A remark by New Yorker editor David Remnick
at Princeton on June 3, 2013 —
"Finally, speaking of fabric design. . . ."
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
The Remnick Remark
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Monday, November 3, 2014
The Rhetoric of Abstract Concepts
From a post of June 3, 2013:
New Yorker editor David Remnick at Princeton today
(from a copy of his prepared remarks):
“Finally, speaking of fabric design….”
I prefer Tom and Harold:
Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word —
“I am willing (now that so much has been revealed!)
to predict that in the year 2000, when the Metropolitan
or the Museum of Modern Art puts on the great
retrospective exhibition of American Art 1945-75,
the three artists who will be featured, the three seminal
figures of the era, will be not Pollock, de Kooning, and
Johns-but Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg.
Up on the walls will be huge copy blocks, eight and a half
by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages of
the period … a little ‘fuliginous flatness’ here … a little
‘action painting’ there … and some of that ‘all great art
is about art’ just beyond. Beside them will be small
reproductions of the work of leading illustrators of
the Word from that period….”
Harold Rosenberg in The New Yorker (click to enlarge)—
From Gotay and Isenberg, “The Symplectization of Science,”
Gazette des Mathématiciens 54, 59-79 (1992):
“… what is the origin of the unusual name ‘symplectic’? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure ‘line complex group’ the ‘symplectic group.’
… the adjective ‘symplectic’ means ‘plaited together’ or ‘woven.’
This is wonderfully apt….”
— Steven H. Cullinane,
diamond theorem illustration
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Sunday, November 2, 2014
A Singular Place
"Macy’s Herald Square occupies a singular place
in American retailing." — NY Times today, in print
on page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline:
A Singular Time:
See Remember Me to Herald Square, at noon on
August 21, 2014, and related earlier Log24 posts.
Also on Aug. 21, 2014: from a blog post, 'Tiles,' by
Theo Wright, a British textile designer —
The 24 tile patterns displayed by Wright may be viewed
in their proper mathematical context at …
http://www.diamondspace.net/about.html:
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Monday, June 3, 2013
New Yorker Art
New Yorker editor David Remnick at Princeton today
(from a copy of his prepared remarks):
"Finally, speaking of fabric design…."
I prefer Tom and Harold:
Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word —
"I am willing (now that so much has been revealed!)
to predict that in the year 2000, when the Metropolitan
or the Museum of Modern Art puts on the great
retrospective exhibition of American Art 1945-75,
the three artists who will be featured, the three seminal
figures of the era, will be not Pollock, de Kooning, and
Johns-but Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg.
Up on the walls will be huge copy blocks, eight and a half
by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages of
the period … a little 'fuliginous flatness' here … a little
'action painting' there … and some of that 'all great art
is about art' just beyond. Beside them will be small
reproductions of the work of leading illustrators of
the Word from that period…."
Harold Rosenberg in The New Yorker —
Tom's book seems to be repeating, in 1975, what Harold said better in 1969.
"Finally, speaking of fabric design…."
Note "fabric design" in Rosenberg's words on philistine views of the art of Noland.
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Thursday, April 9, 2015
Translation
From an informative April 7 essay in The Nation —
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In his marvelous book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything , David Bellos demonstrates many of the ways that translation is not only possible but ubiquitous, so thoroughly woven into the fabric of our daily lives—from classrooms to international financial markets, from instruction manuals to poems—that if translation were somehow to become impossible, the world would descend into the zombie apocalypse faster than you can say “je ne sais quoi ." — "Forensic Translation," by Benjamin Paloff |
See also searches in this journal for Core and for Kernel.
See as well Fabric Design and Symplectic.
