this is all a game

“Horses Running Endlessly” (1995), Gabriel Orozco

"Gestures tend to lose some of their energy when they’re repeated. The shoebox is in the MoMA survey, it’s the first thing you see in the galleries. The dirty ball is there too. So are the yogurt lids, nailed to partition walls. But they feel archival.

The shock and delight of puzzlement, of seeing nothing turn into something before your eyes, are gone.

No one’s to blame; this is the way certain art operates in time."

-Holland Cotter, for the NYT, here

I want this book

click on image to see more

what I mean

(thanks to Gabriel)

mirror cabinet vs. boxes of light

click to enlarge

Some early sketches, which led to

this messy sheet, which breaks down to

basically, the bed option;

the corner option;

and the alley option.

In these I'm pretty obsessed with certain things, as you can probably see. Having some sort of mass of light in the darkness. The objects floating within. The visitor alone in a sea of reflections and scent.

how they look reflected on clear glass. worth it?

But then I came to - this precipitated by a trip to Home Depot - and now I'm trying to come up with something equally (or more) satisfying but less expensive, time-consuming, structurally unsound, wacked out. What I've come up with is... more boxes - this time solid and opaque.

So if anyone has any comments or suggestions, I'd really appreciate it. I'm up for decisive votes for or against anything... tell me what you think will work, physically, conceptually, aesthetically, whatever. I'm open for business.





P.S. The idea that seemed most promising in my head yesterday was the low-lying bench-like thing with cut-out niches for the objects to sit in, perhaps lined with angled mirrors or glass and lit from within.

deep blue sea

via Natori:
(thanks to Amy)

The Unsinkable Scent

At the Titanic exhibit in Times Square NYC, artifacts left from the tragic event are on display. Among them are pieces of leather luggage, ivory hair brushes, gold jewelry and even cuff links inscribed with the “Tiffany & Co.” logo. But most captivating was a collection of 62 perfume vials—the property of first-class passenger Adolphe Saalfeld, a perfumier from England who boarded the Titanic in 1912. Saalfed headed to New York with ambitions of introducing his perfume to the major department stores. And while he survived the sinking of the Titanic, his signature scents went down with the ship and he never created another perfume.

The vials were recovered on a dive in 2000, protected in the leather case Saalfeld had kept them in. But the astonishment of finding these vials amongst the debris was nothing compared to the fragrance they released, still preserved after nearly a century resting on the ocean floor.

Fragrance can elicit the feeling of being transported to another time and place. That is especially true in this case, as these perfumes just arrived from another time and place- one that continues to intrigue and mesmerize since the night it sank- the Titanic.

It seems like it's always the same old song.

on my mind

Hejduk. Vladivostok, 1989


Turrell. Afrum-Proto, 1996


Eliasson. Mirror door (visitor), 2008

negative radio

Dunne & Raby, Faraday Chair, 1998
(thanks to Duncan)

"Faraday Chair: As electronic products escape their cases and leak into the space surrounding them, it might become necessary for people to seek shelter in specially constructed non-radio spaces or negative radios. To shield our homes would be a luxury only the rich could afford. The Faraday Chair provides shelter from electromagnetic fields invading our homes. It is a utilitarian shelter of minimum dimensions and comfort, it might even be a retreat, a new place to dream, away from the constant bombardment of telecomunication and electronic radiation."

One part of their Hertzian Tales, 1994-97

the maybe

Cornelia Parker/ Tilda Swinton, The Maybe, 1995
(thanks to E.Jae)


and I also I found:

Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991
(follow link to see other installation views/ different lighting/ close-ups/ pics of the explosion...)



These were very appreciatively found and duplicated from this blog, The Opposite of Tomato.
The (anonymous) blogger wrote this nice passage to describe the experience of the piece:

Cornelia Parker has long been an artist I much admire, from the time I first encountered her iconic work 'Cold Dark Matter: an Exploded View', a typical garden shed & its contents blown apart at the artist's request by the British Army & then reconfigured in a gallery setting, the pieces of charred wood & objects hung on wires from the ceiling around a central, single light bulb: experiencing the work at Tate Modern was wonderful, as one is both simultaneously able to walk around the arrangement, the physical object, the not-quite-still-life, & yet be enveloped within it, with dramatic shadows of the suspended objects being cast on the surrounding walls & also the distinctive smell of the charred matter lingering in the atmosphere. - TV's Mr. Snooker, North Wales, UK

Very cool. After initially feeling strange and strangely depressed after rehab today I'm getting more optimistic about this. The rulez- I move forward intuitively, I keep mum, and try to figure it out later. This will come full circle eventually, and it will probably be faster if I stop getting in the way. One good sign is that funny convergences, however incidental and innocently irrelevant, are once again cropping up in my "research" (just plain search?) and things are feeling beautifully fortuitous.

smell of old books

From the Telegraph:

"The smell of old books analysed by scientists

Old books smell like grass, with a tang of acidity and a hint of vanilla, according to scientists who have discovered a way to tell the condition of an works by their odour."

link to article

snuff

I went to the AGO last weekend to check out the miniatures in the Thomson Collection. The entire collection was beautiful but I absolutely adored the two walls of Chinese snuff bottles. I wish I`d had my camera on me to sneak a photo or two- next time. They were displayed on two facing walls, their cases backlit by glowing white light. Each bottle sat on it`s own little frosted plexiglass pedestal, and all together they were arranged like a flock of birds.

And of course I like the snuff to nose connection.

Of the bottles below, only the ones 2nd from the right in the 1st and 2nd row are from the Thomson collection. The rest were taken from the website of the International Chinese Snuff Bottle Society. Not a joke. It`s right here at www.snuffbottle.org

here and there

I love Joseph Cornell`s boxes




Joseph Beuys, Fat Chair, 1964
Untitled (Vitrine), 1983
Ausfegen (Sweeping Up), 1972-85

Rachel Whiteread
Water Tower, 1999-2000
see on MoMA site for more

Issey Miyake

Making Things, Ace Gallery New York
Jumping, 1999

Tim Hawkinson, Signature Chair, 1993
Trajectory, 1995
Spin Sink (1 Rev./100 Years), 1995
Uberorgan, 2000

Marcel Duchamp
The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915 -1923

James Griffioen, Feral Houses, Detroit