2004.12.29 11:18
Sontag died on Dienstag
from an email to a friend 28 December 2004:
"Today is Horace Trumbauer's and Guy Debord's birthday, the beginning of Leaving Obscurity Behind, the 2005 Horace Trumbauer Architecture Fan Club Convention. Lots of activity at Logan Circle/Hadrian's Tomb."
Hadrian's Tomb was built because the Tomb of Augustus was full. Record numbers of recently dead attend the opening--Leaving Obscurity Behind indeed.
Otto's speech? Impeccable! "It appears we should add some Cret paper to the roster."
The induction ceremony of new members of the Horace Trumbauer Fan Club thrilled all.
Dr. Albert C. Barnes and Susan Sontag
It was great seeing Le Corbusier slap Barnes around during the initiation.
Le Corbusier, too, while on a lecture tour in America, was a victim of the doctor's bad manners, though he almost had a chance to see the collection. His application for admission, he was informed at first, was approved--for a date and time specified by Barnes. When the architect replied that the time was not suitable because of a previously scheduled lecture, however, Barnes was offended. He wanted a fight. In a letter accusing Corbusier of being drunk during his stay in Philadelphia, he informed him that he was no longer welcome at the foundation. The architect's reply was conciliatory, He was not interested in quarreling with Barnes, he wrote; he preferred to fight with those that disagreed with him on artistic matters, and he knew that the doctor, instead, shared his own enthusiasms. He was certain that he would never meet Barnes, but he wanted the senseless state of war that existed between them to come to an end. Barnes never answered the letter; he returned it, with the word "merde," written in large letters on the envelope.
Howard Greenfield, The Devil and Dr. Barnes: Portrait of an American Collector, p. 252-3.
It was also fun seeing Barnes circumnavigate Logan Circle in an envelope with "Shit" all over it. A spectacle suggest by Debord.
The fan club is always in need of more woman members, so Sontag's initiation was a most happy event. Tableau reenactments ensued:
"Against Interpretation"
"Notes on Camp"
"On Style"
"The Aesthetics of Silence"
"The Pornographic Imagination"
Susan is now in charge of the "Unguided Tour" department, and she joins Duchamp and Jennewein in the presentation of "[Learning from] Nudist Camp at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Barnes is so impressed with African Art, African Voices: Long Steps Never Broke a Back that he's even further rethinking the display of his collection after it moves to Philadelphia.
2005.01.08
many ideas (so not to forget)
1. ignudi in west pediment; CAD model rendering
2. St. Stephen / tsuanmi ends The Odds of Ottopia.
3. tsunami (free wave form) architecture?
4. sell the Stotesbury bathroom marble on eBay.
5. a couple “Artifacts of Ottopia” are not yet recorded (see desk).
6. sort out via notes all the new circus/basilica date as it relates to the two versions of the Ichnographia; start some CAD drawings as well.
7. sort out via notes all the new Ichnographia “erinerung” and “triumphal bridge” data as it relates to “De Spectaculis II” which is slated for 14 May 2005, in honor of the “two states” discovery.
8. “Nudist Camp” is slated for 20 March 2005 because the Naked/Nude tour began with Spring stained glass; see note 1.1 above as well.
9. begin 3d rendition of Romaphilia.
10. compile a list of all the books I’ve read over the last week.
11. I just remembered I’m scheduled to go to the Barnes Foundation tomorrow.
12. compose/compile a virtual sculpture (cad surfase) exhibit for the Calder park within Romaphilia.
13. Is there such a phenom as “Duchamp’s effect on Philadelphia?”; Demos goes “geopolitical” where as I am “local”.
2005.03.01 12:34
Monkey Sea Voyage .9
To: artforum/talkback
Subject: homage to Matta-Clark's father and godfather
Date: 2003.06.06 13:45
ps 2005.03.01
It isn't mentioned anywhere specifically, but part of THE BELL AND THE GLASS includes video projection of portions of the 1956 Duchamp/Sweeney interview where we see Duchamp in front of THE LARGE GLASS saying, "There is a symmetry in the cracking, the two crackings are symmetrically arranged and there is more, almost an intention there, an extra--a curious intention that I am not responsible for, a ready-made intention, in other words, that I love and respect."
Museum Studies 7 reenacts Museum Studies 6.1 which reenacts wavelengths that occurred at the Philadelphia Museum of Art almost 50 years ago.
The movie Time Bandits was on local PBS last Saturday night, but I didn't watch it except during channel surfing. The next chapter of I'm a Big Fat Nobody might just be "quondam cum movies".
| |
2005.03.21 14:28
when the rainbow isn't enuf?
wqc/23/2204.htm
name that ignudi
wqc/23/2205.htm
Michelangelo opposite Jennewein and Duchamp
wqc/23/2219.htm
The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Vatican Hill
Eutropia and Rubens had great fun comparing the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the Life of Constantine tapestries.