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Wednesday, November 19, 2014
The Eye/Mind Conflict
Harold Rosenberg, "Art and Words,"
The New Yorker , March 29, 1969. From page 110:
"An advanced painting of this century inevitably gives rise
in the spectator to a conflict between his eye and his mind;
as Thomas Hess has pointed out, the fable of the emperor's
new clothes is echoed at the birth of every modemist art
movement. If work in a new mode is to be accepted, the
eye/mind conflict must be resolved in favor of the mind;
that is, of the language absorbed into the work. Of itself,
the eye is incapable of breaking into the intellectual system
that today distinguishes between objects that are art and
those that are not. Given its primitive function of
discriminating among things in shopping centers and on
highways, the eye will recognize a Noland as a fabric
design, a Judd as a stack of metal bins— until the eye's
outrageous philistinism has been subdued by the drone of
formulas concerning breakthroughs in color, space, and
even optical perception (this, too, unseen by the eye, of
course). It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that paintings
are today apprehended with the ears. Miss Barbara Rose,
once a promoter of striped canvases and aluminum boxes,
confesses that words are essential to the art she favored
when she writes, 'Although the logic of minimal art gained
critical respect, if not admiration, its reductiveness allowed
for a relatively limited art experience.' Recent art criticism
has reversed earlier procedures: instead of deriving principles
from what it sees, it teaches the eye to 'see' principles; the
writings of one of America's influential critics often pivot on
the drama of how he failed to respond to a painting or
sculpture the first few times he saw it but, returning to the
work, penetrated the concept that made it significant and
was then able to appreciate it. To qualify as a member of the
art public, an individual must be tuned to the appropriate
verbal reverberations of objects in art galleries, and his
receptive mechanism must be constantly adjusted to oscillate
to new vocabularies."
New vocabulary illustrated:
Graphic Design and a Symplectic Polarity —
Background: The diamond theorem
and a zero system .
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Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Insane Symmetry
Continued from yesterday's Church Diamond and from Dec. 17's Fare Thee Well —
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The San Francisco Examiner last year
on New Year's Eve — Entertainment
Discover the modern art of Amish quilts By: Leslie Katz 12/31/09 1:00 AM Arts editor
Quilts made by Amish women in Pennsylvania, Household handicrafts and heirlooms made by American women seen as precursors to modern art is one underlying thesis of “Amish Abstractions: Quilts from the Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown,” a provocative exhibit on view at the de Young Museum through June. Curated by Jill D’Alessandro of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the show features about 50 full-size and crib quilts made between 1880 and 1940 in Pennsylvania and the Midwest during what experts consider the apex of Amish quilt-making production. Faith and Stephen Brown, Bay Area residents who began collecting quilts in the 1970s after seeing one in a shop window in Chicago and being bowled over by its bold design, say their continued passion for the quilts as art is in part because they’re so reminiscent of paintings by modern masters like Mark Rothko, Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt and Ellsworth Kelly — but the fabric masterpieces came first. “A happy visual coincidence” is how the Browns and D’Alessandro define the connection, pointing to the brilliance in color theory, sophisticated palettes and complex geometry that characterize both the quilts and paintings. “There’s an insane symmetry to these quilts,” says D’Alessandro…. Read more at the San Francisco Examiner . |
The festive nature of the date of the above item, New Year's Eve, suggests Stephen King's
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
and also a (mis)quotation from a photographer's weblog—
"Art, being bartender, is never drunk."
— Quotation from Peter Viereck misattributed to Randall Jarrell in
Art as Bartender and the Golden Gate.
By a different photographer —
See also…
We may imagine the bartender above played by Louis Sullivan.
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Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Tuesday April 26, 2005
The Ring of Falsehood
In memory of Philip Morrison, bombmaker,
Morrison
Scientific American columnist,
pioneer of the
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
and author of
The Ring of Truth.
From The Measure of a Life:
Does religion play a role in attitudes toward ETIs? Philip Morrison gave his considered opinion… “Well, it might, but I think that it’s just one of the permissive routes; it isn’t an essential factor. My parents were Jewish. Their beliefs were conventional but not very deep. They belonged to the Jewish community; they went to services infrequently, on special occasions—funerals and high holidays”….
Although Sagan did not believe in God, he nevertheless said this about SETI’s importance… “It touches deeply into myth, folklore, religion, mythology; and every human culture in some way or another has wondered about that type of question. It’s one of the most basic questions there is.” In fact, in Sagan’s novel/film Contact, described by Keay Davidson as “one of the most religious science-fiction tales ever written”… Ellie discovers that pi—the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter—is numerically encoded in the cosmos and this is proof that a super-intelligence designed the universe…
The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle—another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.
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See also yesterday's entry Mathematical Style.
