(Painting by Mauro Reggio, Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, from the website of Arte Antica Salamon Gallery. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a painting of this building before, which is somehow surprising.)
Yearly Archives: 2006
the bible on architecture
“A nation that swears by the Bible also finds it an incomparable book of reference. Alas, the explicitness of the Scriptures in matters of architecture is never as disconcerting as when we learn (Genesis IV: 17) that Adam’s son Cain built a city and named it after his son Enoch. A one-family town, delightful as it sounds, is a most extravagant venture and surely was never repeated in the course of history. If it proves anything, it illustrates the breathtaking progress made within a single generation, from the blessed hummingbird existence in well-supplied Paradise to the exasperatingly complicated organism that is a town. Skeptics who dismiss Enoch as a chimera will find more significance in the Ark, particularly in view of the fact that it was commissioned by the Lord Himself and built to His specifications. The question of whether the Ark out to be called a building or a nautical craft is redundant. The Ark had no keel, the keel being an intellectual invention of later days, and we may safely assume that ships were not known as yet, since their existence would have defeated the very purpose of the Flood. When Noah landed on Mount Ararat he was 601 years old, a man past his prime. He preferred to devote the rest of his life to viniculture and left the task of building to his sons. The Bible mentions (Genesis IX: 27) Shem’s huts – probably put together with some of the Ark’s lumber – but the decline in architecture was sealed.”
(Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: a short introduction to non-pedigreed architecture, non-paginated, from the preface.)
endless book to remember
“This concept developed out of Maciunas’ discussions with George Brecht and what Maciunas refers to in several letters as a “Soviet Encyclopedia.” Sometime in the fall of 1962, Brecht wrote to Maciunas about the general plans for the “complete works” series and about his own ideas for projects. In this letter Brecht mentions that he was “interested in assembling an ‘endless’ book, which consists mainly of a set of cards which are added to from time to time . . . [and] has extensions outside itself so that its beginning and end are indeterminate.”59 This idea for a expandable box is later mentioned by Maciunas as being related to “that of Soviet encyclopedia – which means not a static box or encyclopedia but a constantly renewable – dynamic box.”60 The exact origin of this idea of an expandable publication, though, is not as important as the fact that it is another indication of the general development of Fluxus publications away from more traditional notions of art publications.”
59. George Brecht, letter to George Maciunas, nd [ca. Nov./Dec. 1962], p.2. AS. Although the date on this letter is not certain, it was sent after Newsletter No. 4 and prior to the middle of December when Maciunas responded to it.
60. George Maciunas, letter to Nam June Paik, nd [after Jan. 15, 1962], AS.
(Owen Smith, Fluxus: the history of an attitude, p.88 and notes)
two books to track down
Both almost invisible on the Internet:
- Chris Marker’s The Forthright Spirit (Wingate, London, 1951), a translation of Le Cœur net (Paris, 1949), a novel by the film maker. An amazon.co.uk listing here, this site declares that it’s “about two days in the lives of a network of friends & memories, centering around a solitary airmail pilot caught in a rainstorm over the jungles of Vietnam in the aftermath of ‘a major war’. The dust jacket says nothing much about the author other than that he ‘likes radio more than literature, cinema more than radio, and music most of all.'” Dalkey thinks it should be reissued.
- Barbara Moore, CookPot (ReFlux Editions, 1985), cover visible here, something of a Fluxus cookbook, with recipes by La Monte Young & Carolee Schneemann and probably others. Mentioned in Owen F. Smith’s Fluxus: the history of an attitude; evidently this was originally to be published by Fluxus in the 1970s, then wandered over to Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press, and then Moore printed it herself in 1985.
a giant catfish
Walking home from work on Friday night, I came across this giant catfish. It was outside of a little Bangladeshi shop on 73rd Street. As you can see from one of these (very bad) photographs, it weighted 184 pounds; it was probably about five feet long. I asked where it was from and was told it was from Pakistan – evidently flying frozen fish from Pakistan to New York is a very ordinary thing, which astounded me – you would think there would be an easier way to get fish. They wanted $800 for it, so I didn’t buy it.
locus solus industries 012
Belatedly, a shirt for wearing to immigration protests:
Also, one can’t help but note that the Spanish slogan for the marches is much better than the English one (squint to see it in the picture): in English, one is asked to love the abstract “Immigrant NY” while in Spanish we love the more concrete immigrants of New York:
variously noted
Michel Butor is still not dead and was in New York on Friday. He looks like Santa Claus:
(in this picture, his wife is explaining something to him.) Will attempt, with the help of his translators, to get some of his poetry into print in English and possibly an interview – despite his old website, he evidently hates the Internet, good man.
Also, there’s an article in the New York Times about Brian O’Doherty, which mentions, in passing, Aspen 5–6 which he put together, and which seems like, in retrospect, maybe the best single (well, double, but) issue of a magazine ever.
my favorite subway ads
are these ones from some college:
There’s something about the chains of logic evident in these little narratives that I love: the weird defeatism which reminds me so much of the little stories of Robert Walser, like this one:
The Robber
A pretty woman loved a robber. She was rich, gave parties. Of him it can be supposed that he lived in a hut.
She wore loafers as well as high-heel shoes, and she thought well of him because he was brave, and fair match for hundreds. What an interesting affair.
She had a cage full of lions and tigers and tubs full of snakes. What had he got? Countless sins on his conscience. But at least he wasn’t dull. That decided it.
His overcoat was threadbare enough, it’s true, but she went about with unbelievable chic.
They met partly in the mountains, partly at the railway station. He consigned all his loot to her by bank draft.
Sometimes he’d visit her, and on such occasions he wore an impeccable suit. His behavior was always very polite.
He read Stendhal, she read Nietzsche. This is no place for explanations, even if requests come in for an entire year.
She never permitted intimacies. Their relations remained platonic, and rightly so, for otherwise she’d have lost his spirit of enterprise.
He was a Napoleon! And she? A Catherine the Great, perhaps? Not in the least.
She was the proprietor of a grocery who had three children, and our robber was a decent, reasonable young man, who was in love with the little woman, came into her little shop now and then and chatted with her.
The tigers and lions, the polished bootees, dazzling parties, the impeccable suits, the hundreds he was a fair match for, the relationship full of sacrifice, the whistlings, signals, and shaggy hair, are figures of fantasy.
The person who hatched them now glances at the dial and things it is time to get up from his desk and go for a little walk.
(October 1921: Das Tage-Buch. SW 18.)
(p.32 in Robert Walser, Speaking to the Rose: writings 1912–1932, trans. Christopher Middleton.)
never mind the internet, here’s 82nd street
variously
- An effort to put Finnegans Wake into a wiki full of annotations.
- Ron Silliman goes to DC & thinks about aura w/r/t Sandra Day O’Connor and the Air & Space Museum.
- And there’s an opening at Pavel Zoubok tomorrow night for a show of Ray Johnson, May Wilson, Al Hansen, Buster Cleveland, and John Evans, but their website is not so up-to-date. Hopefully they are busy doing other things. Some information here, for the moment. More Al Hansen on show at Andrea Rosen.
- Coming up: an Eva Hesse show at the Drawing Center.