Shhh... [低調美誌]

testo

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 11:02:00 +0000

speaking of mirroring image

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:01:00 +0000

was a good find.
took me time to realise its source.

{Notes} Munévar, Gonzalo. Evolution and the Naked Truth

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 23:55:00 +0000

Evolution and the Naked Truth

Munévar, Gonzalo. Evolution and the Naked Truth: A Darwinian approach to philosophy. Vermont, USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1998.

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Chapter 1. Evolution and the Naked Truth. 3-22.
1.why evolutionary considerations lead to a complete relativism (perceptual, intellectual, scientific).
2.Defend this evolutionary relativism from standard and new objections advanced b realists.
3.An evolutionary theory of relative truth

3>> ... an entrenched realism would lead us to assume that either the truth of the matter has not yet been discovered in those areas in question, or else that there is no truth of the matter.
Realist would think that those areas where he makes relativist concessions are somehow not as worthy, epistemologically speaking, as those areas where knowledge is really possible.

Kuhn (1970) and Feyerabend (1975)
→ Science itself is subject to the vagueness of social relativism.
... there is no truth of the matter in any empirical investigation, but I [Munévar] suspect that most realists who can recognise the social relativisation of natural science would simply fall back on the position that the truth of the matter has not been found yet.
All the realist needs is the belief that the truth of the matter indeed exists.
→ 'metaphysical realism' A truth in principle impossible

4>> ... to come to know the naked truth, or rather, to come to know the way things really are (in epistemology: to come to know the structure of the world). It is supposed that humans will fall short because their senses are prone to distortion and their intellects to prejudices [...] there is no such thing as knowing the ways things really are. Absolute knowledge is a mistake even as an ideal.

Popper and others have thought that evolutionary theory would in some way provide a warrant fr realism (an evolutionary variation of 'science is successful because it approximates the truth'). But as we will see, careful attention to the implications of evolution will turn the realist diction on its head.

5>> Natural History and Knowledge
the capacity to know and to organise socially in order to know, may have some biological basis.
→ the sort of empirical knowledge possessed by organisms is largely the result of the interaction between the biology of the organisms and their environment.
{see example of a bird p.5} → perhaps bowerbirds too, etc. yea yea?
interaction (social/environmental) → knowledge

1.perception has a biological basis;
2.intelligence arises out of perception and other biological structures;
3.science is a social product of intelligence.
→ perception, intelligence and science

6>> no matter how successful an interaction with the environment is, e.g. a perception, that there could be an alternative interaction which is as successful...

7>> if two interactions are equally successful, i.e., 'good,' it is difficult to say that one is superior to the other. It would be arbitrary to say that one should be preferred to all others.

++ Munévar, G. Radical Knowledge: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature and Limits of Science. Indianapolis: Hackett. 1981. Chap.3 for frame of reference
Frame of reference/perceptual mechanisms
It would be arbitrary to say of any one frame of reference that the perceptions or views of the world that originate within it correspond to reality, or tell us the way things really are. For t is clear that the others would be just as deserving the honour.

One perception, or point of view, can be said to 'correspond' to the way things really are, i.e.., to be the true representations.
Special theory of relativity: when a property, e.g., mass or length, can be measured only relative to a frame of reference, and when there is no preferred frame of reference, there is no 'naked' instance of that property – this in case, there is no absolute mass or length.
→ there's no absolute reality,
→ no such thing as 'the way things really are,'
→ 'no structure of the universe,' no naked truth.

Heuristic
Dictionary of Philosophy, Penguin. 276.
1.adj. pertaining to an experimental, trial-and-error kind of procedure.
2.n. the art of discovery.

8>> Intelligence and Scientific Relativism
close connection between intelligence and the complexity of the central nervous system
its (intelligence's) flexibility and its capacity for indirect action.
→ Munévar, 1981: 40-44. Radical Knowledge...
→ Piaget: thanks to intelligence an organism is scope of interaction with the world goes beyond immediate and momentary contacts. (1950: The Psychology of Intelligence. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.)
{example of vision of a bird p.8}
Understanding intelligence + social cooperation = invent science

9>> when we discussed intelligence, we realised that the increase in the complexity of the central nervous system offered an increase in the variety of certain kinds of response, while the actual development of that system was clearly the result of a series of evolutionary compromises.
In the case of science, social structure may bring about an even greater variety and flexibility of response. In science, thus, the many possible superpositions of social upon natural histories have a multiplicity of pats available to them.
→ no matter how good a 'conceptual frame of reference (i.e., the conceptual potentialities of a genotype) is, there could be others just as good. And as in the case of perception, it would be arbitrary to prefer one to those others.

9>> Scientific Convergence?
Even if we grant that natural history may have produced different brains, and thus different modes of thought, intellectual convergence should still be expected with the growth of science.
→ science (tries to) deals with all-pervasive features of the universe.
The more a science advances, the more similar to other advanced sciences it should become.
{examples of convergence: camera eyes of humans and squids, etc.}
See: Lorenz, K. Studies in Animal Behaviour. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971.
→ p.10 & p.21 notes 4. refer to arguments, etc.

Arbitrary.
Can we not be?
Surly we can, but it can't establish any common grounds.

11>> Objections to Relativism
1.Relativism is contradictory.
Simple-minded relativism: truth is relative to each observer. → this would permit one observer to hold that A is true while another holds that not A is true.
In evolutionary relativism we do not hold that A and not A are true together, for A is held in one frame of reference and not A in another.
2.Plato's first argument (in the Theœtetus):
Progagoras held that all points of view were equally valid. → the absolutist point of view would be valid as well. But the absolutist point of view claims that relativism is wrong. → Plato concludes, relativism is incoherent. → it does not apply to evolutionary relativism, since I [Munévar] do not claim that all frames of reference are equally valid, but only that some may be.
3.Relativism entails that the universe would not exist without observers...
The universe must be independent of any frames of reference. If it were not, then it would not come into existence until it could be described within the point of view of some observer or other.
12>> The frames of reference in question need not be actual frames. Relativism requires only potential frames of reference → the objection does not apply.
4.Evolutionary relativism itself is expressed within a frame of reference, is it not? But why should that frame of reference be preferred to all others? Is the thesis of evolutionary relativism absolutely true or not? If it is, my position turns out to be absolutist at the meta-level. If not, it will then be either false or else 'true' only in some subjective or relativistic way. ... hmmm.... An alternative to a standard is dismissed because it does not conform to that standard.

12>> Sophisticated Realism
'there are real particulars (objects, events, processes, etc.) which are mind-independent,' and 'there is no ontologically given, categorically ready-made world.'

15>> Relative truth
++ In the hypothetical comparisons between frames of reference, when two frames led to similar performance, it was found arbitrary to make of either one a preferred or absolute frame. This indicates that the notion of performance can be fruitfully tied to the notion of understanding, particularly to that of scientific understanding (Manévar, 1981, Chp.4)

Theory by means of an illustration
perception → true representations
see example p.15: Apple

16>> other thory of truth
A view-point was successful either because it was true or because it approached truth.

