the making of, by greg allen
Though I find Alexey Titarenko’s City of Shadows long-exposure photos of crowds in St. Petersburg a little too melodramatic, Geoff’s comment about them struck a chord:
But I suppose this is what the world would look like if we could see the residue of everyone who’s ever passed through.
Though I’d probably say trace instead of residue.
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 Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe into one exquisitely illustrated volume which was reprinted first in 1661, then after Cellarius’ death in 1708, and in a couple of contemporary re-editions up to and including Taschen’s reproduction.
Plate 10 [above]: CORPORUM COELESTIUM MAGNITUDINES – The sizes of the celestial bodies.
Plate 17 [below]: SOLIS CIRCA ORBEM TERRARUM SPIRALIS REVOLUTIO – A map showing the pre-Copernican theory that seasonal changes were attributable to the sun’s spiral orbit around the earth.
LOT 50: CELLARIUS, Andreas (ca 1596-1665). Harmonia macrocosmica, est. $80,000-120,000, June 17 at Christie’s [christies.com]
There are several scans of Harmonia macrocosmica online: the University of Utah Library has one; and so does The Warnock LIbrary in A’dam. The images above come from scans at the extensive Cellarius site published by R.H. van Gent at the University of Utrecht.
Buy the Taschen reissue of Andreas Cellarius’ landmark 1660 celestial atlas, Harmonia macrocosmica, at Amazon [amazon]
In a guestblogger post on the NY Times’ The Moment, some guy in Berlin named Nick Currie, claims that the Japanese word for Muji addicts is Mujirers.
This is wrong. And by mixing up the L and R, it is wrong in a way that boomerangs nicely on people who poke fun at Japanese speaking English. [Not that I think that’s what Currie, of all people, was doing.]
Mujirer is a transliteration of Mujiraa [ムジラー], which is, in fact, what some people call Muji addicts. [As a 10-year-plus Muji obsessive, I confess I’ve never heard or read this term, but it’s out there, so I’ll go with it.]
The Japanese syllable ラ, is the one that’s used to transliterate both L and R. Sonically, it’s somewhere in between. Where Mujiraa is easy and smooth to say in Japanese, in English, Mujirer sucks. Before this Mujirer thing gets too far, I suggest using comparable Japanese words to come up with a better Roman spelling:
One possibly etymology for Mujiraa [ムジラー} is Gojira [ゴジラ], the Japanese name for Godzilla. Compare that to Mozilla, which is transliterated as mojira [モジラ], and except for the long A at the end of Mujiraa, you could make the case for Mujilla.
But I think there’s a better option. The Japanese transliteration of killer–and killah, for that matter, as in Ghostface–is kiraa [キラー]. This pattern would transliterate Mujiraa as either Mujiller or Mujillah. Either one of those is more accurate and sounds better than Mujirer. Use the former for Muji nerds, and the latter for badass Mujihadin who are smuggling suitcases full of that no-label stuff back from the mothership in Yurakucho on a regular basis.
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 the PAGEOS satelloon being tested before its June 1966 launch. It wasn’t much bigger than Echo I [31m vs 30m; Echo II was 40m]; what set it apart was PAGEOS’ incredible mirror-like skin.
Which, I find out, was by design. PAGEOS, short for PAssive GEOdetic Satellite, was used in the impressive-sounding Worldwide Satellite Triangulation Network, an international collaboration to create a single global characterization of the earth’s surface, shape, and measurements.
Geodesy, the science of measuring and representing the earth, helped identify things like plate tectonics and the equatorial bulge. From what I can tell, the WSTN involved taking pictures of the PAGEOS against identical star fields from different points on the earth’s surface, then backing out precise values for latitude, longitude, and elevation from the photos’ variations.
