‘One night in the mid-1790s the architect Etienne-Louis Boullée took a walk in the forest at full moon. Suddenly he noticed his own shadow moving among those of the trees. ‘What did I see?’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘A mass of objects detached in black against a light of extreme pallor. Nature seemed to offer itself, in mourning, to my sight.’ Boullée began to imagine an architecture of naked walls, ‘stripped of every ornament … light-absorbing material should create a dark architecture of shadows, outlined by even darker shadows’.
‘A taste for the monumental unadorned tombs of the Pharaohs may have been prevalent at the time but it was probably no coincidence that Boullée dreamed up his Temple of Death (c. 1795) shortly after Robespierre’s Terror had forced him to withdraw from Parisian public life. His earlier design for a Monument to Sir Isaac Newton (c. 1785) is like a giant, unadorned white balloon, about to rise skyward. The Temple of Death, in total contrast, is sunk into the ground. It looks like a photographic negative, and its ornamentation is a mere punched-out absence – a series of black, square window openings. What was new about Boullée’s design was that instead of being based on living nature it was based on nature’s fleeting, distorted image: its shadow. What Boullée imagined was a monolithic plainness, dark surfaces swaying between flatness and endless depth. More than just romantic horror vacui, this was a premonition of the plain, smooth surfaces that would embody the rationalization of space in the dawning Industrial Age.
‘In the Modern Age it is usually the kaleidoscopic, shiny surfaces of the objects surrounding us that are most eloquent about our desires and fears. The indifferently plain, matt, monochrome, silent surfaces ubiquitous in modern society – industrial finishes in black, grey and anthracite; polished steel, sheets of plaster, pressed wood, plastic and aluminium; walls, streets, machines – are silently taken for granted as being neutral amid the glittering turmoil. Ever since Boullée, however, the reality has been that plain surfaces are not simply neutral objects in social space, but the very materialization of that space.’ — Jorg Heiser, Frieze
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‘Boullée promoted the idea of making architecture expressive of its purpose, a doctrine that his detractors termed architecture parlante (“talking architecture”), which was an essential element in Beaux-Arts architectural training in the later 19th century. His style was most notably exemplified in his ‘Project for a Cenotaph for Isaac Newton’, which would have taken the form of a sphere 150 m (500 ft) high embedded in a circular base topped with cypress trees. Though the structure was never built, its design was engraved and circulated widely in professional circles.
‘Newton’s cenotaph was designed to isolate, to reinvent, the huge movement of time and celestial phenomena. Inside, the viewer is isolated too, on a small viewing platform. Along the top half of the sphere’s edges, apertures in the stone allow light in, in pins, creating starlight when there is daylight. During the night a huge and otherworldly light hangs, flooding the sphere, as sunlight. During the day, the “night effect.” During the night, day.’ — The Ingoing
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‘Boullée’s ‘Monument intended for tributes due to the Supreme Being’ is an expression of the metaphorical, emotional, and symbolic aspects of the architecture’s purpose. Function, shape, setting, lighting, and even scent were all considered in an effort to realize the unique character of the monument within a defined aesthetic environment. Boullée believed that a building’s “character” should be poetic and evoke an appropriate feeling in those who experienced it. For example, the strong use of symmetry in his drawing – not only in the buildings, but in the pyramid-shaped mountain as well – is intended as an image of clarity, order, and perfection. The monument thus becomes a metaphor for the divine nature of the Supreme Being. In a passage of his treatise Boullée also describes the setting for this monument:
… the whole would be decorated with all that is most beautiful in nature; the buildings would be mere accessories, the base of the repository formed by a superb open-sided Temple crowning the mountain top. The Temple precincts would consist of fields of flowers exuding their sweet smell like incense offered to the Divine Being… This beautiful place would be the image of all that ensures our well-being; it would fill our hearts with a sense of joy and would be for us a true earthly Paradise.’ — James Wehn, My Art Canon
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‘Boullée’s ideas had a major influence on his contemporaries, not least because of his role in teaching other important architects such as Jean Chalgrin, Alexandre Brongniart, and Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand. Some of his work only saw the light of day in the 20th century; his book Architecture, essai sur l’art (“Essay on the Art of Architecture), arguing for an emotionally committed Neoclassicism, was only published in 1953. The volume contained his work from 1778 to 1788, which mostly comprised designs for public buildings on a wholly impractical grand scale.
