"I seem to remember I was in Leeds station at the time and the choice was whether to have one of their small ones or one of their large ones. I have got a feeling I opted for the large one, and very good it was too."

Shigeko Kubota, Napkin for Next Supper/Flux Napkins (1964-65).

Readymade Robots

museli for the mind

The artist Lawrence Weiner had an apocalyptic dream not long ago. Lava surged up from a hole in the earth and coursed over Chelsea, swallowing art galleries as dealers ran from the devastation. “It was like Pompeii,” Mr. Weiner recalled recently, shaking his heavily bearded head. “Very strange dream.”

Language as Sculpture, Words as Clay, Randy Kennedy (New York Times)

Tsang Tsellars

"...This city, as you know, is built deep beneath the surface of the earth, with only the vomitories protruding. Having paced the platform outside my own room, I took the lift to the next platform and paced that also, and so with each in turn, until I came to the topmost, above which begins the earth. All the platforms were exactly alike, and all that I gained by visiting them was to develop my sense of space and my muscles. I think I should have been content with this - it is not a little thing, - but as I walked and brooded, it occurred to me that our cities had been built in the days when men still breathed the outer air, and that there had been ventilation shafts for the workmen. I could think of nothing but these ventilation shafts. Had they been destroyed by all the food-tubes and medicine-tubes and music- tubes that the Machine has evolved lately? Or did traces of them remain? One thing was certain. If I came upon them anywhere, it would be in the railway-tunnels of the topmost storey. Everywhere else, all space was accounted for..."

THE MACHINE STOPS

by E.M. Forster (1909)

My life has been accompanied by a paper trail of ideas, scribbled hastily in an assortment of notebooks, napkins, or any surface that I can conveniently grab, before the initial impulse evaporates from my mind.


—Annie Lennox (from display in The House of Annie Lennox at the Victoria and Albert Museum)

Psychedelic socialism in a moment of pause and reflection

"Curiously, my thoughts now shifted from Spadolini to Goethe, the German patrician whom his countrymen have adapted and adopted as their very own literary prince, as I had observed to Gambetti when we last met. Goethe, the honest burgher, the collector of insects and aphorisms, with his philosophical mishmash. (Gambetti did not know the meaning of mishmash and I had to explain it to him.) Goethe, the petit bourgeois of philosophy, the man on the make, of whom Maria once observed that he did not turn the world on its head but buried his own in German parochialism. Goethe, the classifier of stones, the stargazer, the philosophical thumbsucker of the Germans, who ladled their spiritual jam into household canning jars, to be consumed at any time and for any purpose. Goethe, who assembled commonplaces for the Germans, to be published by the house of Cotta and rubbed into their ears by schoolmasters until they were completely blocked. Goethe, who betrayed the German mind more or less for centuries, paring it down to the German average with what I had described to Gambetti, in our last meeting, as Goethean assiduity. Goethe is the philosophical pied piper, the German for all seasons, I told him. The Germans take their Goethe like medicine, believing in its efficacy, its health-giving properties. Goethe is nothing other than Germany's foremost intellectual quack. I told Gambetti, her first intellectual homeopath. The Germans swallow their Goethe, as it were, and are healthy. The whole German nation ingests its Goethe and feels better. But Goethe is a charlatan, I told gambetti; Goethe's writings are the acme of German charlatanry. Be careful, Gambetti, I said, beware of Goethe. He gives everyone indigestion, except the Germans. They believe in Goethe and revere him as one of the wonders of the world. Yet all the time this wonder of the world is a philosophical truck farmer. (Gambetti did not know what a truck farmer was and laughed loudly when I told him.) Goethe's work as a whole is a philosophical truck farm. Goethe never reached the heights in any sphere, I said. He never rose above the mediocre in anything he attempted. He isn't the greatest lyric poet, he isn't the greatest prose writer, and to compare his plays with Shakespeare's is like comparing a stunted dachshund from the Frankfurt suburbs with a tall Pyrenean mountain dog. Take Faust, I said—what megalomania! A totally unsuccessful experiment by a megalomaniac whose ambition went to his head and who imagined that his head could encompass the world. Goethe, the Frankfurter with big ideas who moved to Weimar, the megalomaniac patrician in the world of women. Goethe, who turned the Germans' heads and made fools of them and has had them on his conscience for a hundred fifty years. Goethe is the gravedigger of the German mind, I told Gambetti. Compared with Voltaire, Descartes or Pascal, for instance, and of course with Shakespeare, Goethe is an alarmingly small figure. The prince of poets—what a ridiculous notion! Yet how utterly German! Hölderlin is the great lyricist, Musil the great prose writer, and Kleist the great dramatist. Goethe fails on all three counts. But now my thoughts returned to what Spadolini had said about my mother's being a special person."

