November 25 - December 6, 2008

Reena Spaulings
A novel by Bernadette Corporation
paperback, 2004

I have wanted to read this book from the moment I learned of it (you can read the 1st three chapters here). Somehow I never ordered online, but finally it found me. The last copy at the MoCAD bookstore, it was in stock due to the Bernadette Corporation being in the intelligent and captivating exhibition Business as Usual. Reena Spaulings is a fictional character in her 20s (but isn't she all of us), a museum guard, a fashion model, a novel, and subsequently an art gallery and an art dealer. She's not one thing, she's many. And she's rarely still, though despite the fast pace the reader still is able to get inside her head. sometimes.

Some excerpts:
Preface- "If you look at a city, there's no way to see it. One person can never see a city."
-"It has to be informed, imagined, by many people at a time. It's an everyday group hallucination."
-author
3- Reena
4- "She is not happy, not sad, not nothing."
-secrets
-Nobody ever talks in the way it would blow her brains out. Plus she has no desire to interfere with the flows that brought these streams of people, words."
-bangs
7- "Reena could be a Manet, one of these thinking pictures you can't see through, no matter how long you stare at them."
12- "I am often surprised, not to say a little embarrassed, at how blown-away I can be by the street's beauty after a day in the museum."
15- "A body is a living, breathing image that thinks while exposing itself to others."
16- "What if nothing belonged to anybody?"
31- Manet, Young Lady in 1866
34- "The illusion unravels like in a Warhol, leaving something that's not an illusion."
-"Here is observing for those who can no longer see. Or, for those who can't really look into another person's eyes."
53
55- "We move through a city that produces boys and girls and extends itself through them."
57- "...thinking of how the sky is shoved to the periphery of the stage by our monuments and monumental buildings."
61- "I think how can we make a beautiful brushstroke with our existence?"
63- "an economy of essences"
65- "his shirts were always blank"
73- (war) "Anyway, there's no point in discussing such things if we can't find a way of talking about them that's as outrageous as the things themselves."
-dandy- "existence consists in the wearing of clothes"
-abstract painting- "opening a blank space in the texture of institutionally recognized meaning. Few artists leave that void empty for long."
76- hands
78- "It's as if an envelop is falling over this place, sealing us up inside."
-"I feel loads of unspoken words showering down on me. Shooting star sentences that will never be translated."
79- "She's an open book but every turned page presents another cover."
82- "New York is an entire library of books about everything and everybody. Reading here is work, and behind every book-filled room is another room of books and the reading never ends."
-"The city is an open structure that works by calibrating every relationship to its programmed expansion and destruction."
-"The city needs Reena and folds her into its architectures..."
-(NYC) 12 million reader-authors
-"There is no New York story, only an endless effort to make us forget that narration is war..."
-Reena's lighting system
84- "Bedrooms are the site of intimacy. What is more intimate, when shared, than boredom."
85- "Boredom like stupidity contains its own treasures."
93-94- "Was Reena pursuing her desires, or was she inventing them anew with each ring of the cash register."
94- "Its exclusivity lay entirely in the mis-relationship between what it had cost and what it actually was. The price here stood in for any and ever other quality."
95-96- 99 cent store
98- "Shopping together is like traveling: an elaborate way of making the couple visible to itself."
99- "'I'm surprised how much birds sing.'"
133- Voltaire- "That which needs an explanation is not worth an explanation!"
136- "...Capitalism, Empire, whatever...there's a general context that not only controls each situation but, even worse, also tries to ensure that, most of the time, there is no situation."
-"That the desert of these times isn't perceived is only one more proof of the desert."
137- "To live in the world means: to begin with the situation, not to deny it. To give consistency to a situation. To make it real, tangible. Reality is not capitalist."
143- Zizek
154- "Funny how individuality makes you generic."
154-155- "Here is an intellectual body of pure capability, but one that is also open, looking to be determined from outside, ready to re-write everything, to co-write, to be written on..."
158- "Better to eat candy like Andy."
165- "People want to be someone. But the really exciting challenge is to become no one."
174- "Everything emblematic of a being-alive that once was, is not available in a variety of prices and quality."
188- "I wanted to go out and see people and talk about everything I saw."
190- "Nothing ever ends until you let it go."
-"Only the impossible is worth the effort."
200- "because in New York we were sweating the evil they would be photocopying in three years time."
201- "You see? Your love is circular. There is nothing like it. It makes us forget how to change."
202- "I'm trying to wangle my way out of obligations because I need long hours to do nothing, which I consider to be a big part of my work now."
-back cover

