Words from Piero Manzoni

From For the Discovery of a Zone of Images (1957) by Piero Manzoni, the man who brought us Artist's Shit (pictured above):
"...subjective invention is the only means of discovering objective reality, the only means that gives us the possibility of communication between men...We absolutely cannot consider the picture as a space onto which to project our mental sceneography. It is the area of freedom in which we search for the discovery of our first images.
Images which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are to be."

Fluxus

A couple of weeks ago I read a fascinating piece about Fluxus, an international network of artists of all kinds (visual artists, composers, designers, architects...) that was especially active in the 1960s and known for their "intermedia" art pieces. A manifesto for the movement is pictured above. The piece I read is called "Between Water and Stone" by Kristin Stiles from the exhibition catalogue for "In the Spirit of Fluxus" at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1993. Here're some of my favorite bits:
"Performed for the 1963 Fluxus festival in Amsterdam, the actions that constitute Zyklus für Wassereimer [oder Flaschen] (Cycle for Water-rhymes [or Bottles] are direct and simple, subtle and conceptually sophisticated. The score permits the performer between ten and thirty bottles or buckets. Its duration depends upon the speed and precision with which the artist undertakes the process of pouring, a procedure either quickly resolved or enduring for long periods. The task may, but does not have to, depend upon skill. It is the kind of quiet action that a thoughtful child might perform as a means to study the operation of things...Speculating on the nature of existence, the artist who performs Zyklus undertakes the careful exploration of human labor as a concrete condition that determines meaning. While Schmit's score leaves the construction of laborand its significance open to a mechanics of doing, at the same time, doing emphasizes the concrete condition of being. This doing, because it has a temporal dimension, equally calls into question the relationship of being to becoming, in and through time, and positions ontological speculation in the pragmatic activities of labor. Doing both exhibits and stabilizes the unstable relationship between objects and the human states of becoming and being. Metaphysical questions circle in Zyklus in the mundane conditions of the piece itself, in the actual flow and change among human action, bottles, and water."
and
One artist, Robin Page, "turned a corner...into a Suicide Room and filled it with all the knives, razor blades, and poisons normally found in the home. There the public was encouraged to interact and a sign read: "Kill yourself or else stop beefing and get on and enjoy life.""
And finally my absolute fav:
"'Goofing off' is a quality that Fluxus artists certainly honed in performance, and...there are positive qualities to goofing-off. Goofing off requires developing a fine-tuned sense of what it means to pause long enough and distance oneself far enough from worldly objects and events to recognize their illusory dimension and thereby reinvest the world with wonder.
In order to really goof off well, the instrumental sense of purpose so deeply ingrained in Western ego and epistemology must be abandoned."

Great stuff! Would have been awesome to be a part of.

SUPER-VISOR

The other day I saw a woman wearing a shirt that said "supervisor" on the back and I was thinking, "super visor?!?" until I realized that 'supervisor' is actually a word. Let me illustrate what I mean:
Plug 'supervisor' into Google image and you get this:

But plug in 'super visor' (note the space) and you get this:

SUPER VISOR!!!!!!!

Antibodi Chairs

These Antibodi chairs from Italian design company Moroso caught my eye. You can choose to leave the fabric petals folded for a "severe" modern look (the black chair up top) or unfold them to create a whimsical seating organism (below). They're available in a number of styles and colors for endless combinations. I wonder if they're actually comfy to sit on?

Freshwest Design

The design team at Freshwest Design have crafted some pretty rockin items. A couple of my favorites are shown above. Top, the duo's ContemPlates each have a single silhouetted figure printed on them and underneath, the details of where and when that person was photographed. Say the designers, "the eater is encouraged to stop for a moment, and contemplate the hidden world emerging on his or her plate." On the bottom is the "You Are Here" table, a glass slab engraved with a map of London and a mark showing the location of the home for which the piece was commissioned. Super sleek and cool, love it.

Best Saturday Ever

The "Cop a Snack" car careening down Dolores Street during the Red Bull Soapbox Race in San Francisco. A fun way to spend the afternoon, especially if you can get into the VIP tent and snag free eats!

Estelle, Gym Class Heroes, and The Roots later in the evening at the San Jose Event Center. Goes without saying it was an epic show.
Couple more shots on my flickr...