How many times overall did Rubens reenact a Sistine ignudi?
And indeed yesterday there was a lot of standing room only in the Great Hall.
Next month's focus is on Julian "willing and" Abele and James Stirling
wqc/18/1717.htm
2005.03.22 10:42
Re: new Trumbauer fan (system)
here's some of my favorite quotations from
Philadelphia. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Etant Données: 1° la chute d'eau. 2° le gaz d'éclairage. Reflections on a new work by MARCEL DUCHAMP. Texts by A. d'Harnoncourt and W. Hopps. (Bulletin. Vol. 64, No. 299/300.) Philadelphia, 1969
so far:
"The timing of Duchamp's artistic activity always ranged between the carefully planned and the chance creation, the long-drawn-out deliberate process and the swift decision."
"Bored with the very practice of wielding a brush and deeply dissatisfied with painting as the only means to "make" something, he not only decided to stop being a painter in the conventional sense but set his mind to work on the whole problem of the artist's engagement with the real world. Rejecting established approaches to art as well as the contemporary modes of the Cubists and Furturists, and suspicious of the very concept of "reality" which his colleagues still attempted to explore (in however radical a way), he began to construct his own alternative version of reality: a mythic, pseudoscientific system which brought the tools of chance, humor, and ironic indifference into play."
"Not as explicit as water or gas, but equally present in Duchamp's "amusing physics" is the invisible current of electricity. The potential connection between Bride and Bachelors is an "electrical stripping" with all sorts of eccentric fixtures: the "desire-magneto," the "motor with quite feeble cylinders." The failure to connect is a short circuit. The same current runs quite literally through Duchamp's rotating optical machines of 1920 and 1925, and the Rotoreliefs of 1935. An early note in the BOX OF 1914 proposes: "L'electricite en large, Seule utilization possible de l'electricite 'dans les arts.' Duchamp's metaphor to describe the encounter between the spectator and a work of art is that of a "spark" which "gives birth to something, like electricity."
2005.03.23 12:17
Re: new Trumbauer fan (system)
wqc/temp/cols01.jpg
wqc/temp/cols02.jpg
Saw this artwork last night as I continued to read ETANT DONNES... (by d'Harnoncourt and Hopps).
"Another "landscape" which Duchamp produced in 1959, forms a tantalizing link between The Large Glass and ETANT DONNES... . The punning title Cols Alités, is amplified by a startling inscription: "Projet pour le modèle 1959 de 'La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même'" The drawing is more startling still. Duchamp has drawn a background for his Glass! The basic elements of the Glass, including three parallel lines across the middle representing the Bride's Clothes, are drawn in ink, and behind them, apparently lightly sketched in pencil, rise the irregular rolling forms of a hilly landscape. To the right, just tangent to on blade of the Scissors atop the chocolate Grinder, Duchamp has added an electrical pole, the common variety that punctuates the countryside everywhere, complete with glass insulating knobs and wires disappearing in the distance.
-----
For it is impossible not to take the view of undulating hills and the explicit electrical pole, with the title pun to "Causalités," as a broad hint at the assemblage [ie, ETANT DONNES] that was gradually nearing completion in the Fourteenth Street studio. The pole its wires reads in retrospect as a direct reference to the "electricity at large," which now performs a practical function in the new tableau."
-----
I can't read French, so I don't know what Duchamp's inscription says. Nonetheless, it's evident that Duchamp (too) thought about the presence of electricity everywhere. [Brian, I'd like to introduce this work to electronetwork, though perhaps you might better put it in context there.]
I'm seeing this work as another link (albeit minuscule) between where Duchamp's work mostly is now (ie, the Philadelphia Museum of Art) and the collection's prime location at the head of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
-----
Was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art yesterday taking pictures--was there Sunday as well, but only scoped out then what I'd rather photograph on a sunny day. Some very nice axial coincidences were there to be recorded, which is great because "Nudist Camp at the Philadelphia Museum of Art" centers on the axial coincidence of Jennewein's Sacred and Profane Love and the Duchamp collection, especially The Large Glass.
I haven't seen the Dali exhibit yet, put the public video gallery is now playing, along with Un Chien Andalou, Destino (a Dali - Disney 1945 'collaboration' completed 2003). Destino is a joy to watch, and, though I'm generally not crazy about Disney animation, the animated imagery is great via Dali's imagination. I took about 2 dozen still of the video and will post them soon.
