August 31, 2009
Classic. Throw it on the compost pile; it is done. Burning Man's official delusional complicity in its own cynical corporate exploitation is now complete. This year, the Man has been set atop a pyre [above] made of 2x4s swirled...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:05 PM
greg.org reader Kara C. just sent along this new photo of A. Lawrence Rocher & Albert Frey's Aluminaire House, a fantastic early prefab design--and Frey's first building in the US--which is currently parked on the Islip, LI campus of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:30 PM
See what happens when you just ask? My posts the last couple of days about [mis]remembering Walter de Maria's 1966 stainless steel sculpture, High Energy Bar/ High Energy Unit, is shaking loose some interesting bits of information on the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:46 PM
August 30, 2009
After blogging about it the other day, I thought it was high time I get the real story on the msyterious Walter de Maria stainless steel edition I'd been watching for all these years, the one which has never...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:55 PM
August 28, 2009
If I'm reading John Cage's first book Silence: Lectures and Writings correctly, this is a quote from "Where are we going? And what are we doing?" a lecture/text/performance piece he first performed at Pratt in 1960:I was driving out to...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:37 PM
So I sneaked out last night to see Inglourious Basterds, which I found to be generally fantastic; Brad Pitt's craft has come a long way since Meet Joe Black. Because, I confess, I'm still working through a stack of badly...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:18 AM
August 26, 2009
Three people--a 59-year-old phony aristocrat and an art dealer couple in their 60's--were arrested in Stuttgart, Germany for fraud and copyright infringement [!] after police broke up an international Alberto Giacometti forgery operation. Over 1,000 fake Giacommetis were confiscated...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:03 PM
According to BoingBoing, the Sierra Nevada Corporation's been testing its SA-60 Spherical Airship at the Reno-Stead Airport. [SNC's the same company whose surveillance blimp was set to be mooned this month by 1,500 hundred angry Canadians in the quiet...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:42 PM
And speaking of conceptually loaded minimalist objects of precision-crafted metal, here are a couple of early Walter de Maria works I was looking at a few months back: Betty Freeman bought Melville [1967, above] in 1968. It's a polished, book-sized...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:52 AM
Turns out the IPK is on the cover of one of Andy's favorite books, The Best Book Designs 1997, designed by Simon Davies: Also, from Metric Views, a blog of "commentary about the British measurement muddle," a PDF of "Standard...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:36 AM
August 25, 2009
Caught this on the CBC last night. I always assumed a kilogram is equal to the mass of a liter of water. But it turns out to be messy/tricky/complicated to measure water accurately enough, plus, some scientists decided to...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:31 AM
August 21, 2009
My step-father bought this crazy Pedro Friedeberg painting in 1966 in Mexico City. It's ink and paint on board, and the title is Hairless Hearts Of Some Hairy Nuns. Here's a large detail of the central rooster, who is...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:51 PM
August 19, 2009
Maybe it's just me who figured at the time, everyone was caught up in the giddy, optimistic hype of the World's Fair. I guess I hadn't counted on E.B. White. His nonplussed review of the 1939 New York World's Fair...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:25 AM
August 15, 2009
I've never thought much of Ai Weiwei's work; despite some of its undeniable power, he'd been compared to Warhol a few too many times for me to take him seriously. Well, it's time for me to rethink that. First and...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:46 AM
August 12, 2009
Hah, Michael Govan's kickback public engagement in LACMA's decision to suspend its film program surprised me, but not as much as seeing the museum basically organizing its own netroots opposition. Now, barely ten days into the LACMA Film Program Deathwatch,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:29 AM
August 10, 2009
It's now known as "Theater Piece No. 1," and it is considered to be the first multimedia happening. It included simultaneous solos of dance, poetry readings and a lecture, along with slides, film, painting, and phonographic recordings. But if John...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:43 PM
August 8, 2009
I'd ignored Artforum's recap of the recent Süddeutsche Zeitung report that the EU's looming ban might pose a problem for museums and artists whose work incorporates. incandescent lightbulbs. I mean, it seems like such a piddly little question, right? Sure,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:01 AM
August 7, 2009
Haha, It only took ten days the first time. When Wallace K Harrison reassembled Kocher and Frey's Aluminaire House on his property in Huntington, LI, after buying it for $1000 and taking it apart in a matter of hours, it...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:08 AM
So sweet. Check out this awesome aluminum-clad house, which curator/architectural historian Erik Neil spotted yesterday on the campus of the NY Institute of Technology: I looked it up on the Internet, and found this post, which I wrote last weekend....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:43 AM
August 6, 2009
LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne delivered a mordantly hilarious stream of live Twitter updates from a Sci-Arc panel discussion last night. I'll be damned if I can comment on it, and I'm not sure I can even link to...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:16 PM
When you watch this 1950s newsreel footage of an [the?] Italian police motorcycle drill team, turn off the music [it's not original anyway] and instead, just make motorcycle noises, and occasional exclamations of "Mama mia!" and "Magnifico!" maybe slip...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:39 AM
August 5, 2009
Harry Patch had a bustling career as one of the last living British WWI veterans. He was the last soldier to fight in the trenches. He died on July 25 at 111, just a couple of weeks after fellow veteran...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:45 PM
August 4, 2009
Wow, Jennie Livingston's incredible documentary Paris is Burning, about vogueing gangs and balls, is on YouTube. This was a formative New York City film for me. I've given talks about it in church, even. I found it one of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:26 PM
Assman's Balloon (LOC), originally uploaded by The Library of Congress. William Assman was a balloon racer from St. Louis who attempted several times to win the John Gordon Bennett Trophy, a flying endurance competition to spur development of gas...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:25 PM
The newly redesigned Design Observer would've been awesome even without hosting the archive of Places: Forum of Design For the Public Realm, a print journal published by the architecture faculties at MIT and UC Berkeley from 1983 until Spring 2009....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:22 AM
Before I realized that if I wanted to see an exhibit of a 100-ft silver balloon, I'd have to make it myself, I was still just ruminating on art I hoped/wished someone would make. One of those projects I...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:03 AM
August 3, 2009
The funny thing is, I think my problem is I couldn't have made something like this up:Hi Greg, Here's a trend and story idea for the growing number of architecture company cars piling up from economic downsizing: The majority of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:59 PM
August 2, 2009
I stumbled across Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey's Aluminaire House last night while trying to figure out who built this house at Black Mountain College. It's from the Charles Olson Research Collection at UConn, and was posted at An...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:47 PM
August 1, 2009
Let me get this straight: the first modernist prefab in the US; one of two US houses included in Phillip Johnson's 1932 International Style exhibition at MoMA [the other: Neutra's Lovell House]; built in 10 days from off-the-shelf industrial...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:33 PM
Tim Burton was at MoMA yesterday, talking to media folk about a film dept. retrospective of his work, which includes an exhibition this fall of sketches, storyboards, props, puppets, etc. from his wacked out output. I wasn't in town...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:12 AM
