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January 31, 2006
Graffiti Type Foundry
Handselecta | Graffiti Type Foundry
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Web Design times
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statement of direction
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alfredo Jaar
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Mono-ha
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Kishio Suga - Mono-ha
Art in America: Extensions of the Ordinary
Extensions of the Ordinary
Art in America, April, 2000 by Janet Koplos
Extensions of the Ordinary
Janet Koplos
In the 30 years since he emerged as one of the leaders of Japan's Mono-ha movement, Kishio Suga has worked in an enormous variety of forms and materials to express a simple--and profound--sense of universal connectedness.
The sculptor Kishio Suga was one of the prime figures in the "Mono-ha" movement, a late-'60s/early-'70s phenomenon in Japanese art. "Mono-ha" (usually translated as the School of Things, which was originally a mocking term) can be related, in its formal austerity, to Minimalism, but is closer to Arte Povera in ascribing a creative and existential power to substances themselves, natural, industrial or synthetic. Works were commonly made of unaltered materials temporarily brought together in some configuration of interdependence. Often the object or installation was not meant to be purchased and preserved but existed as a concept that could be realized anew at any time.
Suga, now 56, has been described as the purest adherent to these principles, which were generally expressed in sculptural form. He believes that transcendence is possible only as an extension from the concrete and mundane; it is impossible in the imaginary world of painted illusion.[1] He has said that the basic philosophy of his work is "expanding outward." That's an interesting phrase, an open, almost poetic fragment that seems itself to expand outward as one thinks about it.
His clearest statement of "expanding outward" was probably his 1970 Infinity Condition. It consisted of several pieces of 4-by-4 lumber propping open the double-hung windows of a Kyoto museum. The wall label for the work cited as its materials "square wood beams, structure of building, outdoor scenery." Another quintessential expression of the encompassing idea was An Aspect in a Whole, Suga's major installation in the Japanese pavilion at the 1978 Venice Biennale, which consisted of 20 cedar logs, split lengthwise, with half of each log standing and the other half flat on the floor. Relationships were multiplied here, starting with each half seeming to yearn for its other, and then pointing beyond the sculpture itself: the verticals related to the structure of the pavilion, to the trees in the Biennale garden, etc.; the horizontals paralleled the floor on which they lay and the ground outside, and so on--to the ends of the earth, presumably.
Regularly featured in Japanese museums and galleries, Suga's work was presented in a 1997-98 retrospective exhibition that completed its four-stop tour at the Chiba City Museum of Art; since then he has had another major show (12 new works and a video) at the Yokohama Museum of Art as well as two Tokyo gallery shows this past summer and fall. All the works in the traveling exhibition showed his typical use of ordinary materials, carefully placed. For example, plywood wall pieces involve gouging the wood and then repairing the injury with plaster, the color and texture of which calls attention to the interaction of these banal substances. Another type of work consists of a rough rectangular frame of wood or stone, parallel to the floor and outlining an empty space; these stand on legs that are irregular in shape and size and are often supplemented with another cooperatively functioning material. The show was a generous sampling of the multitude of possibilities that Suga has suggested over 30 years, including protrusions, displacements, linkages, entanglements, frames, barriers, enclosures, braces and props, to name a few--a catalogue of nouns reminiscent of Richard Serra's list of verbs.[2]
The variety in the makeup of these works emphasizes the deliberate yet unostentatious intentionality of Suga's constructions, which reflect the thought and effort of human endeavors; despite their "naturalness," none of the sculptures could have just happened. At the same time, this variety explicitly announces the provisionality of everything: we see that wood can be chopped or milled and can decay; stone can be cut or broken or eroded; the work can be like or unlike the space that is its context; purpose can be forgotten; names are imprecise; the maker himself is ephemeral. In an essay in the exhibition catalogue, Suga writes, "[W]hat I want to achieve is actually a state of complex and multi-layered existence or what might be called a deepening of conception about ... existence."[3]
Suga's sculptures prompt philosophical musings, yet they are anything but theoretical. Their physical qualities and casual spatial sense make them accessible. The biggest installations add to their material immediacy the power of repetition. They are made of simple elements, but they can become accumulatively complex almost beyond quantifying. The 1997 installation Syuiritsu (Law of Surrounding Position) was a rectangular field of regularly spaced metal poles about 10 feet tall, rising abruptly from the gallery's gray carpeting. At their tops, these vertical elements were joined to horizontal ones by means of brass couplings. Scattered on the floor were dozens of water-smoothed boulders, each with a hole drilled in it and a white rope emerging and running across space to tie onto one of the top poles.
