December 31, 2003
Gottfried Semper
Here is the introduction I wrote for the third issue of KnitKnit, a zine compiled and edited by my friend Sabrina Gschwandtner. It prefaces a selection of Gottfried Semper's writings on textiles.
Gottfried Semper, 19th century German architect, theorist, and polymath, possessed a postmodernist sensibility at the earliest stages of the modern era. A body of critical writing nearly unmatched in nineteenth century arts-related letters buttressed his buildings, including the main building on the campus of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, the town hall in Winterthur, Switzerland, and the Imperial Forum in Vienna. This eclectic epistolary output includes ruminations on architecture’s relationship to textiles and, specifically, fashion; Semper viewed the architecture of classical civilizations through the lens of then-current research on the architecture of citizens’ dress.
It is now de rigeur to link fashion and architecture—see recent issues of many theory-heavy culture magazines or any feature article on clothing designer Hussein Chalayan—but the radicalism of this notion during the middle third of the nineteenth century cannot be underestimated. Semper’s process was syncretic, drawing on a wide range of scholarship in classical languages as well as German, French, and English to infuse architecture (and theories about it) with arts and crafts. His classic text Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts is a dizzyingly erudite meditation on the importance of handicraft to ancient and classical-age cultures. Here’s where the postmodern sensibility creeps in: Semper not only rehabilitates arts and crafts, integrating them more fully with our understanding of architecture and other fine arts; he also smudges the line between “advanced” and “barbaric” contributions to culture, reincorporating the contributions of minority citizens to the achievements of ancient Greece, Egypt, and beyond.
Semper was centrally involved in London’s 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, undoubtedly one of the touchstones of modern architecture and urban civilization. Yet the twentieth century “modern” sensibility we know from art and architecture history books—formally reductive and bereft of color, relentlessly forward-pushing—would look alien to Semper’s eyes. Our current moment, whether named postmodern or late modern, seems more in line with his vision: once again artists, architects, and designers are looking to both neglected arts such as craftwork and previously-ignored cultures and heretofore historically minor artistic figures for inspiration.
This issue of KnitKnit once again addresses a contemporary flowering of creativity around craftwork. The artists and artisans featured use textile design, weaving, knitting, sewing, and fashion as both means and end. The stitch and the knot are apt metaphors for that which Semper and KnitKnit contributors attempt: to mend ruptures historical and current and to tie together various practices; benefiting from the strengths each has to offer.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
December 12, 2003
Three quick notes
German critic, teacher, and curator Roger Buergel has been appointed director of Documenta 12 (2007). Mark your calendars! (Via the Flash Art e-mail newsletter.)
Mike Kelley, the Los Angeles-based artist whose collected writings and interviews are being published in three parts by MIT Press, is taking his first turn as curator. "Street Credibility" opens at MOCA in Los Angeles in late January, and will be comprised largely of photographs from the museum's collection. (Via Artnet.com.)
Gagosian Gallery is opening a second space in London. Set to open in April, the new gallery will weigh in at 12,500 square feet on Britannia Street near the British Museum. (Via The New York Times.)
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
The week ahead
Please double-check to confirm dates and times. This subjective list is accurate to the best of my knowledge. Some events require advance tickets. If you have an event you'd like to see listed, please e-mail me with the information.
Continue reading "The week ahead"Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
Two poets and prose
Last night I reread "A Poet and Prose," Joseph Brodsky's paean to the poetry and prose of Marina Tsvetaeva. The essay brims with fascinating ideas, many of which contain the gravity of serious intellectual reflection without losing the quotability of our best aphorists. Some of these I want to memorize and repeat to myself like mantras. A select few:
"What does a writer of prose learn from poetry? The dependence of a word's specific gravity on context, focused thinking, omission of the self-evident, the dangers that lurk within an elevated state of mind."
"Tsvetaeva's sentence is constructed not so much in accordance with the principle of subject followed by predicate as through the use of specifically poetic technology: sound assocation, root rhyme, semantic enjambment, etc. That is, the reader is constantly dealing not with a linear (analytic) development but with a crystalling (synthesizing) growth of thought."
"The most awful thing about service to the Muses is prepcisely that it does not tolerate repetition--either of metaphor, subject, or device. In everyday life, to tell the same joke two or three times is not a crime. One cannot, however, allow oneself to do that on paper; language forces you to take the next step--at least stylistically. Not for the sake of your inner well-being, of course (though subsequently it does prove to be for its sake as well), but for the sake of language's own stereoscopic (-phonic) well-being. A cliché is a safety valve by means of which art protects itself from the danger of degeneration." (Emphasis mine.)
The essay was translated by Barry Rubin and appears in Less Than One: Selected Essays, which I recommend highly. It's often available on the half-price literature shelves at Strand Books here in New York.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
December 9, 2003
Exhibitions I wish I could see, #1
This will perhaps become a regular feature of the site, like the weekly roundup of New York events. Here is a list of exhibitions now on view that I wish travel budgets and time would allow me to see:
As mentioned in the last post, I'd love to see Gerhard Richter's Atlas (book link), now on view at the Whitechapel in London.
Didier Courbot, a French artist whose name has come across my desk via various articles (most notably this one, which posits a 'Romantic Conceptualism' to which I am greatly attracted), has a solo exhibition in Japan. It is at the oddly-named SCAI The Bathhouse.
"Now What? Dreaming a better world in six parts" is the type of group exhibition I suspect can only be found in (and around) European kunsthalles: sprawling, multifaceted, socially engaged, often accompanied by extensive publications, and with an optimism that seemingly comes only from the young and idealistic. This exhibition is hosted by the BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht.
"Yearning for Beauty: For the 100th anniversary of the Wiener Werkstatte" opens tomorrow at the MAK, Vienna's museum for applied arts and contemporary art. It is the most beautiful museum I visited on my European vacation this summer, one whose permanent collection alone is worth the price of admission.
