nationally ranked squash player excels at other stuff too!

meet the new blue, same as the old blue.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/france-slowly-bringing-back-its-forgotten-vegetables-180974780/#.Xq3r9mkoKO0.facebook
 

French veg

You know you've probably lived too long when Spiral Jetty turns up on Antiques Roadshow.

 

An effort to describe the diversity of birds led to one of the first modern color systems. Published by Smithsonian ornithologist Robert Ridgway in 1886, A Nomenclature of Colors for Naturalists categorizes 186 colors alongside diagrams of birds. In 1912, Ridgway self-published an expanded version for a broader audience — Color Standards and Color Nomenclature — that included 1,115 colors. Some referenced birds, like “Warbler Green” and “Jay Blue,” while others corresponded to other elements of nature, as in “Bone Brown” and “Storm Gray.”

 

1507 world map

cajun boudin

 

RP 1971: John Gibson Gallery—who were some of the artists around then? Was anybody else doing things like you? What about minimalism? Robert Smithson?
 

VA I thought everybody was doing things like I was. I think we all shared the same general concerns, to break out of, and break, the gallery system—to range the way the “Whole Earth Catalogue” ranged—to be as articulate as possible about work so that art wasn’t mystified, to see art as just one system in an interrelated field of systems, to hate the United States, and power, during the Vietnam War.
 

Minimalism was my father-art. For the first time, I was forced to recognize an entire space, and the people in it (I had to look at the light socket on the wall, just in case, I wasn’t going to play the fool). Until minimalism, I had been taught, or I taught myself, to look only within a frame; with minimalism the frame broke, or at least stretched.
 

Smithson was probably everybody’s conscience. Maybe because Smithson went outside, I could go inside—I had to go somewhere else—inside myself.
 

smithson/jennings

A 1948 flood washed away the WWII housing project Vanport—but its history still informs Portland's diversity.

and the identity of Jack the Ripper is...

Origin of the spiral jetty. / just to beat Alex to the punch.

5/5: no limes? No problem.

MSG

macro or micro

numb nutz

great cocktail moments in literature

toxic pigments sourced from polluted streams

Leafsnap: An Electronic Field Guide

Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. This free mobile app uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves.

Leafsnap contains beautiful high-resolution images of leaves, flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. Leafsnap currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington, D.C., and will soon grow to include the trees of the entire continental United States.

Available initially for the iPhone.

new smithsonian american art museum blog: eye level

(this is the dog we were talking about tonight that has the puppies.)

Reminder:
Afterbirth opens today, Wednesday, at Living with Art (in SoHo)
Opening reception 6-9pm
153 Lafayette (at Grand St.), 7th Floor

Tillamook Cheddar: Afterbirth comprises paintings and sculptures created during the months before—and after—the birth of her first and only litter, six healthy puppies born July 10, 2005.

• Opening Reception with Tillie on Wednesday, November 2nd from 6 to 9 pm.

• Kid’s Reception. Tillie will host an afternoon for kids on Saturday November 5th from noon to 5 pm and will demonstrate her talent with a live painting performance – adults friendly.

• Pet Reception. Tillie will welcome dogs of any breeds on Saturday, November 12th from 2 to 5 pm – human friendly.

Afterbirth exhibit: November 2 to 15. The Living with Art gallery is open for visits from noon to 6 everyday except Sundays and Mondays.



Also, Tillie's first solo museum exhibition opens Thursday:

An Exhibit of Art by Tillamook Cheddar
Curated by Baird Jones
November 3, 2005 through November 24, 2005
The Paterson Museum
2 Market St.
Paterson, NJ (973-321-1260)

and this:

“Who is the Most Provocative
Conceptual Artist of Our Time?”

An Exhibition of Art by

Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson,
Christo, Tillamook Cheddar

Curated by Baron Edmund Voyer and Baird Jones

Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005, 10:15 - midnight

Gypsy Tea Nightclub, 27 W. 24th St. (off 6th Ave.)

Private vodka mixed drinks reception from 10:15 - 11:30PM

Free admission for you and your guests from 10:15 until midnight
by saying that you are there for this art show

smithson blitz at nyt

A westside weekend:

The Kitchen and Highline 'block party'

Smithson's 'Floating Island' realised

(not in order of preference)

"The Whitney Museum and the New York-based arts organization Minetta Brook are collaborating to bring life to Floating Island, an unrealized project from 1970 by legendary American Earthworks artist Robert Smithson. Slated for Sept. 17-18 and 24-25, 2005, and planned in conjunction with the Whitney's major retrospective of Smithson's work (opening June 23rd), the project consists of a barge filled with earth and vegetation, towed around the island of Manhattan by a tugboat."

