"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
I'M NOT GOING TO CALL HIM A LIAR BEHIND HIS BACK BUT I WOULD SAY IT TO HIS FACE IF HE WAS HERE
30 April 2009
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
21 April 2009
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
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
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.
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.
4 April 2009
26 March 2009
23 March 2009
"There is green light and red light. Then there is black light, which is mostly danger."
With only a scant amount of daylight penetrating the tent, the works had developed an ethereal glow.
"Once I apply the violet pigments with a brush, the surface will become gold," he said, gazing intently at the 3- by-5-meter, or 10-by-16-foot, paintings resting on wooden sawhorses. "As the light reflects it, it will change color."
His dealer Gordon VeneKlasen, who represents him with Michael Werner, interjected, "Violet has had mystical properties since the Renaissance, which has always fascinated Sigmar."
"Once I apply the violet pigments with a brush, the surface will become gold," he said, gazing intently at the 3- by-5-meter, or 10-by-16-foot, paintings resting on wooden sawhorses. "As the light reflects it, it will change color."
His dealer Gordon VeneKlasen, who represents him with Michael Werner, interjected, "Violet has had mystical properties since the Renaissance, which has always fascinated Sigmar."
Sigmar Polke: Inscrutable master of the unexpected, Carol Vogel - The New York Times, 27 May 2007.
22 March 2009
Horn of Plenty