17>> The relative truth (or seeming absolute truth) of a viewpoint depends on its success, not the other way around. The naturalist's task is to explain why a 'picture'- making activity appears satisfactory.
Evolutionary thinking is the best I can do within the bounds of my conceptual equipment, and I suspect that it has the highest potential for performance with respect to a great number of areas of experience, particularly those that have to do with living things and their history.

20>> Conclusion:
Plato's second objection to Protagoras: if truth were relative to a culture, or to a point of view, then there would be neither reason nor motive for changing (for every point of view would already be satisfactory). This removes one presumed advantages and disadvantages has now tilted in relativism's favour.

Casual realism (Hooker, Lewis, etc.): The would is that 'something' that in casual interaction with frames of reference brings about certain points of view. It is the same world, but forever indescribable: 'mysterious substratum,' a 'Kingdom of Being,' 'noumena.'
relativist: Truth is relative ANYWAY

Therefore:
except for the emotional connotations of the little, evolutionary relativism is the view that best fits their philosophical outlook.
Understanding the nature of knowledge rather than fantasizing about the naked truth.
→ to see the process!!!!!!!

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Chapter 6. The Connection Between Evolution and the Nature of Scientific Knowledge. 65-74

65>> whether scientific knowledge is somehow a result of evolutionary pressures (that it has adaptive value, say- or that evolution presents the key in understanding the nature of scientific knowledge.

Ernst Mach, Konrad Lorenz, Karl Popper, etc.
Evolutionary Epistemology (19th century) Mach, etc.
1.science has the function of reproducing facts in thought in order to save, or replace, experiences. (According to Mach, one of the main functions of science is the economy of thought. Mach's biological or evolutionary theory of knowledge can be found in his Popular Science Lectures, Open Court, 1943. 184-235, and in section IV of Chapter IV of his Science of Mechanics, Open Court, 1942. & p.222.
2.Through evolution the mind adapts itself to the world.
{quote p.65}

Spencer: 'What is a priori for the individual is a posteriori for the species.'
by adapting to the world the mind comes to reflect it ('the structure of the world forces itself upon the structure of the mind.')
Poincare: we choose our theories not because they are true but because they are more convenient.

The Foundation of Science, The Science Press, 1946. p.91.
{quote p.66-1} .. geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
{quote p.66-2} p.428. Truth & error.

We see that if geometry is not an experimental science, it is science born apropos of experience; that we have created the space it studies, but adapting it to the world herein we live. We have selected that most convenient space, but experience has guided our choice; as this choice has been unconscious we think it has been imposed on us; some say experience imposes it; others that we are born with our space ready made; we see from these preceding condiserations what in these two opinions is the part of truth, what of error.

66>> Mach, Popular Scientific Lectures, p.235.
We are prepared, thus, to regard ourselves and every one of our ideas as a product and a subject of universal evolution; and in this way we shall advance sturdily and unimpeded along the paths which the future will throw open to us.

Our scientific ideas have changed quickly and considerably for the past few hundred years. Thus, if they were biologically embedded, as Mach suggests, our biology must have changed in a similar fashion. But that is clearly not so.

67>> Karl Popper 'Is there an Epistemological Problem of Science,' Problems in the Philosophy of Science. Eds. North-Lakatos, A. Musgrave. North Holland Publishing Company, 1968. 163.
theories are like organs that we develop outside our skins → exosomatic evolutionary
Popper. Objective Knowledge. Oxford University Press, 1972. 264.
human knowledge can only be understood as an instrument in our struggle for survival.

Theoretical adaptation he has in mind is adaptation to an 'objective realm' separate from the world of things (i.e.., from the universe), that is, adaptation to what he calls the 'Third World.' (p.106)

++ Popper argues that a theory should be preferred if it adapts best to the intellectual environment it faces. This environment is provided by the ideas, techniques, and problems that the scientific community of the time finds pressing and important.

67>> Toulmin requires mechanisms for variation and selective perpetuation (generation of alternative views, and what Feyerabend calls the 'principle of tenacity, ' although applied only to successful candidates). For these mechanisms to operate, there must be a forum or a court in which the new alternatives may be 'heard,' and a tribunal that will preserve the accepted view until one of the alternatives can show that it is better adapted (or perhaps adaptable) to the discipline's intellectual 'environment.'

both Toulmin's and Popper's approach can be called 'biological' or 'evolutionary' only in an analogical sense. This approach fails to draw as sharp a distinction as required between scientific and non-scientific intellectual activities.

Piaget: intelligence is 'the form of equilibrium towards which all the structures arising out of perception habit and elementary sensori-motor mechanisms tend.' Psychology of Intelligence. Littlefield, Adams & Co. 1966. p.6

→ the intelligent mind interacts with the universe by forming views of it and then trying them out. This accord very well with the contemporary philosophy of science developed by such thinkers as Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Lakatos, all of whom would claim in some form or another that out scientific views structure the very manner in which we experience nature.

69>> if intelligence has adaptive value, in part precisely because of the way it interacts with the world, and if science constitutes the means to that interaction, then science has adaptive value as well. A science as such helps:
1.dealing with greater ease with our environment (our 'niche')
2.increasing the number and diversity of environments that we can deal with (enlarging the 'niche')
3.coping with a continuously changing environment (which puts a premium on flexibility or response).

70>> survival value is more or less connected with foreseeable application. It is often said, for example, that whereas animals can only take care of immediate and pressing problems, ie., react to them, we can behave in ways that do not constitute a reaction to an compelling demands of the environment, we are endowed with curiosity (a higher form of which provides much of our scientific motivation), and curiosity liberates us from the drudgery of 'plain' animalhood.
→ see J. Bronowski in his television series (& book), 'The Ascent of Man.'
There is a long standing prejudice that what distinguishes science from other activities is that science tries to force upon itself the verdict of experience (through predictions, testing, and so on).

71>> of course we can expect great differences between the curiosity behaviour of animals such as ravens and that of man. The difference lies in the fact that man's investigative behaviour is pursued until the onset of senility, a formate characteristic made possible by the neotenous nature of our species. In other animals such investigations are restricted to an early phase in individual development. Curiosity ends when play behaviour ends.

++ if science is an attempt to satisfy intellectual curiosity, it seems that its origin is not to be found in problem solving but in play! Its preservation, furthermore, seems dependent on the very happy accident that we are able to keep our childlike sense of wonder.

