Category: ART

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L’espirit de France

diderot
Denis Diderot

October 5 was a birthday of Diderot and Louis Lumiere.

French philosopher, and man of letters, the chief editor of the L’Encyclopédie, one of the principal literary monuments of the Age of Enlightenment. The work took 26 years of Diderot’s life. In seventeen volumes of text and eleven of illustrations, it presented the achievements of human learning in a single work. Besides offering a summary of information on all theoretical knowledge, it also challenged the authority of the Catholic Church. (Via)

Diderot was a freethinker who disregarded any dogma, tradition or authority, ecclesiastical or secular, over his mind—his right to think and express his thoughts. He never found the answer of his quest, but he described the enigma of our existence (via)

La Religieuse (The Nun)
Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse (The Nun), 1966 is the adaptation of Denis Diderot’s novel (1760).
The film was banned despite Anna Karina”s” great presence and acting.

What is a Diderot Effect? (Beware of trading up – the burden of wealth).

Beware of the contamination of sudden wealth. The poor man may take his ease without thinking of appearances, but the rich man is always under a strain.

L’espirit d’escalier

that moment of belated inspiration when you think of the perfect comeback for a difficult encounter only when you’re walking down the stairs after the conversation is over. That’s another Diderot effect I observe too often in myself. (On Diderot Effect)

Late Theresa Duncan named her blog The Wit of the Stairecase

From the French phrase ‘esprit d’escalier,’ literally, it means ‘the wit of the staircase’, and usually refers to the perfect witty response you think up after the conversation or argument is ended.

Snowball Fight

See also The Card Game (1896) on youtube.

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Michel De Broin

michel2
michel
“The moment the object jubilates gush forth its qualities”
—Francis Ponge

Michel De Broin works in Montreal and Berlin’

Questions and answers via artnet de

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keZ6scadq1Y

(5) What is the purpose of your art?
As a strategy, I often intensify the function to show its absurdity, but I see art as what frees itself from any function or intension.
(7) What does your art change?
Change is understood as something positive, but we should consider that what we call change as a natural process participates in a progressive and irreversible degradation of resources, slowly forwarding us to an inexorable end. In that sense it is probably better to not be held responsible for too much change.

Pedal car meets the law in Canada, video on youtube here

the case was thrown out. The Shared Propulsion Car was deemed nothing more than a glorified bike with a roof. (Pedal car not guilty)

See Lost Object and a hilarious video Inside Out

When a visitor penetrates into the space, the latex form retracts and hide into the wall like an improbable animal.

Black Whole Conference consists of 72 chairs 400cm in diameter.

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Barney Rossett and Joan Mitchell -Part II

barney1
Barney posing in front of a portrait of Joan Mitchell in Maya by Goya pose.

Mitchell’s confrontational defenses made it almost impossible for her to maintain an intimate relationship, and she and Rosset probably got along better as friends, after their divorce in 1952. Rosset would unsuccessfully try to win her back, and poignantly describes their relationship as that of “brother and sister.” He remembers Mitchell being “great” in the same way he found Samuel Beckett to be. The combativeness that made it so difficult for Mitchell to sustain a partnership would, however, help protect her in the almost exclusively male world in which she wanted to become a serious contender. She could be as drunken and belligerent – and as sensitive – as any of the males who dominated the world that she now joined with surprising speed. (Remembering Barney and Joan )

Barney Rossett has a blog.
The founder of Grove Press, Rossett is to be celebrated soon this November.
Publisher Who Fought Puritanism, and Won – Charles MaGrath

On Nov. 19 Mr. Rosset will receive a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in honor of his many contributions to American publishing, especially his groundbreaking legal battles to print uncensored versions of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.” He is also the subject of “Obscene,” a documentary by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor, which opens on Friday at Cinema Village.

Here is a good article about Barney’s attempt to write his autobiography and his enduring friendship with Samuel Beckett, also happend to be his business partner – You Can’t Paint That!

Read previous post on Joan and Barney their early years here.

joanmitchel
Painting by Joan Mitchell. (See more Joan Mitchell paintings here)

More juicy trivia for Joan Mitchell….

  • Joan Michell was a figure skater when she was a teenager in Chicago, according to John Perreault.
  • Joan Mitchell’s love letter to Michael Goldberg is here.