Photo by: Pam Kaminski
"What does disco do? It programs a random-access search for “origins” and incites in the reader a search for sources, which turn out to be hallucinations or echoes of sources. Such a programming language was once called literature (we have chosen to call it art history), though disco, of course, is not a literature at all; it merely simulates the effects of literature (as empty brand) with the uncanny precision of our era’s version of a lullaby: the remix. Disco is a programming language. It simulates the desire to remember when human remembering has become, from a technological standpoint, unnecessary or impossible. Disco thus proposes a solution to the vast volumes of distributed media (now databased on the Internet) that began in the nineteenth century and have snowballed of late—in the form of photographs, tape recordings, films, records, CDs, and hard drives. How in this morass of information, most of it noncontinuous (i.e., digitized and subject to random access memory) can anything be located? Disco proposes a radical minimalization in the accessing of voices, regarded as discrete and modular data.
For as we have seen, disco involved the systematic subtraction of extraneous information “tracks” and elevation of a percussion track into a remix having minimal harmonic or melodic progression, and grounded in repetition. This subtraction would be exploited in the late seventies and early eighties with Eurodisco, Italodisco, minimal ambient house musics; contemporary artist writing/distribution projects; and a host of disco-oriented stylistics and sampling/appropriation-based poetries.
Unlike the other arts that were bracketed by arts of long-term memory (ars longa, vita brevis), disco was keyed not to memory but to what human memory became with the advent of computerized data storage and accessing: a mood, understood as the by-product of an obsolescent human memory system. For this reason it is customary to say that one can “have” a memory but not a mood; it is more accurate to say that a mood overtakes one. Moods, which are not inherently subjective and do not differ significantly from person to person, are a waste product antithetical to precomputer memory and thus nostalgia. So moods are rightly understood as a mode of accessing data inaccessible to human memory. Before the DJ, moods were harder to come by, let alone produce systematically. This was mainly because moods were amorphous and believed to be subject to a certain “distillation.” But with the advent of large-scale computing, things began to change. The verb “to access” was coined in 1962 with respect to “large-capacity memory,” which was viewed as a kind of “happening.” It took less than seven years for a soft synaesthesia of music, lights, dance, and performance to congeal into a cultural format that reflected systemic changes in how collective memory gets processed. As Ebbinghaus says, “How does the disappearance of the ability to reproduce, forgetfulness, depend upon the length of time during which no repetitions have taken place?” (Kittler 1990, 207). Disco solved a crisis in the same way that the core memory inventor An Wang did, whose work in the early fifties on the write-after-read cycle paved the way for developments in magnetic core memory. Wang’s invention “solved the puzzle of how to use a storage medium in which the act of reading was also an act of erasure.” Disco functions as magnetic core memory does, where every act of reading or accessing material destroys the original source (i.e., clears the address to zero), which necessitates the continual repetition or rewriting (the write-after-read cycle) of data."
Tan Lin Disco As Operating System
"What does disco do? It programs a random-access search for “origins” and incites in the reader a search for sources, which turn out to be hallucinations or echoes of sources. Such a programming language was once called literature (we have chosen to call it art history), though disco, of course, is not a literature at all; it merely simulates the effects of literature (as empty brand) with the uncanny precision of our era’s version of a lullaby: the remix. Disco is a programming language. It simulates the desire to remember when human remembering has become, from a technological standpoint, unnecessary or impossible. Disco thus proposes a solution to the vast volumes of distributed media (now databased on the Internet) that began in the nineteenth century and have snowballed of late—in the form of photographs, tape recordings, films, records, CDs, and hard drives. How in this morass of information, most of it noncontinuous (i.e., digitized and subject to random access memory) can anything be located? Disco proposes a radical minimalization in the accessing of voices, regarded as discrete and modular data.
For as we have seen, disco involved the systematic subtraction of extraneous information “tracks” and elevation of a percussion track into a remix having minimal harmonic or melodic progression, and grounded in repetition. This subtraction would be exploited in the late seventies and early eighties with Eurodisco, Italodisco, minimal ambient house musics; contemporary artist writing/distribution projects; and a host of disco-oriented stylistics and sampling/appropriation-based poetries.
Unlike the other arts that were bracketed by arts of long-term memory (ars longa, vita brevis), disco was keyed not to memory but to what human memory became with the advent of computerized data storage and accessing: a mood, understood as the by-product of an obsolescent human memory system. For this reason it is customary to say that one can “have” a memory but not a mood; it is more accurate to say that a mood overtakes one. Moods, which are not inherently subjective and do not differ significantly from person to person, are a waste product antithetical to precomputer memory and thus nostalgia. So moods are rightly understood as a mode of accessing data inaccessible to human memory. Before the DJ, moods were harder to come by, let alone produce systematically. This was mainly because moods were amorphous and believed to be subject to a certain “distillation.” But with the advent of large-scale computing, things began to change. The verb “to access” was coined in 1962 with respect to “large-capacity memory,” which was viewed as a kind of “happening.” It took less than seven years for a soft synaesthesia of music, lights, dance, and performance to congeal into a cultural format that reflected systemic changes in how collective memory gets processed. As Ebbinghaus says, “How does the disappearance of the ability to reproduce, forgetfulness, depend upon the length of time during which no repetitions have taken place?” (Kittler 1990, 207). Disco solved a crisis in the same way that the core memory inventor An Wang did, whose work in the early fifties on the write-after-read cycle paved the way for developments in magnetic core memory. Wang’s invention “solved the puzzle of how to use a storage medium in which the act of reading was also an act of erasure.” Disco functions as magnetic core memory does, where every act of reading or accessing material destroys the original source (i.e., clears the address to zero), which necessitates the continual repetition or rewriting (the write-after-read cycle) of data."
Tan Lin Disco As Operating System
20 March 2009
The authors of this Weblog would like to emphasise that they neither endorse nor condone the following remarks

Scams
Con artists are widespread in China. Ostensibly friendly types invite you for tea, then order food and say they have no money, leaving you to foot the bill, while practising their English on you.
Don’t leave any of your belongings with someone you do not know well. The opening economy in China has also spawned a plague of dishonest businesses and enterprises. The travel agent you phoned may just operate from a cigarette-smoke-filled hotel room.
Extracted from http://www.lonelyplanet.com/china/practical-information/health
18 March 2009
16 March 2009
I saw Mike Kelley at LACMA looking at Martin Kippenbergers.

