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18 August 2003 |
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08 August 2003 |
NG considering extending its in-gallery digital print-on-demand service to accredited print shops around the world. Would the current lack of DRM prevent piracy, and/or allow an effective redress? [via ntk]
4:54:06 PM 
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Mark Kostabi once said there is no "Duchamp market", because he produced so little work:
Many pseudo-purists will advise you to keep production low and prices high. But Picasso and Warhol are the kings and barometers of the art market because they had huge quantity as well as quality. Duchamp is just as important historically but no one makes an art-market decision based on how the Duchamp market is going. Because there is no "Duchamp market." He produced too little.
Interesting idea, and last year, perhaps, we saw the proof when a Phillips sale of readymades in NY failed to make their estimates:
However, the sale of 14 "readymade" sculptures by the father of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, was more problematic. The collection, which Phillips had guaranteed for an estimated $10 million, brought only $5.3 million. After the sale, dealers said there was nothing wrong with the prices realised - Phillips had simply put too high a price on the works.
To bring us up to date, here's Richard Polsky recommending good summer deals in the 2003 art market (no Duchamp).
1:38:48 PM
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07 August 2003 |
3:15:39 PM
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05 August 2003 |
Nineteen chess sets designed by artists at Somerset House, London
On public view for the first time will be five recently commissioned chess sets designed by leading contemporary artists Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Paul McCarthy, Yayoi Kusama and Maurizio Cattelan. These new works will be set in context by chess sets designed during the 20th century by such major artists as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder and Yoko Ono.
7:00:59 PM
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04 August 2003 |
In 'Of Two Minds and One Nature', Rhonda Roland Shearer and Stephen Jay Gould use the Jastrow duck-rabbit figure in discussing the idea that Leonardo, Duchamp and other artists successfully bridged art and science, and therefore show us the value of breaking down/through the unhelpful (false, even? - in the view of our authors, themselves a well-known partnership of art theorist and paleo-scientist) dichotomy between the two cultures.
In a key passage from one of the most influential books of our times (The Structure of Scientific Revolution), T.S. Kuhn bridged the disciplinary gap between visual representation and conceptual innovation when he used the famous gestalt illusion of the duck-rabbit [...] as a primary symbol for the meaning and nature of scientific revolution: 'It is as elementary prototypes for these transformations of the scientist's world that the familiar demonstrations of a switch in visual gestalt prove so suggestive. What were ducks in the scientist's world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards.'
An interesting article, but not sure it tells us anything new, unlike much of Shearer's research into MD.
Art students usually discover the duck-rabbit figure via Gombrich, who says:
we can switch from one reading to another with increasing rapidity; we will also 'remember' the the rabbit when while we see the duck, but the more closely we watch ourselves, the more certainly will we discover that we cannot experience alternative readings at the same time.'
[Art and Illusion, A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 1959, 5]
Yet this famous binary flip-flop between duck and rabbit always seemed insufficient: if you look at the picture long enough, the visual opposition starts to break down. The duck aspect becomes minimally contaminated by the (possibility of flipping over to the) rabbit aspect, and vice versa. This contamination is, we guess, what makes the flip-flop possible. You start with Jastrow's duck-rabbit = a rabbit OR a duck. You end up with Jastrow's duck-rabbit = a rabbit-duck OR a duck-rabbit. (Just found our embarrassingly confused explication of same, with images from 1997. Forgive our cod-Derridean enthusiasm.) Which is what we think Wittgenstein means when he writes about 'seeing-as' being a combination of seeing and thinking [Philosophical Investigations, 212e] and:
I am shewn the duck-rabbit and asked what it is; I may say 'It's a duck-rabbit'. But I may also react to the question quite differently. - The answer that it is a duck-rabbit is again the report of a perception; the answer 'Now it's a rabbit' is not. Had I replied 'It's a rabbit', the ambiguity would have escaped me, and I should be reporting my perception.
The change of aspect. 'But surely you would say that the picture is altogether different now!'
But what is different: my impression? my point of view? - Can I say? I describe the alteration like a perception; quite as if the object had altered before my eyes.
[...] The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception's being changed.
[Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M.Anscombe, 1953, 194-5]
More to be read:
1:26:19 PM
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01 August 2003 |
12:21:16 PM
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30 July 2003 |
I walked into the open-plan office upstairs and heard the girls mournfully talking about how the new printer was no good. I asked whether it was slow, or had poor print quality. No: they didn’t like the newly upgraded printer’s song, which was mechanical and annoying. The old printer’s noise had been repetitive but musical, so they used to sing along with it when it did a large run of flow charts. I asked them what the old printer song had been like, and one of them started humming it to me. Gradually the others joined in until there were about five of them humming it, in remembrance.
9:50:37 PM
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Rodcorp's books read in 2003 (now you know what we've been doing instead of working) and 2002.
9:45:23 PM
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(in progress)
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Geography/latitude: Greenwich (meridian). St Pauls / The Thames / Charing Cross as the centroid - thanks to Chris (and also: Hammersley has some interesting comments on geographic centres of continents)
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Systemic
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Charing Cross station is the centre of London for Black Taxis
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Piccadilly Circus is considered the centre of the Underground network (though Victoria is the busiest, and the first line ran from Farringdon to Paddington via King's Cross)
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Postal districts: useful explanations here and here, but no mention of an origin
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In name (historically): Apsley House - 'No 1, London'
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Historical, again: Roman London. The square mile roughly defines where Roman London stood, and there was a basilica and forum in Cornhill, dating from 70/90AD. (Where were roads measured to? - thanks Chris)
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the flow of people: multiple centres (Struan)
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retail and finance: where are the most/highest transactions and revenue? Oxford Street? City of London for non-retail.
Sort of related: openguides, a network of free, community-maintained city guides to which anyone can contribute (thanks Paul)
Sources: London Encyclopaedia, various
To check: histories of London, Museum of London.
9:06:24 PM
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Quarries, mines, refineries, shipyards, dams: Gursky meets Salgado.
Nature transformed through industry is a predominate theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.
These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.
8:57:31 PM
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28 July 2003 |
5:19:01 PM
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Rhonda Roland Shearer's thesis is that none of MD's readymades were genuinely off-the-shelf.
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Shearer, Marcel Duchamp's Impossible Bed and Other "Not" Readymade Objects: A Possible Route of Influence From Art To Science: part one and part two.
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As reported by Leslie Camhi in Art News: Did Duchamp Deceive Us? - "Shearer has been marshaling support for a radical hypothesis concerning Duchamp's readymades, among the most revolutionary (or anti-art) objects of the 20th century. Most people think of the readymades as mass-produced items transformed into art by Duchamp's choice and by their displacement to museum and gallery settings. Shearer has set out to prove that they are all unique creations, extensively manipulated by the artist's hand."
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Opinion by Emily Liebert: Taking the 'ready' out of readymade artwork - "a larger question remains: whether or not such a discovery matters. Can a piece of information have the power to subvert a genre of art? The answer, quite simply, is no"
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An Artist's Timely Riddles (with references)
5:17:42 PM
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David Thomson meditates on what glued viewers to 24, and why the show fell short He hints at its fetishisation of mobile phones, which always seemed to be more than simply a plot device to glue together the different story strands and locations.
The sharpest pleasure in 24 has always been to awaken the scenarist in us all. It was evident early in the first series that hooked viewers were not simply asking story questions like, 'Do you trust Senator Palmer's wife?' Or, 'Are Jack and Nina over?' No, we were identifying with the team behind the show, and their self-imposed dilemma. We wanted to know, 'How are they going to spin this out through the middle sections without losing us?' Or, 'It's not just who is the traitor, but is anyone telling the truth?' Or, 'The secret is, it's all about cell phones.'
[...]
[T]he show required commentary. It needed its own talk show, with real-life pundits and senators coming on to discuss President Palmer's situation. It needed a great dash of what Altman tried to do in Tanner, and what Welles was always after – the organic confusion of fact and fiction. It needed to bleed over into the rest of television.
Go one step further: the commercials should have been written and directed by the show's talent, and they should have had the show's actors or characters. Thus you cut away from a car chase to have Kiefer Sutherland proposing this or that SUV. In the midst of telephonic deceit, Nina confides to the camera about the 'love-affair confidentiality' of her latest Nokia. And so on.
[...]
