2026.03.02
a fiction all but for the fourth dimension
 
2019.03.22
Mary Boone's 180 hours of community service hour 35
Mary Boone's 180 hours of community service hour 36
2006.03.22
FUNCTION - physical or metaphysical
When I was younger there were five different funeral homes in my immediate neighborhood, close enough that I could walk to any one of them within a few minutes. All these funeral homes were first houses--three were large single homes and two were the corner houses at the end of a row of homes. Only one of the funeral homes still exists as a funeral home today, one is now Triumphal something something church, one is a Lutheran Family center, and the two row homes are now just row homes again.
And when I was very young, some dead neighbors on my block were laid out in their living rooms. In the 1980s I used to joke that I wanted to be buried under my basement.
Ah, their house is a museum when people come to see 'em.
Form and function follow imagination, and imagination follows human physiology.
2005.03.22
Re: new Trumbauer fan (system)
Here's some of my favorite quotations from:
Anne d'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps, Etant Donnés: 1° la chute d'eau. 2° le gaz d'éclairage. Reflections on a new work by Marcel Duchamp (Bulletin: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vol. 64, No. 299/300, 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."
Philadelphia Museum of Art
   
 
 
Expiration Date (No. 7)
2000.03.22
Re: Aesthetic Intentions
Ludwig II of Bavaria well understood the potential of absolute monarchy, and it seems architecturally evident that he intended to fulfill that potential. I doubt it escaped Ludwig's cognition that monarchs are rare, absolute monarchs even more rare, and mid-nineteenth century monarchs (like himself), absolute or otherwise, were an endangered species.
Ludwig II took the notion of (European) absolute monarchy to its final extreme, and each of his major buildings, Neuschwanstein, Linderhof, and Herrenchimsee, are Gesamptkunstwerks (architecture, decorative arts, music, theater, mythology) that reenact absolute monarchy, as much as they represent a race against time (specifically, the race of European monarchy against time). Ludwig and his younger brother Otto (the real mentally ill member of his immediate family) were literally the end of their family's line. Ludwig was an extreme European monarch in every sense, and his architecture is also extreme European royal architecture in every sense--consummate examples of Zeitgeist and its effects.
I believe Ludwig II achieved his intentions as far as he could take them. But I doubt even he was aware of manifesting an architecture that will forever spark architectural imaginations.
1998.03.22
book proposal
...the notes comprise the narrative of the investigation and the coming together of the pieces of the puzzle.
|