Search for ‘MATT ’ (136 articles found)

by Zachary Sachs ╱ from Domus ╱ 20 August 2012

'Ecstatic Alphabets' at MoMA

The floorplan of Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, on the second floor of the Museum of Modern Art, is shaped like a lopsided “T.” Visitors enter at the stem of the letter, which courses through the history of twentieth-century art animated by language and language given artistic form. From the earliest examples, like El Lissitzky’s Dila golosa, they tease apart the connection between sign and signified through modes of interruption largely inspired by the technology of printing. Cones and drums by Marcel Duchamp and Liliane Lijn literally give the words motion (and in the process demonstrate how fickle their legibility can be); Dexter Sinister’s catalogue for the exhibition, along with the Brazilian journal Noigandres, include texts that attempt at intervals to rationalize and idealize language, at once to purify it and to demonstrate its essential muddiness.

The poster Zang! Tumb Tumb (If You Want It) by Dutch provocateurs Experimental Jetset characterizes the internal conflict intrinsic to much of this work. A riff on John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1970 War Is Over poster, it upends the original intention by substituting the chaotic voice of F. T. Marinetti — whose novel, Zang Tumb Tumb (1914) is the account of a battle in which he fought as a Futurist-soldier: “We will glorify war, the world’s only hygiene — militarism, patriotism, and the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers…” Experimental Jetset’s poster, populating the large anti-war type of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s poster with a clashing message, is, in a sense, what linguists call a “snowclone” — a phrase-template in which the meaningful elements can be filled with analogous ones, but whose gestural meaning and grammatic structure remains the same. (The name comes from the journalist’s cliché “if Eskimos have 50 words for ‘snow’, x must have n words for y.” And much of the art in this section posits objects or ends that are within reach — “If You Want It” — as if being “in reach” is merely a matter of saying so.)

The historical works here swing between anxiety and ambivalence, emotions seemingly inevitable in response to the immense power (and attendent limitations) of written communication. In an essay in Frieze (June-August 2009), Jan Verwoert puzzled over the complexity of Conceptual art’s linguistic idiom, which is at once pointedly neutral and opaquely prickly:

“At the heart of the code, we sense the presence of a secret: the key to a way of thinking and of doing things that seems intimately connected with the spirit of the early 1970s. To understand the meaning of the radical rupture that Conceptual art constitutes, one would need to find a way of tapping the experience from which it resulted. To say that Conceptual art became hermetic is a way of describing a specific sensation, namely — to attempt a shorthand definition of “hermetic” — that of confronting artefacts or articulations that defy common modes of interpretation and instead, through innuendo, hint at a body of experiences into which one would have to initiate oneself first to be able to grasp the full implications of their significance.”

Such an “innuendo” runs underneath Zang! Tumb Tumb, along with Kay Rosen’s Shaped Words, and Robert Smithson’s Heaps of Language, all of which are entangled with the specifically visual aspects of the linguistic sign. The great malleability of the word — its “arbitrariness” as Saussure saw it — makes it a powerful device to twist, distort, rearrange, and otherwise challenge its comprehensibility without undermining the connection altogether.

At the crossbar of the exhibition’s “T” shape, there are double-doors that enter into a more spacious back area, which focuses on contemporary works. Here, the focus on the idioms of printing give way to more recent developments. Tauba Auerbach’s bravura RGB Colorspace Atlas at once anatomizes a language of digital color representation and re-encodes it into analogue form: books are printed edge-to-edge, top-to-bottom, based on the three-dimensional red-green-blue color model sliced at various biases. Their pages, across which gradients cascade, liberate into pigment the rippling shades usually caged two-dimensionally in Photoshop’s color picker.

Paul Elliman’s Found Fount and My Typographies collect odds and ends — various man-man objects: “dead scissors,” “paste jewelry” — that form themselves into matrices, mimicking the internal variety and continuity between glyphs of a given typeface. They are chosen partially, in the words of the wall text, by “a size criterion: each of the elements must be small enough to fit in the mouth or passed from hand to hand, like money.”

If you take a couple of lefts on your way out the exhibition you will come across Mel Bochner’s 1970 piece, Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography) — which includes an index card on which the artist has written an excerpt from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Though targeted at photography, the quote casts a net that may better encompass the hypostasis of these heaps of language, that are both language and image, fully abstract and fully concrete. “Let us remember we don’t have to translate such pictures into realistic ones in order to ‘understand’ them … Something is a picture only in picture-language.”

by Dennis Overbye ╱ from the New York Times ╱ 4 July 2012

Gets a little carried away ?

