August 31, 2010
The Ed-werd Rew-Shay Memorial Art World Pronunciation Guide keeps on growing! the latest additions include: Richard Anuszkiewicz Huma Bhabha Thomas Houseago And some great mispronunciations that needed addressing: Chinati Laocoon Modigliani Also, I just know the Aperture Foundation's video editors...
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9:39 AM
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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1:38 PM
August 21, 2010
I know that what's really needed around here is a redesign, and probably the addition of a few thousand tags. But right now that's an 8th burner project, and I've only got a 4-burner stove. But in the mean time,...
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Posted by greg at
2:43 PM
I'm glad and not surprised to see I'm the only person using Google Street View as an artistic source. Since at least last year, photographer Michael Wolf has been making a series of Street View-based works that explore urban...
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12:00 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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1:31 PM
August 14, 2010
While wandering through the National Air and Space Museum [family's in town], I stumbled across James Keeler's lantern slides of spiral nebulae, taken at the Lick Observatory outside San Jose beginning in 1888. Keeler was a pioneering astronomer at...
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9:34 PM
August 12, 2010
I love Eliot Noyes as much for his own designs as for his role as catalyst, instigator and patron for some of the greatest modernist objects and buildings of the postwar era. And yet somehow I hadn't made the...
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10:35 AM
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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Posted by greg at
10:44 AM
July 8, 2010
Wow, I knew about the Moon Museum segment because Jade Dellinger emailed about it. But I didn't know the first episode of this season's History Detectives also included a whole segment on satelloons and Project Echo. I love how they...
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2:43 PM
July 5, 2010
ESA has released images of the first all-sky survey from the Planck space observatory, which is currently in orbit around Lagrange-2, a balancing point between the gravitational exertions of the moon and the earth. Planck rotates at a constant...
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4:16 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
July 1, 2010
Thanks to greg.org reader Fred for sending along a link to a memo computer graphics pioneer Alvy Ray Smith wrote in 1995, soon after his company Altamira [the one he founded after Lucasfilm and Pixar] had been assimilated by...
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Posted by greg at
8:28 AM
June 29, 2010
53 years later, the guy who invented the square pixel regrets the error. In 1957, NIST computer expert Russell Kirsch scanned the world's first digital image [a photo of his infant son, above] using the country's first programmable computer....
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8:08 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 24, 2010
Alberto Giacometti's figures look the way they do because he tried to capture what he called, "The moment I see them" and the way "they appear in my field of vision..." Arthur C Danto said this accounted for "the...
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Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
June 10, 2010
When I offhandedly declared a jpg of Richard Prince's 2003 rephoto, Untitled, (Cowboy) to be my own work a year ago, I had no idea it would ever leave my blog post. As an idea, appropriating an appropriation might be...
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Posted by greg at
10:30 PM
June 8, 2010
Look, no one is more surprised than I am about this. But when Jen Bekman and I started talking about it a while back, it started sounding like the awesomest thing in the world. So I've done an edition with...
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8:57 PM
June 7, 2010
Whoa, check that out! The Moon Museum's on the Tee Vee! Or it will be, June 21st. The PBS show History Detectives is trying to figure out whether the Moon Museum, a SIM card-sized ceramic wafer created in 1969...
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Posted by greg at
7:16 AM
June 2, 2010
After bagging on Blake Gopnik's comments on Marcel Duchamp playing the buyers of his readymades for fools, I started looking more closely at Duchamp's actual statements and working process. It's so easy to consider him as just a source of...
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Posted by greg at
10:22 PM
May 21, 2010
A digitized collection of vintage NASA Goddard Space Flight Center newsletters led me to the June 23, 1963 issue of LIFE Magazine. If it were possible for any photo of a Project Echo satelloon to be slightly less than awesome,...
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11:41 AM
May 14, 2010
Apex Art just announced that Courtenay Finn and Gary Fogelson were selected for this year's open curating slots. Finn's proposal uses a work by Bruce Nauman as a jumping off point for a show about "the role of reading in...
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4:26 PM
April 25, 2010
More from Giuseppe Panza's 1985 Archives of American Art Oral Histories interview with Christopher Knight, this time on Panza's preference for abstraction: But I believe that the modern science reveal to our knowledge a world which is far above the...
