May 11, 2012
Richter's studio, 1965, as seen in Elger's A Life In Painting. Note the lady in the bikini on the left, which Jasper Johns is well known for destroying his early work, thereby managing and reordering the story of his...
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2:59 PM
April 29, 2012
And speaking of big universes and small worlds, I'm starting to listen to the 1991 recordings of John Cage's Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse), and just ten minutes in, I'm reminded that Cage's...
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10:39 PM
April 24, 2012
Destroyed Richter Painting No. 04, 2012, oil on canvas, 110x110cmPostmasters is pleased to announce: RICHTERIANA GREG ALLEN, DAVID DIAO, RORY DONALDSON, HASAN ELAHI, FABIAN MARCACCIO, RAFAËL ROZENDAAL May 12 - June 16, 2012 opening reception, saturday, may 12, 6-8...
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7:55 PM
April 20, 2012
Fingerspuren/Finger Marks, with Palermo, 1970, image via gerhard-richter.com Despite an 11-year difference in their age, Gerhard Richter and Blinky Palermo became fast friends in the early 1960s. Richter's first wife Ema sewed Palermo's groundbreaking Stoffbilder/Cloth Pictures starting in 1966,...
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5:23 PM
February 18, 2012
Of the many extraordinary photos of Max Ernst and his sculptures that Michael posted at stopping off place this week, this is my hands-down favorite My guess is Thomas Houseago has stared long and hard at this thing as...
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5:57 PM
February 13, 2012
Untitled (for Parkett), 1994 image via phillips de pury I've been wondering how Felix Gonzalez-Torres' billboard edition, Untitled (for Parkett) was playing out in the real world. How many of the 84+15+? copies still existed? How many had been...
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9:19 PM
February 12, 2012
this one. Untitled, 1991, Site #21: 504 W 44th St. One of the formative artworks in my life is set to re-appear this month. I saw one of the giant black & white billboards of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres' empty...
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7:06 PM
January 27, 2012
This 1963 episode of I've Got A Secret pops up periodically. From this week on Boing Boing to Alex Ross's 2007 blog post searching for Karl Schenzer. And it is, indeed, pretty interesting. John Cale was recently arrived in...
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10:35 PM
January 2, 2012
I just pulled out some Future Systems books last night, and I'd forgotten how hard I'd fallen for them. And though I knew they were The Future at the time, it's still pretty awesome/eerie how much our 2006 ended...
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10:55 AM
December 19, 2011
[l to r] Viola Farber, Bruce King, Remy Charlip, Carolyn Brown & Merce Cunningham performing Nocturnes in 1956. photo CDF/Louis A. Stevenson, Jr. via the estate project Remy Charlip was an early collaborator in Merce Cunningham's orbit. Years before...
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8:50 AM
December 17, 2011
John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg photographed in 1960 by Richard Avedon In a few days, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will perform for the last time. I have not been a close follower of Cunningham's work, except...
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10:53 PM
December 10, 2011
"Season 3, Episode 3: 'Golden Anniversary'" This is epic. Painting the key sweaters of The Cosby Show, one episode at a time, in chronological order. Which is awesome, not because it charts the evolution of the Cosby Sweater; any...
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8:34 PM
December 8, 2011
A few months ago, I was asked to write something about Ray and Charles Eames by the folks at Humanities Magazine, published by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH had provided some funding to Jason Cohn and...
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11:59 PM
November 11, 2011
Insurrection, 1962, image: corcoran.org I needed to see some hard-to-find Chris Burden catalogues--more on that later, but soon--and the quickest place I could find them was the Corcoran School's library. I called ahead, and they had them waiting for...
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10:38 PM
November 9, 2011
i love that the headline on this story, "Hubble Directly Observes The Disk Around A Black Hole," has to be followed immediately by, "but it's not that disk." The spectacular patterns and rays in the photo above of the...
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11:23 PM
November 7, 2011
Sweet, near the end of World War I, Paris planned and began construction on a "Sham Paris," decoy trains, stations, avenues and factories, to confuse German aerial bombers. Above, a detail from the photo, "Luminous canvas on the ground...
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7:23 AM
October 30, 2011
I've been writing this post in my head for months, years, even, but so many pieces have piled up in my browser tabs, it's slowing my computer down. And plus, this weekend MoMA announced that they acquired and will exhibit...
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3:40 PM
October 23, 2011
Joie de Vivre, Mark di Suvero, Zuccotti Park, detail of image via ourtravelpics.com Or maybe #OccupyJoiedeVivre, then? Either way, please tell me I'm not the first or only one to think of this. Actually, please tell me someone's already...
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3:08 PM
October 21, 2011
See, this is why I wonder about whether Gerhard Richter, "shocked" by seeing Edward Steichen's MoMA exhibit Family of Man in West Berlin in 1955 while he was a student, ever went on to research Steichen's earlier photography exhibitions,...
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12:48 PM
The Tate video of Nic Serota and his team in Gerhard Richter's studio is nice for many reasons: it includes some squeegee action scenes from Corrina Belz's Gerhard Richter Painting [which I'm trying to get a copy of; Is...
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9:55 AM
October 13, 2011
Karen Meyerhoff, Managing Director of Business Development at the Guggenheim Museum, and my new hero:People come to an art museum in part to be inspired by the works of art on view there. And we develop an emotional relationship with...
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8:57 AM
October 11, 2011
Ever since Wired's article on the history of the International Prototype Kilogram, or Le Grand K, and the debate over its replacement, I've been thinking I'd write something about them again. So I went back to reread my 2009 post...
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11:09 AM
October 10, 2011
I was very saddened to learn that the great designer John Neuhart passed away last month. He and his wife and fellow designer Marilyn were early and influential colleagues of Ray and Charles Eames, and have been heavily involved...
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5:53 PM
If I've accomplished little else with my grandiose ambitions for my satelloon fetish, it has at least turned me into several people's go-to guy for odd projects involving shiny balls and/or large amounts of Mylar. So thanks Michael Dumontier...
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8:05 AM
September 27, 2011
Sometimes I really just am slow to put things together. I mean, I've written at length, ad nauseam, even, about the history of Mark Cross. Mondo-Blogo had a huge post months ago about what Superfreaks they are. There's the...
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10:58 AM
September 19, 2011
Cady Noland's Tanya as Bandit, 1989, General Idea, and Guerrilla Girls at MoMA, 2010, image via greeds Welcome to another installment of Things I've Been Meaning To Post For Months. Only this time, the longer I wait, the more...
