Yearly Archives: 2012

how life was in 1978

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“To learn that the government – using information that the law now requires be recorded on tape and stored indefinitely by banks, the telephone company, airlines, credit-card companies – can know more about me (my more sociable activities, anyway) than I do myself. If necessary, I could list most of the plane trips I’ve taken; and my old checkbook stubs are in a drawer – somewhere. But I don’t remember whom I telephoned exactly four months ago at 11 a.m., and never will. I don’t think it was Julia.”

(Susan Sontag, “Debriefing,” p. 46 in I, etcetera.)

october 16–october 31

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Books

  • Carmen Laforet, Nada, translated by Edith Grossman
  • René Daumal, Mount Analogue, trans. Roger Shattuck
  • Clancy Martin, How to Sell
  • Chris Ware, Building Stories
  • Benjamin Anastas, An Underachiever’s Diary

Films

  • Closed Vision, directed by Marc’O
  • The Master, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
  • Party Girl, dir. Daisy von Scherler Mayer
  • I Walked with a Zombie, dir. Jacques Tourneur
  • Sedmikrásky (Daisies), dir. Věra Chytilová
  • Irma la Douce, dir. Billy Wilder

the first modern style

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“From this point of view, mannerism is the first modern style, the first which is concerned with a cultural problem and which regards the relationship between tradition and innovation as a problem to be solved by rational means. Tradition is here nothing but a bulwark against the all too violently approaching storms of the unfamiliar, an element which is felt to be a principle of life but also of destruction. It is impossible to understand mannerism if one does not grasp the fact that its imitation of classical models is an escape from the threatening chaos, and that the subjective overstraining of its forms is the expression of the fear that form might fail in the struggle with life and art fade into soulless beauty.”

(Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, trans. Stanley Godman, vol. 2, pp. 100–1.)

inconclusiveness

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“So it comes about that the effect of such a building is not merely not impaired when it is left uncompleted; its appeal and its power are actually increased. The inconclusiveness of the forms, which is characteristic of every dynamic style, gives emphasis to one’s impression of endless, restless movement for which any stationary equilibrium is merely provisional. The modern preference for the unfinished, the sketchy, and the fragmentary has its origin here. Since Gothic days all great art, with the exception of a few short-lived classicist movements, has something fragmentary about it, an inward or outward incompleteness, an unwillingness, whether conscious or unconscious, to utter the last word. There is always something left over for the spectator or the reader to complete. The modern artist shrinks from the last word, because he feels the inadequacy of all words – a feeling which we may say was never experienced by man before Gothic times.”

(Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, trans. Stanley Godman, vol. 1, pp. 242–3.)

october 1–october 15

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Films

  • Faces, directed by John Cassavetes
  • Made in U.S.A., dir. Jean-Luc Godard
  • La decima vittima (The Tenth Victim), dir. Elio Petri
  • Serial Mom, dir. John Waters
  • Mars Attacks, dir. Tim Burton
  • Beetlejuice, dir. Tim Burton
  • Head, dir. Bob Rafelson
  • Harriet Craig, dir. Vincent Sherman

Exhibits

  • “Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan,” Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
  • “Robert Adams: On Any Given Day in Spring and Light Balances,” Matthew Marks
  • “Jackson Pollock & Tony Smith: Sculpture An Exhibition on the Centennial of their Births,” Matthew Marks
  • “Richard Tuttle: Systems, VIII–XII,” Pace
  • “Robert Irwin: Dotting the i’s & Crossing the t’s: Part II,” Pace
  • “Dorothea Rockburne Works 1967–1972,” Craig F. Starr
  • “A Visual Essay on Gutai,” Hauser & Wirth
  • “Gego: Origin and Encounter, Mastering the Space,” Americas Society
  • “Chris Ware: Building Stories,” Adam Baumgold
  • “Duchamp Brothers & Sister,” Francis M. Naumann
  • Gerhard Richter, Marian Goodman
  • “We the People,” Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
  • “Mark Flood: Art Star,” Zack Feuer
  • “Zoe Leonard,” Murray Guy
  • “Ai Weiwei: Fairytale Chairs/New York Photographs,” Carolina Nitsch Project Room
  • “Þórdís Aðalsteinsdóttir: Call on Me with Your Softness,” Stefan Stux Gallery
  • “Leonardo Drew,” Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
  • “Bernini: Sculpting in Clay,” Met

september 16–september 30

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Books

  • Jean-Cristophe Valtat, 03, translated by Mitzi Angel
  • Max Frisch, Montauk, trans. Geoffrey Skelton
  • Italo Calvino, The Watcher and Other Stories, trans. William Weaver & Archibald Colquhoun
  • Elizabeth Smart, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals
  • Sophie Calle, The Address Book, trans. Pauline Baggio
  • Benjamin Anastas, Too Good to Be True

Films

  • Le tombeau d’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik), directed by Chris Marker
  • Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera, dir. Mark Obenhaus
  • Magritte, dir. Adrian Maben
  • Cosmopolis, dir. David Cronenberg
  • Boxing Helena, dir. Jennifer Chambers Lynch

Exhibits

  • “Josef Albers in America: Painting on Paper,” Morgan Library
  • “Robert Wilson/Philip Glass: Einstein on the Beach,” Morgan Library
  • “Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art,” Brooklyn Museum

the story of our life

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“Once upon a time there was a woman who was just like all women. And she married a man who was just like all men. And they had some children who were just like all children. And it rained all day.

The woman had to skewer the hole in the kitchen sink, when it was blocked up.

The man went to the pub every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The other nights he mended his broken bicycle, did the pool coupons, and longed for money and power.

The woman read love stories and longed for things to be different.

The children fought and yelled and played and had scabs on their knees.

In the end they all died.”

(Elizabeth Smart, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals, p. 81.)

a sparkle even if synthetic

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“When Jericho fell, weeping was permitted, and in Babylon it was fashionable to make a memorable moan by the retreating waters. But here you must go to your office, looking spritely, with a sparkle even if synthetic in your eye. For who dares to stand up and say ‘We are weary! O Christ but we are weary!’ ”

(Elizabeth Smart, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals, p. 23.)

the price of books

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“83. When Fust, or Faustus, sold at Paris his first printed bibles as manuscripts, the price of a parchment copy was reduced from four or five hundred to sixty, fifty, and forty crowns. The public was at first pleased with the cheapness, and at length provoked by the discovery of the fraud. (Mattaire, Annal. Typograph. tom. i. p. 12.; first edition).”

(Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. IV, chapter XLIV; p. 802 in volume 2 of the Penguin edition.)

a proposal for reforming congress

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“The Decemvirs had neglected to impart the sanction of Zaleucus, which so long maintained the integrity of his republic. A Locrian who proposed any new law, stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck, and if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.”

(Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. IV, chapter XLI;V pp. 783–4 in volume 2 of the Penguin edition.)