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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83695272014-09-07T02:56:12.458-05:00ART OR IDIOCY?
The Artist Extraordinairehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-77298692130182162602014-09-03T22:57:00.001-05:002014-09-03T23:00:58.725-05:00Ger van Elk"What I want is a realistic depiction of unrealistic situations"
said Ger van Elk in a 1977 interview. (Via Artforum.com's obituary)

Van Elk's sensibility was characterized by simple, humorous and often touching gestures. The artist's direct approach is perfectly on display in the piece he contributed to Gery Schum's Fernsehgalerie. In the 1960s and 70s Gerry Schum ran a television gallery, an entity whose exhibitions existed only as broadcasts on German television. For the exhibition themed "Identifications" van Elk produced the work seen below.

Ger van Elk died on August 17th at the age of 73.

Ger van Elk • The Well-Shaven Cactus • 1970 • from Indentifications - Fernsehausstellung II, Fernsehgalerie Schum

For you videophiles out there, you can also find a high quality transfer on vimeo.

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-65480505921724759532014-07-10T17:09:00.002-05:002014-07-10T17:15:41.321-05:00JULY 10, 2014

On Kawara • I AM STILL ALIVE • telegram sent in 1979 • via Bukowski's

JAN. 2, 1933

JULY 10, 2014

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-41337388182568044382014-04-08T16:47:00.000-05:002014-04-08T16:47:18.026-05:00Rene RicardI met Rene Ricard in 2002 when he came to give a lecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I was a student. Ambitious young artist and writer that I was, I set up an interview with him. Instead of a brief chat, I was pulled into his frenetic world. I only spent a short week with him, but it was a life changing experience, something I suspect happened with almost everyone whose life intersected with his. Rene (no accent mark!) passed away in early February.

Q & A SESSION

Rene in 2003 • Nancy Smith, artnet

"The clubs were just filled with all these... 'Young geniuses.' Of course that's all gone now. The whole art world is dead. No one goes to the clubs anymore, there's nothing interesting happening."

"But maybe–not to be brash."

"Oh, please, be brash."

"Not to be brash."

"Yes, yes, get on with it."

"Maybe you just don't know where any of the good clubs are."

"Yes, yes, I'm old and boring and nobody loves me. I don't get invited to any of the good parties. Is that what you mean, you little bitch?" Gasps, silence and then laughter. Rene Ricard takes a drag from his unfiltered Camel cigarette, one of many he's been chain-smoking throughout his lecture. "…Or whatever you are?" Holds the fag daintily and gently taps the ash off. "Or did I hit the nail right on the head?"

THE REAL ANDY

In the early 1960s, when Rene was seventeen he saw one of the Warhol Flower paintings at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. He stared at it until the museum closed; he'd been sitting there for three hours. After that he immediately went to New York and joined the Factory. He had a Screen Test, he was in Chelsea Girls and he was one of Warhol's Superstars.

Rene Ricard (left) with Andy Warhol (center) during the Factory days • photo via Hotel Chelsea Blog

"Can I ask you a gossipy question?"

"Oh No! Gossip. No, go ahead. But just one."

"So can you talk about the fight you had with Andy?" I asked.

"We had so many! Ha!"

"I mean when he did those Shadow paintings."

"Oh god, those were so horrible, I absolutely loathed them."

"I know; you got in a big fight at a dinner. And Andy, in his diaries said how he was so embarrassed..."

"You know the funny thing about that is that it's all true. He used to call up Pat Hackett every day and tell her everything."

"He said his face was red. That he was so embarrassed because everyone saw 'the real me.' I was amazed. You brought out the real Andy, Rene."

"You see, the important thing about those diaries is that Andy would call up Pat and tell her what happened and she would write it down, verbatim. It's incredible. It's the most accurate social document."

At this point we were taking the sad walk from Rene's suite in the Silversmith to the subway station, which would carry him to the airport and back to New York. When a friend and I were with him in his room he said that when he got on the plane Chicago would disappear.

"You see Andy and I had a VERY complicated relationship. I mean here I was, this 18-year-old boy. This 17-year-old boy. And, well. Andy had a crush on me. And I thought, well, you know I thought. I... I just couldn't do it. Just because anyway…

And all that stuff about Andy being asexual just isn't true, because I saw him having sex."

"Wow."

"Yeah, I know. But he kept it well hidden. He was very clever in that way. You see, back then homosexuals posed an enormous threat to the male art world. If you were a homosexual, you would just plateau. And the critics would, well; it's just much better to be a eunuch. There's all that history."

"And it's much more romantic."

"Yes, the wondrous god coming down from the sky with all the knowledge."

Bartolomeo Manfredi • Cupid Chastised • 1613
oil on canvas 69 x 51 3/8 inches • The Art Institute of Chicago

The Visiting Artists Program was in a cramped little office above the cafeteria and just off a small, dark attic lounge where students had sex on filthy love seats. Rene and the Director, Romi Crawford, were looking at a website that someone made in his honor, collecting many of his poems and other writing, when I came in to meet him. There was a black and white picture of him. It was strange because you could tell it been taken in the past, but in it he looked much older than he did now, like it was him in the future. "I think that's a good look for you," she said turning from the picture to Rene. "Romi!" he said, "That was my crack cocaine phase!"

I accompanied him to the museum. He wanted to look at the Ingres drawings and an appointment had been made in the prints and drawings room. When we walked in he exclaimed, "It's me!" I thought he was announcing his presence, but he was talking about an Alex Katz print that was his portrait. They had pulled it out just for him. He pointed out that, "Alex is the only person who paints eyelashes." Then he went to les Ingres. He was most interested in the portraits with the Venetian landscapes in the background.

One of the prints and drawings people brought up David Hockney's theory, "Did Ingres really use the camera lucida?"

"No, no way." Rene instantly referred to the drawings themselves.

"Look at the erasures there. There's too much erasures. Later in life Ingres did daguerreotypes, as a photographic reference. And he hid those like mad, but it still got out that he used them. So there's just no way he would have been able to keep it a secret. Actually, It was the early photographers that were trying to copy Ingres, not the other way round. They were finding his pictures and trying to do it like he did."

He noticed a bit of oil with a slight halo around it on one of the drawings. What was the restoration history, he wanted to know. The prints and drawings person didn't know, she was an intern and had just started.

Rene knew who everyone was in the drawings. This was his friend a composer, this was so-and-so's wife. He got a magnifying glass. "Look, look," he said, "see how he gives us choices for the edge?" pointing out the several contours implying the edge of a face. "You don't do that with a camera lucida. Look at that face, he really makes it full, it's not a line, it's the edge, that face is a head, it doesn't just stop, it keeps going around the cheek."

We looked at how Ingres merely uses a few bits of line and you get the whole brickwork of a bridge. There were full figure portraits, with tiny meticulous faces, amazingly rendered hair and delicate landscapes in the distance. "Look at all the problems with the feet, his ankle should line up with the indentation below the Adam's apple, but it doesn't. It makes it look like he's pitching forward. But he sure could draw faces huh?" And there were slightly larger ones. A friend's wife, done when Ingres was in his 80's and a piano layer. "He must have done it while he was playing the piano, look, look! There's a motion line, just like in the cartoons. You can see all the possibilities for hands. And look at this," he said in a raunchy way, referring to the extremely loose bits around the body.

"How great it is."

Then we left.

The first thing he said when we got outside was, "I can't believe they stuck me with the fucking intern. I'm a celebrity."

Peter Paul Rubens • The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis • 1636 • oil on panel • 10 5/8 x 16 3/4 inches • The Art Institute of Chicago

We went to look at the older paintings; that's what he was really interested in. He wanted to see "the Chastisement of Cupid," he was calling it by the name of the guy who painted it, "the Bartolomeo Manfredi." We started in the room with the de Zurbarán. "He paints from black, all these artist do. It's great, you can see it when the pigments on top crack," he said pointing to the note tacked at the bottom of the cross. Nobody can do white like de Zubarán. Then there's the Assumption of the Virgin (1577–79) by El Greco, which is horribly lit and you can never see it.

"It's really a great thing that they got it here."

Except it's like that don't have it, because you can't see it," I said.

"Churches aren't like this, they were never meant to be seen in this light. And that gold leaf altar around it is just god-awful. Look at all that wasted gold leaf!"

Rene explained how the Met tried to get this El Greco, but somehow Chicago pulled through and they worked it out and that was quite an impressive thing. Rene was quite impressed with the Art Institute, how it holds such great works by such rare artists. Or a rare good painting by an otherwise bad painter. "This museum is really world class, it's not provincial at all."

As a kid Rene loved to go to the museum. When it was announced that the class wouldn't be going to the baseball park, but the art museum for a fieldtrip, he would be the only happy kid. Even as a kid he knew exactly what he would buy with a million dollars, a Vermeer, even though they already cost two million dollars. He maintained that youthful exuberance for art all his life.

He spotted a Coreggio across the room and raced up to it. In one breath explaining the whole of it. As much as he could fill you up on 1980's gossip, he could tell you about the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Rococo and so on.

Always look at paintings on copper, such as Virgin and Child Admired by St. Francis (1606/7) by Francesco Albani. Paintings on copper maintain the richness of pigment that canvas sucks up. You can always tell with green. Green is a fugitive and unstable pigment, if you have a good green, then you can rest assured that what you see is pretty close to what it looked like the day it was painted. The paint cracks and flakes off, and that's what makes oil on copper so rare, so whenever you come across a painting on copper pay close attention.

Poussin "painted from orange"–meaning he used an orange ground–that's why his blue skies are so amazing. He pointed out the French tendency to simplify nature. "Look at this painting, it's all cones and cylinders. There's even a sphere right in the center."

"So it's no surprise that Cezanné came up with what he did. I mean look at that Poussin, it looks like a View of Mt. St. Victoire!"

