Showing only Notes + Links tagged art
The New York Earth Room, 1977, by Walter de Maria
An interior earth sculpture. 250 cubic yards of earth (197 cubic meters) 3,600 square feet of floor space (335 square meters) 22 inch depth of material (56 centimeters) Total weight of sculpture: 280,000 lbs. (127,300 kilos)
The New York Earth Room, 1977, is the third Earth Room sculpture executed by the artist, the first being in Munich, Germany in 1968. The second was installed at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany in 1974. The first two works no longer exist.
The New York Earth Room has been on long-term view to the public since 1980. This work was commissioned and is maintained by Dia Art Foundation.
141 Wooster Street, New York City.
See also: A Loft Filled with Dirt, the Man Who’s Cared for it for 19 Years
The Broken Kilometer, 1979, by Walter De Maria
The Broken Kilometer, 1979, located at 393 West Broadway in New York City, is composed of 500 highly polished, round, solid brass rods, each measuring two meters in length and five centimeters (two inches) in diameter. The 500 rods are placed in five parallel rows of 100 rods each. The sculpture weighs 18 3/4 tons and would measure 3,280 feet if all the elements were laid end-to-end. Each rod is placed such that the spaces between the rods increase by 5mm with each consecutive space, from front to back; the first two rods of each row are placed 80mm apart, the last two rods are placed 580 mm apart. Metal halide stadium lights illuminate the work which is 45 feet wide and 125 feet long.
This work is the companion piece to De Maria’s 1977 Vertical Earth Kilometer at Kassel, Germany. In that permanently installed earth sculpture, a brass rod of the same diameter, total weight and total length has been inserted 1,000 meters into the ground.
The Broken Kilometer has been on long-term view to the public since 1979. This work was commissioned and is maintained by Dia Art Foundation.
It’s almost useless to post a picture of this except to entice you to drop whatever you’re doing and go here now. 393 West Broadway, New York City.
Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis (Spectral View)
Metastasis or Metastaseis (“dialectic transformations”), is an orchestral work by Iannis Xenakis, a Greek composer-architect and a major figure in the postwar development of musical modernism worldwide. He is particularly remembered for the pioneering use of stochastic mathematical techniques in his compositions, including probability (Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases, aleatory distribution of points on a plane, minimal constraints, Gaussian distribution, Markov chains), game theory, group theory, Boolean algebra and Brownian motion.
Metastasis was inspired by Einstein’s view of time (a function of matter & energy) and structured on mathematical ideas by Xenakis’s colleague Le Corbusier. The 1st and 3rd movements don’t have a melodic theme to hold them together, but rather depend on the strength of this conceptualization of time. The 2nd movement does have some sort of melodic element. A fragment of a 12-tone row is used, with durations based on the Fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34…)
The preliminary sketch for Metastasis was in graphic notation looking more like a blueprint than a musical score, showing graphs of mass motion and glissandi like structural beams of the piece, with sound frequencies on one axis and time on the other. In this video I tried to display this by presenting the frequency spectrum (0-20.000Hz) of the piece and how Xenakis actually “drew” music.
SWF Symphony Orchestra Hans Rosbaud, conductor October 1955
Saw the Iannis Xenakis show today at The Drawing Center and it blew my mind. Architecturemusicdrawing.
We Like America and America Likes Us, 2010, by the Bruce High Quality Foundation
I never feel like I have the time of patience for video art, but this is good. Was lucky to visit the BHQF University (a.k.a. their studio) yesterday and also see the Brucennial.
Walter De Maria is on the line and would like to talk to you.
My major praise for the exhibition is the extraordinary installation of highly aggressive works, each of which would probably prefer to be all alone in the room—if not in the universe.Peter Schjeldahl — The Dakis Joannou collection, The New Yorker
“Turbo“, 2008 by Baptiste Debombourg.
