december
Reading:Gestures of Exhibiting, Beatrice von Bismarck
Everyday Camoflage in the City, Rafael Gomez-Moriana
Conservation and Regeneration: Complementary or Conflicting Processes? The Case of Grainger Town, Newcastle Upon Tyne, John Pendlebury
Wencun Village, China, by Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu’s Amateur Architecture Studio, Yiping Dong Today
Dream Works, newly published translations of the work of two overlooked design prophets, Frieze
‘Erase the traces’: urban experiance in Walter Benjamin’s commentary on Brecht’s lyric poetry, Luciano Gatti
november
John Humphrey Spender, Newcastle United Football Club Changing Room, 1938
‘Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.
In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is -
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages’
Philip Larkin, Friday Night At The Royal Station Hotel
‘... Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script ...’
Vergissmeinnicht, Keith Douglas
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The Glashaus (Glass House) Pavilion for the Werkbund (Work Federation) Exhibition at Cologne 1914, collaboration between Architect Bruno Taut and Poet Paul Scheerbart
‘Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.
In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is -
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages’
Philip Larkin, Friday Night At The Royal Station Hotel
‘... Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script ...’
Vergissmeinnicht, Keith Douglas
october
‘He had had to put on the light, and by doing so he had ended the summer. He had bundled the long days, the dog days when the grass begins to show yellow and the haystacks slip over to one side, into one of the drawers of his enormous desk’
Emma Tennant, Wild Nights, 1981
Heidegger’s concept of Geworfener Entwurf (thrown projection)
Dasein is a ‘thrown projection’, projecting itself onto the possibilities that lie before it or may be hidden, and interpreting and understanding the world in terms of possibilities. Such projecting has nothing to do with comporting oneself toward a plan that has been thought out‘Your destiny can't be changed but, it can be challenged. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one’
May Morris
(1862–1938) once described herself as a “remarkable woman… though none of you seemed to think so.”
Pinchbeck
89% copper to 11% zincChristopher Pinchbeck, a London clockmaker, invented pinchbeck in the 18th century. He sold it as imitation gold, or "pinchbeck metal". The word "pinchbeck" came to be used to mean fake or imitation because other jewelers tried to pass it off as real gold
september
Omnia mea mecum porto
All that is mine, I carry with me
‘Any work of art that can be photographed can take its place in Malraux's super-museum. But photography not only secures the admittance of objects, fragments of objects, details, etc., to the museum, it is also the organising device: it reduces the now even vaster heterogeneity to a single perfect similitude. Through photographic reproduction a cameo takes up residence on the page next to a painted tondo and a sculpted relief; a detail of a Rubens in Antwerp is compared to that of a Michelangelo in Rome. The art historian's slide lecture, the art-history student's slide comparison exam belong in the museum without walls’
Douglas Crimp, On The Museum's Ruins, p52
folly (2024) references slides so far
Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen
‘Of the cities in the world, few are depicted in and mythologized more in film and TV than the city of Los Angeles. Carefully weaving together footage from films made in or about the city, Thom Andersen gradually builds his thesis about how Hollywood has represented, and misrepresented, its hometown’
Facadism
‘Facadism is nothing new. Almost a century ago Herbert Baker cheerfully demolished John Soane’s Bank of England but rebuilt his own massive version behind retained sections of his predecessor’s impregnable walls. But the sacrificial offering of a single remnant of an older building, usually a street elevation and never more than skin deep, has suddenly reached epidemic proportions, turbo-powered in London at least by escalating land values.The agreement to retain a facade is, for the key players, a get out of jail card. It may come at the very end of a long wrangle but eventually the developers receive their planning permissions, prettily iced with listed building consents, the architects can relax and get on with the job (the demolition contractors and engineers having already done the trickiest bits) which leaves the marketing team and estate agents free to egg up the ‘heritage’ angle and clinch sales. Meanwhile the local activists have retired exhausted, or have moved on to ready themselves for the next battle of nerves. And – this is the trump card – all this means that the number of listed buildings saved from demolition appears to be continually rising’
Reading:
Objects in This Mirror, Brian Dillon
Why I Do What I Do: Global Curators Speak: 4, (Sternberg Press / Thoughts on Curating)
Order and Collapse, The Lives of Archives, Art and Theory Stockholm
Essays: On the Museum’s ruins, Douglas Crimp
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth- century Europe, Hayden White
Edgeless, Modeless, Paul Shepard
The Artist as Historian, Mark Godfrey
The Aesthetics of Decay, Nothingness, Nostalgia
and the Absence of Reason, Robert Ginsberg
Reading an Archive, Photography between labour and capital, Allan Sekula
Jorge Luis Borges and George Bernard Shaw, Leonard A. Cheever
Experiance and Poverty, Walter Benjamin
Heidegger on Melancholia, Deep boredom and the Inability-to-be, Kevin Aho
august
Reading:
Objects in This Mirror, Brian Dillon
Why I Do What I Do: Global Curators Speak: 4, (Sternberg Press / Thoughts on Curating)
Order and Collapse, The Lives of Archives, Art and Theory Stockholm
Lina Bo Bardi, exhibition deisgn
‘The São Paulo Museum of Art is recreating a 1968 exhibition design by Brazilian Modernist Lina Bo Bardi, commissioning updated versions of her glass and concrete easels to recreate an original exhibition design by the architect, for a new show of 117 artworks from 400 BC to the 2000s.São Paulo based Metro has recreated more than 100 of the easels – which featured a pane of glass supported by a concrete cube – by examining pieces that remained from the originals’ (2015)
When Lina Bo Bardi presented the collection of MASP on glass she expressed the desire to free works of art from any established reading or judgement and gave space for new relations between them and the public.