Extra credit: |
Friday, May 9, 2003
Friday May 9, 2003
ART WARS:
The Religion of Cubism
In the dome of the Capitol at Washington, DC, a painting depicts The Apotheosis of Washington . Personally, I prefer the following pair of pictures, which might be titled Apotheosis of the Cube.
logo
A New York Times article says Tony Smith's instructions for fabricating Die were as follows:
"a six-foot cube of quarter-inch hot-rolled steel with diagonal internal bracing."
The transparent cube in the upper picture above shows the internal diagonals. The fact that there are four of these may be used to demonstrate the isomorphism of the group of rotations of the cube with the group of permutations on an arbitrary set of four elements. For deeper results, see Diamond Theory.
For an explanation of why our current president might feel that the cube deserves an apotheosis, see the previous entry, "The Rhetoric of Power."
See, too, Nabokov's Transparent Things :
"Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow. This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another. Easy, you know, does it, son."
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Friday May 9, 2003
ART WARS
The Rhetoric of Power:
A meditation for Mental Health Month
From “Secondary Structures,” by Tom Moody, Sculpture Magazine, June 2000:
“By the early ’90s, the perception of Minimalism as a ‘pure’ art untouched by history lay in tatters. The coup de grâce against the movement came not from an artwork, however, but from a text. Shortly after the removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc from New York City’s Federal Plaza, Harvard art historian Anna Chave published ‘Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power’ (Arts Magazine, January 1990), a rousing attack on the boys’ club that stops just short of a full-blown ad hominem rant. Analyzing artworks (Walter de Maria’s aluminum swastika, Morris’s ‘carceral images,’ Flavin’s phallic ‘hot rods’), critical vocabulary (Morris’s use of ‘intimacy’ as a negative, Judd’s incantatory use of the word ‘powerful’), even titles (Frank Stella’s National Socialist-tinged Arbeit Macht Frei and Reichstag), Chave highlights the disturbing undercurrents of hypermasculinity and social control beneath Minimalism’s bland exterior. Seeing it through the eyes of the ordinary viewer, she concludes that ‘what [most] disturbs [the public at large] about Minimalist art may be what disturbs them about their own lives and times, as the face it projects is society’s blankest, steeliest face; the impersonal face of technology, industry and commerce; the unyielding face of the father: a face that is usually far more attractively masked.’ ”
From Maureen Dowd’s New York Times column of June 9, 2002:
“The shape of the government is not as important as the policy of the government. If he makes the policy aggressive and pre-emptive, the president can conduct the war on terror from the National Gallery of Art.”
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From the New York Times, The National Gallery of Art in Washington has just acquired Tony Smith’s first steel sculpture: “Die,” created in 1962 and fabricated in 1968. “It’s a seminal icon of postwar American art,” said Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery. |
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Die (Tony Smith) |
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Bishop Moore |
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From a New York Times obituary, Bishop Dies Paul Moore Jr., the retired Episcopal bishop of New York who for more than a decade was the most formidable liberal Christian voice in the city, died yesterday at home in Greenwich Village. He was 83…. Bishop Moore argued for his agenda in the most Christian of terms, refusing to cede Biblical language to the Christian right. Although he retired as bishop in 1989, he continued to speak out, taking to the pulpit of his former church as recently as March 24, even as illness overtook him, to protest the war in Iraq. “It appears we have two types of religion here,” the bishop said, aiming his sharpest barbs at President Bush. “One is a solitary Texas politician who says, `I talk to Jesus, and I am right.’ The other involves millions of people of all faiths who disagree.” He added: “I think it is terrifying. I believe it will lead to a terrible crack in the whole culture as we have come to know it.”…. [In reference to another question] Bishop Moore later acknowledged that his rhetoric was strong, but added, “In this city you have to speak strongly to be heard.” Paul Moore’s early life does not immediately suggest an affinity for the kinds of social issues that he would later champion…. His grandfather was one of the founders of Bankers Trust. His father was a good friend of Senator Prescott Bush, whose son, George H. W. Bush, and grandson, George W. Bush, would become United States presidents. |
Related material (update of May 12, 2003):
Question:
Which of the two theories of truth in reading (2) above is exemplified by Moore’s March 24 remarks?
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