Some ropes went straight up, others stretched across the width of the installation. One wrapped around the outside of a perimeter pipe in its itinerary from aerial attachment to grounding in a stone. The grid arrangement of the poles established a rational framework for the whole; the stones exemplified the variability of nature; the zigzag ropes looked like diagrams of a ricochet. The installation was striking for its delicacy, and for demonstrating spatial depth while hinting at pictorial flatness (the rows could suggest lattice screens). In Japanese tradition, a stone wrapped and knotted with string and set on a step or at the threshold of a garden gate means "do not enter"; the stones in Suga's piece were not wrapped but tethered, which introduced the thought that they might move around. The work was suffused with an odd sense of exhilaration: it was as if the ropes were flying away, or the stones had all crept into position just before one came upon the scene. This implication of action existed within the stillness of the grid.
Renkai (World Connection, 1977/97) consisted of about 30 drastically pruned tree trunks--different species and different sizes, but all trimmed down to one slender trunk with one or two forks. These essentialized trees of just a couple of branches each were lined up against two walls of a large gallery, leaning from about a yard away. They were linked by a great length of rope modestly coiled at both ends of the row. In between, it passed over each clipped end of each branch of each tree. Since most of these branches touched the wall, the rope line made a kind of drawing against that white ground. The rope was not under tension, and it looped lazily, comfortably between trees but linked the branches within each tree more concisely; the drawing thus consisted of straight lines and curved lines, all interconnected. Connection is as much a theme of Suga's work as "expanding outward."
Probably the most engaging installation in the show occupied the Chiba museum's most unusual gallery, the Saya-do Hall.[4] Suga filled the Beaux-Arts structure with Kaienkotai (Circumference-Verge-Unit-Body, 1998). Thirty or so red-painted A-frame "ladders" were scattered around the hall; solid timbers (about 2 by 2 inches) and larger open or closed box beams stretched from the rungs of one ladder to another and sometimes to a third. One wandered among the ladders as if in a labyrinth, turned back here and there by a stretch of lumber that acted as a barrier, unless one should choose to crawl under it.
In another gallery was Syukuikei (Surroundings-Room-Enclosure-System, 1998), an 8-foot cube made of raw wood, painted wood, plastic cloth and bubble wrap. The structure was almost completely closed, but one could see blurrily through the bubble wrap or peek through narrow slots at two corners: inside, in a seemingly haphazard array, were a white wooden box, a sheet of fiberglass and various bare boards leaning together or leaning outward, against the cube's more orderly frame. Because there was no obvious rationale for their placement, one carefully studied the relationships, and in so doing slipped into a reverie of subject and object, of self and substance in intimate confrontation.
This is vintage Suga. This is what he has been doing from the beginning, although his work has passed through successions of materials and forms, including several (such as wax and aluminum, stacked blocks and flat floor "boxes") not represented even in the expansiveness of this multifloor retrospective. A few younger American artists, such as Jessica Stockholder, Matthew McCaslin and Jason Rhoades, have something in common with his thinking, although the stuff that fascinates them tends to be manufactured, and Stockholder adds an interest in composing color. In the utter concreteness of their work and his, the instant is heightened and the quotidian ennobled. Suga's tendency to use a lot of materials that do not refer to contemporary culture, however, stirs up a more open, universal knowledge of being and sensation. His works exude a serenity one is tempted to call spiritual.
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21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa : About the Museum
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3d scanner
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January 30, 2006
Archinect:favorite modern sculputre discussion
Archinect : Discussion Forum : Who is your favorite modern sculptor ?