According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous.

Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.

from the London Review of Books ╱ 22 June 2012

More on Monroe

David Thomson has high standards in film stars and he imposes rather firm rules about how they ought to twinkle, but he isn’t being fair to Marilyn Monroe (Letters, 24 May). The actress won’t be confused anytime soon with Abraham Lincoln or Abbie Hoffman, but in her own way she changed the situation, pre-1960s, by making the personal feel like something more political. Twentieth Century-Fox wanted nothing from her but cheesecake and compliance, and, increasingly, as Jacqueline Rose pointed out, she gave them trouble, the kind of trouble that can only challenge the rules of exploitation.

Thomson suggests Marilyn was never as well behaved or professional as Elizabeth Taylor: that’s right, but she was never as happy or as well-spoken as Liz either, or as stable in terms of her family life or education. And yet, unlike every other actress, Marilyn fought for director approval after 1955 and she got it. She never again made a picture with a director she didn’t think intelligent. And on the list of directors she esteemed was Alfred Hitchcock, who expressed a wish to work with her and who clearly, contra Thomson, was fascinated by her talent. It seems Thomson doesn’t wish, as Rose does, to locate Marilyn’s issues with power in a brutal childhood. Men wanted only one thing from her; but she wanted other things from herself, and in this lay her struggle. To imply that her battle was stupid or worthless is to deny her reality all over again.

Nobody said she handled the film industry brilliantly, but she did get Bus Stop made; she did attend the Actors Studio at a time when every journalist in America was scoffing at the notion; and she did make her contempt for Something’s Got to Give so evident that they fired her from the production, and then had to rehire her when her co-star Dean Martin wouldn’t do the picture with her replacement (Lee Remick). Maybe Thomson is just fed up with the whole Marilyn story, and can’t be bothered to seek out the things that matter about her (and mattered to her). But Marilyn’s wish to be a thinking person and a political person is not, for me, undermined by the fact that some of her contemporaries had similar wishes.

Thomson’s point about Anna Christie is daft: Lee Strasberg loved her in the part, but he wasn’t a producer or a commercial director by that point in his life. In fact he didn’t work on a single stage play between 1951 and 1963. He was though, as Rose says in her piece, mad keen to direct her in a television production of Somerset Maugham’s Rain. Again, Marilyn showed her loyalty and exercised her power with NBC by holding out for him as director, because he had done the work with her. She was indeed a democratic being, and Thomson might allow that democracy doesn’t always come out on top, especially when it hangs out with dictators. But Marilyn was her own faltering powerhouse, a small agent of change, and none of the other splendid actors Thomson mentions booked a table every night at the Mocambo to ensure that Ella Fitzgerald got the gig.

Andrew O’Hagan
London NW3

from Dusted Magazine ╱ 25 May 2012

Interview with Royal Headache

Someday a biologist will research what vitamins or magical bacteria Australians and New Zealanders consume that lead their nations to dominate the world’s catchy-punk landscape. Until the secret comes out, heads will nod and feet will tap to the latest Sydney-based phenom, Royal Headache. Recorded by Mikey Young of Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Royal Headache’s self-titled debut has the clear, backwards-harking analog sound familiar to ECSR fans, but don’t expect any extended Stooges-style jam-outs here. Lead singer Shogun has a classically heartstrings-tugging power-pop voice with a quaver that recalls the Undertones’ Feargal Sharkey; the band bangs out two-minute gems that might evoke Powerpearls hits, the Jam, or... fuck it, let’s dance. RH selected some compatriots (among others) for their Listed. They’ll be touring the U.S. throughout the next month.

1. Big Star – Radio City
No one has ever been this badass at guitar. Alex Chilton is probably my favorite guitarist of all time, these are his guitar songs (that’s a bit dumb but it makes sense if you know the first two Big Star records). The first record is probably everyone’s favorite because it sounds pretty, but this is better. It is tougher, not that it’s tough like a biker bar brawl, but you know, tough like the Rolling Stones when they stopped with haircuts. But the main thing is these songs have more heart than anything you’ll ever hear — this motherfucker, it’s like Dan from Roseanne sitting in a bar drinking because he lost his job and he’s got a retarded Midwest misfit family to raise. Real human shit. (Joe)

2. X – X-Aspirations
This is probably the greatest record to ever come out of Australia. It’s like hardcore for Rose Tattoo fans. Tough and wild, almost no chops but so much power. It is embraced as a seminal punk record but these guys never saw themselves as a punk band. Therefore it’s even better because it seems completely unaware of itself. It can’t exist any other way, there’s no pose it’s just rough outlaw rock and roll. (Joe)

