Meeting Bob Irwin

I had the great and fortunate opportunity to meet one of the artists of an earlier generation whose thoughts and work have had a tremendous impact on my own artistic direction. In the photograph are myself and Robert Irwin and you can also see Richard Tuttle in the background in a blue coat. Bob's work is on display at PaceWildenstein in Chelsea, Manhattan.

Everyone Has a Song Inside...

Microsoft's Official Ad for its new software, Songsmith: Radiohead's Creep: The Police's Roxanne:

Fwd: Omelette

Begin forwarded message:

From: Julie Newton Date: January 22, 2009 6:00:18 PM EST To: Matthew Newton Subject: Omelette

First omelette (spelled correctly?) in the funny microwaveble dish.  Turned out well.

Kurt Schwitters' Hannover Studio

"Now the source of the peculiar odor (let's call it the Schwitter's aroma) could be classified in all its complexity.  It was compounded, I discovered, of many things: (I) of the hot glue and homemade starch Schwitters needed for assembling his collages and his manuscripts, which were all cut up and pasted back together again, or his layouts and typographical compositions, which were similarly assembled; (2) of the plaster of Paris and clay required for composing his reliefs and sculptures; (3) of the cooking food; and (4) and of the just plain baby smell.

The guinea pigs Kurt kept merely went into the aromatic bargain.  In this atmosphere Kurt Schwitters' work and family life went on."

from Kate Steinitz's "Kurt Schwitters"

Janus

Chelsea Art Gallery map

I just created a Google Map listing many of the art galleries in Chelsea, Manhattan.  Feel free to make use of the map.  Also, if you notice any omissions or inconsistencies please feel free to let me know.  A gadget in the right panel of this blog also shows the map.

About Big Numbers

Explore the world of big numbers.

Discover how big and how small our world is.
How big is a zillion?
How small is a quadrillion?
Numbers and science. 
From the atom to the universe. 
Sun and sand and water and air.
And more.

Kurt Schwitters' "The Critic"

Thearth

Ethel Maid - Finest in Funeral Fashions

http://www.ethelmaid.com/

Beryl Korot hunting the Bull

Referring to the ancient drawing of a bull in the Lascaux caves, video artist Beryl Korot said in an interview that she "wanted to... figure out what kind of image did I want to make if I was in the cave."  She meant that she wanted to figure out what image would be as powerful and personal to her as the bull was to the person in the cave who made it some thousands of years ago.  It took her eight years.  But the important lesson for me is that she worked all along following the traces of what she was after.  Starting with literature, migrating to visual arts through video and then breaking from video to learn drawing and textiles before ultimately returning to video.  How attractive is that honest and flexible pursuit.

El Perro del Mar music video

Check out this excellent music video from one of my favorites, El Perro del Mar.

I think I have to choose between time and space and also choose between sex and death. I think I will choose death, in which case it seems natural to also choose time.

I think I would like to show a vagueness about whether these things exist.

I expect that I will also end up handling space and sex as well through time and death.

So here are a few things I think I've decided the work should hold:

Death, or lack there of

Time, or lack there of

With the qualities of:

Duplication

Evolution

Meandering

maybe tack on Transparency.     

Thoughts on Wendell Berry's New and Old Worlds

I came across this paragraph while reading last night in Wendell Berry's "Andy Catlett: Early Travels". The book is fiction but these thoughts are surely straight from Berry himself who has written extensively on these topics in essay form.

"Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world; and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater. This new world seems a jumble of scenery and props never quite believable, an economy of fantasies and moods, in which it is hard to remember either the timely world of nature or the eternal world of the prophets and poets. And I fear, I believe I know, that the doom of the older world I knew as a boy will finally afflict the new one that replaced it."

The affliction that Berry expects to come on the new world may already exist when we think of economic situations in other parts of the globe who still live in the 'old world.' Maybe the "New World" he mentions is not new at all but instead new to 'his people.' Surely luxury that detached people from labor has been in use for at least a couple millennium. The real issue to acknowledge may be that luxury, grown from wealth, is made only through consolidation of others' labor in the service of a few. In our globalized economy, the labor that Americans (and others) consolidate to their luxurious benefit can be dispersed across the world, rarely seen or understood to be connected to our lifestyles.