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Roxy Paine at Cohan Gallery
James Cohan Gallery: Current Exhibition
ROXY PAINE Bad Planet, 2005 foam, epoxy, lacquer, oil, stainless steel 65 X 60 X 60 inches
Beginning January 14, 2006, the James Cohan Gallery will present an exhibition devoted to new work by sculptor Roxy Paine. The exhibition runs through February 25.
In his new work, the artist mirrors natural processes themselves, drawing increasingly on the tension between the organic and the built environment, between the human desire for order and nature’s drive to reproduce. As Steven Henry Madoff noted in The New York Times, Paine creates work in which “the pastoral and the processed bump heads with dizzying force.”
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January 29, 2006
Photoshop Cover Girl
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January 28, 2006
William Hunter -- Wood Turner
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January 26, 2006
clock kit supplier
Klockit - The World's Leading Clock Parts and Clock Movements Supplier for over 30 years
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japanese tobi safety shoes
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January 23, 2006
subtraction: Blog
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January 18, 2006
Bruce Mau Speech at Parsons
At the Parsons Table with Bruce Mau | Metropolis Magazine
Goldberger: I think that there are two ways for design to sort of pull us out of our normal stupor. One of them is to frustrate us--and you were talking about the frustration of design that doesn't work very well. But another is to uplift and create a sort of awesome experience of something that is stunningly beautiful and different from what we might have expected. And so surely design still has that latter purpose from time to time.
Mau: It does, but it is a marginal activity. I mean, you need only go to Rotterdam to see what happens when it's not. Because suddenly every building is attractive, and it's terrible. You end up with a kind of screaming ordinary, which is not very pleasant.
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Calatrava Kitsch
The Gutter: Goldhagen Drops the K-Bomb on Calatrava!
In these urban designs, and in much of his architecture, Calatrava's work falls painfully flat. His organic images, which range from re-interpreted versions of Gaud�'s palm fronds to running, twisting,
dancing bodies to blinking eyes to birds alighting, are perfectly legible and utterly hokey. The style is
exuberant but shallow; it is exuberantly shallow. This is true of the WTC transportation hub, which, for all its merits, projects (and is conceptually based on) the almost risible image of a child's hands releasing a bird into flight. It is the case also at the Milwaukee Art Museum, in which an apparently similar bird bedizens actually movable wings; and in the otherwise amusing Valencia Planetarium, a sculpted white half-sphere centered inside a steel-and-glass arc, which, when reflected in water, creates the image of a surrealistically floating Mir�-like bluish-white eye. Its "eyelid" even opens and closes.
Transportation--flight. Planetarium--seeing. Get it? Too often Calatrava's buildings are little more than one-liners, architectural analogues to Roy Lichtenstein's public sculptures. As is the case in
the public reception of the work of (the immeasurably more talented) Gaud�, people like the simplicity and the obvious iconicity of Calatrava's architecture. It is popular because it is comprehensible. To be sure, iconicity does not disqualify a building from considered praise, and neither do popular appeal and immediate comprehensibility. But are these really the main criteria by which we should select architects and judge architecture?
There is a word that characterizes the phenomenon that I am describing. That word is "kitsch."And as
Calatrava builds more architectural projects, it becomes increasingly apparent that much of this work
is not even well-considered kitsch. Consider Calatrava's long-standing interest in kinesthetic architecture. His extremely large structures often sport movable parts: the roof of the WTC hub will open to the sky every September 11, and the flapping "wings" of the Milwaukee Art Museum offer a slowmotion image of a bird taking off from the ground. It's cool. But for an architect who claims that his design principles are grounded in the natural world, it is more than slightly ironic that Calatrava exhibits little interest in environmentally responsible ("green") architecture. When in motion, these buildings must consume more energy than others thrice their size.
