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Cornelius Cardew was a fascinating figure. Both in his life, and through his music, he posed questions with which I find myself in equal sympathy and conflict. He is undeniably one of the most important figures in the Post-War British avant-garde. Cardew, by all accounts, was a prodigy. During his early twenties he worked at the highest levels of performance. In 1958 (age 22) he won a scholarship to study at the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, and was promptly asked by Karlheinz Stockhausen to serve as his assistant. Stockhausen’s recollections of Cardew are drenched in respect. He was one of the few people whom he allowed to work on his scores unsupervised. During the late 50’s, influenced by John Cage and other members of his generation, Cardew abandoned Serialism and began to compose scores utilizing indeterminacy and experiment. It was this period of his work for which he is most remembered, and from which Treatise (our subject) comes. In 1967 he joined the iconic free-improvisation collective AMM with Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe and Christopher Hobbs, which advanced his sense of compositional possibility. The following year with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons he formed the equally important Scratch Orchestra, which grew into a large ensemble, preforming over the following four years.

 


- bill 2-29-2016 8:46 pm [link] [7 refs] [add a comment]

Artist Frank Stella’s abstract synagogues on display in Poland

The works are from his Polish Village series produced in the 1970s. He  embarked on that project after he was inspired by a 1959 book by Polish architects Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka entitled “Wooden Synagogues.” The exhibition also features photographs of the synagogues by Szymon Zajczyk, a Jewish photographer and art historian who was killed in the Holocaust.

 


- bill 2-19-2016 3:44 pm [link] [12 refs] [add a comment]

Steve and Ruth in times review


- steve 2-18-2016 11:30 pm [link] [7 refs] [6 comments]

but it's like that and that's the way it is / freeports


- bill 2-02-2016 8:58 pm [link] [25 refs] [add a comment]

Marginalized but not Demystified
 


- bill 1-06-2016 7:31 pm [link] [11 refs] [add a comment]

 

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.
 


- bill 1-01-2016 7:40 pm [link] [2 refs] [add a comment]