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Posted by greg at
11:04 PM
April 20, 2010
While researching the National Gallery of Art's Barkley L. Hendricks paintings, which were purchased by J. Carter Brown with money from Michael Whitney Straight, I came across one of the crazier space-meets-art moments in the history of exhibition design: Art...
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Posted by greg at
7:06 AM
April 15, 2010
Some interesting developments since putting the Walking Man self-portrait collection out there. Thanks for the feedback and responses. I think it's becoming clearer that walking man is not, as I wrote, a guy who "came upon the Google Street...
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Posted by greg at
9:56 AM
April 13, 2010
While I remember where it came from, here's another image found in that Jan. 1961 Popular Science story starring William O'Sullivan Jr, who headed Project Echo and the whole satelloon paradigm at the fledgling NASA. When you see a...
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3:31 PM
April 12, 2010
Google Street View Bilbao 2 Originally uploaded by artberri I have no idea who walking man is, and ultimately it doesn't really matter to me; the portraits of him that got inserted repeatedly throughout Google Street View ultimately stand...
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Posted by greg at
10:01 PM
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 10, 2010
In the Summer of 2009, an unidentified young man came upon the Google Street View Trike preparing to map the Binnenhof, the center of the Dutch government, in The Hague. He decided to tag along. The man walked alongside...
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11:53 AM
April 9, 2010
He's pretty harsh on unnamed governments who complain about unblurred faces, and got more than a bit of engineer's arrogance, which is why, I guess, he works for Google, but Michael Jones's talk, "The Meaning of Maps,"at O'Reilly's Where...
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Posted by greg at
9:18 PM
March 31, 2010
I've been looking into how Google Street View panoramas are made, and it's been kind of awesome. Each equirectangular panorama is stitched together on the fly out of 21 photos. Equirectangular projection, or plate carrée (flat square), is a...
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Posted by greg at
8:01 AM
March 30, 2010
So the last couple of months, I've been working on an idea for book, and I wanted to see a mockup/proof. It's mostly photographs/images, with a very text introduction, and I wanted only one image per spread, like a nice...
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2:39 PM
March 23, 2010
I could feel Mondo-Blogo was baiting me as I scrolled through the photos from MoonFire, Taschen's luscious 2009 commemorative book for the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. He was amped about the text by Norman Mailer, and the...
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Posted by greg at
10:48 PM
March 16, 2010
While rummaging around in Vito Acconci's early exhibition history for traces of Kathryn Bigelow's work [more on that in a second], I came across a set of three early, short Super 8mm films I'd never heard of: Three Attention...
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Posted by greg at
1:17 PM
"The lady clad in bright red silk was having her picture taken from every angle around Abramovic's performance. It was spectacular." C-Monster has an awesome photoset and a firsthand account of experiencing Marina Abramovic's MoMA performance, The Artist Is...
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11:02 AM
March 14, 2010
Part of re-creating the Project Echo satelloons as art objects is tracking down the documentation and history of it all, identifying archives and primary source materials, and finding out how, exactly NASA built these early, early satellites. Because it's...
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5:41 PM
March 9, 2010
I'm still looking for the c. 1958-9 images of the 12-foot satelloon prototype being inflated in the US Capitol Building as part of NASA's push to fund the 100-foot version. But look what I found in the March 14, 1961...
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8:53 PM
March 3, 2010
547 West 27th Street Proposed Rooftop Painting Originally uploaded by Madilworth Last fall as the Dutch Landscape paintings idea was kicking into gear, artist Molly Dilworth emailed me a link to her rather awesome project, Paintings for Satellites. For...
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Posted by greg at
1:22 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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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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Posted by greg at
11:15 PM
February 22, 2010
Because I now appear to be constitutionally incapable of doing otherwise, after mentioning the Mauritshuis, the Vermeer-loaded Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague, I checked to see if was camo-obscured on Google Maps. [I kind of knew it wasn't,...
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5:36 PM
February 20, 2010
You may recall how Google Maps recently changed the polygonal camouflage on one of the Dutch landscapes I was using for my painting project. I was back there, getting a clean shot of the nicely distorted grid plaza--the site...
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9:45 AM
February 16, 2010
Reductivist abstraction and pixelated photo-appropriation? If only it could involve a short film, an Ikea table, or a White House stage set, I could wrap this whole blog up with a bow and go home. From Peter Blum Editions' text...
