January 2009

Josef’s Art

From Josef von Sternberg’s autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry: All reference books seem to agree that art requires uncommon skill, though this too is open to debate, as skill often reveals shallow content. Nowhere is it stated that art, might perhaps, be a hygienic search for obscure values, or a cultural memorandum, or an [...]

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No Funes

Architect Nadim Karam: Is memory a vacated dilemma?  We’re in a state of memory zero.  We erase memories almost as quickly as we experience them to be able to keep up with the spirit of the age. From Nadim Karam & Atelier Hapsitus, Voyage, 2000.

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The Spirit World by Conor Stechschulte

I keep coming back to this comic, a hand-printed work that grows in the mind long after you’ve read it.  All it is is a few drawings of trees with a surprise between.  But the pace and the point-of-view recall Tarkovsky or Tarr.  A feat, considering comics have very little to say over how fast [...]

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Dousei Jidai notes

I have a long essay about KAMIMURA Kazuo’s Dousei Jidai in TCJ #295.  It’s a sprawling, messy romance from the early 70s about two youths who move to Tokyo to chase their dreams. And shack up.  For 2000 pages. It if sounds like Red-Colored Elegy, you’re right.  The title means “The Age of Cohabitation,” more [...]

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Cartoon Workshop/Pig Tales by Paper Rad

Halfway through Cartoon Workshop, itself half of this Paper Rad salvo, the California Raisins appear.  Without singing, they bask in their fame, none more than the giant one made of smaller Raisins, like a fruit-aisle Voltron.  Then we go back to the story, which pits Dr. Trustwell against a morphing Spanish Peacock.  In other words, [...]

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Junktopia by Chris Marker

  If Marker’s Zone is the Web, then there’s this memory floating there, about a couple of days on a beach in San Francisco.  Some sculptures angle at the lens and it’s M. in miniature, playful, best seen not said. I don’t know if the Zone accounts for the erosions of the web– flash video, [...]

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Pictograms by Warja Lavater

In Platonic plates of dots and squiggles, Warja Lavater played mind games.  She took to perception, essence, and souls, to pick just three of her 60 Pictograms’ titles.  All pen and ink, the prints make a fine book, a curious mind’s pocket epics. Robert Kushner, in the April 1997 Art in America, calls her style [...]

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