"Company; at table or table d'hôte.... Spinach is served. Mrs. E.L., sitting next to me, gives me her undivided attention, and places her hand familiarly upon my knee. In defence I remove her hand. Then she says: 'But you have always had such beautiful eyes.' ... I then distinctly see something like two eyes as a sketch or as the contour of a spectacle lens...."
This is the whole dream, or, at all events, all that I can remember. (...)
– Sigmund Freud On Dreams
14 March 2009
"To be very, very, very rough: first of all the model of this friendship is a friendship between two young men, mortals, who have a contract according to which one will survive the other, one will be the heir of the other, and they will agree politically - I give a number of examples of this. Which excludes first of all friendship between a man and a woman, or between women, so women are totally excluded from this model of friendship: woman as the friend of a man or women as friends between themselves. Then the figure of the brother, of fraternity, is also at the centre of this canonical model. I show this of course through a number of texts and examples. Brotherhood, fraternity, is the figure of this canonical friendship. Of course this concept of brotherhood has a number of cultural and historical premises. It comes from Greece, but it also comes from the Christian model in which brotherhood or fraternity is essential. Men are all brothers because they are sons of God, and you can find the ethics of this concept in even an apparently secular concept of friendship and politics. In the French Revolution this is the foundation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Fraternity was the object of a terrible debate in France at the time, and fraternity appears, between equality and liberty, as one of the foundations of the republic. So, you have to deal here with what I would call a phallocentric or phallogocentric concept of friendship. Which doesn't of course mean to me that the hegemony of this concept was so powerful that what it excluded was effectively totally excluded. It doesn't mean that a woman couldn't have the experience of friendship with a man or with another woman. It means simply that within this culture, this society, by which this prevalent canon was considered legitimate, accredited, then there was no voice, no discourse, no possibility of acknowledging these excluded possibilities."
- Jacques Derrida Politics and Friendship: A Discussion with Jacques Derrida
13 March 2009
5 March 2009
Hotel Aktion

"For consider this man's [Jimmy Swaggart's] television performance before his fall. Striding back and forth and back and forth across his stage, he was like an animal in heat. Strutting and shouting, he appeared in cheap-looking suits that weren't necessarily cheap (this man had money but he had to appeal to his mainly lower-middle-class constituents), with their fabric often drawn taut across his thighs and his crotch. A pimp for Jesus. A cock of the walk. A cock that walks and throbs and thrusts itself, again and again, across the stage. It shouts and moans and yells its incantations of sin and lust and god and hell, its moving, brutal mouth pulled wide open and snapping shut, again and again. But words are secondary here. What mesmerizes and what really counts is this motion, this ramming plunging power. More than the logic of the words, this motion is convincing – so powerful, so demanding, so essential."
– Carol Squiers At Their Mercy: A Reading of Pictures From 1988
2 March 2009
28 February 2009
26 February 2009
Making It Work

Individualism vs. Collectivism
Defining Workplace Culture, Pt. 6
© Melissa Dylan
Apr 26, 2007
Do you value teamwork, or promote individuality?
(This is the sixth in a series of self-assessment articles on defining workplace culture. Click here to go to main article.)
A good mix of individuality and teamwork is imperative for most workplaces. But some function best with an emphasis on one or the other. Here are a few questions to help assess where your workplace stands.
This is another situation where there are no right or wrong answers—whatever works best for your business is acceptable. But with a clear idea of how your organization operates, you can attract people with a proclivity toward your atmosphere.
How much do your employees rely on one another? Is there a hierarchy of tasks to achieve a goal, and is each task assigned to a different person? Or is each employee self-sufficient? For instance, in a restaurant a busboy must clear and set the table before the hostess can seat the table before the waitress can take the order before the cook can make the meal, etc. In some restaurants the waitstaff does the bussing and seating themselves, making them largely self-reliant, with the exception of cooking. Is each waitperson responsible for their tables only? Or are they expected to keep an eye on all customers, regardless of designated “sections?”
Do they stick to assigned tasks? If Stella in marketing is swamped with a project, will Roger from IT lend a hand? Or will the rest of the team head home while Stella pulls an all-nighter? If there is a line out the front door, will the manager open a register and take orders? A true teamwork-oriented environment means the management team pitches in as well, taking on tables of their own when the restaurant is swamped, or grabbing a mop during a factory spill.
Is the staff encouraged to express themselves? Is there a specified sales pitch for all sales team members? Is the uniform inflexible, or more of a guideline? Really look at your policies and their implications. If you require 20 pieces of flare, is that really promoting individuality? Or giving your employees (and customers) a false sense of independence that is actually another thinly veiled regulation?
On a scale of 1 to 10, how much does your workplace value teamwork? Ten being everyone pitching in on every task with no assigned job titles, one being each person sticking to an area of expertise and focusing on their own list of duties.
21 February 2009
Sphinx Productions

