Log24

Saturday, November 12, 2022

Inside a White Cube

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:09 pm

For the late Brian O'Doherty, from posts now tagged "Pless Birthday 2022" —

A Mathieu Puzzle: 24 Diamond Facets of the Eightfold Cube

This post was suggested by an obituary of O'Doherty and by
"The Life and Work of Vera Stepen Pless" in
Notices of the American Mathematical Society , December 2022.

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Outside the White Cube

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:01 pm

      

"Remember, remember the fifth of November"

  — Hugo Weaving in 2005

"If it's Tuesday . . ."

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Inside the White Cube

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:01 am

(Continued)

Saturday, May 4, 2019

Inside the White Cube

Structure of the eightfold cube

See also Espacement  and The Thing and I.

Thursday, November 29, 2018

The White Cube

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:57 am

Clicking on Zong in the above post leads to a 2005 article
in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society .

See also the eightfold  cube and interality .

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

White Cube

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:21 pm

Inside the White Cube” —

“We have now reached
a point where we see
not the art but the space first….
An image comes to mind
of a white, ideal space
that, more than any single picture,
may be the archetypal image
of 20th-century art.”

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090205-cube2x2x2.gif

“Space: what you
damn well have to see.”

— James Joyce, Ulysses  

Sunday, December 20, 2020

Looking Firmly

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:39 pm

“… and the song of love’s recision is the music of the spheres.”
— E. L. Doctorow, City of God

Doctorow’s remark was quoted here earlier, on February 5, 2009

The central aim of Western religion–

"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
 masculine and feminine,
 life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)

The central aim of Western philosophy–

 Dualities of Pythagoras
 as reconstructed by Aristotle:
  Limited Unlimited
  Odd Even
  Male Female
  Light Dark
  Straight Curved
  ... and so on ....

“Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy.”

— Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993)

“In the garden of Adding
live Even and Odd…
And the song of love’s recision
is the music of the spheres.”

— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)

A quotation today at art critic Carol Kino’s website, slightly expanded:

“Art inherited from the old religion
the power of consecrating things
and endowing them with
a sort of eternity;
museums are our temples,
and the objects displayed in them
are beyond history.”

— Octavio Paz,”Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship,” in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987), 52

From Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 Artforum essays– not on museums, but rather on gallery space:

Inside the White Cube

“We have now reached
a point where we see
not the art but the space first….
An image comes to mind
of a white, ideal space
that, more than any single picture,
may be the archetypal image
of 20th-century art.”

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090205-cube2x2x2.gif

“Space: what you
damn well have to see.”

— James Joyce, Ulysses  

Saturday, June 6, 2020

Inside Job

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:22 pm

A film not unrelated to the screen career
of Sophia Lillis:  Inside Daisy Clover.

I prefer Inside the White Cube.

Monday, July 10, 2017

Under Bleu Cup

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 am

Publishers Weekly  on a Nov. 1, 2011, book, Under Blue Cup

"Krauss’s core argument (what she deems a 'crusade')
is that the 'white cube,' which conceptual and installation
artists have deemed obsolete, actually thrives."

For other "core arguments," see Satuday's post "Common Core"
and the Art Space posts "Odd Core" and "Even Core."

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Secular Space

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:30 am

This morning's previous post, on sacred space,
linked to "Positively White Cube Revisited,"
an article by one Simon Sheikh.

Sheikh writes well, but he seems to be a disciple
of the damned Marxist lunatic Louis Althusser.

As Pynchon put it in Gravity's Rainbow ,
"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."

In this case, a video starring Sheikh on the exhibition "All That Fits"
suggests, by its filming date (May 27, 2011),  a Maltese  cross.

"The stuff that dreams are made of." — Bogart

IMAGE- 'Maltese Falcon' clip uploaded Oct. 25, 2012

(See also Oct. 25, 2012.)

Sacred Space, continued

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

"An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space
​that, more than any single picture, may be the
archetypal image of 20th-century art."

