At an outdoor temporary pavilion in the main parking lot at the Southern California Institute of Architecture are fellow architects Peter Cook, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Eric Owen Moss and Greg Lynn, where Moss is director. (Rafael Sampaio Rocha / September 26, 2010) I have had Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about a Troubled Relationship […]
Author: Deborah Barlow
Liang at the ICA
The painting by Fred H. C. Liang that hangs next to my desk. Its surface, almost impossible to capture in a photograph, pulls me into its labyrinth of layers every time. Closer view Boston-based Fred H. C. Liang is one of my favorite artists and also a finalist for the ICA’s Audrey Foster prize. He […]
- Art Making
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Ways of Working
At some level, everything is of interest to the eye…a view of one corner of my studio space How do artists work? In a recent posting on Real Clear Arts, Judith H. Dobrzynski makes the case that as mysterious as the creative process is, it is that which people most want to know. And that […]
Social Instruction
Blake Morrison has published his review of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, in the Guardian. Reading a Brit’s view of this very American novel is refreshing. Plus Morrison is an insightful reader. Here’s an excerpt: Like most writers, Franzen is a mass of contradictions. His fiction is generous and expansive, but it’s achieved through monastic […]
Daily Muses
From the wry mind of Andrei Codrescu in The Poetry Lesson: The Ten Muses of Poetry 1. Mishearing 2. Misunderstanding 3. Mistranslating 4. Mismanaging 5. Mislaying 6. Misreading 7. Misappropriating cliches 8. Misplacing objects belonging to roommates or lovers 9. Misguided thoughts at inappropriate times, funerals, etc. 10. Mississippi (the river) I have found that […]
- Aesthetics
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Witnessing
“Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one,” is saying that one witness is everybody else giving you their feedback and opinions (which is worth listening to, there’s some truth in what people say) but the principal witness is yourself. You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep […]
Judy Pfaff: Five Decades
Judy Pfaff’s work has inspired me for a long time. Her new show at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe called Five Decades, includes work from various times as well as formats. Seeing artifacts made by her always thrills something in me, particularly her 2D creations. But this show has playfulness and delight on exhibit in […]
Where Words Gathered
Words The simple contact with a wooden spoon and the word recovered itself, began to spread as grass, forced as it lay sprawling to consider the monument where patience looked at grief, where warfare ceased eyes curled outside themes to search the paper now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient, word entered its continent eager […]
Counter-Spirits
In search of the “flashes of identity between subject and object”……the world that exists outside language The following provocation closely aligns with my own views. This passage is by a forceful voice, Barbara Guest, from a book of her writings, Forces of Imagination: There is no substitute for imagination. Words deprived of their stability—that is […]
Eternally Artful
Some images never grow old, never fade in color on that screen of our life that lives at the back of the mind. Some of the images that live on for me were created 18,000 years ago, in southern France. I remember the first time I saw ever saw cave painting art. I was a […]