    • Joan and Mike joanmiketwo abstract painters
    Michael Goldberg paintings here

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    Overlooked

    Aparatec tvwood[now known as rival consoles] seventeen
    (via ROBJN-home)

    In his fiction and his essays alike, Wallace incorporated the world around him in streams of consciousness that were like some hitherto unimaginable hybrid of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and the rock criticism of Lester Bangs, but that also seemed to register the inner tics of personality common among people who had grown up inundated by mass media. DFW R.I.P – Scott McLemee

    Asset, a fiction by David Foster Wallace (New Yorker)
    Wallace’s four works published in The New Yorker are also available:here.
    “Several Birds,” June 27, 1994
    “An Interval,” January 30, 1995
    “Good People,” February 5, 2007

    From Overlooked – Five direly underappreciated U.S. novels 1960.
    On “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” by David Markson (1988) DFW wrote,

    “W’s M” is a dramatic rendering of what it would be like to live in the sort of universe described by logical atomism. A monologue, formally very odd, mostly one-sentences. Tied with “Omensetter’s Luck” for the all-time best U.S. book about human loneliness. These wouldn’t constitute ringing endorsements if they didn’t happen all to be simultaneously true — i.e., that a novel this abstract and erudite and avant-garde that could also be so moving makes “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.

    (of the five novels DFW picked the only one I read was “Wittgenstein’s Mistress”. Not sure Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is overlooked. The other three unheard of novels by William Gass, Kosinski and Dennis Johnson, are definitely overlooked.)

    Found this link from Matt Christie – pasaudela

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    Esther Freud

  • Hideous Kinky

  • Esther Freud is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud and Bernadine Coverley and is the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. Her semi-autobiographical novel was adapted to film, Hideous Kinky starring Kate Winslet. In the film the identity of the father of two girls is obscure. The film is best known as a post Titanic Kate Winslet vehicle where she established herself as a serious and daring actress, choosing an independent small project. I don’t remember how I found out that this is a story of Freud’s great grand daughters or daughters of Lucien Freud.

    Esther esther1 by Lucian Freud

    lucianfreudbellaandesther4

    Esther Freud’s novels have long reflected her family – but not her artist dad, Lucian. Jasper Rees hears why that has changed (Read more here)

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    Two Armchairs

    Click to enlarge! Things I got from garage sale.

    redchairco1Cow redchairgorilla Gorilla

    Click to see a pair of Antonio Gaudi Arm Chairs – Palacio Guell

    UPDATE: “You got both BOTH chairs at a garage sale?” – Alan Sondheim asked.
    MY reply: The big chair I bought many years ago. It was sold hastily by a roommate. The owner of the chair was very sad when he found out that I paid only $5.00. Too late.
    The small one I found last weekend.
    Should have titled this both BOTH.
    <> <> <> redchairsm

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    Words from William Saroyan

    San Francisco celebrates William Saroyan

    W. Saroyan

    Born in Fresno, CA on Aug. 31, 1908, the son of Armenian immigrants. Saroyan gained fame as a writer of short stories and plays such as “The Time of Your Life.” He was also a visual artist of drawings and watercolors which he never sold nor exhibited. His abstract work was influenced by Chinese brush drawing, Jackson Pollock, and the calligraphic work of Mark Tobey. Saroyan died in Fresno of cancer on May 18, 1981.(via)

    William Saroyan Centennial

    “—the hot sun and the heavy rain, the new green of spring and the fire-golden of fall: the farmer’s weather of Fresno, in which I lived and became a part of the human race.”
    Saroyan, The Time of Your Life, (Preface) 1939

    Saroyan wrote “The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
    I’m Richard Rodriguez. (Richard Rodriguez, editor at the Pacific News Service, discusses the work of author William Saroyan. )

    The song was a major hit for Rosemary Clooney (George Clooney’s aunt) in 1951. Did you know that William Saroyan wrote this song? What a surprise!

    Samples of his quotes

    Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming.
    Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.
    Locomotive 38, the Ojibway, 1940

    Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind.
    The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills 1952

    I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely,
    no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.
    The Armenian Writers

    What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.
    The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills 1952

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    Tseng Kwong Chi

    Tseng Kwong Chikwongchi
    The bad weather is keeping us home today instead of camping at the Grand Canyon.
    Meanwhile you may follow the late Tseng Kwong Chi as he went around the world.

    Of course there is plenty of humor and irony in these photographs but seeing them in this context they also begin to take on an somber air of loneliness and sadness.

    Tseng was an improbable pilgrim

    In 1979, Joseph Tseng changed his name to Tseng Kwong Chi and embarked on a decade-long project called East Meets West (also referred to as “The Expeditionary Series”). With the camera’s shutter release in hand, he posed for approximately 150 images as a self-described “ambiguous ambassador” from the East, wearing the vintage Mao uniform he purchased from a second-hand store in Montreal, Velvet-Underground style sunglasses, and a visitor identification badge.