2005.03.23
fallout from the confirmation
I can now begin to see all my work (almost whatever I do each day even) as the potential for some object or thing that constitutes a (sellable) work of art. The objects can have a Duchamp meets Cornell character, like Cornell with a teleology. I really do that already, and I’ve wanted to do that with the Artifacts of Ottopia all along, but now the concept is tighter because the narrative is now so much more real.
Perhaps the greatest conflict lies in me wanting to continue producing via whim or me producing very specifically and more intently. In the second approach some projects will surely fall by the wayside (as if a lot of projects don’t do that already). I like the notion of my work being an ongoing series of clues and manifestations of a deliberate system--that’s what I see as most Duchamp. Yet there is every possibility that my work will have the greatest impact on architecture. I guess what I really should do is compose works that are pseudo scientific, scholarly yet mysterious, hidden meaning and also mixing odd things up. The one thing I have that Duchamp and Cornell never had is cad, and all the drawings that go with that.
Should it be my aim to tackle the abundance?
| |
2005.03.27 13:38
moving along (down the Parkway)
There were claims that Duchamp suggested the mobile form to Calder. In the thirties, Calder was in Paris, making his wire portraits of Josephine Baker and others. Clay Spohn, a very curious artist from San Francisco who was a conceptual bricoleur and who did some of the first assemblage art in California, was also in Paris at that time, and he knew both Calder and Duchamp. Spohn told me that he had actually been the one to suggest the idea of the mobile to Calder. I had heard that it was Duchamp, and asked Marcel about that. He laughed and said, "Oh, people have always misunderstood. Spohn, this strange American whom I enjoyed very much, suggested to Calder that he take the little parts and balance them on wires to make these contraptions. What I did was to name it. What I invented was the word mobile."
Walter Hopps, "Gimme Strength: Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp Remembered" in Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp ...In Resonance (Houston: Menil Foundation, Inc., 1998), p. 74
2005.03.30 08:36
Re: art
go in museumpeace, and may museumpeace be with you
wmpc/01/0001.htm
I Can’t Stand the Sight of Blood long before Hirst
wmpc/02/0146.htm
indecency?
wmpc/06/0580.htm
Euphrates Cat meets Copy Cat in the basement
wmpc/15/1418.htm
I can honestly blame it all on CAD
marcelduchamp.net/wwwboardarchive2/
messages/373.html
2005.03.31 14:48
genius loci today?
Is the modus operandi of genius loci today manifest by the notion of thinking locally and acting globally?
Is that how genius a loci artist operates?
Is that how terrorists operate?
Is that how a super power wishes to operate?
-----
tout fait
Why Duchamp?: The Influence of Marcel Duchamp on Contemporary Architectural Theory and Practice
toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=4312
&keyword 2005.03.31
Marcel Duchamp is a high standing member of the Horace Trumbauer Architecture Fan Club. New member Walter Hopps was extremely unexpectedly thrilled to be present up front and center for Duchamp's and Jennewein's "Nudist Camp at the Philadelphia Museum of Art" 20 March 2005.
[From now on, any work regarding Duchamp and Architecture must demonstrate a thorough knowledge of The Odds of Ottopia and Leaving Obscurity Behind. Indifference to this notice is much more than chancy, even.]
ref:
wqc/20/1965.htm
wqc/26/2517.htm
wqc/26/2532.htm
wqc/26/2535.htm by Rita Novel
| |
2005.04.16 12:38
Duchamp to direct THE LUCKY BUMS
Marcel Duchamp has agreed to direct The Lucky Bums, a theatrical reenactment of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, starring Grace Princess of Monaco as Leonora Ashburnham, Rainier III Prince of Monaco as Edward Ashburnham, Flavia Maria Augusta as Florence Dowell, and Otto I King of Bavaria as John Dowell. The performance is scheduled for 4 August 2005 as part of Leaving Obscurity Behind, the 2005 Horace Trumbauer Architecture Fan Club Convention.
"It was exactly as if I had come out of a museum into a riotous fancy-dress ball."
[three sentences later...]
"I had, in fact, forgotten that there was such a thing as gossip that mattered. In that particular, Philadelphia was the most amazing place I have ever been in my life."
[76 pages before that...]
"The death of Mrs. Maidan occurred on the 4th of August 1904. And then nothing happened until the 4th of August 1913."
"To begin with, she was born on the 4th of August. Then on that date, in the year 1899, she set out with her uncle for the tour round the world in company with a young man called Jimmy."
"Then, on the 4th of August 1900, she yielded to an action that certainly coloured her whole life--as well as mine."
"On the 4th of August 1901, she married me, and set sail for Europe in a great gale of wind--the gale that affected her heart."
