High Lights, Clear View on the Vista

Stars so close,
You can reach out and kiss one.

Salk Institute of California, Ezra Stoller image

Kennedy Airport, Ezra Stoller image

Architectural photographer Ezra Stoller was a nostalgic master of chiaroscuro, invoking Film Noir and the old world glamour of Hollywood with his deep focus and razor sharp foreground detail.

"My photos, tend to be confusing.  I show a great many vistas."

- Ezra Stoller

Stoller's images offer up a number of different framed views in each single shot, reflecting on his own photograph of the Salk Institute of California (Louis Kahn), Stoller says "there are I think nine separate areas you can view through, nine vistas."

Salk Institute of California, Ezra Stoller image
more here

Natalie Bookchin and Lev Manovich:Porno-Pictorialism, 1995

This digitally manipulated image by Lev Manovich and Natalie Bookchin, has us viewing a scene of viewing, though this time we do not see the viewer's gaze, only infer it from her legs and feet.  The oval framing of the scene suggests either peephole or classic oval frame, the latter associated with time remembered.  The spherical distortion of the end of the bed suggests a wide-angle lens, but in any case, the oval masking and optical distortion place us in the position of voyeur.  We do not see her expression to understand what she makes of her collection of art nudes and we do not see her hands.  The title suggests the erotic reverie of a teenager.  The picture reminds us that art has long sanctioned the viewing of naked bodies and one could do worse than these books of images when musing upon one's nascent sexuality.  The train bearing down on the bedroom would seem an obvious paste-in and portentous sign of the force and power of that sexuality.  It contrasts strongly with the delicacy and obliqueness of the rest of the picture. (Perhaps also an allusion to Alfred Stieglitz's The Hand of Man).

Alfred Stieglitz: The Hand of Man, 1902

Absorption/recognition: a notion that gained currency in the Diderot era of France that the viewer's pleasure in a painting with human figures, lies in the works ability to wholely engross the viewer.  It depends on the assumption that the subjects are not posing, rather, that they are absorbed in whatever they are about, and this absorption is a condition for our absorption in viewing them.  more here

Jeff Wall: The Destroyed Room, 1978

Jeff Wall considers this large format photograph to be his first successful attempt in challenging photography norms using lightbox transparencies. Referencing pop culture (illuminated cinema signs, advertising) and the sense of scale invoked by classical painting, The Destroyed Room is a staged scene of destruction in the bedroom of a young woman in which only the lithe figurine on the bureau and one black stiletto remain standing. The discarded objects are the debris of commodities that promise personal beauty, but are subject to constant changes in style and planned obsolescence.


Wall has said that he “filtered” the work through Eugene Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalous (1827), a painted depiction of aggression and violence. Thus, Wall has associated his picture with the tradition of Western painting just as it was turning from the idealization of historical painting toward a preoccupation with the late Romantic emotional turmoil or psychological disruption.

Eugene Delacroix: Death of Sardanapalous, 1827

The personal possessions strewn across the floor invoke not only images of anger, the state of mind the imagined gestures might have revealed, but also, the notion of the abject embodied in commodity fetishes in a culture of waste. This photographic tableau is a beautiful picture of a devastated interior in a present marked by the commodity culture of late capitalism. more here

And so apt that Sonic Youth made use of it then for their compilation album of tracks (hand picked by the band) previously only available on vinyl, limited-release compilations, imports, and b-sides to international singles, including unreleased material:
The Destroyed Room: B-sides and Rarities. 

Pure Heart

Sandra Eterovic

Limpia el camino de paja

Que yo me quiero sentar

  Ghoul                                                    Callow

Luna

Peach

Lagoon

Kirra Jamison is a Melbourne artist.

Hey Future

Shame

Art can't fix anything. It can just observe and portray. What's important is that it becomes an object, a thing you can see and talk about and refer to. A film is an object around which you can have a debate, more so than the incident itself. It's someone's view of an incident, an advanced starting point.

- Steve McQueen

Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee

Quietus

Agora - Miniartextil Como 2012

Quietus

 

Gone to Seed

- Claire Morgan

Power 100 - 2012 Art Review

It’s been 11 years since ArtReview first produced its annual ranking of the most influential people in the artworld.  Since its inception, the Power 100 has aimed to map and document the complex and shifting network of factors at play and as a result, their list is founded on observation rather than judgements about who is best and who is worst.   The entire list is here.

