Painting Photography Painting – Carol Armstrong
June 18, 2018
Skee Mask – Compro
Painting Photography Painting – Carol Armstrong
“A white, male, German artist, deceased in 2010, who came of age in the years of European Pop, Polke was known for his combining of materials and mediums—photographic, digital, textile, draughtsmanly, printerly and painterly—under the larger medium-umbrella of painting. But what does it mean to say that? The answer lies, still, within the institutional definition of painting, as well as in painting’s recent history. Which is to say that “painting” is still considered the primary medium in art museums and art schools, the one under whose heading large, ambitious work is made, and in which what we might call “material thought” of the first order is understood to take place—in which facture and techne are put to the service, not of craft alone or technique per se, but of some kind of thinking. Which also means that hybridity of this kind has now come to be seen as painting’s, rather than photography’s, province.“
Oneohtrix Point Never’s Quest to Make Music That Freaks People Out
June 4, 2018
Oneohtrix Point Never’s Quest to Make Music That Freaks People Out
“Every song is an opportunity to freak somebody out,” Mr. Lopatin said during an interview in one of Empac’s conference rooms while his band got set up.
“Generally my response to seeing something really symmetrical and perfect is … it’s the scene with Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the first ‘Batman,’ the museum scene,” Mr. Lopatin said. “Him just spray-painting the Mona Lisa, and whatever, with his goons. It is really the most satisfying thing you could do, is to just put a little scratch in something that thinks it — that has the arrogance of knowing what it is. But it is sort of funny that I just do that over and over. It’s very bratty.”
At the same time, he added, “It also works well in the inverse. I also like to take chaos and structure it so it has a kind of comprehensible pulsation.”
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Clement Greenberg, et al.
May 12, 2018
What Do We Mean When We Call Art ‘Necessary’?
Modernist Painting – Clement Greenberg
“The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic, and while he withdrew much from its old jurisdiction, logic was left all the more secure in what there remained to it.”
A Crisis of Bigness
May 9, 2018
A Crisis of Bigness (from Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist) – Paul Kingsnorth
Kohr’s claim was that society’s problems were not caused by particular forms of social or economic organisation, but by their size. Socialism, anarchism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called “the human scale”: a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once scaled up to the level of modern states, all systems became oppressors. Changing the system, or the ideology that it claimed inspiration from, would not prevent that oppression – as any number of revolutions have shown – because “the problem is not the thing that is big, but bigness itself”.
Ecology Without Nature – Timothy Morton
April 25, 2018
Ecology Without Nature – Timothy Morton
“We start by thinking that we can “save” something called “the world”
“over there, ” but end up realizing we ourselves are implicated. This is the solution to the beautiful soul syndrome: reframing our field of activity as one for which we ourselves are formally responsible, even guilty. It is a kind of “action,” but a theoretical one.” Dark ecology undermines the naturalness of the stories we tell about how we are involved in nature. It preserves the dark, depressive qualities of life in the shadow of the ecological catastrophe. Instead of whistling in the dark, insisting we’re part of Gaia, why not stay with the darkness?” (p187)