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11:50 PM
February 8, 2010
As soon as I started thinking that Dutch Polygonal Camo on Google Maps would make great abstract landscape paintings, I thought of a some giant, abstract, polygonal landscape paintings I'd seen way back in 2000-2. But for the life...
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11:04 AM
I guess that's the whole point of camo, you just never really know what you're gonna see. In February 1942, the Dutch minesweeper the HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen survived the Battle of the Java Sea, in which the Japanese Navy...
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7:22 AM
February 4, 2010
Gather ye screengrabs while ye may, I guess. The camo-obscuring of sensitive sites on Google Maps by the Dutch Intelligence Service (MVID) is a dynamic process. One of my favorite sites I found last November is a complex along the...
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8:58 AM
February 2, 2010
So my copy of the Serpentine Gallery's catalogue for "Gerhard Richter: 4900 Colours" finally came. This is the frontispiece, a photo by Joe Hage [who is turning up everywhere in Richterland now? He's the collector who's helping the artist...
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Posted by greg at
8:51 PM
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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1:12 PM
I've been searching for historical and primary source material for Project Echo, one of NASA's earliest missions, which kicked into high gear in 1958. The giant, inflatable satelloons were functional--passive reflection communication satellites. That they were shaped just like...
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6:58 AM
January 18, 2010
Now that I can make any map or image into a color-averaged, triangular camo abstract wonderscape, I am in big trouble. Triangulation - web interface [triangulation.jgate.de via andy] original image: Stadtbild PL, 1970, Gerhard Richter [gerhard-richter.com]...
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Posted by greg at
9:54 PM
So awesome. With a few skateboard wheels, some L-brackets, and some grip tape, Brussels-based videographer VJ Aalto turned the ladder-shaped side bracket from Ivar, my Ikea component system of choice, into a EUR18 dolly track. The great-looking test videos...
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10:48 AM
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 15, 2010
I've recently stepped up my search for more examples of objects that resonate with Enzo Mari's autoprogettazione model: artists and designers who offer not just the non-authorial conceit of "made by anyone," but "permission to make it yourself." It's...
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11:14 PM
January 12, 2010
I've had a research question simmering on the back burner for a while, trying to figure out what the history of modernism and contemporary art have been in Washington DC. Partly, it was the dearth of good modernist architecture that...
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4:41 PM
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
December 29, 2009
For the Allied forces, The Battle of Hürtgen Forest was the longest and one of the bloodiest, most pointless battles of World War II. Between October 1944 through February 1945, over 33,000 US soldiers were killed in the dense...
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1:51 PM
December 17, 2009
The American Museum of Natural History maintains a Digital Universe Atlas, which maps all the objects in the universe using the most current data available. They just released The Known Universe, an animated version of the data, in conjunction...
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Posted by greg at
11:03 AM
December 10, 2009
I'm fallen in love all over again with the Solar Toy Ray and Charles Eames created around 1956-7 for Alcoa. Writing about it in 1958, Charles Eames also called it the "Do Nothing Machine." As Steve Roden discussed a...
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9:06 PM
December 6, 2009
I love it when several plans come together. Apparently, not all the Dutch Google Maps landscapes camo'd out by the Military Intelligence Department are actually sensitive sites. And some sites will toggle in and out of camouflage without warning...
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Posted by greg at
7:03 PM
November 29, 2009
Gerhard Richter used a randomizing computer program to place the 11,500 hand-blown squares of glass in 72 different colors in his 2007 stained glass window for the Cologne Cathedral. He used the same program at the same time to...
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10:51 PM
Been trying to think about where the idea of painting an intentionally obscuring, computer-generated, institutionally applied abstract pattern onto a systematically produced aerial photographic map of the entire world fits into the historical painting/photography, abstract/representational context. From Andre Bazin's 1945...
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2:16 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
Enzo Mari X IKEA Mashup, Ch. Last, originally uploaded by gregorg. home stretch, from Thanksgiving 2007 to Thanksgiving 2009. And it is done. [more pictures here] A quick recap: An EFFE table based on a 1974 design by Enzo...
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11:28 AM
November 23, 2009
Just another, particularly beautiful, addition to the list of sky atlases throughout history which showed the entire universe. Or the known universe. Or the known universe that they could show: Zwillinge (Twins : Gemini), a 1799 constellation map by Christian...