"In 1474, a chicken passing for a rooster laid an egg, and was prosecuted by law in the city of Basel. The animal was sentenced in a solemn judicial proceeding and condemned to be burned alive "for the heinous and unnatural crime of laying an egg." The execution took place "with as great solemnity as would have been observed in consigning a heretic to the flames, and was witnessed by an immense crowd of townsmen and peasants." The same kind of prosecution took place in Switzerland again as late as 1730."
– E.V. Walter Nature on Trial: The Case of the Rooster Who Laid an Egg
14 February 2009
Homer's 'systematic soldiering'
“In his critique of the everyday, Lefebvre sought not simply "entertainment" or "relaxation" but the articulation of different forms of knowledge, knowledge that could aid in the potential and/or intermittent process of "dis-alienation." It is not in leisure as such where a critique of capitalism is to be found. Rather, a critique may emerge in those moments when the relations between elements of the everyday are made evident or challenged. Duchamp's presentation and arrangement of the readymades exhibit a desire to foil the functionality of these objects, whose usefulness resides in their ability to aid domestic and maintenance labor. Yet in foiling work, the readymades do not offer leisure as work's simple antithesis (nor do they offer art as pure leisure). Instead, their placement in the home/studio tangles the categories of both work and leisure. This presentation of nonwork and leisure has a social and historical context larger than Duchamp's studio, for Duchamp's refusal of work (both maintenance and traditional means of artistic labor) happened alongside one of the most profound shifts in twentieth-century conceptions of work: Taylorism.”
- Helen Molesworth, Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp's Readymades
12 February 2009
10 February 2009
2 February 2009
31 January 2009
30 January 2009
29 January 2009
A Chicken/Egg Enquiry

This Farmer Grows Robots
By Jia Hepeng (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-07-07 15:32
A month ago, Wu Yulu sold his "son" for 30,000 yuan (US$3,750).
Wu Laowu (the fifth son of the Wu family), is, well, a robot Wu made with his own hands 10 years earlier.
"I couldn't sleep well for several days after selling the child, but I had no other choice. I had to pay off my debts," said Wu, 44, a farmer from Mawu village in eastern Beijing.
On his TV screen, he plays a video of Wu Laowu, serving tea and lighting cigarettes.
In the past 26 years, Wu Yulu has made 25 robots, and "all of them were like my sons."
Wu had a way with machinery and mechanics from childhood.
"Sometimes when people passed by, I would think about the mechanical functions of walking," Wu recalled.
Unfortunately, he could not pursue his passion through textbooks. He was one of five children in the family, and his parents could not support his education after he graduated from primary school in the mid-1970s.
But a lack of formal education did not deter Wu from copying what he called "marvellous human motions."
"At that time, I didn't even know the term 'robot'," Wu said. "But in my spare time from farming, I tried to collect everything that could be used in those movable things.
"I loved to play with robots. The cleverer they became, the deeper the emotional link I felt to them. Later, I began to call them my sons."
The wire, metal, screws and nails he used came from rubbish sites, or sometimes used parts from farm machinery.
In the late '70s, Wu got a job at a farm machinery factory, and the small income helped him turn used sewing machine parts and some steel wire into his first robot.
"Until now, I don't know the theory of physics, but I knew that electricity can drive motors and power can be transferred to the robot's hands and legs with levers and wires," Wu said.
After his first robot turned out to be "disabled," Wu continued to experiment. In 1982, the first movable robot, Wu Laoda (the first son of the Wu), was born.
Another video shows Wu Laoda as a coarse combination of steel wires and sticks without head and skin. He was destroyed in a fire seven years ago.
Although Wu compensated for his lack of scientific knowledge with his talent and devotion, there were accidents, the first of which happened around 1995.
"I got a rechargeable battery-like tube for a very low price from a recycling shop, thinking I could save money," Wu said.
But he did not understand the English warning on the tube, and "when I tested the tube, it exploded in my hands. I remember a big fireball suddenly burst out, and I lost my memory."
Luckily, neighbours rushed him to hospital. His memory returned, but the scars on his hands and arms and the pain he frequently feels in his wrists will last forever.
Another fire broke out in 1999 when Wu left a transformer unattended to repair a piece of farm machinery.
"Just as I was enjoying the praise for my skills in repairing, someone rushed in and said: 'Wu, your home is on fire,'" he recalled.
It was too late. No one was injured, but all six rooms with his belongings, including some robots, were destroyed.
"I was left with nothing," Wu said.
Neighbours, and even strangers, gave him money to rebuild his house, with no mention of repayment. Three months later, Wu was in a new home, costing 90,000 yuan (US$11,250).
Wu was determined to repay them but his pursuit of building robots did not leave much savings.
His son Wu Hongfeng said: "With his skills, my father could have become rich by making more profitable tools, but after the fire, the whole family was preoccupied with repaying our debt."
Wu Yulu eventually decided to sell some of the robots that had been stored elsewhere.
"I felt terrible, but had no choice," he said.
An institute affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Sciences bought one of the robots for "several thousand," Wu said, and a collector bought another.
Wu's perseverance finally began to pay off.
Feature stories on the "farmer inventor" began appearing in various media.
After one report on China Central Television (CCTV), its science channel hired Wu as a prop-maker, paying more than 3,000 yuan (US$375) a month.
Each week he goes to CCTV for orders and makes them at home.
Selling robot Wu Laowu helped speed the repayment of his loan. "The neighbours would not mention money, but I had to show them some consideration," he said.
Last month, Wu made the headlines again for a new invention, a robot able to pull a rickshaw one step every three or four seconds.
Sitting in the rickshaw, Wu said he has no plans to start a robot business.
"I can invent robots able to carry a sedan chair, and next I will make robots of the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac.
"There are so many good things in life, and they become the basis for my robots."
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4LIThTB8Ww&feature=related
28 January 2009
26 January 2009
22 January 2009
9 January 2009
There is no Absolute Wrong context
6 January 2009
5 January 2009
3 January 2009
29 December 2008
25 December 2008
21 December 2008
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