– Thomas Bernhard, Extinction

A bystander saw him collapse while out on a walk in Brentwood shortly after midnight and called paramedics, who rushed him to the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center where he was declared dead.

bran dance n old-fash

A dance or dancing party on a surface that is sprinkled with bran.

1833 Sketches D. Crockett 148 wTN, This is the famous bran dance of the west, and derives its name from the fact that the ground is generally sprinkled with the husk of Indian meal. 1883 (1972) McDowell Dialect Tales 152 Sth,They’re going to have a bran dance to-morrer over in the settlement [Ibid 155, We found the dancers in a rustic arbour… Floor there was none save the smooth earth covered three inches deep with wheat bran. Slightly dampened, it was pleasant to dance on; but Heaven preserve them when they danced it dry.] c1960 Wilson Coll.csKY, Bran-dance – an old fashioned solo dance, done on an open space at the country store or on a barn door [sic] properly sprinkled with bran or sand.

- Dictionary of American Regional English, Volume I: Introduction and A-C

51. DRǍGHICENI Hut

County Olt 19th century

            The oldest form of dwelling, of Neolithic origin, the mud, hut was widespread all over Europe in the Middle Ages. Climate, historic, social, economic and cultural causes have determined its existence in southern Romania until the beginning of the 20th century. This one, built around 1800, was brought to the museum in 1949, having been inhabited until one year prior to its transfer. By preserving an ancient building technique, as well as by the environment of life it presents, this mud hut from Drăghniceni village, county Olt as well as the neighbouring one brought from Castranove, county Dolj, are real documents of great historical, social and cultural value.

Muzeul Satului, Bucharest

The New Media Art

“It is always from the depths of its 

impotence that each power center 

draws its power, hence their extreme 

maliciousness, and vanity” 

― 

Gilles Deleuze

SMOKING MACHINE BY KRISTOFFER MYSKJA


http://kristoffermyskja.com/

the manchunian forager

Jamie Oliver finds Joy Division and New Order master tapes in restaurant basement

The tapes were found alongside guns and gold during an excavation in Manchester

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Photo: PA

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has apparently found rare Joy Division and New Ordermaster tapes when digging up the basement of a new restaurant in Manchester.

The new restaurant, which is being built in a former branch of Midland bank, was being excavated when the tapes were found, alongside guns, gold and jewellery. The total value of the haul is £1.1 million, reports Holy Moly. Oliver has since given everything found in the basement to the treasury.

New Order have just been announced as the Saturday night (September 8) headliner at this year's Bestival. Bestival will take place from September 6–9 at Robin Hill Park on the Isle Of Wight. For more information about the event, seeBestival.net.

Prior to that, the Manchester band tour the UK for the first time in over five years.

New Order will play:

O2 Apollo Manchester (April 26, 27)
Birmingham Ballroom (29)
O2 Academy Brixton (May 2, 3)
O2 Academy Glasgow (5)

To check the availability of New Order tickets and get all the latest listings, go toNME.COM/TICKETS now, or call 0871 230 1094.

Bang!

(Indeterminate, yet sharply delineated noise; perhaps of gunshot or fist thumping table or boot contacting stone)


"I refute it thus."
--(Dr. Samuel Johnson, kicking a stone; rejecting Bishop George Berkeley's idealist philosophy.)


Furniture


No matter what the debate, whatever its content or its medium (text or talk), there is likely to be some furniture around. While we talk about things and events, principles and abstractions, cognition and reality, or read about construction and objectivity, we do so in chairs and in rooms, at desks and tables, or even out in the open, where the rocks and trees are. The appeal of these things is that they are external to the talk, available to show that it is just talk, that there is another world beyond, that there are limits to the flexibility of descriptions. Hitting the furniture also works as a nonverbal act, offering the advantage of getting outside of language; its force is that it avoids the rhetorical danger of appealing to nonverbal reality by putting it into words.