‘Boullée’s fondness for grandiose designs has caused him to be characterized as both a megalomaniac and a visionary. His focus on polarity (offsetting opposite design elements) and the use of light and shadow was highly innovative, and continues to influence architects to this day. He was “rediscovered” in the 20th century.’ — Helen Rosenau
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‘In Peter Greenaway’s 1987 film The Belly of an Architect, the main character Stourley Krackite is not only obsessed with celebrating an architect (Etienne-Louis Boullee) who never finished a building, but he is also consumed with representations of the body part whose rebellion will lead to his eventual demise: his belly. Kracklite photocopies the stomachs of representations of architectural greats (the emperor Hadrian, Boullee) and draws his ailments in order to illustrate his pain for his doctors. Kracklite’s fascination with Boullee seems appropriate in that it mirrors his own creative impotence; in the scene in which Kracklite catches Caspasian in the act with his wife, one cannot tell if he is enraged because his conjugal property is being stolen, or because Caspasian is using his model of a Boullee lighthouse as an enlarged surrogate phallus.
‘The fact that his two image obsessions somewhat mirror each other in form (as the repeated form in Boullee’s sketches is a dome quite reminiscent of Kracklite’s bloated belly) marries his creative life and impending death and solidifies the reality that it is likely Kracklite will go the way of Boullee and die without many major constructions to carry his image forward into the future.’ — Caitlin Mae Verite
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Video made by Luca Cosmi and Francesco Dall’O ‘as part of the seminar “communicating architecture and design” 2014
3D modeling process of the Newton’s Cenotaph by Étienne-Louis Boullée using Sketchup.
This Building designed by the architect (Étienne-Louis Boullée) as a proposal for a cenotaph for the English scientist Isaac Newton. The building itself was a 150m (500ft) tall sphere encompassed by two large barriers circled by hundreds of cypress trees. Though the structure was never built, its design was engraved and circulated widely in professional circles. This is my final project done in the workshop (Unbuilt Realities) conducted by Karim Mousa from MIR Studio.
Lux in Tenebris is a speculative exploration of the work of Boullée, extrapolated from faded etchings into a fully digital imagined reality.
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‘Étienne-Louis Boullée, (born February 12, 1728, Paris, France—died February 6, 1799, Paris), French visionary architect, theorist, and teacher.
‘Boullée wanted originally to be a painter, but, following the wishes of his father, he turned to architecture. He studied with J.-F. Blondel and Germain Boffrand and with J.-L. Legeay and had opened his own studio by the age of 19. He designed several Parisian city mansions in the 1760s and ’70s, notably the Hôtel de Brunoy (1774–79). Despite the innovative Neoclassicism of his executed works, Boullée achieved a truly lasting influence as a teacher and theorist.
‘Boullée’s emphasis on the psychology of the viewer is a principal theme of his Architecture, essai sur l’art, not published until the 20th century. He has been criticized as a megalomaniac, because of his tendency toward grandiose proposals, but these should be regarded simply as visionary schemes rather than as practical projects. In his desire to create a unique, original architecture appropriate to an ideal new social order, Boullée anticipated similar concerns in 20th-century architecture.’ — Encyclopedia Britannica
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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Wait, you’re going to have your own podcast? What a fantastic idea! Whoa. Really looking forward to that, need I even say. ** Dominik, Hi!!! It’s always so strange to remember something I did as an adult, say read with Paul Monette, and realise the person I’m talking with was just a little kid at the time, but I have a kind of blind spot about age difference with people I know, I guess because I feel like I’ve always been basically the same person whatever age I’ve been? I don’t know if that’s good or bad or maybe neither. Yes, I think Placebo is especially huge in France. Certainly compared to their popularity in the US. It’s interesting. How in the world does Stephen King write so many books? It’s boggling. He must get good ideas at a rapid fire pace, and I guess his prose isn’t something he hugely labors over, or not based on the few books of his that I’ve read. Given I’m a prose writing inch worm, my love happily accepts the Tina-like help your love offers. Love offering a very solid form of love akin to the scat escort I found yesterday who asserts that he takes anti-diarrheal drugs and eats lots of dark chocolate so his shit will stick to his clients’ teeth, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Happy you were intrigued, Ben. Right, those images of that flat complex were renderings. What does ‘state of the art cinema’ mean, I wonder? Well, I suppose it’s obvious, never mind. I hope it’s utopian too and has an IMAX theater that shows nothing but experimental films. Fat chance, or, rather, obsese chance. ** Steve Erickson, Thanks for the download link. Well, slightly better is better than not, I guess, but, yeah, time for improvement rapidly, I hope. Everyone, Here’s Mr. Erickson: ‘For Gay City News, I reviewed David France’s COVID documentary HOW TO SURVIVE A PANDEMIC’ here. ** Okay. Today my blog post chooses to concentrate on Etienne-Louis Boullée’s visionary and almost always unrealizeable architectural notions, and I hope you enjoy it. See you tomorrow.
