2003.01.19 12:43
Re: Critical Theory Clinically Dead?
I've owned Formless since March 2002, and read a fair bit of it back then. It's good reading in my opinion. I'll give it some more attention, especially with regard to the sacred/profane issue.
I think I know what you mean by "This moral dilemma in art is a little silly," but, as far as I and my art (which includes chronosomatics) are concerned, it is nonetheless worthwhile investigating where "moral dilemmas" actually come from.
2003.01.19 14:01
Re: Critical Theory Clinically Dead?
Today 12 years ago, I completed a work entitled Teacher's Pet in Paris, and I want to compose a small web display of it by the end of today (hopefully). This work is the coda of The Dick Manifestos, a collection of works from the early/mid 1980s.
2003.01.19 16:05
Re: Critical Theory Clinically Dead?
So that means one now has to be aware-period, but in order to be so purely aware one must subtract history/reality. [How does one subtract history/reality if one is not aware of history/reality?]
Is pure awareness like committing a murder while not being aware that murder is a crime?
Well, why the hell not. Awareness without consequences. Sounds like the perfect party to me.
2003.01.19 17:26
Mnemonically Delineating Veracity
Mnemonically Delineating Veracity
"Authenticity is one thing, veracity another."
Marguerite Yourcenar
An apparent lack of veracity has always been at issue within modern interpretations G. B. Piranesi's Ichnographia Campus Martius (1757-62) despite Piranesi's extraordinary 'scientific' knowledge of ancient Rome and it's remains as evident throughout the four volumes of Le Antichità Romane (1756), as well as throughout Piranesi's other archaeological publications, including the Il Campo Marzio dell'Antica Roma.
Contemporary architectural theorists from historian Manfredo Tafuri to architect Peter Eisenman view the Ichnographia as a city devoid of its own history, thus a plan prognosticating autonomous urbanism, yet that is exactly what the Ichnographia Campi Martii is not.
Beginning with comparisons between select portions of the Piranesi's Ichnographia and Giambattista Nolli's Pianta Grande di Roma, it becomes clear that the Ichnographia is an elaborate mnemonic devise. Like the imaginary building plans that Roman orators created in their minds as an aid toward the memorization of their speeches, the Ichnographia is literally an imaginary plan manifest as an aid toward the memorization of virtually all of ancient Rome's history. Thus the Ichnographia is not a fantastical reconstruction, rather, like the art of memory itself, the Ichnographia is a reenactment.
Mnemonically Delineating Veracity concludes with a brief reenactment of how an independent artist from Philadelphia came to discover a heretofore unnoticed initial(?) printing of the Ichnographia Campus Martius.
Stephen Lauf
2003.01.19
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2003.01.20 00:28
Re: Critical Theory Clinically Dead?
I get the feeling that Bataille would well understand the difficulty of correcting "historical' mistakes, especially those that are written by respected historians. Familiarity isn't the only thing that breeds contempt.
2003.01.21 12:05
Re: "REEKING GALERISM"
Perhaps the biggest irony is that Duchamp very overtly played the reenactor, yet virtually no one, and perhaps even Duchamp himself, realized just how much of Duchamp's art is all reenactment.
Hamilton is certainly the occasional reenactor of Duchamp, but does he even realize that is exactly what he is doing above all else?
Check out Readymade in Japan with Laser Print on Transparancy, a completely admitted reenactment of something that is actually not Duchamp.
Note: the limit of reenactment is that it can never be exactly that which it reenacts.
2003.01.21 13:04
Re: "REEKING GALERISM"
I think the real issue presently questioned / addressed is that PR, self-promotion, and entertainment are NOT necessarily three different things anymore. Moreover, the confluence of PR, self-promotion, and entertainment has become a (new) hybrid artform in its own right.
Maybe all it really needs is a name that everyone can agree on—probably a hybrid name with multiple entendre, sort of like museumpeace.
2003.01.22 09:22
Re: Critical Theory Clinically Dead?
...and coincidence is art [in some circles/squares]
2003.01.22 13:14
Re: Favorite Artist?
Furthermore, while everyone thought Duchamp had given up art for chess playing, he was actually being an "underground artist" (Duchamp's own term). And even further, during the early 1950s, Duchamp was arranging the Arensberg collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a collection that includes the largest collection of Duchamp works anywhere. Thus Duchamp literally arranged the bulk of his own work within a major museum, including the covert Étant donnés.
Duchamp is both literally and figuratively a very good aperture through which to view 20th century art.
Arranging one's own art work within a museum, what a virtually interesting idea. Perhaps even worth reenacting.
2003.01.22 15:10
Re: Favorite Artist?