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Posted by greg at
11:50 AM
September 15, 2011
image: nymag The awesomeness of David Byrne's giant, inflatable globe shoved under the High Line gives us a good chance to look back. To remember David Byrne's pioneering show of PowerPoint Art at Pace in 2003. And also to...
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7:06 AM
September 2, 2011
I am aware of the work of Pablo Neruda Gerhard Richter. I have not been reading Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007 straight through, of course, but it's been with me a lot lately. And it's kind of annoyed me that there...
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10:30 AM
August 16, 2011
So wonderful. William Smith writes about visiting Robert Breer's home studio as part of Triple Canopy's publication in residency last Winter at MOCA Tucson. Which sounds like the awesomest boondoggle ever, btw: Breer famously composed most of his films one...
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Posted by greg at
10:03 PM
August 15, 2011
I'm not sure why I'm so fascinated with the Netherlands, or more precisely, why it's the source/site/subject of so much of my art/object/image/culture interest. Maybe it's because of New York, which has always felt to me of a piece with...
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1:15 PM
August 14, 2011
I've had Michelle Kuo's interview with Robert Breer [artforum, nov 2010] open in my browser tabs for months now, ever since Steve Roden posted about his incredible little toy Float, which was sold at MoMA's gift shop in 1970,...
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7:41 PM
Everyone was so hyped up about the extraordinary, long New Yorker feature detailing the hunting and killing of Osama Bin Laden, that well, obviously, I couldn't post about it at the time. But I was so pissed at Helmut Lang...
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1:18 PM
August 12, 2011
image: portlandart.net I confess, I was as taken as the next guy by the Shiny Object-ivity of Jacob Kassay's electroplated solo debut at Eleven Rivington in 2009. Next guys like Portland Art's Jeff Jahn, who wrote the show felt...
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8:44 PM
July 27, 2011
What's the opposite of writer's block, the thing where you have so much damn good stuff to write about, you're paralyzed into inaction? Because that's what I've got, and August vacation voids or not, I just can't help it;...
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10:33 PM
July 26, 2011
I'm looking into ways to paint on aluminum, and so I've come back to Gerhard Richter's 4900 Farben, which is made up of 196 Alu-dibond panels, each with 25 lacquered [aluminum?] squares mounted onto them. Whatever the exact process, they...
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9:31 PM
July 16, 2011
Mirror Stratum, 1966, Robert Smithson, image via moma Robert Smithson's Mirror Stratum is a longtime favorite of mine. These crystalline and strata sculptures are like abstracted geological or topographical structures, which is awesome enough. But these mirror [there's at...
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11:56 PM
July 7, 2011
I've begun speaking to enough people on the ground that it wouldn't have gone unnoticed for much longer, but now word's got out that I've established a foundation to bid on the site of Robert Smtihson's Spiral Jetty, a...
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3:45 PM
July 6, 2011
In the Spring of 1991, I was about nine months out of school, and six months into a new job. After striking up a conversation with a documentary film crew from NHK at Tennessee Mountain in SoHo, I'd bailed on...
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7:07 AM
July 4, 2011
I've always considered John Cage's politics to have been those of conscious non-engagement, but that's because I have really not known anything about "Lecture on the Weather," a text/sound/film/stage performance commissioned by the CBC for the US Bicentennial in 1976....
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12:33 PM
June 30, 2011
As I mentioned the other day, I've been going through our storage space, getting these time capsule-like pops of memory from old files and boxes and stuff. One of the more unexpectedly unexpected encounters: print photos. I just don't have...
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9:21 AM
June 13, 2011
I love it when a plan comes together. Or at least when several subjects of interest converge unexpectedly. It seems the Dutch art world is about to be decimated by sudden and substantial government funding cuts and reorganizations. [for angry...
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1:04 PM
June 8, 2011
I found a beautiful and odd book the other day, Reflections: The Story of Water Pictures, published in 1936 by Marion Thayer MacMillan. While vacationing in the Indian territories surrounding Georgian Bay on Lake Ontario, soon after the end...
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11:01 AM
May 19, 2011
Von Heyl-bait: Spatial Force Construction, 1921, Lyubov Popova A couple of weeks ago Charline von Heyl made a refreshingly badass presentation on painting at the Hammer Museum. [It was organized by UCLA's art department.] The tenor was quite different,...
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9:17 AM
May 15, 2011
I just watched Tarkovsky's 1975 film The Mirror for the first time as an adult, basically; when I saw it in college, I had no clue and was bored out of my gourd by it. In fact, for a...
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10:16 PM
May 13, 2011
Not quite sure what to make of this, but this image showed up this morning on the golden livestreaming page for Man Bartlett's piece, #140hBerlin. And though maybe he wasn't even born when it came out, it immediately made...
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Posted by greg at
10:14 AM
April 18, 2011
Richars Serra's work, and especially his drawings and sketches, have a pretty foundational place in my art worldview. So I'm stoked to see the Met's drawings retrospective, especially after Brian Dupont's process-oriented perspective on the work and the show. I...
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Posted by greg at
10:13 PM
April 16, 2011
What is the point of books if you're just going to store them out of sight? I mean, just look at the back cover of A.R.T. Press's 1992 interview of Vija Celmins by Chuck Close. If only I'd had this...
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1:57 PM
April 3, 2011
image via Morioka Yoshitomo's online syllabus of Art & Technology I don't collect posters, I really don't. I just buy some. And then some more. But when I saw the description of this poster in the Getty's E.A.T. archive...
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8:26 PM
April 1, 2011
I recently found a poster for a Pontus Hulten exhibition at Moderna Museet called "Utopier & Visioner, 1871-1981," which I think may have come from Billy Kluver's own collection. There's not much information online about the show with that title,...
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1:45 PM
March 31, 2011
"Our lives are spent trying to pixellate a fractal planet." - A. King in Society. [via mathowie]...
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Posted by greg at
10:08 PM
I may be too late to see the Getty Research Institute's exhibit on postwar Japanese art, but I think it's also past time I hotfoot it out there and start digging through the E.A.T. archives. If there are more...
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9:31 AM
March 29, 2011
Before I talk about Microworld, the 1976 industrial film made for AT&T by Owen Murphy Productions, let me just state the obvious, and get it out of the way: We are long, long overdue for a comprehensive, scholarly retrospective...
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9:03 AM
March 23, 2011
Holy smokes, Richard Prince, Patrick Cariou, Larry Gagosian, Judge Batts, Bob Marley, Richard Serra [! I know, right?], Brooke Shields, $18 million in artwork, the fate of appropriation, the implosion of the gallery system, copyright apocalypse, there's so much...