‘Jeanne Liotta’s work follows her enthusiasms, whether the result is a series of short films titled “Science’s Ten Most Beautiful Experiments,” a collaged video of nighttime sky footage (2007’s “Observando el Cielo”), or Kodachrome footage of a lunar eclipse (2005’s “Eclipse,” an inclusion in the Whitney Biennial). She notes that science and astronomy have sparked much of her work over the last 10 years, but a casual glance at her filmography reveals a zeal for teasing out vast ideas from anything that catches her eye, always taking pains to approach the materials, whether they be archival footage or a poem, with care. She says, “I think about how much to touch something or how little to touch it. All the time. How much do you intervene with something that already exists? … That just became really heavy, I realize, for a Saturday morning! This is something I think about a lot, and in editing, you’re completely manipulating relationships, so it’s a big responsibility. Sometimes when I work with not just poetry but let’s say, found images, archival images, I think about that same level of, ethics is maybe the way to talk about it. It had its own life before I ever saw it, so let me try to meet it somewhere and not handle it too much.”
‘Respect for one’s materials is one of those bromides artists toss off frequently, but the effect of Liotta’s ethics rings clearly, especially in her collaborations. “Dark Enough,” a 2011 film made with poet Lisa Gill, pulls off an integration of text and image rare in such collaborations. Instead of adding the text in postproduction, a technique common in film-poetry collaborations, Liotta manipulated the words, treating them as another layer in the flickering, black-and-white fuzz of the film: “I was a little nervous about these words from someone else that I was going to have my way with. So we did correspond, but I started my working method – I have a title board, like an actual sign board with letters that you put in, and I actually reconstructed all of the poems from the book that I like. I did the stanzas on the title board and made rubbings, like graphite and paper. It was really interesting for me to actually reconstruct the words and handle the letters and think about the language as a material – we say that all the time; I hear poets talk about that all the time, but I was literally making it into a mechanical term! I had rubbings and I had paper with text on it, and I refilmed that. I felt like I needed to start with the material aspect and then slowly find a way to bring it into the moving image.” The result is an ephemeral texture with a little frisson of personal warmth – the time-consuming process is somehow palpable in the finished piece.
‘Mounting a career retrospective, as Liotta recently has, makes a great opportunity to highlight the through lines in an artist’s body of work. While science has a central place in Liotta’s constellation of interests, it’s clear that an enthusiasm for the underlying work of scientific thought is the real spark: “Working with film has something of a scientific base in and of itself – you have that chemical aspect, you’ve got the optical aspect, so you’re really dealing with perception, ultimately, which I could call science, in a way; it’s some science and philosophy. I use the term ‘natural philosophy’ a lot because that’s what we used to call it before we had this term ‘science.’ It was everyone’s job – it was like citizen science. Each person has the responsibility or the opportunity as a human being to discover what their world is made of and what they think about it, to observe and take notes and reflect upon – that’s our job as human beings somehow, that’s what I feel like I’m doing when I make things. It’s just my thinking.”
‘Having taken a circuitous path to art – studying theatre at NYU, playing in a band, and falling in with the kind of bohemian types known so well to Austin – shows in Liotta’s conversational arabesques, in which possibility caroms about so infectiously it’s difficult not to drop the phone and get to work on a project. “I like to go back to the ancients all the time, myself,” she says. “I use quotations from Lucretius, who’s one of my main guys. But I feel like part of the reason to do that is to kind of remember that there were other trajectories of thought and knowledge that could’ve taken place, but we had to get to the Enlightenment. … Not that I’m against the Enlightenment! But things get lost along the way. It’s true in every type of art and science form. Certain kinds of advancements get made – in film, we always say, ‘Oh, once they had the synced sound down and we went down the road of the talkies, so much was lost, and what would cinema have developed into otherwise?'”