Anna Leese & Terence Dennis 25/8/2008

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:01:00 +0000

Purcell: Sweeter than roses; If music be the food of love
Haydn: The Spirit's Song; She never told her love
Britten: Two Songs from On This Island
Walton: Three Sitwell Songs
Alvarez: La Partida
Guridi: Two Canciones Castellanas (Castillian Songs)
Richard Strauss: Brentano Lieder, Opus 68
Puccini: Concert Aria O fior del giorno (Edgar); Concert Aria Chi il bel sogno (La Rondine)

I actually only stayed for the first half (again) though I thoroughly enjoyed Leese's performance. I especially liked the way she took the hall with her confidence and eye contact. During performing, plentiful of facial expressions and some graceful body gestures worked well within the context.

I admit being not good at selling, but I was only a volunteer. So all the smiling and greeting were unnecessary, so was the dissatisfaction from certain old ladies. Let's say when one pays 50$ for a ticket, why not 5 more dollars for a programme? If you so want the 2$ discount, present the voucher! And surly I am not going to take 2$ just because you don't have enough money. Kick me like a vending machine, would you.

Takács Quartet 23/7/2008

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:43:00 +0000

Featuring - Edward Dusinberre: violin, Károly Schranz: violin, Geraldine Walther: viola, and András Fejér: cello.

Yeah, was quite an experience -- a good one, needless to say. one of the best yet this year.
i helped out selling programmes so was fortunate enough to be granted a free pass to the concert. though i dont know anything about music, the programme included:
Haydn - String Quartet in G minor Opus 74 No 3 'Rider'
John Psathas - A Cool Wind, world première of new commission by CMNZ
Beethoven - String Quartet in C Opus 59 No 3 'Rasumovsky'

have been to a few chamber music new zealand concerts this year, and i just don't think i like john psathas' work very much. it seems to me that the instruments are used as means to imitate natural sounds, which makes me enjoy less of the whole atmosphere. it becomes 'trying too hard,' if i may say, from my ignorant personal point of view.

Encore was Allegretto (Polka) by Shostakovich, i liked it.

no more

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:46:00 +0000

doing it

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:40:00 +0000

insti2

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:26:00 +0000

roof walk

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:19:00 +0000

domain walk

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:29:00 +0000

belongingness

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:19:00 +0000

tempted, quand tu penses à moi

seminar 28/5/2008

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Wed, 28 May 2008 07:49:00 +0000

In this seminar I will present my thought process as to put emphasis on the areas of critical theory and painting in which my interests lie:
1. Karl Popper
First I will start with Karl Popper's theory of knowledge, and how I have used it as a methodology to progress my practice.
2. My approach to this methodology
Relating my practice to this methodology, I will show how in the process I have gained knowledge in my field of research.
3. Knowledge and Communication
Then I will look at different systems of communication used in images and in language, and how the two systems operate differently to fabricate our understanding and ways of communication.
4. Knowledge and Meaning
In knowledge and meaning I will slightly touch on Lacan's use of language. And will also give examples of sentences that lose their meaning when linguistics comes into play.
5. The Stranger
Lastly, I will introduce the significance of 'the stranger', and discuss whether or not knowledge is universally good and powerful.

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1//////// Karl Popper
My research this year is largely drawn from a continuation started last year, where I looked at painting and its limitations, ways to negotiate within these limits, and the problematic of the ways to go around them. My investigation into painting's capacity to reconsider its own structure last year, I thought, indicated a relationship between critical theory and the practice of painting. The exploration which I took on last year to negotiate painting's limits required a series of trials and experiments.

We may refer to philosopher Karl Popper's theory of knowledge to see how this methodology can be established. Under Popper's schema we start from a problem and try to solve it by producing a tentative theory as our tentative solution. We then put our theory to the test, trying to fail it: this is the critical method of error elimination. As a result of all this a new problem arises (or perhaps several new problems).

As the equation shown:
P1 + TT + EE = P2
Where P1 is the initial problem from which we start. It may be a practical or theoretical problem, TT is the Tentative Theory which we offer in order to solve that problem. EE means a process of error elimination, by way of critical tests or of critical discussions. P2 means the problem with which we end -- problems which emerge from the discussions and tests.

2//////// My Approach

(left) Sylvie Huang -1. "100% Wool – Brighton," 2008, yarn on wall.
(right) Sylvie Huang -2. "100% Wool – Lilac Mist," 2008, yarn on canvas, 80x100cm.

Should I apply this approach to my studio practice, here I have chosen a few examples to illustrate my progress:
At the beginning of the year I wanted to use a material that was different from what I used last year, as to leave my obsession of the paint medium. This can be viewed as P1, where I see paint as a problem to progress my investigation in the practice.

In both (1) and (2) I started from a point in the plane, working subconsciously with the string until it meets the boundary of the given architectural element, or edge of the canvas. It was a conversation between shapes and surface. This process made obvious that the string as a material had its existing dimensionality that was different from that of paint, and by sticking it to a surface forfeited its flexibility as a soft material. This was more evident in the detached areas (figure 1.2, 2.2), showing the material’s three-dimensional nature.

(left) Sylvie Huang -1.2 detail
(right) Sylvie Huang -2.2 detail

In order to faithfully explore this material, various techniques are used to negotiate the confines of image-making, such as cutting, gluing, folding, and twisting of materials, etc. I believe this process of 'drawing in space' speaks of painterly concerns that envision an interdisciplinary terrain between painting, sculpture, and architecture. These works as examples of my learning process this year to date, from which I have acquired knowledge in this specific interdisciplinary field.

(left) Sylvie Huang -3. "100% Wool – Hero Tones", 2008
(right) Sylvie Huang -4. "100% Wool – Rose Cream," 2008

Referring back to Popper Using Popper's methodology, we may sum up these particular works as follows:

P1 (initial problem) = material
Paint was restricting me, because it is associated too much with painting. Even though I was treating it in a different way, it restricted my ability to explore other materials and their intrinsic qualities. I have decided to explore the possibilities with wool yarn. Problem is, what is the materiality of wool? How can I treat a material as an object in its own right? In my case, how can I treat wool as an object?

TT (tentative theory)
My tentative theory here is by succeeding in my exploration of wool yarn, I should be able to treat any material as an object. This material has different possibilities to create different combinations. It won't be made into anything use-able, but manipulations of the material can change our perception of the material - By treating it as an object in its own right, you can disassociate it from prior notions of its destined usage (e.g. to knit a scarf)

EE (error elimination) = surfaces and dimension
By sticking this material to either a formal or informal surface, I have not allowed all its dimensions to come through. We still associate it with paint on a surface. It is merely replacing paint as a material, and not bringing the properties of the wool yarn to the surface. Therefore, I have eliminated this technique of sticking the wool to a flat surface.

P2 (problem with which we end) = colour
Amongst other techniques used I discovered how colour as a fluid medium could be a distraction to looking at materiality, for that it brings in psychological associations. Thus 'colour' brought to my awareness as P2 here in my investigation of materiality as one of the results of my experiments.

