July 10 - August 2, 2008

Everything That Rises A Book of Convergences
Lawrence Weschler
2006 Hardcover
10 cards



I was aware of this book when McSweeney's released it, but at the time I didn't have time to read it. This fall I had time to listen to Weschler's talk from U of M's Penny Stamps lecture series and now by August I've finally finished reading the book. There are four very different sections of this book. I found the first two the most interesting in the connections the essays explore between works of art and other things. One of my favorites is a photo of the moon that Weschler compares to a late Mark Rothko painting. I also appreciate that he also puts forward such observations without trying to tie them up into perfect explanations or lines of influence.



Before this book I've experience synchronicities with material I've read and things in daily life, but this book led to a great one. On page 99 there's a reproduction of Velazquez's Aesop. Unfamiliar with this painting until encountering it here, while reading this book I saw a copy of Aesop's face by John Singer Sargent (a copy of the original Velazquez) at the Ackland Museum of Art. (I also have some photos from when I was younger that look somewhat similar to the photo on page 79 which is just creepy.)

Some excerpts:

15- "What's interesting to me is that history repeats itself, not only in how people arrange themselves but in how the portraits of them stands in relation to them."

22- Joel Meyerowitz: "...one is always carrying a chapbook of images around. ...For a street photographer like myself, randomness is everything, because that's one thin the world has in abundance and I am just passing through it with my share."

33- "The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual world."
-James Agee: "how deep and deft creative intelligence must be to recognize, foresee and make permanent [that world's] best moments."
42- Benjamin: "...There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."
47- Rothko: "The people who weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them."
-Rothko "If you are moved by the color relationships then you miss the point."
-"it draws you out and gives nothing back. Its presence, like that of a black hole, is of such density that you might lose your self there."
-"For those Rothkos do not make a statement; rather, they raise a demand, or more precisely maybe, a question."
-"There is a moment in looking at those paintings when we stop looking at them and they start looking at us- and if we are not careful, if there is not enough of us there, straight through us."
-"Rothko keeps bleeding out of aesthetical categories and into ethical ones. Not, is it beautiful? But rather, how should one lead one's life?"
-p. 46 and p. 49
-"And yet on the moon, there was nothing there...A vast interminable emptiness: a howling airless silence. A vacuum of meaning: absolute silence."
-W.H. Auden: "Out apparatniks will continue making/the usual squalid mess they call History:/all we can pray for is that artists,/chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it."
51- Eisenstein
-footnote- Larry McMurty (Lonesome Dove) (forefathers) "What they dreamed, we live and what they lived we dream."
53- "Funny the way mirrors (time or otherwise, canvas or crystal) are constantly doubling and redoubling possible significations in a vertiginous regress."
-Magritte, La reproduction interdite, 1937
54- Diebenkorn- solitary women
-"Abstraction: to be lost in thought, lost to thought transported out of oneself. But out of oneself toward what?"
57- trains- standard time
-Einstein- theory of relativity- trains- "one of the principal motifs in the exploration of simultaneity"
58- Einstein- day job- Swiss patent office- "mindless drudge work, something to help pay the bills while the real work of genius transpired late at night and around the margins."
-Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money, 1900
-GS: "The meaning of money lies in the fact that it will be given away."
59- "As a tangible item, money is the most ephemeral thing in the external practical world; yet its content is the most stable since it stands as the point of indifference and balance between all other phenomena in the world..."
69- (Edward Snow- Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring) LW- "Has she just turned toward us, Snow asks, by way of entry into the image, or is she just about to turn away?"
-"Capture and release. A punctum."
80- poster tribute to Bruno Schulz
89- (Herb) "He'd be my best reader and I was writing for him."
93 (Vermeer's Lacemaker) "...how everything in it is slightly out of focus, either too close or too far, except for the very thing the girl herself is focusing upon..."
133- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Midnight clock [currently it's 5 minutes to midnight]
159- (heart bumper stickers in 1981) "The phenomenon seemed at once naive and a bit hopeless- another American effort to single yourself out, to differentiate yourself (and your car) from the hordes of apparently identical beings and things. At the same time, it seemed like an attempt to reach out across the asphalt to signal your humanity (through what you hearted) to other souls..."
169- Persian proverb- "Fear those who fear you."
182- Rhonda Roland Shearer wrote in 1999 about Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q.- "Duchamp had subtly superimposed a photo of his own strangely feminine face onto Da Vinci's portrait, before pencilling in the wicked little moustache and goatee."
-decades speculation about Da Vinci superimposing his face on the Mona Lisa
218- Proust
220- every cell in our bodies replaced every 7 years
223- W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn- "The greater the distance, the clearer the view..."
232- Lao-Tzu- "...We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want..."