Ai Wei Wei
	1. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev 2. Larry Gagosian 3. Ai Weiwei 4. Iwan Wirth 5. David Zwirner 6. Gerhard Richter 7. Beatrix Ruf 8. Nicholas Serota 9. Glenn D. Lowry 10. Hans Ulrich Obrist & Julia Peyton-Jones 11. Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani 12. Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood (e-flux) 13. Cindy Sherman 14. Alain Seban & Alfred Pacquement 15. Adam D. Weinberg 16. Annette Schönholzer, Marc Spiegler & Magnus Renfrew 17. Marc Glimcher 18. Marian Goodman 19. Massimiliano Gioni 20. Jay Jopling 21. François Pinault 22. Klaus Biesenbach 23. Matthew Slotover & Amanda Sharp 24. Barbara Gladstone 25. RoseLee Goldberg

Posting your comment.

Jeff Koons

26. Eli & Edythe Broad
27. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
28. Bernard Arnault
29. Nicholas Logsdail
30. Liam Gillick
31. Ann Philbin
32. Victor Pinchuk
33. Maja Hoffmann
34. Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
35. Marina Abramović
36. Dakis Joannou
37. Udo Kittelmann
38. Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers
39. Matthew Marks
40. Gavin Brown
41. Damien Hirst
42. Rosemarie Trockel
43. Wolfgang Tillmans
44. Agnes Gund
45. Chus Martínez
46. Isa Genzken
47. Iwona Blazwick
48. Anne Pasternak
49. Sadie Coles
50. Daniel Buchholz
51. Toby Webster
52. Adam Szymczyk
53. James Lingwood & Michael Morris
54. William Wells & Yasser Gerab
55. Michael Ringier
56. Theaster Gates
57. Pussy Riot
58. Jeff Koons
59. Steve McQueen
60. Takashi Murakami

Cindy Sherman

Some space to let my tape rewind

Sunny Saturdays & Sundays

Mirrors on the ceiling

 pink

champagne

Hollywood Hills’s Glass House Architecture, John Lautner

on

ice

Sheats Goldstein Residence

Satre - the Eeore of philosophy

As so described by one Amelia Evans.  The New Yorker offers:

Le Blog de Jean-Paul Sartre

Saturday, 11 July, 1959: 2:07 A.M.
I am awake and alone at 2 A.M.
There must be a God. There cannot be a God.
I will start a blog.

Sunday, 12 July, 1959: 9:55 A.M.
An angry crow mocked me this morning. I couldn’t finish my croissant, and fled the café in despair.
The crow descended on the croissant, squawking fiercely. Perhaps this was its plan.
Perhaps there is no plan.
Thursday, 16 July, 1959: 7:45 P.M.
When S. returned this afternoon I asked her where she had been, and she said she had been in the street.
“Perhaps,” I said, “that explains why you look ‘rue’-ful.”
Her blank stare only reinforced for me the futility of existence.
Friday, 17 July, 1959: 12:20 P.M.
When S. came through my study just now I asked her to wait a moment.
“Rueful,” I told her. “Because ‘rue’ is the French word for street.”
“What?” she said.
“From yesterday,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. Right.”
“And you said you had been in the street.”
“I got it,” she said.
“It was a pun,” I said.
“Got it,” she said. “Puns aren’t your thing, are they?”
“They fill me with dread,” I admitted, for it is true.
“I gotta go,” S. said. “Hey, from now on? Maybe not so much for you with the jokes. It’ll be like an hour for lunch, I gotta thaw the poulet.”
Existence is a vessel that can never be filled.
Sunday, 19 July, 1959: 8:15 A.M.
Let others have their so-called “day of rest”! I shall continue to strive, to think, for in work alone is Man’s purpose. This is what the bourgeoisie seem never to grasp. Especially that lout M. Picard from No. 11. Every day is a “day of rest” for that tête de mouton. How I wish he did not have his Citroën up on blocks in the front yard! Appearances are without meaning, but still, it does not look nice.
Wednesday, 22 July, 1959: 10:50 A.M.
This morning over breakfast S. asked me why I looked so glum.
“Because,” I said, “everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident.”
“Jesus,” S. said. “Aren’t you ever off the clock?”