No one knows how Rubens made his paint; it's a mystery. It just doesn't behave like paint should. Look at Rubens's student Jacob Jordaens's Temptation of the Magdalene (c. 1616/17) as an example. Rubens's St. Francis (c. 1615) on panel, "It's a shame, it's been cleaned to nothing." Rene was adept at catching restoration and cleaning, from explaining the polishing of Roman marble, to how cleaned paintings get completely scraped to the underpainting, and how awful it is that they transfer paintings from a panel support to canvas.

There was a Rubens oil sketch, Wedding of Peleus and Thetis 1636), made with only red and brown. Rene pointed out how he's made yellow with just a little sienna and white and how Rubens tricks us into seeing dark, dark blues.

Fragment of a Painted Wall • mid-1st century A.D. • Roman • plaster & pigment • 19 1/8 x 18 7/8 x 3 1/8 inches
Lent by the Field Museum of Natural History • The Art Institute of Chicago

POLISHING MARBLE

We were supposed to eat lunch in the nice restaurant upstairs, but there was a wait and Rene wanted to get back to the museum. So we went to the cafeteria in the basement. He was happy to have me along, but did not want to do a formal interview. "Rene Ricard doesn't do interviews," he'd stated flatly. It was at lunch that he said, "Here's your quote: 'Criticizing and making fun of art you hate is easy. Writing about good art is hard without sounding like a press agent.'"

In researching him for the interview, I read everything he'd written that I could get my hands on. He wrote a catalog essay on Phillip Taffe, which was really about Roman frescoes. He told he totally hated Phillip Taffe's work, but they paid him an "ungodly sum" to write an essay, so he just wrote about what he felt like, which happened to be Roman frescoes.

They still don't know how it was done to this day. The frescoes "glimmer and shine, which is something that frescoes just don't do." And that's not a result of polishing or restoration. We were in the Roman and Greek antiquities section now. He pointed out the Pompeian red, which is so vibrant and deep, a complete mystery. There was one with a small still life; you could see the layers. There is an underpainting with lines on top. Again, you just can't do this with fresco.

In front of the ancient Roman frescoes were three marble portrait heads, the center was Emperor Hadrian, to the left Antinous, his boy lover. When the boy died, Hadrian decreed that he was a god, and as a result there are more carved images of this boy in antiquity than any other god. It's a shame though, on the face you could see the gouges from when statues were sacked at the fall of Rome are all smooth because they were polished down by restorers. There was a nude woman, which is rare, because the male nude was held as a higher example of beauty than the female. What's best is she is untouched. She is covered in "sugar." When marble is left untouched it flakes and turns to sugar. When they restore and polish it, they scrape all that off.

ALL ABOUT JULIAN SCHNABEL

"In your essay 'Not About Julian Schnabel' you said..."

"No I didn't!"

I continued, "In the essay you write about how your responsibility isn't to the painter, the dealer, or yourself, it's to the pictures. Is it possible to still look at the pictures that way today, without all the politics and history of the 80's interfering?"

"I'm just a poet, by the time I find out, the parade has passed me by. Painting is a way we experience history, in graphic. Real art has a historical prerogative. It's always a comment on the art that proceeds it. Jean Michel's Enola Gay (1981), what made me know it was real art was that it was drawn on a grid structure. It showed a participation in history. It had a touch. Does that answer your question?

When I look back at that time, I cry. I don't think about politics, I think of all my dead friends."

Rene has seen thirty thousand dollars in cash, because when he sold a Julian Schnabel painting for thirty thousand dollars, he got the money in cash. He put twenty thousand in a safe deposit box and took ten thousand and went to Italy for a while. I asked him how he survives, like pays for stuff. He said I wasn't privy to ask questions and that I was much more attractive when I wasn't asking questions.

"So how did you get into Art Forum?"

"By being Rene Ricard."

"Julian's problem is that he overproduced. There's that famous Mary Boone waiting list. Julian was just cranking out these paintings to meet the demand. A couple of years ago about thirteen paintings came onto the market in one season, which can completely ruin your career. But Julian has protection," Rene explained. The biggest diamond dealer in New York, which is the nicest guy—I don't understand that part—Got some friends together, and they all bought up the paintings before they went on sale. Which is a good thing because that stopped Julian's career from plummeting. "But then Julian made that When Darkness Falls movie and the whole series of giant girl faces with white splattered over the face, based on a thrift store painting he found a way back, that kind of did it in for him. But the important thing is that Julian has market protection."

Julian Schnabel • Blue Nude with Sword • 1979/80 • broken ceramics, bondo, oil & wax on wood • 244 x 275 cm • Bruno Bischofberger
Cover of Artforum • Summer 1980

Julian's career was kind of already made, but Rene was working on this great piece for Art Forum, everyone kept asking him what it was going to be about and he said it wasn't going to be about Julian Schnabel, but then it was. So he called it "Not About Julian Schnabel." It really has some great passages, like: "One doesn't want to hurt an artist, but really, one has a bit of a duty to eradicate the mediocre. Children should never be encouraged to be creative."

"You just had to love Julian. He would invite people up to his studio to see his work. He'd cover his giant paintings with tarp and unveil them to you. There'd be one on each wall." Finally one day Rene went up to see him and on the stairs ran into some art world somebody going down, shocked and disgusted. He got up to the studio and there was just one painting, and the tarp was all lumpy and sticking out and odd shaped. And Julian yanked on it, and it snagged on the jagged edges. It was the first plate painting. Rene said, "You've done it Julian, now I can write about you, now I can make you a star."

So Rene was working on this piece for Art Forum and one day leaving Julian's studio, he happened to notice a coffee cup in the gutter, and it had a figure on it exactly like the one in Julian's Blue Nude (1979-80). And Rene kept it around for a while and then gave it to the editor of Art Forum. There's a picture of it in the "Not About Julian Schnabel" article. He doesn't mention it, or say anything about its relation to Julian's work, but it's there.

Now they were waiting to get the advance copy of Art Forum, Julian and Rene. And it somehow was that they had to wait at a bus stop in the middle of the night and the driver would have the copy for them, and they could only get one. When they got it, it was horrible, because it had a tiled image of the coffee cup on the cover that Rene had given the editor, not one of Julian's paintings. Julian was furious and it was hell for Rene, because he was staying at Julian's house. And Rene was hurt because Julian's career was already made, he didn't need the cover of Art Forum, and he never once congratulated Rene for getting the cover, even though they were friends.

The last time Rene had dealings with Schnabel was when he got a two million dollar portrait commission for Julian and was supposed to get 10%. He only got five thousand dollars. And then Julian did the same thing to his daughter, Lola.

The movie Basquiat (1996) is all Julian getting back at Rene for getting the cover of Art Forum, and leaving him for Jean-Michel. The movie is almost entirely based on Rene's landmark essay, The Radiant Child. He's quoted in there ad infinitum, and a lot of significant vignettes are anecdotes and bits from the essay. Rene said he should sue for character assassination, except they paid him a ton of money for the rights to insult him.

Jean-Michel Basquiat • Gringo Pilot (Enola Gay) • 1981 • oil stick, marker, pencil & acrylic on paper • 81 x 103 inches at widest
via Basquiat Biography

THE RADIANT CHILD

Jean-Michel was the Radiant Child. "Julian was mad because he wanted to be the Radiant Child and he just wasn't." Rene first saw a Basquiat when he went home with a guy and the roommate had the piece on the mantle. He just stared at it and sat in front of it. He stayed there till the sun came up. It was Enola Gay (1981), it had a plane dropping a bomb. He called up Art Forum and said he had the next new artist to write about, they asked him who it was and he said he didn't know, but he'd find out. And that was the genesis of "The Radiant Child" essay. Stephanie Seymor, The Victoria's Secret model, owns it now, or she did in 2002 when Rene told me this anecdote: She told Rene she thought it was funny and he said, "My God Stephanie, that's the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima!"

I cannot do justice to the way Rene talked. He was so passionate and lucid. The words just flowed out and you get all emotional hearing it. Rene spoke with such conviction, that you just knew in your heart that what he is saying must be true.

He gave me a book of poems as a gift. As a thank you I gave him a small artwork. At the time I was drawing and painting a cartoon orange every-dog on a blue ground. For me it was as rooted in On Kawara's methodology as the whimsy of Yoshitomo Nara. I handed him the small piece in a little ornate frame and he was touched. "Do you know what color this is?" Rene asked, indicating the background.

"Ultramarine Blue Light!" I dutifully recited wanting to show off the attention to specificity I'd learned from walking through the museum with him.

"It's periwinkle! This color is going to be very hot in the next year."

I felt ahead of the curve.

"I'm going to put this on my bureau!" I can still hear his musical over pronunciation of the word "bureau."

Years later, in the middle of the night, I got a phone call. When I asked who it was, the caller replied, "It's Rene fucking Ricard." He'd first called my mom and asked her for my number when it turned out I wasn't there. I'm sure that was an amazing conversation.

As he launched into conversation I imagined him in his room in the Chelsea Hotel where he lived. I thought of that little dog I'd made for him in a place of honor amongst the clutter of various precious knickknacks and other treasures. I wonder what has become of it now that Chelsea Hotel is closed indefinitely for renovations and Rene is gone. Chicago didn't disappear when he got on that plane, but the New York he helped make did when he died.

Rene Ricard • mixed media on paper • signed & dated: "March 2012 NYC"
via Morning Passages

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-10098572444085663602014-01-27T10:55:00.000-06:002014-01-27T10:55:57.327-06:00The Production Line of HappinessArt or Idiocy congratulates Christopher Williams on his large scale museum exhibition, surveying his 35-year career, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through May 18th.

