sugimoto’s history of history

hiroshi sugimoto has a show up at the japan socoety which i’ll wager money is an impressive one. it’s called a history of history. morgan meis of 3 quarks daily mused on the subject today, saying: His concern for history sometimes feels like a tribute to its struggle against time. But, then again, the mood of Sugimoto’s inquiry suggests that he is an observer from outside, peering at history from the vantage point of eternity. How else could he dare contend that he is producing a history of history. Such is the stuff of gods or extraterrestrials or brains in a vat. Indeed, a person could be forgiven for thinking that Sugimoto is one of Epicurus’ gods, surveying the course of history from the intermundus, the space between worlds, with a sublime indifference. if you are unfamiliar with sugimoto work see below for a sampling.

posted by jmorrison on 11/28 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
case 95

and now we continue with our series of case studies from psychopathia sexualis  richard von krafft-ebinng’s 1886 catalog of all the sexual “perversions” fit to print. (see earlier cases 116, 225, 123, 98 / 99, and 88). i suppose it warrants mentioning for those of you just joining us that dr. krafft-ebinng, though certainly a trailblazer, was ultimately a man of his age. a summation of the book’s possition might be as follows: if your own tastes stretch beyond monogamous “missionary work” you are likely a tainted psycopath begotten by maniacs. if you also happen to be a woman… well, head directly to the assylum, do not pass go, do not even think about sexual fullfilment. i’ll get deeper into all that in a future installment. for now…

posted by jmorrison on 11/28 | lost & found - wtf | | permalink
turkey day after-action report

Like usual we trooped over to the in-laws for Thanksgiving. You go light on breakfast because you know you’ll be eating yourself into a stupor after noon. There were parades on the TV; wonder what it’d be like to live right next to the parade route? I bet that would be groovy, huh? But, anyway, once we were over there…

posted by tbuckner on 11/27 | piss & vinegar - fiction | | permalink
the cloud appreciation society

manifesto of the day- quote: At the cloud appreciation society we believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them. We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wheresoever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at monotonous blue every day. We acknowledge that the clouds are the most egalitarian of Nature’s displays since everyone has an equally fantastic view of them. We fear that they are so everyday as to be in danger of being overlooked. And so we seek to remind people that the clouds are expressions of the atmosphere’s moods that can be read like those of a person’s countenance. We’re in danger of becoming meteorologically autistic – of becoming ignorant of the meanings of these expressions. They are the Rorschach images of the sky, and if you consider the shapes you see in them you will save on psychoanalysis bills.

posted by jmorrison on 11/26 | lost & found - wtf | | permalink
hey garfield! leave them kids alone.

to be honest i’m finding it hard to concentrate this morning. unlike most days where the reasons are mysterious and possibly myriad today the reason is all too obvious. it’s the thousands of people surging past my living room window, no more than 20 feet from where i’m sitting. you see i live half a block from the thanksgiving day parade. this in effect makes my front “yard” a parade ground. complete with balloons, strains of marching band horn sections, endlessly circling news helicopters, traffic barricades, signs which read “please have bags ready for inspection,” screaming parents, and of course, the cause for screaming parents everywhere, screaming children.

etchasketchathon etcetera

jake and dinos chapman have a new show up at the white cube gallery in london called like a dog returns to its vomit.  as the title suggests it’s not new work as such, but rather the complete corpus of their revised etchings. hundreds of them. on the surface, which is to say to hear them and their work described, the chapman’s would seem primary candidates for the yawn treatment and yet more often than not i enjoy their work. perhaps it’s because, as a recent guardian article puts it, unusually in contemporary art, they have this thing called talent. see the work, hear what they’ve got to say, and decide for yourself.

posted by jmorrison on 11/23 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
a thanksgiving po-em.


So there it was, on the cover of the Journal of the American Medical Association magazine, a Jan Steen painting called “As the old ones sing, so the young ones pipe.” Steen is quite the genre painter, and his 17th century Holland is more Tarantino than Norman Rockwell. This, one of his more over-the-top efforts, moved me to poetry…

posted by tbuckner on 11/23 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
adventures in nonism: asemic art

our name, the nonist, was originally (for our purposes) coined as a half joking, half serious, (all drunk no doubt) reaction to the chain rattling ghost of art past and the verbose zombie of art present. i for one had gotten tired of all the manifestos and texts i was expected to care about, all the explanations i was obliged to stay awake through, not to mention the boundaries which a knowledge of art history sneakily laid down. “been done.” “reminds me of so-and-so.” “that’s so passe!” simply put “isms” were a drag. who needed em? nonism was a way of saying fuck you politely. we were young and full of wine so what else would you expect?

posted by jmorrison on 11/20 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
differentiating between stupidities

chances are you’ve been calling other people stupid since you first discovered the existence of insults. it’s a natural extension of “no” that most popular word among the learning to speak crowd. “no” is a way of asserting power. insults take it to the next level by essentially saying “no” to the totality of another human’s being. anyhow not long after such zingers as doody-head and jerk-face began losing their potency you most likely began indiscriminately tossing about two old favorites- idiot and moron. what’s more i’m willing to bet those two have managed to stay dog-eared in your lexicon to this day. all of which is simply to say you’ve been calling people idiots and morons for a loooong time.