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7:46 AM
March 14, 2011
I totally remember seeing John Cage's The First Meeting of the Erik Satie Society in the summer of 1994. An unbound version was on view at the Fuller Building on 57th Street. Susan Sheehan Gallery. It was on during...
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9:29 AM
March 2, 2011
Frieze's 20-year retrospective of itself continues apace, and wow, it's like running into an old flame on a train platform. I hadn't thought about Daniel Birnbaum's 1996 essay, "IKEA at the End of Metaphysics" in years, but wow, it's just...
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8:57 PM
February 17, 2011
A 1968 NY Times review of Robert Rauschenberg's giant Autobiography edition by Hilton Kramer was titled "Art: Over 53 Feet of Wall Decoration." And the abstract mentioned simultaneous installations at the Whitney and MoMA, so I was interested to...
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11:13 PM
February 16, 2011
I cannot believe this has under 1,000 views. I'm only about 8:00 into this YouTube video, and already, Viktor Pinchuk is my hero. While anyone with a yacht or a palazzo could assemble a tranche of the art world...
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10:43 AM
February 14, 2011
So I'm reading along in my new copy of Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007--which is pretty awesome, and which does appear to supersede the artist's previous collected writings, The Daily Practice of Painting, which is good to know, but really, what...
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7:41 AM
February 8, 2011
While poking around online about Tate Modern's version of the Gabriel Orozco retrospective, I found this rather incredible letter from 2009, written, apparently by Orozco himself, to his dealer Jose Kuri. The letter is an ostensibily-but-not-really private round in an...
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1:57 PM
Sister Andreina holding Yves Klein's ex-voto for Santa Rita di Cascia in 1999, photo: David Bordes I get the sense that in the contemporary art world, an artist's religiosity or spirituality is often perceived as an obstacle, an eccentricity...
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7:38 AM
January 28, 2011
Maybe it was me looking for Tacita Dean's Sound Mirrors that brought me there, but David Williams' 2009 post at Skywritings about Dean, Derek Jarman, Dungeness, gardens, Tehching Hsieh is pretty wonderful:Everything here has been found, salvaged, re-cycled from...
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4:46 PM
January 23, 2011
In 2002, as I was still trying on various kinds of public writing, I tried to capture the transformative experience of listening to--no, experience is the better word--On Kawara's One Million Years. That post was even titled like a...
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11:29 PM
January 22, 2011
If you can see the full text of "On Collaboration In Art," David Shapiro's conversation with John Cage, published in the Autumn 1985 issue, (No. 10) of Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, perhaps you can tell me if it does, in...
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2:29 PM
January 21, 2011
Rather sensibly, IBM tapped Errol Morris to create films commemorating the company's 100th anniversary. Even when a guy delivers slightly underwhelming lines like, "We changed the way the world shops," this one, They Were There, is pretty awesome. My...
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11:02 PM
January 14, 2011
This just in from the greg.org Department of Stunningly Beautiful Digitized Maps of The Netherlands: Bibliodyssey has some highlights from the National Library of the Netherlands' fresh upload one of the rarest and most beautiful atlases in history, mid-17th century...
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6:46 PM
January 4, 2011
Doug Ashford ended the 2009 presentation I just posted about, "Abstraction as the onset of the real," with a slide of this beautiful painting, Untitled, 1950 (May 20) by Myron Stout. Washburn Gallery had a sweet little early Stout...
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11:04 PM
December 15, 2010
I've been deep in the commercial letterpress lately, and neglecting my Ant Farm. Fortunately, Mondo Blogo is there to bring me back in line, with this awesome poster the Farmers made for 20:20 Vision, their show at CAMH. 20:20...
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8:38 PM
December 12, 2010
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has a sweet Struth photo of the Cologne Cathedral, and somehow, Gerhard Richter's pixel-style stained glass window is not the most awesome thing about it. Also, is that a mop on that ledge in...
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2:47 PM
December 10, 2010
I love it when a tossed-off plan comes together. In this case, it's the idea of artist-designed vinyl car wraps. And camo. The Times had a great story about auto spyshots, and the increasing use of camouflage vinyl wraps...
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9:23 AM
December 8, 2010
It's crazy sometimes how long it takes to see what's right in front of your face. I've been thisclose to artist James Seawright's kinetic and electronic sculptures over the last couple of years, and yet I only really discovered...
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10:46 PM
December 6, 2010
Via Ubu comes a provocative essay, "Constructed Anarchy," from the poet and John Cage critic Marjorie Perloff. She takes the death of Merce Cunningham and the company's plans to dissolve after a worldwide farewell tour as an opportunity to ask...
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Posted by greg at
10:37 PM
December 5, 2010
image: walkerart.org Welcome to one of the oldest tabs in my browser: the inflatable balloon set for Merce Cunningham's 1968 piece, Walkaround Time, which is based on Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass, which was made by the company's artistic director...
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Posted by greg at
9:35 PM
November 30, 2010
Rather than post this beautifully composed 1895 photo of Henri LaChambre's rather awesome gas balloon inflated at Nancy, I should've freakin' bought it by now. Of course, my problem is that, now that I've seen it, I've filed it...
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10:59 AM
November 21, 2010
Also up at Phillips today was this nice little [25x25cm] seascape, Meer (Sea), a 1973 offset print by Gerhard Richter. Richter replaced the sky in one snapshot with the sea from another. This particular example sounds like it had...
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7:42 PM
November 19, 2010
The only thing cooler than this 2006 televised [!] performance of John Cage's 4'33" by the BBC Orchestra is the fact that at least 1.5 million people have watched it since. [via kottke]...
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Posted by greg at
9:40 PM
November 15, 2010
Ausgezeichnet, this is so awesome. Amidst a fierce, ongoing, politicized debate, Google has released the first Street View panoramas for Germany. To assuage privacy concerns, the company is allowing homeowners to assert their Verpixelungsrecht, that is, their Right to...
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Posted by greg at
9:40 AM
November 11, 2010
So fantastic. When I started digging around a bit on its history, I just assumed Jean Tinguely's kinetic masterpiece, Homage to New York, would itself be the most interesting find. Not quite. After making a name for himself in Europe...
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Posted by greg at
9:19 AM
November 10, 2010
Our stop at the Stedelijk over the weekend gave me On Kawara on the brain. Which makes me sad to have missed the San Francisco Art Institute's show this summer, On Kawara: Pure Consciousness In 19 Kindergartens. It was about...
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Posted by greg at
11:34 AM
November 9, 2010
Looking at objects and vintage photos in isolation, it blows my mind that Enzo Mari is somehow not a famous, formative artist, but only [sic] a designer. How did that happen? Did he make all his work in secret? Did...
