2011

James Grashow's Corrugated Fountain

“Everything in the cosmos exists to emerge as a Book” If Mallarmé were writing today, he might want to change that to Film. James Grashow worked for four years on “Corrugated Fountain, “ an installation of melancholy and ephemeral beauty. A lifelong woodcutter, he carved-and-pasted the work out of corrugated cardboard in anticipation of its eventual dissolution. In time, it will exist only on film as the protagonist, so to speak, of Olympia Stone’s documentary of its making: “The Cardboard Bernini.” Continue Reading
Thornton Willis at Elizabeth Harris

WHAT WE LIKE TO CALL THE “MODERNIST GRID” is really not modern at all. It is the application to painting of a structural pattern that is so ancient it can almost be thought of, in Platonic terms, as an Ideal Form. Grid patterns determine the layout of streets in antiquity on different continents. The grid template shaped Indus Valley town planning in the third century B.C.E.. It appealed to the Greeks and Romans. Ancient Mexican builders used it; so did the Chinese and Korean. Continue Reading
Calder at the National Portrait Gallery

WE ARE SO FAMILIAR WITH ALEXANDER CALDER’S kinetic mobiles and painted stabiles, we forget that he was also a prolific portraitist.  Throughout his career, Calder (1898-1976) portrayed entertainment, sports, and art-world figures, including Josephine Baker, Jimmy Durante, Babe Ruth, and Charles Lindbergh, as well as colleagues , Fernand Léger, and Saul Steinberg, among others. Herewith, the museum’s introductory précis:
Typically, Calder worked in the unorthodox medium of wire, a flexible linear material, which he shaped into three-dimensional portraits of considerable character and nuance.
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Dolls, Dames and Scholarship

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION features an article on an instructional project by a Hamilton College sophomore. She put some minimal geometry to work to create a life-sized Barbie scaled to the original. The result is a sculpted tutorial intended to let us know that female eating disorders have little to do with food. Just in case we did not already know. // // Still, two things are worth noting. First, the over-sized, over-endowed Barbie is better suited to a Whitney Biennial than an institution of higher play learning. Continue Reading
Ash Wednesday

ASH WEDNESDAY WAS YESTERDAY, March 9th. I mention it today because, by last night, I had seen only two other people in town wearing ashes. buy priligy online https://medicalcoder.io/wp-includes/sitemaps/providers/php/priligy.html no prescription buy cipro online https://www.mobleymd.com/wp-content/languages/new/cipro.html no prescription It saddened me. Even in childhood, Ash Wednesday captivated me in some unspoken way. I loved walking about displaying the mark of my mortality rubbed onto my forehead. All around were others, adults and kids like me, carrying the same mark. Not everyone, of course, but enough that my burnt-palm ashes did not isolate me. Continue Reading