June 3-18, 2008

Ed Ruscha and Photography
Sylvia Wolf
hardcover
10 cards

I saw Ed Ruscha 8 years ago at the Hirshorn where he gave a performance talk. I was intrigued by this man who spoke of Os and he definitely made me go, "huh?" The Believer interview a few years ago prompted me think about his use of words in new terms. Then luckily a series of his parking lots photographs this winter propelled me headlong into my new found fascination with his work and online talks (here and here) and serendipitously an exhibition of his photographs and books at the Art Institute. This is the catalogue for the exhibition, and a publication that explores a definitive and fascinating part of the artist's career. Sylvia Wolf takes great care in exploring this aspect of Ruscha's work. Ed Ruscha early on was interested in collage, adding yet one more layer to his brilliance.

Selections from the cards:
14- stamp collection
18 and 19- 2 early photographs
21- collage

25-Kurt Schwitters

24- Ross the rooster

25- "Distressing the print gave it added presence, as did pairing it with another like image."

45- photograph with the word WAR

48 and 49- wigs in windows

53- refrigerator photo

55- Yashica camera- "with a twin-lens reflex camera, there is an element of distance that makes taking pictures a private experience- detached from direct eye contact with a subject."

60- (office sign- Zurich) "The names of individuals and businesses etched in metal suggested a permanence of information, unlike the ever-changing plastic signage he knew from Los Angeles."

69- ER on not speaking a foreign language- "...tried to figure out what they meant, based on pure visual analysis."

-French affichistes

70- Cannes

78- The Artist's Shoes

79- "I was making observations but occasionally I got something beyond observation, where I might have uncovered something that I could use later on."

85- El Greco, View and Plan of Toledo, c. 1610

"I had this notion that maybe I could take some pictures of Toledo and somehow, at some point in the future, I could look back and say, 'Look at this. It's the same as it was in El Greco's time."

87- R. A. Bertilli, Continuous Profile of Mussolini, 1933

89- "[Europe] added the weight of history to the whole picture...When I got back, I had more inspiration for American culture."

95- "...art springs directly from life, with all its anguish.."

110

111- Duchamp's retrospective

115- Wallace Berman's Semina

-Rejected ad

122- reaction from gas station attendants

128- California- ER: "...it has to do with a collage in your mind of what this place is all about."

129- Some Los Angeles Apartments- "not the ideal home ownership that was the American dream"

144- Thirty four parking lots ER: "Those patterns and their abstract design quality mean nothing to me. I'll tell you what is more interesting: the oil droppings on the ground."

-"sociological approach to the urban landscape"

163- "The affluence and decay, opportunity and waste reflected in some of Ruscha's books and photographic worlds of the mid- to late 60s is characteristic of a volatile time in American history."

-"By singling out a word in his art, Ruscha makes its meaning ambiguous and invites a broad range of interpretations."

164- Records

-his collection of records- ER: "I wanted to chop a little piece of of my life and put it in a book."

169- Bernd and Hilla Becher

180- Mason Williams, "Creativity was a lifestyle, not something that was a separate activity, linked to any institution or movement."

184- 1970, installation Venice Biennale, Chocolate Room

187- (his books becoming familiar by 1972) "with the first one, people did not know what I was up to. There was genuine doubt in their minds. I liked that, the idea of the question mark..."

190- 5 Girlfriends ER: "going back and retracing steps that you went through as a person...part of a mapping idea."

194- materials

204- ER: "Excuses are what create art for me. I sometimes pick a random subject to make art. It doesn't have to be riveted to my soul as some valuable things. Sometimes it can be something ridiculous, and a lot of time it is."

240- collecting aerial photographs of LA

241- 5 photographs, edges of books, 2001

-"Photography is the medium best-suited to record the present, which, in the end, may be its allure for Ruscha."