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Posted by greg at
9:22 AM
November 8, 2010
When we last considered the techno-militartistic merits of pre-WWII era sound location devices, I wondered where to start. And now I know: the Netherlands. I'm not sure why, but it was acoustic locator-palooza over there. On the wall of the...
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Posted by greg at
8:42 PM
November 3, 2010
Look, I don't doubt that Enzo Mari hates the art world as much as he hates design. Even more, probably, since he's a faithful communist in an era when--Picasso bedamned--it's really hard out there in the art market for...
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Posted by greg at
11:04 AM
I couldn't really articulate it at the time, but the overwhelming absence of modernist architecture was an integral part of growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina. The country roads were widened, and winding capillaries and cul de sacs were cut...
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9:50 AM
October 24, 2010
Someday this will all look and sound really coherent, I swear. But for going on, wow, 20 years, some of the most powerfully influential photos for me have been the images Ansel Adams took at Manzanar, the desert prison...
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10:32 PM
October 19, 2010
It's hard to do bad interview with Errol Morris. But this exchange with Amanda Katz for the Boston Globe is particularly awesome:We have this idea that reading leads to self-betterment. But reading can, properly considered, lead to self-immiserization! Did you...
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Posted by greg at
9:09 AM
October 12, 2010
Here are some things I find I have kept open for several days or weeks, which I guess is one measure of how they are sticking with me: Andrew Russeth's look into the market and objects of Marcel Duchamp is...
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9:56 PM
October 11, 2010
Karen Green has a show of her most recent art work at the Space Art Gallery in South Pasadena. Thematically, it is similar to her show last year:The work of making the pieces in "Latent Learning Experiments," Ms. Green said,...
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11:36 PM
October 5, 2010
Terrance O'Shea, late 1960s, 11x11x2 slab of laminated plexiglass This summer while poking around into the conflicted treatment of the Pasadena Art Museum's Warhol Brillo Boxes, I found a tangential mystery: 10 or 30 or 40 or more Kellogg's...
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8:36 PM
October 4, 2010
Now I love me some rodeo, but primarily bull riding. It pains me to think how many rodeos I've missed at Madison Square Garden. So seeing legendary Magnum photographer [wait, is there any other kind?] Ernst Haas' 1957 photo...
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10:25 PM
September 30, 2010
So after posting about Four-Color Process, I was looking around to see who is working to preserve this masterful, cheap, laborious-looking halftone printing process. I mean, we brought letterpress back, right? Well. So far, on the printing front, I'm not...
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11:46 PM
September 26, 2010
Trying to clear some browser tabs. From John Hilgart, the guy who brought the world Comic Book Cartography, comes his next foray into the overlooked, undersung details of comics history, Four Color Process. It's an incredibly beautiful collection of...
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3:03 PM
September 18, 2010
God bless the Internet and all who surf upon her. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what I thought was an esoteric topic, even for greg.org: the fantastical lost machines from "Three Lessons of Architecture," Daniel Libeskind's exhibition...
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9:08 PM
September 15, 2010
And so far, I can't find it anywhere:UEZ: when your work first started to appear and was classified as Conceptual art, did you have a secure visual language which you knew would be viable over time? Or could you have...
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Posted by greg at
7:28 AM
September 14, 2010
That's Futurist painter Luigi Russolo on the left being helped by his friend Ugo Piatti, probably around 1913 or 1914. They stand amidst Russolo's musical instruments, intonarumori, noise-intoners, which were designed in accordance with the principles laid out in...
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9:38 AM
September 12, 2010
Good grief, it was only a couple of hours ago, and I can't even remember what took me to this three-year-old link roundup on BLDGBLOG that mentions hail cannons. I mean, hail cannon. Turns out they still make'em, they just...
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Posted by greg at
10:05 PM
August 24, 2010
MOS, of the PS1's woolly mammoth carcass MOSes, is one of seven architecture firms and collaboratives included in "Workshopping: an American Model for Architectural Practice," at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibit is curated by Michael Rooks of the...
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Posted by greg at
1:38 PM
August 20, 2010
And thus we see the painful difference between meaning to buy Wary Meyers' awesome-looking design project book Tossed and Found and actually buying it. I would have been inspired by their Enzo Mari autoprogettazione-esque mantle many months ago. What...
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Posted by greg at
1:31 PM
August 15, 2010
Dealer-turned-public art empresaria Emi Fontana talking in Artforum about West of Rome:...people believe that public art needs to occupy planned and assigned spaces. What we're doing is much more fine-tuned: You have to find the space that resonates with the...
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3:47 PM
August 13, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, I watched Henning Lohner's film essay/documentary about working with John Cage to make One11 and 103, Cage's only feature film project, completed just before he passed away in 1992. It's on YouTube, chopped up...
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Posted by greg at
2:18 PM
August 9, 2010
In addition to being the subject of his film and photographic work, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Light Space Modulator modulated light and space as a sculptural installation, and it served as a Light Prop for an Electric Stage. But in 1930, the...
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Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Licht Raum Modulator, 1970 reconstruction, image: bauhaus.de Did I say a few minutes? Laszlo Moholy-Nagy spent around eight years [from 1922-30] building his Light Space Modulator, and then he carted it around Europe, and to America, reworking...
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Posted by greg at
4:14 PM
July 29, 2010
I'd known Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's 1930 kinetic sculpture Light Space Modulator indirectly as a film subject, and then in 2002 through incredible color photographs Oliver Renaud-Clement showed at Andrea Rosen in 2002. [And again, in direct relation to the artist's sculptures...
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Posted by greg at
9:15 AM
July 23, 2010
In addition to the world's greatest artist website, artist Gerhard Richter also makes paintings. Now these two endeavors come together with the debut of a micro-site devoted to 4900 Colours, the set of 196 5x5 grids of 25 randomly...
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Posted by greg at
8:28 AM
July 14, 2010
So woohoo, Andrew Russeth pointed back to a Charlie Finch artnet gossip column from 1998, and just wow. I was there, I mean, I remember a lot of that stuff, and it is freaking me out how alien and...
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10:44 AM
July 5, 2010
Photomultiplier Tubes, or PMT, are vacuum tubes used to detect electromagnetic energy. In 1979, Hamamatsu Photonics began development of the world's largest PMT, 25 inches across, which would be used in the Kamiokande proton decay detector being constructed by the...
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Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
NPR's Robert Krulwich had a fascinating story the other day that works even better online. Because there are slideshows and video footage of Starfish Prime, the hydrogen bomb the US detonated in space on July 9, 1962. The launch...
