letters and l.a.

letters of note, this one from Kurt Vonnegut to Marianne Brown

photos of Los Angelinos, by Shawn Nee

burning man

turn off the sound and watch this in the dark, full-screen.

prosthetic limbs

I love the wooden supports in the work of artist/sculptor Kristen Morgin.
She works primarily in unfired clay. Images from artnet.com

from her installation "Objects for everyone I have ever known", 2008


Carousel Horses, 2006


Lion, 2006

fragments

“One of the issues I focus on is the boundary we create within ourselves by categorizing the world,” (Kumi) Yamashita says. “Through my work, I wish to remind ourselves of how we preconceive what is around and inside us. Knowledge, ideas, and values are too often accepted without questioning. Can we find a way to evaporate ourselves from a pond and condensate over an ocean? Can we see a common thread that connects all things?” -from the website of the New Mexico History Museum

see more: http://kumiyamashita.com/




Fragments, 2009 - Light, Cast-resin, Shadow



Origami, 2005- Light, Aluminum, Shadow

kiss

Tino Sehgal. ‘Kiss.’ 2002
(photos from this article on the current Sehgal exhibition at the Guggenheim.)

"...I felt stirred up, but light and refreshed, the way I sometimes — but not that often — do when I feel that I’ve met art in some very bare-bones way. It really is about life. It really is about communication. It really does have no answers. And it really is addictive." - H. Cotter for The New York Times, published Jan 31st, 2010

Also on at the Guggenheim right now is Anish Kapoor's 'Memory'. It also looks gorgeous.




(read more here: www.db-artmag.com)

it's cold

Chelsey Hames' Wild Things fort for www.booooooom.com

there are cooler ones but this is how i feel today.

happy twenty-ten!

lookee here: http://www.stringgardens.com/index.php

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

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.

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