▲Visual Arts▼

"Shouldn’t it be possible to conceal a house in an Alpine slope while still exploiting the wonderful views and allowing light to enter the building? Surprised that it was permissible to construct a pair of dwellings so close to the world famous thermal bath of Vals, the client seized the opportunity to develop the site, without disturbing the bath’s expansive views." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

Directed by: Hydra (John Hobbs, Ariel Danziger, Sam Stephens). Visual Effects: Sam Stephens, Alex Postelnicu
. Passion Pit: Michael Angelakos, Ian Hultquist, Ayad al Adhamy, Jeff Apruzzese, Nate Donmoyer. \\ mp3 direct link: http://neonized.net/uploads... - Adriano

Duchamp addresses his session in English at the Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957. Interestingly he mentions a personal "art coefficient" which is a ratio based on non-measurable subjective qualities. - Adriano

"Currently showing at the Kunsthaus Zurich is an exhibition of some 70 paintings and drawings by one of the fathers of modern art and masters of the Pointillism movement, Georges Seurat. The exhibition, entitled “Figures in Space,” is notable as the artist’s work has rarely been represented in European museums east of Paris." - Adriano

notice how Seurat includes his own painting, La Grande Jatte, in the background. - Adriano

what usually troubles art historians is that orange/brown object with white circle in front of the first tree on the left... - Adriano

"Darwin's “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872) was one of the first scientific texts to use photographic illustrations (which helped him identify universal facial expressions). \\ Étant donnés” focused on a single work by Duchamp at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is both immense and immensely entertaining. Written largely by the curator Michael R. Taylor, it gives an exhaustive account of “Étant Donnés,” the artist’s final masterwork — inspired by a clandestine affair, and kept hidden from the world for 20 years — and still manages to be a terrific read." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

Re: Darwin, they don't really seem enthusiastic: "Darwin wasn’t much of a photographer himself, but he corresponded with artists and searched London shops, studios and museums for images that would help him identify universal facial expressions. He was looking for the kind of stop-action sequences later pioneered by Muybridge, but made do with the less systematic (and often manipulated)... more... - Goran Zec

Christine Buci-Glucksmann parlera des métamorphoses du féminin travers une série d'expositions internationales d'artistes femmes (Orlan, Mona Hatoum, Cindy Sherman, Mariko Mori). Cédric Lagandré analysera le film 2012 et les conceptions du temps dont il est le symptôme. - Adriano

"Currently showing at Rome’s Galleria Borghese is an exhibition displaying 14 paintings by Caravaggio along with 17 paintings by Francis Bacon. Mixing the past and present masters together gives rise to inevitable comparison, and although it is widely acknowledged that Caravaggio had no direct influence upon Bacon, their work shares a broad range of thematic and stylistic properties– among them, a fascination with anatomy, a fixation on depicting an anguished and tormented human condition and revolutionary approaches towards depicting the human form and the expressive portrait in pursuit of realism." < 24 Jan 2010 - Adriano

photo taken by a camera attached to a latex weather balloon from about 800 feet in the air. "After the piece was constructed in 1970, it spent decades underwater as the lake rose. It has re-emerged in the last few years because of drought, but its appearance has changed markedly, whitened by salt crystals and the buildup of silt. Mr. Smithson, who was fascinated by the concept of entropy, might have welcomed this transformation. But it is less clear what he would have thought about changes wrought by visitors to the remote site, who have, at times, carried off some of the rocks as art souvenirs. Or moved them to construct their own tiny spiral jetties nearby." http://www.nytimes.com/2009... - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"A cinematic puzzle, Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad is a radical exploration of the formal possibilities of film. Beautifully shot in Cinemascope by Sacha Vierny, the movie is a riddle of seduction, a mercurial enigma darting between a present and past which may not even exist, let alone converge. The film stars Giorgio Albertazzi as an unnamed sophisticate attempting to convince a similarly nameless woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they met and were romantically involved a year ago in the same enormous, baroque European hotel. In the end, it hardly matters -- they're not characters so much as pawns anyway. Hypnotically dreamlike, Last Year at Marienbad is a surrealist parody of Hollywood melodrama, a high-fashion romance with a dark, alien underbelly. According to screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movie is a pure construction, without a frame of reference outside of its own existence -- the lives of its characters begin when the lights go down, and conclude when they come back up." ~ Jason Ankeny - Adriano

"You walk up to the house of a total stranger, ring the bell and inform them that their child has been killed in combat. When they open the door and see two uniformed men, they already know the news. Some collapse. Some tell you it's a mistake. It isn't a mistake. "The Messenger" is an empathetic drama about two men who have that job. [The film] knows that even if it tells a tearjerking story, it doesn't have to be a tearjerker. In fact, when a sad story tries too hard, it can be fatal. You have to be the one coming to your own realization about the sadness." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

"Princess Hijab's billboard liberation: a simple black swath completely changes the meaning of the advertisement. The billboards in the Paris subway system are carefully chosen—yet the execution, with the classic graffiti artist drips—have the touch of the human hand." \\ Interview, PH: "Guerrilla art is innocent and criminal, ancient and dystopian, intimate and political. I chose the veil because it does what art should do: it challenges, it frightens, and it re-imagines. I use the subway for the same reason the advertisers do: it’s a place where the whole city is a captive audience." http://www.good.is/post... - Adriano

#smllove - See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

"The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." Michel Foucault's book Discipline and Punish http://ff.im/cdM9z uses the idea of the panopticon as a metaphor for Western society and its emphasis on normalization and observation." - Adriano from Bookmarklet

in other news ;c ... 25 Nov 2009: "Woody Allen has successfully courted France's first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. The former supermodel and wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy says she's agreed to be in the famed director's next film, but doesn't know what role he has in store for her and admits she could be a terrible actress." http://www.nytimes.com/aponlin... - Adriano