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Posted by greg at
1:44 PM
July 3, 2010
This FT essay by Daphne Guinness about buying Isabella Blow's estate before it was dispersed at Christie's is a wonderful, sad, incredible thing. [via @artnetdotcom] All the way back in 2002, I overwrote a long post about Blow, Walter Benjamin,...
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4:32 PM
June 28, 2010
See, now here is another reason I've gotten so backed up: I was overwhelmed by the awesomeness of this. It's currently freaking me out how much is turning on the Osaka 70 World Expo. It's as if there's a...
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11:21 PM
June 19, 2010
I didn't follow Sigmar Polke's work closely. At least not consciously. This excerpt from Reiner Speck's essay about Polke's 2004 artist's book Daphne is awesome, even if it sounds a bit like someone's been huffing toner at the end:An...
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Posted by greg at
9:16 PM
May 29, 2010
Sure, there's Dutch Camo Landscapes, and Razzle Dazzle, and the Civilian Camouflage Council, but it all pales in comparison to the truly epic WWII camo accomplishments of Jasper Maskelyne and The Magic Gang. Maskelyne was a British magician-turned-Army camo mastermind...
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3:03 PM
May 26, 2010
So fantastic. I stumbled across this inadvertent diptych in Google Books, it's pp. 86-7 of P. Ch. Joubert's 1844 addition to the Manuels Roret series, Nouveau manuel complet du fabricant et de l'amateur de tabac. It's beautiful, somewhere between...
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5:53 PM
April 25, 2010
Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, interviewed by Christopher Knight in 1985 for the Archives of American Art:DR. PANZA: Well, the connection between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art was made through Rauschenberg, because if you look at Rauschenberg, you see also the...
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9:04 PM
April 18, 2010
Following on to their 2008 retrospective of ZERO, Sperone Westwater is exhibiting work by the group's co-founder, Otto Piene. " Otto Piene: Light Ballet and Fire Paintings, 1957-1967" runs through May 22nd. [16 Miles has very nice installation shots.]...
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Posted by greg at
2:50 PM
April 12, 2010
HUGE news from on the Enzo Mari autoprogettazione X [Scandinavian Furniture Giant] mashup front: The Finnish manufacturer Artek will announce 'sedia 1- chair,' "the first object from Mari's thought-provoking project 'autoprogettazione' to go into production" with the company. "the...
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Posted by greg at
12:55 PM
April 3, 2010
I was reading Calvin Tomkins' 1963 New Yorker profile of abstract sculptor Richard Lippold, who was a favorite of the International Style and High Modernist architecture crowd. Depending on your mood, Lippold's giant, intricate, and ambitious metal & wire works...
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Posted by greg at
9:23 AM
March 3, 2010
From Ken Johnson's thrilled NYT review of "Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age," which was at the National Gallery last winter:The painters of the golden age in Holland brought the city onto center stage and made...
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Posted by greg at
1:36 PM
March 1, 2010
Joerg has an interesting recap of Thomas Ruff speaking with Philip Gefter a couple of weeks ago at Aperture. I'm a fan of several of Ruff's series of work--and distinctly not a fan of others, but hey. Here's a...
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Posted by greg at
9:43 PM
February 23, 2010
These are mostly for me, just kind of gathered here without order or comment for the moment. I've been thinking about Alberto Giacometti lately, and his sculptural, spatial pursuit of that moment when a figure comes into view. Arthur...
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11:15 PM
February 21, 2010
The inconvenient intrusion of war and political upheaval [i.e., the collapse of the Dutch government and the looming withdrawal of Dutch troops from their frontline deployment in Afghanistan] into my Dutch Landscapes project has sent me trying to re-find...
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Posted by greg at
5:27 PM
February 17, 2010
Here's Sherrie Levine talking in 1993 about the making of her Meltdown woodblock print series with BAM's Constance Lewallen in the Journal of Contemporary Art. Levine did just what Susan Tallman, who reviewed Meltdown kind of negatively in 1990, feared:...
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3:42 PM
February 3, 2010
I swear, I didn't plan to go all Errol Morris and do three posts about one photo in one catalogue about one artwork. So look at this other photograph! The second thing you notice--first if you just crack it open,...
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8:04 PM
February 2, 2010
A 2001 visit to Gerhard Richter's studio, from when Michael Kimmelman used to write about art:He puts a canvas on an easel at the end of the room and slides the photograph into a projector. The photo appears, projected onto...
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Posted by greg at
1:12 PM
January 17, 2010
As someone who backed into a project last September of making paintings of readymade abstraction, I was nervous, stoked, and inspired by "Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture," the group show curated by Debra Singer which...
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3:29 PM
January 8, 2010
Sometimes I worry about the dishes. I think we have half our dishes out, and half in storage. Not fancy china, which we felt right off was a pointless wedding scam, but the everyday stuff, which we still have a...
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Posted by greg at
1:00 PM
The California College for The Arts is organizing an open pin-up show to honor Larry Sultan, the photographer, conceptual artist, and teacher who passed away last month:This show is a way for us to mark his passing and his enormous...
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8:24 AM
January 6, 2010
Inspired by Hans Ulrich Obrist's perennial interview question, I wrote about artists' unrealized projects a few years ago for the NY Times. As I stack up some [as-yet] unrealized projects of my own--including, alas, catching up on my unread e-flux...
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11:34 PM
January 2, 2010
I'm fine with somethings in the air, and zeitgeists, and influences, and inspirations, and appropriations. When I finish some of these Dutch Landscape paintings, I'll go up to Mary Heilmann and Gerhard Richter and a dozen other folks and give...
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5:47 PM
December 13, 2009
Considering how important and incredible the work is, it's funny how ambivalent the Times' Gabriel Orozco feature sounds. Ann Temkin did a great show of Orozco's work in Philadelphia, and yet she comes across as a bit flustered discussing the...
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7:54 AM
November 30, 2009
I've thought about similar situations before, so when I saw the mention in the NY Times article about all the dela Cruz's Felix Gonzalez-Torreses I realized I was surprised at how infrequently I hear or see Felix's partner mentioned...
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6:23 PM
November 24, 2009
The uncovered radiator was starting to seem a little dangerous in the kids' bath, and since I had a bit of Ikea shelving left over, and a leftover can of primer turned out to match perfectly the color of...
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7:25 PM
November 21, 2009
I'm diggin' the crazy cats at WNYC and The Jazz Loft Project. After abandoning his family in Westchester, longtime LIFE photographer W. Eugene Smith wired his 6th Ave loft for sound and recorded the hell out it for several years...
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2:25 PM
'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die' The headline was glib enough that I waited several days before actually reading it, but Spiegel's interview with Umberto Eco does turn out to be worth it. SPIEGEL: But why does...