3. Ed Kuepper - Electrical Storm
Ed’s debut solo full length after The Saints, The Aints and The Laughing Clowns. I love the amazing languid delivery of this record. It just sways along in its own drunkenly earnest way. Electrical Storm contains a number of moody down-tempo ballads, dispersed between the more upbeat rockers. The shadow of Mr. Kuepper still looms as one of the greatest and most distinctive guitarists to emerge from our shores. The tones and execution of this record has definitely influenced my other band Camperdown & Out. (Shorty)

4. Television Personalities - …And Don’t The Kids Just Love It
The first Television Personalities LP released in 1981. This album is pretty much perfect in my books. There is a brilliant simplicity in both the melody and instrumentation, but a great urgency in the delivery. Dan Treacy’s musical lens was skewed through a youth of living in housing commission buildings, and a penchant for ‘60s mod and psychedelia. His lyrics were not full of forced political sloganeering, or abstract art school smarter-than-you waffle. Each song provided a soundtrack for small observations about existing. Songs that often fantasized about hopes and dreams of a better life. Sometimes sad, sometimes funny, but always endearing. The best pop songs only come straight from the heart. (Shorty)

5. Rikk Agnew - All by Myself
Anyone with half a clue knows that Rikk Agnew wrote ALL of the Adolescents’ best songs. They clearly became a far less exciting prospect after he left. Myself is an extension of his Adolescents era output but with freedom and total control to really fly. "Falling Out," "Surfside" and "Yur 2 Late" are, in my opinion, some of the best punk songs written in America in the early 1980s. This album contains two of the elements which are a constant in most Royal Headache songs- melody and urgency. (Shorty)

6. The Go-Betweens - Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express
Although I am a fan of most of the Go-Betweens back catalogue, I feel that this fourth LP is their most consistent and cohesive album. I revisit Liberty Bell more regularly than I do the others. Everyone in Australia knows this band. They craft distinctly poetic Australian pop songs which could provide the soundtrack to every good Peter Carey or Robert Drewe novel. I decided few years ago now that I want "Apology Accepted" to be played at my funeral. (Shorty)

7. The Flys - Love and a Molotov Cocktail
The Flys were a great short-lived punk/mod/pop outfit out of Coventry, England. The "Love and a Molotov Cocktail" single was released 1977 or ‘78, I think. All three songs "Civilization," "Can I Crash Here?" and the title track are bonafide smash hits. Their following debut LP was good, but never quite reached the heights of this 7-inch. (Shorty)

8. Eddy Current Suppression Ring - Eddy Current Suppression Ring
This record came out at an important time for me. I’ll admit I was a little burnt out on most local music. Not that it was necessarily bad, but I can perhaps attribute those sentiments to my headspace at the time. Previously, I had heard the ECSR singles which had me excited, but I wasn’t prepared for the impact of this record. This album hit me hard! It literally did not leave my record player for almost a year. It was easily the most exciting thing happening in the country. I don’t think I’d be going overboard as stating that this album is comparable in cultural importance in modern times as Stranded was in 1977. (Shorty)

9. Kitchens Floor - Loneliness is a Dirty Mattress
When I think of contemporary independent music from Brisbane, this LP is the first thing that springs to mind. I believe that it captures and exemplifies all that is musically important from that city. Loneliness contains 11 completely muted and fragmented pop songs. The whole record is delivered with this savage fragility which is so gut-wrenchingly honest. You just can’t ignore it. I love Kitchens Floor. (Shorty)

10. The Replacements - Let It Be
This record is like The Sandlot kids. They’re not the best baseball players in the world, they don’t have uniforms, they’re not pretty but they made your favorite movie of all time. Every time you watch it you’re gonna feel nostalgic for somewhere you didn’t even exist. I can’t explain it, but this is the one of the greatest records of all time. That doesn’t mean they’re the best songs you’ll ever hear (they probably will be). I know this record is a mess but you can’t help but love it. Something happens and all logic leaves. This is one of the greatest bands of all time, even though you know it’s not true. When you wish classic rock FM sounded more punk, you’ve been searching for this. (Shorty)

from Wikipedia ╱ 24 May 2012

Richard Belzer

[Belzer appeared on The Flash and Lois and Clark.] He followed that success with starring roles on the Baltimore-based Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–99) and the New York-based Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999–), portraying police detective John Munch in both series. Barry Levinson, executive director of Homicide, said Belzer was a "lousy actor" during his audition when he first read lines from the script for "Gone for Goode", the first episode in the series.[3] Levinson asked Belzer to take some time to reread and practice the material, then come back and read it again. During his second reading, Levinson said Belzer was "still terrible", but that the actor eventually found confidence in his performance.[4]

