The 20th

melisaki: The Show Folies Bergère, London photo by William...

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:30:28 -0400

melisaki:

The Show Folies Bergère, London

photo by William Davis, 1926

Alexander Mcqueen. ...

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 21:48:04 -0400

Alexander Mcqueen. Givenchy. Fall 1999.

via { misscheriedior }

Rudi Gernreich. ...

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 21:41:30 -0400

Rudi Gernreich. 1965.

via { misscheriedior }

Mina Loy: Songs to Joannes

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 03:01:42 -0400

Mina Loy: Songs to Joannes:

1915

“The individual is the inhibition of infinity.” —...

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 02:56:11 -0400

“The individual is the inhibition of infinity.”
— Mina Loy

A Portrait of Keiichi Tanaami: 14 Films 1975-2009 via { Brickbat...

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 02:46:21 -0400

A Portrait of Keiichi Tanaami: 14 Films 1975-2009

via { Brickbat Books }

pwn3d. Who made this? It’s not bad.But you forgot:...

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 02:18:49 -0400

pwn3d.

Who made this? It’s not bad.
But you forgot: “KUSAMA OWNS DOTS”

Reminds me of the comment that always comes up in art critiques:
“You know, you should look at ( name ), even though their art has nothing to do with yours or with the discussion, because they used ( material ), and you’re using that also.”
And I’m not saying that’s necessarily bad. It just IS.

Timeline of Computer History

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:42:49 -0400

Timeline of Computer History

trinhtiet: nam june paik

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 01:12:18 -0400

trinhtiet:

nam june paik

oldbookillustrations: Arthur Rackham, second end-paper from...

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 02:05:26 -0400

oldbookillustrations:

Arthur Rackham, second end-paper from Undine, by De La Motte Fouqué, London, 1909.

(Source: archive.org)

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are two theorems of...

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 23:24:17 -0400

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that establish inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems for mathematics. The theorems, proven by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics. The two results are widely interpreted as showing that Hilbert’s program to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all of mathematics is impossible, thus giving a negative answer to Hilbert’s second problem.

The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an “effective procedure” (essentially, a computer program) is capable of proving all facts about the natural numbers. For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem shows that if such a system is also capable of proving certain basic facts about the natural numbers, then one particular arithmetic truth the system cannot prove is the consistency of the system itself.

-Wikipedia

The Phenomenon of Weightlessness, Remedios Varo, 1963. From {...

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 17:42:56 -0400

The Phenomenon of Weightlessness, Remedios Varo, 1963.

From { JungCurrents.com }

A man, presumably a scientist, stands in a room with a number of orreries on shelves. One orrery, of the Earth and Moon, has broken free of its base and floats in the air. In addition, the room is duplicated and shown superimposed over the original, but at an angle of 30 degrees. This room is the special theory of relativity made real, or surreal. To depict the so-called Lorentz equations, which are at the heart of Einstein’s revelation, one would draw a standard graph with X and Y axes, and then rotate the graph 30 degrees to show how time and space shift for different states of motion.

••••••

Varo was a genius who didn’t get enough attention.
Shame that the reproductions of this image online are all completely shitty.

Simone Forti Illuminations Drawing (Circles series) 1972 Ink on...

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 15:24:26 -0400

Simone Forti
Illuminations Drawing (Circles series)
1972
Ink on paper
11 x 8 1/12 inches (27.9 x 21.6 cm)

via { Zwirner }

Alfred Jensen Number six is the first that partakes of every...

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 15:16:49 -0400

Alfred Jensen
Number six is the first that partakes of every number. Pythagoras
1963
Ink on paper
23 x 29 inches (58.4 x 73.7 cm)

via { Zwirner }

art-documents: Roy Lichtenstein/Drawing for Kiss V ,1964

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:36:08 -0400

art-documents:

Roy Lichtenstein/Drawing for Kiss V ,1964

jessiebaylin: Yousuf Karsh, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1956

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:17:00 -0400

jessiebaylin:

Yousuf Karsh, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1956

kusama: Yayoi Kusama, Amsterdam Orgy via {the Looniverse}

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 23:26:05 -0400

kusama:

Yayoi Kusama, Amsterdam Orgy

via {the Looniverse}

Guerrilla Girls, ‘Do women have to be naked…?” (2004, first...

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:51:07 -0400

Guerrilla Girls, ‘Do women have to be naked…?” (2004, first appeared 1989)

via the { Visual & Critical Studies } blog, at SVA.

Walking in My Mind: Yayoi Kusama

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:33:00 -0400

kusama:

PREFACE:

Art is the product of creative thinking within an aesthetic context. Rather than merely mirroring our social experience or the times we live in, art can actively ‘think’ about a broad range of cultural and social issues, engineering and giving form to new perspectives that have the potential to change the way we perceive not only our surroundings, but also our own cognitive activity. Art can illuminate, in other words, the unseen processes by which we make sense of the world as well as our own interior life.

Walking in My Mind examines this crucial dimension of contemporary art practice. Bringing together a diverse group of international artists whose work maps, models and explores the workings of the creative mind, it highlights the idea that an is an alternative way of thinking things out and ultimately of apprehending reality, especially aspects of our experience that are often otherwise closed or inaccessible to us. Besides investigating their own perceptual and creative processes, the artists in the exhibition also engage more generally with the question of how individuals process information and understand their surroundings. Their work, which often takes the form of immersive installations, invites us to become aware of own thoughts and feelings, and to reconsider the role these play in framing our relationships with external phenomena and the broader cultural context in which we live.

