IN COLLEGE, I focused on printmaking. A lot of my work is actually a kind of reaction to printmakers. They’re territorial and they don’t understand art the same way I do. They look at it pictorially and miss the essence of what they do, which lies in the technical process – using specific chemicals and materials and pressing them together. You can control that in certain ways; you can do things graphically and physically that are worth doing as an artist. Printmaking is an easy way to get going. It’s procedural. It’s like the process of a singer warming up, preparing, thinking; that’s how Keith Richards writes songs, in the process of tuning his guitar. I’ll sit here and paint any number of silk screens. They change as I print. The ink falls out and some more comes through and so on, as I use it again. Josh Smith, in Josh Smith Talks About Currents 2008–, Artforum International XLVII, No. 6, February 2009, p162.
Tag: art
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In College I Focused on Printmaking a Lot of My
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Slot Machines Are Indeed a Software Chimera the
[Slot machines] are indeed a software chimera, the tail of a serpent attached to the head of a lion. It combines business graphics with the Internet, cinematic memory, remote-control systems – and banking, franchise capitalism at your fingertips. Norman M. Klein, in The Electronic Baroque: 1955-2050. From The Vatican to Vegas, 2004 p341.
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Museums Would Map the Transition Toward This New
Museums would map the transition toward this new Baroque, like the new Guggenheims in Las Vegas, as part of a franchise that has stopped growing in the U.S. Museums were also under the gun. Very likely, shows will look more like Baroque wunderkammers than they used to. They will overlap and sprawl more, like browsers and search engines. The pressures to make shows monumentalize the new power relations will be intense, an often under shrinking curatorial budges, with signature buildings outside, like the Electronic Baroque: gaudy outside, conservative at its core. Norman M. Klein, in The Electronic Baroque: 1955-2050. From The Vatican to Vegas, 2004 p338.
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Gothic Revivals Polish Decay Until It Turns
[…] Gothic revivals polish decay, until it turns into special effects. Ultimately, they retrofit the haunted house until it looks as if no one has moved in yet. Norman M. Klein, in Building the Unexpected. From The Vatican to Vegas, 2004 p159-160.
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Eidophusikon
From Wikipedia (link): The Eidophusikon (Greek: Ειδωφυσικον) was a piece of art, no longer extant, created by 18th century English painter Philip James de Loutherbourg. It opened in Leicester Square in February 1781.
See also this modern day Eidophusikon project for more history and a replica video.
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Suspicious As a Generator of Disquiet May Be Found
Suspicious as a generator of disquiet may be found in certain contemporary paintings when a simple house, seen in an ambiguous light, and isolated against the landscape, becomes haunted and takes on a threatening and malign air […] The Kafka of The Trial was a master of suspicioun, but sometimes (as in Metamorphosis) what is uncanny is not so much the horror that is shown and described 9a man wakes up to find he has been transformed into a disgusting insect), but the fact that his family take the event as embarrassing yet entirely natural, and we suspect that the story is really talking about our acquiescence in the face of the evil that surrounds us. Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, p323.
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Can You Explain to Me Why when We Defecate We
‘Can you explain to me why, when we defecate, we often examine our excrement?’ Aesop explained: ‘In olden days there was a king’s son who, because of his life of luxury, spent most of his time sitting and shitting. Once he remained seated thus so long that, having forgotten what he was doing, he shat his own common sense. From that day forward, men shit hunched over, being careful not to crap away their own common sense. But don’t you worry: you can’t shit something you don’t possess!’ Anonymous, The Aesop Romance, quoted in Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, p134.
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And to Thee Nothing Is Whatsoever Evil Yea Not
And to Thee nothing is whatsoever evil: yea, not only to Thee, but also to Thy creation as a whole, because there is nothing without, which may break in, and corrupt that order which Thou hast appointed it. But in the parts thereof some things, because unharmonising with other some, are accounted evil: whereas those ver things harmonise with others, and are good; and in themselves are good. And all these things which harmonise not together, do yet with the inferior part, which we call Earth, having its own cloudy and windy sky harmonising with it. Far be it then that I should say, ‘These things should not be’: for indeed long for the better; but still must even for these alone praise Thee; for that Thou are to be praised , do show from the earth, dragons, and all deeps, fire, hail, snow, ice, and stormy wind, which fulfil Thy word […] St. Augustine, The Confessions, VII, quoted in Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, p48.
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The Poets Have Utilized What Are Called Solecisms
The poets have utilized what are called solecisms and barbarisms; they have preferred, by changing the names, to call them figures and transformations, rather than avoid them as evident errors. Well, take them out of poetry, and we would miss the most melodious sweetness. Gather many together in a single composition, and it will vex me because all will be mawkish, pedantic, affected […] The order that governs and moderates such things would not tolerate their being too many, nor too few. A humble and almost disregarded discourse highlights elevated expressions and elegant movements, alternating between one and the other. St. Augustine, On Order, IV. Quoted in Umberto Eco, On Ugliness, p47.
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I Was Looking at Robert Franks Photograph Sick of
I was looking at Robert Frank’s photograph Sick of Goodby’s in his book The Lines of My Hand. Moments before I had been listening to a Johnny Cash song called I Wish I Was Crazy Again. Then I thought of the goodbyes in the book to old friends caught once and for all and never again to be seen in life, and I was struck by the intensity of the sadness of life and its redeeming qualities as reflected in these moving photos. With Johnny Cash as well, the desire to see it all again, to go out one more time into the wild flame only to be burned up forever and never be seen again except in these farewell photos, is moving beyond description. The photos speak of an acceptance of things as they are. the inevitable death of us all and the last photo – that last unposed shot to remind us of our friends, of our loss of the times we had in a past captured only on film in black and white. Frank has been there, and seen that, and recorded it with such subtlety that we only look in awe, our own hearts beating with the memories of lost partners and songs.
To wish for the crazy times one last time and freeze it in the memory of a camera is the least a great artist can do. Robert Frank is a great democrat. We’re all in these photos. Paint dripping from a mirror like blood. I’m sick of goodbyes. And aren’t we all, but it’s nice to see it said.
Lou Reed on Robert Frank’s Sick of Goodby’s (1978). From the Tate’s “Six Reflections on the Photography of Robert Frank”