DISTRESS CALL

drifters dialectic

Day 4: The prosecution begins its case. Howard Morgan, a 14-year-old student in Scopes's biology class is on the witness stand:
Q--Did you attend school here at Dayton last year?
A--Yes, sir.
Q--Did you study anything under Prof. Scopes?
A--Yes sir.
Q--Did you study this book, General Science?
A--Yes, sir....
Q--Did he ever undertake to teach you anything about evolution?
A--Yes, sir....
Q--Just state in your own words, Howard, what he taught you and when it was.
A--It was along about the 2d of April.
Q--Of this year?
A--Yes, sir; of this year. He said that the earth was once a hot molten mass too hot for plant or animal life to exist upon it; in the sea the earth cooled off; there was a little germ of one cell organism formed, and this organism kept evolving until it got to be a pretty good-sized animal, and then came on to be a land animal and it kept on evolving, and from this was man.

"Last year a man in South Korea died after spending 50 hours playing an online game."
-From the BBC website

untitled (Ryan's World Proposal)

Update

I have just been awakened by people scraping crusty metal off the walkup staircase. My dream was set in a lush, flat country field containing humanbuilt waterfalls, caves extracted from the earth and turned inside out, historic ruins, and "primitive" monuments. The festivities seemed to follow the logic of a funeral (for me?), and we were all there celebrating with bonfires, and roasts. Rob had just arrived on his bicycle from a race, and Michael dressed in a police uniform. The proceedings seemed to go well, but the scraping metal interrupted a little too soon to know for sure.

The Importance of a Name

Mike Kelley bootleg

http://channel.walkerart.org/detail.wac?id=2007

I have already repressed the memory of the last post that was deleted

"Objects arise as the figures in the landscape of empire; narratives and actions put them in motion."
- W.J.T. Mitchell "What do pictures want?", The University of Chicago Press (Chicago and London;2005), p. 154.

Copyright-Free, printable, personalizeable blog invitation card

"Let us recall the staged performance of "Storming the Winter Palace" in Petrograd, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, on 7 November 1920. Tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, students and artists worked round the clock, living on kasha (the tasteless wheat porridge), tea and frozen apples, and preparing the performance at the very place where the event "really took place" three years earlier; their work was coordinated by the Army officers, as well as by the avant-garde artists, musicians and directors, from Malevich to Meyerhold. Although this was acting and not "reality," the soldiers and sailors were playing themselves - many of them not only actually participated in the event of 1917, but were also simultaneously involved in the real battles of the Civil War that were raging in the near vicinity of Petrograd, a city under siege and suffering from severe shortages of food. A contemporary commented on the performance: "The future historian will record how, throughout one of the bloodiest and most brutal revolutions, all of Russia was acting"54; and the formalist theoretician Viktor Shklovski noted that "some kind of elemental process is taking place where the living fabric of life is being transformed into the theatrical."
-slavoj zizek "Repeating Lenin"
available: http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm

"A personality: that is an institution in a single instance."
-Arnold Gehlen "Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter" (Hamburg 1957).

Flea Market On a Spring Day

July 10th, 2004

From Lil' Knowles

From Our Readers

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/arts/design/05cott.html?_r=1

"We still love K.D. & her music
But we still love beef
She hasn't taken away our freedom of choice!
Why should we take away hers?"
(demonstration sign as composed by Lang supporter in Consort, Alberta, 1990; image found in Tony Godfrey "Conceptual Art" Phaidon Press; 1998; p. 349)

"Here the focus turns to the curious problem of presence-absence, which haunts research on systems of significations. A system or sub-system, whether of objects or words, both is and is not self-sufficient. It is self sufficient; it is complete whole. Each element refers to all others. It looks as full as an egg. Look at it a bit longer and a bit more closely: see, it empties itself. A host of questions, posed technically by linguists and tragically by philosophers, now arises. We ask: Who? For whom? Why? How? The system is not self-sufficient. This 'whole' is partial and open. It refers to 'something else': purpose on the on hand, and the 'subject', on the other, and beyond these two terms lies the totality and the meaning. (,,,)"
_ Henri Lefebvre, "Preface to the study of the Habitat of the 'Pavillon'" in "Lefebvre: Key Writings" (Continuum; NY, London; 2003) p. 132.

