Art Blocks in the previous post —
"… making accessibility and IRL viewership a core component" . . .
From this journal on the above art date — April 6, 2021 —
Tuesday, April 6, 2021
|
Saturday, August 26, 2023
For the Church of Synchronology
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Friday, December 30, 2022
“The ‘Dim Void’: Beckett’s Worstward Ho!”
The title is from . . .
https://booksonthewall.com/blog/samuel-beckett-quote-fail-better/ .
This post was suggested by yesterday's Feast of St. Thomas Becket —
A Beckett-related flashback linked to here yesterday —
"To get inside the systems of this work,
whether LeWitt's or Judd's or Morris's,
is precisely to enter
a world without a center,
a world of substitutions and transpositions
nowhere legitimated by the revelations
of a transcendental subject. This is the strength
of this work, its seriousness, and its claim to modernity."
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Sunday, December 11, 2022
Pawner versus Pawnee
A music producer pawns his current drum device
and acquires a demonic 1970s machine.
Related material —
This post was suggested by a remark made during the filming
of "Edge of Tomorrow," by a Log24 post on the new Nolan film
about Oppenheimer, and by the work of a different Edge:
"… a reality that only my notes can provide."
— Kinbote in Nabokov's novel Pale Fire
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Sunday, January 24, 2021
A Love Shack for Daisy Clover
Provenance — See Lockscreen in this journal.
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Saturday, January 23, 2021
Lockscreen Artspeak Continues.
The same texts appeared in another Windows lockscreen today —
I prefer the beach huts inspiration in "Body Double" (1984) —
Midrash for Hollywood —
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Monday, October 26, 2020
Saturday, August 8, 2020
Under the April Snow
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Thursday, July 4, 2019
From Devil’s Night 2014
And now, General, time presses; and America is in a hurry.
Have you realized that though you may occupy towns and win battles,
you cannot conquer a nation? — The Devil's Disciple
A figure related to Dürer's "magic" square posted during Devil's Night —
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Wednesday, July 3, 2019
Disorder/Order
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Monday, June 10, 2019
Revelations of a Transcendental Subject
(Namely, Plato's ghost)
Background: "Transcendental subject" is Kant's term for, more or less, the self.
"To get inside the systems of this work,
whether LeWitt's or Judd's or Morris's,
is precisely to enter
a world without a center,
a world of substitutions and transpositions
nowhere legitimated by the revelations
of a transcendental subject. This is the strength
of this work, its seriousness, and its claim to modernity."
More from Krauss —
A book by an author with somewhat wider "cultural experience" —
See also "Plato's Diamond" in this journal.
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Saturday, July 14, 2018
Expanding the Spiel
The walkerart.org passage above is from Feb. 17, 2011.
See also this journal on Feb. 17, 2011 —
"… Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness…."
— T. S. Eliot,
Four Quartets
For further details, see Time Fold.
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Saturday, July 7, 2018
Easter Eggs for Rosalind
Three hidden keys open three secret gates
Wherein the errant will be tested for worthy traits
And those with the skill to survive these straits
Will reach The End where the prize awaits
— Ready Player One , by Ernest Cline
Related text —
Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram
aedificabo ecclesiam meam et tibi
dabo claves regni caelorum
Related imagery —
From Steven Spielberg's film "Ready Player One" (2018) —
From this journal on June 17, 2003 —
From The New York Times on Easter night, 2007 —
See as well Rosalind Krauss on LeWitt:
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Sunday, November 19, 2017
Nightmare for Midsummer
In memory of a Brooklyn art figure who reportedly killed himself
on November 9, 2017 —
From an obituary linked to here in a post, "Information from the Middle
of the Night," at 2:02 AM ET on June 23, 2017 —
"In 1976, Ms. DeAk, with Mr. Robinson, Sol LeWitt and
Lucy Lippard, helped found Printed Matter, a publisher
and distributor of artists’ books."
"A version of this article appears in print on June 23, 2017,
on Page B15 of the New York edition with the headline:
Edit DeAk, a Champion of Artists Outside the Mainstream,
Dies at 68."