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1:37 PM
November 4, 2009
Walter Hopps' 1991 exhibition at The Menil, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s, changed my art life, basically. Bob and Cy trekking around Italy. Bob and John and Merce collaborating. Bob and Jasper, whoa. Did not hear much about that...
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12:36 PM
October 18, 2009
Unbelievable. The Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica refused to sell his work; his estate, the Projecto Helio Oiticica, held an estimated 95% of his entire output when he died in 1980. The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston had a...
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Posted by greg at
10:30 PM
October 11, 2009
So I decided to make the Dutch landscape paintings I wanted to see made from those incredible security-obscured Dutch Google Maps I found a couple of weeks ago. I'll print the images out and paint over them. Since they...
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9:39 PM
September 3, 2009
Grain Edit has some truly spectacular gouache/lithograph-based advertising work done for the late TWA by the late David Klein. It's one truly beautiful poster after another, starting with this piece featuring the Gateway Arch. Tyler Green just got back...
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3:02 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...
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8:37 PM
August 26, 2009
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...
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8:36 AM
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...
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6:26 PM
July 31, 2009
Regular readers of greg.org know it, but I'll say it upfront: I'm Team MoMA. I've supported the museum for years--I feel like I grew up in it, art-wise. And film-wise. Right now, MoMA's film department and programming are stronger than...
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12:05 AM
July 27, 2009
I'm surprising myself by how much I feel the loss of Merce Cunningham, or more precisely, how much more acutely I'm feeling an appreciation for his work right now. From the LA Times' obituary by Lewis Segal:"When you work on...
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8:43 PM
Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver helped design photocells so that dancers triggered lights and sounds and films [with images by Stan VanDerBeek and Nam June Paik.] According to media art net, this excerpt was from a 1965 TV performance...
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11:05 AM
July 20, 2009
I've had Christy Lange's long 2005 Tate Magazine essay about revisiting conceptual art systems open in my browswer tabs for weeks now, but I hadn't read past the Walter deMaria section that first led me to it. Well, it's just...
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11:48 AM
June 5, 2009
Apparently, it's Chris Burden day. Kottke just posted a clean clip of Chris Burden's 1979 work, The Big Wheel, in which a massive, 19th century iron fly wheel is set into rapid motion by a little motorcycle wheel. I think...
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Posted by greg at
10:20 AM
April 28, 2009
This gorgeous Darren Almond photograph, Infinite Betweens: Becoming Between, Phase 3, of an impossible-to-map landscape covered with Tibetan prayer flags is coming up at Philips in a couple of weeks. It reminded me how quietly strong his work is,...
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11:47 PM
April 25, 2009
Untitled (Autoprojettazione, 1123 xE/1123 xR), 2004 courtesy kurimanzutto As I've said before, the first Enzo Mari autoprogettazione furniture I ever saw was by Rirkrit Tiravanija. He had tables and chairs fabricated from polished stainless steel, which his gallery from...
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Posted by greg at
5:01 PM
April 24, 2009
In its first iteration in 1984-5, The Territory of Art I was described as "a sixteen part series of half-hour radio programs that explored issues of contemporary art and design through commentary, interviews, original drama, and new music from more...
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11:20 AM
April 16, 2009
These are the last two segments from the lecture I gave at the University of Utah School of Art in 2007, titled Visiting Artist [sic]. They're both about Robert Smithson. The first [above] is about Smithson's own 1972 slideshow...
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9:19 PM
March 31, 2009
Errol Morris is unfurling another fascinating investigation of a 19th century photograph on hit NY Times blog. Today, in part 2/5, he talks with author and Civil War historian Mark Dunkelman about a breakthrough in researching the life of Amos...
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8:56 PM
March 25, 2009
The closest I've ever come to getting a tattoo was this one, a 1992 work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The artist first showed this motif, a circle of dolphins that looks like it could have come from the border of...
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9:58 AM
February 24, 2009
I can't believe it. New Yorker Films is closing after 43 years in the independent and foreign film distribution business. In the business? They were the business for decades. When I was working the projection booth at International Cinema at...
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8:45 PM
February 8, 2009
The first time I finally dared go into Kim's video, I thought I was ready, so I asked why Blade Runner wasn't in the Ridley Scott section. [Yes, son, back when I was a boy, we had to go all...
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11:04 PM
November 11, 2008
"Writing fiction takes me out of time," he explains. "I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That's probably as close to immortal as we'll ever get. I'm scared of sounding pretentious because...
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9:03 AM
October 31, 2008
This morning I was buying a Diet Coke at the gas station, which forced the lady to get up from her chair by the radio. "Arlo Guthrie! I didn't even know he was still alive!" "Really! You know who I'm...
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5:38 PM
September 7, 2008
Former NGA curator and Dia director Jeffrey Weiss writes about the state of Land Art in the latest issue of Artforum. His focus: T.S.O.Y.W., a 3-hour Earthworks road trip movie/installation by Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler shown in this year's...
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10:33 PM
August 20, 2008
Daniel Birnbaum in Artforum, discussing "Beckett/Nauman," a Spring 2000 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien The organizers of "Beckett/Nauman," Kunsthalle Wien curator Christine Hoffmann and art historian Michael Glasmeier, aren't really out to prove anything, but their juxtaposition of works by...
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Posted by greg at
11:24 AM
August 10, 2008
Just, wow. John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Louise Nevelson, and yet the sycophancy and superciliousness of this 1974 interview in SoHo by a couple of early Interview contributors is almost unwatchable. Almost. I just watched it again:R. Couri Hay: My...
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Posted by greg at
12:00 AM
April 19, 2008
In 2005, Robert Gober curated a show at the Menil Collection in Houston. In his catalogue, Robert Gober Sculptures and Installations, 1979-2007," for the Schaulager show, Gober says, "Initially, I was only interested in curating from the collection and not...
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1:21 PM
March 14, 2008
My daughter got Tibetan necklaces for Christmas when she was two. I asked her if she knew where Tibet was. And then I told her, "It's next to China." image of Buddhist monks in Xiahe, Gansu province [in China]...
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11:39 PM
March 8, 2008
From "Jeremy Blake in Three Parts," written by editor/curator Bennett Simpson for PS 1's "Greater NY" show. In 2000, Blake's 20-min. digitally animated abstraction titled Angel Dust was in both the harried, hasty "Greater NY" and the Pompidou's "Elysian...
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Posted by greg at
4:10 PM
March 5, 2008
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } blue_before and after, originally uploaded by scottburnham. In 2000 curator Scott Burnham organized a projection...