Stellar geodesy was obsoleted during PAGEOS’ lifetime by lasers [more on that later], but not before the WSTN, under the direction of the Swiss scientist Dr. Hellmut Schmid, was able to calculate the accuracy of locations on the earth’s surface to within 4m. According to Wikipedia, between 1966 and 1974, Schmid’s project, using “all-electronic BC-4 cameras” installed in 46 stations around the free world [the USSR and China were not participating for some reason], produced “some 3000 stellar plates.” Photographs of the stars with a 100-foot-wide metallic sphere–designed to capture and reflect the sun’s light, and placed in an orbit that provided maximum visibility–moving in front of them.
I’d love to see some of these plates, or find any useful reference sources beyond the kind of scattershot, autotranslated Wikipedia articles.
Balloon Satellite [wikipedia]
PAGEOS
Stellar Triangulation
Hellmut Schmid
As the guy married to the officially coolest scientist at NASA, I admit, I took a personal, even a slightly defensive, interest when I read on Gizmodo that
Scientists from NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory have made [magnetic fields] visible as “animated photographs,” using sound-controlled CGI and 3D compositing. It makes the fields, as explained by the scientists, dance in an absolutely gorgeous movie called Magnetic Movie. You don’t want to miss this one, which is the coolest video that you’ll see all week, guaranteed. You can’t argue with a combo of beautiful effects and amazing science.
Of course, I needn’t have worried. Gizmodo’s is just the most concretely inaccurate description of Magnetic Movie, which was produced by Animate Project. The directors are Ruth Jarman & Joe Gerhardt, a visual performance/sound-film artist duo who work as Semiconductor. It was shown last year on Channel 4 in the UK as part of the Animate TV series
But since Gizmodo’s also among the most influential blogs to have covered the film, its errors have been amplified across the web. Now Semiconductor’s aesthetic experiment is being either passed along as actual science or angrily debunked as fraud. These visceral responses based on some combination of ignorance and misinformation are the inadvertent, negative corollary to Semiconductor’s own creative process. From an interview for Animate Project:
RJ: With Magnetic Movie, it’s a short film we’ve made where we’ve interviewed space scientists about a quite specific subject that they study: magnetic fields.
JG: As the scientists would explain their ideas, their science to us, we could only understand the very beginnings of it, the surface of it. And this leads to a very kind of creative imagination of what it is they’re trying to explain to us.
…
RJ: And so we’ve listened to the scientists’ descriptions, which are very elaborate, and then we’ve tried to make our own interpretation of what these descriptions are. And we’ve created visualizations of these descriptions and placed those back within the Space Sciences Lab.
Semiconductor also tapped SSL for unprocessed scientific imagery of solar flares for their 2006 sound-film, Brilliant Noise, “We’re quite interested in things that go unseen or unheard. And a lot of scientists are dealing with these things and revealing these things to us in new ways,” said Jarman. Only the visual seductiveness of the solar imagery stands in sharp contrast to the lab itself, a shabby series of storerooms populated by a bunch of amiable nerds speaking impenetrable nerdspeak.
The irony, if that’s the right word, is that the real unseen and unheard elements in this world are the bureaucratic dishevelment and the people, the ones who amuse themselves by calling planet-dwarfing solar flares “hairy balls.” And while sound-film artists are by definition different, some of the space scientists I know are actually incredulous about the seen and the heard. When you’re dealing with magnetic fields or high energy particles all day, you work to understand the data in the format you have; the fact that they’re “invisible” is irrelevant.
Just the opposite, the inherent subjectivity and limitations of the human visual and audible spectrums actually makes them suspect. I’ve heard X-ray astrophysicists heave exasperated, skeptical sighs over the attention given to the latest spectacular photos from the Hubble telescope which, they point out, contain next to no useful data, but which are colorized to enhance their aesthetic appeal.
See the Magnetic Movie page at Semiconductor’s site [semiconductorfilms.com]
Brilliant Noise is, but Magnetic Movie is not and on Worlds in Flux, the Semiconductor DVD released last year [amazon]
At the moment, the full 4:50 version of Magnetic Movie is on YouTube [youtube]
A guard at the Carnegie International defaced a Vija Celmins painting, Night Sky #2, making a “long vertical gouge” with a key. The conservator calls it a “total loss,” though the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns the 1991 painting, said they would look at the possibility of repairing it.