All art, of course, offer us the opportunity to see things through the eyes of its creator. But the works in this show go a step further: they layout mental landscapes that we can inspect and reflect on as if we were walking around inside the artist’s mind. The use of the word ‘walking’ in the exhibition title draws attention to the importance of our physical exploration of these works, as well as to the intimate link between bodily experience and creative thinking. It suggests that these artworks solicit both focused and unfocused ways of seeing, and that we should pay attention to the full range of our experience in responding to them. Rather than trying to find an answer to what they ‘mean’, we should allow ourselves to discover the different mental paths and ways of processing information that each work presents.

P.19

Yayoi Kusama, Chiharu Shiota and Pipilotti Rist each create an image of the mind that refers on different levels to the web-like structures of neuronal processes. Tyson’s work includes imagery of electro-chemical pulses. In the installations of both Rist and Kusama, viewers lose their orientation, one way or another, and - in a metaphorical sense - find themselves caught up in a network of neurons and synapses. Meanwhile, in Shiota’s work, the interconnections of thought processes find visual form in a web of black threads.

In Kusama’s installation Dots Obsession (2009), made up of mirrors and balloons decorated with red and white polka dots, we are in danger of losing our way, but in a manner that is entirely different from the experience of the other installations. One has a sense of being absorbed into this artificial scenario, of losing touch with the limits of one’s own body. Lost amid the balloons and mirror images, we cannot see the end of the passage. When we make our way through the space and step out onto the terrace of the Hayward Gallery and are confronted with her work Guidepost to the New World (2005), in which polka-dotted sculptures are scattered over an Astroturf lawn, it is as though we are seeing the outside world through Kusama’s eyes. This impression is reinforced by the trees between Hungerford Bridge and Waterloo Bridge, which Kusama has clad in polka-dot fabric. As Kusama herself has said:

“A polka dot has the form of the sun which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon which is calm, round, soft, colourful, senseless and unknowing … Our earth is only one polka dot among the million stars in the cosmos … Polka dots are a way to infinity.”

This representation of infinity conveys a notion of the mind as something ungraspable and indefinable. And if we read her installations as images of her mind, then the dots could be taken to represent the millions of neurons that exist in the brain. As viewers wander amongst these ‘neurons’, they create the synapses. These polka-dot works are, in formal terms, the opposite of Kusama’s Infinity Net Paintings, where our thought patterns take the form of web-like structures, similar to those in her early drawings.

P.26

“When I’m facing a canvas and painting a net of dots I see the dots continuing on from the desk to the floor until they even cover my own body. The dots repeat and repeat and the net of dots stretches out infinitely. In other words, I forget myself, and become lost in the net, until my arms, legs, my clothes, and the entire room is filled with dots.”

Yayoi Kusama began to experience visual and auditory delusions in her teenage years. Diagnosed as schizophrenic and manic-depressive by a psychologist who discovered her artistic genius during her adolescence, she continued to suffer from pronounced neurosis after moving to New York in the late 1950s. In a show of 1959, she exhibited her first Infinity Nets. The New York art scene at the time was dominated by Action Painting, but Minimalism, with which Kusama would compare her works, was beginning to emerge. With its distinctive visual rhythm and monochrome palette, Kusama’s work attracted considerable attention. To the artist, Infinity Nets released something indefinable and ineffable in her innermost depths ‘into the chaos of the void’.

“My life is a dot, in other words, one of a million particles. Through the white matrix of nothingness of dots connected on an astronomical scale, self and other and the entire universe is obliterated”,

she has explained. She bases her aesthetic ideas on dissolution and combination, proliferation and separation, a feeling of disintegrating into particles and of hearing messages from outer space. But this is not mere obliteration, for in the process, she elevates herself, like cosmic dust, into something eternal. Externalizing her inner microcosm, she projects it onto a macrocosm far surpassing our powers of conception, and in doing so acquires an infinite mission. This is the source of the momentum that has sustained Kusama’s creative energy for over half a century.

Kusama’s first environmental work, Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show was exhibited in 1963 at the Gertrude Stein Gallery. She filled a 10-meter-long boat with stuffed phallus-shaped objects and then covered the floor, walls, and ceiling of the gallery with 999 black-and-white photographs of this sculpture. She then went on to produce environmental works employing the phallus — a symbol of her terror of sex — and macaroni, standing for the food mass-produced by american consumer society. In Driving Image Show (1964), she covered the gallery floor with macaroni, and in Infinity Mirror Room — Phalli’s Field (1965) she created and environment out of mirrors and plastic. Mirrors were also employed in the 1966 Kusama’s Peep Show, where she exhibited the Endless Love Room, a hexagonal, mirrored space illuminated by flashing red, white, blue, and green lights, creating visual equivalents of such immaterial and intangible things as ‘mechanization, repetition, threatening ideas, impulses, vertigo, and all-encompassing, non-existent love’.

Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, and after several retrospective exhibitions during the 1990s, mostly in the United States, began to create much larger installations that have been exhibited around the world. She continues to employ the mirrors featured in Endless Love Room. In Fireflies on the Water (2002), 150 tiny lights hang down from the ceiling, creating an effect of infinite repetition on the mirrored walls and the pool in the centre of the floor. The result is a scene of great serenity and ethereality. The three-dimensional objects, repeated endlessly and illusionistically in the two-dimensional mirrored surfaces, visible to the eye but impossible to actually reach out and touch, are the perfect embodiment of Kusama’s art of phantasms and hallucinations, evoking the indefinable and ineffable.

from Walking in My Mind, “Between the Microcosm and the Macrocosm”,
essay by Mami Kataoka

melisaki: Grand Entrance, Exposition Universelle,...

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 17:26:04 -0400

melisaki:

Grand Entrance, Exposition Universelle, Paris

unidentified photographer, 1900 | wiki

••••••

The Grand Entrance was designed by
{ René Binet }: French (1866 — 1911) architect, designer, artist