— Brian O'Doherty, "Inside the White Cube"

Cube  spaces exist also in mathematics.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Cube Space

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:24 pm

For the late Cardinal Glemp of Poland,
who died yesterday, some links:

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Object Lesson

Yesterday's post on the current Museum of Modern Art exhibition
"Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925" suggests a renewed look at
abstraction and a fundamental building block: the cube.

From a recent Harvard University Press philosophical treatise on symmetry—

The treatise corrects Nozick's error of not crediting Weyl's 1952 remarks
on objectivity and symmetry, but repeats Weyl's error of not crediting
Cassirer's extensive 1910 (and later) remarks on this subject.

For greater depth see Cassirer's 1910 passage on Vorstellung :

IMAGE- Ernst Cassirer on 'representation' or 'Vorstellung' in 'Substance and Function' as 'the riddle of knowledge'

This of course echoes Schopenhauer, as do discussions of "Will and Idea" in this journal.

For the relationship of all this to MoMA and abstraction, see Cube Space and Inside the White Cube.

"The sacramental nature of the space becomes clear…." — Brian O'Doherty

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Forgive Us Our Transgressions

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:15 pm

Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society

"Recent Advances in the Langlands Program"

Author(s):  Edward Frenkel
Journal:     Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 41 (2004), 151-184.
Posted:     January 8, 2004

Item in the references:

[La5] G. Laumon, La correspondance de Langlands sur les corps de fonctions  (d'après Laurent
La fforgue), Séminaire Bourbaki, Exp. No. 973, Preprint math.AG/0003131.

Correction—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101204-BourbakiNo873.jpg

Related material— Peter Woit 's post on Frenkel today—

"Math Research Institute, Art, Politics, Transgressive Sex and Geometric Langlands."

See also an item from a Google search on " 'nit-picking' + Bourbaki "—

White Cube — Jake & Dinos Chapman 

Fucking Hell is not, evidently, a realistic (much less nit-picking ) account of the ….
The following link enables you to pan virtually around the Bourbaki
www.whitecube.com/artists/chapman/texts/154/ – Cached

— as well as a search for "White Cube" in this journal.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Art Object, continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:00 am

Inside the White Cube

"An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space
 that, more than any single picture, may be
 the archetypal image of 20th-century art."

"May be" —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101123-plain_cube_200x227.gif

     Image from this journal
     at noon (EST) Tuesday

"The geometry of unit cubes is a meeting point
 of several different subjects in mathematics."
                                    — Chuanming Zong

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101125-ZongAMS.jpg

    (Click to enlarge.)

"A meeting point" —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101125-NYTobit-UN.jpg

  The above death reportedly occurred "early Wednesday in Beijing."

Another meeting point —

                            http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101125-McDonaldLogoSm.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101125-DayTheEarth.jpg

(Click on logo and on meeting image for more details.)

See also "no ordinary venue."

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Deconstructing Alice

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Alyssa is  Wonderland

Manohla Dargis in The New York Times  yesterday

“Of course the character of Carroll’s original Alice is evident in each outrageous creation she dreams up in ‘Wonderland’ and in the sequel, ‘Through the Looking-Glass,’ which means that she’s a straight man to her own imagination. (She is  Wonderland.)”

Alyssa Milano as a child, with fork

From Inside the White Cube

“The sacramental nature of the space becomes clear, and so does one of the great projective laws of modernism: as modernism gets older, context becomes content. In a peculiar reversal, the object introduced into the gallery ‘frames’ the gallery and its laws.”

From Yogi Berra–

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

Related material:  For Baron Samedi and…

Symbology
Robert Langdon (played by Tom Hanks) and a corner of Solomon's Cube
Jacques Derrida on the Looking-Glass garden, 'The Time before First,' and Solomon's seal

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Out of What Chaos

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:28 pm

Mathematics and Narrative, continued…

Out of What Chaos, a novel by Lee Oser

"This book is more or less what one would expect if Walker Percy wrote about a cynical rock musician who converts to Catholicism, and then Nabokov added some of his verbal pyrotechnics, and then Buster Keaton and the Marquis de Sade and Lionel Trilling inserted a few extra passages. It is a loving and yet appalled description of the underground music scene in the Pacific Northwest. And it is a convincing representation of someone very, very smart."