Though the story only surfaced on Friday in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the incident occurred on May 16th [a Friday]. The guard, an Azerbaijani immigrant named Timur Serebrykov, was confronted about the action and arrested on May 20th [a Tuesday]. He initially denied any wrongdoing, but then he confessed, adding, “I didn’t like the painting.” There were eight Celmins paintings of night skies in the gallery at the time.
Guard charged with ruining museum piece [post-gazette.com via artforum]
Night Sky #2, 1991, Vija Celmins [artic.edu]
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 Depot, and the boards they sell come from New Zealand. So in keeping with the spirit of Mari’s design, I’m going to use components from Ikea furniture kits instead.
The dining table I’m going to make is called either F or EFFE, depending on which plans you look at [Mari’s own autoprogettazione book uses the former; Peter Stamberg’s 1976 blueprint anthology, Instant Furniture, which reproduces four of Mari’s autoprogettazione designs, uses the latter.] It calls for wood in two sizes. The truss and leg structure is made of 1×2 in lengths ranging from 10 1/2″ to 51″. The top calls for four 79-inch 1×8 planks, which actually comes to about 30″ across. [After it’s dried and finished, 1×8 boards are usually 3/4″ x 7 1/2″. I had no idea.]
There turns out to be far fewer useful sources of lumber in Ikea than I originally thought. [The idea hit me when I passed giant warehouse shelves filled with rolled up pine bed slats.] But most of the pine pieces in Ikea furniture are only 1/2-inch thick, too thin to use for underpinning a table.
Though I stuck to pine on principle, there is some solid wood furniture, mostly birch, with some oak. But by far, most of the wood-looking furniture is made from veneered particleboard; who knows what’d happen if you cut it?
I don’t doubt you could make a quintessentially Ikea Mari table by using only these kinds of components; the sleek, plastic-over-sawdust goodness of Ikea’s signature Lack tables and shelves could make for a very conceptually tight mashup, but that’d be the second or third piece I’d make, not the first.
The other major constraint is the length of the boards for the top; only three products have decent width pine boards within range of 79 inches [which is 200cm, if you’re wondering why Mari picked that length]. The 5/8-in. thick sides of the tallest Trofast storage units [above] are either 11 3/4 in. or 17 in. deep, but only 69 in. tall. And some of them have regularly spaced grooves for sliding bins.
[Though it felt like cheating, I did check out readymade tabletops. The Vika Furuskog tabletop comes in pine, and is 78 3/4 in. long, but only 23 5/8 in. wide; too narrow to use, too wide to double up on.]
The new Mandal bed [king-size, $249] comes really close to being the perfect Mari table kit. It has a smoothly sealed headboard and footboard of solid pine, which, on the king size model, are each 78 in. long. The headboard is 23 1/2″ wide, and the footboard is 12″; placed top-to-top, they’d be 35 1/2″ wide, which isn’t too far off. As a bonus, they have both taper on the bottom edge, which would be nice on the underside of the tabletop. [There is a row of pre-drilled holes along the base of each piece, though, which kind of bugs.]
Mari’s table calls for more than 66 linear feet of 1×2 wood underneath. It’s close, but the Mandal’s inner support rails may provide enough wood without buying extra pieces. The siderails are smoothly finished, too, and each 78 in. piece is 3 in. wide on the outside face, tapering to 2 in. wide on the inside face. The unfinished pieces underneath the bed are either 7/8 x 1 3/4 in. [i.e., 1×2], or 1 3/4 square. Four 1 3/4 sq. pieces are 27 1/2 inches long, just 1/4-in. longer than the table leg specs. If more wood is needed, a $20, twin-sized Sultan Lade bed slat offers one of the best options for raw wood. The 15 slats are 2 3/4 x 3/4 x 38, with slightly beveled top corners.