August 31 - September 2, 2008

Horses

by Philip Shaw

33 1/3 Books, 2008, paperback

19 cards

The first time I saw Patti Smith was on R.E.M.'s Monster tour in 1995. I was in high school. I didn't know much about her yet but I knew that she was someone to find out more about, much like R.E.M. pointed me towards The Velvet Underground. I don't remember the quote exactly but I recall Michael Stipe saying once how when he heard Horses he realized anyone could sing, that he could sing. R.E.M.'s music and interests gave me a perspective beyond the one-traffic light town I lived in. Because of Horses significance to Stipe, the bits I know about Patti Smith, and the concerts of hers I've seen since, I was excited to see that the 33 1/3 book about her focused on Horses.

Philip Shaw's story of musical discovery and research bears some similarities to mine, though his was guided by Ian Curtis and Joy Division and Patti Smith, who he knew first through the Horses cover. The format and approach for 33 1/3 books varies with the author. Shaw writes about Horses as a fan, as well as the necessary invocation of Rimbaud while also discussing it through other texts. As he says, "...Horses is about what happens when we listen as well as read."

Selections:

3- "...but from Patti Smith I learned that the loss of control, a key word for Ian Curtis, need not lead to a suicidal walk 'upon the edge of escape' (She's Lost Control Again) As Land taught me, the loss of control could lead, equally, to the sea of possibilities."

7- Velvet Underground and Warhol

8- Bob Dylan

9- Robert Mapplethorpe

13- rigor and taking music seriously

-"Elvis Costello line (the attribution is disputed) 'writing about music is like dancing about architecture.'"

15- "unlike other cultural forms, music is where we are most likely to encounter ourselves"

16- "What music offers is the promise of release from the restrictions of everyday life. But such a release is, of course, illusory, and just as ideology works to convince its subjects that they are, in fact, outside ideology, thus rendering itself immune to critique and to the potential for revolt, so music, by concealing its origins in commerce, and by providing a sense of escape from the workaday world, operates as a lure to critical consciousness. To be lost in music, released form the nine to five, is to feel alive, but also, as Sister Sledge adds, to be 'Caught in a trap': for who, once they have experience such freedom, would wish to reflect on it? Might the act of close critical engagement ruin the illusion?"

19- "nothing is more heady in the sense of intoxicating, than the champagne froth of a radical new idea."

22- Benjamin

23- the Situationists

24- "With each song, Smith presents a sort of photographic negative, her characters inhabiting a shadow version of the land of the free."

28- Lacan: "A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is being written, even if it looks like a subject."

-"Patti Smith always distrusted the idea that human beings possess a fixed or stable identity."

29- "Yes, she is a poet, and she is a poem that is written."

-eye patch

30- Rimbaud- self-fashioning

33- Alice in Wonderland

37- Philadelphia Museum of Art

41- Illuminations

44- Piss Factory

-that photograph

49- drawings

52- "death by water"

-"how many tears on your pillow. crocodile or real. watershed."

52- T.S. Eliot

54- "the night stretched like a cloud"

55- (questions) "Perhaps all of these or none of these things."

56- PS: "I had to go to Paris to find myself as an artist, but I came back to New York filled with words and rhythms."

56- close alliance with Lenny Kaye

60- Sam Shepard- PS: Shepard's "whole life moves on rhythms. He's a drummer."

61- street angel

62- "her stress on the act of reading"

63- words, language

66- longing

67- Rimbaud quote- women

70- Artaud

72- Richard Hell: "The art-form of the future is celebrityhood."

76- Gross: "She was a woman who dared to get up on stage and not smile- not aim to please."

77-78- silences

86- Patty Hearst- "I am nobody's million dollar baby."

97- John Cale- mirror quote

98- Horses read as artifact

102- "Again, who is singing here, and to whom?"

106- Lacan, Zizek

121- album "form of memento mori, an artistic meditation on the limits of mortality."