Matt Greenfield in The Valve

"If Evelyn Waugh had lived amid the American Northwest rock music scene, he might have written a book like this."

–Anonymous Amazon.com reviewer

A possible source for Oser's title–

"…Lytton Strachey described Pope's theme as 'civilization illumined by animosity; such was the passionate and complicated material from which he wove his patterns of balanced precision and polished clarity.' But out of what chaos did that clarity and precision come!"

Authors at Work, by  Herman W. Liebert and Robert H. Taylor, New York, Grolier Club, 1957, p. 16

Related material:

Unthought Known

Pearl Jam 'Backspacer' album released Sept. 20, 2009

and the

Catholic Analyst's Couch, White Cube Gallery, 2002

White Cube Gallery, 2002

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Sunday October 11, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 pm
Concepts of Space

Today I revised the illustrations
in Finite Geometry of the
Square and Cube

for consistency in labeling
the eightfold cube.

Related material:

Inside the White Cube:
The Ideology of
the Gallery Space

Dagger Definitions

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Thursday September 24, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:01 am

Who Knows
What Evil Lurks…

The brain-in-a-jar on the cover of the new Pearl Jam album "Backspacer" (previous two entries) is apparently there because of a song on the album, "Unthought Known"–

"All the thoughts you never see
You are always thinking
Brain is wide, the brain is deep
Oh, are you sinking?"

The song title is from a book, The Shadow of the Object (Columbia U. Press, 1987), by psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas.

The "unthought known" phrase has been quoted widely by second-rate psychologizers and by some not so second-rate. Their lucubrations suggest that sinking brain-worshippers should seek a…

Amy Adams and Meryl Streep ('Doubt') as Catholic psychoanalysts, with their couch
The couch is from a 2002 exhibit
at London's White Cube gallery.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Thursday April 2, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:25 pm

Transformative
Hermeneutics

In memory of
physics historian
Martin J. Klein,
(June 25, 1924-
March 28, 2009)

"… in physics itself, there was what appeared, briefly, to be an ending, which then very quickly gave way to a new beginning: The quest for the ultimate building-blocks of the universe had been taken down to the molecular level in nineteenth-century kinetic theory… and finally to the nuclear level in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. For a moment in the 1920s the quest appeared to have ended…. However… this paradise turned out to be, if not exactly a fool's paradise, then perhaps an Eden lost."

No Truth Except in the Details: Essays in Honor of Martin J. Klein, introduction by A.J. Kox and Daniel Siegel, June 25, 1994

New York Times obituary dated April 1, 2009:

"Martin J. Klein, a historian of modern physics…. died Saturday, [March 28, 2009] in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 84 and lived in Chapel Hill."

Klein edited, among other things, Paul Ehrenfest: Collected Scientific Papers (publ. by North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1959).

"It seems, as one becomes older,
 That the past has another pattern,
 and ceases to be a mere sequence…."

 

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

A Walsh function and a corresponding finite-geometry hyperplane

"Note that at first, you can see
 the 'arrow of time.'
 After a long period, however,
 the direction of time
 is no longer evident."

— "The Ehrenfest Chains,"
     by Kyle Siegrist, ex. 16

Related material:

"Almost every famous chess game
is a well-wrought urn
in Cleanth Brooks’ sense."

— John Holbo,
Now We See
Wherein Lies the Pleasure

"The entire sequence of moves in these… chapters reminds one– or should remind one– of a certain type of chess problem where the point is not merely the finding of a mate in so many moves, but what is termed 'retrograde analysis'…."

— Vladimir Nabokov, foreword to The Defense

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Thursday February 5, 2009

Through the
Looking Glass:

A Sort of Eternity

From the new president’s inaugural address:

“… in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

The words of Scripture:

9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12 For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 

First Corinthians 13

“through a glass”

[di’ esoptrou].
By means of
a mirror [esoptron]
.

