December 31, 2011
Well first off, apologies to Remy Charlip. I'd said he was "a bit off on dates" when he wrote about touring with Merce in a VW Microbus driven by John Cage from 1956-61. When we know [sic] that Cage only...
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9:52 PM
See, this is the kind of frugal Sforzian stagecraft that Mitt Romney learned from his Mormon pioneer ancestors: just use the replica sets from The Music Man and con a local into holding your chair! There's no trouble in...
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9:13 AM
December 29, 2011
The very special presentation of Merce & John: The VW Years will return after this brief announcement from holy crap, Richard Serra's suburban! Thanks, wary meyers! Now don't get all stalky. And stay tuned, eventually, finally, for Donald Judd's Land...
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9:59 AM
December 23, 2011
Sometimes all Mark Grotjahn wants is to dance. Here are four five videos of those times, in chronological order: Nov. 2007: Jan. 2008: May 2008: Feb. 2011 [via artblogartblog]...
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10:35 AM
December 22, 2011
You know what I never got around to doing in 2010? Finishing the catalogue of all the designs created for the Alcoa Forecast ad campaign in the late 1950s. That was the postwar, civilian/consumer-oriented, Glorious Aluminum Future PR campaign that...
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12:53 PM
Yes, I know I should be praising Norman Foster for his Dymaxion Car, which, of course. But instead, I will be grateful for the deftness of Lord Foster's humblebraggadocio in the essay he wrote for his wife's show/book in Madrid...
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10:04 AM
December 21, 2011
Electrum @ Reference with Hugh Scott Douglas, 2011 Oh, man, basically every thing in Ben Schumacher's shows and his source and reference material and his investigations and archive divings and whatever the hell else in his tumblrs is just...
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11:42 PM
The VW bus makes many appearances in John Cage's own writings, especially his tour diaries in Empty Words: Writings '73-78:After winning the mushroom quiz in Italy, I bought a Volkswagen microbus for the company. Joe's was open but said it...
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9:59 PM
December 19, 2011
Let me tell you, spare, door-sized black & white prints in screen-like triptychs are not what I think of when I hear "Carlo Mollino" and "photography." [Google search possibly nsfw] But Becky Beasley's show "The Outside," at Francesca Minini...
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9:26 PM
[l to r] Viola Farber, Bruce King, Remy Charlip, Carolyn Brown & Merce Cunningham performing Nocturnes in 1956. photo CDF/Louis A. Stevenson, Jr. via the estate project Remy Charlip was an early collaborator in Merce Cunningham's orbit. Years before...
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8:50 AM
December 17, 2011
John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg photographed in 1960 by Richard Avedon In a few days, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will perform for the last time. I have not been a close follower of Cunningham's work, except...
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10:53 PM
While I was painting today, I first listened to a slightly underwhelming Q&A from MIT with Otto Piene and Hans Haacke, which was short, and so my iTunes started shuffling, which never happens. I don't really listen to music,...
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4:01 PM
While moving some art around this week, I found a bag of acrylics I bought early last year, when I planned to paint the Dutch camo landscapes. Trying to figure out how to do it led me to start...
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2:10 PM
Since I appear to only be able to find the time bandwidth to paint on the weekend, sometime I might have to investigate terms that already haunt me anyway, like "weekend painter." At least I'm not painting on Sunday,...
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2:01 PM
December 16, 2011
I love this boro jacket at Sri as much for the color as the patching:This jacket is well-used, as is quite obvious. To describe its color is difficult: it is a kind of medium-range grey blue; the hemp cloth...
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8:59 AM
December 14, 2011
OK, here are some more details about how the crazy-awesome synthesizer/lightboard came together in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, courtesy of Ray Morton's 2007 book on the making of the film. Maybe not surprisingly, it grew and evolved along...
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11:36 PM
I'm really bummed to have missed The Gifting of Bill Walton's Studio on December 4th, the extraordinary culmination of the ICA Philadelphia's memorial recreation/exhibit of the late local master's crowded workplace. As ICA blogger/curator Rachel Pastan tells it, the...
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10:32 PM
This is so awesome. I know there's no sound, but it seems like I can hear all those reality TV show team members' hearts beating. [Michael David Murphy via waxy]...
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10:11 AM
December 12, 2011
I don't know what, if anything, these mean, but these two stories last week made me wonder about the relationship of art and politics and Washington DC as viewed from a political/media perspective. First up, and most disturbing, was the...
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11:24 PM
The new issue of Public Art Dialogue is out--as you know, right?--and it includes an article by Drake University art historian Maura Lyons that looks at how Disney, photography, and Ken Burns altered the Gettysburg National Military Park. In the...
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9:35 PM
Here is a PBS Newshour Q&A with Steven Tepper, discussing his research into why art--or the arts, really, since he looks at theater, libraries, music, too--triggers protests in some communities at some times and not others. He found that...
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10:09 AM
December 10, 2011
"Season 3, Episode 3: 'Golden Anniversary'" This is epic. Painting the key sweaters of The Cosby Show, one episode at a time, in chronological order. Which is awesome, not because it charts the evolution of the Cosby Sweater; any...
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8:34 PM
December 9, 2011
BELLMAC-32A Layout in the Ball Labs, Murray Hill Lobby, image: ieeeghn.org Look closely, at least until I can track down a larger version of this snapshot. Because it may be the world's largest plotter pen drawing. It's a 20x20-foot...
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9:14 PM
December 8, 2011
A few months ago, I was asked to write something about Ray and Charles Eames by the folks at Humanities Magazine, published by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH had provided some funding to Jason Cohn and...
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11:59 PM
Here's video of James Bridle giving a live, keynote speech version of his awesome tumblr, The New Aesthetic, at a web conference in Australia. Lots of good stuff, though not much that will be new to TNA followers. There are...
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10:43 PM
December 7, 2011
Here's another recipe from John Cage, this one maybe from a stay in Ithaca? Before he went vegan, obviously. From Empty words: writings '73-'78, p. 91:Holiday Inn: Room 135. Four cups of ground walnuts; 4 cups of flour; 12 tablespoons...
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3:02 PM
December 6, 2011
We took the family to Hillwood over the holidays. It's Marjorie Merriweather Post's house-turned-house museum, and it's kind of bizarre, frankly. Not seriously wack, but just a low-grade oddness which, who knows, maybe the passage of time and the accretion...
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11:17 PM
A little while ago, I got an email from LA-based artist Kim Schoenstadt, asking if it was alright to reference some photos I took a few years ago of unusually awesome modernist houses in Salt Lake City. She planned...
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9:53 PM
Wild. The previous post about erased and archived and someday-to-be-resuscitated Nixon reminded longtime greg.org reader Jonathan of another obscured national conspiracy: the Dictabelt recordings of the Kennedy assassination. Apparently, a motorcycle policeman along the presidential motorcade route through Dallas had...
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9:33 PM
December 5, 2011
The new issue of Cabinet arrived today [free with my new iPad case!], and it includes a fascinating article by Susan Schuppli about the 18 1/2-minutes of erased audiotape at the center of the Watergate scandal. Apparently, the National Archives...
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9:36 PM
December 2, 2011
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross posted this extraordinary video of Philip Glass and the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly outside Lincoln Center, where the Metropolitan Opera performed Satyagraha, the composer's 2008 production of his 1980 telling of the...
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2:00 PM
December 1, 2011
Whether you're sitting at home, poking at your remote to stretch, squash, and crop your Criterion movies; or preparing a video group show in Miami, Electronic Arts Intermix's High Definition Video Guide is an indispensable source of basic technical information:If...
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12:04 AM
