Jarrett Moran

“Early study” for OMA’s scrapped Whitney...

Wed, 16 May 2012 17:30:57 -0400

“Early study” for OMA’s scrapped Whitney Museum Extension, 2001

artlog: Jeremy Deller, The History of the World, 1997. Photo by...

Wed, 02 May 2012 22:53:12 -0400

artlog:

Jeremy Deller, The History of the World, 1997. Photo by Linda Nylind.

N 11th and Kent, Brooklyn, April 2012

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 02:07:26 -0400

N 11th and Kent, Brooklyn, April 2012

N 11th and Wythe, Brooklyn, April 2012

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 18:20:00 -0400

N 11th and Wythe, Brooklyn, April 2012

bangs/benjamin

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 17:10:45 -0400

bangs/benjamin

Top: Arched gateway of Inwood A marble, in its original (and...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:01:35 -0400

Top: Arched gateway of Inwood A marble, in its original (and present) location at Broadway and 216th Street as it appeared in the early twentieth century when it graced the entrance to the Seaman-Drake estate. The automobile is a 1910 Matheson. Collection of The New-York Historical Society.

Bottom: The arched gateway from Figure 9 as it appears today. Photo credit: Robyn Green

(via BLDGBLOG and Lawrence H. Conklin)

The New Apartment Blocks Near Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 01:34:00 -0400

The New Apartment Blocks Near Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Michael Riedel, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,...

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 23:38:13 -0500

Michael Riedel, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, 2011. Courtesy David Zwirner.

I tried to write about Michael Riedel’s show at Zwirner last year and threw away the (boring) results. Months later I ran into an artist challenging the void of the iPhone/iPad screen with tapestry, using its weave as an analogy for pixels. I spend most of my life looking at a screen, with increasing reluctance, and the extent to which that medium has absorbed my life’s activities is a problem to which an online art gallery will never be a solution. Now I’m convinced the Riedel show was an attempt to deal with the screen, an attempt to force it into the usual parameters of a Michael Riedel artwork.

Riedel’s imperfect reproductions and recordings often allude to the backdrop of his art space Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16, where he recreated gallery shows, nights of clubbing, etc. that initially occurred elsewhere around Frankfurt. The Filmed Films, for example, were recorded with a camcorder in Frankfurt movie theaters and then screened at Oskar-von-Miller Strasse. In a shaky video documenting what Riedel calls his “first gallery exhibition,” Riedel and a coconspirator sneak into a gallery where the current show, by Jeppe Hein, consists of white partitions moving through the glass-fronted cube in response to motion detectors. Crouching under cardboard boxes shoddily painted white, Riedel and his companion shuffle around mimicking the movements of the partitions. An oblivious gallery employee peeks in and doesn’t notice anything awry. Riedel gives just about every medium this kind of treatment; it would be conspicuous if we caught him ignoring the screen.

Michael Riedel, Moving Walls, 2001. Courtesy David Zwirner.

So Riedel googles himself. Some pages from the MoMA and Zwirner websites come up; he copies the html and drops it into InDesign. It’s frustrating. Riedel’s computer is frozen. Abstract evocations of Apple’s beach ball of death float everywhere. We have just enough information to know we’re looking at the internet on a Mac. Riedel’s canvases depict a screen without actually depicting a screen, or much of anything intelligible at all. Just as a screen is no substitute for an art exhibition, Riedel knows an exhibition is no substitute for a screen. He bolds words like “click,” “print,” and “slideshow” in the fragmentary html, pointing to the absent interface. The hardware itself is emphasized by its absence—the same hardware we once elided (along with the conditions that manufacture it) when speaking of an information economy. What all this baffles is the conventional attitude towards the screen: idly and/or purposefully looking past it in the manner of someone alone in public compulsively manipulating an iPhone.

The recursive narcissism of Riedel googling himself makes these pieces uniquely horrifying. They don’t refer back to life at Oskar-von-Miller Strasse, or if they do, Oskar-von-Miller Strasse now looks like a startup where rows of artists procrastinate on MacBooks. Riedel usually achieves an air of deadpan-yet-sociable jokiness indicating that he’s getting the last laugh; this time it’s hard to know whether Riedel or the screen is laughing.

Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of...

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 10:39:50 -0500

Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size—the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lockkeeper’s lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children’s bothy in the garden—are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

-Sebald, Austerlitz

Top left: Cyprien Gaillard, Desniansky Raion, 2007, video still. Courtesy Cosmic, Paris.

Top right: Cyprien Gaillard, Belief in the Age of Disbelief, 2005. Courtesy Laura Bartlett Gallery, London.