The Realist's Dilemma


Of course, the hitting is not just a slapping; not only words signify. The table-thumping does its work as meaningful action, not mere behavior. All the pointings to, demonstrations of, and descriptions of brute reality are inevitably semiotically mediated and communicated. Rocks, trees and furniture are not already rebuttals of relativism, but become so precisely at the moment, and for the moment, of their invocation. We term this the realist's dilemma. The very act of producing a nonrepresented, unconstructed external world is inevitably representational, threatening, as soon as it is produced, to turn around upon and counter the very position it is meant to demonstrate.
The solidity and out-there-ness of furniture (etc.) makes it a hard case for relativists to deconstruct. And just as commonsense observation is the hard case for relativism, it is the soft case for realism. Furniture arguments are realism working on its chosen soft ground. However, there is a cost for realism in this strategy: for in resorting to these cases, realists appear to be setting aside, conceding even, a huge amount of more contentious stuff to relativism--language, madness, the social order, cognition, even science. And it is generally disputation about these sorts of things that ends in table-thumping, the point of such gestures being to bolster a realist defence of something more contestable. In the rhetorical situation we are describing, the relativists may be winning the Epistemological Wars, but are in danger of losing the final battle. The forces of relativism are gathered about the last and best-defended castle of realism (Fortress Furniture), laying siege to it, and in the process suffering a blistering bombardment--Bang! Bang! Bang!


The Bottom Line: The Rhetoric of Reality Demonstrations - Malcolm Ashmore, Derek Edwards, and Jonathan Potter

PTSD

"Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them".


Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 15

La Cochon Culturale

The commonality of animal rearing for food is rooted in the peculiarities of local history. Ashington’s history as a significant urban centre dates back only to the early twentieth century. Rapid development of the local mining industry in this period required the colliery owners to import a labour force from outlying rural areas and from their agricultural estate lands in places as distant as Ulster. Continuity of the rural subsistence skills that these people brought to the area was facilitated principally by the emergence and resilience of the allotment movement and stimulated periodically by the shortages of war, recession and unemployment.


Having said this, rearing of animals is more than a mere matter of subsistence. These semi-domestic animals are subjects of an array of beliefs and practices whose logic is intimately related to local experience, and, in particular, to the threat of mining death. Above all, the pig is simultaneously the most revered and feared of animals. In some accounts it is attributed with the powers of prediction. Charlie Burnsey: ‘You can tell when there’s a storm comin’ when a P.I.G. turns its arse to the breeze.’ In other accounts it is characterized as the purest of animals. Jackie Thompson: The pig eats nothing but ‘rubbish, muck and shite, but when you cut it open it’s as clean as a whistle’. Indeed, among the varied ingredients, the Guinness, the virgin’s urine, and the rabbit droppings, that are used to nourish prize vegetables, pig’s blood is regarded by many as the very best. Charlie Burnsey: ‘A bucket of gissy blood on your leeks works wonders . . . it’s like rocket fuel.’


Contrastively, for fear of inviting death many people refrain from using the word pig, referring to it instead as ‘P.I.G.’, ‘gissy’, ‘grunter’ or descriptively ‘round fat thing with stumpy legs’. On a number of occasions the taboo has been used effectively. For example, one man relayed a story of the last days of the strike of 1928. Many of the men at Newbiggin pit were weakening and returning to work. In response, a group of men broke in and nailed the decapitated head of a pig to the entrance of the main shaft. Before the management had time to remove it, one of the returning men saw it and beat a hasty retreat. Word of the event spread and the strike remained firm for a while longer


