December 9th, 2012
You got to admire these two artists. In 2001 and 2002 renowned German artist Rosemarie Trockel produced five videos called Manus Spleen I–V. The films emerge around Manu Burghart, who is a close friend and has been an inspiration throughout the last decade. In autumn 2002 Manu and I went to see the opening at the Dia Art Foundation in New York. Am deeply grateful to have both grande dames in my life.
by Jeremy Denk
December 7th, 2012
Via The New Republic: "A score has nothing to do with paper, or e-ink; it can appear on an iPad or on parchment. A score is at once a book and a book waiting to be written. Perhaps a golden age of music was born with the score and died with the recording. If you are listening to a recording, you are hearing someone’s truth about Bach’s truth, their idea of Bach’s truth. The wonderment is that you may hear truths you never suspected, possibilities you never dreamed—but still you are buying another person’s truth. So I say, in all seriousness, if you don’t play an instrument, take one up; take lessons; make the time. After a while, set some Bach on the music stand and play it yourself. Look at the notes on the page, envision the relationships between them. Don’t just press play. Don’t be afraid; we all live too much in fear and awe of the perfectly edited recordings around us. No matter how halting, how un-transcendent, your technique is, I promise that it may be the best Bach you will ever hear."
Larry Hagman (1931-2012)
November 23rd, 2012
Via Internation Movie Data Base: "[referring to his choice of final resting place for his ashes] I want to be spread over a field and have marijuana and wheat planted and harvest it in a couple of years and then have a big marijuana cake, enough for 200 or 300 people. People eat a little of Larry."
by Tehching Hsieh
November 18th, 2012
From The New York Times: "Art takes total commitment, but few artists maintain it around the clock. An exception is the Taiwanese-born performance artist Tehching Hsieh (pronounced dur-ching shay), specifically, the five, grueling one-year pieces he executed, mostly in New York, from 1978 to 1986. Their subject and material was time itself.
The Museum of Modern Art is devoting a small, gripping exhibition to the documentation of Cage Piece (1978-79), the first of Mr. Hsieh’s One Year Performances. It entailed spending a year in near-solitary confinement in a cell-like cage doing absolutely nothing. The show makes an altogether apt debut for the Modern’s new series of project exhibitions devoted to performance art. Few pieces communicate the medium’s potential and its demands in such a basic, resonant way. (…)
What’s most tangible about the Cage Piece is the almost palpable immensity and emptiness of time, nothing but time, of life as the filling of time. Mr. Hsieh carved a notch for each day in the wall. (He didn’t consider it writing.) He said he spent the time staying alive and thinking about his art."
September 23rd, 2012
Via Dangerous Minds: "In an interview with Playboy in 1968, Kubrick gave an answer on the meaning and purpose of human existence, which could almost be a description of 2001:
'The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism – and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong – and lucky – he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death – however mutable man may be able to make them – our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.'
The documentary 2001: The Making of a Myth is introduced by James Cameron, who looks at the stories behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, examining why the film has endured and why it still generates such interest. With contributions form Arthur C. Clarke, Keir Dullea, Elvis Mitchell, and Douglas Trumbull."
Via Dangerous Minds: "If you or anyone you know insists that they know what Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey is all about, they are of course, bluffing, because no one really knows what that film is all about. There was, of course, one exception, and that would be the auteur himself. So what did Kubrick have to say about the “plot” and meaning behind his iconic film?
From a 1969 interview with Kubrick by Joseph Gelmis:
'You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man’s first baby steps into the universe—a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there’s a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system.
When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he’s placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man’s evolutionary destiny.
That is what happens on the film’s simplest level. Since an encounter with an advanced interstellar intelligence would be incomprehensible within our present earthbound frames of reference, reactions to it will have elements of philosophy and metaphysics that have nothing to do with the bare plot outline itself.'"
September 7th, 2012
Via Knowledgebase Erwachsenenbildung: "In his main theoretical work which is pointedly aimed against Hegel, Adorno said that identity is the primal form of ideology, and applied this to both the instrumental tyranny of the concept over that which has to be comprehended each time and over the irreducible ineffable, as well as the commodity character of the social sphere, which makes the entirety of the non-identical individuals and work commensurable by social exchange as a model of society. The reification, which is equally produced by the temptations of the industrial commodity economy and the logic of capitalistic economy, that is, the basic expressibility of everything by means of the factor of money, seemed to be dangerously all-encompassing to him: The spread of the principle constrains the world to the identical, to totality.