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    Hello Blinky Palermo

    BlinkyblinkyPalermo (via)

    Hello Binky Palermo (Interactive EU Berkeley)
    Chris Ashley (Look, See) must have coded this work so do not skip. (Here is an old post on Blinky by Chris A)

    Meeting Imi and Blinky at Dia:Beacon

    Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel met at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in the Sixties while studying with Joseph Beuys alongside Jörg Immendorff, Imi Giese, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter. Both Knoebel and Palermo were exploring art’s essential objectness, the importance of spatial arrangement, and dynamic installation strategy. Like other artists in both the United States and Germany, they earnestly aspired to change the course of art history. Knoebel, investigating the imageless areas between materiality, objectness, and arrangement, worked with unpainted fiberboard. Palermo was particularly interested in non-objective, semiotic color propositions. (Read more here)

    Blinky who died mysteriously at 33 years old, continues to haunt the art world, Dia:Beacon is another one of the recurrent trends.

    blinky2 (via)

    <> <> forever young <> <> <> Hymne an die Nacht – für Novalis

    Blinky Palermo was named after this boxer.

    Man of the Cloth by Adrian Searle

    The Unexpected Death of Blinky Palermo in the Tropics is the title of a typically blustering painting by Julian Schnabel, which fed the Palermo myth (founded on the idea that Palermo was an “artist’s artist”) and didn’t do Schnabel’s reputation any harm either. Fostering the association gave Schnabel a bit of easy gravitas.

    I still remember the first time I saw his work at the gallery in New York (Betty Parsons? or Jack Tilton?), I was knocked out. Later I learned about his tragic life and his captivating name.

    Blinky in MoMa Geo/Metric exhibition (Joanne Mattera) Beautiful!!

    A baby sleeping peacefully in front of Blinky’s iconic paintings (flickr)

    Hyun Chun’s Blinky Palermo flckr page <> <>Daneille and Blinky Palermo flickr page

    #23- from Mike Dumlao’s Flickr page

    Beuys and Blinky Palermo beuys

    Goodbye Beijing Olympics 08 olympics08_closing

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    Art, Wine and the Hess Collection

    Listen to podcast about Hommage Leopold Maler

    No lines, no admission fee to see the best of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Morris Louis, Theodore Stamos, Robert Motherwell, Anselm Kiefer, Per Kirkeby, Francis Bacon, Alan Rath, Frank Stella, Rolf Iseli and others.

    hess1The Hess collection hess2

    offers great art at beautiful setting on Mt. Veeder. Herr Donald Hess is Swiss and he has been collecting art for more than 48 years.

    View of vineyard from healdsburg Healdsburg, California. (Mosaic Winery, originally Delaurimier).
    When we visited this winery more than ten years ago, there was no charge, now the name got changed and the taste as well.

    Complimentary wine tasting grape is now rare. Here is a list of six wineries where we had complimentary tasting.

    1, Mason Winery in Napa masonnapa
    <> <> <> <> <> <> <> masonnapa2

    2 Sausal Winery sausal
    3 Kenwood Vineyards
    4 Wellington Vineyards
    5 Lake Sonoma Winery
    6 Ridge Vineyards

    Most wineries now charge a tasting fee, but if you are planning to buy wine, your $5.00 or $10.00 tasting charges will be deducted from your purchase.

    The Headquarters of the Salvation Army in Healdsburg
    <> <> <> <> salvationarmy
    Healdsburg used to have a great thriftstore in Downtown, not anymore. The downtown where the Duchamp Hotel is located has now become another generic tourist trap.

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    JTWine and Dogs De Young

    Leaningdeyoung3 with De Young Museum.
    San Francisco was cold as you can see. Daisy has a sweater and Jurgen is wearing a jacket.

    Jurgen has a blog – it’s called JTwine – Now.
    We saw Hitler Porcelain together. He mentioned bitter melon but we ate eggplant instead.

    What is Niesatt?

    Previous post on Jurgen Trautwein (aka JTwine)

    On August 1 we left Arizona, camped at Yosemite, did some wine tasting in Napa, Sonoma and Healdsburg, peeked at Duchamp Hotel, spent a nice day with Jurgen in SF and drove to LA via Big Sur.
    Both Daisy and Spike loved camping, sleeping in the tent and later they learned to sniff and love Motel 6.
    Duchamp Hotel would have charged $60 per pet. (Peggy Gunggenheim had great named pets and they were buried in Venice.)
    More about our California trip with photos will be coming soon.