Related material —
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Saturday, October 14, 2017
Center
"To get inside the systems of this work,
whether LeWitt's or Judd's or Morris's,
is precisely to enter
a world without a center,
a world of substitutions and transpositions
nowhere legitimated by the revelations
of a transcendental subject. This is the strength
of this work, its seriousness, and its claim to modernity."
"The center of
the quaternion group,
Q8 = {1, −1, i, −i, j, −j, k, −k} ,
is {1, −1}."
Illustration from a post of Feb. 3, 2011 —
.
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In Principio:
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Tuesday, June 20, 2017
Truly Tasteless* Tulips
Excerpt from the above story —
"The project could also be a new frontier for Mr. Koons.
'It’s superconceptual,' said Judith Benhamou-Huet,
a French art critic and blogger, in that 'he’s giving
the concept but not the realization.' She compared
the approach to that of Sol LeWitt, who sold wall drawings
that buyers then executed on their own."
See also the previous post and Rota on Beauty.
* A reference to Truly Tasteless Jokes , by Blanche Knott
(Book 1 of 11, Ballantine Books paperback, May 1985, page 50).
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All-Spark Notes
"For years, the AllSpark rested, sitting dormant
like a giant, useless art installation."
— Vinnie Mancuso at Collider.com yesterday
Related material —
Giant, useless art installation —
Sol LeWitt at MASS MoCA. See also LeWitt in this journal.
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Monday, May 9, 2016
Search for the Lost Theorem
The three Solomons of the previous post (LeWitt,
Marcus, and Golomb) suggest the three figures
-1, 0, and 1 … symbols for the three elements
of the Galois field GF(3). This in turn suggests a
Search for The Lost Theorem. Some cross-cultural
context: The First of May, 2010.
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Sunday, May 8, 2016
The Three Solomons
Earlier posts have dealt with Solomon Marcus and Solomon Golomb,
both of whom died this year — Marcus on Saint Patrick's Day, and
Golomb on Orthodox Easter Sunday. This suggests a review of
Solomon LeWitt, who died on Catholic Easter Sunday, 2007.
A quote from LeWitt indicates the depth of the word "conceptual"
in his approach to "conceptual art."
|
From Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective , edited by Gary Garrels, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 376:
THE SQUARE AND THE CUBE "The best that can be said for either the square or the cube is that they are relatively uninteresting in themselves. Being basic representations of two- and three-dimensional form, they lack the expressive force of other more interesting forms and shapes. They are standard and universally recognized, no initiation being required of the viewer; it is immediately evident that a square is a square and a cube a cube. Released from the necessity of being significant in themselves, they can be better used as grammatical devices from which the work may proceed." "Reprinted from Lucy R. Lippard et al ., “Homage to the Square,” Art in America 55, No. 4 (July-August 1967): 54. (LeWitt’s contribution was originally untitled.)" |
See also the Cullinane models of some small Galois spaces —
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Friday, May 16, 2014
Way to Go
Or: Death Edit
Log24 on the reported date of Sturtevant’s death:
Conceptual ArtFiled under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 2:01 AM
Yesterday’s online New York Times has the following quote: “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” For instance, some conceptual art not by LeWitt: Diamond Theory Roulette (Feb. 2, 2014). |
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Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Conceptual Art
Yesterday’s online New York Times has the following quote:
“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”
— Sol LeWitt
For instance, some conceptual art not by LeWitt:
Diamond Theory Roulette (Feb. 2, 2014).
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Thursday, March 7, 2013
Ten Years After
Rock guitarist Alvin Lee, a founder of
the band Ten Years After , died
on March 6, 2013 (Michelangelo's
birthday). In his memory, a figure
from a post Ten Years Before —
Plato's reported motto for his Academy:
"Let no one ignorant of geometry enter."
For visual commentary by an artist ignorant
of geometry, see a work by Sol LeWitt.
For verbal commentary by an art critic ignorant
of geometry, see a review of LeWitt by
Robert Hughes—
"A Beauty Really Bare" (TIME, Feb. 6, 2001).
See also Ten Years Group and Four Gods.
