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"Despite all the good things that can be said about conceptual art — its critique of the commodity, its attack on mass cultural manipulation, and its negativity in the face of the remorselessly happy consciousness promoted by the mass media — the movement, “in its helplessly ironic mimicry not of knowledge, but of the mechanisms of the falsification of knowledge,” [Jeff Wall speaking] is only the mirror image of the commodification it rejects. In the end, the routine conceptual artwork turns out to be a “helpless, mute, decorative object . . . a witty piece of contextual virtuosity,” devoid of the life-changing, revolutionary energy it presumes to inject into the rigid and oppressive fabric of the capitalist city."
excerpt from 'the garden of subjection' by john bentley mays _ the walrus 12.2007
jeff wall _ A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) 1993
hokusai _ 36 views of mt fuji
jeff wall _ invisible man
ralph ellison
".. Wall believes “suffering and dispossession remain at the centre of social experience,” .. art can help provide something else — a counter-tradition, a new avant-gardism that points the way to the future. “It provides this complicated glimpse of something better,” Wall says. “The glimpse of something ‘other’ which you experience in art is always a glimpse of something better because experiencing art is, as Stendhal said, the experience of a ‘promesse de bonheur,’ a promise of happiness.”
“And how do you think your pictures, which are so attentive to the unfreedom and unhappiness of the present, give a promise of happiness?” Barents asks.
Wall: “I always try to make beautiful pictures.”"
from 'the garden of subjection' by john bentley mays _ the walrus 12.2007
tokyo summerland wave pool
son of tam
scans from 'self-help for cloying creatives' by paul arden
"what you see is what you see" _ frank stella
robert irwin
frank stella
tulip farms in holland
"Obviously, three-dimensional work will not cleanly succeed painting and sculpture. It's not like a movement; anyway, movements no longer work; also, linear history has unraveled somewhat. The new work exceeds painting in plain power, but power isn't the only consideration, though the difference between it and expression can't be too great either. There are other ways than power and form in which one kind of art can be more or less than another." donald judd _ specific objects 1965
national geographic scans ca. 1960-70
* self-promotions department
henri cartier-bresson _ madrid, spain 1933
robert irwin _ light and space 2007
the eruptions of old faithful
denver airport _ december 2006
strip-mining in the ozarks
pit mines in russia
richard box
tunak tunak tun
martian moon phobos, in stereo.
sunset on mars.
from nasa
axel antas
the majority of this material has been collected over the past few years and saved in an unorganized 'from the web' folder. apologies for not giving credit where credit is due.
u.s. library of congress flickr photostream
le corbusier _ plan voisin for paris, 1925
stuyvesant town _ manhattan 1945. fucking brutal, but a 'success'?
norman wilkinson _ dazzle camouflage paint, ww1
"According to Deleuze and Guattari, smooth space is occupied by intensities and events. It is haptic rather than optic, a vectorial space rather than a metrical one. Smooth space is characteristic of sea, steppe, ice and desert. It is occupied by packs and nomads. It is a texture of "traits" consisting of continuous variation of free action. The characteristic experience of smooth space is short term, up close, with no visual model for points of reference or invariant distances. Instead of the metrical forms of striated space, smooth space is made up of constantly changing orientation of nomads entertaining tactile relations among themselves." via christian hubert
smooth vs striated
'architecture is an art of distinctions within the continuum of space.' _ w.j. mitchell 
from LA NOW v.4 _ thom mayne + ucla dept of architecture
* sketchbook scan circa 2002
rothko _ black on maroon 1958
michael heizer _ foot kick gesture
huge respect to yuji adachi at 9031.com for creating fliqlo; the most elegant + perfectly functional screen-saver of all time.
michael heizer _ displace replace
michael heizer _ double negative 1970
"It is interesting to build a sculpture that attempts to create an atmosphere of awe. Small works are said to do this but it is not my experience. Immense, architecturally sized sculpture creates both the object and the atmosphere. Awe is a state of mind equivalent to religious experience, I think if people feel commitment they feel something has been transcended. . . . I think that large sculptures produced in the '60s and '70s by a number of artists were reminiscent of the time when societies were committed to the construction of massive, significant works of art." michael heizer, in an interview with julia brown. via
“.. a piece of architecture is not architectural because it seduces, or because it fulfils some utilitarian function, but because it sets in motion the operations of seduction and the unconscious.” - Tschumi 1977
* kahn _ salk institute 1966.
photos july 2007.
michael ondaatje _ elimination dance.
scanned from the cinnamon peeler: collected poems
block.
* self promotions department
prodigy (mobb deep)
shaun micheals
tentacle creature void.
michel de broin
* self promotions dept
"He is so very incorrect, except in this: he gave the century a way of making literary art that dealt with the remarkable violence of our time. He listened and watched and invented the language - using the power, the terror, of silences - with which we could name ourselves." frederick busch, nytimes _ reading hemingway without guilt
"In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves." _ Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms
“Hemingway’s words strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook. They live and shine, each in its place. So one of his pages has the effect of a brook-bottom into which you look down through the floating water.” _ Ford Madox Ford
moustache collage heaven.
evoke + maki _ ottawa techwall circa 2005
vice magazine fashion issue
perfect for all your hipster-collage needs.
centered symmetry 1
celestial 1
neon grey
sugar fruit | real fruit
ivana martinovic