The Mandal has the added benefit of being factory sealed with a smooth acrylic finish. If it’s important to stick close to Mari’s original idea of unfinished wood, the far-and-away winner is the Ivar storage system. Ivar’s component-based, which means the shelves, side units, and corner posts may be all you need to make a table.
One pine top shelf [$19] is 3/4 x 11 3/4 x 82 5/8 inches Cut off the embedded metal brackets from each end, and it’s right at 79 inches. There’s also a vertical piece to cut off [or to not attach in the first place; the shelf I saw didn’t have it at all.] If you use three shelves, the table will be 35 1/4 inches wide, which adds 5+ inches to the horizontal pieces underneath the table, too.
Corner posts are 1 3/4-in. square and filled with drilled holes [$8, $12]. The side units are their own standard dimension–1 3/4 x 1 1/4 inches–which could be pulled apart and used as lumber. But it’s also tempting to use the ladder-like pieces whole. Both parts come in 70 1/4″ and 89″ lengths [$12, $15].
Maybe you could cut down [sic] on the sawing required by just making the table to Ivar’s dimensions instead of Mari’s. Then instead of a lengthwise shelf, you could build a top from shorter 33 x 11 3/4-in. shelves [$6] set crosswise.
I sit here trying to juggle the variables to the best effect: faithfulness to Mari’s original design; faithfulness to his concept, which is not quite the same thing; the inherent “Ikea-ness” of the inputs; the quality and utility of the output; the amount of tweaking, finishing, and labor required. And I repeatedly find myself creating a conceptual justification for the path of least resistance. All conceptual stunts being equal, I’m drawn toward the one that involves the least labor and mess. Which turns out not to be the same as requiring the least time, cost, or effort, as the 8-month over-analysis of making a simple table attests.
Macy’s has installed Jeff Koons’ 53-ft tall Bunny balloon in its Chicago store [f/k/a Marshall Fields] in conjunction with the Koons retrospective at the MCA. Katnp has more Bunny photos on flickr.
“Sex, for Zohan, is like hummus: there is an endless supply, and no occasion on which it could be judged inappropriate.”
– Anachronistic taste, hedonism, international man of mystery, yet AO Scott’s review makes no mention of Austin Powers at all. Is it a Jewish conspiracy, what?
Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up Basel:
Ferreira finally teased the name out of the Englishman, who turned out to be Nicholas Logsdail, founder of Lisson Gallery, at which everyone around me seemed to tense up a bit.
After a brief chat with him, he motioned to step away. Shaking my hand he said, “Pleasure to have met you. I suppose if you’re successful, I’ll see you everywhere, and if you’re not, you’ll disappear.”
— Andrew Berardini
[artforum]
Oh my heck, if you read the Washington Post’s article on black folk in Utah, be sure you read it to the end. I love my people and all, but seriously, it is time to wake up:
When [Rodger] Griffin [an African American HR administrator who moved to Utah from Delaware] was voted secretary of the Utah Correctional Association, the 300 people casting ballots did not lay eyes on him until he rose, expecting the applause showered on every other winner asked to stand. What greeted him instead was “exactly” the silence Cleavon Little encounters in “Blazing Saddles,” when his character, the black sheriff, enters a small Western town.
“I’ve had so many weird experiences like that,” said Griffin. “I went to San Francisco, and people didn’t stare at me. And it made me very uncomfortable, because everyone always stares at me.”
The $19 million deal for Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs has been canceled by the sellers for breach of terms.
The Rockefeller Guest House was a New York anomaly. The Farnsworth House was bought by the architecture collector. The. Collector. Andre Balasz’ Prouve is portable. After counting how many houses Michael Govan’s actually added to the LACMA collection, note that the overpriced Louis Kahn house failed to sell. The Breuer trailer-house deal barely made its reserve. Now with the Kaufmann deal unraveling.
I think we can safely say that the modernist architecture market is not, after all, a seamless extension of the art market. Somebody better tell Neutra’s son that he won’t be getting $140 million for the old office building in Silverlake. Or $3.5 million, for that matter.
