From ‘Advertisements for Architecture’ (1976-77) by Bernard Tschumi.
Tschumi illustrated several of his early theoretical texts with Advertisements for Architecture, a series of postcard-sized juxtapositions of words and images. Each was a manifesto of sorts, confronting the dissociation between the immediacy of spatial experience and the analytical definition of theoretical concepts.
Eric Baudelaire, ‘Everything is political (I)’ (2011)
39 books and 39 recordings of the final sentences of each book.
Gregory Laynor, ‘The Making of Americans’ (2008)
A reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans in 913 mp3’s, one for each page of the book. Available on ubuweb
Jordan Wolfson, ‘Con Leche’ (2009)
Watch on ubuweb
Shot on video in Detroit Michigan, the characters walk through the desolate streets in real video sometimes in groups and sometimes alone. The image wobbles, flips and turns inside of the video frame. A commercial voice over actress speaks from texts Wolfson collected from the internet referencing identity, technology, memory and mortality most of which are personal accounts spoken in first person. Every few minutes Jordan Wolfson interrupts her giving basic formal instructions and adjustments distorting her tone, volume, and “sex”
“Hubert Damisch’s study, A Theory of /Cloud/ (1972), makes /cloud/ the sign of painting’s paradoxical combination of the ephemeral and the material. Above all, it signals the escape of painting from the dominance of perspective and its historical transformation; the problem of surface became the problem of illusion. By the use of two forward slashes, Damisch transforms /cloud / into an index or signifier, rather than a word denoting “cloud” in any descriptive or figurative sense. Enslaved to linear perspective (so Damisch argues), painting seeks another way of representing visual experience. /Cloud/, whether rendered as the absence of sky or as deceptive trompe l’oeil, poses an alternative to the linear order. It becomes a sign of all that painting has to overcome. Instead of organizing the limits of a flat surface, the illusionistic clouds of the painted baroque cupola overflow their architectural frame. Correggio, according to Damisch, was the first to construct his pictures from the point of view of a Kantian subject for whom space is a constitutive aspect of consciousness.
Damisch’s semiotic analysis of pictorial production takes the theme and texture of /cloud/ as an indexical case-study for the development of painting, making /cloud/ the defining problematic of painting from the baroque to the present day. This “pictorial” or “painterly” space – what he calls “a free and unlimited depth, considered as a luminous and aerial substance” – is opposed to a modernist emphasis on linear style, with its flatness and overlapping forms. /Cloud/ is the sign of the volume repressed by modern painting’s fixation on the flatness of the representational surface. Its semiotics challenge the insistence of twentieth-century modernism on the representation of painterly space. Clouds round out pictorial space instead of flattening it; they point to the organization of the pictorial as a dialectic of surface and depth. /Cloud/ negates solidity and shape. Nebulous and indefinite, it signals an indeterminate volume, defying the medium and restoring painting to the realm of illusion. But /cloud/ also contains the paradox of form which signifies itself.”
From: ‘Cloud Studies: The Visible Invisible’, by Mary Jacobus
‘View of the world from 9th Ave.’, the March 29, 1976 cover for The New Yorker, by Saul Steinberg.
Letter from cartoonist Alfred Joseph Frueh to his wife Giuliette Fanciulli, sent on Jan. 10th, 1913.
The letter opens up to form a model of a gallery hung with paintings. Frueh made this model to inform his wife about the details of a specific art gallery before her visit.
Collection of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