Lil Babylon

Vito Acconci speaking to Hans Ulrich Obrist: "...I paid attention to phrases like, "A person who lives by the sword dies by the sword." In other words, if a project starts out as private, it ends private; if something is meant to be public, it better start at least as a semi-public project. Now, one is private, and two is a couple, a mirror image, but three is a crowd; three spoils the couple, so it must be the beginning of public..."

Four more days of Questioning

http://www.apexart.org/exhibitions/soo.htm

Deterritorialized Hot Melt

Who Knew?

''Given two things that resemble one another to any chosen degree, but one of them a work of art and the other an ordinary object, what accounts for this difference in status?''

-Arthur C. Clarke

Interview from above

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Goodwill Ambassador U.S. actress Angelina Jolie whispers to U.S. actor Brad Pitt during the "A New Mindset for the UN" session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland January 26, 2006.

Summary of reasons why an artist run centre stamp series is essential

I) Art is an important part of ___________________ identity.
II) Contemporary art is vital to ___________________'s international reputation.
III) Artist-Run Centres(or artist led centres) are integral to contemporary ___________________ art.
IIII) Contemporary art has been neglected in ___________________ postage.

Day 12

"A biennial is a glimpse of a transnational utopia."

Arthur C. Clarke

proposal for painting exhibition

"A collective biography, if written in the way one would describe an individual, always seems to describe a baby-being. Something born, with no prior experience. Collective efforts thus appear to the uninitiated as infantile, unformed, goofy creatures."
- V.I. Lenin

The $8,000 Tandem

"Collaboration: A late twentieth century euphemism for artists working creatively together.

Collaboration: An early twentieth century euphemism for so called enemies working creatively together."

Paul Sullivan, Exit Review, Static-ops, 2003.

Day 11

"... Down into the earth where dead men go I would go soon and maybe come out of it again in some healthy way, free and innocent of all human perplexity. I would perhaps be the chill of an April wind, an essential part of some indomitable river or be personally concerned in the ageless perfection of some rank mountain bearing down upon the mind by occupying forever a position in the blue easy distance. Or perhaps a smaller thing like movement in the grass on an unbearable breathless yellow day, some hidden creature going about its business - I might well be responsible for that or for some part of it. Or even those unaccountable distinctions that make an evening recognizable from its own morning, the smells and sounds and sights of the perfected and matured essences of the day, these might not be innocent of my meddling and my abiding presence. (...)
"Or perhaps I would be an influence that prevails in water, something sea-borne and far away, some certain arrangement of sun, light and water unknown and unbeheld, something far-from-usual. There are in the great world whirls of fluid and vaporous existences obtaining in their own unpassing time, unwatched and uninterpreted, valid only in their essential un-understanding mystery, justified only in their eyeless and mindless immeasurability, unassailable in their actual abstraction; of the inner quality of such a thing I might well in my own time be the true quintessential pith. I might belong to a lonely shore or be the agony of the sea when it bursts upon it in despair."
-Flann O'Brien, "The Third Policeman" (1967).

"If it's construed as art in your mind, then keep it on your property."

David Cassivi, Windsor City Council

PROTOTYPE

The Demise of Something Worth Pursuing

"Does this mean that you have produced somthing of note??? HOpe all is well,, Happy New Year and keep on growing in your art. Alexx"

Take my shoes off

"Dame Nature is a gentlewoman. No guide's fee will obtain you her favor, no abrupt demand; hardly will she bear questioning, or direct, curious gazing at her beauty."
-Frederick Law Olmstead, from 'Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England', 1852.

Day 10

Show Business

Interlude

I just wanted to tell you about a dream I had last night. Jon reported that he had heard back from one of the spaces for which we had devised a proposal, but he said: 'something astounding has happened- they offered me a solo show'.

Day 9

LIFE COULD BE BEAUTIFUL

Another Knowles Eddy Knowles

Day 8

1990 U.S. Census:

.............frequency (%).....cumulative (%) ...ranking

knowles __ 0.012_________43.328________995__

eddy_____ 0.007_________50.047_______1718__

Day 7: The Surrealist Kitchen