etc. – Page 10 – greg.org

iIkea: Furniture In The Cloud

An aside from Dan Hill’s extended examination of physical retail:

a conversation earlier today, spiraling out of the fact that we have some Ikea furniture (a bed) in a shipping container somewhere, traveling from Australia to Finland, and the thought occurs that Ikea could replace that physical shipping by simply sending a copy of the bed from the Espoo store, and picking up the old one in Sydney. A form of fabrication possible with their already distributed network of components.

On Retail [cityofsound]

Awesome Twitter Juxtaposition Of The Day

These tweets actually do reflect the opinions of greg.org:

I really need a photomurals tag at this point. The Kodak Colorama billboard was installed in the Great Hall of Grand Central Station from 1950 until around 1990, when the station began a long-overdue restoration.
Anyway, 18×60 foot backlit, color transparencies, “the biggest photographs in the world,” one a month for forty freakin’ years. It’s like if Norman Rockwell had a son named Jeff Wall who went into advertising.
According to the Kodak Colorama mini-site, company executives Adolph Stuber and Waldo Potter originally thought to recreate “Kodak’s success with projecting color slides to a staggering size for the 1939 World’s Fair,” but the Great Hall’s sunlight forced them to go the backlit route.

Just as regular photomurals were first printed in wallpaper-like strips, the Colorama transparencies were made of 18-inch [and later 36-in] rolls pieced together witn tape.
Colorama was designed to promote “a critical cause — photography for photography’s sake.” Which means something different to a company that sells cameras and film. The majority of the Colorama pictures were by Kodak staff photographers, who inserted amateur photographers in glorious landscapes.
But not all. There are several Coloramas over the years by Ansel Adams, including the August 1954 panorama of Bryce Canyon, Utah up top. The 1967 Earthrise image above is the only black & white Colorama photo. Apparently, it had been covered a lot immediately after NASA received the transmission from the Lunar Orbiter, and the Colorama appearance kind of leveraged that familiarity.

Contrast that, though, with the 1969 Apollo 11 images, where Kodak engineers rushed to print NASA’s just-released negatives from the moon landing, and ended up scooping Time, Newsweek and Life, to the benefit of the “awed crowds.”
The Kodak Colorama [kodak.com]
Last summer, Kodak donated the Colorama Archive to Eastman House [eastmanhouse.org]

Police Action Painting

Police spraying protesters in Kampala, Uganda, May 10, 2011 [image james akena/reuters via cfr.org]
I haven’t been able to get these images out of my head since Brian Sholis pointed to them; they’re stunning and disturbing at once.
As Time Lightbox’s Ishaan Tharoor put it,

We’re used to protest movements that come in colors–the yellow of people power in the Philippines, Ukraine’s orange, the green of Iran’s brutalized democrats. We’re less accustomed to seeing protests quashed with color. But in Uganda, security forces sprayed opposition leaders and activists with a vivid pink dye–a mark intended both to humiliate dissidents and make it easier for police to nab them.

The first publicized use of dye cannons was in Cape Town, South Africa in 1989, in a fiasco that became known as the Purple Rain Protest [image below via wikipedia] An anti-apartheid demonstrator seized the cannon and turned it on the white-painted buildings in the square, including the National Party headquarters. “The purple shall govern” became a rallying cry for the democracy movement.

In 2008, after Indian police painted protestors purple in Srinagar, Slate’s Explainer put together a concise history of the dye cannon. Which is, well, ironic, considering how aesthetically similar the police painting images are to the Indian Holi Festival, where crowds bombard each other with powdered pigment as part of an equalizing, anarchic celebration of religious joy.
Clearly this is not art; but it is painting. And the sobering political implications and power dynamics depicted in these incredible–even, I hate to say it, beautiful–images makes me question the glib, benign assumptions I hold for that word, that action.
For a long time, I’ve been fascinated by the military definition of ‘painting,” the use of laser sighting and guidance systems to target weapons ranging from guns to missiles. It made me wonder what other seemingly paradoxical contexts “painting” has found its cultured, refined way into. I guess I can add one more to the list.
Color in the midst of protest [time lightbox]

Random Twitter Juxtaposition Of The Day

Sometimes it’s like they’re just having a conversation in my tweetstream without me. The only possible improvement is if the Kiarostami movie had been Ten, but that’s quibbling.

