Minimal Abstract Artist, Mary Obering (1973 -2022)
August 4th, 2022
Mary Obering, Abstract Painter With a Passionate Following, Dies at 85
(See more Mary Obering artnet)
Mary Obering and David Lynch shared a gallery space in 2018.
Amen Mathieu Kassovitz – La Haine, Le Bureau Etc.
August 3rd, 2022
(Birthday Girl starring Nicole Kidman, Ben Chaplin, Vincent Cassel and Mathieu Kassovitz)
Happy birthday Mathieu Kassovitz
La Haine 
Mathieu Kassovitz wrote, directed and acted in La Haine.
(Upon its release, La Haine received widespread critical acclaim and was well received in France and abroad.
The film was shown at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival where it enjoyed a standing ovation.
Kassovitz was awarded the Best Director prize at the festival and he was 27 years old.
Le Bureau French TV Series
(Exciting TV series as great as “Breaking Bad”, “Borgen”, or “The Queen’s Gambit”.
Korean artist – Kwon Young Wu ((1926-2013)
August 1st, 2022
Kwon Young Wu Between Past and Future
Kwon Young-Woo’s (1926-2013) works explore the relationship between traditional materials and abstract expression. The artist is considered as a pioneer in Korean abstract art known as Dansaekhwa.
Thanks to Pascal Blanchard for introducing this artist on FB.
Jennifer Bartlett (March 14, 1941 – July 25, 2022)
July 28th, 2022
Artforum Review- Leaking System by Jennifer Bartlett
Artist Jennifer Bartlett, Known for Her Intensive Investigations Into the Possibilities of Painting, Has Died at Age 81
Jennifer Losch Bartlett (March 14, 1941 – July 25, 2022) was an American artist. She was known for paintings and prints that combine the system-based aesthetic of conceptual art with the painterly approach of Neo-Expressionism
In 1983, she married German actor Mathieu Carrière, with whom she had a daughter, Alice; they divorced in the early 1990s.
Brian Hioe – A Taiwanese American Journalist
July 27th, 2022
New Bloom Magazine net/author/Brian Hioe
Brian Hioe is one of the founding editors of New Bloom. He is a freelance journalist, as well as a translator. A New York native and Taiwanese-American, he has an MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University and graduated from New York University with majors in History, East Asian Studies, and English Literature. He was Democracy and Human Rights Service Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018.
Popula com/author/Brian Hioe
(Read the articles by Brian Hioe here).
Brian Hioe at Amy Goodman – Pelosi planned Taiwan visit triggers threats.
RIP Bob Rafelson (February 21, 1933 – July 23, 2022)
July 25th, 2022Jack & Bob 
Rafelson did six films with Jack Nicholson, Head (1968), Five Easy Pieces (1970), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Man Trouble (1992), and Blood and Wine (1996).
Bob Rafelson Emerges to Reflect on His Feud-and-Brawl-Filled Career (Esquire Interview)
Hunter S. Thompson was an Aspen neighbor with whom Bob Rafelson would practice shooting using pictures of Richard Nixon.
Rafelson left home at 14 and worked variously as a rodeo rider, a hand on an ocean liner and a jazz musician. He later enrolled at Dartmouth College to study philosophy. He started writing plays in 1953.
During his military service he was based in Japan where he took up disc-jockeying and subsequently working on films produced by the Shochiku company.
(Directed by Bob Rafelson. With Debra Winger, Theresa Russell, and Sami Frey)
Aspen honored Bob Rafelson with the life time achievement award and his lost masterwork Mountains on the Moon
On “Mountains on the Moon” “It’s my best work and it’s my most personal work,” Rafelson said
Tours de France Paris Finale 2022
July 24th, 2022
Claes Oldenburg (January 28, 1929 – July 18, 2022)
July 18th, 2022
Art in America – Oldenburg and Mouse House
(Two pocket sized books – Claes Oldenburg Notes in Hand (spread) and a novel by Harumi Setouchi – photo by Fung Lin Hall)
Claes Oldenburg homepage (He shares with his wife Coosje van Bruggen)
Ridiculous costume for Police.New York, 1967
Ball point pen, typewriter. His note below.
“You must realize cops are just you and I in uniform. Now I propose then a uniform which is ridiculous. When they do the thing they do, they learned to do,
namely when they do restrain you and they draw the blood – they look ridiculous. As you and and I if caught drawing , draining blood.”
Artts Magazine (New York) Summer 1967. p 34.
The costume is shown on a rack, as it might be hung in the station house.
And more his giant Wikiart Claes Oldenburg sculptures from here .
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(Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, Patty Mucha, and Robert Rauschenberg at George Segal’s New Jersey home, circa 1968)
Ai Wei Wei, Arch Installation in Stockholm, ETC.
July 16th, 2022
(Ai Weiwei’s Arch Installation Opens in Central Stockholm)
The artwork was last seen in 2017 in New York, under the arch of the Washington Square Monument, as part of the Good Fences Make Good Neighbors installation. According to the artist, when the piece was first shown, it was about racism and the global refugee crisis caused by regional insecurity. Since then, the artwork has taken on new meanings, just as more crises and conflicts unfurl, like the collective isolation and vulnerability experienced during the pandemic, and more recently, the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Interview via Inews UK Rwanda Asylum Policy Racism
Books that inspire Ai-Wei-Wei
Existentialism Is a Humanism – Jean-Paul Sartre (1946)
The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx (1848)
The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry (c. 11th – 7th Centuries BC)
Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (1973)
The Classic of Mountains and Seas (c. 4th Century BC)
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism – Vladimir Lenin (1917)
Gypsy Romance – Federico Garcia Lorca (1928)
Life on the Mississippi – Mark Twain (1883)
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) – Andy Warhol (1975)
Permanent Record – Edward Snowden (2019)
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman (1855)
The Trial – Franz Kafka (1925)
Tao Te Ching – Laozi (c. 4th Century BC)
Philosophical Investigations – Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953)
A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking (1988)
Heavenly Questions – Qu Yuan (c. 475 – 221 BC)
Ingmar Bergman – Persona , Madame Sade & Magic Lantern
July 13th, 2022
Madame Sade Bergman’s hit production of Yukio Mishima’s play.
‘Starkly ascetic regarding the physical effects, yet vibrating with sensibility.’
Curious Conundrums of Bergman’s Magic Lantern
I’m planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That’s hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded.
– Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern
The Magic Lantern, Bergman’s
first autobiography, was a huge-
ly
revealing and honest piece of
writing. In general terms, how-
ever, Bergman’s unparalleled
successes as a film, theatre
and television director have
clearly overshadowed Ingmar
Bergman the author. Dubious
as a document, masterful
as literature, the book had a
non-chronological structure,
with altering chapters on child-
hood, theatre work, the tax
affair in 1976, marriage crises,
and encounters with artists like
Laurence Olivier, Greta Garbo,
and Herbert von K
Siah Armajani – Follow This Line
July 9th, 2022
Art News – Philadelphia Museum, Siah Armajani Floor
Siah Armaani The Crime of Hospitality
Siah Armajani – Glass front porch for Walter Benjamin
(Read about Walter Benjamin’s tragic life from previous post)
Siah Armajani at The Met Breuer press preview of Siah Armajani: Follow This Line February 19, 2019.
Photo courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Fraught and Fabulous: Art That Shows a Passion for Democracy
Theater Visionary Peter Brook dies aged 97
July 3rd, 2022Guardian Obit – RIP Peter Brook
(English theatre and film director Peter Brook was the first person to win the International Ibsen Award, in 2008.)