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Posted by greg at
12:10 AM
March 4, 2008
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } It's A Longshot, originally uploaded by JPaul23. I've had Derek Jarman on the brain the...
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9:14 PM
While is ridiculously easy to soak in Derek Jarman's work in the UK at the moment, it's nigh impossible to find anything programmed in the US. Fortunately, one of Jarman's most easily accessible bodies of work--music videos--is also one...
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9:04 PM
January 30, 2008
Daniel Thompson, the guy behind Clean Flix, [1], Flix Club, an Orem, Utah video store that, like Clean Flicks before it, edited sex, nudity, and swearing scenes from Hollywood movies, has been arrested for paying for sex with 14-year-old girls....
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10:03 AM
October 22, 2007
I'm still looking around for anyone who gave an account of yesterday's discussion of Warhol films at the American Museum of the Moving Image. Warhol Film Project director Callie Angell and film critic Amy Taubin were supposed to "discuss the...
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11:38 PM
September 22, 2007
I've been listening to WNYC's anniversary tribute programming for John Cage, and it's really great [if a bit over-narrated; I mean, who's going to listen to 24h33m of John Cage programming on-demand who isn't at least somewhat familiar with...
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Posted by greg at
11:44 PM
August 14, 2007
Seeing William Burrough's old Nike commercial reminded me of Burroughs' 1996 music video Thanksgiving Prayer, directed by Gus Van Sant. Classic stuff....
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12:15 AM
July 31, 2007
today: Michelangelo Antonioni, 94, Italian Director, Dies [ap/nyt] yesterday: Ingmar Bergman, Master Filmmaker, Dies at 89 [nyt]...
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7:28 AM
July 20, 2007
From Theresa's blog, The Wit of the Staircase: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. "Esprit...
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1:03 PM
May 29, 2007
This is awesome. John Cage performing "Water Walk," live on the 1960 TV quiz show, I've Got A Secret. John Cage performing "Water Walk" [youtube] John Cage on a TV Game Show in 1960 (video) [WFMU's awesome blog, with...
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Posted by greg at
12:09 PM
April 7, 2007
So I'm researching camera angles for an article I'm writing, and so I break out the trusty Susan Sontag, On Photography, and I finally get to the last essay/chapter, which I guess I've never read. It's the one where she...
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11:57 PM
February 6, 2007
The idea to use a large heliostat to deliver winter sunlight to a small village deep in a valley of the Italian Alps, was a success: The mirror — 870 meters, or 2,900 feet, above Viganella and measuring 8 meters...
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9:26 AM
December 20, 2006
I used to live downstairs from Nam June Paik. I was too starstruck to ever talk with him at length, but we had friendly chats when we'd see each other in the stairway of our Little Italy loft building....
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3:17 PM
November 21, 2006
After memorizing The Player, the visceral Short Cuts got me hugely excited for Pret a Porter. Oops. At the time, I had to learn for myself what Pauline Kael knew long ago: she "joked about his fertile seventies output that...
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9:58 PM
November 10, 2006
Even when I worked for The Mouse, I cringed and laughed at the pile-up mash-ups of corporate life and pop culture. On the rarest occasions, like with Atomic Revolution, the nuclear propaganda comic book produced by adman M. Philip Copp...
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1:10 PM
December 24, 2005
As I type this, the Maysles Brothers classic Grey Gardens is playing at MoMA. Unfortunately, I'm in the wrong time zone to see it, but watching those Crazy Edies suddenly seems like an excellent Christmas Eve tradition. Meanwhile, I will...
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3:34 AM
October 18, 2005
For the 1993 Venice Biennale, PS1 produced an exhibition of and about John Cage's work calledIl Suono rapido delle cose. This week, WPS1 has added a webcast of the accompanying CD to their archive. The CD features performances by Lee...
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9:54 AM
October 5, 2005
Bill & Nada's was an unassuming Salt Lake institution, a 24-hour diner ["we never close"] that sat on a downtown corner for decades, providing eggs & brains, pancakes with coconut syrup, hot coffee and a haven for folks who...
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8:37 AM
September 18, 2005
UCLA Medical Center is the epicenter of the Los Angeles basin or something. Robert Wise died there this week at 91. In between editing Citizen Kane and flacking for Scorsese's Gangs of New York [Scorsese was a big fan, so...
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8:02 AM
February 4, 2005
Finally, the business model for the ostensibly-aspiring-to-a- Subway-sized-franchise-empire rice pudding boutique on Spring St, Rice To Riches, is explained in a way even an MBA like me can understand: it was founded with proceeds from a $21 million sports gambling...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 AM
November 26, 2004
I've admired Hirokazu Kore-eda's films since seeing Maboroshi at New Directors/New Films in 1995. His 2000 film, After Life and Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I were what finally stoked the fire under me to get me finally start making...
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8:15 AM
September 5, 2004
Driving up the foothills to my mother's house in Salt Lake City, you pass a nearly unbroken carpet of lawn, with the thickened, careful edges at the sidewalks that only result from successive generations of earnest teenage entrepreneurs. A couple...
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1:56 AM
July 19, 2004
I remember at college in 1989 a friend proposed to his girlfriend my singing her Depeche Mode's "Somebody". At the time this seemed supremely lame to me, mostly because it was from like 1984, three albums earlier. It was a...
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11:09 AM
May 31, 2004
It's my guess that we cling to the harsher bits of the past not just as a warning system to remind us that the next Indian raid or suddenly veering, tower-bound 757 is always waiting but as a passport to...
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11:08 AM
May 6, 2004
Derek Jarman's last feature film, Blue is composed of a poetic/narrative soundtrack and 79 minutes of unexposed color film, which was printed blue. It rocks. Tonight at Passerby at 8:30, Whitney video curator Chrissie Iles will explain how hard...
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Posted by greg at
5:35 AM
Vladimir Nabokov's son and translator Dmitri has sold his collection of his father's books and memorabilia at auction. The Times has a poignant story about it. Many books contained marginalia from the author himself; most prized were those containing...
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Posted by greg at
2:12 AM
April 28, 2004
"Certainly the show is inventive and cool looking. The voices, most done by the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are also hilarious. (Cartman's pronunciation of 'authority'ó aw-THOR-eh-tah ó is unaccountably perfect.)" - Virginia Heffernan, writing in...
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Posted by greg at
1:18 AM
April 6, 2004
After a night of hanging out with The Man, and sipping from the firehose of his conversation (hey, whatever it takes to get the movie made, right? ahem.), it's no surprise at all that there are fansites dedicated to picking...
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3:24 AM
February 20, 2004
Last week, in the Sony Classics offices on Madison Avenue, I sat down to talk with Errol Morris, whose current documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, was nominated for an Academy Award....