Christopher Williams
 For Example: Chaton sjouant avec un appareil photo dans le style d'une photographie conceptuelle (Revision 13)
via Fotointeres

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-76217187152348714082013-11-22T12:24:00.000-06:002013-11-22T12:55:37.727-06:00Family History / World HistoryGuest contribution from Helen Wenzel Moss

It was sometime in the 1960's Mama told me the story of how our family knew the Oswald family. She said we knew the family through Christ Lutheran Church. The father was an insurance collector who came by our house on Independence Street in the late 1930's to collect payments on an insurance policy bi-weekly or monthly, as was the practice during those times. Mama said he was a very nice, pleasant man. Unfortunately he died very suddenly from a heart attack about two months before his second son was born. The Oswald mother, Marguerite, was in hardship from the loss of his income and with children to support. When the youngest son was a few years old, she put the children in the Bethlehem Children's home. Christ-Bethlehem Lutheran School was on the Bethlehem property. My sisters Faith and Judith, and brother Bruce attended school there at the time. Judith went to school with an older son of Marguerite Oswald.

Mama never thought of the Oswalds again until late in 1963. In 1963 Mama worked for the National Bank of Commerce at 210 Baronne Street (at the corner of Common Street) in New Orleans' Central Business District. Uncle Fritz was manager of Jefferson Hardware Store at 4209 Magazine Street in Uptown New Orleans. After work, Mama would walk the three blocks to the corner of Camp Street and Common Street. She would wait there in front of the old New Orleans International Trade Mart building. Uncle Fritz would drive downriver and pick her up to go home in Gentilly.

While Mama waited there, she noticed a young man handing out flyers. It was not unusual for people to hand out flyers in New Orleans at this time for all sorts of causes. She mostly studied him because there was something familiar about the way he looked. She felt like she knew him but couldn't quit place him. When the news came out that Lee Harvey Oswald had handed out pro-Castro flyers on the corner of Camp and Common Streets in summer of 1963, Mama realized why the young man had looked so familiar. He looked very much like his father did when he was her insurance man.

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-24523290623627042092013-11-15T16:51:00.001-06:002013-11-20T14:23:55.192-06:00Is a Pound of Passivity Worth A Pinch of Pique?

I do not want to document my starting points, turning points, high points, low points, good points, bad points, stopping points, lucky breaks, bad breaks, breaking points, dead ends, breakthroughs or breakdowns.

Robert Morris • Untitled (Scatter Piece) • 1968 - 9 • felt, steel, lead, plated zinc • plated copper • aluminum & brass
Installation view at the Art Institute of Chicago • photo: Art or Idiocy?

It will be interesting to see what Robert Morris has to say tonight at the University of Chicago when he delivers his public presentation entitled IS A POUND OF PASSIVITY WORTH A PINCH OF PIQUE?

The following is from "Robert Morris on Silence" posted on the Critical Inquiry blog in 2011. You may notice the curious detail that the CI website runs counter to The Chicago Manual of Style and puts the traditional double-space at the end of sentences. Thanks to Philip von Zweck for sharing.

One of the more inexcusable forms of talking comes in the form of those cultural events called art symposiums. Now that the role of curator in museums has metastasized to truly horrifying dimensions, it is necessary to keep these culture mavens busy by having them dream up completely irrelevant culture fests. As an aging artist I am still on occasion invited to these stupid shindigs. For years I made up excuses for not showing up. But now I have fashioned an all-purpose document of reply, which goes like this:

I do not want to travel to distant places to give talks about art I made half a century ago. Minimalism does not need to hear from me. I do not want to travel to distant places to give talks about art I made yesterday. Contemporary art is making enough noise without me. I do not want to be filmed in my studio pretending to be working. I do not want to participate in staged conversations about art—either mine or others past or present–which are labored and disguised performances. I do not want to be interviewed by curators, critics, art directors, theorists, aestheticians, aesthetes, professors, collectors, gallerists, culture mavens, journalists or art historians about my influences, favorite artists, despised artists, past artists, current artists, future artists. A long time ago I got in the habit, never since broken, of writing down things instead of speaking. It is possible that I was led into art making because talking and being in the presence of another person were not requirements. I do not want to be asked my reasons for not having worked in just one style, or reasons for any of the art that got made (the reason being that there are no reasons in art). I do not want to answer questions about why I used plywood, felt, steam, dirt, grease, lead, wax, money, trees, photographs, electroencephalograms, hot and cold, lawyers, explosions, nudity, sound, language, or drew with my eyes closed. I do not want to tell anecdotes about my past, or stories about the people I have been close to. The people to whom I owe so much either knew it or never will because it is too late now. I do not want to document my starting points, turning points, high points, low points, good points, bad points, stopping points, lucky breaks, bad breaks, breaking points, dead ends, breakthroughs or breakdowns. I do not want to talk about my methods, processes, near misses, flukes, mistakes, disappointments, setbacks, disasters, obsessions, lucky accidents, unlucky accidents, scars, insecurities, disabilities, phobias, fixations, or insomnias over posters I should never have made. I do not want my portrait taken. Everybody uses everybody else for their own purposes, and I am happy to be just material for somebody else so long as I can exercise my right to remain silent, immobile, possibly armed, and at a distance of several miles.

Read the full essay here.

Von Zweck explains that Morris sent this "all-purpose document of reply" to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in response to an invitation.

2013 Presidential Arts Fellow Robert Morris
IS A POUND OF PASSIVITY WORTH A PINCH OF PIQUE?
Friday, November 15, 2013 • 7:00pm
Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts, Performance Hall
915 E 60TH ST Chicago, IL 60637
FREE
The Artist Extraordinairehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-28911959538105788032013-10-11T17:29:00.000-05:002014-05-06T11:45:33.318-05:00Amalia Pica / MCA Chicago

Amalia Pica • Stabile (with confetti) • 2012 • paper & sellotape • dimensions variable
Installation view & detail at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland • via Herald St

I was recently looking at a website that specializes in selling art. Its fairly detailed cataloging system works well if you are selling Matisse etchings but not so much for today's art. One of the categories to be filled out for each work is "style." The style for recently made artworks is "contemporary" which sounds humorously inadequate. After all, doesn't art today consist of so many different disciplines, genres, media and approaches that it is impossible to think of it as a single style? But if there's one thing to be gleaned from the wealth of biennials, triennials and art fairs, it's that contemporary art most definitely has a "look." It's a style composed of clever gestures and smart moves. Working across multiple disciplines and media is an aesthetic position.

In her exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Amalia Pica has the look down, utilizing various materials, most of which are humble and everyday, to construct her slight gestures. The exhibition is remarkable because it so dutifully and flawlessly touches on all the right points necessary for a solid contemporary art practice: Performance and participation, personal biography connected to broader political history, obsolete technology deployed as signifier. It all works together too well, which is why it feels so flat and lifeless as a whole.

Amalia Pica • Moon Golem • 2009
Found photograph, etched glass, mirror, plinth & lamp
Installation view at Hayward Gallery Project Space, London
via The Project Space

Much of Pica's work amounts to illustrations for stories she's researched. (Research, another contemporary art attribute.) Often what is referenced is more powerful than the artwork that is referencing it. For instance in Moon Golem (2009) a small round mirror is placed on a plinth so that it bounces a spotlight onto the center of a photograph hanging on the wall before it. The image is of a tiny metal figure on the surface of the Moon. An accompanying wall text, which is also part of the piece, tells the story of how this statue was commissioned from the artist Paul van Hoeydonck by the astronaut David Scott to commemorate all the astronauts who died in mankind's quest to reach the stars. In 1971 the statue, along with a plaque listing fallen astronauts and cosmonauts, was snuck aboard the Apollo 15 and brought to the Moon. The crew only revealed the project after returning to Earth.

The statue, Fallen Astronaut, and the effort to get it to the Moon is the art. Pica is just pointing to it. It's much more interesting to think about how this is the least public monument ever created, not only is it miniscule, it's not even on Earth. That this piece brings such a captivating story to our attention is of value, but why did it need to be an artwork? Or more accurately, why did it need to be told in this way?

Pica is at her strongest is when she confines herself to a simple gesture that packs a wallop. The standout work in the show and one of the most memorable pieces of late is Stabile (with confetti) #2 (2012). A mass of confetti has been scattered onto the floor of the gallery. Each little circle of colored paper has then been taped down. The initial chaotic act of tossing a handful of colored discs has been frozen. Viewers walk through the space and the air currents flow, but rather than being carried along by such forces, the confetti stays put. There is an interesting tension in the level of effort. I would describe the effort to individually secure hundreds of small pieces of paper to the floor with strips of transparent tape as "painstaking". But it's just tape and some cheap confetti you'd get from a party store. Still, the space is activated by the haphazard arrangement, disrupting all the other works of Pica's, which no matter how casual they try to be, reek of being carefully placed "just so".

What makes Stabile so good is that it's risky. It might be stupid. And it kind of is. And that's invigorating. It's not weighed down by references to history or literature, it hasn't been overly conceived, it's a simple gesture that gives us room as viewers to experience and contemplate what's in front of us.

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-24623274959247268342013-08-08T20:19:00.002-05:002013-10-15T23:44:05.617-05:00How Much Can I Get For This Used Van Gogh?Marketplace, a program highly recommended in general for its thorough and intelligent reporting on economics for the common man, has a feature today on the ongoing situation in Detroit. Lizzie O'Leary interviews Detroit Institute of Arts Director Graham Beale. The DIA's collection has become the public face of the debt crisis with the City eying it like a drug addict desperately trying to get some fast cash. You can read the interview HERE or listen to the segment embedded below.

Karl Scmidt-Rottluff • Cactus in Bloom • 1919 • oil on canvas • 26.25 x 29.5 inches
City of Detroit Purchase • Detroit Institute of Arts

This painting by German Expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff purchased for the DIA by the City of Detroit is one of the contested works now being appraised by Christie's auction house. Even if the works, which are expected to be valued in the many millions, were all sold to the highest bidder the proceeds wouldn't put much of a dent in the City's debt, which is estimated to be 18 billion dollars.

 The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-16626495141126582542013-07-30T17:56:00.000-05:002013-10-15T23:45:23.026-05:00Dust and WaterThe idea of a random space in Manhattan's SOHO neighborhood, amidst all the other cramped spaces, filled with dirt is fascinating. What other strange things are hidden amongst the stacked shoeboxes that make up some of the world's most pricey real estate?