‘This notion provides a handy field guide for Liotta’s own work: What would an eclipse look like if light couldn’t bend? What would an aria transforming into a woman look like? If there’s any luck, one of those divergent realities must house a karaoke bar where Liotta’s “Sweet Dreams” is cued up and waiting for an intrepid singer. “One time I was in Pompeii and I was following along with a tour guide and talking about the pre-Renaissance mosaics, and he was saying, ‘Yes, the Renaissance came along and then all of a sudden everything was about perspective.’ We have this idea that perspective was reality, and we left behind – these mosaics just stopped there. What could have happened if that hadn’t developed? And I thought, ‘Oh my god – I had never thought of it.'”‘ — Sarah Smith
“In This Immense Space hidden Things Appear Before Us”, 2018
Forties 58, Jeanne Liotta
_____ Interview
Mark Alice Durant – One really learns by following one’s curiosities and enthusiasms, and in that sense your approach to knowledge and culture is enthusiastic, it’s obvious in how you talk about things but that quality also in your work. I am also unpedigreed in a certain sense and am led by enthusiasms. One can be self-conscious about that, especially in academic or professional contexts, and there is the danger of dilettante-ism. But to follow one’s enthusiasms and curiosities allows one to be more embracing and less critical, so that collage nature of learning can be very fruitful.
Jeanne Liotta – It’s not like the world is a certain way – it’s a construction of many parts and we are participating in that and it makes perfect sense to be in a process of discovery all the time. Also knowledge is not on some progressive trajectory – awareness zigzags all over the place, people forget, cultures forget. Arabic culture had so much wisdom about mathematics and astronomy while the Europeans were digging around in the mud throwing rocks at each other. Discovery is happening all the time and it can be personal. If I discover something for myself – it still feels like an authentic discovery. I remember following instructions in an astronomy book to look up at the Big Dipper and follow a star pattern until you see a faint glow called Sidus Ludoviciana or ‘Ludwig’s Star’. But when I ‘discovered’ that particular star for myself, I dropped my binoculars on the ground from the shock to my system. That I could follow these instructions and see something there and know that I was seeing basically in the same manner as that guy 300 years ago.
MAD – Have you ever had that happen with art?
JL – Yes.
MAD – I ask because your story reminded me of when I saw the Fra Angelico frescoes for the first time in Florence. Each one is painted inside a single small cell where a monk would sleep and pray. The monastery is now a museum of course and you walk down these non-descript hallways but when you bend down to step inside one of the cells you are confronted with this image – the scale is so human, the colors seeped into the wall like dyed skin and I was overwhelmed by the intimate beauty of it, the idea that this image was painted for individual contemplation. Here I was some white trash guy from Boston at the end of the 20th c. shuddering in front of a 600-year-old Italian painting. The mysterious power of recognition across the centuries, shaking me to my core. Is that power in the painting, or is it in me? How does such power get activated?
JL – That image is a tool. It’s not just art, it’s beyond art because its made for use. Like Indian yantras those abstract design patterns, which help in meditation. The word yantra in Sanskrit means ‘machine’, it’s a machine to help you do something. It is ancient knowledge that an image can be a mechanism to help you move, to transform. Speaking of religious paintings I felt like that when I went to see the Isenheim Altar piece by Grunewald. Originally commissioned for a convent where victims of the plague were being tended. So it’s a painting of Jesus who is supposed to have suffered more than any human, yet he goes willingly toward his suffering. So you have to show images to help people endure their own suffering, and its got to be worse than what they are going through. Grunewald’s Jesus is disgusting, he is green, almost melting off the cross, and his mother stands by utterly stricken, white as a sheet. I have never seen anything so abject in religious painting. Originally it was a polyptych so various panels could be opened and closed depending on the message or desired effect, again like a machine with particular functions. On the other side is the painted Resurrection, and equally stunning, the figure of Christ rising through this diaphanous yellow mist. It’s as crazy as a Dali painting. And it struck me that these images are like medicine.
MAD – I am thinking about all those insipid portraits of Christ that hang in middle class American homes in which Christ looks like a 1970s soccer coach or soft rock guy, like Loggins and Messina or a member of the Eagles. That Christ did not need to look like he suffered because pictures like that adorned comfortable homes, so actually looking at his suffering would be ‘icky’ or impolite somehow.