Tom Moody dissects this piece of “internet aware art” from VVORK, which he defines, in one sense, as “offline art made with internet presentation and dissemination in mind.”
Neat idea but it doesn’t need to exist as a piece—you have everything you need from the installation shot. The bulge, a gallery pole, and the human for scale. It reads as instantly and dramatically as an advertising image, with the “product” being an academic soundbite about patriarchal space rendered abject. Would this have been made without vvork.com and the internet to spread it around? Yes, it could be an image in an art magazine, but would it have survived the first critic’s visit who noticed the piece only “read” from a couple of angles and didn’t hold up to more than a few seconds’ study? Vvork means never having to explain—success is presumed.
One of my teachers says that a good work of art can’t be read like a sentence.
I don’t subscribe to the notion that simply evoking a strong visceral reaction from the viewer is a characteristic of good art work.
Paddy Johnson — Art Fag City » In Brief: The Independent and Volta
Hallelujah to that!
Trademarks from September 1970, by Vito Acconci
“Biting myself: biting as much of my body as I can reach. Applying printers’ ink to the bites; stamping bite-prints on various surfaces.”
(via imawino)
Why You Should Buy Art by William Powhida
Just ordered this, but—not gonna lie—it took me a few minutes to decide whether or not buying it would be hypocritical.
The ultimate collective mind-map.
Fear, organized. Brian Rea, organizer of worry, “I discovered like most people I had a lot of fears — after a few months, I began to catalog them: physical fears, natural fears, political fears, random, emotional.” After 11 years in New York, he made lists of his own and those of the people around him to fill up a 7-meter-by-3.5-meter wall, an exhibition at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona called Murals.
Just listened to Alissa Walker’s interview on Humble Pied about “ignoring your job title.”
It’s the same idea that had me all excited about Gabriel Orozco’s show at the MoMA.* He doesn’t feel constrained by the collective consciousness definition of what an artist can be, or I, at least, don’t get the feeling that he’s trying too hard to create capital A-R-T. Either way, the joy is evident and in the breadth of the work there is clarity.
Like Alissa says, whatever you do becomes your body of work!
* and now that I think about it, this is the same reason that I get excited about anything. Maybe it’s also why I like reading writing about writing, I can’t find the quote, but somebody said that the business of a writer is living life, if that connection makes sense at all.
Find the cracks in the wall.Tibor Kalman, New York, June 1998. He continues, “There are a very few lunatic entrepreneurs who will understand that culture and design are not about fatter wallets, but about creating a future. They will understand that wealth is means, not an end. Under other circumstances they may have turned out to be like you, creative lunatics. Believe me, they’re there and when you find them, treat them well and use their money to change the world.” (via bobulate)
An interview with Kentridge wherein the artist comments on his own responses; these appear in blocks of white that interrupt the original interview.
Abbott Miller and Kristen Spilman of Pentagram have designed a gorgeous book to accompany the William Kentridge retrospective at the MoMA. I had the chance to see Kentridge speak about his work and the opera he is working on a few weeks ago and found that he is all-at-once academic, inspirational, and hilarious. Did I mention the work is beautiful too?
The Pentagram designed book, above, honors and accentuates the work in a variety of ways, but I was particularly taken by the design of this interview that was later revised and annotated by Kentridge. After one lecture it’s not like I know the guy, but to go back and comment on his responses seems so delightfully like him! I’m glad to see it executed so sharply in terms of design.
Writers always envy artists, would trade places with them in a moment if they could. The painter’s life seems less ascetic, less monkish, less hunched. Instead of the austere mess of the desk there is the chaos of the studio: dirty coffee cups, paint-smudged cassette decks, drawings of the artist’s girlfriend, naked, on the walls … In the age of the computer the writer’s office or study will increasingly resemble the customer service desk of an ailing small business. The artist’s studio, though, is still what it has always been: an erotic space. For the writer the artist’s studio is, essentially, a place where women undress.Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage (via erasing.org)