Bottom: Cyprien Gaillard, View over Sighthill, 2008, photo. Courtesy Laura Bartlett Gallery, London.

The only animal which has remained lingering in my memory is...

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:28:00 -0500

The only animal which has remained lingering in my memory is the raccoon. I watched it for a long time as it sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own.

-Sebald (at the zoo), Austerlitz

Image: Elmgreen and Dragset, Ongoing, 2003. Performed Nov. 1, 2011 at the Performa 11 Opening Gala. Via

Never realized that A Charlie Brown Christmas is set in a...

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:27:01 -0500

Never realized that A Charlie Brown Christmas is set in a dystopian capitalist future. It becomes unmistakable when, in a lot full of hollow aluminum christmas trees flanked by searchlights, Linus says, “Gee, I didn’t know they still made wooden Christmas trees.” Maybe that explains why the adults have left the children to direct each other’s plays and set up their own psychiatric practices. In that light, Charlie Brown’s “I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel” sounds like the capitalist version of Brave New World.

Maybe A Charlie Brown Christmas can help our children make sense of Eggbert, a promotional gimmick for Devitt’s Nursery and Supply as treasured Christmas tradition passed on to the next generation. “Did your mommy used to come to see Eggbert when she was your age?”

In 1996, Robert Adams sends a letter to the New York Times Magazine. “I have simpler advice...

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 00:32:00 -0500

In 1996, Robert Adams sends a letter to the New York Times Magazine. “I have simpler advice than that offered by the decorators who were asked (in “Style,” June 16) how to use Damien Hirst’s ‘sculpture’ consisting of a real pig sliced in half: don’t buy it, don’t go to see it, and don’t write about it.” The letter is not published.

-Quoted in Robert Adams: The Place We Live

Robert Adams, Old-growth stump, Coos County, Oregon, 1999–2003. Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery.

Yes, I was horrified to wake up to the coordinated police crackdowns on OWS. But I also think...

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 12:09:00 -0500

Yes, I was horrified to wake up to the coordinated police crackdowns on OWS. But I also think Bloomberg released the movement from a trap last night. The long-term occupation of Zuccotti made OWS what it is while becoming a liability, a weak spot vulnerable to distractions like a splinter faction of drummers, vagrants from Rikers dropped off by the police, the police themselves. Why get sucked into a legal battle for Zuccotti? Why not consolidate the movement’s achievements and move on? In more than a few articles by OWS protesters, I’ve noticed hints of a desire to escape the day-to-day logistical drain of the park. This city contains more possibilites for protest and occupation than Zuccotti. The winter in New York and the national solidarity around OWS call for new experiments.

Design just a little dated will interest any artist. Design current is always terrible. Anyone who...

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:34:00 -0400

Design just a little dated will interest any artist. Design current is always terrible. Anyone who has tried to find a good contemporary lamp or clock will know what I mean.

-Walker Evans, “Collectors Items,” Mademoiselle, May 1963.

“When the end draws near,” wrote Cartaphilus, “there no longer remain any...

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 00:24:00 -0400

“When the end draws near,” wrote Cartaphilus, “there no longer remain any remembered images; only words remain.” Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries.

-Borges, “The Immortals”

Reading the postscript of Borges’ “The Immortals,” which suggests the entire story is a collage of other texts, I remembered how it felt to reach the end of Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” in Harper’s (back in 2007) and realize the entire essay is composed of quotations, including one from Harry Truman. But Lethem’s essay is a polemic, and perhaps one that gives in to its ecstasy. Abstract critiques of originality (my favorite is probably Adorno’s “Gold Assay” aphorism in Minima Moralia) don’t translate 1:1 into political policy. For that, I got around to Caleb Crain’s essay on intellectual piracy today, a more sober take on how intellectual property is circumstantially eked out, from one technology to the next.

Guy Davenport’s 1978 essay on literary anecdote, “Seeing Shelley Plain,”...

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 21:52:00 -0400

Guy Davenport’s 1978 essay on literary anecdote, “Seeing Shelley Plain,” draws from Davenport’s extensive knowledge of the genre and his own contributions to it - for example, the time he assisted in extinguishing Sartre’s jacket pocket (“Monsieur, vous brûlez”). Rereading the essay last week, I ground to a halt, laughed disbelievingly, and texted Nozlee in all caps about the presence of a poet not mentioned in the essay or in any writing I’m aware of by Davenport.

On the difficulty of prying insight into a poem from the prosaic life of the poet, Davenport remarks, “Talk about pitching mercury with a fork!” He is remembering Richard Brautigan’s poem “Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork”:

Loading mercury with a pitchfork

your truck is almost full. The neighbors

take a certain pride in you. They

stand around watching.