Leisure and Change in a Post-mining Mining Town - Andrew Dawson

to be Fair

THE F SCALE: FORM 78
2. Although many people may scoff, it may yet be shown that astrology can explain a lot of things.
3. America is getting so far from the true American way of life that force may be necessary to restore it.
6. It is only natural and right that women be restricted in certain ways in which men have more freedom.
9. Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a more red-blooded, active way of life.
10. It is more than a remarkable coincidence that Japan had an earthquake on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1944.
12. The modern church, with its many rules and hypocrisies, does not appeal to the deeply religious person; it appeals mainly to the childish, the insecure, and the uncritical.
14. After we finish off the Germans and Japs, we ought to concentrate on other enemies of the human race such as rats, snakes, and germs.
17. Familiarity breeds contempt.
19. One should avoid doing things in public which appear wrong to others, even though one knows that these things are really all right
20. One of the main values of progressive education is that it gives the child great freedom in expressing those natural impulses and desires so often frowned upon by conventional middle-class society.
23. He is, indeed, contemptible who does not feel an undying love, gratitude, and respect for his parents.
24. Today everything is unstable; we should be prepared for a period of constant change, conflict, and upheaval.
28. Novels or stories that tell about what people think and feel are more interesting than those which contain mainly action, romance, and adventure.
30. Reports of atrocities in Europe have been greatly exaggerated for propaganda purposes.
31. Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished.
32. It is essential for learning or effective work that our teachers or bosses outline in detail what is to be done and exactly how to go about it.
35. There are some activities so flagrantly un-American that, when responsible officials won't take the proper steps, the wideawake citizen should take the law into his own hands.
38. There is too much emphasis in college on intellectual and theoretical topics, not enough emphasis on practical matters and on the homely virtues of living.
39. Every person should have a deep faith in some supernatural force higher than himself to which he gives total allegiance and whose decisions he does not question.
42. No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only one reason.
43. Sciences like chemistry, physics, and medicine have carried men very far, but there are many important things that can never  possibly be understood by the human mind.
46. The sexual orgies of the old Greeks and Romans are nursery school stuff compared to some of the goings-on in this country today, even in circles where people might least expect it.
47. No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished.
50. Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn.
53. There are some things too intimate or personal to talk about even with one's closest friends.
55. Although leisure is a fine thing, it is good hard work that makes life interesting and worthwhile.
56. After the war, we may expect a crime wave; the control of gangsters and ruffians will become a major social problem.
58. What a man does is not so important so long as he does it well.
59. Human nature being what it is, there will always be war and conflict.
60. Which of the following are the most important for a person to have or to be? Mark X the three most important.

artistic and sensuous popular, good personality
drive, determination, will power
broad, humanitarian social outlook neatness and good manners
sensitivity and understanding
efficiency, practicality, thrift
intellectual and serious
emotional expressiveness, warmth, intimacy
kindness and charity

65. It is entirely possible that this series of wars and conflicts will be ended once and for all by a world-destroying earthquake, flood, or other catastrophe.
66. Books and movies ought not to deal so much with the sordid and seamy side of life; they ought to concentrate on themes that are entertaining or uplifting.
67. When you come right down to it, it's human nature never to do anything without an eye to one's own profit.
70. To a greater extent than most people realize, our lives are governed by plots hatched in secret by politicians.
73. Nowadays when so many different kinds of people move around so much and mix together so freely, a person has to be especially careful to protect himself against infection and disease.
74. What this country needs is fewer laws and agencies, and more courageous, tireless, devoted leaders whom the people can put their faith in.
75. Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere imprisonment; such criminals ought to be  publicly whipped.
77. No sane, normal, decent person could ever think of hurting a close friend or relative.
—Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (1950)

43 comments...

"HEIDEGGER HOTEL

In January 2002, broken, I read Heidegger's Being and Time and thought nonstop about hotels.
Heidegger was my hotel, an unfriendly, dominating, domicile. I stayed for one cold, difficult month.
No philosopher, I entered Being and Time for aesthetic pleasure and for hotel gleanings.
My goal: to refurbish the meaning of hotel. As Heidegger says, "it is the business of philosophy to protect the power of the most elemental words..." (...)
Being-at-home, Heidegger says, is not the "primordial phenomenon." "Not-being-at-home" is more fundamental. To be not-at-home may mean to be at hotel. (Am I at home in this language?)
I may deviate from Heidegger in this discussion.
Hotel presupposes home. To speak about hotel is an oblique way to address home problems.
Do you check into a hotel? Or does the hotel condition check into you?
My friend referred to his lover's death, euphemistically, as "checking out": "Mark checked out." We "check out" when we cruise: "I checked him out."
Dwelling in the hotel state, my voice newly neutral and indifferent, I hope to override the "They" of home, of fixed domicile.

