talks on painting...

sunday night at the mandrake in culver city, i'll be part of a panel discussion about painting with tom lawson, brett cody rogers, amanda ross-ho, moderated by jill newman. should be a lively evening...

talks on painting: painters beyond painting,
sunday june 26, 7pm
mandrake bar
2692 la cienega blvd.
culver city.

debussy on simplicity and truth...

in 1901, debussy told his colleague paul dukas that too many modern works had become needlessly complex - "they smell of the lamp, not of the sun."

from alex ross: the rest is noise, listening to the 20th century.

when fences speak...

can't stop looking at this image from a 1960 reynolds aluminum fence catalog... found a week ago... my mind wandering... images layered, yet still visible complete... as if a model of the crafting of a painting...

cage on the power of things...

what changed matters, made conversation possible, produced cooperation, reinstated one's desire for continuity, etc., were things, dumb inanimate things (once in hands they generated thought, speech, action).

john cage, art & technology, 1969

from the palace at 4 am...

"i whirl in the void. in broad daylight i contemplate space and the stars which traverse the liquid silver around me... again and again i'm captivated by constructions which delight me, and which live in their surreality - a beautiful palace, the tiled floor, black, white, red under my feet, the clustered columns, the smiling ceiling of air, and the precise mechanisms which are of no use. [and further] once the object is constructed, i tend to see in it, transformed and displaced, facts which have profoundly moved me, often without my realizing it; forms which i feel quite close to me, yet often without being able to identify them, which makes them all the more disturbing."

alberto giacometti, 1933 (as quoted in "a concise history of modern sculpture")

miniature playhouses for a very small audience

cigars clamped between
their teeth:

i've read that goethe, hans christian andersen, and lewis carroll were managers of their own miniature theatres. there must have been many other such playhouses in the world. we study the history and literature of the period, but we know nothing about these plays that were being performed for an audience of one.

(text from charles simic's absolutely stellar: dime-store alchemy, the art of joseph cornell
drawings by goethe, hans christian andersen, and lewis carroll.)

to induce surrealist dreams...

i picked up a 1975 issue of art news at the flea market on sunday for a buck, mainly because it featured a small article on richard smith; but the real discovery was an ad for a max ernst edition pictured above, called the "cage-bed with screen."

the bed and screen were made in an edition of 99, published by modern art associations, and was exhibited at leonard hutton galleries from february to march of 1975. the edition included: the bedcover (made of mink fur), the sculpted "cage" bed frame, and the screen which contained 2 signed lithos.

i haven't done much research on this, but until this morning, it was an ernst endeavor i'd never come across. i believe it is one of the few environments he created in the latter part of his career - somewhat hokey and kind of related to some of the environmental and furniture pieces that dali editioned late in his own career, although not nearly as lame.

while it would be easy to sneer at ernst's attempt to bring some of his most ernstian imagery into a weirdly victorian installation context, i find myself thinking it is actually pretty interesting - not because it resonates any stronger than his paintings or collages (it definitely doesn't), but because it is pretty darn interesting that someone who worked with dream imagery for much of his career, would create a sleeping environment that could be purchased and installed in anyone's home (anyone who had the dough and the room of course...)

what listening looks like...