In addition, he has also played Munch in episodes of seven other series and in a sketch on one talk show, making Munch the only fictional character to appear on ten[citation needed] different television shows played by a single actor. These shows were on five different networks:

Belzer has portrayed Det. Munch for nineteen consecutive seasons on live-action primetime television, one season short of tying Kelsey Grammer (who portrayed Dr. Frasier Crane on Cheers and Frasier from 1984–2004) and James Arness (who portrayed Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke from 1955–75) for the record of twenty consecutive seasons.

from Frieze ╱ 4 May 2012

David Weiss, 1946–2012

Peter Fischli and David Weiss, from the Equilibriums series, 1984–5

Peter Fischli: The little book of questions, includes the question: ‘Do I suffer from good taste?’ In the ‘Equilibriums’ we were slightly relieved of the question of which object must be selected according to which criteria: it didn’t matter whether the colour of the cigarette lighter that establishes and maintains the balance is a nice green or not.

David Weiss: The only criterion shaping the composition was balance.

Peter Fischli: Gerhard Richter once said something I really liked: a lottery ticket with six out of six winning numbers marked on it can only be good. Only an idiot would say. ‘But the crosses aren’t nicely distributed’. And the same is true with the ‘Equilibriums’: if it stays up, then it can only be good.

From an interview with Jörg Heiser, October 2006

from Metropolis M ╱ 27 April 2012

Exhibition views from 'The Stuff That Matters'

Exhibition view, The Stuff That Matters. Textiles collected by Seth Siegelaub for the CSROT, Raven Row, 2012 Courtesy the CSROT Historic Textile Collection at the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam. All photos: Marcus J. Leith.

by Zachary Sachs ╱ from Artforum ╱ 9 April 2012

Brian Ulrich at Julie Saul Gallery

Brian Ulrich, Circuit City, 2010, color photograph, 24 × 20”.

Brian Ulrich’s latest exhibition runs Pop backward through its sausage machine. The ten photographs on view dismantle chunks of advertising—from the fluorescent words that announce discounts to the typologies of chain retailers’ buildings—and reinsert them back into their (often bleak) physical geographies. This juxtaposition highlights the hard times for which there is no suitable expression in ad jargon, wrestling the graphics away from the imperative of sales and back into the entropy of all matter.

The photographs’ irony is perhaps oversold by the show’s title, “Is This Place Great or What: Artifacts and Photographs,” but mostly it arises from, rather than foregrounding, the places in the pictures. In Powerhouse Gym, 2008, for instance, a window is painted with a huge underlined YES. But behind its hot tangerine affirmation and immediacy, one glimpses only an empty room. Ulrich also presents several works from his “Dark Stores” series, 2008–11: here, branches of Circuit City that have been replaced by scrappier businesses or abandoned altogether. (One new occupant, “Big Thrift,” looks like a hermit crab only recently installed in his found shell.)

Circuit City’s electrical plug–shaped facade is a version of what Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown labeled “duck” architecture—the American compression of advertising and roadside structure of which a duck-shaped stand hawking duck eggs is the classic example. Thanks to the uniform design of national franchises, this model of building became deaf to its own physicality. The peculiar fragility of the depopulated concrete mammoths in Ulrich’s photographs suggests that symbols or appliqués are not (despite how inured we may have become to them) as disposable as their abstract marketing campaigns. They do not always lapse with the trademarks they promote. The “merely” decorative quality of commercial surfaces cannot be completely separated from its material embodiment. No matter how hermetically sealed the sign, given time, birds will nest.

from The London Review of Books ╱ 23 March 2012

T.J. Clark: Picasso in England

Picasso, ‘The Source’ (1921); Henry Moore, ‘Reclining Figure’ (1936).

Picasso, ‘The Source’ (1921); Henry Moore, ‘Reclining Figure’ (1936).

