Recently by david roth
Click here for a fascinating collection of Vincent Van Gogh's Letters. There are some interesting nuggets in here, including this one on hullucinations:
... Again - speaking of my condition - I am so grateful for yet another thing. I've noticed that others, too, hear sounds and strange voices during their attacks, as I did, and that things seemed to change before their very...
Letter from Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, 22 May 1889
I stumbled across this gem at the ever-so-indespensible Museum of Online Museums.
From the New York Times:BANGKOK, Monday, Sept. 24 — The largest street protests in two decades against Myanmar’s military rulers gained momentum Sunday as thousands of onlookers cheered huge columns of Buddhist monks and shouted support for the detained pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
Winding for a sixth day through rainy streets, the protest swelled to 10,000 monks in the main city of Yangon, formerly Rangoon, according to witnesses and other accounts relayed from the closed country, including some clandestinely shot videos.
Link
There's a great piece over at Smithsonian Magazine written by Joyce Johnson called "Remembering Jack Kerouac." Written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publishing of Kerouac's seminal work On The Road, it contains some real gems:
"Becoming beat had implied a kind of spiritual evolution. But "beatnik" stood for an identity almost anyone could assume (or take off) at will. It seemed to come down to finding a beret or a pair of black stockings and a bongo drum to bang on. Beatniks wanted "kicks"—sex, drugs and alcohol. They were more interested in hard partying than knowing themselves or knowing time. The two ideas, beat and beatnik—one substantive and life-expanding, the other superficial and hedonistic—helped shape the counterculture of the '60s and to this day are confused with each other, not only by Kerouac's detractors but even by some of his most ardent fans."
While I've always preferred Dharma Bums, there's no doubt that On the Road made a much larger impact. It remains relevant today.
Cayetanno Ferrer makes photo installations that reveal what's hidden. It's an interesting conceit, and the work look pretty cool. It's always hard to tell if this sort of thing is durable enough to extend to a whole show, but the work on his web site looks great.
ThreeWalls
119 N. Peoria #2D
Chicago, IL 60607
312.432.3972
Opening Reception: Friday, September 7, 2007, 6:00 - 9:00 PM
I'm a fan of Archer Prewitt's work, and an even bigger fan of BoingBoing.net. Following is a blurb of their blurb.
Sof' Boy is a wonderful but extremely infrequently-published comic book by musician and artist Archer Prewitt. I love this comic about a homeless, naive dough boy who happily lives in a crime- and filth-ridden urban neighborhood, surviving attacks by man and beast because he is made out of some kind of indestructible, infinitely elastic rubber.
Giant Robot sells Sof' Boy comics: Combo Reprint (Issue #01 & Issue #02), Issue #03.
Link
Someone cue up that naughty Blue Danube Waltz - played at double speed thank you very much. Galactic Suite aims to get a jump, or launch as the case may be, on the space tourism industry we were all promised back in the 70's. Their target date is 2012, a seemingly ambitious goal when you consider that they're intending to develop the spaceport, spaceship and spaceresort.
While it sounds like a really cool idea, I have to wonder what the insurance waiver will look like. I guess when you've got $4 million to spend on a vacation (complete with tropical-island based training) then you can afford to have your attorney give the waiver a once-through. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for the Jet Pack I was promised.
Tally Ho!
For my money Duchamp is one of the most important artists of the modern era, one of the funniest, and most certainly one of the most misunderstood (followed closely by Pollock and Warhol). Regardless of the fact that his legend has generated a raft of reductivist, mindless art babble, there's no question that the man's work is indispensable.
Even today these works seem retinal, vital and human. They're also far removed from the type of work we see today which lays claim to his legacy, much of which fits too-neatly into the rubric of "art for blind people."
Now we have the wonderful web site Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp, a timeline-based Flash site which provides something of a legend for the Legend. This site is great for both appreciators and detractors alike. Here's a quote from the site:
Bicycle Wheel was the first of a class of objects that Duchamp called his "readymades." He created twenty-one of them, all between 1915 and 1923. The readymades are a varied collection of items, but there are several ideas that unite them.
The readymades are experiments in provocation, the products of a conscious effort to break every rule of the artistic tradition. in order to create a new kind of art -- one that engages the mind instead of the eye, in ways that provoke the observer to participate and think.
Don't be a hater!
"Ingmar Bergman, one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of cinema and an artist who changed the way the world perceived the movies, died Monday, local media reported. He was 89 years old."
For more of Michael Wilmington's piece on Bergman click here. (Registration at chicagotribune.com is required, but it's free.)
10 New pieces, plus a select collection of recent work. All of this work finds it's pretext in High Modernism, natural processes, and the ever-fascinating subject of symbolism.
For more info, click here.
Editor's note: Richard Serra is one of the finest sculptors, if not the finest living sculptor working today. His solo show at the MoMA in New York is, of course, being heralded as masterful. For a nice, if short, interview with Serra click here. To watch a time-lapse video of his pieces Torqued Elipse IV (1998) and Intersection II (1992) being installed in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at MoMA click here. The show runs through September 10, 2007.
The following shots were taken by Chicago photographer Jordan Schulman, whose bio follows these wonderful shots. We're very happy to show his work. The these images are © copyright Jordan Schulman 2007 and cannot be reproduced without permission and written consent.
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