Someone should show it all in one day (Antonia Quirke had that idea for the ICA in London – but there were print problems). And everyone in the audience has a cell phone so they can call home. Or wherever you'd call if the bomb flashes. But the doors are locked – only as much food and weaponry as you can carry in. Give claustrophobia a chance. I told you we needed Buñuel. It's The Exterminating Angel, with Nina presiding, waiting for Jack to sleep.
Also: Top 100 British tv programmes.
[via philgyford]
12:26:58 PM
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21 July 2003 |
Taipei Times: Vietnamese painters profit from copying craze:
Demand for look-alike masterpieces is so great that Dong has to turn away "vanity" clients who want their portraits done.
On average, Dong's studio of six workers churns out 400 pieces a year with about half sold locally and the rest exported.
Prices are calculated on a basic rate of US$50 per square meter and US$20 extra for paintings with more than one face due to "more intricate copy work", Dong said.
If his studio was in the Western gallery system, Ngo Dong would be Andy Warhol or Mark Kostabi.
Related: Rome is making all of its street artists perform a test to ensure that they are the artists of the work they're selling - some people have been importing pictures from Thailand at a few dollars apiece.
9:08:20 PM
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illuminates the process by which designers transform their often groundbreaking ideas into functional, manufacturable products. Drawings, cardboard models stuck together with tape and ultramodern computer animations are more significant here than the finished products, for they illuminate the designer's process in a way that the finished product--unless it is a deconstructive design object!--does not
Buy in UK. Incidentally, some interesting looking related books here too.
[via MachineLake]
9:07:12 PM
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"For designers who collect, the cluttered workspace is a library of inspiration". The desks of designers Rob Cristofaro,
Maira Kalman, Scott Stowell and Milton Glaser.
[via MachineLake, itself via manAmplified]
9:06:44 PM
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This weekend we met a bunch of bike couriers at a barbecue. Interesting people, with a strong sub-culture - sub in the sense that non-couriers know very little about what they are like, how couriering works etc. Unsurprisingly, most of them are mad about bikes, and it's a way to earn a crust. So there was much talk of the Tour de France. They knew only one person who'd gone on from couriering to 'proper' road racing. There are 600-1000 couriers working London at any one time, and they do about 70-80 miles a day in town, mostly within the Circle line area, though they may travel further west to Notting Hill, and further east to the Docklands. This bunch had a strong sense of identity and shared culture/community. Some have expensively tricked-out rides, some something seemingly more standard (the playoffs between lightness/efficiency, reliability and cost being the key equations couriers run in choosing the tools of their trade), with single/no brakes and single gears common.
About 50+ of the London couriers are into "alley cat racing": illegal checkpoint-to-checkpoint race where the racers only know the next checkpoint. Ie: orienteering on a bike, in (and often against) the traffic. AC Racing was imported from US couriers in the mid-90s. Last night they showed a video made by film students by mounting a camera on one of the alley cat racers. 8 minutes of crazy, often-dangerous riding through traffic and people; ends with the cyclist getting hit by a truck when he attempted to zoom across a red-light and straight across the traffic going both ways (he'd successfully done this a few times already in the film). He wasn't hurt too badly, but the bike probably was. "Oh well, that's racing", he concludes.
Even though you don't quite get a sense of the true speed on film, it was fantastic, and reminiscent of several other illegal car or motorbike films (Claude Lelouch's infamous C'etait un Rendezvous, the Getaway in Stockholm films, Black Prince Peripherique).
Couriers, alley cat racing, etc:
Other films:
(Update: Struan correctly reminds us that alley cat racing perpetuates the image of 'cyclists as arrogant, self-righteous grumps with only limited respect for the law'. Which, together with the rest of us non-courier cyclists going through red lights, really doesn't help. Perhaps the racing is symptomatic of a bike culture that sees itself as *against* motor traffic. Alley cat racing isn't safe or particularly clever, but we have to admit it was quite exciting to watch.)