Childish things:

Froebel's third gift, the eightfold cube
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
 

Not-so-childish:

Three planes through
the center of a cube
that split it into
eight subcubes:
Cube subdivided into 8 subcubes by planes through the center
Through a glass, darkly:

A group of 8 transformations is
generated by affine reflections
in the above three planes.
Shown below is a pattern on
the faces of the 2x2x2 cube
that is symmetric under one of
these 8 transformations–
a 180-degree rotation:

Design Cube 2x2x2 for demonstrating Galois geometry

(Click on image
for further details.)

But then face to face:

A larger group of 1344,
rather than 8, transformations
of the 2x2x2 cube
is generated by a different
sort of affine reflections– not
in the infinite Euclidean 3-space
over the field of real numbers,
but rather in the finite Galois
3-space over the 2-element field.

Galois age fifteen, drawn by a classmate.

Galois age fifteen,
drawn by a classmate.

These transformations
in the Galois space with
finitely many points
produce a set of 168 patterns
like the one above.
For each such pattern,
at least one nontrivial
transformation in the group of 8
described above is a symmetry
in the Euclidean space with
infinitely many points.

For some generalizations,
see Galois Geometry.

Related material:

The central aim of Western religion– 

"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
 masculine and feminine,
 life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)

The central aim of Western philosophy–

 Dualities of Pythagoras
 as reconstructed by Aristotle:
  Limited Unlimited
  Odd Even
  Male Female
  Light Dark
  Straight Curved
  ... and so on ....

“Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy.”

— Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993)

“In the garden of Adding
live Even and Odd…
And the song of love’s recision
is the music of the spheres.”

— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)

A quotation today at art critic Carol Kino’s website, slightly expanded:

“Art inherited from the old religion
the power of consecrating things
and endowing them with
a sort of eternity;
museums are our temples,
and the objects displayed in them
are beyond history.”

— Octavio Paz,”Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship,” in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987), 52

From Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 Artforum essays– not on museums, but rather on gallery space:

Inside the White Cube

“We have now reached
a point where we see
not the art but the space first….
An image comes to mind
of a white, ideal space
that, more than any single picture,
may be the archetypal image
of 20th-century art.”

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090205-cube2x2x2.gif

“Space: what you
damn well have to see.”

— James Joyce, Ulysses  

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Tuesday January 6, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 am
Archetypes, Synchronicity,
and Dyson on Jung

The current (Feb. 2009) Notices of the American Mathematical Society has a written version of Freeman Dyson’s 2008 Einstein Lecture, which was to have been given in October but had to be canceled. Dyson paraphrases a mathematician on Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes:

“… we do not need to accept Jung’s theory as true in order to find it illuminating.”

The same is true of Jung’s remarks on synchronicity.

For example —

Yesterday’s entry, “A Wealth of Algebraic Structure,” lists two articles– each, as it happens, related to Jung’s four-diamond figure from Aion as well as to my own Notes on Finite Geometry. The articles were placed online recently by Cambridge University Press on the following dates:

R. T. Curtis’s 1974 article defining his Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) was published online on Oct. 24, 2008.

Curtis’s 1987 article on geometry and algebraic structure in the MOG was published online on Dec. 19, 2008.

On these dates, the entries in this journal discussed…

Oct. 24:
Cube Space, 1984-2003

Material related to that entry:

Dec. 19:
Art and Religion: Inside the White Cube

That entry discusses a book by Mark C. Taylor:

The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation (U. of Chicago Press, 1999).

In Chapter 3, “Sutures of Structures,” Taylor asks —

“What, then, is a frame, and what is frame work?”

One possible answer —

Hermann Weyl on the relativity problem in the context of the 4×4 “frame of reference” found in the above Cambridge University Press articles.

“Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge.”
— Vladimir Nabokov 

Friday, December 19, 2008

Friday December 19, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 1:06 pm
Inside the
White Cube

Part I: The White Cube

The Eightfold Cube

Part II: Inside
 
The Paradise of Childhood'-- Froebel's Third Gift

Part III: Outside

Mark Tansey, 'The Key' (1984)

Click to enlarge.