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12:03 PM
February 17, 2004
Ever since 1992, when I stumbled, completely ignorant and unprepared, into a screening of the restored version introduced by Agnes Varda ("she does documentaries or something, right?" was all I had in my head), I've been transfixed and fascinated...
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Posted by greg at
1:09 AM
February 10, 2004
Since relaunching their website, Harper's has been posting selections from their 140+year archive. For example, "Battle Gossip," an 1861 column by Charles Nordhoff. In addition to vivid accounts of women in combat, Nordhoff writes about Napoleon III's use of balloons...
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5:55 AM
January 14, 2004
[via Kultureflash] John Cage Uncaged is a weekend of performances, films and discussions ("and mushrooms!") at Barbican Hall. Cage symphony performances are rare enough to make them not-to-be-missed events. Highlights: Friday's BBC Orchestra concert, "Cage in his American Context," (which...
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Posted by greg at
9:51 AM
January 13, 2004
I'm listening to the composer Vijay Iyer and poet/rapper Mike Ladd discuss their collaborative song cycle, "In What Language," on WNYC's Soundcheck. It explores the inner lives and thoughts of people in international airports, and it rocks. Iyer and Ladd...
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2:48 AM
January 4, 2004
has me talking/writing like a knight. I.e., half Quixote, half medieval times. oh, and all posts will be 900 pages long....
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9:36 AM
December 10, 2003
Gus Van Sant, Elias McConnell, and Dany Wolf at Cannes 2003, image: festival-cannes.com There he is, scorched in Death Valley and on the Saltflats of Utah; in a mold-closed school with a barebones crew on scooters; and on the...
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3:59 AM
November 25, 2003
[via GreenCine] Doug Cumming's got an account of Agnes Varda discussing a screening of her latest short film in Seattle. Also, an earlier bonus Varda discussion at Filmjourney. My Google Ad, which used to read, "Damn you, Agnes Varda/The Gleaners...
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3:50 AM
November 8, 2003
In a Guardian interview, Ennio Morricone talks about composing music for films. My favorite of his theories: "The music in a film must enter politely, very slowly," like an uninvited guest at a party. [Guess they raise a more genteel...
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4:35 AM
November 4, 2003
Gus Van Sant's the center of the universe, you see, or you will see, by the end of this post. [Before, I'd been forced to the alarming conclusion that the universe revolved around Norman Mailer, so you'll understand if...
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8:39 AM
October 23, 2003
I came to Kieslowski for the fateful mystery of La Double Vie de Veronique, but I stayed for the unassuming, naturalistic power of the Dekalog. This seminal ten-part series of films is playing this weekend at Symphony Space in NYC....
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11:07 AM
October 3, 2003
To explain how I came up with my Souvenir series of ultimately inter-related short films, I went into an extended discussion of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog with someone recently. Now it turns out Riverside Studios in London is screening the entire...
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2:07 AM
September 16, 2003
Get the greg.org e-commerce fire hose ready*. I'm wrapping up Soderbergh's book, Getting Away With It, and I've rather liked it. Makes me want to see Schizopolis, one of the movies he angsts over in his journal entries. Trouble...
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11:53 AM
July 14, 2003
The Guardian's Lee Roberts reports on Iranian film godfather Abbas Kiarostami's debut stage production of the Ta'ziyeh, a compilation of classic tales of the death of Mohammed's grandson, Hussein. The plays are a traditional part of fervent religious festivals in...
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5:08 AM
May 25, 2003
Swearing may be better in French, but teen shooting? That's best en anglais, mon ami. Gus Van Sant just won the Palme d'Or and Best Director awards at Cannes for his latest film, Elephant, which is Columbine-esque, but actually...
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9:21 AM
February 23, 2003
The compelling/amusing Super Mario Brothers: A Literary Criticism (thanks, Jason!), which puts paid to my (non-)critique of the connections between Gerry, its filmic antecedents, and SimCity-style video games....
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3:38 AM
February 18, 2003
Watch Matt Damon and Casey Affleck stagger, scramble and trudge through the desert in Gerry to forget the snow that you staggered, scrambled and trudged through to see it. If that reasoning's too circuitous for you, though, skip the...
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11:58 AM
December 27, 2002
View from the window at Le Gras, 1826, Joseph Nic�phore Ni�pce image: Ransom Center, UT Austin Or specifically, the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin: 1) to see the world's first photograph, a view out his window...
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4:28 AM
November 19, 2002
It's not quite like whipping out your copy of Lolita at the playground, but it sometimes feels weird to read Gravity's Rainbow "in public." Can't say if it's the book itself, which is rather unsettling and is shot through...
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11:27 AM
"Mistral Island Manuscript acquired by Univ. of Texas" According to this report from last week, Pynchon collaborated with Kirkpatrick Sale in 1958 to create a musical set decades in the future, where IBM controls the world. Sale gave "Luddite" its...
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2:40 AM
October 21, 2002
"Great web philosopher" David Weinberger weblogged several talks at PopTech 2002, which had the theme of Artificial Worlds. From his posts, it sounded like a lot of thought-provoking fun. But what's in it for me you ask? (Me meaning me,...
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11:12 AM
October 18, 2002
Palm recharging at home, I had a little red notebook with me on the train last night, and, still stuck on the entry from the other day, I wrote "Who are such mystics, astronauts, filmmakers, ?, people with a Knowledge,...
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12:20 PM
July 3, 2002
To paraphrase Max Fischer: I've applied for early admission to the Edinburgh Film Festival and Cannes. Sundance is my safety. [wesanderson.org is a good source for active fans.]...
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1:18 AM
June 5, 2002
When I saw an hour and a half on Sundance Channel blocked out for Meet Mike Mills, I couldn't figure out how interesting he could possibly be. 90 minutes with Scorsese, sure. But 90 minutes with Mike Mills? Naturally,...
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12:26 PM
May 25, 2002
"Damn you!" campaign results (source: Google Adwords) Findings: The low number of searches/impressions for Varda and Maysles was surprising, as was the high rate (2x) of Wes Anderson searches vs PT Anderson and Soderbergh. And this was a week...
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8:32 AM
May 24, 2002
The greg.org "Damn you!" ad campaign on Google is just about half-over, and the results are rather interesting. (The launch is mentioned in this post.) The campaign appears on searches for the names of directors who inspired/influenced me, either stylistically...
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1:34 AM
April 22, 2002
So tonight, Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse is on Sundance Channel as I come home from the gym. It's the first time I've seen it on television, not in the theater, and the image difference is quite noticeable between video-to-film...
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11:48 AM