Or perhaps, in drawing his guiding principles and imagery from nature, Calatrava has chosen misguided premises on which to ground a contemporary architecture. Why, exactly, should a subway station look like a bird (except perhaps to encourage people to take flight from an ineptly re-developed downtown Manhattan)? Why should architecture, in image or in structure, be dictated by nature at all? The great postwar architect Louis Kahn fiddled with this problem in the early 1950s, determining the guiding principles of his architecture by adopting tetrahedral geometries found in natural forms such as snowflake crystals and radiolarian (a type of protozoa). After a few years, Kahn realized that he was careening toward a dead end, and he changed his reference points entirely. Instead, he carefully constructed normative ideals for the social and cultural institutions he built, and looked toward abstract art, historical precedents, and contemporary practices to arrive at forms that
architecturally embodied these norms and facilitated the social practices that he envisioned.
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January 16, 2006
NYT: Sculpture That Looks Very Much Like a Tree; Actually, It Is a Tree
Sculpture That Looks Very Much Like a Tree; Actually, It Is a Tree - New York Times
A giant deciduous tree has taken up residence in the capacious main exhibition space of the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens. It is the single, quietly spectacular, richly thought-provoking piece in a solo exhibition by Anya Gallaccio, the Scottish artist, based in London, who is known for ambitious sculptural projects involving trees, plants and architecture.
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G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times
Anya Gallaccio's weeping cherry tree at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City.
Anya Gallaccio's "One Art" continues through April 3 at the Sculpture Center, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, Queens;(718) 361-1750.
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Forum: Artists and Exhibitions
A weeping cherry that had its roots accidentally but fatally damaged by construction workers, the leafless, luxuriantly branching tree, cut just above the roots, now stands on a flat base and rises 50 feet into the clerestory skylight that runs the length of the hall. Cables anchored to the gallery's brick walls hold the tree in place, and with a bit of study you can see how it was maneuvered indoors: the tree was carefully cut up with chainsaws and then reassembled, with heavy-duty bolts securing the V-shaped joints.
The sculpture is titled "One Art" after a poem about loss by Elizabeth Bishop, but its effects are multiple. First, there is the sheer physical presence. If you passed it in an ordinary outdoor space like Central Park, you would not give it a second glance; it is not an especially beautiful or remarkably big tree. But in a type of indoor setting where you rarely if ever encounter trees of this sort, it seems huge and infinitely complex. With its crusty bark; gnarly, serpentine limbs and profuse finer branches; and its presumably enormous weight, it gives you a feeling similar to that of being up close to an elephant or a whale.
Noting the tautly stretched cables that hold it upright, viewers who have seen the new "King Kong" movie may think of the great ape cruelly chained and displayed as an exotic curiosity for Broadway theatergoers. The way the muscular tree is pierced by all those shiny steel bolts may also evoke, for the art historically minded, that favorite of Renaissance painters and sculptors, St. Sebastian, the martyr pierced by many executioners' arrows. And then it is not a great leap to the idea of the Crucifixion, which here becomes the crucifixion of nature by industry.
Religious associations are enhanced by the Sculpture Center's architecture, which, though originally designed for hoisting and moving heavy machinery, has a churchlike feeling. The tree stands at one end, opposite the far wall, which is punctuated by five second-story windows admitting copious amounts of afternoon sunlight. Standing back for a full view, you behold the tree showered and almost dematerialized by light. From this perspective, you can see why the tree has been such an enduring archetypal symbol, whether or not you know exactly what it should mean.
An interesting philosophical dimension emerges, too. Ms. Gallaccio's work is, of course, a kind of found-object sculpture - what Duchamp would have called an "assisted readymade." Audiences today should have no trouble seeing a real tree as a work of art, especially after Damien Hirst's sliced-up cows and pigs displayed in vats of preservative. The philosophical intrigue arises, rather, when you think not about the tree as a sculpture but about the difference between tree and sculpture.
A tree is like a sculpture; it occupies space in aesthetically interesting ways. But in traditional sculpture, there is always a discernible difference between the raw material and the form that has been purposefully imposed on that material. With a real tree, there is no such distinction. God may have made the tree, but he did not make it out of some nontree substance the way a sculptor can make the image of a human being out of a nonhuman material like clay or marble. A tree is a tree through and through (leaving aside, that is, talk of universal, submolecular building blocks).
