2025.04.27
451 Rhawn Gallery . . . spent the afternoon enjoying a grand tour of Lynnewood Hall, and is especially happy to have ultimately visited the galleries that originally displayed one of the finest private art collections in the United States, all of which is now at the National Gallery in Washington DC.
2023.04.27
Hello Yura,
I have to immediately apologize to Katya for my comment—“that I now know what it would feel like to look into a mirror and then realize that you're not actually looking at yourself, lol.”
I saw her painting as a collage she thought up and first processed via Photoshop or something, and not till this morning did I ‘discovery’ that her portrait is in fact based on an image I actually took myself!
What I initially saw and thought was:
“Oh, she enmeshed me with Duchamp, that’s clever and insightful.”
“Oh my gosh, she has me wearing one of my brother’s shirts, even with his suspenders. How did she even know that?
“That’s not my head. I bet that’s Yura.”
I woke up this morning really worried that I said/wrote the wrong thing about Katya’s portrait, so I started to reanalyze it. I first had to see it as a painting because I always saw an actual collage.
“How did Katya figure out how to make all those reflections look so real?”
“Those aren’t suspender; they’re camera straps, but I never take pictures with the straps hanging down like that.”
“Yura must have posed for this this picture.”
“I know where Katya got my hands holding the camera, it’s the one where I’m reflected in the chrome bathtub at the PMA.”
“I have to find the picture I must have taken of Duchamp’s coffee grinder.”
Then I found the image, taken by me at the Philadelphia Museum of Art 5 November 2000, that Katya’s portrait is based on.
I honestly forgot completely about that image, and now, comparing it with Katya’s portrait, I have to say that Katya certainly has a real gift for making portraits look alive.
I’m now embarrassed as well as humbled because Katya did me a tremendous honor, one that I’m not even sure I deserve, and I kind of feel like I’ll never be able to thank her enough.
Steve
2015.04.27 11:09
what is 'beauty' in Architecture?
"Cultures, he argued, need the challenge of new forms if they are not to settle into complacency or, worse, terror.
His target here is what he calls 'realism'. Realism, he claims, reaffirms the illusion that we are able to seize hold of reality, truth, the way things "really" are.
Realism, Lyotard argues, protects us from doubt. It offers us a picture of the world that we seem to know, and in the process confirms our own status as knowing subjects by reaffirming that picture as true. Things are, humans are, and, above all, we are just as we have always supposed.
Postmodernity, in Lyotard's account, specifies a different literary and artistic mode rather than a particular period. Duchamp's challenge to realism is intelligible as postmodern. 'You want realism?' Richard Mutt's urinal seemed to ask. 'I'll give you reality itself, a readymade urinal, exactly the kind you see every day'. Er, that is, the kind men see every day. Well, Western men, anyway. Reality itself, when you come to think of it, is also culturally relative."
--Catherine Belsey
2001.04.27
Re: metabolic?
It's not everyday that someone asks my opinion on the 'metabolic'. You're kind of catching me off guard here, but I'll give you my gut reaction. I understand metabolism as a creative-destructive duality that releases energy. The key element of the concept (for me at least) is that both a creative act and a destructive act work equally in tandem. My first thought regarding two universes colliding is that it is more of an accident rather than a creative-destructive occurrance. You're thinking/question is not to be discounted, however, because this new 'beginning of the universe' theory may well represent an important point of distinction relative to the metabolic process, ie, an interesting place to figure out what can be deemed metabolic and what cannot be thus deemed.
I see my painting on the Gehry chair as a metabolic act because while I was being artistically creative I was at the same time being destructive. The chair is still a chair, and even still a Gehry chair, yet it now also a unique work of art by Steve Lauf, namely Museumpeace. The creative-destuctive process is now integral to the piece, as is the notion of duality, and creative-destructive and duality are the operative concepts that (I see) must be present. Now I could take this example further and ask whether Museumpeace has an energy that wasn't there before. Personally, I think there is an energy there that wasn't there before, and hopefully that energy is getting a little stronger every day.
|