Duchampian Nonsense

"Conclusion: after many efforts in view of the comb, what a shame! all the furriers have left and they mean rice."


Marcel Duchamp, [1915].

Colors as Sounds

"YELLOW, for example, possesses the special capacity to 'ascend' higher and higher and to attain heights unbearable to the eye and the spirit; the sound of a trumpet playing higher and higher becoming more and more 'pointed', giving pain to the ear and to the spirit. BLUE, with the completely opposite power to 'descend' into infinite depths, develops the sounds of the flute (when it is light blue), of the cello (when it has descended farther), of the double bass with its magnificent deep sounds; and in the depths of the organ you 'see' the depths of blue. GREEN is well balanced and corresponds to the medium and the attenuated sounds of the violin...and RED (vermillion) can give the impression of strong drum beats, etc."


Wassily Kandinsky, "The Art of Spiritual Harmony" [1912].

A Montage of Andy Warhol's Most Beautiful

Screentests from the 1960s Factory days of Andy Warhol (Paul America, Edie Sedgwick, Richard Rheem, Ingrid Superstar, Lou Reed, Baby Jane Holzer, Billy Name, Mary Woronov, Freddy Herko, Ann Buchanan, Susan Bottomly, Nico, Dennis Hopper).

Art is a Liar

"The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of Art, and Art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth."


Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying" [1891].

Wilde's "The Decay of Lying"

"At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from poets."


Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying" [1891].

This Week, on "The Hills"

"[Stephanie Pratt] went to work for Kelly Cutrone, and it went really, really well. And by really, really well I mean it was like watching Hitler fall down a flight of stairs. It was funny and banal, but still evil."


Richard Lawson, http://gawker.com/5221527/the-hills--working-hard-to-make-a-better-world-for-none-of-us.

An image is like a crystal prism.

“An image is like a crystal prism, it reflects light in the most diverse and unexpected directions illuminating and bringing to consciousness other unexpected images and ideas until, like in meditation, thought itself gets lost in the beauty of the experience."


Manfredi Piccolomini, “Foreward: Omnia Quae Sunt, Sunt Lumina,” On the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas, by Giordano Bruno [1991].

Beliefs

"To behave as a believer has less to do with the content of the belief we hold than with our commitment to the representations that frame it."


Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image [2004].

From my personal files

Dear Elizabeth:

On behalf of ___________, I would like to thank you for your interest in the curatorial internship. Although your application showed you to be most qualified for this position, we have received many more applications that we could anticipate. We simply did not have the opportunity to consider them all.

Best wishes to you,

Sincerely,

___________
Intern

Sometimes you feel like a rat...

"[The rat] seems to me as if to say, 'I know what you mean, I have gone through that myself.' You have a right to be fed up and you have a right to be a rat once in awhile. You don't have to be good all the time."


Louise Bourgeois

Paul Virilio on the Mind/Memories

"When Bergson asserts that mind is a thing that endures, one might add that it is our duration that thinks, feels, sees. The first creation of consciousness would then be its own speed in its time-distance, speed thereby becoming causal idea, idea before the idea. It is thus now common to think of our memories as multidimensional, of thought as transfer, transport (metaphora) in the literal sense."


Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine [1994].

From Frank O'Hara's "Personism" (1959)

"You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'"

Frank O'Hara, "Personism" [1959]

Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque

"Now this shows you the roofless motif which is very, very handsome...This is really the old hotel and you can see that instead of just tearing it down at once they tear it down partially so that you are not deprived of the complete wreckage situation...They really don't know if they want this part of the hotel or not, so it seems very smart to just leave it there...and I mean you never know when you might have some traveler, some tourist who comes to the hotel and wants a place that doesn't have a roof on it."

Robert Smithson, "Hotel Palenque" [1969-1972].

Allan Kaprow on Routine

"I began to pay attention to how much this act of brushing my teeth had become routinized, nonconscious behavior, compared with my first efforts to do it as a child. I began to suspect that 99 percent of my daily life was just as routinized and unnoticed; that my mind was always somewhere else; and that the thousand signals my body was sending me each minute were ignored. I guessed also that most people were like me in this respect."


Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life.