[and 62 pages before that...]
"Florence's aunts used to say that I must be the laziest man in Philadelphia."
2005.04.22 09:48
Re:Memories
St. Genevieve and Duchamp are quite chummy, actually. It has a lot to do with the whole Pantheon as national mausoleum thing.
There's Genevieve and there's Catherine de Ricci. So how many spouses does Christ have exactly?
2005.04.19 10:42
Re: Selective Memories
...and while we're speaking of aesthetic dislocation, Duchamp found a new picture to put on his d'art board--lower left corner of page 10 Artforum February 2004.
"I love hitting the Bullshit's Eye!"
Ah, thanks for the selective memories.
2005.05.04 10:29
Ephemeral City
An image of the Barry Le Va exhibition just at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art is on the cover of this month's Art in America. I found Le Va's work and approach especially interesting because he began his college education studying architecture, but after a year switched over to studying art/sculpture. His knowledge and dexterity of/in draftsmanship remains an integral component of his operations. It's indeed interesting to see how draftsmanship even often informs his work.It's like the architect in Le Va is much more than just ephemerally there. There's a worthwhile article--"Refiguring Barry Le Va"--by Nancy Princenthal inside the magazine as well.
Also in Art in America May 2005 is "Dalí in Duchamp-Land" by Charles Stuckey, which clearly demonstrates that the relationship between Dalí and Duchamp is also more than just ephemeral. Imagine that, Philadelphia as Duchamp-Land--a virtual tour begins here and ends here--a great place to play hooky.
Just a reminder, the azaleas are presently in full bloom again at the Japanese House.
| |
2005.05.05 15:27
5 May 1821 Napoleon dies in exile at St. Helena
Calendar of May
LEAVING OBSCURITY BEHIND
1 May 305
Diocletian at Nicomedia and Maximanus Herculius at Mediolanum divest themselves of the purple.
2 May 373
death of St. Athanasius
2 May 1981
shotgun death of Daniel Hansford at Mercer House, Savannah
3 May
quondam feast of The Finding of the Holy Cross
3 May 1931
birth of Aldo Rossi
5 May 1821
death of Napoleon in exile at St. Helena Island
6 May 1856
birth of Sigmund Freud
6 May 1949
Duchamp makes detailed notes regarding the architecture of the Philadelphia Museum of Art
12 May 1921
birth of Joseph Beuys
etc.
2005.08.07 13:55
"How Did This Happen Revisited"
They all realized something was up when, at LIVE8 Philadelphia, Duchamp was always having these intense conversations with Adam. Marcel and Robert just told eveyone that they were enjoying each other's Philadelphia Museum of Art anecdotes, seeing how the Adam drawing room from Lansdowne House is situated directly above the Duchamp gallery. Well, it all became clear what was going on at the performance of Duchamp's The Lucky Bums 4 August 2005. Marcel had asked Robert to design the sets for the play, and to "Do Vanbrugh."
The Lucky Bums was a smash hit! Now everyone's reading The Good Soldier while remembering Grace, Rainier, Maria and Otto in the title roles. And boy does Marcel know how to strictly adhere to an existing narrative.
As a surprise to everyone, Vanbrugh was the guest of honor at the performance, and, as he liked the play so much, he immediately decided to deliver a paper for the Horace Trumbauer Architecture Fan Club Convention the very next day, hence "How Did This Happen Revisited." Everyone's still amazed by all the disclosures.
2005.08.16 10:42
Big up your home urban conurbation
...you're probably right about the house you left now being worth a lot more. Just this past weekend my mother told me she decided to look through the real estate pages of the Sunday paper and she was amazed at the current prices of things. What scares me is that there is now a lot of Philadelphia that I can't afford anymore, so maybe I will be stuck living in the same house all my life.
...4th and South was the center of my universe exactly 20 years ago. My best friend at the time had this enormous crush on a jazz singing waitress at Copa, so rather than go there alone, he'd invite me to dinner like 5 out of 7 nights a week (and he did this for a few months), thus I got to the point where I had to begin making up my own burger combinations. Spent all of hurricane Gloria at Copa. Rita Margarita indeed!
...nice list, and thanks for including me. I'll add the Duchamp collection, Love Park, and too bad we lost the X-Games. Venturi's "latest favorite" building in Philadelphia is the church on the square close to the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge. Venturi told the friend I had pizza with this past Sunday to go see it. Venturi seems to only know it from train rides up to New York, so he told my friend it's around Allegheny Avenue. After my friend gave me Venturi's description, I told him where it really is. I myself haven't been there in 35 years years, but I'm pretty sure it's on or next to Unruh Street.
|