-"Ruscha's curiosity about everything, "not just the interesting parts" is what drives him to seek inspiration in both high and low culture"

May 26 - 31, 2008

Famous for Fifteen Minutes
My Years with Andy Warhol
By Ultra Violet
1998, hardcover
9 cards

I picked up this book about Warhol, written by one of his Superstars Ultra Violet. Partly about Warhol and partly about Ultra Violet's own life an experiences, a quote at the beginning points out that all conversations are reconstructed, warning one to not take some of the quotations at their word. While interesting in parts, Ultra Violet was out for publicity, in fast pursuit of the media, and the name dropping gets a bit overwhelming at times. She knew (and dated) lots of people including Dali and Ed Ruscha and while she has some great insights, at other times it seems like she's trying to hard to make sweeping statements about the time.

1- "In death, as in life, Warhol deals in contradictions."
3- "I met the King of Pop years ago. His name was Marcel Duchamp. To me, Andy was the Queen of Pop."
5- (Warhol) "He changed the way we look at the world, arguably the way we look at ourselves."
6- "The primary creation of Warhol was Andy Warhol himself."
7- "Magic was a word Andy gargled with for hours."
8- gimlet eye
-"There is no taking of Polaroids in heaven: the ineffable light precludes it."
11- "Here in the Factory the mirrors have come out of their frames and merged into a total environment of silvery reflections and refractions."
12- "...a wonderland where you step in and out of yourself, where memory and fantasy race into each other at full tilt."
-"Maybe what you're creating is artifact not art."
13- "Mirrors- they have the most memories. I am quoting John Graham."
18- Billy Name- "trained in the spirit of Black Mountain. 'All of us carried Rimbaud under our arms.'"
28- doughnuts
31-33- screening of Blow Job
42- worked in a five and dime store
89- luncheonette
90- "In the Factory, Andy always works with loud rock music on. In rock, repetition is the leitmotif. ... the drum, a replica of the heartbeat."
92- "But for Warhol, photography is not just a helping hand. It is a replacement of the chosen object. The photograph becomes the painting. ... no original painting; from the start, there are multiples."
95- "It amazes me that a country as liberal as the United States allows itself to take on the burden of capital punishment."
96- Red Race Riot- "the repetition produces an action painting."
97- subliminal art- "takes objects people are fascinated by and turns them into art."
98- quadruple impact
-"John Cage uses graffiti sounds in his pieces and Merce Cunningham uses everyday noise in his dances."
102- "The Velvet Underground plays so loud you never hear the music."
103- Nico- "She looks like a girl- but when she sings, it's hard to be sure of her sex."
-"The decibels are so deafening that talking is out of the question. That's why Andy loves it so much."
104- "The Velvet Underground is going with music what Andy is doing with images. They repeat and repeat and repeat the same word or phrase until someone screams out, 'Shut up!'"
105- "Minimal music echoes minimal art."
110- Empire "It is a picture postcard of the building transferred to the screen."
125- Duchamp
John Chamberlain- orange corduroy pants

142- Max's Kansas City

144- Brasserie in the Seagram Building

198- "The moon is no cheap date."

205- "Since the sixties people workshop the rock singer more than the song and the dancer more than the dance, everyone starts at the beaming energy of Edie..."

214- Ed Ruscha

216

221- Polaroid camera

254- "And his camera is still an integral part of his clothing."

273- Fiesta ware

May 14 - 24, 2008

Fischli and Weiss The Way Things Go

Jeremy Millar

2007, hardcover

Part of Afterall's One Work series

18 cards

Fischli and Weiss are amazing. Joel and Amanda told me all about them this past summer after they say an exhibition of their work in Europe. Then MoCAD had their work Questions in the brilliant Words Fail Me exhibition. Their Manifesto is also a great addition to any wall and life. This spring Joel and Amanda saw Fischli and Weiss's The Way Things Go again at the Hirshorn and picked up the DVD version of it (available on Netflix even now). This book focuses on The Way Things Go exploring why and how is fascinates in a way that expands this work in exciting directions. The book starts from observation and experience of the work in museum and people's reactions, a rich terrain upon which to build while never reducing the work's "purposeless purposiveness".

Some brief notes from my cards and reading:

-Opens with a Wittgenstein quote

-Der Lauf der Dinge (The Ways Things Go)

2- clapping

-"Even in our ignorance...it was clear that we had watched something great."

3- "...It was a little frightening, being moved like this..."

4- "what makes it popular also makes it good"

-Laurence Sterne, Tristam Shandy, 1759

-connection to Fischli and Weiss's 1984 Equilibres

8- "Our traditional means of formal analysis seems unable to deal with works, such as those, that are less concerned with external appearance than with 'internal' conceptual coherence."