Mark Tansey, The Key (1984)

For remarks on religion
related to the above, see
Log24 on the Garden of Eden
and also Mark C. Taylor,
"What Derrida Really Meant"
(New York Times, Oct. 14, 2004).

For some background on Taylor,
see Wikipedia. Taylor, Chairman
of the Department of Religion
at
Columbia University, has a
1973 doctorate in religion from
Harvard University. His opinion
of Derrida indicates that his
sympathies lie more with
the serpent than with the angel
in the Tansey picture above.

For some remarks by Taylor on
the art of Tansey relevant to the
structure of the white cube
(Part I above), see Taylor's
The Picture in Question:
Mark Tansey and the
Ends of Representation

(U. of Chicago Press, 1999):

From Chapter 3,
"Sutures* of Structures," p. 58:

"What, then, is a frame, and what is frame work?

This question is deceptive in its simplicity. A frame is, of course, 'a basic skeletal structure designed to give shape or support' (American Heritage Dictionary)…. when the frame is in question, it is difficult to determine what is inside and what is outside. Rather than being on one side or the other, the frame is neither inside nor outside. Where, then, Derrida queries, 'does the frame take place….'"

* P. 61:
"… the frame forms the suture of structure. A suture is 'a seamless [sic**] joint or line of articulation,' which, while joining two surfaces, leaves the trace of their separation."

 ** A dictionary says "a seamlike joint or line of articulation," with no mention of "trace," a term from Derrida's jargon.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Thursday May 22, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am
The Undertaking:
An Exercise in
Conceptual Art

I Ching hexagram 54: The Marrying Maiden

Hexagram 54:
THE JUDGMENT

Undertakings bring misfortune.
Nothing that would further.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080522-Irelandslide1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Brian O’Doherty, an Irish-born artist,
before the [Tuesday, May 20] wake
of his alter ego* ‘Patrick Ireland’
on the grounds of the
Irish Museum of Modern Art.”
New York Times, May 22, 2008    

THE IMAGE

Thus the superior man
understands the transitory
in the light of
the eternity of the end.

Another version of
the image:

Images of time and eternity in memory of Michelangelo
See 2/22/08
and  4/19/08.


Related material:

Michael Kimmelman in today’s New York Times

“An essay from the ’70s by Mr. O’Doherty, ‘Inside the White Cube,’ became famous in art circles for describing how modern art interacted with the gallery spaces in which it was shown.”

Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube,” 1976 Artforum essays on the gallery space and 20th-century art:

“The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space. Or rather the history of modern art can be correlated with changes in that space and in the way we see it. We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first…. An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art.”

An archetypal image

THE SPACE:

The Eightfold Cube: The Beauty of Klein's Simple Group

A non-archetypal image

THE ART:

Jack in the Box, by Natasha Wescoat

Natasha Wescoat, 2004
See also Epiphany 2008:

How the eightfold cube works

“Nothing that would further.”
— Hexagram 54

Lear’s fool:

 …. Now thou art an 0
without a figure. I am better
than thou art, now. I am a fool;
thou art nothing….

“…. in the last mystery of all the single figure of what is called the World goes joyously dancing in a state beyond moon and sun, and the number of the Trumps is done.  Save only for that which has no number and is called the Fool, because mankind finds it folly till it is known.  It is sovereign or it is nothing, and if it is nothing then man was born dead.”

The Greater Trumps,
by Charles Williams, Ch. 14

* For a different, Jungian, alter ego, see Irish Fourplay (Jan. 31, 2003) and “Outside the Box,” a New York Times review of O’Doherty’s art (featuring a St. Bridget’s Cross) by Bridget L. Goodbody dated April 25, 2007. See also Log24 on that date.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Sunday April 22, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:31 pm
Built
continued from
March 25, 2006

In honor of Scarlett Johansson's recent London films "Match Point" and "Scoop," here is a link to an entry of Women's History Month, 2006, with a discussion of an exhibition of the works of artist Liza Lou at London's White Cube Gallery.  That entry includes the following illustrations:


The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060325-WhiteCube.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 

This work might aptly be
  retitled "Brick Shithouse."