The New York Earth Room (Walter De Maria, 1977) is located in an expansive gallery filled with waste-high dirt. You can't photograph it, or walk on it. You just look at it, feel the moisture and smell the earth. It's frozen in time. It consists of a vast main space once site to large-scale installations by the likes of Dan Flavin, and perhaps most intriguing, a smaller gallery, the project room, nestled in the back. You can catch a glimpse inside, see that the dirt continues, and spot a few light cans and then only imagine what is unseen. It's a bit like imagining what is happening at the wreck of the Titanic at this moment. Or inside one of the pyramids. The experience most impressed upon me outside the odd smell of fresh earth, notable in a city often noted for its less than fresh odors, was the forced perspective. As a viewer, you are allowed a very narrow vantage and are left wondering what it would be like to stand at tantalizingly unreachable vantage points.

Entrance to The New York Earth Room • photo: Art or Idiocy?

The Earth Room is periodically tilled, watered, and weeded so that it is always fresh. By now most of the little plants and things that had been carried with the soil are gone. The New York Earth Room was the final exhibition at Heiner Friederich Gallery in 1977. It's now maintained by the Dia Art Foundation, which Friedrich co-founded, and has been on continuous view for over 30 years. While the work itself is quite amazing, quite literally a gold standard of "Earth Art" what makes it stand out is the context in which it exists. The gallery has long since closed, but its final exhibition continues in perpetuity. It is kept lively and new like the day it was installed. The white cube, like an unchanging tomb, is also free of time.

To think of the Earth Room in terms of burial and, in its perpetual state of newness, a type of immortality is irresistible. After all, what is the work of art but a way for the artist to live forever? What is the desire to participate in history other than a way to carry on after you art gone? It's like having children, but on a grander, less mundane scale. But then again, it is The New York Earth Room and other works fostered by the Dia that have attained a certain eternity more than their creators.

Boris Groys' essay "On the New" seems incredibly relevant here:

It is a difference not in form, but in time—namely, it is a difference in the life expectancy of individual things, as well as in their historical assignment. Recall the 'new difference' as described by Kierkegaard: for him the difference between Christ and an ordinary human being of his time was not a difference in form which could be re-presented by art and law but a nonperceptible difference between the short time of ordinary human life and the eternity of divine existence. If I move a certain ordinary thing as a readymade from outside of the museum to its inner space, I don't change the form of this thing but I do change its life expectancy and assign to it a certain historical date. ["The New York Earth Room, 1977" still on display in 2013] The artwork lives longer and keeps its original form longer in the museum than an ordinary object does in "reality." That is why an ordinary thing looks more "alive" and more "real" in the museum than in reality itself. If I see a certain ordinary thing in reality I immediately anticipate its death—as when it is broken and thrown away. A finite life expectancy is, in fact, the definition of ordinary life. So if I change the life expectancy of an ordinary thing, I change everything without, in a way, changing anything.

This nonperceptible difference in the life expectancy of a museum item and that of a "real thing" turns our imagination from the external images of things to the mechanisms of maintenance, restoration, and, generally, material support—the inner core of museum items. This issue of relative life expectancy also draws our attention to the social and political conditions under which these items are collected into the museum and thereby guaranteed longevity. At the same time, however, the museum's system of rules of conduct and taboos makes its support and protection of the object invisible and unexperienceable. [The Earth Room being closed to visitors during the summer months for maintenance] This invisibility is irreducible. As is well known, modern art tried in all possible ways to make the inner, material side of the work transparent. But it is still only the surface of the artwork that we can see as museum spectators: behind this surface something remains forever concealed under the conditions of a museum visit. [You cannot photograph it, you cannot walk on it, enter into it, only view it from without, from the entrance of the gallery that has a regular wood floor and from behind a glass enclosure.] As a spectator in the museum, one always has to submit to restrictions which function fundamentally to keep the material substance of the artworks inaccessible and intact so that they may be exhibited "forever."

Entrance to The New York Earth Room • photo: Art or Idiocy?

Indeed the idea of carrying on an exhibition indefinitely, one made up of such a simple gesture as fresh earth replacing the floor of an otherwise empty gallery, is the perfect example of Groys' position. For it's not only a single work being preserved, or even a final exhibition, but a moment in time made up of all these things.

Even if the material existence of an individual artwork is for a certain time guaranteed, the status of this artwork as artwork depends always on the context of its presentation in a museum collection. But it is extremely difficult—actually impossible—to stabilize this context over a long period of time. This is, perhaps, the true paradox of the museum: the museum collection serves the preservation of artifacts, but this collection itself is always extremely unstable, constantly changing and in flux. Collecting is an event in time par excellence—even while it is an attempt to escape time.2

But for now we can revel in The New York Earth Room's apparent timelessness, the thoroughly corporeal work's simulated existence outside of corporeal reality— even as the gallery that hosted it, and now its maker—have succumbed to temporality.

Walter De Maria died at the age of 77 last week.

____________
1. Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 36 - 37.
2. Ibid, 39.

 The Artist Extraordinairehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-18240496113937796912013-07-14T19:13:00.001-05:002013-10-15T23:53:26.272-05:00Fear of A Black Planet

David Hammons • In the Hood • 1993 • athletic sweatshirt & wire • via Peripheral Noise

Hood (e.g. Executioner, grim reaper, hoodie, hoodlum,
hostage, klansman, neighborhood, prisoner, S&M, serial killer)

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-76137205640572355352013-07-04T17:05:00.001-05:002013-10-15T23:51:06.622-05:00I Like America and America Likes Me

Joseph Beuys • I like America and America likes Me • 1974
Print on paper • 569 x 543 mm • via Tate

Happy Fourth of July. Joseph Beuys likes America.

In May 1974 the German artist, teacher, shaman and social sculptor Joseph Beuys arrived at JFK Airport in New York. He was rushed to an ambulance and wrapped in felt, the sickness in the air overcoming him. The ambulance, sirens blazing, took him to René Block gallery where a caged off area containing hay and a live coyote waited for him. Beuys spent the week communing with the spirit of America (embodied by the coyote), performing a healing and cleansing act. I like America and America likes Me, marked the artist's first visit to the US and further developed his ideas of the artist/shaman as healer.

This notion is at the core of Beuys' personal mythology, beginning with his origin story fit for a super hero. After crashing in Siberia as a Luftwaffe pilot during WWII, he was nursed back to life by wandering Tartars. They covered him in fat, and as in I like America and America likes Me, they wrapped him in felt. These materials became motifs in his work, addressing the question, "Why do you use ____ in your work?" artists regularly face in quite an inventive way.

It's interesting to look at the complex belief system Beuys authored in comparison to the myths surrounding successful artists today. Beuys' artist persona was based on spiritualism and faith in art, whereas today artists' backgrounds are often amount to unique selling points aimed at giving them an edge in grant applications, filling niches within collections, or simply standing out as a specialized commodity.

Celebrate the spirit of America and heal with Joseph Beuys by watching this video. It contains documentation of the performance and discusses the artist's work in general.

Coyote. Joseph Beuys in America from huubkoch on Vimeo

 The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-41194836828194602782013-06-25T15:07:00.003-05:002013-10-15T23:39:37.716-05:00Lecture Notes: Thomas BaylreGerman artist Thomas Baylre is part of a lesser-known contingent of artists, including Peter Roehr, who came up in the 1960s alongside Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. If ever there was a "Capitalist Realist" it would be Bayrle. In the last few years his profile has risen meteorically. The graphic artist once rumored to have designed the logo for the RAF has been featured in a major installation at dOCUMENTA (13), exhibitions at Air de Paris and Gavin Brown's Enterprise, and a career survey at WEILS Contemporary Art Centre, all within the last year.

   Thomas Baylre delivered a lecture for the Society for Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago in the spring of 2013. Here are the highlights from that talk:

Thomas Bayrle • billboard installed outside Gavin Brown's Enterprise • 2012 • photo: Art or Idiocy?

I will say 2 – 3 words about my so-called 'career'.

I was not always aware if I'm a real artist or not.

Apprenticeship in weaving. Like Sculpture. The weaving of society. It is also like mapping.

I am not willing to do anything bigger than is absolutely necessary… Technically.

Chairman Mao brought the potato to China in 1957 because he didn't want to be dependent on rice. I had a collection of magazines from China and was struck by ads that say, 'Potatoes only grow if you read the Mao bible' and other crazy fantasies. I saw stupidity in advertising in the West and in China. Stupidity here and stupidity there. Organizing masses in China for their purposes and in the West we must organize the masses through advertising to buy products.

Thomas Bayrle • Kartoffelzähler (Potato Counters) • 1968 • color screenprint on paper • photo: Art or Idiocy?

It was surrealism, they had to read the Mao bible to make potatoes grow. It is most crazy that it worked.

I tried to join the Leninists and Maoists, but they said, 'You paint the figures with ties and we cannot have that.' I learned they are impossible to work with. Stupid people. Any artists trying to work with them learned quickly, it's not possible.

In World War II women cleaned as ideology, then after the war as products. Always cleaning.

Having US troops stationed in Frankfurt was very important. Since they were drafted, the intelligence of the United States was all there. Plus jazz.

A lot of my images were asked for by advertising agents: 'Why not try our Glücksklee Milch?' But they didn't like it so much. So I kept it, I liked it.

Thomas Bayrle • installation view of "All-in-One" at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels • photo: Sven Laurent

Love and butter.

The figures make the image of what they dream.

Chickens are not happy, but they look happy.

When I did these things I did not think about ideology. I just thought, 'Here is a terrible man, I will make him out of his mustache.'

Thomas Bayrle • Stalin • 1971 • color screenprint on gray wove paper • 836 x 609 mm
The Art Institute of Chicago

There was no criticizing. I was not criticizing technology. I just like the telephone in my mother. We didn't even have a telephone at home.

Thomas Bayrle • Telefonbau-Normalzeit (Telephone AT&T) • 1970
Screenprint in colors on wove paper • 35 1/4 x 27 inches (89.5 x 68.6 cm) • edition of 25

Make an image out of images. Make a super image.

