Critical Line

A collaborative journal/project rethinking expanded contemporary art and exhibition; a sketchbook of ideas and practice. Please add, contribute, and collaborate.
On the occasion of Hammer’s eighth participation in the Berlin International Film Festival, we are pleased to present the first ever-solo show of her work, with a focus on the 1970s. With film retrospectives at New York’s MoMA (2010) and the Tate Modern, London, (2012) many are now recalling the artist, who was born in Hollywood in 1939, as a pioneer of queer cinema who made decisive contributions to feminism and gay liberation as well as avant-garde cinema and performance art. Barbara Hammer’s first solo gallery show:KOW Gallery, BerlinFebruary at 18:00 - 11 March at 21:00

On the occasion of Hammer’s eighth participation in the Berlin International Film Festival, we are pleased to present the first ever-solo show of her work, with a focus on the 1970s. With film retrospectives at New York’s MoMA (2010) and the Tate Modern, London, (2012) many are now recalling the artist, who was born in Hollywood in 1939, as a pioneer of queer cinema who made decisive contributions to feminism and gay liberation as well as avant-garde cinema and performance art. 

Barbara Hammer’s first solo gallery show:
KOW Gallery, Berlin
February at 18:00 - 11 March at 21:00

Man at the Crossroads, Diego Rivera: Rivera’s mural for Rockefeller Center was destroyed and removed by Nelson Rockefeller, who didn’t like the painting’s inclusion of things like women drinking alcohol and images of Trotsky and Lenin. As soon as Rivera was paid, Rockefeller had the work covered, then demolished.

—Critical Line is compiling a series of accounts, images, and descriptions of work that has been broken/lost/destroyed/never realised, exploring art of absence. Please spread the word and submit.

Great showcase today over at DC’s Galerie Dennis Cooper presents Piet Zwart’s Typotechture Zwart always referred to himself being a ‘typotekt’, a contraction of the words typographer and architect, as he built pages with type. The main proponents of Zwart’s distinct style were strong diagonals, primary colours, use of scale, varying typefaces, and careful asymmetry, rejecting the conventional symmetry around a fixed central axis. DC’s

Great showcase today over at DC’s Galerie Dennis Cooper presents Piet Zwart’s Typotechture

Zwart always referred to himself being a ‘typotekt’, a contraction of the words typographer and architect, as he built pages with type. The main proponents of Zwart’s distinct style were strong diagonals, primary colours, use of scale, varying typefaces, and careful asymmetry, rejecting the conventional symmetry around a fixed central axis.

DC’s

Thomas Hirschhorn on what it means to be an artist.

John Baldessari “I will not make any more boring art” 

John Baldessari
“I will not make any more boring art” 

The World Won’t Listen features people in Turkey, Colombia, and Indonesia performing karaoke versions of Smiths songs.

A couple years back this piece was everywhere I went and combined two of my favourites: the Smiths and karaoke (okay, so I hate karaoke)… but if you are going to be stalked by a piece of art I’d still recommend something by Phil Collins, no?

Science explains things which have been defined and formalised in advance and which subsequently conform to these explanations, that’s all that ‘objectivity’ is.

—Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death

Barbara Hammer on Maya Deren’s sink (around 2:03)

Salinger's kimode

…and J.D. Salinger’s toilet was on sale last autumn on ebay

hmmm, someone could assemble their own auteur loo…

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

—

TRANSLATION OF JEALOUSY 
(RECORDED EXCERPT)

ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET

Now the shadow of the southwest column— at the corner of the veranda on the bedroom side— falls across the garden. The sun, still low in the eastern sky, rakes the valley from the side. The rows of banana trees, growing at an angle to the direction of the valley, are everywhere quite distinct in this light.

From the bottom to the upper edge of the highest sectors, on the hillside facing the one the house is built on, it is relatively easy to count the trees; particularly opposite the house, thanks to the recent plantings of the patches located in this area.

The valley has been cleared over the greater part of its width here: there remains, at present, nothing but a border of brush (some thirty yards across at the top of the plateau) which joins the valley by a knoll with neither crest nor rocky fall.

Read more

 

—translated by Richard Howard

Reprinted with permission from Grove Press. 
© Section 23, Aspen Magazine, No. 5 +6

Source: ubuweb

(Images of Irwin’s column pictured in better times)

Robert Irwin’s acrylic columns bend light, condensing a room’s presence while simultaneously disappearing into their surroundings. Galleries tended to display the columns as revered objects, separated behind velvet ropes and such. At the exhibition in San Diego, Irwin stipulated that any sort of separation device not be installed in order for the object to exert its own presence/absence… which it did, as someone walked into it and broke it. 

Robert Irwin
Untitled, 1969-70
Cast Acrylic Column 
144 x 8 1/2 3 1/2in

Critical Line is compiling a series of accounts, images, and descriptions of work that has been broken/lost/destroyed/never realised, exploring art of absence. Please spread the word and submit.

The Stone Breakers, Gustav Courbet: This French painting was created around 1850 and first exhibited at the Paris Salon. It was destroyed in World War II when Allied forces bombed a transport vehicle carrying paintings stored at K-nigstein Fortress.

—Critical Line is compiling a series of accounts, images, and descriptions of work that has been broken/lost/destroyed/never realised, exploring art of absence. Please spread the word and submit.

“For those who are visual minded I will say: there seems to be a fine ship at anchor. Fear is the anchor, convention is the chain, ghosts stalk the decks, the sails are filled with Pride and the ship does now move.”

Agnes Martin, Writings

photo by Peter Moore

Martin in the early 60s, photo: Peter Moore

en tarde-garde

The Battle of Anghiari, Leonardo da Vinci: This painting by Leonardo da Vinci dates to 1505 and was abandoned by the master when technical difficulties arose with the paint. It’s rumored to still exist beneath frescoes in a hall in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio.

—Critical Line is compiling a series of accounts, images, and descriptions of work that has been broken/lost/destroyed/never realised, exploring art of absence. Please spread the word and submit.

Examined Lives from Socrates to Nietzsche: Lives of the Philosophers, Warts and All

“For Friedrich Nietzsche, the answer was obvious: to test a philosophy, find out if you can live by it. This is “the only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something,” he wrote in 1874. It’s also the form of critique that is generally overlooked in the philosophy faculties of universities. Nietzsche therefore dismissed the professional discipline as irrelevant, a “critique of words by means of other words,” and devoted himself to pursuing an idiosyncratic philosophical quest outside the academy.”

Review at New York Times