Related material:

The artist's self-portrait

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060325-LizaLouSelfPortrait.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

See also this morning's entry

"She's a brick… house…
The lady's stacked
   and that's a fact,
Ain't holdin' nothin' back."

— and last year's entry
on this date:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060422-Johansson1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"Her wall is filled with pictures,
She gets 'em one by one."

The bricks and "white cube"
above and in this morning's entry
may be contrasted with the
bricks of Diamonds and Whirls
and the cube of On Beauty.

  Poetic allusions such as these
may help provide
entertainment in the afterlife
for Beavis, Butt-Head, and
other inmates of Plato's Cave:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070328-PlatoCave.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"The Garden of Eden is behind us
and there is no road back to innocence;
we can only go forward."

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
Earth Shine, p. xii

 

Friday, April 7, 2006

Friday April 7, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:27 am
ART WARS
in Poetry Month

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060407-Heaven.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Tomorrow is the final day
for the Liza Lou exhibit at
  London’s White Cube gallery.

For related material, see
Log24, March 24-26, and
the entries culminating
on Pi Day.

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Sunday March 26, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 am
Midnight in the Garden
continued

Questions posed by
Roberta Smith in the
New York Times
of Jan. 13, 2006:

“‘What is art?’ may be the
art world’s most relentlessly asked
question. But a more pertinent one
right now is,  ‘What is an art gallery?'”

—  from “Who Needs a
White Cube These Days?

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060320-Masks.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

An example that may help:
London’s White Cube gallery
and its current Liza Lou exhibit,
which is said to convey
a palpable sense of use,
damage, lost time, lost lives
.”

See the previous entry for details.

On the brighter side, we have

Clint Eastwood on the
“Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil”
soundtrack CD

“Accentuate the positive”–

and an entry from last Christmas:

Compare and contrast:


(Click on pictures
for details.)


The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/EightfoldCubeCover.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/EightfoldWayCover.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“Recollect what I have said to you,
that this world is a comedy
to those who think,
a tragedy to those who feel.
This is the quint-essence of all
I have learnt in fifty years!”

Horace Walpole,
  letter to Horace Mann,
5 March, 1772

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Saturday March 25, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:23 pm
Built

In memory of Rolf Myller,
who died on Thursday,
March 23, 2006, at
Mount Sinai Hospital
in Manhattan:

Myller was,
according to the
New York Times,
an architect
whose eclectic pursuits
included writing
children’s books,
The Bible Puzzle Book, and
Fantasex: A Book of Erotic Games.

He also wrote, the Times says,
Symbols and Their Meaning
(1978), a graphic overview of
children’s nonverbal communication.”
This is of interest in view of the
Log24 reference to “symbol-mongers”
on the date of Myller’s death.

In honor of Women’s History Month
and of Myller’s interests in the erotic
and in architecture, we present
the following work from a British gallery.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060325-WhiteCube.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

This work might aptly be
  retitled “Brick Shithouse.”

Related material:

(1) the artist’s self-portrait

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060325-LizaLouSelfPortrait.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

and, in view of the cover
illustration for Myller’s
The Bible Puzzle Book,

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060325-Tower.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

(2) the monumental treatise
by Leonard Shlain

The Alphabet Versus
the Goddess: The Conflict
Between Word and Image
.

For devotees of women’s history
and of the Goddess,
here are further details from
the White Cube gallery:

Liza Lou

03.03.06 – 08.04.06

White Cube is pleased to present the first UK solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Liza Lou.

Combining visionary, conceptual and craft approaches, Lou makes mixed-media sculptures and room-size installations that are suggestive of a transcendental reality. Lou’s work often employs familiar, domestic forms, crafted from a variety of materials such as steel, wood, papier-mâché and fibreglass, which is then covered with tiny glass beads that are painstakingly applied, one at a time, with tweezers. Dazzling and opulent and constantly glistening with refracted light, her sculptures bristle with what Peter Schjeldahl has aptly described as ‘surreal excrescence’.