Why does Orson Welles have wheelbarrows? His lips looked like wheelbarrows.

My work is like Japanese pod hotels.

We should see the production of everything. This is why I take students on field trips—they should see what's behind the curtain.

Everyone wants his Mercedes but also wants to get into heaven.

I think without humor nothing is possible.

It comes from the moment when you have to say, 'I can't do it any better. I can't make it perfect.'

I'm not making an ideology out of it, but I do most of it myself. It is also meditation.

Thomas Bayrle • Kartoffelzähler • installation view (with R.B. Kitaj painting) in "Der Geteilte Himmel"
(The Divided Heaven) at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin • 2011 • photo: Art or Idiocy?

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-85943065975288713202013-05-30T14:52:00.000-05:002013-10-15T23:42:27.896-05:00Interview with Tania Bruguera

I'm very excited to announce that my interview with Tania Bruguera has been published on ArtSlant. I've been working on it with her for a few months, and I am proud of what it achieves—we cover a number of issues that are pertinent to the current state of contemporary art. Bruguera's stances on topics ranging from class, education, labor, and professionalism in the art world will hopefully spark much-needed debate.

"It is a process of excitement about the impossible made possible; which is also an aesthetic moment. Aesthetics have shifted from the craft that is in the transformation of objects (natural or manmade) into the meaning for a craft to transform our selves (as a single person or as a group). It is not a stone exquisitely becoming the face of a saint in ecstasy, but the mobilization of the realization of ourselves, which by the way was also in the face of that saint." – Tania Bruguera

Read the interview

Image: Tania Bruguera • Portraits • 2004-2005 • Medium: Sound installation, performance • Materials: Space painted white, historical speeches translated into applauses, recorded applause, white speakers, white text in the wall with the historical information on the speeches, security guards with dogs randomly walking into the space • Courtesy of the artist • Photo: Rüdiger Ettl for Kunsthalle Wien

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-35612427632499776012013-05-24T19:31:00.000-05:002013-05-24T19:36:45.447-05:00Yes I Smoke Crack
I'm not even sure where to start with "Witch House", a genre coined as a joke and then canonized by Pitchfork. It is the most interesting thing I've found of late. It combines gothy emo emotion, pretty high-pitched synth melodies from 90s rave music, slowed down vocals, the occult ...and rap. It should be the worst thing ever, and that's part of it's charm–it is horrible and brilliant at the same time, as all the best art is.

It also perfectly describes how I feel right now in the crudest hyperbolic way possible:

You ain't shit to me –nah
You ain't piss to me –uh uh
You ain't spit to me –nah
Ya bitch, you shit/you can suck a dick for me

<object width="250" height="40" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" id="gsSong3511984081" name="gsSong3511984081"><param name="movie" value="http://grooveshark.com/songWidget.swf" /><param name="wmode" value="window" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="flashvars" value="hostname=grooveshark.com&songID=35119840&style=metal&p=0" /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://grooveshark.com/songWidget.swf" width="250" height="40"><param name="wmode" value="window" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="flashvars" value="hostname=grooveshark.com&songID=35119840&style=metal&p=0" />Krawl by Salem on Grooveshark</object></object>

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-37964775941459144102013-05-22T23:43:00.000-05:002013-05-22T23:46:52.171-05:00Marumari
This is my favorite song right now. I keep listening to it in my head. You know a song is good when you hear it in your background idle thoughts as clear as if it were coming through your headphones. I hear its rich textures, smooth synthesized bass and lush atmosphere. I smile at the end when I the campy tribal horn that comes right out an 80s song that I can't quite place. This song sounds like trying to remember.

<object width="250" height="40" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" id="gsSong2950322139" name="gsSong2950322139"><param name="movie" value="http://grooveshark.com/songWidget.swf" /><param name="wmode" value="window" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="flashvars" value="hostname=grooveshark.com&songID=29503221&style=wood&p=0" /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://grooveshark.com/songWidget.swf" width="250" height="40"><param name="wmode" value="window" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="flashvars" value="hostname=grooveshark.com&songID=29503221&style=wood&p=0" />Birch Beer Forest by Marumari on Grooveshark</object></object>

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-67685355784238570302012-12-10T22:34:00.000-06:002013-10-15T23:52:13.975-05:00The Twinkie DefenseUPDATE: Twinkies returned. On my birthday no less.

Tomorrow morning the Hostess will deliver the last shipments of Twinkies and other beloved artificial treats to select grocery stores. Everyone knows these golden cakes that neither rot nor decay have a special place in the hearts of Americans. Few people realize, however, that the storied confections appear all throughout history. Such as in this painting by Paul Cézanne:

Paul Cézanne • French, 1839-1906 • The Basket of Apples with the Crazy Stack of Twinkies • c. 1893 • oil on canvas • 25 7/16 x 31 1/2 in. (65 x 80 cm) • The Art Institute of Chicago

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-74730252016714315502012-11-16T22:43:00.000-06:002012-11-16T22:43:31.205-06:00Time Capsule
Artist and Art Institute of Chicago preparator Robert Burnier shares this find. A crew tearing down an old wall in the museum came upon this newspaper clipping sealed inside over 20 years ago.

Tuesday, April 16, 1991

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-51372609220131571502012-11-06T22:21:00.002-06:002012-11-06T22:28:52.682-06:00Obama

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-78562067914653134382012-08-27T11:43:00.002-05:002012-08-27T11:49:17.382-05:00Notes on Documenta

Notes on dOCUMENTA (13)

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-43530130063393875512012-06-22T16:43:00.000-05:002012-06-22T16:50:18.054-05:00Ai Weiwei Summons Ball of Energy & Attacks

via: prosthetic knowledge source: "Zong Zong ball" on google+

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-1716238351150047862012-05-24T00:56:00.000-05:002012-06-22T16:44:34.501-05:00The Underpass
<big>In the dank concrete pedestrian walkway that led under the highway to the lakefront, someone had written with a magenta paint marker, "YOUR VOCABULARY IS DEEP BUT YOUR HEART IS SHALLOW."

"Vocabulary" had been scratched out and someone else had written "VAGINA".</big>

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-34880051346961373802011-09-12T08:30:00.006-05:002011-09-12T10:26:02.332-05:00Bernese Nights

I have been to Bern, Switzerland the past three summers for the Sommerakademie at the Zentrum Paul Klee, an intensive two-week residency for artists, curators, writers, academics and all of the above—"art people" as it were. First I attended as a Fellow in the Sommerakademie, returning as an Editor and Contributor to a book published by the Sommerakademie and as an Alumnus. The group of people affiliated with the Sommerakademie is kind of like a family that meets up in this Swiss city at the end of every summer for little bit of fun and formality. Each year it grows as new people become involved.

Bernese Nights. I have thought about that stupid title every year I've been in Bern. The idea being some sort of diaristic narrative, like George Orwell's "Burmese Nights". Maybe for no other reason than they sound similar. Every summer, late at night in Bern, what was originally a lame joke I made to annoy myself comes back to me and refuses to go away. What is a pretentious and clever title is also a device that suggests the content of the writing. Wandering around the empty stonemasonry that is Bern's architecture I think, "I should totally write something called 'Bernese Nights!' That would be so stupid!" I've never read "Burmese Nights." I did read, "Shooting an Elephant", which is about being a policeman in Burma, though. And it is Burmese Days, not "nights." I think I am thinking of Down and Out in Paris and London. Bern is neither Burma nor London or Paris. And rather than being down and out, which is pretty much how the other fifty weeks out of the year lived in Chicago have been, August in Bern is the only time I get to feel like my commitment to a life in the arts is amounting to much of anything. To be an international artist, how exciting! But also probably much less exciting than the life experiences of Eric Blair.

Bern is one endless picturesque vista, a quaint European city beautifully displaying its medieval origin. Paul Klee grew up here. Albert Einstein lived here. The Kunsthalle Bern was the site of Bernese native Harald Szeeman's paradigm-shifting exhibition "When Attitudes Become Form." The year prior he let Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrap the kunsthalle, their first building.

I like to say that Bern is a city founded by bears. Bern's coat of arms is a fierce bear sporting enormous sword-like red claws and an equally red engorged penis. Medieval settlers came upon an area suitable for starting a village except there was a community bears already installed there. The King waged war on the bears and once victorious imprisoned the Bear King in a pit on the edge of town known as the Bärengraben. Nobody really knows how the Bern got its name. A popular tale tells of the Duke vowing to name the city after the first animal he killed on hunt. And since the 1440s there really has been a bear pit at east end of the Nydegg Bridge. Only now it is an historic site and the bears live in a natural habitat on the riverbank called Bärenpark. It is kind of odd then that this small old-world city is the capital of the cantons that make up the "Confoederatio Helvetica".

When I mentioned this to someone in conversation, he replied, "Yes, but the economic capital is Zurich. And Geneva. And the cultural capital is split between Zurich and Basel." Subjective somewhat I'm sure, but the opinion of a Swiss citizen nonetheless.
"But the actual power is here, right? The Bundeshaus is here."
"It's the political capital. But that's a different kind of power." Said as if to remind me that it is common knowledge that goes without saying that government is a showy and relatively meaningless formalism. It made me think about how this goes without saying in America, not because everyone realizes it as an essential truth, but because it is unapparent to most people. Most Americans think that government is the cause of, and solution to, all the nation's problems. It should be bigger or smaller, more or less involved, stricter or more lenient; but never does the commanding role business plays come into question. Business, the economy, the marketplace, they are always spoken of as some sort of helpless thing that the government must regulate or free. This conception implies the government for better or worse is in control and the private sector is more like a wildlife habitat or a colony of bacteria. In reality, it seems apparent to me that in America, as in all Western countries, it is the private sector that dictates the agenda—and in a quite sentient, organized and efficient way. Capitalism is a form of government; the question of democracy, communism or dictatorship is secondary.