Hic et ubique
Here and everywhere
Here and everywhere
Rose Salane, 60 Detected Rings and Panorama 94
‘Salane acquired the rings in 60 Detected Rings from a metal detectorist who unearthed them over decades in Atlantic City’s sands. Again, the artist ferried the rings between a psychic and a lab, the latter of which was asked to conduct a second metal detection of the lot ... The rings were then mounted in a frame, each accompanied by excerpts of an investigation into their provenance’‘Panorama 94 examines a collection of 94 rings that were lost then found throughout the New York City Subway system in 2016. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority stored each ring for one year in the hope that they would be reclaimed by their respective owners. The rings were documented by colour and material before being archived with a detailed description and unique number for the MTA’s records. Salane acquired the lot and has since been working with a biology lab to extract potential traces of mitochondrial DNA left behind on each ring, an intuitive reader to search for any spiritual information imbued within these objects, and a pawnshop to appraise their material values. Presented with this assortment of collected insights, we are asked to consider parallel notions of value and truth as we recall the lineages of the individual in a public environment, the individual within the city, and the individual within a global population’
The River, restaurant by Dean Baldwin Lew
‘On a soft bend in the slow moving Burnley Creek running through Warkworth, Ontario a restaurant was opened for a single weekend in 2015. In the week prior, traps were set to capture an invasive species of freshwater crustaceans called “Rusty Crawfish”. As it is prohibited to “carry overland” a known invasive species (in that they might be introduced to a new uninfected watershed), the entire kitchen and dining area was set-up directly in the river’
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Dion Kitson, Rue Brittania, Ikon Gallery, 10.05.2024–08.09.202
‘The visual environment of Kitson’s exhibition at Ikon draws on the artist’s experiences of growing up in Dudley, a market town which prides itself as the birthplace of the industrial revolution and, as such, is replete with ruination – a metaphor for the wider state of British towns. Visitors to Rue Britannia are invited into the architectural installation Council House of Kitson (2024), which recreates both the façade and interior of his father’s house, who’s living room was also
pebbledashed. In contrast with the large-scale pebbledash installation, Ode to Rubbish Mountain (2022) is a miniature recreation of the iconic landfill pile that was removed from Brierley Hill in the Black Country in 2016 after a 5-year local battle to have it taken away.
Visitors to the exhibition can play on a functional pool table, as Kitson brings the staple of the British pub into the gallery space. Elsewhere, he shows a series of prints created from scratched bus stop windows, a form of found drypoint etchings. Slung from a suspended telegraph wire are the unmistakable ruby slippers of Dorothy. The Wizard of Oz – a whimsical, trippy and yearning tale of searching for the way home – is a key reference point for Kitson’
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Dion Kitson, Rue Brittania, Ikon Gallery, 10.05.2024–08.09.202
and Silver Lining at J W Evans Silver Factory, 54-57 Albion Street, Birmingham
‘The visual environment of Kitson’s exhibition at Ikon draws on the artist’s experiences of growing up in Dudley, a market town which prides itself as the birthplace of the industrial revolution and, as such, is replete with ruination – a metaphor for the wider state of British towns. Visitors to Rue Britannia are invited into the architectural installation Council House of Kitson (2024), which recreates both the façade and interior of his father’s house, who’s living room was alsopebbledashed. In contrast with the large-scale pebbledash installation, Ode to Rubbish Mountain (2022) is a miniature recreation of the iconic landfill pile that was removed from Brierley Hill in the Black Country in 2016 after a 5-year local battle to have it taken away.