HEIDEGGER AND CUSTARD PIE

While reading Being and Time, suddenly I remembered a custard pie from the 1960s. I hadn't tasted it; I'd merely seen it, quivering, in its cafeteria vitrine. The relation between house and hotel is like the relation between restaurant and self-serve smorgasbord. The custard pie, trembling behind glass, is the hotel, offering itself.
Hotel existence uncannily suspends us above groundedness. To be in hotel is to float, or to tremble, like just-set custard.
Heidegger frequently uses the term "thrown." We are thrown into Being. And, I'd add, we are thrown into the hotel, thrown into its impersonal, public muddle.
We turn away from work as a means of "taking care," says Heidegger. To check into a hotel: this too, may be a mode of taking care, of refusal.
Hotel is a method of "not-staying." Curious, we stray; we enter the euphoric state of "never dwelling anywhere."
Hotel existence, because socially unattached, is silent, even amid noise.
We may take speed in a hotel room, and yet a hotel room more frequently finds us tranquilized and numb. Stranded, alienated, closed off from authenticity, in the hotel we commit what Heidegger calls "the plunge." We dive into "everydayness." We eddy. We "fall prey."
To be in hotel: is this an inauthentic practice? Checking into a hotel, are we freed from surveillance and ordinariness, or are we squashed and smothered by the "They"?"

—Wayne Koestenbaum, Hotel Theory

lamb on polenta

Smoke Teaser (what you pompous seminar-goers missed... whoops, is this microphone on?!!)

Q: Can phallic chandeliers also be mothers?

"So — the first waldorf school was named after a cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany. The waldorf salad got its name from the Waldorf Hotel in New York (later the Waldorf Astoria), where it was created. But were there any connections between the cigarette factory in Stuttgart and the hotel in New York? Incidentally, the company that owned old cigarette factory in Stuttgart also bore the name Astoria — The Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Company — though nowadays the factory is occasionally mentioned only as the Waldorf cigarette factory. (I believe? I may be mistaken here though.) And the waldorf schools, as far as I know, never adopted the entire name Waldorf-Astoria.

And, more importantly, what happened to the Waldorf cigarette factory? My google searches didn't bring up anything but a very brief history of the factory itself on wikipedia. I may have come across more substantial information at some point in the past, but I cannot remember.

The Waldorf Hotel, opened in 1893 according to Wikipedia, clearly predates the Waldorf school. The salad, likewise, was a creation of the 1890s. The Waldorf Hotel closed for relocation, merged with the Astoria Hotel and opened as the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1931.

The Waldorf-Astoria Cigarette Company, on the other hand, was established by Emil Molt — the anthroposophist who would later be involved with Rudolf Steiner in setting up the first waldorf school — and colleagues in 1906. It had been named after John Jacob Astor (1763-1948) from a German town called Walldorf. He had emigrated to the US and become enormously wealthy. Molt's Waldorf-Astoria cigarette company went out of business in 1929 — that is, before the joint Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York had even been opened.

To make the story more complicated, the Waldorf-Astoria hotel had originally been two hotels, both of which were established by descendants of the same rich emigrant John Jacob Astor, whom the cigarette company had been named after. As already mentioned, the Waldorf Hotel was opened in 1893. The other hotel — the Astoria — was established four years later. By this time, it seems, the family had adopted the name of John Jacob Astor's home village, Walldorf, though with another spelling: Waldorf.

The Waldorf-Astoria Tobacco factory may have ceased to exist in 1929, but the tobacco brand remained in production, during many years manufactured by a company called Remtsmaa. The Waldorf schools are still around. When the Stuttgart school had been established by Molt and Steiner in 1919, Molt was manager of the cigarette company, and he and the company provided the building space the school needed."

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"OK, Zooey, first correct a typo here. You've got JJ Astor living to be 185!

"It had been named after John Jacob Astor (1763-1948) from a German town called Walldorf."

So, JJ the First dies on March 29, 1848. But then William Waldorf Astor, 1st Viscount Astor, is born two days later, March 31, 1848, and that day straddles Steiner's death day of March 30! Wee Willy Waldorf is the son of JJ the Third, and he is the Waldorf half of the famous Hotel.

Wee Willy's cousin, JJ the 4th, is the Astoria half. But JJ the 4th is probably most famous for going down with the Titanic in 1912. But before he died, he put his wife into the lifeboat. She was 5 months pregnant with JJ the 6th (there's a reason it's not the 5th) and he is considered a Titanic survivor even though he was a fetus at the time.

Then Wee Willy Waldorf Astor dies in October 1919 just a month after the first Waldorf School opens. How karmi-cosmic the timing!

The school opened on Sept. 7, 1919 with 256 pupils in eight grades; 191 of the pupils were from factory families, the other 65 came from interested families from Stuttgart, many of whom were already engaged in the anthroposophical movement in that city.