Nice

There sure has been a lot of calling card hoopla these days. It seems like it peaked just as I was moving an old file cabinet, and I found this packet of cards I had made in 1999 in Paris. They were still wrapped in the Hotel Costes stationery I’d used to break the order down and transport it more easily in my luggage.
I’d gotten them made at Calligrane, a small paper store in the Marais that still doesn’t have much of a web presence. I remember it as a little giftier than I like, with elaborate desk sets or something, but still the only place I could find who could do the typewriter-like letterpress cards I was seeking.

Because I did not want engraved cards, and I didn’t want fine paper. I already had business cards like that, and so did all kinds of people. What I needed, I told them, was a replica of the earlier calling cards I had made in 1995.
That’s when I had a business card with three addresses and six phone numbers in two countries on it, it was ugly and ridiculous. All I needed, I figured, was email [gallen@echonyc.com], and since it’s the internet, I really thought the cards should be typed.
I got really lucky, it turns out, because in Vieux Nice, just up the hill from the cathedral, was a little printing and paper studio run by a Scandinavian guy named Peter. He’d salvaged the type from old typewriters to do letterpress with. Wow, those were clean.
I still have one small box of those somewhere. It has Peter’s full name in a stamp on the bottom. I think when I looked him up to order replacements, he was still in Nice, but had switched from printing to sculpture. Gotta track that guy down again.

Pakistani Camo Landscape

These people are not wearing their videoconference faces.
According to the EXIF data, White House photographer Pete Souza took this photo at 4:05 PM, or 1:05 AM Abbottabad Time, five minutes in. They’re watching it as it happened. Which people already know, since it has ~~garnered 455,000 views~~ been blogged and retweeted and facebooked 455,000 times in a matter of hours.
Souza also asks us to “Please note: a classified document seen in this photo has been obscured.” Indeed, there it is. Funny how unobscured it looks at this size.

Let’s take a closer look:

Didn’t I just post something about collecting all the seals and emblems of government agencies?

Because that’s the seal for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency sticking out from underneath there. As you’d expect.

And that corner of landscape does look like the image of left sideyard of OBL’s compound. [image via ogleearth]

And now that you mention it, the pixelated image does look like the front gate area of the compound, just at an as-yet-unacknowledged high resolution. Of course, from here, it also kind of looks like a painting. I’ll get right on that.
Previously: Google Maps & the everchanging Dutch Camo Landscape

The Great Letterhead Of The United States

I’ve written before about the “clean and presumptively powerful” design of various government letterheads I’ve come across in my recent archive diving.

And I must not be doing it right, because my searches for the expansive survey of the history of such official design, and for the comprehensive sourcebook containing the thousands of seals and emblems of various government agencies and offices keep coming up empty.

I mean, Total Information Awareness, right? Somebody must be keeping a list. Anybody? Bueller?
So I’m reduced at the moment to random click trains through Wikipedia, or to search diving in the digitized collections at the National Archives. Not very productive.
Though it has yielded some nice finds. Nothing spectacular, but then, that’s kind of the point of these designs. Up top, the United States Information Agency, once part of the State Department. That’s the director’s office letterhead there, with the smaller seal.

What I really like, in addition to the undesigned design, is how all the rest of the information is handled. Though a zip code does pop up occasionally, there’s almost never a street/mailing address. Or maybe there is; “Department of State comma Washington” would probably get you or your letter there in 2011 as easily as 1898.

But it’s the way information accretes, the way the document functions, that’s kind of cool, too. The tiny instruction for answering and the reference number on the upper left of this 1922 Dept. of Labor letter, for example. And all the stamps! Check out that received stamp: not just the date, but the time, too.
Anyway, I made a little flickr photoset of a few examples I’ve found. I’m looking forward to having my scattered, amateur enthusiasm swamped by the exhaustive review of government logo and letterhead design that some expert has already compiled. And then we can start talking about what I’m looking at this stuff for.
Previously: The Great Letterpress of The United States

Dear pwn0 on Publicsurplus.com, I want to buy your Palomar Sky Survey Prints

Dear pwn0,
How are you? I would like to discuss with you the Palomar Sky Survey prints you bought on publicsurplus.com in 2010.
I know it was a POSS-I set of prints, but from the size of the file cabinet, it looks like it was an early or partial version. And I hear from the folks at the planetarium who sold it that it might have been incomplete.
I have attempted to relay a message via publicsurplus.com itself, but the company does not respond to any non-automated communication attempts.
pwn0. Are those your initials? Perhaps someone knows you, and might relay this message to you? From the other, large, shop-related items you have purchased recently on publicsurplus.com, I am assuming you live in Utah. Which is awesome. My mom lives there, and we’ll be visiting in a few weeks.
Anyway, I’m interested in hearing about that old file cabinet full of obsolete astronomy photos–and then I’m interested in buying it from you. So please drop me an email at greg at greg dot org. Thanks!

