16.7.13

Ocean Chart

"...He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

A map they could all understand."
Lewis Carroll, The hunting of the snark, 1876


Henry Holiday's illustration for the 1976 edition


16.4.13

Virginia Woolf / Robert Smithson...

...have both wandered in the british countryside.

Chalk Mirror Displacement, Robert Smithson, 1969

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/nancy-holt-and-robert-smithson-england-1969


"To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought — to call it by a prouder name than it deserved — had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until — you know the little tug — the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say."
A room of one's own, Viginia Woolf

10.4.13

mark vs mike

Mark Dion, New England Digs, 2002

Mike Kelley, The Endless Morphing Flow of Common Motifs (Jewelry Case), 2002

22.3.13

21.1.13

If explanations exhausted my work, it would die and stop being art. [...] The artwork would be no more than a redundant illustration of a theory. It is possible that much of my work is no more than that. But if there is any part of it that survives beyond the reading of this text, it does so because of its inexplicability. Only this inexplicability is capable of an expansion of knowledge. Therefore, we find ourselves again in the realms of magic, of a surprised credulity, of passing mysteries as a validating condition for art. The creative process is lighted by theory, but true art stalks from shadows incompletely evanesced.” Luis Camnitzer, 1986.