This exhibition, a meditation on the vulnerability of the human body and the architecture of confinement, will include several new figurative sculptures as well as two major sculptural installations. Security Fence (2005) is a large scale cage made up of four steel, chain link walls, topped by rings of barbed wire and Cell (2004-2006), as its name suggests, is a room based on the approximate dimensions of a death row prison cell, a kind of externalized map of the prisoner’s mind. Both Security Fence and Cell, like Lou’s immense earlier installations Kitchen (1991-1995) and Back Yard (1995-1999) are characterized by the absence of their real human subject. But whereas the absent subject in Kitchen and Back Yard could be imagined through the details and accessories carefully laid out to view, in Lou’s two new installations the human body is implied simply through the empty volume created by the surrounding architecture. Both Cell and Security Fence are monochromatic and employ iconic forms that make direct reference to Minimalist art in its use of repetition, formal perfection and materiality. In contrast to this, the organic form of a gnarled tree trunk, Scaffold (2005-2006), its surface covered with shimmering golden beads, juts directly out from the wall.

Lou’s work has an immediate ‘shock’ content that works on different levels: first, an acknowledgement of the work’s sheer aesthetic impact and secondly the slower comprehension of the labour that underlies its construction. But whereas in Lou’s earlier works the startling clarity of the image is often a counterpoint to the lengthy process of its realization, for the execution of Cell, Lou further slowed down the process by using beads of the smallest variety with their holes all facing up in an exacting hour-by-hour approach in order to ‘use time as an art material’.

Concluding this body of work are three male figures in states of anguish. In The Seer (2005-2006), a man becomes the means of turning his body back in on himself. Bent over double, his body becomes an instrument of impending self-mutilation, the surface of his body covered with silver-lined beads, placed with the exactitude and precision of a surgeon. In Homeostasis (2005-2006) a naked man stands prostrate with his hands up against the wall in an act of surrender. In this work, the dissolution between inside and outside is explored as the ornate surface of Lou’s cell-like material ‘covers’ the form while exposing the systems of the body, both corporeal and esoteric. In The Vessel (2005-2006), Christ, the universal symbol of torture and agony holds up a broken log over his shoulders. This figure is beheaded, and bejewelled, with its neck carved out, becoming a vessel into which the world deposits its pain and suffering.

Lou has had numerous solo exhibitions internationally, including Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo and Fondació Joan Miró, Barcelona. She was a 2002 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Liza Lou’s film Born Again (2004), in which the artist tells the compelling and traumatic story* of her Pentecostal upbringing in Minnesota, will be screened at 52 Hoxton Square from 3 – 25 March courtesy of Penny Govett and Mick Kerr.

Liza Lou will be discussing her work following a screening of her film at the ICA, The Mall, London on Friday 3 March at 7pm. Tickets are available from the ICA box office (+ 44 (0) 20 7930 3647).

A fully illustrated catalogue, with a text by Jeanette Winterson and an interview with Tim Marlow, will accompany the exhibition.

White Cube is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10.00 am to 6.00 pm.

For further information please contact Honey Luard or Susannah Hyman on + 44 (0) 20 7930 5373

* Warning note from Adrian Searle
    in The Guardian of March 21:
   “How much of her story is
    gospel truth we’ll never know.”

For deeper background on
art, patriarchal religion,
and feminism, see
The Agony and the Ya-Ya.

Friday, January 13, 2006

Friday January 13, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Beyond the Fire

“Who Needs a White Cube These Days?”
Headline in today’s New York Times

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire…
— Poem title, Gerard Manley Hopkins

 
                                          
“… Sleep realized
Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect,
A diamond jubilance beyond the fire,

That gives its power to the wild-ringed eye.”

— Wallace Stevens,
   “The Owl in the Sarcophagus”
III 13-16,
    from The Auroras of Autumn, 1950


Related material:
The five entries ending on Christmas, 2005.

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