9- gravity

10- procede- Raymond Roussel

-Roussel, near-neighbor of the Prousts

11- Duchamp- Roussel- The Large Glass

-Robbe-Grillet

-Foucault

12- "As with Fischli and Weiss, a rigorous play is fundamental to Roussel's practice."

-Parmi Les Noirs, 1935- identical phrases- single letter- different meanings

15- Kierkegaard "Boredom is the root of all evil."

17- change

20- anticipation

-"Everywhere things are transformed into actions, nouns become verbs."

21- illustrations by Wiliam Heath Robinson

-Frederick Winslow Taylor

23- Esperanto

24- Futurists

27- "...it seems to be both an anticipation of the birth of time and memory of its end. But where does that place us?"

28- Archytas of Tarentum- 4th c. BCE- treatise on place

29- Focillon- "'a work of art treats space according to its own needs, defines space and even creates such space as may be necessary to it.'"

32- Henri Bergson- Creative Evolution

-the concrete solution

33- Bergson, time

34- waiting- humor

- Creative Evolution- influence on Marcel Proust

36- interventions

37-38- epic and anti-epic

55- "It becomes a part of time not apart from it."

-Bruno Schulz- "Our creators will not be heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise; their characters- without a background. Sometimes, for one gestures, for one word along, we shall make the effort to bring them to life."

57- Bakhtin- laughter and the epic

59- the Incongruity Tradition

-1981 film, The Least Resistance, rat and bear costumes

60- 1979 sausage series

61- At the Carpet Shop- gherkins

66- Peter Fischli, "Operating on two planes at once is part of our practice."

-Koestler- impersonator

67- Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 1968

-machines and perfection

70- The Way Things Go- "...objects do no more than they need to, no more than they are able."

-simple object, technology

-familiar and unexpected

-Bergson, Le Rire, 1900

71- automatism and life

73- "Balance is most beautiful just before it collapses."

75- rigidity

-hesitate

76- pause

-timing, comedy

77-78- Kant- "laughter as 'an affection arising from the strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing.'"

80- "purposeless purposiveness"

81- seeing how it was made

82- "of the smile rather than the laugh"

-"smile of wonder"

83- "This smile is not ours alone, but sits with quiet benevolence on the faces of the artists too... Just as one can hear the smile in the voice of someone talking over the phone, so one can see it in Fischli and Weiss's artworks."

-"one can produce wonder only if one succeeds"

-place of wonder in their practice

84- St. Augustine

107- Fragen (Questions), relationship to Daston and Park Questiones naturals of Adelard of Bath

87- David Weiss, "There is a reason why the Pyramids are famous. When you go there, no matter how many photographs you've seen of them before, you realize that the Pyramids are unique and that you don't understand them..."

-Heidegger

89- the sublime

-"wondrous"

91

92

May 8 - 10, 2008

If You're Feeling Sinister

Scott Plagenhoef

From the fabulous 33 1/3 series http://33third.blogspot.com/

Paperback, 2007

8 cards

I have always been fond of Belle & Sebastian. The characters in the songs tapped into bits about how I felt in high school, the people they sung about were the people I wanted to be friends with, but in a town with one stoplight, they weren't too many like them around. I didn't hear Belle & Sebastian in high school though, if I had, they would have been much like R.E.M. for me. I remember Automatic for the People allowed me to realize there are interesting people out there, they think some of the same things you do, that it can get really interesting out there in the world, and there's lots to discover. I first borrowed B&S cds while working at an ad agency. I enjoyed them but the quest to know more about them didn't grip me. Their new cds came out and I enjoyed them. Then a few years ago something caused me to go back and listen more closely to certain songs, particularly Sinister's "Get Me Away from Here I'm Dying." I saw them a few years ago live in Detroit. I love Belle & Sebastian now, but I still didn't know as much as I should. Thanks to Scott Plagenhoef though now some of that's been filled in. One part of Plagenhoef's book that I don't quite understand however is his stand against the internet and quick, dismissive chatter about bands on it. He waxes on this topic here and there throughout the book yet the back cover says he works for Pitchfork. While I read Pitchfork and it is great for tour news, it is one of the biggest contributors to being quickly dismissive of amazing albums or bands. What I know about Pitchfork and what Plagenhoef writes about seem to be at odds. This is still a good book and I really enjoyed reading it. He's totally right about how we currently listen to music, and the need to really listen, and not just allowing it to become merely background noise. Listening with people is also a lovely activity much like conversing about music.