The quest into this specific genre of 'image making' abandons the depiction of subject, making painting the subject of painting. As one of the pioneers working in this field, Donald Judd believes that materials vary greatly and are simply materials (Judd, 1997). His 'specific objects' are purged of any traces of illusionism, metaphor, gesture of anthropomorphic references. Yet without these references, do we need to turn to areas outside of art and aesthetics -- disciplines such as linguistics and ideologies to interpret art?

3//////// Knowledge and Communication
It has long been my belief that art is about communication, regardless of the medium or discipline an artist works with. Yet there are different means of communication and often visual communication works on a different system from that of verbal communication.

René Magritte. "The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe)," 1929.

To illustrate my point, here we have a René Magritte’s painting "The Treachery of Images," 1929. In this painting we see a truthful representation of a pipe, and an inscription underneath it saying "Ceci n’est pas une pipe (It is not a pipe)." Magritte knits verbal signs and plastic elements together, and brings pure similitudes and nonaffirmative verbal statements into play within the instability of a disoriented volume and an unmapped space. We may argue that the title of this painting could also have been "A pipe is a pipe." (Žižek, 1968:104).

This is an example that brings about discussions on separation between linguistic signs and plastic elements, and equivalence of resemblance and affirmation. These two principles constituted the tension in classical painting, because the second reintroduced discourse into an art from which the linguistic element was excluded, since affirmation exists only where there is speech. Hence the fact that classical painting spoke while constituting itself entirely outside language. (Foucault)

My intention here is to present an entry point to see how linguistic and visual communications operate in their own systems, and how confusing it could be when we combine the two. Each instance successfully communicates something (the visual shows a pipe, and the written is a statement that makes sense). However, each instance also contradicts the other. For an in-depth discussion or an interpretation to take place, it is preferable that one should have knowledge in, for example, the Real, the Thing-in-itself.

4//////// Knowledge and Meaning
In today's society, each discipline is more and more specialised in its own development: I would not be surprised to find myself completely alienated in the department of engineering. The acquisition of knowledge, as we have seen in Popper's theory and my application of this methodology, can be a very personal development, thus it may also be exclusive. Which makes me wonder, with the development in visual art and the interpretation of art, whether or not do we have to rely on both to make successful works of art?

Contemporary curatorial practice usually offers accompanying texts to exhibitions either as parallel writing or interpretation of the works. In a recent article responding to the Whitney Museum's Biennale exhibition of contemporary art in The Wall Street Journal Online (18 April 2008), journalist Eric Gibson writes: 'Texts written by the Whitney's curators and outside contributors are being widely (and accurately) dismissed as unalloyed gibberish.' This complaint is made significant by the fact that it comes also from artists and critics who are knowledgeable and well-disposed toward the museum and its efforts. He explains that when the writer no longer had to base his critical observations on a close scrutiny of the work of art after Duchamp -- 'He could simply riff.' This gave birth to the phenomenon in art criticism of inaccessible writing. Indeed, popular verbs with critics such as 'resuscitates,' 'references' and 'activates' may nonetheless say just about nothing. As we can see from one of the 'random quotes' from the exhibition:

... Bove's 'settings' draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings.

The crypticness of this passage brings to mind the discussions of French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) and his use of language, also known as Lacanese, that du Lacan (of Lacan) has been used in colloquial French with reference to an incomprehensible phrase or an exceedingly awkward formulation. This is because Lacan is known for his use of puns and play with words in his seminars. Therefore, it makes Lacanese nearly impossible to be translated into another language; and as a result, if I may add, makes this knowledge more difficult to be accessed by others.

Examples given by Corinne Maier may help us see the complexity in speaking Lacanese, in her 'travel guide' to 'Lacania.' A proper way of saying 'I am ill' in Lacanese is: 'My symptom does no longer succeed in quilting my lack of being' (Maier, 2003: 52). And a woman who wants to speak to her friend because her husband has just left her, in Lacanese, she says: 'For the subject who is now confronted with its lack of being, the hole of the loss in the real mobilises the signifier' (ibid.: 62). Here we see that Lacanese seems to be a sophisticated designer idiom for the improved description and communication of a new set of meanings.

In the course of my research, this book Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid by Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn has been recommended by my critical studies supervisor. In which I find the notion of the knowledge economy extremely insightful as to grasp the ideas I have been pondering for sometime:

A form of dependency in which we are all potential knowledge specialists, and therefore perpetually in debt to someone else's knowledge. Rather than establishing a commonality of understanding, this situation consolidates the rule of the individual knowledge ego. (Nobus, 2005: 1)
With the knowledge economy we have today, it has drawn to my attention whether the fabrication of knowledge can be standardised. In the case of an educational institution, such as the university, where admittedly the individual knowledge ego thrives, understanding others becomes potentially more and more difficult. In order to gain access to another person’s knowledge, we may constantly find ourselves in a repeating process of studying and trying to interpret.

5//////// the Stranger
Or, we may go even further to suppose that we may be ceaselessly in the pursuit of the knowledge of others' without formulating our own's, simply because we want to be able to understand others, and we do not want to appear not as knowledgeable, or 'stupid.' It may be useful at this point, to introduce 'the stranger' which I find helpful:

Derrida[1] has reminded us, from Plato’s dialogues it can already be seen that it is often the stranger who formulates 'the intolerable question', who unwittingly challenges the authority of the master, who is not scared to jeopardize the hospitality he has received. [...] The stranger speaks from ignorance and thus forces his interlocutors to break the silence that governs mutual understanding within his presence, as Simmel[2] put it, physical proximity and social remoteness, geographical nearness and mental distance, the person of alien origin occupies a privileged position, which gives him the opportunity to cross boundaries and somehow be exonerated by reason of ignorance, and which can make him privy to secrets that will never be revealed to any 'regular' inhabitant of the community. (Nobus, 2005: 67)

1. Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby, Standford, CA: Standford University Press, 2000.
2. Simmel, Georg. “The Stranger,” trans. Donald N. Levine, in Donald N. Levine (ed.) On Individuality and Social Forms, Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1971. 143-9

This suggests that ignorance may be as powerful as knowledge in effective communication and understanding. It is a concept I still find puzzling and difficult to realise, but nevertheless a concept I feel that I could relate to. In my interpretation, if we could apply this in the case of visual art, perhaps it is worth approaching the work without an overload of context, and allowing our visual sensory to explore, relate and connect.

(left) Wassily Kandinsky. "Farbstudie Quadrate," 1913. Image source: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/goto/prints-329769
(right) Sylvie Huang. "Untitled." 2008.

Here we have two works that have perceptible similarities, such as in colour, saturation, and use of geometric forms. While Kandinsky (1866-1944) links colour to musical harmony, Huang's choice of colour refers to commodity objects. Putting these two works of different contexts side by side, we may be able to see them from a stranger's point of view for at least a brief of a moment, that regardless of the contexts these works set within, they communicate directly and instantly of a combination of colours and forms that stimulates our instinct response.