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11:46 PM
November 18, 2009
I don't know who Bruce MacEvoy is, but his is the most exhaustive series of comparative analyses of various theories of color theory I've found. [aha. A web guy/artist who sold YHOO better than I did.] As I debate in...
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2:38 PM
November 13, 2009
The first Project Echo satelloon may have started out as a 100-meter sphere, but it didn't stay that way. Echo IA launched on August 12, 1960, and it stayed in orbit and visible to the naked eye until May...
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Posted by greg at
4:05 PM
Though they're pixelated abstractions, and though they're almost as likely to be landscapes as people, Alex Brown's paintings feel a bit like the opposite of what fascinates me about the Dutch Landscape paintings I'm working on. From a q&a...
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Posted by greg at
2:27 PM
Thaddeus S. C. Lowe was once one of the country's most famous aeronauts. His grand plan to fly a balloon across the Atlantic was shelved by the outbreak of the Civil War. He preferred to be called Professor. On...
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11:50 AM
November 12, 2009
I didn't realize it until I surfed across this half-pixelated Takashi Murakami painting, but I have Murakami's factory lodged in my brain as a model of digital-to-analog painting and production. Back before the whole Louis Vuitton thing, even before...
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9:50 PM
November 6, 2009
You never know what'll turn up. In the same sale as that Sheeler study is this 1965 geometric abstract painting by Dean Fleming, one of the pioneers of SoHo. In 1962, Fleming founded the Park Place Gallery, an artist...
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8:37 PM
To be honest, I've never felt very interested in the late paintings of Charles Sheeler. After his Precisionist, industrial peak, and his consistently strong, modernist photography, the delicate, highly constructed, cubist/abstract Pennsylvania barn compositions seemed a little twee. They...
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7:57 PM
November 2, 2009
Maybe I've just been living in the digital world too long, but I'd like to somehow extract a color list from these polygon-laden Google Map images, and then order paint that matches. Only I'm not finding a vast, well-developed, digital-to-analog...
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4:03 PM
November 1, 2009
I just got the first prints of Dutch Landscapes to paint. And I've captured a few more to prep for printing. Here are a few more of the camo-obscured Dutch sites I also like but haven't gotten around to capturing...
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5:19 PM
October 30, 2009
It's hard to see Theo van Doesburg's work up close these days, especially paintings. But for this Dutch Landscapes paintings project, the technical and theoretical logic of both Mondrian and van Doesburg is pretty inarguable. Though the de Stijl...
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11:07 PM
October 28, 2009
Sheesh, as if I wasn't painfully aware of the nearly finished Enzo Mari x Ikea Mashup table sitting behind my sofa, I get this, from Peter Nencini, [above] which frankly just hurts:A couple of weeks ago we reassembled 32...
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Posted by greg at
1:21 PM
October 27, 2009
From the Other Things I Didn't Know About What Goes Inside Geodesic Dome Pavilions Department: Christine Macy and Sarah Bonnemaison devote a chapter in their 2003 book, Architecture and nature: creating the American landscape to geodesic domes, including this description...
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Posted by greg at
11:16 PM
October 26, 2009
So it looks like we won't be finding the Warhols just yet. The Kickstarter project deadline came today, and only $265 of the $1400 or so required to print and ship a batch of giant Wanted posters had been pledged....
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11:46 PM
October 21, 2009
Yeah, well it's like five days until the Find The Warhols! project expires on Kickstarter, and we're still a ways to go from our goal. Normally this would right about the time that a groundswell of sympathy for the...
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Posted by greg at
9:24 PM
October 20, 2009
Lawrence Weschler narrates a slideshow of David Hockney's iPhone/Brushes drawings for the NY Review of Books:When he finishes one of these drawings, he sends it out into the world... There's about 15, 20 people, and he assumes that we send...
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Posted by greg at
8:47 PM
October 17, 2009
Well that's complicating. Richard Weisman has withdrawn his $25 million insurance claim for the 11 Andy Warhol paintings he reported stolen last month from his home in Los Angeles. As a result, the insurance company, Chartis, has withdrawn its...