One Foot Scale

The curators of NIST’s collection of historical and scientific artifacts have thrown open the racks in hopes of crowdsourcing the origins of some unknown pieces.
On top of the list: this brass one foot scale, in a handy, fitted, velvet-lined travel case, which is obviously the inspiration for Walter de Maria’s High Energy Unit [also here]. Love that thing.

Anyway, case closed. What else ya got, NIST?
One Foot Scales: NIST Digital Collections crowdsourcing initiative [nistdigitalarchives]

Allied To The Human Form

Can I just tell you how awesome the Contra Mundum I – VII lecture compilation is? How did I not buy this before? How did I not fly out to LA in 2009 for these talks, each one of which is greater than the next, and the first was pretty damn near perfect?
Rupert Deese kicked off the lecture series at the Mandrake with his incredible tales of building and documenting and investigating furniture for and by the likes of Donald Judd, Josef Albers, and Gerald Summers.
Oh, how I totally remember seeing those incredible 1929 Gerald Summers single-sheet molded ply chairs at Bergdorf’s in 1990 [above] and having my furniture mind blown. Only I didn’t realize those were the first and only good knock-offs, and I didn’t snap them up for a song when they were changing the display.

But enough about me. The story I have to put here is not mine, or even Deese’s:

When I was at the information desk at the Met, Norma, one of the people there, told me a funny story about Charles and Ray Eames. They were doing a show at the Met and they showed up; it was about two years before Charles died. Ray died ten years later to the day. So the information desk, most of you know, is round, in the middle of the main hall there, and when people come to visit they come up and they say, “The Eameses are here.” So you call up to the department and you say, “The Eameses are here,” and then you politely ask, “While you are waiting for the curator to come down can you please step away from the desk?” So, as the Eameses stepped away from the desk Ray dropped something. So, she did not bend her knees, she just reached down and picked the thing up. And Norma saw her rear end and said, “Oh, my god, that is the plywood seat!” And so she told me that. And, well, the Eames furniture is allied to the human form, I’d say–quickly I would say that–but Judd’s furniture is allied to this. [gesturing to the room] It’s all about the structure around it.

Contra Mundum I – VII, published in Nov. 2010 by Oslo Editions [osloeditions.com via ro/lu]
Alex Klein and Mark Owens explain Contra Mundum in 500 words [artforum.com]
Buy Contra Mundum I-VII online via textfield, $18 [textfield.org]

This Week In Awkward Twitter Juxtapositions

I think Jason’s tuning that one a bit, but still.
I’ve had this one sitting on my desktop for a little while, actually.

