30 April 2009

Presence and Absence in Crowds

"But junk art is now considered tasteful-it has been for many, many years. Three or four generations of artists have produced junk art, so it's hardly avant-garde. But I see signs of market resistance. For example, there seems to be a surge in communal groups that produce art. That's interesting, but a lot of what I see has a retro quality-a kind of nostalgia for the old avant-garde. I don't know if this is an attempt to recuperate those values, or if it is simply laziness. I feel the same way about a lot of contemporary music; I hear a lot of bands that sound like ones I've heard before. I find myself wondering, What is the voice of this generation? I'm sure there is one. I suppose I just cannot recognize it." - Mike Kelley

23 April 2009

'Coked Up in the Club' (The New Fragrance for Men and Women)


"Once I had seen the photograph of [Tony Oursler's] The Influence Machine, and started to think about the way it spoke to our present utopia of information, I could not stop coming up with points of comparison for it from the art of the last 150 years. I thought of the end of modernism in the late 1960s, and of steam, in Robert Morris, as the figure of that ending. I read Morris's steam piece as essentially a literalization of the previous century's pursuit of abstraction, reduction, and dematerialization – its wish to give art over to the moment, the event, to pure contingency. I had my doubts about what Morris's literalization of these impulses did – whether to literalize them was to banalize them – but at least I understood, or thought I understood, where Morris was coming from. And I knew he knew he was at the end of something, so maybe even the banality of the metaphor was deliberate – it showed us what modernism amounted to by 1968. This still left me with the problem of what Oursler achieved by giving Morris's steam a face. That is, by projecting onto modernism's emptying and dispersal enough of an apparition, a suffering subject, a stream of words.
"Then, of course, I began to realize that steam, in the art of the last two centuries, was never unequivocally a figure of emptying and evanescence. It was always also an image of power. Steam could be harnessed; steam could be compressed. Steam was what initially made the machine world possible. It was the middle term in mankind's great reconstruction of Nature. Rain, Steam, and Speed. The speed that followed from compression turns the world into one great vortex in the Turner, one devouring spectral eye, where rain, sun, cloud, and river are seen, from the compartment window, as they have never been seen before. Steam is power and possibility, then; but also, very soon, it is antiquated – it is a figure of nostalgia, for a future, or a sense of futurity, that the modern age had at the beginning but could never make come to pass. Hence the trails or puffs of steam always on the horizon of de Chirico's dreamscapes. A train races by across the Imperial desert. It looks as though the Banana Republic is producing the requisite goods. Or are we already belated visitors here, tourists, gawping at ruins half-overtaken by the sand? Is modernity spreading and multiplying still to the ends of the earth – setting up its statues and smokestacks, having its great city perspectives march off into the distance as far as the eye can see? Or is this a retrospect, a collection of fragments? A cloud of steam in de Chirico is often glimpsed between the columns of an empty arcade. Once upon a time the arches led to the station, and people hurried to catch the express. Not anymore. Once upon a time people gloried in the vastness of the new perspectives, and built themselves dream-houses devoted to the worship of cog wheels and tensile strength. But modernity was always haunted by the idea that this moment of dreaming, of infinite possibility, was over."
– TJ Clark Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam

20 April 2009

Supplying international art without the shipping costs since 2004



Hi
Whilst it would not be flagged as a phantom item specifically, you can put the parent onto the sales order and use the explode BOM function. This will leave the parent on the order, but not as an item, and the components of the parent as individual requirements.

Depends on the controls you have in place and the requirements of the parent being an item. Is it a true phantom where you never sell it or stock it, or is it a pseudo phantom that whilst usually not sold or stocked it can be if required.

I hope this is clear and helps

Steve

17 April 2009

The Pathological Patron

"You know, sometimes if a villager sees an artist working on a landscape painting, they think the government has given them the land and the artist is making a map. So they take a big stick and... Smash!"

"Smash the painting?"

"No, smash the artist!"

14 April 2009

The perfect synthesis of career and lifestyle



"A second visual clue relates to 'fractal displacement', which refers to the pattern's property of being described by the same statistics at different spatial locations. As a visual consequence, the patterns gain a uniform character and this is confirmed for Pollock's work in the upper inset of Fig. 3, where the pattern density P is plotted as a function of position across the canvas.

In conclusion, Pollock's contribution to the evolution of art is secure. He described Nature directly. Rather than mimicking Nature, he adopted its language - fractals - to build his own patterns."

http://phys.unsw.edu.au/phys_about/PHYSICS!/FRACTAL_EXPRESSIONISM/fractal_taylor.html

10 April 2009

The Hans Namuth re-enactment


Continuity: When the photographer is making the movie of Pollock he "zooms" in on the shoes. But the old 16 mm camera he is using has a three fixed lens turret. He should not be able to zoom. All his other shots are as expected from fixed lenses of different focal lengths.

Revealing mistakes: When Lee asks the man to carve the turkey, he goes through the motions of cutting it, though the knife never touches the meat.

Continuity: As the documentary filmmaker is filming Pollock painting, Pollock's footwear changes from "painting boots" to shoes and back to boots.

Anachronisms: We see a post-1958 Chevrolet truck (with four headlights) when Pollock takes the sick dog to the veterinarian in 1956.

Audio/visual unsynchronized: When Jackson was moving into their fix'er up cottage in the Hamptons, the couple were out doors in the yard. Time of year was late fall with trees in the background having no leaves. At this time of year, the song of a bird (Woodthrush) would not be heard, since a Woodthrush sings during spring and summer months for territorial reasons. Though this bird may still be present in the wooded area around the Hamptons, it would not be singing as such.

Factual errors: When Jackson and Lee first go out to the barn, they discover that it was being used for storage and that, if cleaned out, it might make a suitable studio space. In reality, Jackson and Lee moved the empty barn to improve the view from the upper windows of their house. After moving the barn, Jackson started using it as a studio. This was probably done for the reasons that, since they were shooting on location, and moving the barn would have not only been much more expensive, it would have been illegal as it is a historic landmark.

Eating an abstract to shit a thesis



"Hi all,

so far I've spoken with people at school who are interested in material relating to:

-performance art

-the idea using the very tools and technologies of a system one sets out to critique (especially with regard to representation)

.

best, (...)"

7 April 2009

The Rudiments of Collaboration

RL: Since we’re talking about drawings, in general, is it not true that the ideas that you realize as sculpture have their origin in your drawings?

AA: Yes.

MC: Sometimes.

DR: What? How?


The Object as Protagonist: an Interview with Los Carpinteros Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo, and Dagoberto Rodriguez by Rosa Lowinger. Sculpture Magazine, December 1999 - Vol.18, No. 10.