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8:54 AM
October 14, 2009
Why, I feel just like Alma Thomas, what with my shopping around for a modernist painting technique to use on my Dutch camo Landscape series... Anyway, I headed over to the Phillips Collection in search of Arthur Dove paintings....
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1:35 PM
October 12, 2009
This 1960 LIFE Magazine photo by Grey Villet of Antenna bouncing first message off Echo I satellite is a great, uh, echo of Trevor Paglen's The Other Night Sky series....
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Posted by greg at
2:40 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 30, 2009
BeDazzled was an exhibition organized by the appropriately named RISD librarian Claudia Covert of the library's collection of WWI Dazzle Camouflage patterns and photographs from the US Shipping Board:Maurice L. Freedman donated the plans and photos in the collection...
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Posted by greg at
8:15 AM
Last year Jeff Koons covered Dakis Joannou's angular yacht Guilty [designed by Ivana Porfiri] with a pattern inspired by WWI naval camouflague. The technique, known in the US as Razzle Dazzle and in the UK as just http://www.gotouring.com/razzledazzle/articles/dazzle.htmlDazzle Painting,...
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Posted by greg at
7:15 AM
September 27, 2009
NL Architects thinks it might make a good Herzog & deMeuron project, but I think Google Maps' security pixelization of the Dutch Royal House's Noordeinde Palace in Den Haag would make an absolutely fantastic series of landscape paintings. Where...
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Posted by greg at
8:18 PM
September 21, 2009
Earlier this month eleven portrait paintings by Andy Warhol were reported stolen from the home of Los Angeles collector Richard Weisman. The paintings, known the Athletes Series, depict some of the greatest athletes in the world in 1977, plus...
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Posted by greg at
9:25 AM
September 14, 2009
It's got shiny spheres, and science re-creations, and DC artists and quotes from curator and museum director friends. But it's been a few weeks now, and the only thing I can say about Blake Gopnik's mind-numbing/blowing article on Jim Sanborn...
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1:58 PM
September 13, 2009
Just like how, once you've learned it, you start hearing a word all the time, now I see satelloons everywhere. Including at the Buckminster Fuller retrospective last year at the Whitney [which went on to Chicago this summer.] Buckminster...
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Posted by greg at
9:09 PM
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...
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7:31 AM
August 4, 2009
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...
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Posted by greg at
12:03 AM
July 26, 2009
I'd seen Tauba Auerbach's text- or letter-based paintings before, but I didn't know about her prints. She did a couple of pairs of prints using pixels last year with Berkeley-based Paulson Press. There's a black and white set, 50/50,...
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Posted by greg at
10:21 PM
July 24, 2009
I was researching a project just now, came across this, and then noticed the date:ROBERT SMITHSON, 35, A SCULPTOR, IS DEAD July 24, 1973, Tuesday Page 41, 227 words Robert Smithson, a sculptor, was killed in the crash of a...
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9:41 PM
July 12, 2009
Solicitors for the National Portrait Gallery are apparently threatening legal action against a US Wikipedia user for downloading 3,300 digital photographs of paintings in the UK museum's collection, and then uploading them to Wikipedia. Says Londonist:All of the paintings are...
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9:43 PM
June 29, 2009
ikea x Mari mashup being mashed up, originally uploaded by gregorg. I realized I'd been putting off the actual assembly of my Enzo Mari table, daunted by the impending exactitude and fearful of the commitment of actually screwing all...
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Posted by greg at
10:05 AM
June 24, 2009
VOISIN STANDARD TYPE BIPLANE (1909), originally uploaded by public.resource.org. The Grand Palais was already the best of the three venues in the world capable of accommodating my Satelloon project--a re-creation of NASA's Project Echo (1960), the 100-ft metallic spherical...
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Posted by greg at
12:11 AM
June 10, 2009
I just got my first edition of Untitled (300 x 404, after Untitled (Cowboy), 2003 by Richard Prince) from the printer. It's a 1px = 1mm version, which came out to be 12 x 16 inches, inkjet printed on...
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Posted by greg at
2:59 PM
June 7, 2009
Enzo Mari x Ikea - Joinery, originally uploaded by gregorg. The tile in the guest bathroom in North Carolina was handmade and sun-dried in Mexico, as you can tell by the single square with the artful flaw, a footprint...