JL – The one I had hanging in my room was the most like ‘Loggins and Messina’ you can imagine, all beiges and browns, the curling hair and soft light…. And you’ll appreciate this, there was a tiny speck of light in his eye and my mother who was a mystical Irish catholic said – ‘See that light? It is in the shape of the Eucharist in the chalice” I will never forget that.
MAD – Did you see it?
JL – I can see it now. And I wondered was it a miracle or was it just something the artist put there, or was it just like people who see Jesus in a tortilla, just a meeting of random shape and projection. But you don’t have to believe it’s true to have the experience.
MAD – Did you study art in college?
JL – No, I went to NYU, studied theater, played in a band, working as a waitress and living in a basement apartment in the east village, everyone lived in basement apartments. I just wanted to be a bohemian, to live a bohemian life. I don’t think I recognized it at the time but that exactly what I was doing. But it was the punk ethos of ‘No Masterpieces’, everyone was doing everything, artists were in bands, the musicians were actors…. it was a super fluid time. We would put on shows, make projections for backdrops, play the music. I worked with a variety of collaborative groups like Gargoyle Mechanique and the Alchemical Theater Company. My art school education started with being an artist’s model, I had a child at a young age and I was wandering around trying to figure out what I was doing or going to do with my life and I started modeling at Cooper Union. That was the first time I ever stepped foot in an art school. And its almost like church, you are sitting there, still. Dealing with duration, listening to artists impart their knowledge. As a model I got so into the art of presentation and the tradition of the artists model I would go home and practice! I’d check out Rodin books from the library and in front of my mirror at home I would try to recreate the poses and gestures in his sculptures and drawings. It was the best job.
MAD – How about film – when did you become involved in film?
JL – I was always into photography, since high school. When I was working with Gargoyle Mechanique I was doing slide backdrops, bleaching and altering the images, thinking about sequencing. Someone bought a Super 8 camera and we used that to make short films. One involved me spinning around in a white dress on a black background. And we did this piece with that film looping through a projector that someone carried through a labyrinth leading the audience to a place where I was actually there spinning. Things like this really got me to thinking about film, performance, structure, and presentation. But I didn’t make my first film until I was 27.
MAD – I wanted to talk to you a little about your film Observando Del Cielo. In talking about this film you described the earth as your tripod. I really like that idea and puts me in the mind of comparing wondrous technologies like the Hubble telescope and the more humble efforts of individual artists – who in some ways are trying to discover and speak about the infinite just with way more limited resources. I generally don’t like the ‘Big Questions’ in art. I prefer specificity, but in your images of the heavens there is a real human quality. There is specificity in the attempt to represent something beyond our comprehension. Your mystery never veers into vagueness or pretense.
JL – I spent 10 years filming and assembling very subjective and fragmentary footage of the skies, and on days I was full of doubt, I would ask myself why I was doing such a foolish and fanciful thing when NASA does it so much better. But that’s our job, not only as artists, but also as humans to gaze up at the stars and contemplate. I don’t like the word ‘wonder’ because it implies an end to itself which seems simplistic, childlike and unconnected to the search for and creation of knowledge. And if you wanted to make images of that you don’t need much – you don’t need the Hubble, all you need is a Bolex, a pinhole camera. But the whole idea of visualization in science is crucial. In a way we are moving beyond seeing faraway objects. We are trying to visualize data and there is an interpretive process there. Scientist’s imaginations and theoretical guesses are at play in imaging the universe, and I love that we are all in this imaginative world together, trying to see what it is.
There is imagery in my film of the starry heavens swirling by just moments of screen time but to capture that footage I had to sit on the side of a mountain for the entire night and I have to say that I had some pretty dark thoughts while I was trying to grasp the enormity of it and it was scary. Insignificance is not the right word, I felt utterly unprotected and joyful simultaneously. Knowing you are unprotected is terrifying and liberating, I wasn’t looking for protection, I was just trying to recognize my being in the middle of all this. I thought to myself ‘This is it, I am alive under the forces’. It ain’t about beauty – it is the sublime, terror, and awe. It’s not like I am against beauty, it is everywhere and can appear at any moment. Ironically, someone once came up to me after a screening of Observando and asked me how could I make such a beautiful thing in such a terrible world.