8:35:01 PM
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18 July 2003 |
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Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies: One hundred worthwhile dilemmas, "each of which is a suggestion of a course of action or thinking to assist in creative situations"
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Charles and Ray Eames' House of Cards: Comes in five flavours. "The images are of what Eameses called 'good stuff', chosen to celebrate 'familiar and nostalgic objects from the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms'. The six slots on each card enable the player to interlock the cards so as to build structures of myriad shapes and sizes"
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IDEO's new Method Cards: "Each card describes one method and includes a brief story about how and when to use it. This is not a 'how to' guide. It's a design tool meant to help you explore new approaches and develop your own. Use the deck to take a new view, to inspire creativity, to communicate with your team, or to turn a corner"
9:32:53 AM
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("best of" according to Rodcorp, who've only read the website)
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MEART, the semi living artist: mammalian neurons (emryonic rat cortex) + software + drawing arm + feedback = drawings + behaviour
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Drawing Machine, which takes feedback via microphones, and draws
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Fotron2000, seemingly a photobooth which uses led light on polaroid film to draw portraits
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Automated Architecture Robot creates a building design with ice and water in one hour. "The robot sculpts a block of ice into an organic form using water (The water is stored and recycled by the robot). Every 10 minutes the sculpting stops and the robot's water tubes move into their 'stored' positions. Doors, windows and other architectural elements are projected onto the ice with a slide projector. Visitors can influence the outcome of the sculpted architectural model by making adjustments to a large control knob. They can choose between 'Palatial Home', 'Discreet Home', 'Mixed-Use Development', 'Company Branch Office', or 'Company Headquarters'. The robot will do its best to create the home/office of their dreams"
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Scratchrobot: send an e-mail to robot@spess.com. The scratchrobot will scratch your message and reply in a unique way
9:31:40 AM
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17 July 2003 |
we've fount rerembrandtsers, their hours to date link these heirs 2
to here but wowhere are those yours of Yestersdays? [FW 54.2]
Be sure and link him, me O treasauro [FW 462.22]
Jorn Barger's James Joyce portal is often a good place to start, and his abstract of FW is interesting. And from there we find:
10:58:43 AM
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16 July 2003 |
2:31:48 PM
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15 July 2003 |
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01 July 2003 |
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Hektor is an inkjet printer made out of a can of spraypaint and a series of clever, machine-controlled pulleys
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with this handheld printing device you swipe your hand back and forth and it lays the print (of whatever you bluetoothed to it) down
[both via boing boing]
7:37:39 PM
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18 June 2003 |
Just finished: Vol 1 of The LOEG, which was excellent. It manages to be both dark (in the usual Moore manner) and lighthearted, and it's feel is steampunk-(Gibson/Sterling or Stephenson) -meets-slipstream. It's fully-packed with references to turn of the [last] century pulp fiction. Campion Bond looks like George Lucas. We recommend it. LOEG is annotated in detail by Jess Nevin, and it seems that Nevin's work is being collected and published in an unofficial companion.
More AM: long interview from 2000 and the Alan Moore fan site.
See also: the COMICA event at the ICA later this month has talks from Warren Ellis and Joe Sacco, and features the launch of the OuBaPo (the Ouvoir de Bande Dessinee Potentielle, Workshop for the potential of comics).
Previously read: Warren Ellis' Orbiter: Shuttle disappears, and mysteriously reappears 10
years later. Pretty good.
10:12:01 AM
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LA Times feature on the managing architect/project manager who makes Gehry's buildings happen. Architect as project manager rather than visionary.
Apart from "knowing how to build stuff," says Gehry, the key to Bell's role is "knowing how to keep a crew of workmen together, and earning a certain amount of respect for his position, because the construction guys always try to diss the architect." In another sense, Gehry continues, Bell's job is "like being the conductor: You've got the score. Now, how do you do it?"
[via ?]
2:34:06 AM
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Priest won the Arthur C. Clarke award this year for Separation. He picks his top ten slipstream books here, and luckily we also have Bruce Sterling explaining what "slipstream" actually means:
... this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility. We could call this kind of fiction Novels of Postmodern Sensibility, but that looks pretty bad on a category rack, and requires an acronym besides; so for the sake of convenience and argument, we will call these books "slipstream."
(Or put another way, slipstream is unheimlich?) Sterling also has a list of slipstream books.
2:28:52 AM
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© Copyright 2003 rodcorp.
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We're moving:
Rodcorp's new home
Art, Architecture etc
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