Looks Like I Picked The Wrong Week To Give Up Everything

Holy crap, I go away for a long weekend, and what happens?
The death toll in Japan doubles,
The number of meltdowns triples [or something],
We are at war in Libya,
The Death Star has the T-Mobile rebellion caught in a tractor beam,
and Richard Prince somehow lost his open & shut copyright infringement case.
I totally did not see that one coming.
UPDATE: OK, I’ve read through a bunch of the motions, affidavits, and depositions, and the decision [pdf here via aphotoeditor.com], which is basically a flabbergasting shitshow. I’ll probably write a bit more specifically later today, but if it stands, it would have major, sweeping, and stifling effects.
Not only would the current operating assumptions of fair use and transformative use be ratcheted way back, but the contemporary art world would be turned upside down. It would restrict both how artists appropriate, or even refer to, copyrighted work. And it would turn galleries into copyright police, with an affirmative responsibility to clear images, sources, and references for the work they show and sell.
If visual artists and the art market have been operating in some kind of an appropriation bubble, this decision would pop it. Artists would have to adopt the sampling, licensing, and rights clearing practices and infrastructures of the music industry, or the entertainment industry.
But the decision has some glaring omissions and relies rather heavily on almost-20-year-old textbooks and articles from law journals, while ignoring several highly relevant, recent decisions. The most notable ignored precedent is Blanch vs. Koons (2006), which happens to involve another Gagosian artist, and which seemed to set out a workable test of transformative use.
From reading the case materials, including Prince’s detailed descriptions of the making of each of the 29 Canal Zone paintings, it seems obvious to me that Prince and Gagosian were operating under the transformative work/fair use assumptions of Blanch, where changes in scale, medium, context, and color, along with process, editing, collaging, or other process-related elements, are used to identify a transformative work. Judge Batts doesn’t even address process, or any relevance of Blanch to the transformativeness; instead, she makes a blanket assumption that all 29 Prince paintings are infringing because they include Cariou’s Rasta images in some way. It’s really an eye-popping and untenable conclusion.
At the least, the fact that Gagosian the man and Gagosian the gallery were found equally liable for infringing, I am almost certain that this decision won’t go unchallenged. In a series of truly amazing statements, the most shocking is Batt’s cursory finding that Prince, Gagosian, and the gallery all acted in bad faith by not proactively pursuing permission from Cariou to use his images. In other words, operating under the assumption that an artist enjoys a fair use exemption to use or reference a copyrighted element, or that an artist is using copyrighted material in a transformative way, is, on its face, bad faith.
With upwards of $20 million in artwork and unspecified but certain punitive damages pertaining to bad faith actions on the line, there is NO way that Gagosian will let this decision stand.
On the other hand, the photographer crowd is jumping up and down with schadenfreudian glee. [Zaretsky’s rounding up more reactions at The Art Law Blog]

Animal, Vegetable or Minimalism?

Have we considered Damien Hirst’s vitrine sculptures from the Wunderkammer perspective? Because the giant grab-bag auction at Pierre Berge & Associes in Brussels is stuffed [heh] with disturbing taxidermy, eerie medical/scientific specimens, and elaborate butterfly displays. Yes, that is a butterfly skull under glass. If you’re playing any Hirstian drinking games, you are now passed out on the floor.

Or have we considered Olafur Eliasson’s art to be inhabiting a similar historical aesthetic trajectory?

Because seriously, put something in a bell jar, or on a tiny little display stand, and it gets immediately objectified and pretty damn near artified.

If not, then hop to it, Art History. Because right now, I’m too busy planning my show of found conceptualism and ur-Post-Minimalism:
Lot 451: a suite of 9 framed marble samples [est. EUR1300-1500]

Lot 562: a cube-shaped Oryx-skin pouf [est. EUR 300-450]

I guess it’s really a pair: Lot 563: a cube-shaped boar-hide pouf [est. 300-450]
Lot 561: a large monochrome grid made of white wolf skin [est. EUR3000-5000]

I guess it’s really a diptych: Lot 823: a large monochrome grid made of pink flamingo feathers [est. EUR 1500-2000]

And a couple for the back room:
This could be bigger: Lot 504: a sphere [23cm dia.] of polished thuya root burl [est. EUR 150-200]

And this could be a bit less Madison Avenue, but still: Lot 576: a plaque of caravan salt from Mali [est. EUR 1200-1500] [ref. flickr]

I Am An American

I’ve written and been inspired by Ansel Adams’ WWII Japanese-American internment camp photos for years, but inexplicably, I haven’t looked closely at Dorothea Lange’s. Paul has some intriguing examples at Eyeteeth. He also notes that Lange was actually covering the internment process for the War Relocation Authority, which quickly became as complicated as you might imagine. According to the Library of Congress, the US government immediately censored many of Lange’s photos, which tended to highlight the patriotism of the Americans being imprisoned without cause or charge. They weren’t widely seen or known until 1972, when the Whitney organized an exhibition about the internment titled Executive Order 9066.
The caption on this photo, taken in San Francisco in March 1942, when the store was being confiscated and its owner jailed, says the UC graduate nisei had installed the banner outside on Dec. 8, 1941. So on the bright side, in those four heated, panicked months, no one tore it down.
Day of Remembrance – Dorothea Lange’s Japanese Internment Photos [eyeteeth]
Dorothea Lange: Women Come To The Front [loc.gov]