====================================
References
　　　　 Judd, Donald. "Selected Writings." Donald Judd Sculpture, Prints, Furniture. Centro Cultural de Belém, 1997. 11-21
　　　　 Judd, Donald. "Specific Objects," Arts yearbook 8. New York, 1965: 74-82; reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975. Halifax Nova Scotia, 1975.
　　　　Foucault, Michel. "This is Not a Pipe (1968)." Retrieved 13 May 2008.
　　　　Gibson, Eric. "The Lost Art of Writing About Art." The Wall Street Journal Online: 18 April 2008.
　　　　Maier, Corinne. Le Lacan dira-t-on: Guide français-lacanien. Paris: Mots & Cie. 2003
　　　　Nobus, Danny and Malcolm Quinn. Knowing Nothing Staying Stupid: Elements for a psychoanalytic epistemology. New York: Routledge, 2005.
　　　　Liddle, Rod. "The Countdown of the World's 'Public Intellectuals'." Times Online: 4 May 2008. Retrieved 10 May 2008.
　　　　 Rose-Carol Washton Long. "Review: Kandinsky, the Language of the Eye by Paul Overy." The Art Bulletin, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Jun., 1971): 273 (review consists of 1 page). Published by: College Art Association.
　　　　Popper, Karl R. "Knowledge: Objective and Subjective." Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: In defence of interaction. Routledge, 1994: 1-23.
　　　　 Žižek, Slavoj. "On Radical Evil and Related Matters." Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993: 100-5.

Waplington, Nick. Learn How to Die The Easy Way. London: Trolley Ltd., 2002.

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 23:34:00 +0000

Waplington, Nick. Learn How to Die The Easy Way. London: Trolley Ltd., 2002.
ISBN 0954207971
UoA Fine Arts Library 770 W252L

though i only gave it 2stars i thought it was a pretty good book, it's just that i don't generally like works on paper referring to works that can be of actual existence. o well, virtual existence does not count, what is it? argh, too much reading involved for this one. But yea, enjoyed the dark humour in Waplington's work so i will research into that in the near future -- i think.

Walker, Robert. Colour Is Power. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:56:00 +0000

Walker, Robert. Colour Is Power. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.
ISBN: 0500542597
UoA Fine Arts Library 770 W183

colour street photography. an okay book for a tired-from-household-chores flip-through.

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." - Oscar Wilde

Henri Cartier-Bresson in The Decisive Moment:
The difficulties involved in snapshooting are precisely that we cannot control the movement of the subject; and in colour-photography reporting, the real difficulty is that we are unable to control the inter-relation of colours within the subject.

Polly Apfelbaum. Ed. Bennett Simpson

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:43:00 +0000

Polly Apfelbaum. Ed. Bennett Simpson. Phildelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. 2003.
ISBN 0884541037
UoA Fine Arts Library 759 A641

"Interview with Polly Apfelbaum by Claudia Gould" (11-9)
\\\\titling of work\\\
"Daisy Chain", "A Pocket Full of Posies", "Peggy Lee and the Dalmatians" contrast with "Ice", "Bones", "Reckless"... etc. contrast in the aesthetic qualities: initial pop/bang/explosion of colour followed by the sense of minute accumulation, accretion, form layered upon form...
(((Pop is never innocent)))
My work is never explicitly narrative, so the titles are always indirect - sometimes they refer to the process, but they are often simply meant to be evocative - I think Duchamp said that titles were like another colour in the work. (11) Using film titles as colour references, etc.

\\\creating entertainments\\\
(((music is very evocative and emotional, but never literal)))
The difference between music and "entertainments" is, for Apfelbaum, that the emotional content is very literal in entertainments whereas in music it's "less intellectual and more intuitive, but at the same time it's very precise. (14)

\\\influenced by taste in film and music\\\
(((my taste is very eclectic)))
I think there's an analogy with what I do - taking little pieces and rearranging them.... I am drawn to the quirky and not always popular.. Many of the pieces work from very explicit rules, or systems, but often - in fact just about always - the system is invisible. I guess I like that kind of tension, between the intuitive and the formal, or the emotional and the controlled. (15-7)

\\\the power of colour and form\\\
(((there's no pure abstraction)))
there is always some reference outside - a connection to place, to memory or to popular culture... By keeping the content indirect, I try to leave space for viewers, so they can bring their own experience to the work. The idea is to make the work rich enough, dense enough, or complex enough so that there is always something unexpected that may come out of that experience. (17)

"Having It All: Polly Apfelbaum at ICA by Ingrid Schaffner" (21-43)
\\\a contrarian\\\
Polly Apfelbaum believes you can have it all and she is determined to realise the possibility through her art ... "Every single painting has 100 more paintings in it, his [Matisse's] million decisions and indecisions are the picture ... Apfelbaum's art appears free of anxiety and stress. But like Matisse's, it is based on a similar desire to embody the irresolute, especially the immateriality of colour ... Her work involves the activities and occupies the space of sculpture, but makes a contentious bid for painting, sculpture, and installation to occur all at once, and to be experienced simultaneously ... Apfelbaum's art has sparked talk about issues of appropriation and abstraction, the legacies of minimalism and feminism, and, most recently, the powerful pleasures to be had in surrendering to design and bringing in architecture. (21)
We can have it all: colour, drawing, structure, formlessness, systems, chaos, thinking, doing, painting, sculpture, geometry, mess. These things don't necessarily cancel each other out. Indeed, polarising them simplifies complexities, which are not only challenging to consider, but pleasurable to embrace. (40)

\\\colour\\\
Sculpture is about form, not colour, which belongs to the precinct of painting. In an essay called "Colour and Sculpture: A Capricious Affair," art historian Frances Colpitt elaborated: "The rejection of colour in sculpture stems from the Western predilection for purity. From Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) to Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), theorists have demanded that each art form be true to its essential nature, with the implications that colour belongs to painting and is superfluous in sculpture." (26- Frances Colpitt, "Colour and Sculpture: A Capricious Affair," Chromaform: Colour in Sculpture, University of Texas at Antonio Art Gallery, 1998, 7.)
Since the Italian Renaissance, artists, philosophers, and critics have argued over the supremacy of drawing (disegno) versus colour (colore). It was a mind/body debate, as well as a moral and class issue: akin to writing, line was the intellect, with all the privileges due enlightenment. Beyond words, colour was sensual, immoral, tricky, dumb. (Anybody can enjoy it.) (40)
"Yes, colour grounds the value of art in the bodily social relationship between the beholder and the object, not in the shadow realm of the disembodied idea. Think about it!" -- Libby Lumpkin, "Vive la résistance: Polly Apfelbaum's Vanitás of Painting," Reckless, Helsinki: Kiasma, Studio K, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998, 13. (40)

