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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The Scent of Belle Haleine

July 24, 2011

Can the smell of Duchamp’s famous perfume be reconstructed? The blog “Olfactory Art” tells all. Unfortunately, even OSX Lion doesn’t come with scent-receptors.

Time for Steve Jobs to team up with William Gibson…

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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...

An Interesting Critique of John Cage

July 17, 2011 "Music is sound. Some sounds may be music. Silence is the medium in which sounds and music are expressed. Spare me the next crackpot offering of themes and variations on silence. The deaf have ways of understanding sound and appreciating music. Tell me how you would convey the artisitic merit of silence to the deaf??" -Justinae, reader/contributor to the London Telegraph. How indeed could the deaf be made to appreciate "4'33?" A new problem for Cage .. read more...