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Thursday, November 29, 2012
Conceptual Art
Quotes from the Bremen site
http://dada.compart-bremen.de/ —
" 'compArt | center of excellence digital art' is a project
at the University of Bremen, Germany. It is dedicated
to research and development in computing, design,
and teaching. It is supported by Rudolf Augstein Stiftung,
the University of Bremen, and Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung."
See also Stiftung in this journal.
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Thursday, February 23, 2012
Minimalist Whirl
See St. Bridget's Cross
on the Web and in this journal.
Related material—
(Click images to enlarge.)
From Tablet magazine on St. Bridget's Day, 2012—
From Tablet magazine today—
Of greater secular interest—
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Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Insane Symmetry
Continued from yesterday's Church Diamond and from Dec. 17's Fare Thee Well —
|
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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Thursday, June 11, 2009
Thursday June 11, 2009
Geometry for Jews
(continued from Michelangelo's birthday, 2003)
"Discuss the geometry underlying the above picture."
Abstraction and the Holocaust (Mark Godfrey, Yale University Press, 2007) describes one approach to such a discussion: Bochner "took a photograph of a new arrangement of blocks, cut it up, reprinted it as a negative, and arranged the four corners in every possible configuration using the serial principles of rotation and reversal to make Sixteen Isomorphs (Negative) of 1967, which he later illustrated alongside works by Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse in his Artforum article 'The Serial Attitude.' [December 1967, pp. 28-33]" Bochner's picture of "every possible configuration"–
Compare with the 24 figures in Frame Tales
(Log24, Nov. 10, 2008) and in Theme and Variations.
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Sunday, November 30, 2008
Sunday November 30, 2008
Abstraction and Faith
For related remarks on abstraction perhaps less easily vulgarized than those of LeWitt, see Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.
|
From Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, edited by Gary Garrels, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 376:
THE SQUARE AND THE CUBE The best that can be said for either the square or the cube is that they are relatively uninteresting in themselves. Being basic representations of two- and three-dimensional form, they lack the expressive force of other more interesting forms and shapes. They are standard and universally recognized, no initiation being required of the viewer; it is immediately evident that a square is a square and a cube a cube. Released from the necessity of being significant in themselves, they can be better used as grammatical devices from which the work may proceed. Reprinted from Lucy R. Lippard et al., "Homage to the Square," Art in America 55, No. 4 (July-August 1967): 54. (LeWitt's contribution was originally untitled.) |
A vulgarized version
of LeWitt's remarks
appears on a webpage of
the National Gallery of Art.
|
Today's Sermon
"Closing the Circle on Abstract Art" On Kirk Varnedoe's National Gallery lectures in 2003 (Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, Sunday, May 18, 2003):
"Varnedoe's lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself."
|
For related remarks on abstraction perhaps less easily vulgarized than those of LeWitt, see Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.
For the relation of this sort of geometry to faith, see All Hallows' Eve, 2006.
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Sunday, April 8, 2007
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Sunday June 26, 2005
Thanks for the Memory
As I write, Susannah McCorkle is singing "Thanks for the Memory."
Below are some photos from the website of Paul Winchell, ventriloquist, inventor, theologian. Winchell died in his sleep at 82 early on Friday, June 24, 2005.
"God is a mathematical equation
beyond our understanding."
beyond our understanding."
Related material:
From Friday's entry —
Cross by Sol LeWitt
(Fifteen Etchings, 1973):
"No bridge reaches God, except one…
God's Bridge: The Cross."
— Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,
quoted in Friday's entry.
This cross may, of course, also
be interpreted as panes of a window
— see Lucy photo above —
or as a plus sign — see "a mathematical
equation beyond our understanding"
in, for instance, Algebraic Geometry,
by Robin Hartshorne. For a theological
citation of Hartshorne's work, see
Midsummer Eve's Dream
(June 23, 1995).
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Friday, May 27, 2005
Friday May 27, 2005
Drama of the Diagonal,
Part Deux
Part Deux
Wednesday’s entry The Turning discussed a work by Roger Cooke. Cooke presents a
“fanciful story (based on Plato’s dialogue Meno).”
The History of Mathematics is the title of the Cooke book.