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11:00 PM
May 23, 2009
Résultats de la vente 1567, Livres et manuscrits modernes, Lot 73, Enzo Mari PROPOSTA PER UN AUTOPROGETTAZIONE Milan, Galleria Milano, 1974. Cat. in-16 à litalienne, Vendu EUR 497 [artcurial.com]...
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5:09 PM
An update on the Enzo Mari x Ikea autoprogettazione table project: I just finished putting on the second coat of varnish sealer, and now everything's drying and curing in the basement. The picture above was how the wood sat...
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2:07 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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5:01 PM
For the 2002 reissue of his 1974 catalogue, PROPOSTA PER UN'AUTOPROGETTAZIONE , Enzo Mari added "a few technical hints." I love them, especially the quotation marks, even as I prepare to ignore them a little and end up with...
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12:17 AM
April 20, 2009
If you're in Milano--and after all, why wouldn't you be this time of year? It's Il Salone del Mobile, after all--definitely check out Everyday Life Objects Shop, an experimental retail exhibition of sorts organized by Apartamento Magazine and master curator/shopkeep...
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9:59 PM
April 17, 2009
So I'm finally going to make my Enzo Mari autoprogettazione table from Ikea components. A publicist from Ford had offered a Flex station wagon for a road trip, and last weekend, I took them up on it. Which meant...
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12:02 PM
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 own1969 slideshow lecture...
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9:19 PM
April 8, 2009
I didn't realize it at the time, but these two clips about Cary Leibowitz and Joep van Lieshout end up being related. Both artists make work that directly questions the value that the "Art" label imbues to an object....
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10:03 AM
April 7, 2009
In April 2007, I spoke at the University of Utah as part of their Visiting Artist lecture series. I was stoked, partly because Robert Smithson had famously spoken at the UofU, too, in 1969; his lecture and slideshow, "Hotel Palenque,"...
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11:07 AM
March 13, 2009
Dan Fox, an editor at Frieze, has a long but excellent essay? article? exploration? of what it means to be a "professional artist." How should artists behave? How should we discuss art, build venues to show it in, tell people...
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9:33 PM
It seems the Pentagon has gotten wind of my master plan to re-create satelloons, the giant, inflated satellites with the integrated reflective communications capability, and they're trying to beat me to the punch with a $400 million, 450-foot-long, inflated surveillance...
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2:48 PM
February 4, 2009
There's nothing specific on the horizon, but the way things are going, what with all the domes and mirrored domes and Buckminster Fuller and movies and all around here... I mean, you never really know--and by you, I obviously...
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11:19 PM
August 12, 2008
More 1970's video awesomeness from Anton Perich's YouTube channel: this time it's John Chamberlain with a flensing knife in The Dakota. The site is a smallish, park-facing room in writer John Hersey's Dakota apartment. Much of the space is...
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1:19 PM
June 13, 2008
Christie's is calling Andreas Cellarius' Harmonia macrocosmica "PROBABLY THE FINEST CELESTIAL ATLAS EVER PUBLISHED." But then, they would; they have a first edition from 1660 they're hoping will sell for $80-120k next week. Cellarius compiled the celestial maps of...
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8:52 PM
June 11, 2008
When I first discovered satelloons a few months ago, I admit, I was a little disappointed to have fallen so hard for the first generation satelloons of Project Echo. This disappointment kicked in when I saw this photo of...
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3:39 PM
June 8, 2008
In the early 1970's, Enzo Mari suggested using 1-by pine lumber to make his autoprogettazione furniture because it was cheap, standardized, easy to cut, and universally available at the corner hardware store. Now, my local hardware is a Home...
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4:40 PM
May 10, 2008
I wrote a few months ago about making a dining room table following Italian designer and theorist Enzo Mari's 1974 Proposta per un'autoprogettazione, roughly translated as "A Project for self-design." Mari's goal was to effect a critical examination of...
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11:50 PM
March 11, 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; } Géode, originally uploaded by zyber. But darned if it isn't pretty damn close. La Géode...
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9:33 AM
February 16, 2008
Here's a description of the American Pavilion at the Osaka '70 Expo from an online exhibit at Columbia called, "Housing The Spectacle: The Emergence of America's Domed Stadiums":Trying to best R. Buckminister Fuller's Geodesic Dome built for the U.S....