Be sure to read, if you haven't already done so, the text Duchamp prepared and read for the panel discussion "Where do we go from Here? at Philadelphia, 20 March 1961. This text is within the "Ephemerides..." of Hulten et al, Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life, 1993. It is at the end of this speech/text that Duchamp states, "The great artist of tomorrow will go underground."
Given that we now know that Duchamp was secretly working on Étant donnés at that time, it seems only natural to assume that Duchamp was indeed clandestinely referring to himself. Not only was Duchamp good at reenacting, he got pretty good at preenacting as well.
Duchamp, an underground artist predicting the future greatness of himself. How artistic can you get?!
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2003.01.23 11:19
Re: Favorite Artist?
I'll be with you when you personally demonstrate that Duchamp is the easiest artist to write about. Hurry, I'm holding my breath (of Paris air).
Piranesi is my favorite artist. Exhalation as turd island, and then some.
You know, it might just be that Piranesi actually met my 'dada' the night of 24 September 1997—xxx.htm
2003.01.23 14:09
Re: Favorite Artist?
won't grade you on the hard parts
The Duchamp center in NYC is (presently) not MoMA, rather http://www.toutfait.com/ and related sites (unfortunately experienceing much web transmission difficulty lately), of which the real site in Lower Manhattan (home of Rhonda R. Shearer, Duchamp scholar and Stephen Jay Gould's widow) contains the largest private collection of Duchamp works anywhere.
I've been invited there, but haven't gotten the change to fulfill the invitation yet. Maybe soon, however. Probably the next time I stay over-night in the East Village, apparently on the floor below Christopher Wool's abode(?) or is it studio(?) or does he rent it out(?). [I did like what I saw of Wool online at some German gallery web site last November, and that was even before I found out I had already spent a night beneath him.]
2003.01.23 21:27
Re: Favorite Artist?
What I say here is usually a response, and providing a link to some of my work online is sometimes just the response I want to make, thus I'm not doing all this necessarily for feedback as much as for receiving a further responce maybe. Feel free to deliver your prepped choice words, however. I have to wonder though, will you be signing with your real name? That might just make your words really choice.
I will from now on at talkback write virtually nothing about Duchamp—just for you. I think that's the easiest.
2003.01.23
ideas
"rare not duchamp plurals" - popular underwear; good for ebay.
2003.01.24 10:10
Re: I've been shut out at artforum
I did read the introduction and the conclusion of Formless by the way, and I'm glad I did. On the issue of sacred and profane, however, I will point out that while Bataille's perspective is sound, it nonetheless is devoid of the second birth notion. Not that that is therefore an error on Bataille's part, more just a distinction that can(/must?) be made between Bataille and Eliade (for example). Also, I got a hint of reasoning that Bataille envisioned an uncanny sameness(?) or reciprocity(?) between extreme 'profane' and extreme 'sacred'--I like to think it's because when something gets very extreme (in either 'direction') it's the extreme-ness itself that becomes the overriding issue.
2003.01.24 15:27
Re: Favorite Artist?
I like exploring limits via (my) art. I seem to have touched upon some of your tolerance. While finding your tolerance is not exactly my objective, I now have more data about limits, especially within this corner of the artworld. I could be clever and say "sad little self promotions" is my form of self abjection, and in some ways that's true. But, on the other hand, my self promotion is not so little, and your attention helps to confirm that.
In defense of the links I've posted here, I'd say almost all of them have been fairly specific to the issue being responded to. For example, the issue of carjackings was brought up and thus I responded with a story I wrote that centered around a carjacking. Della Francesca was brought up, and I responded with a large portrayal of Helena Augusta, the woman credited with actually finding the True Cross because The Legend of the True Cross is della Francesca's largest work.
Extremes are interesting because they involve both the wholly outer and the wholly inner. All and nothing are both extreme cases.
Finally, besides exploring extremes, I participate in online forums as a (personal) art project. I like talkback because it is so artscene-centric. You should try the late-antiquity list. I took things so far there right after 9-11 that some came to essentially ask that I be 'damnatio memoriae'-ed. I'm rather proud of accomplishing the trek into that territory because damnatio memoriae was a quintessential late-antiquity practice. Mind you, I raised legitimate late antique issues, particularly the dating of Helena Augusta's death and the correct chronological sequence of Eusebius' Vita Constantini Book III, which shook up some otherwise staid thinking.
I favor Piranesi because he treated historiography as art, the same way he treated archaeology as art. What he did came right before the distinct rise of science, and it's separation from art. I want to learn how to do such work again, thus I've been working at reenacting Piranesi for almost 15 years now. Piranesi primarily utilized two mediums, etching/engraving and publishing. I too utilize publishing as a medium, but in conjunction with html.
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2003.01.24 21:04
Re: Favorite Artist?
What is Jonathan Borofsky doing these days. He didn't turn into Tom Friedman, did he?
