicating humanity's entire story: past, present, and future. Accepting the conclusion that the distance between the crotch and the navel corresponds to the chronological stretch from late 5 B.C. to 1543 A.D. enables the calibration of a full scale, of years, centuries, and millennia, spanning the body from the feet to the head, including the assignment of specific years to all the circle/square junctures. The completed Timepiece gauge, likewise, indicates the current position of the plane of the present. The year 2000 A.D. falls between the circle/square juncture at 1543 A.D. and the next circle/square juncture at 2183 A.D. On the surface of the body, 2000 A.D. is approximately 2.5 inches above the navel, and internally the plane of the present slices through the lowest tips of the rib cage, the colon transversum, the duodenum, the kidneys, the pancreas, the lowest portions of the stomach and liver, and the joint between the first and the second lumbar vertebrae.
1995.07.24
The Motherboard of Dementia
2024.07.22
bored with modern & contemporary, yet?
Vitruvius's book De architectura was rediscovered in 1414 by the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini. To Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) falls the honor of making this work widely known in his seminal treatise on architecture De re aedificatoria (ca. 1450). The first known edition of Vitruvius was in Rome by Fra Giovanni Sulpitius in 1486. Translations followed in Italian (Como, 1521), French (Jean Martin, 1547 [10], English, German (Walter H. Ryff, 1543) and Spanish and several other languages.
On June 25, 1496 at the age of twenty-one, Michelangelo arrived in Rome.
Opposite it in the south transept is the Sagrestia Nuova (New Sacristy), begun in 1520 by Michelangelo, who also designed the Medici tombs within. [Michelangelo's first substantial architectural work.]
Architecture books were still fairly new and rare in Michelangelo's time, and they pretty much covered the basics (and anyone who could read, could grasp the basics). The greater architecture 'texts', however, were buildings themselves, and here the 'rules' are legion. I wouldn't say Michelangelo was intuitive in looking at existing architecture, rather sculpturally observant (and them sculpturally imaginative). Remember too, the most celebrated ancient columns in Renaissance Rome looked like this--
--hardly your 'basic'.
Another example of the sculpturally observant-sculpturally imaginative:
Michelangelo himself wrote of how the newly discovered Belvedere Torso was a great inspiration for him. And now see how the ignudi of the Sistine Chapel ceiling represent the potential Michelangelo saw in the Belvedere Torso.
2008.07.16
ottopage00001.jpg
Scan of a random page from the several, several thousand pages written by my brother, Otto George Lauf, almost daily over the past 42 years. Both sides of this page were written on or soon after "Monday, September 14, 2009."
2024.05.19
theartblog.org
Art that can be construed as supporting LGBTQ+ rights at museumpeace.com
2024.04.19
I read Julia Bryan-Wilson's "Impermanent Collections" (Artforum International, September 2021) this morning, soon after waking up but before getting out of bed. I'm pretty sure I haven't read the essay before, although, as a subscriber to Artforum, I've owned this issue of the magazine since September 2021, but September 2021 was also a uniquely critical month in my life as full-time caregiver for my then stroke-effected brother. I'm absolutely sure I paged through the magazine the day I received it, which is what I do every time I receive the magazine, but it seems I haven't paged through the magazine again till last night when I randomly chose to browse through the magazine to help me fall asleep. Anyway, I now feel a strong connection to "Impermanent Collections," and the last two paragraphs of Julia Bryan-Wilson's essay are especially worth repeating.
"In a moment ringing with clarion calls to reevaluate the entire premise of museums, or, more radically, to abandon them altogether, it is worth noting how many queer and trans artists have in the past few decades proposed new kinds of (temporary, unrealized, experimental, minoritarian) institutions. Each of these examples animates a different conception of the queer/trans museum: For Wilson, a recontextualization of clinical material uncovers lesbian erotics; for Khaled, a real act of homophobic injustice is refracted through the prism of an invented person; for Vargas, physical objects are conjured into relation; for Campuzano, mobile displays that imbricate fact and fiction put pressure on how nations construct their own histories. All these projects mobilize, and destabilize, what André Malraux described as the leveling inherent in a "museum without walls" by using acts of queer fabulation. In so doing, they recognize that the museum organizes history not only through objects but through the eloquent space between objects--the gaps within which interpretation takes place. When those gaps are penetrated and held open, other stories creep in.
Critically, such insurgent museums require much less money to run than brick-and-mortar outfits and therefore have no need to pander to funding agencies or to supplicate wealthy board members. For subjects whose identities have been forcibly removed from national histories, surveilled with hostility by the state, and strategically concealed as a means of survival, what, if anything, might the museum offer as a conceptual tool for thinking memory differently? Artists like Campuzano, Khaled, Vargas, and Wilson recruit the language of the museum precisely because they grasp the immense power that word holds. The museum is a regulating apparatus, one that enforces family structures, polices cultural norms, and confers privilege. Significantly, it also possesses the capacity to make worlds out of fragments--a tactic queer and trans people have become adept at. Hence there is something especially fitting about a museum that is inhabited, and exploded, by queer and trans artists. The colonial ideologies that led to the encyclopedic collecting museum are impossible to rally behind, as are the blood monies of trustees that prop up workplace hierarchies. In the end, the queer, transient, artist-imagined, speculative museum might be the only one worth saving."
2024.03.17
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