COMBATANTS OF WINTER

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

ALL WINTER

CAMBODIA

TINY DANCER

BABES IN TIME

by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys

TO DUST

"Two sculptures are hung from a mechanism that gently grinds them into each other. The sculptures will slide against one another for many years creating new unimagined form."
From artist Jonathan Schipper.

TIMEKEEPER AT SECESSION

Pierre Huyghe at Secession in Vienna. He sanded down layers of paint on the walls, revealing all the previous coats. The Secession is an incredible art museum. One of the highlights of Vienna for me.

OXBOW ARCHIVE

Photographs from Joel Sternfeld's Oxbow Archive

from the Exhibtion Catalogue description -
In 1836, the landscape painter and conservationist Thomas Cole completed "View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow)," his iconic painting of the Connecticut River where it bends like an ox yoke. Some 200 years later, Joel Sternfeld walked into the field depicted in the lower right quadrant of Cole's painting - which he'd first photographed in 1978 while travelling for his seminal American Prospects series - & began making almost daily images. By 2006, the oxbow in the river was crossed by an interstate highway, realizing Cole's worst fears of the impact of progress. This exhibit collects 77 quietly haunting photos Sternfeld made over the next 1 1/2 years.

More Sternfeld photos >
Navigate the images via the tiny cursors in the middle below the image.

ONE CANDLE

Gerhard Richter and Nam June Paik.

from portikus.de
NAM JUNE PAIK
ONE CANDLE/EINE KERZE

01/21/89 - 03/12/89

"Nam June Paik (born in 1932 in Seoul/South Korea, living in New York) counts as the founding father of video art. While he is not the only one who was preoccupied with television in the early sixties, no one else has contributed so much to the development to an independent art form than he has.
At Portikus, Paik shows an installation centred around a single candle. Paik is known to a broader audience usually through large walls of monitors. He has developed his installations in all conceivable directions. Objects, closed-circuit installations, or multi-monitor installations: in each field, large work complexes have been created that are interconnected organically. Ideas and materials are subject to his principle of recycling. This is especially evident with his video tapes; although they are produced with state-of-the-art editing computers, they often include material from his earliest experiments.
Next to the closed-circuit installations that demonstrate reproduction mechanisms in a tautological way and raise the philosophical question of reality, he has, in the eighties, mainly created large-surface multi-monitor installations using several video tapes in which the different images, to a great extent abstract on account of the way they are edited, fit together to a super-matrix having a kaleidoscopic effect. The largest of these installations, with more than 1000 monitors, is erected at the National Museum of Modern Art in Seoul on occasion of the Olympics 1988. In addition to these large-scale projects, Paik has still always created stringent, minimal works referring back to the sixties and seventies, like "One Candle" (1989) for example.
This is one of the few installations using video projection: a single candle is filmed by two cameras and projected to the walls by several projectors in the television colours blue, red, and green. The room is filled with live, overlapping candles appearing in different colour-mixtures. Light is not only a prerequisites of video art - that's something Paik also conveys."

DON'T FORGET

NEW ANIMALS INTERNET ART PROJECTS

Today begins a new internet art project entitled "My Pet."
Please enjoy.

WHAT IS THE STAR WARS?

I LIKE AMERICA AND AMERICA LIKES ME

by Joseph Beuys






"Beuys traveled to the United States in 1974 and performed an action entitled I like America and America Likes Me at the René Block Gallery in New York. The action actually began at Kennedy Airport, where friends wrapped him in felt and transported him to the gallery in an ambulance. Beuys then spent several days in a room with only a felt blanket, a flashlight, a cane that looked like a shepherd's staff, copies of the Wall Street Journal (which were delivered daily), and a live coyote. His choice of employing a coyote was perhaps an acknowledgment of an animal that holds great spiritual significance for Native Americans, or a commentary on a country that through its Western expansion had become "lost" America." from Walker website. link.

WEIRD WINDOW

Giorgio Morandi, 1890–1964 retrospective at the MET now open. Simple, subtle, sublime, weird painting. Don't miss it.
New Yorker review.

KORE WA WARHOL DESU

7000 OAKS

An idea grows roots. 7000 oaks by Joseph Beuys.

Read quotes and an essay on 7000 Oaks.
Watch Beuys explain in German.
Watch Beuys get photographed by Andy Warhol.

WORK AND PLAY

I've had a lot of work in my life lately. Not very much time to play. And I've felt distinctly out of step, out of sync with the world. "Balance," my dad would always say, "balance is the key!" Work is necessary. It makes fun more fun. But sometimes, I think Andy Warhol is right - work is fun. Supposedly, Andy would work all day and all night on his artwork (amphetamines help). Andy said in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol - "I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of "work," because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do." I love reading Andy's book, maybe even more than I like looking at his paintings.

Andy continues his thoughts on work - "Unless you have a job where you have to do what somebody else tells you to do, then the only "person" qualified to be your boss would be a computer that was programmed especially for you, that would take into consideration all of your finances, prejudices, quirks, idea potential, temper tantrums, talents, personality conflicts, growth rate desired, amount and nature of competition, what you'll eat for breakfast on the day you have to fulfill a contract, who you're jealous of, etc. A lot of people could help me with parts and segments of the business, but only a computer would be totally useful to me.

If I had a good computer I could catch up with my thoughts over the weekend if I ever got behind myself. A computer would be a very qualified boss."

Andy published his book in 1975. Who knew that he would predict the internet, blogs, forums, social networking sites, and email? Andy was a smart guy. He made good art and introduced a lot of new ideas. Maybe because he worked so hard. Read more about Andy here.

LEARNING WITH TED

This is one of my favorite new sites - TED. The videos run the gamut of fascinating, seemingly disconnected content floating in the ether of the internet. Here are two of my favorite videos previously featured on both boingboing and tomorrowland. Above is a theory on the face of Da Vinci, and below is an enthralling lecture on the apparition of mathematical fractals in African art and architecture.

THE WOUNDED CYBORG

A very large Gustave Courbet exhibition is now on display at the Met. From the New Yorker - "Courbet's drenching seascapes should come with towels and his steaming nudes with towelettes. He revels in the quiddity of paint: moist dirt. His art isn't about life; it is life precipitated, with raucous panache. Nothing could be better therapy for a bodiless society of cybernetic narcissicisms than the mad wallow of this show." Nice one, Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker! A little cultural jab there at the end. This particular bodiless cybernetic narcissist can't wait to see the show.

OCULAR ODDITY ODYSSEY

If you haven't been over to Bibliodyssey, you really should click. It's a grab-bag of medieval, renaissance,and victorian hyper-real imagery floating in the ether of the world wide web. One day it's Biblical maps and Noah's family tree, and the next is a parade of anthropomorphic animal postcards.



For even more disjointed imagery, head over to FFFFound! where random users post randomer images. For a more focused approach, our friend at Tomorrowland has pointed to oSkope for all your image searching needs. oSkope presents an innovative search for images in Amazon, ebay, and flickr, and allows the user to drag, stack, flip, and enlargen to the heart's content. Viva la visual!