Official: $19M Kaufmann House sale ‘terminated’ [via archinect]
Maybe I shouldn’t post about this until I win the auction, but Peter Young’s Folded Mandala paintings are spectacular, an entrancing mix of hippie, psychedelic beauty and rigorously visible process.
Young left the New York art world behind literally while his show was up at Leo Castelli. The Folded Mandala paintings developed after the schism, so on a purely artistic basis, it was the right thing to do.
Career-wise, however, not so much, but then, that was his point. Young’s paintings from the 1960’s-1980’s were the subject of two tantalizing shows last year, at PS1 and at Mitchell Algus. [Algus had the mandalas].
The shows’ favorable reviews apparently tipped off a sharp-eyed estate sale watcher, who picked up this mandala, #27, just a few weeks ago, and is now flipping it at Christie’s. Rather random estimate: $7-9,000.
Update: seriously, what are the odds? I’d read that Young stopped painting grids after visiting Agnes Martin’s studio in the 1960’s, but check out how Young explained the 1966 encounter to the Brooklyn Rail:
Working at Pace as a preparator, Young had the occasion to visit Agnes Martin’s studio. By this point, he had begun making his own grid paintings, a practice he abandoned shortly after his visit. Martin would twice play a pivotal role in his development. On this occasion Martin herself was not present but her paintings were enough to convince him that he had better reconsider his subject. He turned to images of the night sky and the dotting technique that would shortly bring him notoriety.
I notice that Young’s site has many dot works that pre-date his discovery of Martin’s paintings, but this 1967 dot painting, #8, is wonderful, at once abstract and yet evocative. As if it were a photonegative of a sky survey, perhaps.
Weird title for a great review: Kandy-Colored Dot-Flake Streamline Maverick [nyt]
also a nice slideshow [nyt]
Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni was the first to devise a way to visualize the sounds transmitted by solid objects using sand. “He demonstrated the method by sprinkling sand on plates of glass or metal and drawing a bow down their sides to produce a visible vibration pattern called ‘Chladni figures.'”
Chladni published engraved images of these figures in a 1787 portfolio, Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges., a first edition of which is to be auctioned at a sale of The Richard Green Library of Scientific Books, June 17 at Christie’s New York.
CHLADNI, Ernst Florens Friedrich (1756-1827), est. $4,000-6,000 [christies]
Previously, somewhat related: Spatial Vibration: an experiment in visualizing sound by members of Olafur Eliasson Studio
Interesting. The script for one of my favorite Scorsese films, his dark, odd 1985 After Hours, appears to have been heavily lifted from a 1982 performance by Joe Frank, one of my favorite dark, odd radio dramatists. Andrew Hearst has connected the dots, apparently for the first time in print.
Joseph Minion’s script for After Hours began as a screenwriting class project at Columbia. His original title was reportedly Lies, which is the same name as Joe Frank’s piece. The film’s story, the arc, and a whole host of details significant and minor are identical to Frank’s play. According to Hearst and a Salon article on Frank, the writer received a large settlement from the producers, which is certainly the least they could do.
Even more intriguing, though, are Frank’s own references to the plagiarism scandal in a 1986 show titled, “No Show,” which has been performed, aired, or released in 2-hr, 90-min, and 1-hr versions. [There’s mention of a torrent version of the show, but I haven’t been able to find it online.]
In “No Show,” Frank apparently performs phone conversations with Minion, wherein the young screenwriter begs for leniency and help saving his career. Hearst thinks that Minion’s IMDB profile after After Hours is thin, a consequence of being frozen out by the industry. But he still made films with Nicolas Cage and Kathleen Turner, and his current project has Lisa Kudrow attached and producing, so he hasn’t been too blackballed.
Though I’d like it to be true because it’s a perfect, Frank-ian twist, I don’t believe the speculation on the Joe Frank mailing lists that Minion is actually Frank. Though frankly [sic], does Frank-as-Minion actually writing After Hours seem any more implausible today than a SoHo populated by artists and weirdos, yet without cars or ATM’s or more than one place to go at night?