Der Krieger und die Kaiserin

I watched this beautiful and strange film this past week and the more I think about it the more intrigued and charmed I am by it. The performances are superb and it's all in the most wonderful saturated colors. I can't really explain what it's about without giving too much away, but suffice to say it's a meditation on fate, life, love and the pursuit of happiness and a real gem of a film.

Soy una amiga!

It's official: I've been made a bona fide Lomo Amigo on lomography.com! Check out my interview and gallery on the online magazine/blog thing and also on the Lomo Amigos website under "Diana." The shots are all from this summer, taken on my friendly little LC-A+! Most of them are also on my flickr, though I haven't gotten around to posting all of them yet. Enjoy!

Words from Michael Fried

"There is nothing binding in the value judgments of formal criticism. All judgments of value begin and end in experience, or ought to, and if someone does not feel that Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Matisse's Piano Lesson, or Pollock's Autumn Rhythm are superb paintings, no critical arguments can take the place of feeling it. On the other hand, one's experiences of works of art are always informed by what one has come to understand about them, and it is the job of the formal critic both to objectify his intuitions with all the intellectual rigor at his command and to be on his guard against enlisting a formalist rhetoric in defense of merely private enthusiasms."

As someone who tends toward formalism, I dig it!
From Art and Objecthood.

Expanding

This morning I finally managed to remember to stop by Stanford's own Thomas Welton Art Gallery on my way home from class to see the current exhibit there, "Expanding." The show consists of pieces by eleven Bay Area artists that, in the words of the curators, "pulls you out of a routine and plants you firmly in the middle of a new perspective by offering a fenestration on the unfamiliar and a new context to the familiar. When contemplating expansion one might think of the expanding universe, the expansion of landscape, or expanding one's mind..."
The piece pictured above is Shims: Thousands of Uses-Use #17 by Christine Lee. It's a number of wooden slats jammed together in a constrained space to create intriguing fluctuating patterns. The installation "alludes to the composition of geological equivalents of sediment transformed by wind...[and] melds the architecture and natural environment seamlessly."
I was also particularly taken with Katie Lewis' Parallel Evidence, another site-specific installation of thousands of pins pushed into the wall in patterns reflecting bodily sensations, with a mirror image of pin holes and numbered markings directly opposite.
I also loved Jesse Houlding's Ferrous Wheel, an intricate piece of machinery that drags a magnet in a perfect circle across the back of a sheet of paper, thus also dragging rusty iron filings across its front that leave a reddish brown trail behind them. Next to the working machinery hangs a roll of paper with a completed circle on it, and it seems to raise up from the paper and even slightly pulse.
I took these pictures with my cameraphone, so they're not the best quality!
Ferrous Wheel, with extra rolls of paper to the side:

Close-up of the filings on their endless journey across the paper:

The finished circle (note the places where falling filings left traces down the bottom of the sheet):

All in all, a very interesting show.

Du musst Caligari werden

Last night I watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for the first time and I can definitely recommend it. Directed by Robert Wiene in 1920, the film is a masterpiece of German Expressionism, not to mention creepy as all hell. Conrad Veidt's performance as the somnambulist Cesare was terrifying--when he awakens from his slumber (shot of it above), it is one of the most bone-chilling moments of cinema I have witnessed. His heavy makeup, dark costume, and trembling, inhuman facial and body movements make for a spectacle so frightening that even Lil Dagover's overwrought performance as Jane seems justified. For those of us who don't buy into the whole "gore is scary" thing that seems so popular these days, it's a perfect Halloween thriller. Go watch it!

Spoon @ the Fillmore 9/22

More on my Flickr.

Anderson Collection

Alexander Calder

Mark Rothko

Robert Motherwell

Vija Celmins

Franz Kline


I also liked work by Lynda Benglis, Carole Seborovski, Donald Sultan, Mark Fox (a recent Stanford MFA), and many more.
I had no idea this incredible collection of modern art was so nearby! I was lucky enough to see the private collection in the Anderson home, but there is also a public portion of the collection of which there are tours on the third Thursday of every month. The collection website is here with info about signing up for tours of the public collection. There's also a great feature on the SF MoMA website here that gives an in-depth look at 15 works from the collection and more. Check it out!