Even for as omnivorous a reader as Davenport, the knowing allusion to Brautigan seems out of place. Would Davenport have expected his reader to pick up on the reference? Is he really throwing this implicit homage to Brautigan amongst anecdotes about Eliot, Frost, and Pound? I’m reading from the collection The Geography of Imagination, in which Louis Zukofsky, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound appear as (at the time) living paragons of American poetry, alongside various associates of Black Mountain College.

Brautigan is decidedly more Haight-Ashbury than Black Mountain, a side of twentieth century letters Davenport refers to with disdain in a list of “jaded old fools” from his short story “The Bicycle Rider”: “Aldous Huxley, a giggling British neurotic, moral idiots like Burroughs and the poet Ginsberg, and the shit-for-brains Timothy Leary.” By the seventies, Brautigan already sounded dated, though the collection Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork wasn’t published until 1976. All of this makes the poem an unlikely echo to hear in “Seeing Shelley Plain.” Then again, revising received opinions about poets is a theme of Davenport’s essay, and it sent me looking for my high school copy of Brautigan.

God is not in the earthquake nor in the fire, but in the still, small voice. They are but the blunt...

Mon, 30 May 2011 23:27:00 -0400

God is not in the earthquake nor in the fire, but in the still, small voice. They are but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lamp-black and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep and the calm, and the perpetual; that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood; things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally: which are never wanting, and never repeated; which are to be found always, yet each found but once; it is through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty given. These are what the artist of highest aim must study; it is these, by the combination of which his ideal is to be created; these, of which so little notice is ordinarily taken by common observers, that I fully believe, little as people in general are concerned with art, more of their ideas of sky are derived from pictures than from reality; and that if we could examine the conception formed in the minds of the most educated persons when we talk of clouds, it would frequently be found composed of fragments of blue and white reminiscences of the old masters.

-John Ruskin, “Of Truth of Skies,” Modern Painters

In many orders of beauty, particularly those of the finer arts, it is requisite to employ much...

Sat, 21 May 2011 20:30:00 -0400

In many orders of beauty, particularly those of the finer arts, it is requisite to employ much reasoning in order to feel the proper sentiment; and a false relish may frequently be corrected by argument and reflection. There are just grounds to conclude, that moral beauty partakes much of this latter species.

-David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never...

Thu, 12 May 2011 00:51:00 -0400

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.

I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.

In short, I went on thus for a long time, I may say it without boasting, faithfully minding my business, till it became more and more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully, I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.

-Thoreau, Walden

I was reading E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat recently and stopped at something strange in White’s voice. It took me a moment to realize that I was hearing Thoreau. It was like recognizing a close friend’s mannerisms in a mutual acquaintance.

Lately I’ve run into quite a few polemics about the current plight of the artist, writer, etc. They seem to imply that artists deserve, as if by natural right, compensation for their work. They also present the current state of affairs (the internet) as having undermined this natural right.

Such guarantees have never existed, and I’m not sure how to make sense of them. But these polemics have been around for a while. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, as increasing literacy led to an overproduction of trashy novels, writers penned similar lamentations. Cf. Martha Woodmansee’s The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics.

I love to write, and not speak, and when I write it’s by hand, not on a typewriter. Several factors...

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:33:00 -0400

I love to write, and not speak, and when I write it’s by hand, not on a typewriter. Several factors contribute to this choice. First there is a refusal: my body refuses to speak out loud to … nobody. Unless I’m certain that another body is listening to me, my voice gets stuck, I can’t get it out. If, in a conversation, I notice that that somebody isn’t listening to me, I stop speaking, and it is simply beyond my power to leave a message on an answering machine (I don’t think I’m alone in this). Voices are made to reach out to the other; to speak alone, with a tape recorder, strikes me as terribly frustrating. My voice is literally cut off (castrated). There is nothing to be done, it is impossible for me to be on the receiving end of my own voice, which is the only thing the tape recorder has to offer me. My writing, meanwhile, is immediately destined for everybody. Its slow pace protects me: I have the time to dangle the wrong word from the tip of my pen, the word that “spontaneity” never ceases to generate. There is a great distance between my head and my hand and I take advantage of it in order to avoid saying the first thing that comes to me. Finally, and this is probably the real reason, the challenge of tracing words on paper has a truly sculptural jouissance [une véritable jouissance plastique]. If my voice brings me pleasure, that is only out of narcissism. Writing comes from my muscles. I abandon [jouis] myselfto a kind of manual labor. I combine two “arts”: the textual and the graphic.

-Roland Barthes, “Une sorte de travail manuel,” quoted in “From the Desk of Roland Barthes” by Ben Kafka.