122- Jim Morrison- the task

128- Voltaire- back to England- Louis XV- said to have asked him: 'What did you learn over there?' 'To think, sire.' (penser- to think), to which the King replied, 'Horses?' (panser- to groom horses)"

129- "Horses, then, is about thinking; or rather, it is about allowing oneself to be thought..."

131- Barthes

132- Lacan- child- mirror

July 25 - August 14, 2008

Michel Foucault

This Is Not a Pipe

25th Anniversary edition, 1982, paperback

11 cards

While I'm just starting this summer to read books by Foucault I was surprised that I had not heard about this one before discovering it on a shelf in a DC bookstore. Foucault takes as his subject Magritte's infamous painting as his subject, discussing it with the complexity that it deserves but in a way that doesn't overwhelm. Foucault discusses two pipes (a 1926 drawing, and a 1966 painting) that both contain the phrase "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," however there seem to be even more. It was surprising to me that he didn't mention the 1964 painting at the Art Institute of Chicago (part of the Bergman collection) also containing this phrase but titled "L'Air et la Chanson." It makes me wonder how many additional paintings with this phrase were made by Magritte and their titles. Foucault's comments on Klee and Kandinsky broadens my understanding of elements of both artists' work.

Selected notes:

Translator's Introduction:

2- de Chirico's "The Song of Love"- Magritte claimed to have realized "the ascendancy of poetry of painting.

4- Borges

9- Magritte: "it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say."

Foucault:

15- handwritten script

20- "what misleads us is the inevitability of connecting the text to the drawing"

-calligram

21- "As a sign, the letter permits us to fix words; as line, it lets us give shape to things."

24- "The text must say nothing to this gazing subject who is a viewer, not a reader. As soon as he begins to read, in fact, shape dissipates."

25- "They very things that is both seen and read is hushed in the vision, hidden in the reading."

-"Magritte redistributed the text and the image in space."

33- Klee

34- "The essential point is that resemblance and affirmation cannot be dissociated."

-"the colors that Kandinsky called 'things.'"

36- Magritte: "The titles are chosen in such a way as to keep anyone from assigning my paintings to the familiar region that habitual thought appeals to in order to escape perplexity."

37- "Magritte secretly mines a space he seems to maintain in the old arrangement. But he excavates it with words..."

38- Magritte: "Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life."

40- "the sort of things that cannot be names and that in fact 'name' themselves bear an exact and familiar name. The painting is the converse of a rebus, that chain of shapes so easily recognized as to be immediately identifiable..."

41- "In order to deploy his plastic signs, Klee wove a new space. Magritte allows the old space of representation to rule, but only at the surface...beneath, nothing."

43- resemblance and affirmation

44- "To me it appears that Magritte dissociated similitude from resemblance, and brought the former into play against the latter."

-"Resemblance presupposes a primary reference that prescribes and classes."

-"Resemblance serves representation, which rules over it; similitude serves repetition, which ranges across it."

46- (resemblance)- "...reveals the clearly visible; similitude reveals what recognizable objects, familiar silhouettes hide, prevent from being seen, render invisible."

-"Resemblance makes a unique assertions, always the same: This thing, that thing, yet another thing

46-47- Magritte: "Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it."

-"Thought resembles without similitude...."

47- "Magritte's painting doubtless rests here, where thought in the mode of resemblance and things in relations of similitude have just vertically intersected.

-networks

48- "Who speaks in the statement?"

49- infinite games

51- mirror- Les Liaisons dangereuses

54 "...Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell."

57-58- letters from Magritte to Foucault

57- "Las Meninas is the visible image of Velazquez's invisible thought. Then is the invisible sometimes visible?"

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 26 2008

A Year in the Life of Andy Warhol

Text by David Dalton

Photographs by Dave McCabe

2003, hardcover

4 cards

This book seemed interesting when I first encountered it a few years ago. In spending more time with it this time around I realized the photographs it contains were orginally commissioned by Andy Warhol. Dave McCabe took these photographs, to document Warhol's life for a year. Warhol never published these photos but, as Dalton deftly explains, these photographs seem to have played an important role in Warhol's formation of his public personality in the 1960s. This is a fascinating book which seems to contain some secrets within it still.

Some excerpts:

7 "By 1964 he was developing his new! improved! Andy."

