(Continued from this date last year,
"Spiel ist nicht Spielerei. ")
Thursday, December 31, 2015
High Concept
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Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Painting the News
"His paintings weren’t a kind of art.
They seemed to present themselves as
art in essence, immaculately conceived.
They made me feel, precisely, dumb,
with nothing to say."
— Peter Schjeldahl today on the late
Ellsworth Kelly
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul continues …
"He must know somethin',
but don't say nothin'."
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Another Show
On the exit of an historian from the academic
stage on Sunday, December 13, 2015 —
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Inverse Image
The previous post discussed some art related to the
deceptively simple concept of "four colors."
For other related material, see posts that contain a link
to "…mapsys.html."
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Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Four and Four
A passage linked to here on the afternoon of Dec. 6, 2015 —
|
From news.artnet.com, Dec. 16, 2014 — "Kosuth's early roots were in analytical philosophy, and his neons fiddle with that legacy: it's language that considers the nature of language as it describes the world—as it makes meaning and creates objects. So the earliest here, Five Fives (to Donald Judd) , from 1965, is five rows of five words, of the numbers one through to 25 which stack up like bricks in an unfinished wall. Like the nearby phrase "An Object Self-Defined" (Self-Defined Object [green], 1966), or the four colored words of Four Colours Four Words (1966) it's a test of the relationship of a thing to an idea to a word. These texts short-circuit the question of how visual art relates to how we speak about it, dating from a period when modern art had gotten stuck with a certain idea of what modern art should look like, and how it should be talked about." |
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Monday, December 28, 2015
Fuse
"Tell me the news, something I can use
Something red hot to light my fuse"
— Motörhead, "Bad Magic" album
Illustration from Oct. 25, 2013.
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ART WARS Continues
Combining two headlines from this morning’s
New York Times and Washington Post , we have…
Deceptively Simple Geometries
on a Bold Scale
Voilà —
Click image for details.
More generally, see
Boole vs. Galois.
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Mirrors, Mirrors, on the Wall
The previous post quoted Holland Cotter's description of
the late Ellsworth Kelly as one who might have admired
"the anonymous role of the Romanesque church artist."
Work of a less anonymous sort was illustrated today by both
The New York Times and The Washington Post —
The Post 's remarks are of particular interest:
|
Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post , Dec. 28, 2015, “Sculpture for a Large Wall” consisted of 104 anodized aluminum panels, colored red, blue, yellow and black, and laid out on four long rows measuring 65 feet. Each panel seemed different from the next, subtle variations on the parallelogram, and yet together they also suggested a kind of language, or code, as if their shapes, colors and repeating patterns spelled out a basic computer language, or proto-digital message. The space in between the panels, and the shadows they cast on the wall, were also part of the effect, creating a contrast between the material substance of the art, and the cascading visual and mental ideas it conveyed. The piece was playful, and serious; present and absent; material and imaginary; visually bold and intellectually diaphanous. Often, with Kelly, you felt as if he offered up some ideal slice of the world, decontextualized almost to the point of absurdity. A single arc sliced out of a circle; a single perfect rectangle; one bold juxtaposition of color or shape. But when he allowed his work to encompass more complexity, to indulge a rhetoric of repetition, rhythmic contrasts, and multiple self-replicating ideas, it began to feel like language, or narrative. And this was always his best mode. |
Compare and contrast a 2010 work by Josefine Lyche —
Lyche's mirrors-on-the-wall installation is titled
"The 2×2 Case (Diamond Theorem)."
It is based on a smaller illustration of my own.
These variations also, as Kennicott said of Kelly's,
"suggested a kind of language, or code."
This may well be the source of their appeal for Lyche.
For me, however, such suggestiveness is irrelevant to the
significance of the variations in a larger purely geometric
context.
This context is of course quite inaccessible to most art
critics. Steve Martin, however, has a phrase that applies
to both Kelly's and Lyche's installations: "wall power."
See a post of Dec. 15, 2010.
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Sunday, December 27, 2015
Rigorous Imagist*
The death of a well-known artist today suggested
a search for Pythagorean Stone in this journal.
An image from that search, together with a sentence
from his obituary, may serve as a memorial.
From a New York Times obituary
by Holland Cotter tonight —
"The anonymous role of
the Romanesque church artist
remained a model."
* For the title, see the two previous posts.
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Rigorous
Symbol —
Monday, November 7, 2011
|
.