posted by jmorrison on 11/20 | lost & found - ideas | | permalink
design!

a team from the london college of communication has made my day. (thank you unnamed team members. heartily.) they have scanned and made available every issue of the u.k.‘s design magazine from 1965 - 1974 available online your your browsing, reading, (thieving, cough cough) and inspirational pleasure. and inspirational it is. 120 issues of champion style design folks, all fo free. and happily it’s not just a cover archive, every interior page is available and every article has been retyped and indexed for easy reading and searching. good stuff. now if someone would just get around to doing this for omni magazine all would be peaches and herbs. (via)

posted by jmorrison on 11/17 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
the secret history of the revolving door

The revolving door is most often thought of today, symbolically, in connection to various forms of workplace related dread. as cause of early morning pavlovian groans (christ! here I am again at this hell-hole) or as metaphoric short-hand for conflicts-of-interest, ethical oversight, and corruption. like snapshots from your last colonoscopy or a million dollar damien hirst painting the images conjured aint pretty. The revolving door was not always saddled with such negative connotations. There was a time when it was a symbol of modern man’s ingenuity, an artifact from our energized drive toward the future. Yet surprisingly, even in the glow of the revolving door’s youth, few people were aware of its true origins.

posted by jmorrison on 11/17 | lost & found - ideas | | permalink
running the circus from the monkey cage

h.l. mencken had a lot to say. he was an extremely quotable fellow. for instance: democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage. course just about anyone is good for at least one quote and quotes themselves, as a general rule,  though often pithy and clever, don’t usually offer enough meat for a good teeth sinking. luckily in mencken’s case he not only let fly some memorable one liners (not quite as many as o.wilde or d.parker perhaps though certainly more than say… marcel marceaux) but he also set down a metric ton of paragraphs which expound on his eensy-weensy witticisms. so why is democracy like a monkey running the circus from his cage you ask? as answer i offer last words from 1926

posted by jmorrison on 11/16 | news & views - people | | permalink
the myth of ironus

and I could feel the rumblings of ironus in his endless torment, his prodigious surface area being pushed upward by two revoltingly soft human hands. With all his power he tried to embrace gravity, to become heavier and denser, to resist the human’s force and return to the valley floor. just as it seemed he could summon no more weight the pitiless human would lose his grip and ironus would come thundering down again on to the plain, triumphant! but not so. each and every time the human would return laying those soft hands upon him and begin forcing him up the hill again, and the sweat which ran off him and the steam which rose after him wet ironus’ surface and seeped into his tiny cracks and fissures…

posted by jmorrison on 11/13 | piss & vinegar - fiction | | permalink
luca brazzi sends his greetings from the fishes

Am I funny? Funny how? Do I amuse you? Am I a clown for your fuckin’ entertainment? Just what the fuck is so amusing? Oh, the greeting cards? You wanna see the fuckin’ greeting cards? Like if the family had its own line of fuckin’ greeting cards, what would they say? All right, all right, wise guy, here they are, and I hope ya fuckin’ choke on ‘em!

posted by tbuckner on 11/12 | piss & vinegar - fiction | | permalink
meatyard the primitive

the facts, culled from the encyclopedia of photography: ralph eugene meatyard did not begin to photograph until 1950. he made his living as an optician photographing mostly on weekends. he was a “sunday photographer” who exhibited with Ansel Adams,  Aaron Siskind and workshopped with Minor White. his photographs present a world of somnambulistic mystery, a realm of disquieting intimations. Children appear as masked figures in decrepit rooms, enacting inscrutable dramas or charades. In every image there is something askew. his work was often accompanied by written texts. he was an avid reader, deeply influenced by modernist literature, especially Pound, Stein, and William Carlos Williams. He died in kentucky in 1972.

posted by jmorrison on 11/11 | sights & sounds - art | | permalink
the last frontier of tourism

new meandering content at monochrom. quote: space tourism bends the whole scientific mission of space conquest, and hurls in your face- the fact that exploration missions were always political missions, with the flag waving under zero gravitation, giving it the appearance of flying in the inexistent breeze. We could say we always behaved like tourists, staying speechless in front of space missions, like a couple of idiotic tour-travellers. All the data, the mission details, when and if we understood trickled down to this - why the yoyo doesn’t spin on the end of the loop in zero gravity or how sex is going to affect space crews on long, intimate, and ultimately boring missions…

posted by jmorrison on 11/10 | tech & science - space | | permalink
the building blocks of a new intelligence?

From new scientist, quote: the infant crawls across a floor strewn with blocks, grabbing and tasting as it goes, its malleable mind impressionable and hungry to learn. it is already adapting, discovering that striped blocks are yummy and spotted ones taste bad. Its exploration is driven by instincts: an interest in bright objects, a predilection for tasting things, and an innate notion of what tastes good. This is how babies explore the world and discover that pink, perky objects exist, and that they produce milk. Hands-on exploration moulds their billions of untrained brain cells into a fully functioning brain…

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