-"I think he studies these photographs and used them to form the image he wanted the world to see."

14- Andy and the Glass House

18-21- Andy in the guest house with David Whitney- Richard Lippold sculpture

39- Andy and Dali- Andy petrified

49- movies- social climbing

-Soap Opera

63- Andy and Bob Rauschenberg playing Monopoly

101-102

108- Jim Rosenquist's F-111

109- JR: "I think art is about identifying a condition"

138- "To walk down the street with Andy was an exhilarating experience. It was as if you'd just been handed a pair of special glasses that allowed you to see a secret and compelling world..."

-"Reality in the USA was truly hallucinatory."

-"Everything ins the USA was designed to be looked at..."

-"...Andy let you see the world through eyes you'd not used yet."

139-143- diner!

150- "The Supremes were there chaperoned by their mothers."

174- dancing at openings

182- Jonas Mekas

188- Happenings

152- silkscreen never made

206- "The famous were America's royalty."

217- Billy Name- dj- Motown

May 16, 2008

All Tomorrow's Parties Billy Names' Photographs of Andy Warhol's Factory

Hardcover, 1997

3 cards

Billy Name is someone you might not know by name, but it was he who covered Warhol's first factory in silver, and he who took many of the iconic photographs. While his black and white photographs are well known (one of a tattoo was the cover for the Velvet Underground album White Light, White Heat is just one of many) this book presents his color photographs.

Naming the Colours essay by Dave Hickey

10- (Name's black and white photographs)- "instant classics"- "they have subsequently become exactly what Warhol intended them to be: official icons in the public imagination, ravishingly seductive advertisements for the corporate culture of the factory...these photographs get it exactly wrong themselves, as advertisements."

12- (end of 1968)- "the self-conscious sense of living in the midst of history and very near the end of it"

-Max's, speed freaks scribbling in notebooks

13 "Because colour is vision's amphetamine...the attribute of seeing that kills history, abolishes its aura and delivers us into the embodied present."

"Thus, in an image, it can deliver us, insofar as an image can, not into the grisaille tissue of the past, but into the flash and differentiation of an alternative present/"

14- "Because colours gives us more than characters in a setting, it gives us people with spaces between them."

A Talk with Billy Name, Collier Schorr

17- Meeting Andy

18- "It was almost as if the Factory became a big box camera- you'd walk into it, expose yourself and develop yourself."

19- "The Factory was a very functional place- the only qualifications were that you had some specialty, some beauty or some talent."

20- "We never bought anything. The funny thing is, you didn't need money then."

21- "I'm very much interested in portraiture, not only of people but of space, or people in spaces. I was interested in using angles to make the structure evident."

21- listening to Motown music at the Factory

24- "Film began to turn into art and that's what Andy became fascinated with."

26- Velvet Underground cover

April 27 - May 8, 2008

Andy Warhol

Blow Job

Peter Gidal

Afterall Books, 2008

Part of their brilliant One Work series http://www.afterall.org/books_onework.html

11 cards

I think we're really getting into an interesting period of Warhol scholarship and this book is just one step in that direction. Warhol left a lot behind. There is a lot to deal with but in what has been dealt with, much has been overlooked. This type of focused approach to a single work is the best type of contribution to writing on Warhol since differences and minute details are integral to Warhol's practice. He left many clues but many remain to be found or deciphered to the extent of their full complexity. Gidal sets out a careful and thoughtful analysis of Blow Job while offering exciting jumps to connections between the film and Velazquez's Luncheon or Three Men at a Table as well as Duchamp's Large Glass. I love the MCA bookstore in Chicago and I was particularly excited to see that they had this new release.

Select notes/passages of interest:

1- Warhol's classic figment quote

-exploration of duration

-projected speed, flares, edge numbers, time for reel breaks

4- "...his courage in being prepared to act without denying his sexuality was no mean thing, then or now."

5- four agents in the space

7- Gertrude Stein

8- "no less real for not being seen"

-"The real world is appropriated by the film..."

11- "unendurable durations"

12- the paradox

14- Proust

15- "...not about time regained but time lost. 'In search of...' means not that you find it but that you don't."

