11.11.06

the Cy Twombly House is blemish-free BTW

Future Worker Girl and I detected these three abberations at the Dan Flavin building during a recent visit to the Menil Collection:





Fire extinguisher on the floor, large rust-pattern on auxillary door, & a chink in the sheetrock exposing the head of a drywall screw near one of the sculptures.

17.10.06

How To Build An Owl

1. Decide you must
2. Develop deep respect for feather bone and claw
3. Place your trembling thumb where the heart will be:
for one hundred hours watch so you will know where to put the first feather.
4. Stay awake forever,
When the bird takes shape
gently pry open its beak
and whisper into it: "mouse"
5. Let it go

-- Kathleen Lynch

20.8.06

live long live dirty


Somebody estimated that 90 percent of the Earth's biomass lives underground, in the form of bacteria. Pound for pound, nine times more life lives in the dirt than up here where we typically think of life as living. Bacteria have been found in oil resevoirs four miles below the Earth's surface. You pick the most inhospitable places you can imagine--the 650 degree waters boiling out of vents at the bottom of the ocean--265 times more pressure than what we live with--and there are bacteria there.

This picture shows you what can happen when a bacteria that thrives in our armpits and crotches everyday gets under the skin and settles a colony.

Here's a nice S. J. Gould article on the ubiquity of bacteria.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_bacteria.html

29.7.06

infinite potential

There is one simple Divinity found in all things, everything has Divinity latent within itself. For she enfolds and imparts herself even unto the smallest beings. Without her presence nothing would have being, because she is the essence of the existence of the first unto the last being.
Giordano Bruno, from The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?
Gilles Deleuze, from Essays Critical and Clinical

1.7.06

one more idea

Solar cells shaped like blades of grass
instead of sheets of ice.

Because the shape of grass is a Nature-perfected topography for gathering sunlight. Ice couldn't be more opposite. Yet solar panels look like big sheets of black ice.

18.2.06

seeking truth

hecho poético
"poetic fact"

sentipensante
"thinking with the heart"

While thinking with the mind will lead one to Understanding, thinking with the heart leads one to Fearlessness.

17.2.06

Anti-Art can't also be Art

ArtInfo interview, 17 February 2006

João Ribas: You’ve been very critical of that line of British art, particularly its overemphasis on very sophisticated or conceptual things.

Billy Childish: Well, I don’t think it is sophisticated at all. The problem is it’s pseudo-sophisticated and it’s actually even pseudo-conceptual. There isn’t any concept other than calling something that isn’t art, art. Which Duchamp already did. And if anti-art is art, then what is anti-art?

[These artists] don’t understand [that people] already know that things look interesting. Anything you look at closely or in isolation is interesting and has a story. You don’t need artists to tell you that. It’s condescending, and adolescent, and glib and useless.

The problem with an art of ideas is that it’s highly limited. It’s showing intellect with very little intellect. So I have art without ideas. Which means you just use nature. Everything that’s there is available. Art is ruined by having too much art in it.

six artistic necessities

Gilbert Sorrentino listed his "artistic necessities" in his 1983 writing "Genetic Coding":

an obsessive concern with formal structure
a dislike of the replication of experience
a love of digression and embroidery
a great pleasure in false or ambiguous information
a desire to invent problems that only the invention of new forms can solve
a joy in making mountains out of molehills

22.1.06

Meta-Musicology

Plato felt the best harmony was one that "imitates the utterances and accents of a brave man engaged in warfare."

In "The Politics," Aristotle wrote: "Any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state, and ought to be prohibited . . . when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them."

In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini instituted Iran's first ban against Western music, declaring, "Music dulls the mind because it involves pleasure and ecstasy, similar to drugs. It destroys our youth who become poisoned by it."

Malcolm McLaren said "Punk was just another way to sell trousers."