According to Adorno’s understanding, education, as opposed to this false whole, this false totality of unbridled capitalistic production and consumption that immediately plasters over any opposition with new promises, within which the fetish character of the commodity dominates everything and has long since consolidated into a social blinding context, would have the task to strengthen resistance rather than reinforce conformity.
In that Adorno conceived of maturity as a dynamic category, the production of the right consciousness in light of the critical diagnosis of social relations meant in the very first place education for opposition and resistance, for the immunisation primarily of children and youth against the spreading synthetic philistine culture [...] and [...] against the reactionary countertendencies. In an incomparable tone and implacable radicality, Adorno fully stood on the side of the students against the real school and the systemically determined professional deformation of their educators: I would greatly advocate this kind of education of 'picking holes in everything'.
...to a generation who will be born 1000 years from now
August 8th, 2012
“Suppose, Lord Russell, this film were to be looked at by our descendants, like a Dead Sea scroll in a thousand years’ time. What would you think is worth telling that generation about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned from it?”
Here is the answer.
The World's Longest Album in History
August 6th, 2012
Via Comatonse records: "As of November 18, 2010, The Guinness Book of World Records officially declined the creation of the category "Longest music album (non-compilation, new release)," so we will not have their certification on this project. (Their rejection was a standard form letter stating they favor categories with more active competition and of greater public interest.) However, this does not alter the fact that at the time of its release on May 31, 2012, Soulnessless is, to the best of our research, the world's longest album. (...)
soulnesslessnoun, neologism (distinct from soullessness or an absence of soul) 1. lacking or divested of belief systems through which the dichotomy of soul/soulless assumes value; 2. a meta-state critically rejecting religious and non-religious ideologies employing belief in the existence of soul(s), that belief being prerequisite to sensing or conceding presumed soul’s presence or absence ANTONYM soulness neologism."
To figure all the mysteries and secrets, e.g. of the image above, you order Soulnessless now!
Here is an interview with Terre Thaemlitz to get you started.
Also, I finally got my autograph. Yeay!
Thanks to Marcus Schmickler!
July 29th, 2012
Via The Guardian: "There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning, boys, how's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?' (...)
But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: 'This is water, this is water.'"
Amazing how positive a word can be
June 17, 2012
Via The Guardian: "Yoko Ono: Let me tell you how I met Sam, because it is important people understand about how these things happen. She was probably in a difficult situation like I was in when I made the Yes painting in 1966 [you had to walk up a ladder, with a magnifying glass, to find the word Yes]. I was in a totally difficult situation in my life and I thought: What I need is a Yes, and so I put the word on the ceiling. I never thought it was about to change my whole life by 180 degrees.
Sam Taylor-Wood: Amazing how positive a word can be."
Via Flickr: "Q: How did you meet Yoko?
John Lennon: There was a sort of underground clique in London; John Dunbar, who was married to Marianne Faithfull, had an art gallery in London called Indica, and I'd been going around to galleries a bit on me off days in between records, also to a few exhibitions in different galleries that showed sort of unknown artists or underground artists.
I got the word that this amazing woman was putting on a show the next week, something about people in bags, in black bags, and it was going to be a bit of a happening and all that. So I went to a preview the night before it opened. I went in - she didn't know who I was or anything - and I was wandering around. There were a couple of artsy-type students who had been helping, lying around there in the gallery, and I was looking at it and was astounded. There was an apple on sale there for two hundred quid; I thought it was fantastic - I got the humor in her work immediately. I didn't have to have much knowledge about avant-garde or underground art, the humor got me straightaway. It was two hundred quid to watch the fresh apple decompose.
But it was another piece that really decided me for or against the artist: a ladder that led to a painting, which was hung on the ceiling. It looked like a white canvas with a chain with a spyglass hanging on the end of it. I climbed the ladder, looked through the spyglass, and in tiny little letters it said, YES.
From Lennon Remembers (Jann Wenner editor of Rolling Stone magazine interviewing John Lennon in December 1970)"