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Saturday, December 26, 2015
Midnight Reflection
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Friday, December 25, 2015
At Play in the Fields
See Fields of Force and recent posts.
From PR Newswire in July 2011 —
Campus Crusade for Christ Adopts New Name: Cru
60-year-old Int’l Ministry Aims to Increase
Relevance and Global Effectiveness
Related material:
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Dark Symbol
Related material:
The previous post (Bright Symbol) and
a post from Wednesday,
December 23, 2015, that links to posts
on Boolean algebra vs. Galois geometry.
"An analogy between mathematics and religion is apposite."
— Harvard Magazine review by Avner Ash of
Mathematics without Apologies
(Princeton University Press, January 18, 2015)
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Thursday, December 24, 2015
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Style
(Continued from December 16, 2015)
The New York Times obituary this evening
of a record producer —
"Mr. Garrett signed Gary Lewis & the Playboys in 1964
after discovering them performing at Disneyland.
(Mr. Lewis is the son of the comedian and actor Jerry Lewis.)
The group’s recording of 'This Diamond Ring' reached the top
of the Billboard singles chart in 1965 and sold more than
a million copies." — Sam Roberts in The New York Times
From a Log24 post on the reported date of Mr. Garrett's death —
"That's it, baby, when you've got it, flaunt it, flaunt it!"
— Zero Mostel
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Class of 64
The previous post dealt with one of the 64 symbols
(in a redesigned format) of the ancient Chinese classic
The I Ching .
For those who prefer to be guided by programmed
responses to alphabetical symbols …
A lyric by Ira Gershwin —
A cinematic "T" —
See also "T for Texas" in this journal and
George Clooney's recent attempt to commercialize
both the space program and the letter Omega:
From a post of May 13, 2015 —
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Splitting Apart
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Analogy
"An analogy between mathematics and religion is apposite."
— Harvard Magazine review by Avner Ash of
Mathematics without Apologies
(Princeton University Press, January 18, 2015)
See as well Analogies in this journal.
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Mark
"Condescension and a certain amount of hostility
used to mark the critical reaction…."
— Emma Brockes on Stephen King in
The Guardian , 21 Sept. 2013
For the mark itself, see Black Swan Venus,
Vonnegut Asterisk, and Branding Iron.
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Tuesday, December 22, 2015
Bell de Jour
This journal on Saturday, Dec. 19 —
|
“By groping toward the light we are made to realize how deep the darkness is around us.” — Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy, Random House, 1973, page 118 |
In memory of Madame Claude, who
reportedly died in Nice December 19:
"There were fairies and spirits."
Amen.
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Goal
Quoted by physics writer Heinz Pagels
at the end of The Cosmic Code :
“For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty… one beauty,
the rhythm of that Wheel….”
— Robinson Jeffers
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Boulevard of Broken Punchlines
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How Deep the Darkness
See Bauhaus remarks on space and Devil's Night Eve.
See also Klein Group and, for the Harvard Graduate
School of Design, an appropriate Calvin Klein label —
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Monday, December 21, 2015
The Eppstein Edit
A Wikipedia edit today by David Eppstein, a professor
at the University of California, Irvine:
See the Fano-plane page before and after the Eppstein edit.
Eppstein deleted my Dec. 6 Fano 3-space image as well as
today's Fano-plane image. He apparently failed to read the
explanatory notes for both the 3-space model and the
2-space model. The research he refers to was original
(in 1979) but has been published for some time now in the
online Encyclopedia of Mathematics, as he could have
discovered by following a link in the notes for the 3-space
model.
For a related recent display of ignorance, see Hint of Reality.
Happy darkest night.
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Oral-Aural
See also the Eve of Devil's Night, 2015 —
Related material from an academic's weblog —
Happy birthday to a star of Tarantino's Yuletide offering.
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ART WARS (continued)
Today in History —
"On December 21, 1937, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'
premiered to a record-breaking audience at the Carthay Circle
Theatre in Los Angeles."
Related material: Today's previous post and the Red Book.
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Slouching Towards Christmas (continued)
Under the Volcano:
A Bottle, a Door, a Box
See also Glory Season (Nov. 12, 2005) and Unique Figure (April 12, 2011).
Update of 11:22 AM —
Today in History —
"On December 21, 1937, 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'
premiered to a record-breaking audience at the Carthay Circle
Theatre in Los Angeles."
Related material: The Red Book.
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