Again the question is distance and literalness. At the root of modernism in painting lay the idea – or better, the conclusion arrived at in practice – that the truth of a depiction now depended on deep obedience, or receptivity, to the whole shape and substance of the coloured thing. The hold of a picture on the world, as well as its internal organisation (the kind of depth it offered, the degree of surface incident, its notion of orderliness or free improvisation), were inseparable from the size and format of the canvas used, or the particular liquidity of the mixed paint. (Of course painting has many other parameters. I am singling out those that were most on Picasso’s and Nicholson’s minds.) Let me take an example from Impressionism. Round the corner from the show at the Courtauld is a flawless Pissarro of the railway station at Lordship Lane. The painting has a strange shape, 17 and a half inches by 28 and a half. And getting the unique reserve and slight greyness of South London light, as Pissarro does here to a T, is entirely a matter – I can’t say how, but the fact presents itself – of making each touch of green and white, each slight stretching-out of perspective, respond to (come out of) the canvas’s beautiful unsettling horizontality. The literalness of the container is modernism’s truth-condition. In a culture saturated by false equivalents, short cuts to non-knowledge, pseudo-pictures, the truth of a pictorial proposal has to derive from the proposal’s overtness, its factuality. This is modernism’s core belief.

I do not think that Nicholson ever quite saw this, or saw how to put it into practice. A friend who knows his work much better than I do cautioned me the other day against trotting out the cliché that Nicholson’s problem as an artist was essentially his ‘good taste’. Agreed. (In any case good taste is not necessarily a handicap, even for a modernist. It never stood in Bonnard’s way.) I think Nicholson’s limitation lay in the fact that he became such a master of aesthetic distance, but stayed so irresolute when it came to making the painting all one thing – all one finite fact. Or to put it another way: he did not allow the encounter with Picasso and Mondrian to disturb a basic certainty he had, I think deriving from his being so at home in English culture, about what the realm of art was, and where it began and ended. A painting’s separate firm standing in the world – its self-fulfilling tone-poem completeness – was for him an article of faith. Art was always art, for Nicholson, by virtue of its internal arrangement. His pictures are always fundamentally – in their formal logic – pictures within pictures. They unfold from a centre, and they depend on the presence within the painted rectangle of another roughly rectangular shape, finished and floating, internally rich in quiet relations, balanced and finite, and unrelated to the actual physical object pinned to the wall – free of that object’s contingency. The case is even clearer when Nicholson goes abstract (the contrast with Mondrian is cruel). And this is what I meant by art in England being essentially in hiding.

Think of Three Dancers again. A Picasso or a Mondrian always exists as a problem for the space around it. The pictures somehow indict their surroundings. Genteel modernism suffers – this is the litmus test – from being on good terms with its world: it cannot see why a painting shouldn’t come to rest quietly in its own art-realm. Again, this has nothing to do with attitude or attitudinising, of the Bacon kind. A Bonnard late bath scene is as sweet and dumbfounding – as homeless and unearthly – as any Picasso monster on the beach.

from www.bostonreview.net ╱ 16 February 2012

David Graeber on jubilee

David Johnson: At the end of the book, you suggest one policy proposal of a sort, namely a jubilee, or a cancellation of all debts.

David Graeber: Well, it’s not really a policy proposal—I don’t believe in policy. I’m an anarchist, right? Policy means other people making decisions for you.

DJ: Right. Have you thought about how a jubilee would work right now, in terms of all the underwater mortgages in this country or on the sovereign debt crisis in Europe?

DG: I haven’t worked it out; I’m not an economist. But there are people who have. Boston Consulting Group, I believe, ran a model recently and came to the conclusion that, while having a debt jubilee would cause great economic disruption, not having one would create even more. The situation we have basically isn’t viable. Some kind of radical solution is going to be required at some point; the question is what form it’s going to take.

This time around, they might consider doing it in a form that actually helps ordinary people. It would have been perfectly feasible to take the trillions of dollars that they essentially printed to bail out the banks and give it to mortgage holders, because what the banks had were mortgage-based securities that were no good anymore. If they just paid the mortgages using the same money, that in effect would have bailed out the banks.

DJ: That wouldn’t have been a debt cancellation.

DG: Well, I’m just giving an example. It would have had the same effect as a debt cancellation, because they would have printed money to pay the debts. The irony is that they chose instead to give the money directly to the banks and not bail out the mortgage-holders. Which is a pattern that you see over and over again in world history—one of the more dramatic consistencies I’ve noticed in the history of debt: debts between equals are not the same as debts between people who are not equals.

Debts between either poor people or rich people, that they have with each other, can be renegotiated or forgiven. People can be extraordinarily generous, understanding, forgiving when dealing with others like themselves. But debts between social classes, between the rich and the poor, suddenly become a matter of absolute morality. And that’s what we saw; it’s a very, very old pattern.