\\\Feminism & Abjection\\\
The art market, along with the economy, had crashed, taking mainstream heroes like George Baselitz, Sandro Chia, Julian Schnabel and David Salle down with it. The culture wars called for artists (especially female, gay, and non-white artists) to champion difference and to degrade the canon with critical bodies and subversive politics -- or at least confuse it with hybrid practices and shape-shifting works of art. (26)
Slinky and cheap, textured and tactile, crushed velvet treated with Sennelier dye, a French brand available in 104 colours that she [Apfelbaum] pours directed out of the bottle, has been her main material since 1992 ... Apfelbaum had been distilling throughout her transition from readymade or found sculpture. The mark of the hand is now signified by the stain of the dye and by the gesture of arranging pieces of fabric on the floor. (29)

\\\stain\\\
In Apfelbaum's work, the stain isn't simply repulsive or taboo. It's smart, sensual, and full of feeling. Apfelbaum calls this sculpture "a beautiful mess." It operates equally as a critical and as a constructive object. (30)

\\\the question of rules\\\
Gilles Deleuze: "Folding -- unfolding no longer simply means tension -- release, contraction --dilation, but enveloping -- developing, involution, evolution." Instead of a system of oppositions and ruptures, Deleuze imagines one composed from continuities, which he elaborates elsewhere as elastic, affirming, flowing, and horizontal. (43)

"Polly Apfelbaum: 'I wanted the work to be... as sexy and hallucinogenic as possible.' by Irving Sandler" (49-53)
"I am interested not so much in attempting to invent new categories but in operating promiscuously and improperly -- poaching -- within fields seemingly already well defined." Her aim, as she said, was to "twist" these categories "into a different form." -- Polly Apfelbaum, "Statement for Chain, Vol. 2, one page typescript. (49)
Daisy Chain (1989): composed of found objects, simply juxtaposed, significantly titled, and exemplary of the post-Duchampian practices that were prevalent throughout the 1980s. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's readymades and Andy Warhol's remades at a time when appropriation art was everywhere in the art world.
Ashley Bickerton, Sherrie Levine, & Haim Steinbach: appropriating newly-minted objects to make art that critiqued commodity culture.
Ann Hanilton, David Hammons, Donald Lipski, & Nancy Shaver: transposing things patinated by human touch and time, to convey cultural memory and a sense of loss. [with which Apfelbaum's use of the found object allied] (21)
Colour is notably absent from Apfelbaum's take on this work. Daisy Chain copies the printed set of shapes and their configuration in the form of raw wooden elements, laid out in rows upon the floor.
Pink Dalmatians (1992): She began to control her marks. "The pieces are dyed and cut out, then set on the floor, ordered and arranged to make more forms. The assemblage of pieces mobs through the space like an organic growth... Much of the work consists in directing its flow, organising and looking for new organisations in the liquid movements of fabric and stain." -- Polly Apfelbaum, "The Night," in Polly Apfelbaum, San Francisco: Walter/McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, 1997. (50)
Shaping each velvet swatch by hand is critical. With Matisse's cut-outs as a precedent, Apfelbaum said, "Cutting is drawing, almost." Scissoring into dyed fabric enabled her to draw directly into colour. (50) Decoration and handicraft materials and techniques are historically identified with women's work, which feminists rightly considered art ... Apfelbaum views her artistic enterprise as a quest for beauty. After all, the purpose of decoration is visual pleasure .. It is commonly thought that art that is pleasurable is or has to be mindless. Not so in the case of Apfelbaum's floor reliefs. In providing a conceptual component, she bridges pleasure and cerebration. As Wesley Gibson observed: "Here, beauty is intelligence, and intelligence is beauty." -- Wesley Gibson, "Reviews: Polly Apfelbaum," New Art Examiner, March 2001, 54. (51)
Apfelbaum's abstraction signifies her concern with "high" art. At the same time, she looks for inspiration to popular culture, notably in her material ... The diversity of interpretations that Apfelbaum's work evokes is such that at the same time you are reminded of "high" abstract art and popular culture, you are put in mind of lily pads, landscapes seen from on high, and other natural phenomena... her work is open to myriad readings. -- David Pagel, "A Supersaturated Return to the Spirit of the Punk Era," Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2002, Sec. F, 26. (51)
The underlying content of Apfelbaum's work is the tension between the structured and the unstructured. Her aim, as she sees it, is to compose an initial order, then to welcome disorder - or the unknown - and finally to order it. (52)

"Let's Twist Again by Tim Griffin" (59-60)
Bones (2000): The tubes are totemic, with their basic forms and serial layout; at the same time, they are completely, even uncomfortably ordinary, resembling so many rolled-up rugs on the ground. Embedded in their repetitions is the implication of manufactured items, but the pieces are obviously handmade, richly marked with the artist's trademark mottled patterns of coloured dye. This signature aspect draws the pieces away from the context of minimalist sculpture toward painting, taking potential artistic references off the floor and onto the wall. Evoking the formal purity of, say, Helen Frankenthaler's staining technique, whereby she allowed her paints to seep into canvas, these traces of the artist's hand invite closer inspection ... The majority of the piece is, in fact, wrapped up and completely out of view, enfolded within the layers of would fabric. Bones shows and withholds at once. (59)
Apfelbaum produces work in which two basic factions - whether medium, art history or popular culture - are at odds yet bound together inextricably, so that, as in Bones, the implications wind continuously outward and inward ... her works often have consisted of coloured strips and spots organised into patterns on the floor, invoking Jackson Pollock. But Apfelbaum has rendered Pollock's performative mode into a motif. The drip remains in place, but now registers as flat fabrics saturated with dye; and what was once the gestural trace of the creative subject is now organised according to a formal system set up by the artist. Indeed, any sense of "action" is displaced from artist to the viewer who must navigate the space shaped by the individual works. In this vein, Apfelbaum further closes the gap between painting and sculptural space, as the act of looking becomes more resolutely corporeal, more physical. (59-60)

The Color of My Fate (1989-1990)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_1_92/ai_112131277/pg_2 http://citybeat.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A90962
http://citybeat.com/2003-12-10/art.shtml http://www.irhine.com/index.jsp?page=home_cac012504 http://contemporaryartscenter.org/exhibitions/apfelbaum

Tr : Symposium - Latin American Art and the UK, 1960s to the present

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 04:40:00 +0000

Now i see/hear Hélio Oiticica every second week, he's everywhere.
Went to Guy Brett's talk some weeks ago, was pretty good and inspiring but did not write about it cos half of the time i had problem understanding... but good slides of works by Hélio Oiticica and other visual artists that I enjoyed a lot. thought it was relevant to my practice/research too (then again, what is my research?)
Though all's been done, but it takes time for people to realise what actually has been done before. and they still excite me, they do.