In the case of Ms. Gallaccio's creation, the artwork and the tree are not identical, but it is hard to say where one leaves off and the other begins. There are expert craftsmen who can make seemingly real trees out of modern plastics, but that is nothing like what is at issue here. Neither has Ms. Gallaccio reconfigured the tree in such a way that abstract form or surrealistic imagination prevails over its tree-ness (as might have happened were the artist Andy Goldsworthy or Donald Lipski). The tree itself is still the main attraction, whatever assistance she has provided in bringing it to our attention.
Ms. Gallaccio therefore risks the charge that nothing she did is as interesting as the tree itself; and worse, that she takes credit for something for which only God or nature should be admired. Douglas Gordon's film of a live elephant, shown three years ago at Gagosian Gallery, invited a similar criticism, as does Mr. Hirst's famous giant shark in a tank.
Such cautionary ideas only enrich the play of thought and counter-thought that swirls around Ms. Gallaccio's work, which, however you parse it, remains an object of visual beauty, visceral sculptural presence and stirring arboreal poetry.
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January 12, 2006
Low Income Housing Institute
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The modernist: Furniture and Naked People
The Modernist - The online journal of sex, art, and the New Internationalism
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Nobel Lecture - Harold Pinter
Nobel Lecture - Literature 2005
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January 11, 2006
Tokyo Art Beat
Tokyo Art Beat - Tokyo's Art and Design Events Calendar
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January 10, 2006
Thomas Heatherwick: Designer: Buddhist Temple
Then there is also something like human instincts: when you can tell that something has been made with love, you are more likely to open up your mind and come closer to a part you are unfamiliar with.
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"I'm a three-dimensional designer," he says. "I can't describe myself more specifically than that." But really he's distinguished by an attention to materials, ideas and place-making. "I'm not thinking about the best way to clip your seatbelt in - I enjoy that, but I'm very interested in how you create better environments for people to be in and more interesting functional spaces and places."
Much of the work that Heatherwick has done is in the realm of public art, an issue that Heatherwick feels is usually bound up with place. "When someone says they want public art, what they mean is, 'I want a place to be special.' I can see why people say, 'Why does it need to be art, why not architecture, why isn't it urban design?' I don't think it matters in the end as long as it ends up being considered in its environment."
http://www.icon-magazine.co.uk/issues/january/heatherwick.htm
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This is the Heatherwick difference. Other urban designers might have a mad inspired idea, dismiss it on grounds of practicality or unprofitability, and then do something conventional. They would use off-the-peg materials and aim for a general slight lift in quality, rather than concentrating all the effort on getting a high concept to work.
http://www.hughpearman.com/articles3/blue.html
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'All our projects are public projects,' he says. 'When we first got going, I did a couple of private projects, and I think I found that you put so much into something, and you realise you want it to reach more people. I'm less interested if something's only going to be of benefit to the people who've paid a lot of money. The best experiences are when you are doing things for the public, rather than going to an art gallery to be amazed. Making something better is very motivating, and also because it's harder. That's why things don't happen, because it's hard.'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1311117,00.html
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January 09, 2006
FIRST marathon program
The Less-Is-More Marathon Plan - Runners World
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Artist: Tara Donnovan
ACE GALLERY TARA DONOVAN
"I try to draw upon this universal knowledge in some of my work," Donovan explains, "because it creates a very real physical connection to the work that only becomes evident when people recognize the object or material that is being compiled.
And, while the sculptures often reference biological or geographical phenomena (such as the growth patterns of algae or the stratifications of rocks), the physical properties of the materials (both their limitations and potentials) provide the structural blueprint for the "organic" formations they assume.