Associated Press thought for today:
“History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.”
— Henry Kissinger (whose birthday is today)
For Henry Kissinger on his birthday:
a link to Geometry for Jews.
a link to Geometry for Jews.
This link suggests a search for material
on the art of Sol LeWitt, which leads to
an article by Barry Cipra,
The “Sol LeWitt” Puzzle:
A Problem in 16 Squares (ps),
a discussion of a 4×4 array
of square linear designs.
Cipra says that
“If you like, there are three symmetry groups lurking within the LeWitt puzzle: the rotation/reflection group of order 8, a toroidal group of order 16, and an ‘existential’* group of order 16. The first group is the most obvious. The third, once you see it, is also obvious.”
* Jean-Paul Sartre,
Being and Nothingness,
Philosophical Library, 1956
[reference by Cipra]
For another famous group lurking near, if not within, a 4×4 array, click on Kissinger’s birthday link above.
Kissinger’s remark (above) on analogy suggests the following analogy to the previous entry’s (Drama of the Diagonal) figure:
Logos Alogos II:
Horizon
This figure in turn, together with Cipra’s reference to Sartre, suggests the following excerpts (via Amazon.com)–
From Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, 1993 Washington Square Press reprint edition:
| 1. | on Page 51: |
| “He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being. Man is ‘a being of distances.'” | |
| 2. | on Page 154: |
| “… impossible, for the for-itself attained by the realization of the Possible will make itself be as for-itself–that is, with another horizon of possibilities. Hence the constant disappointment which accompanies repletion, the famous: ‘Is it only this?’….” | |
| 3. | on Page 155: |
| “… end of the desires. But the possible repletion appears as a non-positional correlate of the non-thetic self-consciousness on the horizon of the glass-in-the-midst-of-the-world.” | |
| 4. | on Page 158: |
| “… it is in time that my possibilities appear on the horizon of the world which they make mine. If, then, human reality is itself apprehended as temporal….” | |
| 5. | on Page 180: |
| “… else time is an illusion and chronology disguises a strictly logical order of deducibility. If the future is pre-outlined on the horizon of the world, this can be only by a being which is its own future; that is, which is to come….” | |
| 6. | on Page 186: |
| “… It appears on the horizon to announce to me what I am from the standpoint of what I shall be.” | |
| 7. | on Page 332: |
| “… the boat or the yacht to be overtaken, and the entire world (spectators, performance, etc.) which is profiled on the horizon. It is on the common ground of this co-existence that the abrupt revelation of my ‘being-unto-death’….” | |
| 8. | on Page 359: |
| “… eyes as objects which manifest the look. The Other can not even be the object aimed at emptily at the horizon of my being for the Other.” | |
| 9. | on Page 392: |
| “… defending and against which he was leaning as against a wail, suddenly opens fan-wise and becomes the foreground, the welcoming horizon toward which he is fleeing for refuge.” | |
| 10. | on Page 502: |
| “… desires her in so far as this sleep appears on the ground of consciousness. Consciousness therefore remains always at the horizon of the desired body; it makes the meaning and the unity of the body.” |
| 11. | on Page 506: |
| “… itself body in order to appropriate the Other’s body apprehended as an organic totality in situation with consciousness on the horizon— what then is the meaning of desire?” | |
| 12. | on Page 661: |
| “I was already outlining an interpretation of his reply; I transported myself already to the four corners of the horizon, ready to return from there to Pierre in order to understand him.” | |
| 13. | on Page 754: |
| “Thus to the extent that I appear to myself as creating objects by the sole relation of appropriation, these objects are myself. The pen and the pipe, the clothing, the desk, the house– are myself. The totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being. I am what I have. It is I myself which I touch in this cup, in this trinket. This mountain which I climb is myself to the extent that I conquer it; and when I am at its summit, which I have ‘achieved’ at the cost of this same effort, when I attain this magnificent view of the valley and the surrounding peaks, then I am the view; the panorama is myself dilated to the horizon, for it exists only through me, only for me.” |
|
Illustration of the
last horizon remark: |
For more on the horizon, being, and nothingness, see
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