Europeans seem much more pragmatic than Americans, who are so idealistic. I feel much more optimistic about the future around Europeans because they seem to be generally more realistic about things: economic, social, cultural, whatever. But this can also lead to a kind of defeatism. Idealism is a quality that makes us Americans special; it's what gave us the drive to achieve all the crazy awesome shit we've done. But Americans are now so idealistic about so many stupid, unrealistic things. It is also no longer positivist idealism, but a negative, destructive clinging to increasingly dogmatic ideals. In fact, the last person who said, "Yes we can," has been vehemently opposed, attacked and undermined every step of the way. That is what commitment to ideals has become in America–a tunnel vision that is becoming ever more rigid, stubborn, unwilling and bitter. Most Americans spend a great deal of emotion and energy on socially conservative issues that don't affect them personally while overlooking issues that actually do.

Europe has it's own problems with rabid conservatism, but it is focused almost entirely on immigration (Muslims and non-whites). In America there are so many topics to choose from one can hardly pick. In addition to immigration and Muslims, we've got gay marriage, unions, abortion, taxes, government, that black guy in the White House. Guns. The Constitution. Christianity.

A far-right party in Switzerland funded by wealthy individuals and corporate backers has plastered the country with posters depicting a red field with a white cross over which trample the black silhouettes of countless feet. I thought it was an uncouth ironic sampling of a Nazi aesthetics to promote a youth oriented product or music festival until I read the message commanding me to STOP MASS IMMIGRATION!

The SVP's most adorable ad yet. They also have one with crows.

The Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) is the strongest party in Switzerland, and like its Republican and Tea Party comrades fears a weakened nation state, opposes government spending on social wellbeing and education, and has signed a "contract with the people". Like its "Red State" counterparts in the U.S. the SVP also favors decreased government spending despite having a large constituency of farmers that count on generous subsidies. This wave of increasingly vitriolic conservatism flooding the Western world is troubling but at least Europe has multiple parties. Let's face it, in America the land of plenty we have to choose between Coke and Pepsi. And don't even mention the Tea Party because it's just Coke when they still made it with cocaine.

While they were present on my journey, I didn't see any of those posters in Bern, nor were there demonstrations the way there is always something going on Washington D.C., adding to the understated almost secretive nature of the Swiss federal government.

So anyway, what would a "Bernese night" look like in a place like this, where a gorgeous river valley that cuts through the center of city and a nearby square features a relatively unassuming parliamentary palace? A more classic outing might entail eating fondue in a big group at one of the oldest restaurants in town. Being careful not to scrape through the growing crust of cheese at the bottom of the bowl with your fork, you end up with a solid crispy wafer of cheese and wine. It is a test of skill, collaboration and manners to see if you can produce the toasted a religieuse at the bottom of your pot. Then maybe you walk across one of the many bridges and look out into the darkness, listening to the rushing waters of the Aare hundreds of feet below.

For me, in town because of the Sommerakademie residency, every night is a social function of some sort with artists, curators and academics from around the world. People like to say how awful such things are. And receptions are indeed socially awkward but I also think they are great fun. And honestly, as an eager young artist, it's quite exciting. It's always fun because what starts as passed champagne and a few speeches always leads to a dinner that ends up a low-key dance party. Maybe Pipilotti Rist is on the dance floor shaking her bottom like a feisty child. And then later maybe Jan Verwoert ends the night playing his Sponge Bob guitar and singing "There Is A Light That Will Never Go Out." After the annual dinner that marks the finale of the Sommerakademie, evening becomes night and a group of people winding around the quiet downtown looking for a bar open past 1am.

This year we ended up at Cuba Bar, right near the giant Zytglogge, an enormous mechanized clock complete with an astrological dial and animated figurines that strike gongs and pop in and out of doors. Cuba Bar sells fine Cuban cigars and has an enclosed glass room for smoking on a landing off the stairway down to the toilets. Pretty low key compared to last summer when we piled into a silver Mercedes station wagon driven by an overly enthusiastic Middle Eastern entrepreneur we somehow befriended.

Bern's old city downtown is very small, but he drove us around in circles for a half hour wanting to take us to a great bar. He finally stopped a few blocks from where we met him. We all got out of the car and left him when his brother called to talk about a time-sensitive scheme to import a shipment of rugs. It was clear he had no idea about anything but he was very nice. Actually, he was nice in a threatening way almost. You always have to suspect people that willing and excited to be your friend. We wound up on the edge of town where the highway meets the train depot at Dead End. Behind a heavy black metal door like the entrance to an underworld hideout or a gulag prison cell, a pair of eyes peered out through a slit. The man that answered was tall, hairless, pail and skinny, like a snake with spider legs for fingers. He was a total sweetheart and everyone there was friendly. It was decorated with fiberglass stalactites and stalagmites, like a Chuck E. Cheese vampire cave for heroin addicts. This is the "seedy underbelly of Bern" which is made more bizarre given the sunny face of Bern.

When we left it was just me and a girl. The sky was turning into different kinds of blues. And as the sun woke up this little city we kissed in morning light.

Electric blue lights in doorways and alcoves make it impossible for junkies to find a vein and shoot up.

The only time I ever felt a little unsafe is when a group of us wandered into a real drug addict dive my first year there. In the bathroom a drunk old fuck invaded my personal space either wanting to make out or sell me some drugs. Or get some drugs off me. These prostitutes who were playing Pac-Man tried to get our attention. It was International Blue Velvet. A burned out woman tried to steal the last cigarette off the table as she stumbled by. I snatched it back and scolded her. I pointed at her with my finger and repeated a couple of times, "Nein!" We played some foosball before calling it a night. Outside was a city that literally does not have a scrap of litter to be found.

Near the Dead End there is a massive graffiti-covered squat beneath an overpass. It used to be a huge stable with a giant hall in the center where you could ride horses and take riding lessons. The complex is now a co-op of various groups that stage film screenings, music events, parties and there is probably a communist lending library.

It was night in a world that had ended in a nuclear apocalypse and we'd made it across wastelands to one of the last outposts where all the rebels, nomads, pirates and smugglers stop on their way to parts unknown. Standing sentry was a giant horse made of wood. In a surprising show of civility, the Trojan tree house horse had made it the entire summer without being torn apart by any of the revelers. It had been damaged once, but they got together and fixed it. There were probably open fires in oil drums or at least some torches and over a hundred of people massed. It was incredibly laid-back though because the squat is also just a place where you can go for a drink and sit outside biergarten style. We purchased our drinks and sat at one of the long wooden tables around the side of the fortress, first walking through a cobblestone passageway once traversed by horses and stable hands. In the sleeping medieval village above, the giant cuckoo clock in the towne centre rang a few soft midnight gongs.

 The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-50219484420232578172011-07-15T17:08:00.004-05:002014-07-15T17:37:20.368-05:00Milestone
Friday, July 15th marks the 30th birthday of our Founding Director & Chief Executive Officer for Blogging Operations. What other notable cultural icons share their birthdates with Erik Wenzel? Here is just a selection:

Inigo Jones, the first British architect of the modern era.

Rembrandt, who is like one of the best artists ever.

Walter Benjamin, who famously proved that photographs have no soul.

Jacques Derrida, inventor of the ironic air quote.

Ian Curtis, who was depressed.

Jan-Michael Vincent, Air Wolf.

Jesse The Body Ventura, who got killed by a Predator.

Adam Savage, Mythbuster.

Forest Whitaker, who feels things deeply.

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-63790278272418908362011-07-14T11:15:00.004-05:002011-07-17T15:57:12.725-05:00ANIMALITY

Tomorrow, Friday, July 15th, from 5:00pm—7:30pm is the reception for Animality curated by Zachary Cahill.
My video, Cat Painter (2009) is included in this exhibition.

<big>Animality
DOVA temporary
5228 S Harper Ave, Chicago, IL 60615

On view through July 23rd, 2011
Gallery Hours: 12 – 5PM, Wednesday – Saturday</big>

Contributors to the exhibition include: Marius Aleksa, Theresa Ganz, Sara Garth, David Giordano, Jacqueline Hendrickson, Pierre Huyghe, Samantha Jones, Stacee Kalmanovsky, Melanie Kassel, Hannah Leskosky, Jessie Mott, Jasmine Neal, Elle Opitz, Hannah Pae, Valentina Solano, Cassandra Troyan, Jan Verwoert, Erik Wenzel and May Yeung.

What is animal?

A sacramental deity, food, friend, or foe? Does the animal represent wild abandon or domesticated companionship? Is animality something (or someone) that is on the other side of humanity? Or: is it an element that wells up from the depths of humanity itself? Primordial and otherworldly, what is animal might be thought of as that which resists the symbolic chain of language, yet forms a link between sentient beings through varied modes of sensorial transactions and as such forms something of a peculiar kinship with the arts.

Animality, the exhibition, grew out of an interdisciplinary OPC seminar held this past spring that incorporated a series of visiting lecturers who discussed the subject of "the animal" in relation to their own work. The series included: artist, Pierre Huyghe; scientist, Dr. Roland Kays; media theorist & University of Chicago professor, W.J.T. Mitchell; and art critic, Jan Verwoert. Through the lecture series, discussions, films, and field trips seminar participants endeavored to question the orthodoxy that maintains the line separating humans from animals and the ways in which art itself figures into the debates surrounding animal life.

The exhibition is not intended as a didactic argument lodged in the field of animal studies, but is more of a messy thesis, one which is not hemmed in by the strictures of its own conceits, modestly seeking instead to comprehend something like an animal aesthetic. In keeping with its categorical blurriness or blurry categorizations (classroom as animal, exhibition as menagerie, education in/of the field), the show includes art and artists from beyond the territorial boundaries of the seminar that expand the definition of animality.

— Zachary Cahill

Animality: 2011 OPC Seminar & Exhibition, was made possible by the generous support of The University of Chicago Arts Council, the Department of Visual Arts, The Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the France Chicago Center.