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Spacebloom: Cosmic plants
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Painting: Color Pallette Analyzer
In The Mod: Color Analytics - A Dr. Woohoo Production
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January 06, 2006
On Theory: Critical of What
harvard design magazine - current issue
To be sure, for more sober practitioners of the “post-critical,” the liberal-humanist idea of the “project” supplants theological vision as a guide. Hence, architecture and/or architects who are merely critical (or “merely” antiwar?) are judged to have insuf€ciently ful€lled the old, modernist mission of being “projective” and of thereby af€rming an enlightened alternative. But just as we can justi€ably ask of the straw €gure called critical architecture, “critical of what?” we might ask the af€rmative, projective practitioners of the “post-critical” just what sort of world they are projecting and af€rming in their architecture and in their discourse?
If the answer is anything close to that offered by the United Architects, then I vote “No”—despite its many legitimate claims to an authentic, technologically enabled urbanity.(13) Still, those who lament the relentless negativity of much critique (such as, perhaps, that offered above) are at least partly right, since, the problem is not that critical discourse is too dif€cult and therefore ineffectual. The problem is that it is often too easy. Bruised by the complicities of what Tafuri called “operative criticism,” much critical work does not risk intervening in the future in the systematic manner for which, I think, many architects rightly yearn. Similarly, the need to engage directly with messy realities called for by some post-critics is indeed urgent. The question is which realities you choose to engage with, and to what end. In other words: what's your project? This also means avoiding the elementary mistake of assuming that reality is entirely real—that is, pre-existent, €xed, and therefore exempt from critical re-imagination. For this, alliances are necessary.
So, what is to be done? To begin with, rather than lapse into the post-utopian pragmatism of that grandfather of the “post-critical,” Colin Rowe, the question of utopia must be put back on the architectural table. But it must not be misread as a call for a perfect world, a world apart, an impossible totality that inevitably fades into totalitarianism. Instead, utopia must be read literally, as the “non-place” written into its etymological origins that is “nowhere” not because it is ideal and inaccessible, but because, in perfect mirrored symmetry, it is also “everywhere.” Utopia is both glamorous and boring, exceptional and prosaic. Among its heralds is another, earlier denizen of lower Manhattan, Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, an anonymous, modest clerk who, when asked literally to reproduce what the '60s would later call “the system,” simply and politely refused, declaring “I would prefer not to.”
Utopia, then, is what Derrida called a “specter,” a ghost that infuses everyday reality with other, possible worlds, rather than some otherworldly dream. And if another name for the so-called post-critical is “realism,” we have already seen at Ground Zero how architecture's realist fantasies of twisting, dancing skyscrapers have worked systematically to exorcise utopia's ghost with crystal cathedrals dedicated to a fundamentalist oligarchy. But like all ghosts, that specter is never quite dead, returning to haunt architectural projects already quietly among us and others coming soon. We can call these projects the €rst evidence of a “utopian realism” (details to follow). Meanwhile, utopian realism must be thought of as a movement that may or may not exist, all of whose practitioners are double agents. Naming them, or their work, would blow their cover. (They may or may not all be architects.) Those who could voted for Kerry. (So you, too, could be a utopian realist.) Utopian realism is critical. It is real. It is enchantingly secular. It thinks differently. It is a style with no form. It moves sideways, instead of up and down the family tree. It is (other) worldly. It occupies the global city rather than the global village. It violates disciplinary codes even as it secures them. It is utopian not because it dreams impossible dreams, but because it recognizes “reality” itself as—precisely—an all-too-real dream enforced by those who prefer to accept a destructive and oppressive status quo. Utopia's ghost oats within this dream, conjured time and again by those who would prefer not to.
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January 04, 2006
Digital Files to 35mm Slides
Digital Files to 35mm Slides : iprintfromhome.com
Digital Files to 35mm Slides : artcompetitionslides.com
Digital Files to 35mm Slides : replicolor.com
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S333 Architecture office NL
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Artist Opportunities
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Fellowships and other Opportunities for Art History Graduate Students
RESOURCES IN ART HISTORY FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS
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College Art Association
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Prince St. - Co-operative Gallery NY
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January 03, 2006
The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Clusterfuck Nation by James Howard Kunstler
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Blender: Open source 3d graphics program
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January 02, 2006
contemporary textile design
BANFFscape: www.dirttechnologies.com
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