Dan Graham – Rock My Religion
Download Rock My Religion (450Mb, AVI)
From UBUWeb
Art Archive
From Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks
An excerpt from the introduction to Leonardo da Vinci’s published notebooks, available at the Project Gutenberg website.
Seeing that I can find no subject specially useful or pleasing – since the men who have come before me have taken for their own every useful or necessary theme – I must do like one who, being poor, comes last to the fair, and can find no other way of providing for himself than by taking all the things already seen by other buyers and not taken but refused by reason of their lesser value. I, then, will load my humble pack with this despised and rejected merchandise, the refuse of so many buyers; and will go about to distribute it, not indeed in great cities, but in the poorer towns, taking such a price as the wares I offer may be worth.
Brian Eno – Thursday Afternoon
Now available on DVD. Be ready to turn your monitor or laptop on its side…
/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/brianeno-thursdayafternoon.flvVia UBUWeb
Jordan Baseman – Dark Is The Night
UK based film artist Jordan Baseman is making new work in and around Soho interviewing inhabitants who range from the notorious to the anonymous, including hedonists and faded actors. The interview process is at the heart of Baseman’s work. He heavily edits this recorded material, juxtaposing the finished interviews with film footage taken in and around Soho, to construct narratives that mimic and yet subvert the traditional documentary film format. The end product will be a series of films that are at once semi-narrative, poetic and revealing. The works will create a portrait of a place that is both constant and fleeting.
More information, including a free coach trip from London to the preview and Jordan Baseman in conversation with Peter Bonnell on the Artsway website.
21st February – 5th April 2009
Tuesday – Sunday, 11am – 5pm
Preview and Reception for the Artist: Saturday 21st February 2009 at 2pm
A: Artsway, Station Road, Sway, Hampshire, SO41 6BA
T: +44 (0) 1590 682260
W: www.artsway.org.uk
E: mail@artsway.org.uk
I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now
The original 1969 recording of I Am Sitting In A Room by Alvin Lucier.
Lucier records himself narrating a text, and then plays the recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Since all rooms have a characteristic resonance (e.g., between a large hall and a small room), the effect is that certain frequencies are gradually emphasised as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. The recited text describes this process in action – it begins “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice…”, and concludes with, “I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have,” referring to his own stuttering.
Audio from UBUWeb’s Alvin Lucier page
Quote from the good Wikipedia article about Lucier
Alvin Lucier’s official website
A Central Ontological Transformer
Mahmoud Darwish was born in Galilee in 1941. The specific conditions we are born into is a crapshoot, and Darwish just lost. In 1948 his family fled to Lebanon. He became the poet laureate of Palestine, an expression of a dispossessed people. Like many in his generation his influences included Ginsburg and Rimbaud. In 1971 he moved to Cairo and worked in Al-Ahram. In 1973 he joined the PLO, and was hence banned from entering Palestine.
Published in 1987, his landmark Memory for Forgetfulness expresses the plight of the refugee under siege. This book is an eyewitness account of the peak of shelling in Lebanon during the civil war, called Hiroshima Day. Comparable to Slaughterhouse 5 or Murakami’s The White Sky of Hiroshima, Memories for Forgetfulness is a coherent exploration of a life that is already forfeit, a life of isolation, injustice and alienation.
When he died in 2008, discussions were held with Israel to bury him in his home town. He was buried in exile from that home village so that he could be where all Palestinians can visit. His remains rest in Ramallah at the heart of the disputed West Bank.
What follows is a short excerpt where Darwish recalls going out into the city streets under bombardment.
Cloudcuckooland
I want to riff on birds, riffing as a way of exploring morphic resonance between different kinds of material. Out there in the world, in art, music and literature, birds are ubiquitous. See Max Ernst’s Two Children Are Threatened By A Lark or re-run Hitchcock’s The Birds. Listen to Patti Smith’s Birdland while reading The Raven by Poe. Recall the Four and Twenty Blackbirds Baked in a Pie, Tennessee William’s Sweet Bird of Youth, Jim Morrison’s Bird of Prey, Leda’s Swan, Coleridge’s Albatross and perhaps the saddest bird of all Lewis Carroll’s Dodo. The augurs of ancient Rome would interpret the will of the gods by studying the behaviour of birds, their flight patterns, eating habits and songs. I make no such soothsayer’s claim for my activities, which are more akin to an open play of fanciful pattern matching.
Margarita Gluzberg – Manifesting Commerce
In a recent issue of NY Arts Magazine, Éva Pelczer interviewed Margarita Gluzberg about her show The Money Plot at Paradise Row Gallery in London.
Concrete Dreams
Art, Architecture and Social Space. Concrete Dreams is an exhibtion that features the work of 27 artists including Anya Gallaccio, Lucy Gunning, Alex Hartley, Matt O’Dell, Cornelia Parker and Louisa Minkin. The work explores diverse and conflicting issues relating to architecture such as pathos, humour, desire, history, power, wealth and neglect. Curated by Liz Harrison and Fran Cottell, from 4th to 21st September at APT Gallery in London. More details at www.concretedreams.org.
