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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Indifference: the Musical Score

July 24, 2011

This composer and nonsense aficionado Gary Bachlund sets a short, meaningless verse (cited, or curated, by Douglas Hostfadter in his excellent Metamagical Themas), to a tongue-in-cheek arrangement of chromaticism and diatonic sextuplets.

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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...

Painting with James Hyde and a Weekend at Mount Tremper Arts

July 21, 2011 Why painting?  Or, what is it exactly about the act of lathering, or perhaps even feathering or spilling, paint upon a surface that has intrigued artists, critics, thinkers, and aesthetes alike for thousands of years?  And whatever that origin may be, does it grip us in the same way today, in our post-Duchampian era of post-post-modernism, as it did 100+ years ago?  The answer, seemingly, is yes.  That is, according to New York artist James Hyde.   I.. read more...