18- "existing only in its absence"

19- Velazquez

22- "making nothing materially present"

24- mirror

26- Warhol's time

-"The fear of death doesn't need more than a moment."

-shadow

28- shadows "understanding the state of suspended or arrested recognition"

"Warhol's works are emphatically not iconic"

31- real time during the viewing

32- Proust again

-"extreme light can create an absence of image"

36- "We are unable to lose ourselves in the series of acts represented....'realism' of another kind."

37- machine and body

-"In that re-viewing, the repetition becomes a memory."

38- palimpsest

-"the taking up of time, its being filled, is what obliterates it"

40

-"Thus the subject of the film is never just what you 'see.'"

-silkscreens and squeegee marks

41- Warhol titles

45- boredom

46 (Warhol film) "you are left bereft"

59 Henri Bergson (via Bertrand Russell)

60- the subject and where it exists

61- adequateness and language

61-63-discussion of leaders

63- The Chelsea Girls- silent screen, indexical

64- Empire- "the skyscraper can be both itself and an image of a stable structure and fragile evanescence."

-printing of Sleep

-discussion of time and death towards the bottom of the page

65- "'You don't have sex with a name.'"

66- "So what."

69- time held- Suicide silkscreen

71- "In Warhol's films, meaning is, in the end, always determined by production not consumption. And in the beginning too."

73- Duchamp's Large Glass

73-74- concept of Marcel Duchamp

75- stillness

76- uttering a word- "no sooner spoken than unspoken"

78- moments only

March 22 - 23, 2008

The Velvet Years 1965-67 Warhol's Factory

Photographs by Stephen Short and Essay by Lynne Tillman

Paperback, 1995

15 cards

I have read a number of books about Andy Warhol and this book caught me by surprise. First, because I have not come across it before, and second, because of the writing and interviews. Lynne Tillman writes about Warhol thoughtful, insightful and revealing ways, with sentences oscillating between the poetic and profound, "His scavenging was emphatic, his 'lacks' not absences but presences in his work.." to forthright statements with deep resonance, "If anyone showed how weird the idea of taste is, it was Warhol." Chuck Wein plays and big role in the recent film Factory Girl, but this book shows how the Cambridge crowd he and Edie were part of fit into the Factory. This book also dispels myths of the factory. It was a quite place, sometimes, as well as rarely the site of parties.

A few excerpts from the cards:

(The two mentioned above are from page 11)

-11- "His work is difficult though, if one lets it be, just because it can easily be taken at face value. It questions what one is looking at merely by being on the wall, being looked at by you."

-(soup cans) "Even if they no longer shock, they still may surprise."

-12 "Warhol's own system relied on making a lot of a little."

- dialectical manner

-13- something to argue about

-mixer

-14 palimpsest

-15 image- not being a tortured, isolated artist

"There are those who aren't interested in Warhol's work, don't get the picture, never did or will, fine or see nothing, no qualities, in it, none at all in him."

-L. Woolf's defense of Virgina Woolf

-hyphens

"The frame is an embrace, a lover's decision, and like any embrace, something's included, something's excluded."

-17- photographs

-18 "Death is the frame with the toughest grip, with an embrace for everyone."

-memory and history

-Barthes

"No one is ordinary or everybody is, profoundly."

-29- Gordon Baldwin, "...people just improvising, what their lives are, and no one's quite sure what's expected of them."

-29-20 napkin conversations

-30 "Gee Whiz"

-film Lunch

-45- Gerard Malanga, "A people collector. His being quiet added to it."

-63- John Cale- Piero Heliczer

-sense of humor

-64- "A doer, always a doer."

-75- Donald Lyons, quoting Oscar Wilde, "I put my genius into my life, my talent into my art."

-dandyism

-83 D Lyons about Nico, mentions she was learning Bob Dylan's "I'll Keep it with Mine"

-89- Sterling Morrison, "Rather than put it off till next month, he just did it."

-93- Barbara Rubin, Bob Dylan, saving his life, motorcycle accident

-99- D. Lyons, "The Velvets were suburban. Except John."

-108- Susan Bottomly/International Velvet, "I think we cam with our own show."

-115- Jonas Mekas, "As you look at the work of any unrepeatable artist, anything that is unique like that cannot be repeated by anybody else. You cannot repeat Eisenstein or Dreyer."