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11:06 AM
February 15, 2008
Of course, I'd only need to recreate The Pepsi Pavilion from Osaka 70 if it didn't exist anymore. Does it? No. As relations between Pepsi and Billy Kluver, the engineer founder of E.A.T., deteriorated over issues of budget and esoteric...
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5:38 PM
Let's get one thing out of the way first: I'm a Diet Coke guy. The very fact that The Pepsi Generation existed in 1970 should blow a hole in their brand's supposed youthy credibility big enough to drive a 90-foot...
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3:53 PM
November 11, 2007
The economic and ecological and aesthetic far-sightedness of Enzo Mari's 1974 Autoprogettazione still blows my mind. Translated variously as "self-projects," and "self-design, self-made," Mari's collection of designs for furniture you could build yourself with just a hammer using cheap,...
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10:42 PM
March 13, 2004
A post about an African movie on the mystery of fatherhood seems like as good an excuse as any to soft-launch a new publishing work-in-progress. Daddy Types, a weblog for new dads, (will) gather advice, gear and resources for thinking...
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1:09 AM
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November 12, 2003
Ignore me. I'm making notes for a seminar at CCNY that Paul Myoda invited me to speak at and screen some of the films. I should probably make a Venn Diagram for this... Production diary of my own films Ideas...
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8:01 AM
July 9, 2003
Don't know how I missed this; in Feb., Gus Van Sant talked to The Onion A.V. Club about making his films. The sequential filming mode from Gerry was used again on Elephant; with a small, light crew, Van Sant...
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10:44 AM
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October 10, 2002
Sent off entries to festivals in Rotterdam and San Jose, even though Rotterdam's short film deadline was last week (I got as close to special dispensation as they're willing to do in these circumstances, pleading and dropping the heavy name...
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9:56 AM
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October 9, 2002
from to Currently prepping to shoot a 1-minute scene for an online collaborative film at Memefeeder.com. I'm doing Scene Three, "Commute," for which the first and last shot of the scene has been provided; what actually happens in the scene...
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1:55 AM
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September 10, 2002
Here is the first completed version of a screenplay for a short short film (and I AM thinking of shooting it in film), called Penguins (at least until I make some progress on the larger project that this would fit...
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1:38 AM
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September 8, 2002
And speaking of composite films by collections of directors, MemeFeeder is a collaborative online movie I am participating in. Based somewhere in the aether (the use of the phrase "first in best dressed" makes me think at least one Australian...
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8:46 AM
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May 13, 2002
Poetry using Google Adwords: One more non-traditional (at least by contemporary standards) medium for creative expression (besides ebay and amazon reviews, which I mentioned last week.) The difference with adwords, of course, is that it costs you money ($15/thousand views...
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9:42 AM
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January 3, 2002
When my grandfather was still farming, the shed behind their house was where he parked his tractor and combine. It's still where spare parts and empty grain bags hang at the ready and where tools fill the old kitchen cabinets....
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9:49 AM
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October 4, 2001
My video equipment's out on loan for a music video, and I've been location scouting in DC for the last few days and haven't been able to work on the movie at all. For cheap thrills, I'm flying out of...
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2:22 AM
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August 14, 2001
[Just ignore the dates. There's so much going on, I'm more than a little behind on the log.] On location, day 3 - We spent most of the day following around Chad, a 32-year old farmer in Mapleton. Along with...
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2:53 AM
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August 8, 2001
On location, day 2 - Email still is spotty, dialup is only AOL. And it's hot as heck (as they say around here in rural Utah). Shooting's going well. We were up and out at 7 yesterday (Tues.) to pick...
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7:10 AM
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August 7, 2001
We're here in Utah, shooting. Got in last night. Two points: 1) Having been on DSL at home for so long, I didn't realize what a pain a dialup connection could be. Right now, I'm logged in through my grandmother's...
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4:06 AM
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August 3, 2001
It's two days before leaving for location shooting, and I've been wrapped up in myriad other responsibilities and projects that won't resolve. The takeaway: I've been ten minutes late all day, and it's made all the difference. (This phenomenon was...
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4:01 AM
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August 1, 2001
First week of shooting is scheduled. We (the crew = Jeff and me, with another guy joining up on location) leave NYC for Salt Lake City next Monday and drive down to Mapleton. (The town has the rockin' URL, Mapleton.org....
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12:39 PM
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