18 December 2008
"The emblem, depicting the image of three people-you, me, him/her holding hands together, symbolizes the big family of mankind."

"In a group, the exchanges are always between the same people, whereas in collaborations, it's occasional: the associations are temporary and more diverse, they disappear and reappear, taking on new forms elsewhere, producing singular situations. Discussion has become an important moment in the constitution of a project; you can enter or leave it at any moment, which also affects the modes of production and allows you to escape a rigid and monomaniacal way of thinking. (...)
"We all have a relationship to the group that varies in intensity. It starts with the groups that form at school, the little gangs, then you never cease moving from group to group, and you keep fine-tuning your relationships with each one; that way you are paradoxically independent and attached at the same time. (...)
"[The group that I began working with in the '80s] didn't have so much to do with the ideological dimension [of the groups of the '70s] as with the dynamics. There were six or seven of us doing interventions in public space. It was a very short experience, but enough to see the limits of a collective, whereas with collaborations, a re-negotiation is always possible. It's a way to keep on learning. When you ground yourself in one form of knowledge, you domesticate it, you polish it. But knowledge should remain rough. To remain that way it has to be fed by a continuous dialogue."
- Pierre Huyghe, in Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews Vol. 1.
17 December 2008
14 December 2008
10 December 2008
This song reminds me of my mam and dad spliting up and no-one giving a shit

Apparently M's dad is designing and building an artificial island
for ferrari off the coast of abu dhabi. Supposedly it will have a
shopping mall on it that will have a roof made of imitation metal
bamboo, printed to look like real bamboo. I may be conflating more
than one project here, but have been promised links. The intention was
to use real bamboo, only in the desert climate it would have dried out
and crumbled away, and also collected a 10cm layer of sand on top, and
to deal with this the owners would have had to employ workers to
constantly patrol the roof and sweep it away. Because the mall will
have enormous TV screens dangling inside displaying advertisements,
the roof has to be counterbalanced by having dangling sculptures
outside, hanging from the eaves. I think I suggested giant pandas
(maybe live ones in cages?) would be appropriate. but I'm not sure how
far this will penetrate the design process. I feel like I'm saying
this more than ever, but you really can't make this shit up. A baroque
acid dream indeed.
The Duck Prostitute

These two have been the principal companions of my enterprise, and the art is indefensible as a whole if it does not make clear the nature of my debt to them. In all those areas where our occupations have been distinguishable during the period in which the art was thought about and made, theirs has furnished my own with its most demanding context and its least uncertain purpose. In view of their close attention to the deficiencies of succeeding tests, I am confident that responsibility for the remaining failings rests with me.
9 December 2008
25 November 2008
Are you patronizing me when you use emoticons?
18 November 2008
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