Pamela M. Lee on Robert Smithson in the new (Dec/Jan) Bookforum:

In its rigor and heft, its scope and illustrations, the new Robert Smithson exhibition catalogue is as compelling as a codex. Published on the occasion of a major traveling retrospective originating at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA), itconveys the gravity of its subject through an encyclopedic array of entries: an exacting survey of Smithson's career by the exhibition's curator, Eugenie Tsai; a scholarly essay by an internationally esteemed art historian (Thomas Crow); an unpublished interview (conducted by Moira Roth) rescued from the dustbin of history; and shorter, more specific takes on diverse aspects of Smithson's practice—the logic of salt in his work; his enantiomorphic chambers; his architectural ambitions; his formative impact on contemporary art. These texts make an unequivocal case for the singularity of Smithson's contribution, detailing a much more complex picture of the artist than that of the cowboy architect behind Spiral Jetty.

"Next month, a former factory in a small town an hour north of New York will become the first museum dedicated to the greatest generation of American artists. Not Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning. The next generation, the one that came of age during the 1960's and 70's, the one that includes Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt, Andy Warhol, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra. The history of American art is going to need a little rewriting."

I saw The Adaptation last night. I've beein thinking about it all morning and suspect I will be for quite some time. Bio-collectors and fans of Robert Smithson and Vito Acconci might well enjoy this movie. Here's the rottentomatoes page. (some of the reviews give away much of the plot.)

Stockhausen as Smithson

Robert Smithson

Can You Say ? (You Can See) :

'Poetry Plastique'

Marianne Boesky 535 West 22nd Street, Chelsea Through March 10

"Art and poetry: made for each other. So it has always been. Poets write about art; artists turn to poetry for ideas. Sometimes the two disciplines meet in collaboration; occasionally that collaboration is forged in the work of a single person. All these variables are aired in "Poetry Plastique," in which image and word are flexibly intertwined.

Organized by Jay Sanders, who is on the staff at Boesky, and the poet Charles Bernstein, the selection covers a stretch of recent historical ground. At the early end are scribbly, word-peppered Blakean pages by Robert Smithson from 1962 and a labyrinthine written piece by the arch-Fluxian Jackson Mac Low from 1975. The 1970's are well represented here, with work by Carl Andre, Wallace Berman and text- and-image collaborations by Arakawa and Madeline Gins.

Other work is new. Mr. Bernstein collaborates with Richard Tuttle on a witty sculpture made of plump, strung together 3-D letters, and with Susan Bee on a noirish painting in which Emily Dickinson and Mickey Spillane face off. Dickinson's attenuated handwriting finds an echo in Mira Schor's word paintings. The show enters the digital realm in a rich text-and-image work by Johanna Drucker and Brad Freeman, and in Tan Lin's computer-generated poetry pulsing away on three monitors.

The day after the show opened, the gallery was host to a series of related panel discussions and readings. Poets and artists participated. A big audience turned up. It was great. The buzz of voices and ideas made the art in the room — and Chelsea itself, for that matter — feel alive and interactive. Some of the pieces really need that charge; they look staid and hermetic without it. But others do fine on their own, and the cross-disciplinary concept behind the show is ripe for further exploration.

Perhaps Mr. Sanders and Mr. Bernstein already have further plans along these lines. Meanwhile, art and texts mutually ignite elsewhere in the city these days: in Cy Twombly's not-to-be-missed "Coronation of Sesostris" paintings, based on a poem by Patricia Waters, at Gagosian Gallery (980 Madison Avenue, at 76th Street, through tomorrow); in a collaboration between the painter Max Gimblett and the poet John Yau at Ethan Cohen Fine Art (37 Walker Street, SoHo, through March 10); in a series of collaborative prints by contemporary Puerto Rican artists and poets at El Taller Boricua (Lexington Avenue at 106th Street, through tomorrow); in an exhibition of contemporary text-based works, "A Way with Words," at the Whitney at Philip Morris (120 Park Avenue, at 42nd Street, through March 30); and in a jewel of an exhibition of artists' diaries, with bold little drawings and sonnet-size personal jottings, at the Archives of American Art (1285 Avenue of the Americas, at 51st Street, through May 31)."

- HOLLAND COTTER for NYT

Having seen the show, let me give a stronger recommendation for Guido Hardt and Arthur Tsay, at 456 Gallery (456 Broadway, south of Grand, 3rd Floor). The show includes Guido's pencil drawings, which seem to elaborate on freeway off ramps, in a style that's somewhere between architectural rendering and calligraphy. One series integrates the structures with landscape settings in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Robert Smithson's work. The main thing, however, is a collaboration with Arthur Tsay, (I guess this is where the Chinese-American connection comes in). His PVC pipe sculpture serves as a speaker cabinet, which is suspended in the middle of the gallery, where it emits the electronic soundtrack for a stunning projection of psychedelic video feedback. It's a cool piece. These guys are definitely working in some areas that should be of interest to readers of these pages. The show is up till August 26; go see it.