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8369527.post-43256497722238873762011-07-08T14:04:00.006-05:002011-07-17T15:57:29.501-05:00Catch & Release

Buttons passed out during Gallery Week in Berlin.

Last week ArtSlant published a discussion between critic Abraham Ritchie and myself on the detention and release of Ai Weiwei and its broader relevance to current events. What sparked the debate were remarks made by Dan Keegan, the Director of the Milwaukee Art Museum as to the uselessness of protests and online petitions. This comes at a time when MAM has opened an exhibition of 18th century art and decorative objects from the Forbidden City in direct cooperation with the Chinese government. Thusly it has been foregrounded in the art world's soul searching on issues of censorship, free speech and the politics of cultural institutions in the 21st Century. Keegan had declined all interviews on the subject but responded to reporters on one occasion when he stated, "We don't do protests…I would say very emphatically that we should not protest ever."

Meanwhile, the infamous Change.org petition for Ai's release was started by the Guggenheim and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art staged a 24-hour vigil. On Tuesday, July 12th the Walker Art Center is staging an event inspired by Ai's 1001 Qing Dynasty chairs calling attention the repression of artistic freedom. And of course representing the other side of the spectrum, the Smithsonian National Portrait gallery has engaged in that very type of repression.

Our initial exchange on ArtSlant is HERE.

The discussion continues below.

ERIK WENZEL: I think I need to open up a little more about my personal reasons for what I said. Such as I feel totally guilty because I know that my interest will fade, and I will forget all those kept prisoner. It's just not possible to maintain a constant state of outrage. (Which seems like it is, or should be, an Onion headline: "Nation's Liberals, Conservatives, Wary of Maintaining Perpetual State of Righteous Indignation"). Also, I am not saying petitions shouldn't be circulated or vinyl letters shouldn't be affixed to Tate Moderns, it just seemed kind of silly. Every time I thought of signing the petition, I felt stupid. I asked myself, "What? Because he's a famous artist–and one whose work I like–is that why we art world people are now speaking up? Because he's 'one of ours'?" I just felt like a phony, I didn't have a good answer. I think you make really strong points, and that indeed the petition and other art world denouncements played a role. But it was a combined effort. And ultimately one that may well have played into the Chinese Government's hands. I remember thinking it's almost like a reverse-engineered act of benevolence: Release a high profile dissenter, look good and appear to listen to international calls for free speech. To begin: find a high-profile dissenter, detain them and wait for the attention. It's kind of bone-headed, but they seem like they are trying to play both good cop and bad cop and expecting us not to notice.

Obviously they were trying to silence Ai Weiwei a number of ways and finally took a drastic measure that brought a lot of negative attention. But they are still pretending to be good cops and hoping we'll buy it. A classic example of "saving face."

When I was speaking of ineffectiveness, I was particularly thinking of all the small-scale demonstrations I witnessed throughout the invasion of Iraq and during the Bush Administration. It seemed like little to no good was done. The consistent opposition from many different sources had no chilling effect on the administration whatsoever. This carries over into today: both Democrats and Republicans pay lip service to the voice of the people, but they pretty much just do as they please so long as corporate and upper class interests are met.

The internet (as is the case with everything) appears to be the most viable route. But I always wonder what the efficacy is of all the online petitions I sign. Everyday there is a new one for animal welfare, women's issues, disapproval of something political and net neutrality. I just wonder, "What's the point? Does this ever do any good or are we all just signing these things to make ourselves feel better while putting in minimum effort?" At least in the case of Ai Weiwei, a quantifiable outcome was reached.

Photo: Gao Yaun via ArtInfo

ABRAHAM RITCHIE: I think you are right to question the efficacy of online petitions, and you shouldn't feel forced to sign it if your heart isn't in it. To be quite honest, just yesterday I had to unsubscribe myself from Change.org's email list because I kept on getting too many notices about new petitions to sign, it's an unending battle. I'm sorry if Trader Joe's throws out its food rather than giving it to homeless and food shelters, but that's just a fact of capitalism, and it's not my fight. This is how we operate in a capitalistic democracy--you gather together a large constituency (a market) to agitate for something better (a new product). There are some of us who will tire of the constant friction once we get the main thing we've wanted and that's not wrong, it just is.

But I really have to doubt that the Ai Weiwei debacle played into the PRC's hands in any way, though. There's a renewed international call for the expansion of human rights in China as we've seen how tenuous they really are there. You know if Big Government.com, the tea party activist site from Andrew Breitbart, is bashing China on ethics than something is really noticeably wrong.

The important thing that is usually forgotten soon after someone is released is that human rights are always tenuous there; they just overreached this time by arresting someone who is too famous. Now people are starting to remember that they regularly arrest those who are not protected by their celebrity. I think you are right that by releasing Ai the government expected praise, but really all they got was a begrudging acknowledgment that they had finally done the right thing. Never mind that the PRC claims Ai owes them $1.85 million in "tax."

What the conversation should move to is the new reality is that Ai is "free" but he is really only half-free due to the conditions of his release. And this is a concept and reality that's hard for the media to interest a broad audience in since on the face of it he is "free." Ai's freedom of speech has been essentially nixed, he's not allowed to talk to media about anything meaningful, he's not allowed to tweet or blog, his public voice has essentially been eliminated and that's a travesty not too many media outlets are picking up on. Additionally, Ai's freedom of travel has been significantly curtailed; he's not allowed to leave the country, which is a heavy burden for an artist of his stature. He cannot even leave Beijing without permission. Ai is now so far in debt to China that his labor essentially belongs to the government. So the terms of his bail seem to limit his art practice in very significant ways, not to mention the ordeal of the arrest itself and the fact that the Big Brother government could send him back there at any time for no real reason at all.

It seems the next question to ask is will and how will Ai's art change after this event? I hope he continues the work he has been doing but it seems the government is set on preventing precisely that. In this way the PRC can censor art before it's even made by enforcing Ai into a regimen of self-surveillance.

The Artist Extraordinairehttp://email@example.com


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Ah, Mother's Day. It's that one day of the year when we all (hopefully) stop to think about all our mothers have done for us. Some choose to wax poetically about all of the amazing love and support they have received from their mother over the years, or give tear-inducing recounts of the bond they share or the hurdles they've overcome together. And that's fine, but when it comes to motherhood, sometimes the most appropriate sentiment is laughter.
Especially as a mother myself now, I know that you have to have a sense of humor when it comes to the challenges we face, otherwise, we'd all be locked up somewhere with padded walls. So if your mom is one who likes to see the humor in her role too, here are six awesome eCards (including the hilarious one above about the dumpster) to show her how much you love her and love laughing with her.
This singing baby quartet is pretty adorable, and they dance too.
This is one of my favorites, as it allows you to put your mom's face on the animated figure and show her as One Bad Mutha.
This animated ecard incorporates that saying we've all probably heard our moms say at least once (or 1 million times): "If everyone else jumped off a bridge ... "
You definitely have to have a mom who's up on her celebrity gossip to get this one, but if you do, this ecard about why you're glad she's not too famous could be for you.
For the mom who does it all, why not show her that you know what a superhero she really is.
Have you gotten you gotten the moms in your life cards yet? Which ones are your favorites?
Images via someecards, American Greetings, Blue Mountain, 123greetings, JibJab
The black baby one is offensive to mothers who have adopted for infertility etc. reasons. I know a family who have adopted 2 black babies and who have 2 of their own. What about the kids who read that one? Really inappropriate.
I agree! I adopted a baby who is 1/4 African American, the reason you are seeing so many people adopt them is because there are more of them than white babies available. You can get a baby a lot quicker if you are open to other races. I'm glad my daughter is too young to read because that card is SUPER offensive.
Because you are going to rush out and get these cards, and send them to all of those people who will find them offensive JUST to offend them?
someecards are all like that and they are funny you need to lighten up. obviously your children don't belong on a raunchy e card website..
Personally, I hate the dumpster card. I think in trivializes something that shouldn't be a joke. There are a lot of girls and women out there who don't have a place to turn and they can't handle a baby, for whatever reason. Until there are safe havens in EVERY town that will accept a baby, no questions asked, and it becomes common knowledge that these places exist, then the dumpster baby comments will continue to be offensive, or at the very least, in VERY poor taste!
The Dumpster one is funny to me because My WHOLE life my older sister has told me that I was found in the dumpster, and the reason my blonde hair turns green from the pool is because I was found under a pile of lettuce. I have a sense of humor, so all these were funny, not offensive to me.
what a crock of shit 'article' this is. typical, for The Stir.
offensive, not funny. immature, certainly nothing to be proud of. are you sure your mom didn't dump you in a dumpster, miss i'm-an-ass-of-the-female kind?
CafeMom should be ashamed to acknowledge you as part of their 'team'. ignorant!