In the following years, a numerical balance between the factory workers' and outside children was achieved; it had been an explicit goal of the social three-folding movement to create a school that bridged social classes in this way.
For the first year, the school was a company school and all teachers were listed as workers at Waldorf-Astoria, by the second year the school had become an independent entity." 

-----------------------------------------------

Re: Willy Waldorf & the Cigarette Factory

"Thanks Tom! Unfortunately I was not just informative, I was misinformative.
The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel existed much earlier than I thought when I wrote
the post yesterday! It means the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel existed, under that
name, before the cigarette company."

-a

Steiner

When I was growing up there was always a pub at the end of the road. It was your local.
At about nine o’clock when everyone had got a bit merry, you began to sing. Everybody did it. It was incredibly communal. You could walk up the main road where there was a pub on every corner and it would be a cacophony of singing.

 - Terence Davies

Deutsche Atelier

"I have read so many books...
And yet, like so many autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading—and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter how often I reread  the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading, and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she's been attentively reading the menu. Apparently this combination of ability and blindness is a symptom exclusive to the autodidact. Deprived of the steady guiding hand that any good education provides, the autodidact possesses nonetheless the gift of freedom and conciseness of thought, where official discourse would put up barriers and prohibit adventure.
This morning, as it happens, I am standing, puzzled, in the kitchen, with a little book set down before me. I am in the midst of one of those moments where the folly of my solitary undertaking takes hold of me and, on the verge of giving up, I fear I have finally found my master."
—Muriel Barbery The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Color Underground

 COL. MORRIS DAVIS: "Well, I think it was a complete act of cowardice on his part. As I’ve stated before, I think on Inauguration Day, somewhere between the Capitol and the White House, a pair of testicles fell off the President."

 

"One problem I found myself running into fairly often while writing this book, for instance, was the lack of a theoretical language with which to talk about desire. Unless one is able to convince oneself that there really is a compelling reason to believe that language itself has a special affinity to one’s father’s penis, and is therefore willing to adopt the ideas of Jacques Lacan, or unless one is willing to adopt the Nietzschean approach adopted by authors like Deleuze or Foucault, which makes desire, or the desire for power, the fundamental constituent of all reality—a position that if carried at all far invariably seems to lead to truly bizarre conclusions, such as left-wing academics singing the praises of the Marquis de Sade—one is pretty much stuck."

—David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value

Bad Old Rabbit

I MADE SOME ART - NOW TELL ME EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT A CAREER IN THE VISUAL ARTS

artists who play with a "rupture of sense". 

Strangely indistinguishable from the familiar terrain of normality

The show explores what it means to step over this barrier and to set foot into the inexplicable and illogical world of humour

These strategies, and those of all the artists in 'Ha Ha Road', serve to illustrate the liberating freedom of thought at work in humour. 

A REAL COMEDY SPECIALIST WE HAVE HERE FOLKS:


"I really doubt a member of KEK or an aficionado of Broodthaers actually wants an explanation, but a photo's worth a thousand words, one's i agree with more than the curators write up."

CHARLES  STANKIEVECH

Die Mauer (The Wall), 2009

Nine vinyl records with covers

Courtesy of the artist

Charles Stankievech (b. 1978) is a Canadian artist who often uses

installation and sound art to tell stories inspired by landscape, architecture

and history. Embedded in this practice, Stankievech's minimal installation

Die Mauer intertwines languages of conceptual art, cold war iconography,

institutional critique and rock ‘n’ roll pop culture. In 2009, exactly 30 years

after the album release (1979) and 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall

(1989), the artist bought all The Wall vinyl records by Pink Floyd for sale at

the popular Mauer Park Market in Berlin. That day, there were 9 used LPs

of various editions and prices available from various independent sellers. In

the context of Ha Ha Road, the long assemblage of freestanding covers with

their album art of white bricks daubed with graffiti resonates with the idea

of the “barrier” at play in the exhibition’s title. But positioned on the gallery

floor, due to their specific design, the covers make a humorous reference also

to one of the UK’s greatest art scandals ever: the vandalisation of Carl

Andre’s Equivalent VIII at the Tate in the 1970s. Protesting the idea of “a

pile of bricks” actually being art, someone smeared this work with paint. We

would invite you to be a little more gentle.