MAD – Someone asked you that! How rude! Well that should be title of this interview. But really that is so awful and pretentious, and it’s the wrong question.
JL – Yes but it is something to grapple with right?
MAD – I don’t know, That you are ethically suspect because you are not taking on the ‘real’ issues of the world’? Who determines that?
JL – Yes but what my answer was that I was taking on the issues of the world, that is exactly what I thought I was doing. I was really trying to see what is this place that I live in? How does it work? That is initially why I started making that film. Was it possible to make a film like that? We are on these planets spinning in space and it sounds so silly to say it but it’s crazy that that is our reality. We don’t feel it but it can be seen through the Kino eye – the camera helps us see what the eye cannot. I believe in art, I think artists are helping to run the engine of consciousness. So in that sense the Constructivists were right, making art is a kind of labor, an activity that is helping to transform the world. At the very least we get to leave a mark, some evidence of what it was like to live in our time.
________________ 12 of Jeanne Liotta’s 38 films
_______________ Land of Enchantment (1994) ‘New Mexico camera roll, a Kodachrome home movie, with compass.’— JL
______________ What Makes Day and Night (1998) ‘This 1940’s artifact is coupled with music by Nino Rota to expose the existential skeleton in the closet: our perilous journey on the planet Earth. A readymade film with the barest of interventions.’— JL
_______________ Muktikara (1999) ‘From the Sanskrit, ‘gentle gazing brings liberation’, the title is also the name of the particular body of water which is the image-subject of the film. Landscape as ‘inscape’, not inertly present but beckoning an active perception; a seeing and a seeing into. “… as if my eye were still growing…”‘ — The Film-makers Cooperative
____________ Loretta (2003) ‘For film is a projected light from which its inhabitants can never truly escape. In Jeanne Liotta‘s experimental short film Loretta, the form of a female figure is literally burned into the film and projected with a searing intensity as bright as the sun. Is the woman reaching out to grab our attention? Or are we just voyeurs peeping in as she luxuriates in her own existence?
‘Everything about this four-minute short film is burning with intensity, from the searing yellow flickering that never stops long enough for us to get our bearings to the over-the-top dramatic score arranged by Carlo Altomare.
‘Produced in 16mm, Loretta still works very well watching it on video, although one can imagine a film projection would truly create the sense of projected celluloid going haywire, careening through the projector like a rocketship sucked through a wormhole. But, even watching on a computer monitor, the chaotic, rushing stream of images has a furious energy that’s immensely invigorating.’ — Underground Film Journal
_______________ One Day This May No Longer Exist (2005) ‘Live performance with 2 16mm film projectors and colored filters by artist Jeanne Liotta set to sound by Sun City Girls , San Francisco 2005’.
Intro
______________ Observando El Cielo (2007) ‘Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth. This work is neither a metaphor nor a symbol, but is feeling towards a fact in the mist of perception, which time flows through. Natural VLF radio recordings of the magnetosphere in action allow the universe to speak for itself. The Sublime is Now. Amor Fati!’— Lightcone
Excerpt
__________ Sutro (2009) ‘Animated glitch portrait of the eponymous television tower on the hill, guardian of fog and electronic signals in that earthshaking city by the Bay…’— JL
______________ Crosswalk (2010) ‘”Nuyo-realism” from the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Crosswalk is a place-portrait in sound and image that’s shot at the stylistic intersection of home movie and cinema verité. Filmed on consecutive Good Fridays, the short work highlights the hybrid collage of peoples, cultures, and performances that characterizes daily life in the LES.’— Wexner Center
_______________ Dark Enough (2011) ‘A virtual proscenium stage for the poetry to play itself upon. Text-as-text, text-as-image, avoiding poetic illustration by way of poetic illustration. Sound composed for 60 cycle hum and Tibetan bell.’ — Counterpath
______________ Counterintuitive Proposition for a Black Hole (2012) ‘In Counterintuitive Proposition for a Black Hole, a magnifying glass is suspended inside the beam of the projeciton, creating a shadow in the filmed image of the night sky. As of this moment astrophyscists have yet to actaully *see* a black hole, an infintely dense space that is inherently invisible to us since light is trapped and prevented from escaping. The visualisations they have created are based on observed behaviors of other celestial bodies and gravitational forces in the vicinity.’— JL
Excerpt