Selected notes/passages

1- "In November 1996, when Belle & Sebastian released their second album, If You're Feeling Sinister, being a fan of the band took a great deal of patience and work."

3- Madame Cecile Aubrey's Belle & Sebastian

4- "Murdoch had taken to songwriting in order to engage with a world outside of home..."

6- "B & S's cover stars weren't celebrities or cult heroes, they were friends and acquaintances no more glamorous than the people expected to be buying the records."

7- interviews- "...repetitive and dull for the subjects themselves"

8- Murdoch, "The band is really not about me. The interesting things happen when it goes beyond me."

9- playing at offbeat locales- libraries and churches- "...a hearkening back to the time when underground or indie music was something discovered and investigated by the curious rather than something branded in the music press."

10- Murdoch, "I always think that the best songs are the ones I'll write tomorrow..."

11- "They hold hands but 'only as a display of public solidarity.'"

12- imagining and discussion of Tigermilk

15- strong sense of place in B & S songs

17- "Characters hope to belong, to find kindred spirits, but crucially they refused to compromise themselves in the process, as so many of us must throughout adulthood."

-"life is never dull in your dreams"

20- "do something pretty while you can"

31- (The internet's Sinister list) "The entire experience felt like a night at the pub with friends, dissecting and examining culture, art and each other's lives."

-John Phillip Sousa and the phonograph- "Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music."

-"Their fans couldn't investigate the group itself, so they made inroads into each other's lives instead."

32-33- (Sinister list) "a place where people engaged in conversations about each other's thoughts and ideas about music rather than merely their record collections or the contents of theirs external hard drives."

41- rockism

43- Murdoch, "the trumpet should be as important as the guitar, the cellos should be as important as the piano"

47- Malcolm McLaren, "In the end [punk] is about making ugliness beautiful, it's about destroying in order to create something that liberates you from orthodoxy."

47-48-"The modernists and their followers challenged the belief that creative aesthetics wasn't mean to simply reproduce or reflect life and pursue beauty, but to alter and shape society through intellectual pursuits and progressive approaches to technology, science and the arts."

48- Duchamp

-beauty and youth culture- being suspicious

55- "...audience and artist were almost indistinguishable from one another, in look, and, some would sneer, talent."

63- Isobel Campbell- The Bell Jar and Dorothy Parker

71- Murdoch's exploration of emotions through childhood- "is less about nostalgia or escapism as it is exploring core human emotions without the distractions, compromises and obligations of adulthood."

75- "poet laureates for the outcast liberal arts set"

-dedication of "We Rule the School" to a young, smalltown girl on the BBC- "because life isn't easy for a 16 year old in the middle of nowhere."

-discussion of New Pop vs. The Smiths

79- "Murdoch not only wrote his own myths, he also wrote his own apologies as well."

84- laddism vs. wallflower feminism

85- Nick Hornby

- (talking about Murdoch) "In his songs, women take the chances, have sexual fantasies, and are generally the ones either put at risk or rewarded for living active rather than passive lives."

86- freedom to stumble and fall

87- (Murdoch on cd) "...he's merely a vessel for communicating about life in general rather than his life in particular..."

-"sex, religion, friendship, education, family- rarely are any of them finite or defining characteristics. Whatever we think of any of the above shifts depending on the year or day, and in Murdoch's songs you can feel his characters struggle to come to terms with each as well."

88- Jenny Toomey's writing about their ability to "describe a character in a way that represents their complexity."

-Murdoch "No regular rock venue is set up to deal with the subtlety of singing... But the intimacy of someone's bedroom, when they've just got the record home, there is no scope for any bullshit. To absolutely absorb somebody as they listen tot he LP through on their mono Dansette is what I really want."

91- iPod era "more time hearing music...but less time listening to it...typically something we do in isolation"

92- "One's first records are often spoken of as mystical or magical things- you'd study the sleeve, maybe imagine your own parents being young and listening to the music you discover in your home."

97- "Frankly, almost any line on 'Get Me Away'- perhaps the most immediately loveable track on Sinister- is worth quoting."

104- "Online criticism now seems less about communicating ideas than about simply sharing music."

105 "shrinking column inches and fencesitting major media outlets...considers music criticism to be nothing more than a utilitarian tipsheet, to the point that many are suspicious of anyone wanting to communicate ideas about art rather than simply bit-sized opinions. And although there may now be more chatter about music than ever before, there seems to be far less conversation."