Matthew Ritchie's Proposition Player just opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. It includes four new works created specifically for the exhibition, the most spectacular of which is surely the a 100-foot "three-dimensional drawing." When I worked at MIT, Ritchie was finalizing his proposal for a 77-foot mural commissioned as the Percent-for-Art project accompanying a new sports complex on campus, which I also hope to see someday soon.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Adrian Searle again
Another review by Adrian Searle in London. This time it's of Gerhard Richter's Atlas, the artist's forty-year archive of photographs, now on view at the Whitechapel. The show appeared at Dia:Chelsea in 1995-96 and is on view in London for the first time. This goes on my list of exhibitions I wish I could see.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
December 7, 2003
New York Times's "Editors Choice" and "Notable Books" lists for people who can't be bothered to read them
Today's New York Times Book Review contains the annual Editors' Choice and Notable Books lists. Together they form a daunting compendium of books you will feel guilty about never reading. Here, then, is my separation of the wheat from the chaff, or in this case the really fine wheat from the pretty good wheat. Careful readers will learn a lot about me: no novels set in 17th century Europe, no Gardening books, and much more non-fiction than fiction.
From the Editors' Choice list, I'd first take The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander. A New Yorker review published a month or two ago was absurdly fascinating despite my lack of interest in the subject, so I suspect that going to the source would prove rewarding as well. Click here for the original Times review.
The Notable Books list is divided into sections. Taking my critical machete into the jungle, I came away with a preference for Peter Matthiessen's End of the Earth: Expeditions to South Georgia and Antarctica from the Travel list; Paris: City of Art by Perouse De Montclos and McKim, Mead & White: The Masterworks from the Architecture list; Philip Guston: Retrospective on the Art list; Diane Arbus: Revelations and Arnold Odermatt's Karambolage from Photography.
Continue reading "New York Times's "Editors Choice" and "Notable Books" lists for people who can't be bothered to read them"Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
December 6, 2003
Places of Fire, On the Natural History of Destruction, and more...
Here is an article by Michael Kimmelman in Saturday's New York Times about Brandstätten (Places of Fire or Fire Sites), a new book by German historian Jörg Friedrich that presents harrowing photographs of German cities after the Allied bombings at the end of World War II. The article rightly notes this book's place in line with W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, published in the U.S. at the beginning of this year. I own a copy of Sebald's book but have yet to do more than skim its contents. Perhaps Kimmelman's article is the reminder I need to pick it up. Here are reviews and essays that concern Sebald's book: one New York Times review, here is another; an excerpt of a review run in the New York Review of Books; a review-essay that includes several related books in the Boston Review; an excerpt from the London Review of Books; an excerpt from the book itself, via the RandomHouse website; a Flak magazine review; and a review from London's Guardian.
My interest in this book runs in concert with my interest in Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, a book that grew out of a long essay first published last year in the New Yorker. At the time it was published, I discussed the article at great length here.
One day I hope to weave together my original response to Sontag's article with my thoughts on the Sebald, Avishai Margalit's The Ethics of Memory, and possibly also Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America and David Gross' Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture. I'm interested in the differences between the effects of the visual and the printed word in shaping cultural memory, particularly the memory of horrific events. I would apppreciate recommended additions to this reading list.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
December 5, 2003
The week ahead
Please double-check to confirm dates and times. This subjective list is accurate to the best of my knowledge. Some events require advance tickets. If you have an event you'd like to see listed, please e-mail me with the information.
Continue reading "The week ahead"Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
Dia:Beacon ramblings revised, published
The second-ever post on this site is comprised of an e-mail sent to a friend describing my response to Dia:Beacon and the critics who weighed in after its opening. That text has been cleaned up and presented as the first feature article at ArtLeaf, a new website about visual art. It is run by Peter Wilson, former editor of Tokion and current New York editor of Paper Sky.
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December 3, 2003
Adrian Searle on Martin Kippenberger
Here's Adrian Searle reviewing a Martin Kippenberger retrospective now on view at the Van Abbemuseum. I saw the show at Vienna's MUMOK this summer. I didn't know quite what to make of it at the time; I could tell that something interesting was going on, that his multifaceted approach to art-making must be the lake feeding many current art-world tributaries. Searle gives me a better sense of why that may be, and makes me wish the show would travel stateside so I could see it again.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Matthew Buckingham at Murray Guy
An Artforum.com review of Matthew Buckingham's current solo show at Murray Guy. The link will die two months from now, so here's the text of the review:
Matthew Buckingham's A Man of the Crowd, 2003, is a formally elegant, conceptually rich 16 mm film installation that mimics the structure of Edgar Allan Poe's similarly titled short story of 1840. Poe's London is now contemporary Vienna; Buckingham's camera tracks a young man obsessively trailing a slightly shabby older fellow through the city streets. The camera itself, ducking behind a tree or column as if to avoid being seen, unaccountably yet delightfully becomes a third protagonist. The noirish black-and-white film, shot in dramatic natural light, is projected through a small hole in the wall that separates the gallery from the office and onto a semitransparent two-way mirror in the middle of the room. The result is a set of twin projections—often rigorously symmetrical—"bookending" an almost empty gallery. Viewers are brought into the space of the film as their own reflections on the mirror mingle with the images of pursuer and pursued. Like Buckingham's other works, A Man of the Crowd is filled with subtle cultural references. The nameless protagonists lead the camera down a street traveled by Orson Welles in The Third Man and through arcades described in Walter Benjamin's book-length study. Poe's story is central to much scholarship on the flaneur, including Benjamin's; and Buckingham's film is both an engaging visual corollary to this written corpus and a deftly realized project of its own.