subset: commoncrawl


text:
New Orleans, La. - A powerful exchange on Tulane's campus is all caught on camera. Former U.S. Attorney Jim Letten was confronted at the university by an activist who at first went to Letten's home and videotaped his wife.
In the video, just released Monday, Letten is heard saying, "Let me tell you something buddy, don't ever, don't ever, ever get close to my family again. do you understand?".
James O'Keefe, the founder of Project Vertias who is responsible for the video, replies, "You threw me in federal prison and your judge destroyed my evidence."
O'Keefe showed up to the university where Jim Letten now works to give him a copy of his book. after first going to Letten's Old Metairie home.
In 2010, O'Keefe was convicted of gaining access to Senator Mary Landrieu's office in New Orleans under false pretenses. O'Keefe believes evidence in his case was destroyed.
Letten recused himself at the time, but his office prosecuted the case. In the video, O'Keefe asked Letten if he leaked personal emails with his attorney to the press. It's something Letten denies.
After the confrontation, O'Keefe says he and his crew were detained by Tulane Police for five to 15 minutes. O'Keefe tells FOX 8 News, "I think the Supreme Court has protected the rights of journalists, the right of the public to walk onto a university property particularly because Tulane receives federal grant money in some capacity."
FOX 8 legal analyst Joseph Raspanti responds, "Of course these police officers can detain someone until they identify who they are, they have the absolute right to do that."
In the video, Letten is heard explaining to the officers how O'Keefe attempted to get his attention at Tulane saying, "He left a message for me saying his name was James and that he was a prospective law student and he wanted to talk to me about that."
Raspanti says even if this didn't happen at a private university, O'Keefe could've found himself in trouble. "They said oh because it's private property, he could've gone onto LSU or UNO's campus improperly and that would've been a trespass because he's not supposed to be there. He was there for the wrong reasons that he alleged," Raspanti said.
O'Keefe defends his actions going to Tulane and going to Letten's home telling us, "Nothing we did was illegal. Going to his house wasn't illegal. Knocking on his door and prompting leaving certainly wasn't illegal so the whole thing is an abomination."
Jim Letten in a statement says the actions of O'Keefe and his crew were intimidating to his wife and his staff. He also adds he regrets losing his temper while addressing the impropriety of O'Keefe's conduct.
The video taken at Letten's home and the exchange with his wife was clearly edited. We asked James O'Keefe if he removed anything that he said on the tape to Letten's wife from the video that was made public Monday. He told us he wouldn't answer any questions about his editing.
Fox 8 WVUE-TV
Louisiana Media Company, LLC.
1025 S. Jefferson Davis Parkway
New Orleans, LA 70125
General Number: (504) 486-6161
News Tips: (504) 483-1503
News Room Fax: (504) 483-1543


text:
TigerDirect.com has the Samsung UN46C6800 46″ Class LED HDTV and Samsung HTC5500 Blu-ray Home Theater Surround Sound System and Samsung WIS09ABGN LinkStick Wireless USB Adaptor Bundle for $1,799.97 – $200 coupon (BBI10624) + $40.41 S&H = $1,639.38!
The TV has a 1920×1080 resolution, 7,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, InternetTV, HD tuner and 4x HDMI ports. This deal also includes a Blu-ray home theater surround sound and WiFi dongle for taking your TV online wirelessly.
Don't forget the coupon: BBI10624


text:
The Bishopton
Quick Facts
- Plan #:
- Style:
- Traditional
- Size:
- 713 Sq. Ft
- Stories:
- 2
- Baths:
- 1
- Width:
- 28'
- Beds:
- 1
- 1/2 baths:
- 0
- Depth:
- 26'
Garage Plans Pricingadd to cart
This one-bedroom apartment offers all the convenience you crave in a cozy, cute floor plan. The facade boasts European-style appeal, enhanced by classic rooflines and a charming window arrangement. Inside, storage space is abundant with a closet in the garage and another in the bedroom. The bath offers the convenience of an inviting tub and separate shower--go ahead, pamper yourself! The bayed nook in the kitchen may be the most appealing part of the whole apartment. It combines the pretty look of a bay window with the extra room needed for a kitchen table, creating the perfect spot for intimate meals.
Extras: Walk-In Closet.
Garage Plans Images
Garage Plans Pricing
Complete Plan Information
- House Style
- Traditional
- Kitchen Extras
- Country / Family
- Key Information
- 713 Square Feet
- Beds: 1
- Baths: 1
- ½ baths: 0
- Stories: 2
- Garage Bays: 2
- Width: 28'
- Depth: 26'
- Room Summary
- Apartment / Studio
- Great / Gathering Room
- Guest Suite-incl Bath
- Special Features
- Walk-In Closet
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text:
Cycling in Melbourne Australia
This group is for listing stolen bikes, helpful tips to secure your beloved bike or heads up on bike thefts or gangs operating around Victoria. If you have had a bike stolen please include: date, time, suburb, description, image, model no etc
Location: Melbourne & Victoria
Members: 94
Latest Activity: Jun 26
Started by Fabio Machado Costa Jun 26. 0 Replies 0 Likes
Hi guys,My bike was stolen on Monday (06/23/2014) in the bicycle parking Swinburne University - Hawthorn. The padlock was cut. So, please if someone see any bike being sold and it looks like this…Continue
Started by Daibin. Last reply by Daibin Feb 12. 1 Reply 0 Likes
Lost my bike yesterday in…Continue
Started by Lily King Feb 12. 0 Replies 0 Likes
Found a Hillman in Footscray. In OK condition, left unlocked leaning against dumpster beside Little Saigon market for an hour. Possibly dumped after theft. Have reported to police but they said to…Continue
Started by Nara Butler Oct 15, 2013. 0 Replies 0 Likes
MATTE BLACK GIANT BOULDER 29er XL WITH TOPEAK SIDEKICK SADDLE BAG, CLICK FLASHLIGHTS, ZERO AIRDRIVER PUMP IN BAG ATTACHED TO THE FRAME.Stolen from apartment storage cage in the secured garage on…Continue
I think Victorian Police should form special bike team to bust these thief. I have seen video in UK, where police put bike decoy to catch the thief.
Should government put official registration on all bikes?
My Black, Reid Bike's Condor flat bar road bike was stolen between 3:30 and 4:30pm Easter Sunday. I have only had it 3 weeks, so it really hurts! It was locked up at a bike rack on the corner of Swanston St and Elgin street, near the Melbourne university. Any help finding it is appreciated!
This A**hole is ACTIVE in northern suburbs; Preston, Thornbury, Northcote, Fitzroy, Collingwood.............It Could Be Him, da Biky Thiefy !!!
My white Jamis step through, hybrid was stolen from my backyard in Northcote last night. If you see her around please contact me 0431 539 794. She might still have her DLock attached to her middle. She is one your old but a bit dirty.
Stolen Giant STP1 (2008/2009 Model)
Stolen at Melbourne University night of 9/2/2012
Black bike, white handlebars, black seat
Bike Serial Number: GE772373
Bad brakes that will need repair
Any help is greatly appreciated
email@example.com 0402766270
Found GT Traffic 3.0 Grey Silver Purchased - Shelley St Elwood December
Leaning against our front fence
Clearly a loved bike with many features, reported find to St Kilda police but surprisingly no response
True Owner will be able to describe unique non standard features and contents
Contact David Roche through Cycling & Sports Clothing Elwood 9531-0069


text:
Terms & Conditions.
Discount applied at checkout. May not be combined with any other offer/discount, including invitation credits, promotional gift cards and/or special discount links. Price match does not apply to items on clearance or items purchased from exclusive sales. Clearance products are final sale. Log in to your account to see your savings.
Vico Magistretti created this durable Mauna-Kea stool for Kartell in 1993. Made with a ventilated polypropylene seat, aluminum frame, and zinc-covered screws, the polished accent can be used indoors or out. Gently arched and stunningly simple, the chair typifies the Italian designer's penchant for elegant lines and shapely silhouettes.
No assembly required. Seat height: 30". Aluminum frame with steel legs and polypropylene seat.
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Dirt path, raging river, whatever.
I'm so glad I was finally able to get the juice to finish this one, the last in the Ghost Ranch series. The paintings that came out of me after that experience have really transformed the way I see myself.
Now I feel ready and clear to dive back into the Bloom True process and see what comes out.


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New Balance x Begins MS574BEG
Ocean Blue
The latest collaboration from New Balance is a fishbowl inspired design with Beijing based band Begins. The trainer is a reworking of the classic 574 silhouette and utilises New Balance's pioneering Sonic Welding technology. Finished in a vibrant ocean blue/orange colourway and featuring a dual branded metal 'fish' tag, this release is highly limited.
- Sonic Pressure Welded Suede and Mesh Uppers
- Sonic Welded Construction
- Fish Scale Heel Decal
- Metal Fish Lace Jewel
- Textured Heel Counter
- Photo Printed Insole
- Extremely Limited Numbers


text:
We features privately owned condos located directly on the Gulf of Mexico.
To explore these wonderful vacation rentals, and start your vacation today, is simply a click away. Click on our featured homes for more information.
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What Does the Bible Say About That?
- Wednesday, March 04, 2009
What Does the Bible Say About Ambition?
You've got drive—you've set goals and you'll do just about anything to reach them. Is that wrong? Nope. Doesn't God want you to be the best you can be? Sure he does. However, his wish is two-pronged: Be the best you that you can be, but don't forget to love him and others along the way.
What the Bible Says
Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.
Philippians 2:3
But we urge you, brothers, to ... aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.
1 Thessalonians 4:10-12
Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.
Galatians 5:26
Time to Face the Facts
Watch it: There's a fine line between having a lot of ambition and being filled with pride. It's okay to want to be the best at something, but don't push other people down in the process of lifting yourself up. Remember, God does want your excellent service but not at the expense of loving others. The greatest commandment is to love God, the second greatest is to love others. Don't lose sight of that.
Today I Will…
Think about how I am treating other people. I know what my ambitions are, and I don't want to hurt anyone as I try to reach them.
What Does the Bible Say About Angels?
Are angels really those white beings with big fluffy wings that you see in pictures? Do they just kind of float around and sing all the time? Are they more important to God than people are? Here's the scoop: angels are God's messengers and workmen. They follow God's commands in taking care of you. How cool is that?
What the Bible Says
For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.
Psalm 91:11
And the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.
Luke 1:30-31
And behold, an angel of the Lord stood next to him, and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him, saying, "Get up quickly." And the chains fell off his hands.
Acts 12:7
Time to Face the Facts
Wow! God loves you! He really loves you! He commands his angels to watch out for you; they are probably doing that even when you don't realize it. You see in Scripture how his angels bring messages to people and how they protect people. It only makes sense that God still uses angels to do those same jobs. Aren't you so glad God loves you that much?
Today I Will…
Thank God for the zillions of times he has sent his angels to protect me and watch out for me.
What Does the Bible Say About Anger?
It's no big deal if you blow your top once in a while, right? Everyone gets angry sometimes. God doesn't have rules about that, too, does he? Yep. God knows you're going to get upset ometimes, but he wants you to keep your cool and not say or do things you will be sorry about later.
What the Bible Says
Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath! Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.
Psalm 37:8
Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly.
Proverbs 14:29
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