____________ Property (2013) ‘A few simple techniques of the cinema–a direct quotation, a framed location, an actress in costume, a few cuts to the quick–conspire in a compact couple of minutes to produce an image replete with historical and geographic visibility, to wit: an implied and uncontainable expanse of a landscape bought, sold and inhabited. An anti-landscape film and a one-two punch.’— Light Cone
____________ Affect Theory (2013) ‘2 16mm science education films in planet -and-satellite positions on the screen, with sound collage of Cole Porter variations. A live double projection event.’— JL
p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Oh, right … Everyone, If you’d like a little more of yesterday’s host Nick Brook and his subject Beckford plus a dollop of _Black_Acrylic, here’s a 2010 Yuck ‘n Yum article about Beckford and ‘Vathek’ that the aforementioned power duo co-authored. Nick was so talented and such an interesting guy. I often wonder what became of him. I’ve found no signs anywhere. Wow, your own flat. That place looks cheerful, Excellent news, man. When would you move? ** David Ehrenstein, Thanks on Nick’s behalf! ** Dominik, Hi!!! I knew Paul Monette a little. We were both LA queer writers and did a lot of bumping into another and reading together at events on a few occasions. A very lovely guy. Ha ha. Right, there are posters for the new Placebo album all over the metro here. I haven’t heard the album yet, but, based on the poster photo, he seems to have gotten thin again and grown a moustache. Love, G. ** Misanthrope, Twenty years ago? Wow. Hijinks are an excellent way to propel a narrative forward without resorting to boring marked-out plot devices. Do whatever it takes to make it the best thing you’ve ever written. That’s the only way to write anything worthy. Me thinks. I’m going to try to cajole Yury into cutting my mane today. ** Mieze, Mieze! Wonderfulness incarnate to see you! Hm, and why can’t you see this place hardly at all anymore? God knows this current incarnation of the blog has technical weirdnesses galore that always surprise me. Anyway, I hope you’re doing most splendidly, and I send you a love supreme! ** Ryan / angusteak, Yuck, glad you’re all vacuumed out. Thanks for the share of your Mishima-derived music. I’ll swallow it the minute I get an actual minute. Or several. Mm, I read a bunch of Mishima when I was younger. I was pretty into most of it. I haven’t thought much about him in recent times. I think your reading on his politics <-> art makes a lot of sense. I don’t think I ever mentally delved into that question at any depth. I think I read his stuff not thinking about him personally much at all. I tend to just read things without any thought of the person who wrote it or what their lives or politics, etc. involve. I’m not really so into the cult of personality unless it’s an artist whose art involves smashing their person or persona in your face. And I don’t find those kinds of artists very interesting. Or at least when it comes to books. Even with Burroughs, I tried not to think about his weirdo old dude schtick when I was reading him. In music it can be fun sometimes. Anyway, very interesting Mishima thoughts and tidbits, thanks, man. They make me want to think about him. French shows! Whoa! Yes, let me know if/when those happen I’ll be there, at least the Paris show, whatever it takes. ** Bill, Hi. The Xenakis show was frustratingly small, if that helps. There were a number of performances of his works, which I was very excited about, but they all sold out instantly, and I was bereft. ‘Nancy’: interesting and news. I’ll, you know, see of I can hook myself up. Thanks, buddy. ** Rafe, Hey. Cool, yeah, Nick did a great job. Right? About Bernstein/Andrews? They should organise a kind of old school Language Poetry Lollapalooza type traveling festival. It might get their books in the charts. Oh, wow, your drawings are really fantastic! I’m going to return to them post-p.s. and get lengthier looks. Very, very nice! Thank you so very much! Everyone, Rafe shared some really terrific drawings of his yesterday that could’ve cozied up in the weekends XXX post, and you can check them out one by one. Here, here, here, here, and here. I especially love the second to last one for some reason. Have a super incredible day! ** Sypha, I, of course, wondered if you’d read ‘Vathek’ and assumed you must’ve. I’ve actually read ‘The Monk’, but the rest are mysteries to me. Thanks, James. ** Right. Today I use the blog to cover the work of yet another very strong and daring filmmaker whom I guessing that many of you are not familiar with. The hope is that you’ll investigate her work and get something useful out of it. But that and the rest is entirely up to you. See you tomorrow.
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