----- Message transféré ----
De : Art&Education <edu-news@mailer.e-flux.com>
Envoyé le : Vendredi, 11 Avril 2008, 8h51mn 53s
Objet : Symposium - Latin American Art and the UK, 1960s to the present

Symposium - Latin American Art and the UK, 1960s to the present
26 April 2008 10.00 - 18.30
Department of Art History and Theory
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester
CO4 3SQ
United Kingdom
Telephone (UK): +44 01206 872200
Telephone (international): +44 1206 872200
http://www2.essex.ac.uk/arthistory/

Latin American Art and the UK, 1960s to the present, is the focus for a symposium at the University of Essex on Saturday 26 April, bringing together both emerging and leading scholars in this field.

The symposium is the culmination of a research project, Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art and the UK: history, historiography, specificity (LAUK). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this year-long project is a preliminary investigation into the presence and critical reception of art and artists from Latin America in the UK from the 1960s to the present.

Through the study of specific UK-based initiatives including exhibitions, publications, and the development of academic courses, the project examines the role of the UK in generating an Anglophone body of knowledge on art from Latin America and identifies local curatorial trends and theoretical particularities in the field.

This research project has exposed an unexpectedly rich vein of material relating to the Latin American art in the UK and suggests that what previously appeared to be more or less isolated examples of interest in the field are perhaps be better understood as part of a more sustained and deep-rooted enthusiasm born of shared and often anti-hegemonic concerns.

The symposium participants include:
Michael Asbury (Senior Research Fellow, University of the Arts London)
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado (Curator, Jersey City Museum)
Isabel Plante (Ph.D. candidate, Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Guy Brett (independent writer and curator)
Joanne Harwood (Assistant Director, University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art)
Oriana Baddeley (Director of Research Camberwell College of Art, Co-Director TrAIN)
Dawn Ades (Professor, University of Essex)
Valerie Fraser (Principal Investigator, Latin American Art in the UK Project)
Isobel Whitelegg and Taína Caragol (Senior Researcher and Research Officer, Latin American Art in the UK Project)
Jaime Gili, Ana Laura López, Eduardo Padilha, and Ofelia Rodríguez, Latin American artists resident in London

The event will culminate with a reception to launch a limited edition of prints by Jaime Gili, commissioned by the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art (UECLAA). Live music will be provided by London-based, Venezuelan singer Luzmira Zerpa.

Details of the program can be found at http://www2.essex.ac.uk/arthistory/ Admission is free but places are limited. To register, or for further information, e-mail: tcaragol@essex.ac.uk

This event is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Department of Art History and Theory, the Latin American Centre and the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art.

Image above:
Helio Oiticica outside the Whitechapel Gallery London, 1969, courtesy Projeto Helio Oiticica'

8/4/2008 Eggner Trio

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:37:00 +0000

8/4/2008 Eggner Trio
http://www.chambermusic.co.nz/artists/159/237.php
interview the Eggners TV3

Christoph - Piano
Georg - Violin
Florian - Cello

Three good looking young talented europeans, yea was a good evening of joy. I thought how they treated the start and end of each piece was really sophisticated and elegant, whereas when all three instruments volumed up lost the diversity and individuality -- hmm, i didn't see it so much as reaching a high point of harmony, it was rather distracting actually or i could blame it on the hall setting? That's one thing about live performances which, compared to listening to studio recordings, sometimes confuses the audience of what to listen to, especially bums like me who have little knowledge in music et al... Didn't take them long to warm up the instruments though, very good sounds and perfect notes (again, what do i know really). the whole performance was very proper and structured, could tell they went through highly disciplined training, etc. well, of course, three brothers as a trio, must be a music family..

marco evaristti

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:04:00 +0000

http://evaristti.blogspot.com/
http://www.tvmountain.com/fr/sujet.asp?id_sujet=219

environmental friendly art? so much of awaking the awareness of environmental issues, getting there and completing the whole process is just major. a few hip environmental artists/activists from last year, i guess the world has come to a peaceful maxim that finds nothing better to do than actually looking at our real needs -- yeah, a better future for sure. Hope, that's all we need. Dream on, art makes all possible.

Donald Judd: Sculpture Prints Furniture

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:17:00 +0000

Judd Donald - Sculpture Prints Furniture

Donald Judd Sculpture, Prints, Furniture. Centro Cultural de Belém, 1997.
60's Abstract Expressionism in the United States
Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl André, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt --> Minimal art

Greenberg v.s. Judd
Judd's "specific objects": simple geometric forms purged of any traces of illusionism, metaphor, gesture of anthropomorphic references. His object's engagement with both the wall, floor and ceiling broke the traditional association of the wall with painting and theatre, and his rigorous engagement with scale, symmetry, volume and architectural space linked his art strongly with architecture. (5)
Judd's work subverted traditional notions of artistic creativity, which involved hierarchical relations between different elements. Instead, he used concepts such as gestalt, unity and indivisibility to realise his specific objects, each of which was conceived as a whole, with its own clearly-defined scale. With these primary structures, developed in repetitions of unitary, identical and symmetrical elements, Judd created a new lexicon. (5)

purity & forms
open & closed volumes
plain or coloured plywood, Plexiglas or metal.
space, scale & material.
painting & architecture

Judd, Donald. "Selected Writings". Donald Judd Sculpture, Prints, Furniture. Centro Cultural de Belém, 1997. 11-21

"Jean Arp". Arts, September 1963
part & whole relationship
example of Arp's sculpture: One of the most interesting aspects of Arp's sculpture [...] is that a good piece is a whole which has no parts. The protuberances can never clearly be considered other, smaller units; are not secondary units. This lack of distinct parts forces you to see the piece as a whole. The perception of wholeness dominates the impressions of its parts... (11) "Kenneth Noland", Arts. September 1963
& Norland's painting: Painting has to be as powerful as any kind of art; it can't claim a special identity, an existence for its own sake as a medium. If it does it will end up like lithography and etching. Painting now is not quite sufficient, although only in terms of plain power. It lacks the specificity and power of actual materials, actual colour, and actual space. (12)
"Specific Objects", Arts yearbook, 1965 The new three-dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school or style. The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement... (13)
In the paintings of Pollock, Rothko, Still and Newman, and more recently of Reinhardt and Noland, the rectangle is emphasized. The elements inside the rectangle are broad shapes and surface are only those which can occur plausibly within and on a rectangular plane [...] A painting is nearly and entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group of entities and references. (13)
Three dimensions are real space. That gets rid of the problem of illusionism and of literal space, space in and around marks and colors - which is riddance of one of the salient and most objectionable relics of European art. The several limits of painting are no longer present. A work can be as powerful as it can be thought to be... Obviously, anything in three dimensions can be any shape, regular or irregular, and can any have relation to the wall, floor, ceiling, room, rooms or exterior or none at all... (14)
Materials vary greatly and are simply materials -- Formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, Plexiglas, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific. Also, they are usually aggressive. There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material. Also, of course, the qualities of materials -- hard mass, soft mass, thickness of 1/32, 1/16, 1/8 inch, pliability, slickness, translucency, dullness -- have unobjective uses. (15) A painting isn't an image. The shapes, the unity, projection, order and color are specific, aggressive and powerful. (16)"

Don Judd: an interview with John Coplans
Originally published in Don Judd, Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, California, 1971
yea, kinda boring the interview. not much point made.

