Annals of the Surreal

August 3, 2011 "Lilliputia, the MIdget City: If dreamland is a laboratory for Manhattan, Midget City is a laboratory for Dreamland. Three hundred midgets who had been scattered across the continent as attractions at World's Fairs are offered a permanent experimental community here, 'a bit of old Nuremberg m the fifteenth century.' Since the scale of Midget City is half the scale of the real world, the cost of building this cardboard utopia is, at least theoretically, quartered, so that.. read more...

On Anamorphosis

July 31, 2011 "Distortion may lend itself...to all the paranoiac ambiguities, and every possible use has been made of it, from Arcimboldi to Salvador Dali. I will go so far as to say that this fascination complements what geometral researches into perspective allow to escape from vision. How is it that nobody has ever thought of connecting this with...the effect of an erection? Imagine a tattoo traced on the sexual organ ad hoc in the state of repose and assuming its, if I may say s.. read more...

Hermetic Duchamp?

July 31, 2011

"Marcel Duchamp had exhibited found objects as art with his famous urinal. But Duchamp’s art is hermetic, introverted, it doesn’t go out to the viewer. Rauschenberg’s reflects his own personality: it’s extrovert, generous, non-judgmental.” -Ealan Wingate, co-curator of the current Rauschenberg exhibition in Edinburgh

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Surrealist Lab: Whose Unconscious? (Part 2)

July 29, 2011 In a recent post, "With A Lunatic Gesture We Forsook Jujitsu" (Automatism A), I tried my hand at some automatic writing. This was a practice codified by the Surrealists under the direction of Andre Breton, but its provenance dates to long before that. Its purpose has depended on the historical circumstance. For instance, it used to be seen by 19th century psychics as a way of channeling supernatural sources, even aliens. For others, namely the Beat poets, it was mer.. read more...

An Argument for Tactile Art

July 26, 2011

“It is clear that the liberative importance of the tactile resides in the fact that it can only be decoded in terms of experience itself: it cannot be reduced to mere information, to representation or to the simple evocation of a simulacrum substituting for absent presences.”

Kenneth Frampton (from “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”)

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Physics Comes to the Defense of Modern Art

July 26, 2011 If Duchamp's "Standard Stoppages" lampooned the precise measuring systems of scientists, a Harvard mathematician is now doing something of the opposite for Jackson Pollack: rescuing him from the perception that abstract expressionists are just random paint-slingers. Through a close data analysis of "Untitled 1948-49," professor Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan uncovered some of the secrets of Pollack's technique: he must have "held his brush or trowel high off the canvas, moving.. read more...

Picabia’s 391, up for sale, sold.

July 26, 2011

Francis Picabia’s magazine, 391, showcased the one time dadaist’s eroto-mechanomorphic diagrams and his anti-aesthete’s wisdom. (It still exists in fact, in bastardized digital form http://www.391.org/) Three of the more historical issues went on the market recently, and were offered for around $9000 a piece. They sold almost immediately.

Booktryst has the goods:

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Surrealist Lab: In Search of Automatism (part 1)

July 24, 2011 In a recent post, "With A Lunatic Gesture We Forsook Jujitsu" (Automatism A), I tried my hand at some automatic writing. This was a practice codified by the Surrealists under the direction of Andre Breton, but its provenance dates to long before that. Its purpose has depended on the historical circumstance. For instance, it used to be seen by 19th Century psychics as a way of channeling supernatural sources, even aliens. For others, namely the Beat poets, it was mer.. read more...

Cao Fei’s "Whose Utopia"

July 22, 2011 Among contemporary world artists, the Guangdong new media and video artist Cao Fei is among the most intriguing explorers of the boundaries between the fantastical, the global/political and the everyday. Her recent work "Whose Utopia" unquestionably steals the show at the new Deutsche Guggenheim exhibit "Fantastic Narratives in Contemporary Video," in Berlin. "Whose Utopia" is an elegant triptych, or else a concerto for factory in three movem.. read more...