The Black Box in the White Cube: Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux as Machinic Theater
The 1960s and 1970s mark the first time contemporary art opposed modernist art. Formalist strategies that privileged the art object were displaced by discursive, administrative and conceptual approaches that emphasized relationships, and connoisseurship gave way to the demands of the growing research-industrial complex. The concept of creativity partially shifted from a traditional craft function to [...]
Tearing Real Images from Clichés: Edward Burtynsky’s Industrial Landscapes
Such a voyage does not necessarily imply great movements in extension; it becomes immobile, in a room and on a body without organs—an intensive voyage that undoes all the lands for the benefit of the one it is creating. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 319) Edward Burtynsky’s manufactured landscapes – large-format, photographic compositions of industrially-transformed [...]
Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom
Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom at the MIT List Visual Arts Center from February 4 to April 3, 2011 Moving through Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom, the current exhibition at the MIT List Visual Art Center, one experiences a sudden encounter, turning a corner between the entrance space and the large primary space of the [...]
Simulacrum in the Tableaux Vivants of Thomas Demand
How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable: Simulacrum in the Tableaux Vivants of Thomas Demand Friedrich Nietzsche introduces a chapter of Twilight of the Idols entitled “How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable: A History of an Error” with six concise points that purport to overturn Western philosophy by replacing representation with simulacra.[1] [...]
Matthew Barney’s “Hoist” and the Desiring-Production of Space
There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. -Gilles Deleuze Destricted has finally been released on DVD in the U.S. While I have not watched this version, I have previously seen the one produced for the UK market. The only two films in that series worth recommending are [...]
The Wilderness Downtown and The Poetics of Space
I just discovered “The Wilderness Downtown“, an interactive video for Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait,” from their new album Suburbs. The project was created and directed by Chris Milk, who is responsible for a number of interesting videos and commercials, including one my favorites.
Lebbeus Woods on the Ineffable
In a recent blog post, “Terrible Beauty 2: The Ineffable,” Lebbeus Woods laments the unwillingness of architects to design the ineffable, as well as architectural commentators to broach the topic. Woods begins by defining his subject. He writes: The ineffable is sometimes called ‘the beauty beyond expression,’ having to do with the apprehension of the [...]
The Preservation of Banksy
There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which something living comes to harm and finally perishes, whether it is a person or a people or a culture. -Friedrich Nietzsche “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life” Banksy has been on a graffiti tour of the United States [...]
David Lynch’s “Lady Blue Shanghai”
David Lynch’s latest film, “Lady Blue Shanghai”, is a 16-minute advertisement for Dior. Apparently Lynch was given creative license to create any story as long as it featured Marion Cotillard, the bag, a blue rose and Old Shanghai – relatively minor constraints for Lynch. However, it might have been a nice change if Lynch had [...]
Don DeLillo’s Point Omega
Not a movie but a conceptual art piece…like watching the universe die over a period of about seven billion years…I stayed awhile. Because even when something happens, you’re waiting for it to happen. -Richard Elster on 24 Hour Psycho Don DeLillo’s latest novel, Point Omega, like his (perhaps) greatest novel, Underworld, opens by restaging a [...]
The Ethics of Dust as Sheets of the Past
“You may at least earnestly believe, that the presence of the spirit which culminates in your own life, shows itself in dawning, wherever the dust of the earth begins to assume any orderly and lovely state.” -John Ruskin, The Ethics of Dust (XVIII, 346) I recently visited The Ethics of Dust, an experimental approach to [...]