Review: Hal Foster
Originally published in ARTFORUM magazine, 1978
Rosalind Krauss wrote of a Robert Morris piece, 'the specific configuration of the work is not allowed to become a figure seen against the "ground" of the object's "real" structure'. (Artforum, November 1973) When a box is aligned with the wall, it may have more to do with the illusionism of painting: each box, like a canvas, is seen as a natural extension of our own visual field. (44) Sculpture that is Minimalist in origin must face the brand of "theatre" applied to Minimalism proper by Michael Fried (Artforum, Summer 1967). To Fried the Minimalist object is theatrical insofar as it imposes as a presence, a presence that provokes a situation between viewer and itself. This he spurned as not self-critical. (45) Not only does Minimalist sculpture have a physical presence, i.e. command a situation or theatre, it also speaks to a metaphysical presence, i.e. to a plenitude, not an "exhaustion", of gestalt, forms, ideas, etc. (46) Rosalind Krauss noted, Judd used forms that seemed given, forms that were somehow a priori. This was done in order to delimit (or disguise) intentionality, what she called "the intention-laden grammar of process", and the presence implicit therein. To Krauss the idea was to make meaning "a function of external space" as opposed to a function of internal space, that metaphorical realm where the operations of the constitutive mind occur. She saw the break with the 'Cartesianism' that was the ground of "Western illusionism". (47)

Donald Judd's Equivocal Objects Prudence Carlson
Originally published in ART IN AMERICA, Brant Publications Inc., January 1984.
As always, Judd's new boxes, whether single or arranged in series, are emphatically self-referential objects that wed form, material and content and that, as a consequence, "exist between mind and matter, detached from both and representing neither" (Noted in Lucy R. Lippard, "Cult of the Direct and the Difficult", Changing, New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1971, 116). hmm, pretty repetitive about Judd's practice. no need to note more i guess.

l'article «Rétrospective Keith Haring à Lyon », sur fluctuat.net

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 03:51:00 +0000

Bonjour,

hsiaohui vous invite à lire l'article «Rétrospective Keith Haring à Lyon »

Son message :
1st survey show of Keith Haring in Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art. 22/2-30/6/2008
I've always found Keith Haring interesting for the things that he's accomplished, or not accomplished. Well, drawing everywhere is not as easy as it seems; but commenting on the society at large by drawing everywhere seems too easy. I am not exactly sure what his actions brought about changes to the art world or the happy marriage of business and art, but I am sure this is an appropriate exhibition to have in Lyon. There are quite a few beautiful graffiti in Croix-Rousse, and motifs/icons on corners of streets, etc. This exhibition shall stimulate artistic activities towards a socially radical practice, the American way.

Denis Darzacq : La chute

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:33:00 +0000

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/photography/story/0,,2040037,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2007/mar/23/darzacq?picture=329756707
http://denis.darzacq.revue.com/la_chute/D-Darzacq-World.Press-Photo-07.pdf

\\\\first of all, this post should have been posted ages ago but i just thought i would write something grand. guess i was wrong about myself, as usual. so in order to keep my mind focused i think i should just write sh*t posts and see what happens. free country, free blogging.\\\\
these photos and settings in the series remind me of the french cités i was once familiar with, though they also could be any other city in the world. mass housing system is something quite particular in style, and of course this "cité culture" can be found elsewhere in the world, not just in france. yet the clothing and the body build do refer to the youngsters in the cité and the hip activities they engage themselves in -- jumping off building walls etc. yea, does look kinda cool on newspapers eh.
these photographs are really intriguing eh. make you wonder HOW HOW HOW.

"DON'T speak like someone from the cité!"
if i ever did, i took it as a compliment. merci, salaud.

riot 2005:
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/2005riots/index.html
1968 student revolution:
http://www.marxist.com/1968/may68.html

disinterested.

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 07:27:00 +0000

coheed & cambria in auckland. pretty good eh. but i just stood still on the same spot for the whole concert. if i had listened to their music in my teens i would have had loved them. now it's just pretty cool. but i didn't like powerstation, not a good place for "concerts", etc. having it in a bar is so degrading.

and yo, where's the passion, where's the rage?
it's in me, okay!! it's in me!!

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:55:00 +0000

art photography in Germany today
26/3/2008 st paul st 15h

Barbara Honrath talked about German contemporary photography after 1945 in Museum collections in numerous cities spread out in Germany. Also put photography into traditional painting genres into "portraits", "landscape", "architecture", "interior", and "still life", and showed works by Thomas Struth, Jitka Hanzlová, Simone Nieweg, Beate Gütschow, Thomas Florschuetz, Heidi Specker, Candida Höfer, Beatrice Minda, Christopher Muller, Stephaine Senge, Frank Breuer, Wolfram Hahn, Joachim Brohm, Peter Piller, and Jörg Sasse. I personally found the photos of Peter Piller most interesting, especially "More Beautiful from Above (2004)". The housing says a lot about a culture and the mass influence, etc. blah. yea. good talk, good introduction. a bit tiring though.

http://www.goethe.de/ins/sg/pro/artphoto/index.htm

hsiaohui vous recommande cette page de L'Internaute Magazine

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:38:00 +0000

Bonjour,

hsiaohui a pensé que cette page de L'Internaute Magazine :
Corolle - Origamis : quand le pliage devient un art sur L'Internaute Science Magazine
pourrait vous intéresser.

Le message de hsiaohui :
"pictures of origami works. what you can do with sheets"

Nous vous souhaitons une bonne lecture et une bonne journée.

Cordialement,

L'équipe de L'Internaute Magazine
www.linternaute.com

Sur L'Internaute
Cartes de voeux gratuites | Retrouvez vos copains d'avant | Encyclopédies | Photos | Vidéos | Programme Cinéma | Programme TV

TANGRAM ::七巧板:: - Sent Using Google Toolbar

sylvie.huang@yahoo.com (hsiaohui) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 08:30:00 +0000

古人智力游戏代表作——七巧板

远古新石器时代，河姆渡文化遗址出土的榫和卯。

清代童叶庚对古代七巧板和蝶几图进行研究后，产生"环规为圆，合矩成方，千变万化，十色五光"的方案，制成十五巧板，取名益智图。此名源起《足开发心思》之意。

武氏祠汉代墓室画像，其中女娲手执的就是矩。中国1813年出版的《七巧图合壁》一书中称，七巧源于勾股法，而勾股法的基础是"矩"，这是最早将七巧玩具与数学相联系的记载。

西洋人通宵达旦玩七巧板