Are the Beuys back in town?
Care to see my fine collection of Heilman-C ads?
The Face June 1995 Bjork cover
p. 54 quotes Bjork: "I was born to be in love. I'm obsessed with it, but I'm a bit fickle. I want to meet someone."
turn the page, and guess who's there.
Matthew Barney as Loughton Candidate.
it must be magic.
Meanwhile, the relic head of Helena, my favorite paradigm shifter of all time, resides at Trier. Some pope took her sarcophagus for himself, but now it's in the Vatican Museum. Big purple thing, marble from a specific place in Egypt, you know.
no, this won't go on till you're blue in the face.
"Du bist tausend Kunstler!" said Oma.
2003.01.24 22:29
Re: Despite "Rays of Light', I'm Drawing a Line in the Sand
sand dollar for your thoughts:
Does anyone know what artist started the Pop Out of It Art movement?
2003.01.25 14:55
virtual paintings
I saw the Jay Davis/Mary Boone ad in January 2003 Artforum (again) last night. I see where the 'architectural' notion in this thread is coming from. I saw more of Davis at the Mary Boone web site this morning, plus some of Dan Kopp online; didn't find Monogenus, however.
I was struck by a strong similarity between Davis' work and some of the Quaestio Abstrusa backgrounds, a set of (512) digital images I quickly composed the last four days of April 2001. My images were used as webpage backgrounds for a compact disk publication, and before I am again accused of self promotion, hear me out because I want to raise the issue of the strong likelihood that computer graphics are very much influencing, whether consciously of unconsciously, perceptions/depictions of 'painterly space' (to use a simple phrase) these days. [I'm not suggesting that Davis is somehow familiar with my work, however.]
I know how I came to these images. First I screen captured architectural images I generated using 2d and 3d CAD (computer aided design) software. Then I played with these images within the very basic 'photopaint' software I got with my scanner back in 1996. When I say played, I mean I merely utilized any numbers of image manipulation options on a given image, completely arbitrarily, for about 10 minutes or so, then saved the result, and then started over again with the same 'original' image, or moved on to a next 'original' image, or continued to manipulate the manipulated image I just stored, played with that some more, and then saved it as a whole new image.
Once I got started, it was quick, quick, quick, and easy, easy, easy. Granted the digital images are not large paintings, but they could be, or they could be projected on a large monitor (note they are already projected on a small monitor), or they could be printed on large transparancies and mounted on a light box, etc. The quickness of image generation process is a big plus, and should not be discounted as 'not seriously skillful enough' (again to use a simple phrase). Computers did/do greatly enhance and accelerate dexterity, remember.
Picking up on Capricorn's concise history of 'picture space' above, the space within software on a computer screen has to be annexed to that history. Architects were somewhat forced to accept the new 'drawing plane' of the computer screen (and luckily I've been doing just that since February 1983). I remember very distinctly back then wondering where this new way of drawing and viewing imagery was going to lead. I also early on learned that just being completely arbitrary with it all lead very quickly to the most fecund results.
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2003.01.26 10:27
Re: Despite 'Rays of Light', I'm Drawing a Line in the Sand
It's doubtful you're the first or the last artist to find frustration and lose when trying to translate something on a screen onto some(plane)thing out/off of the screen. Yes, the differences do indeed exist, but they can also be exploited. Complete 1 to 1 translation is likely an ideal that doesn't even exist anyway, so why bother trying.
It's sad you feel you lost a bunch of work, because you really didn't if you backed it up. It's all still there, 'sitting' as you put it. It's even been dated, for future reference.
The screen environment isn't shrinking.
Which is better:
tools determining how you think
or
thinking determining how you use tools
Will artists ever be judged or valued because of their personal "thousand other things been done?"
2003.01.26 12:01
Re: Despite 'Rays of Light', I'm Drawing a Line in the Sand
evolution of dexterity
Are we living in an age when a person/body without hands or without hands that are working can go to art school and begin to draw by talking to a computer?
Where exactly are artists without their corporal and extra-corporal tools?
2003.01.28 09:29
Re: Matthew Barney in the New Yorker
working title
EXQUISITE LULLABY TO LAZY CORPSE
[officially BOMBASTIC PIECE NO. 2]
The young man was saabing.
"But it's the source material that really puts me to sleep."
The passenger was a she.
"Stop saabing. I want to get out now."
2003.01.29 07:29
Bombastic Piece series
Artist's note: finally I can appreciate the fine fit of a tailor-made artform.
2003.01.29 08:47
Re: Matthew Barney in the New Yorker
going to pieces
Bombastic Piece No. 3
the author stripped bare by his bachelors, even
Bombastic Piece No. 4
tender Bjork chops
I was on Iceland twice before Bjork.
She was born exactly 31 years before Quondam, however.
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