Visitors to the exhibition can play on a functional pool table, as Kitson brings the staple of the British pub into the gallery space. Elsewhere, he shows a series of prints created from scratched bus stop windows, a form of found drypoint etchings. Slung from a suspended telegraph wire are the unmistakable ruby slippers of Dorothy. The Wizard of Oz – a whimsical, trippy and yearning tale of searching for the way home – is a key reference point for Kitson’
Paul Reas, Flogging a Dead Horse, Man with a Movie Camera, 1993
‘The decline of manufacturing industries in Britain throughout the 1980s forced the collective imagination of Britain to retreat into a time of more certainty. A time of empire, a time of full employment, a time of paternalistic benevolent mill owners and a time of the pastoral and picturesque. This desire for an illusion of stability was serviced by the heritage industry; with its themed industrial museums and country houses, heritage offered a novel (if spurious) sense of place and identity to a country which had lost its old ‘eternal truths’ of industry and empire, reassuring us that our lives are better in the new service economy than those of our parents in ‘the bad old days’ of the industrial past. But these heritage centres did not recover the past-they re-created it. The heritage process irons out differences, glosses over contradiction and unifies all the conflicting dynamics of the past into a single romantic and idealised version of it’
Derinkuyu
‘In 1963, a man knocked down a wall in his basement and discovered a mysterious underground city. The subterranean city is up to 18 stories and 280 feet deep in places and probably thousands of years old. The Derinkuyu Underground City is the largest of its kind: It could house 20,000 people’
july
Read:
Theatres of Memory, Raphael Samuel
Ruins: (Documents of Contemporary Art), Whitechapel Gallery
Art + Archive, Sara Callahan
Dust, Caroline Steedman
‘You know perfectly well that the infinite heaps of things they recorded, the notes and traces that these people left behind, constitute practically nothing at all. There is the great, brown, slow-moving strandless river of Everything, and then there is its tiny flotsam that has ended up in the record office you are at work in. Your craft is to conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater, and your competance in that was established long ago. Your anxiety is more precise and more prosaic. It’s about PT S2/1/1, which only arrived from the stacks that afternoon, which is enormous, and which you will never get through tomorrow’
Caroline Steedman, “Something She Called a Fever”
The Nigerian Pavilion at theVenice Biennale
2024, featuring exclusively commissioned, site-specific works, which have been installed throughout the historic Palazzo Canal in Venice’s Dorsoduro. Nigeria’s second participation, curated by Aindrea Emelife (Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at MOWAA, the Museum of West African Art in Benin City, Nigeria). Showcasing works by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Ndidi Dike, Onyeka Igwe, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Abraham Oghobase, Precious Okoyomon and Fatimah Tugga.
june
Read:
Always Open, Always Closed, Caitlin Merrett-King
People Person, Sam Cottingham
River, Esther Kinksy
Michael Rakowitz, The Flesh Is Yours, The Bones Are Ours, Graham Foundation, Chicago 2016
‘Rakowitz’s installation deploys fin de siècle Istanbul’s architectural remains as a counternarrative to the city’s rich multiethnic historical development, at the same time excavating psychic and material traces of the Armenian craftspeople responsible for much of the city’s art nouveau façades.The exhibition’s title “The Flesh Is Yours, The Bones Are Ours” refers to a customary Turkish saying used when an apprentice was given over to a master—meant to convey that the teacher was granted influence over their pupil’ Context collapseis a phrase used in digital culture to describe how the boundaries of different communication contexts collapse on social media, as personal, professional, and family spheres coalesce on these virtual platforms. danah boyd coined the phrase to describe how “technology complicates our metaphors of space and place, including the belief that audiences are separate from each other” (Marwick and Boyd 2)
Civil inattention defines how individuals show others that they are conscious of others’ presence without offending people by avoiding showing pervasive attention to them.In his studies, Goffman found that polite inattention often begins with a modest social engagement, such as extremely short eye contact, head nodding, or flimsy smiles. Following that, both parties usually turn away from one another.’
Glasgow School of Art BA Degree Show
...Helen
- conversation in Tramway, deciphering the join-the-dots exhibition guide of over 40 worksHelen welsh gold, harp, mother’s engagement ring london staying with a friend...
Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno
‘The Cimitero monumentale di Staglieno is an extensive monumental cemeterylocated on a hillside in the district of Staglieno of Genoa, Italy, famous for its monumental sculpture. Covering an area of more than a square kilometre, it is one of the largest cemeteries in Europe’‘For all its through traffic, constant din of vehicles, people in transit, none of whom intended to stop, and despite the constant trickle of decaying masonry, the place had come to a complete standstill; it was like one big theatre backdrop, a prop left by the side of a road which could be blown away in the next storm, or carried away in a flood’
River, Esther Kinksy
may
Read:
Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, Danielle Dutton,The Fall of Public Man, Richard Sennett
Danielle Dutton, Prairie, Dresses, Art Other
Nocturne‘It's the hottest week in the world. In Sweden a forest fire has crossed the Arctic Circle. In Oman the overnight low is 120 degrees. Near a small German town famous for its asparagus, long-deserted bombs are exploding beneath the trees. And just downstream in Czechia a hunger stone has emerged in the Elbe, the water having hit a record low. ‘If you see me, weep', it reads, the words etched desperately four centuries before. A second message emerges upriver: We cried - We cry - And you will cry? But the dead are as loud as toasters. The fish flap in the mud. Meanwhile, farther north, seen only from the sky, ghostly landscapes rise up via drought: the blueprint of an eighteenth-century mansion on a lawn, a World War II airfield beneath a Hampshire farm, an elaborate Victorian garden long ago cut down’
Episodic / Semantic memory
‘Episodic memory enables individuals to consciously recollect previous experiences and events in a serial form, from which one can reconstruct various instances and occurrences. Semantic memory, though, maintains no tie to personal events and is utilized in understanding symbols, language, and problem-solving’
Luc Tuymans, Schwarzheide
2019, Palazzo Grazzi‘When painting almost huffed its final breath in the 1990s, Tuymans was on hand to resuscitate with a new breed of figurative painting, and for that we are indebted. Cut, pasted then painted, Tuymans’ works are frequently archival abbreviations of press, internet and film source material, shorthand chronicles for seminal moments in culture and history, all burdened with secrets and narrative chaos. But if you didn’t read up, you’d probably never know. ‘I didn’t want words on the walls. I loathe those,’ he says. This lack of context shifts all the mental heavy lifting onto the viewer. The load is almost unmanageable, but the intrigue alone provides enough fuel to persevere.‘La Pelle’ offers little to no theme or chronology, and Tuymans by nature isn’t an easy read. It’s like peeping into someone else’s bank of fragmented memories, frantically searching for something solid to grasp. The visions are peripheral, jumbled and intangible. ‘He does not intend to take the visitor by the hand, he is asking them to make an effort to come closer; a reflection and a physicality instead,’ explains curator Caroline Bourgeois’
Ostracon
‘Ostraca (plural for ostracon) are potsherds used as surfaces for writing or drawing. By extension, the term is applied to chips of limestone which were employed for similar purposes. Figural ostraca vary from sketches of a single feature to polychrome painted compositions. They were used to practice drawing, draft compositions, and copy scenes. However, some ostraca were created for more durable functions, used as cult images in religious practice and deposited at tombs or shrines as sites of access to the divine. Ostraca on which animals appear acting as humans have been variously interpreted as playful jokes, political satire, or illustrations to fables or myths in the oral tradition’
Sarah Esme Harrison, Untitled (Gate for a Tree), 2023-2024
“Sometimes I feel heretical when I use the gate to conceal parts of the plein air painting. At the same time, on their own, the naked landscapes strike me as an obscenity by omission. I make paintings about Earth, not images of utopia. In the United States, where people subject the natural world to their fantasies about possession, control, and safety, the land contains a taboo. I add the gate as a form of anti-censorship: a way of owning up to that taboo, and implicating myself in it. The gate is my movable cloister, a place that lets me see. It is also an acknowledgment of my shadow.”
Sculpture House, Jacques Gillet
‘The Belgian architect Jacques Gillet designed the sculpture house in Liège (1967-1968) as a synthesis of structure and form, collaborating on this project with the sculptor Félix Roulin and the engineer René Greisch. This ‘living- sculpture’ was undertaken by the team as a reaction against the general pressure of that time towards standardisation of forms in architecture, in which an artistic poverty and deficiency needed to be counterbalanced through collaboration with sculptors and painters’
Wim Wenders, Perfect Days
‘Hirayama feels content with his life as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Outside of his structured routine, he cherishes music on cassette tapes, reads books and takes photos. Through unexpected encounters, he reflects on finding beauty in the world’ (the shadow bit)
Komorebi
‘Is the Japanese work for the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind. It only exists once, in that moment’
april
Feet of Clay
a weakness or hidden flaw in the character of a greatly admired or respected personChambre de Bonne
‘A chambre de bonne is a type of French apartment consisting of a single room in a middle-class house or apartment building. It is generally found on the top floor and only accessible by a staircase, sometimes a separate "service staircase". Initially, these rooms were intended as the bedroom for one of the family's domestics, and the name originates from the colloquial name for such maids: a "bonne à tout faire". Due to the social level of the envisaged occupants, chambres de bonne are characterised by their tight proportions. The rooms usually have a floor areaof around 6–12 m2 (65–129 sq ft), which is sometimes accentuated by being in a garret‘
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (button holes)
Fata morgana
‘A Fata Morgana is a complex form of superior mirage visible in a narrow band right above the horizon. The term Fata Morgana is the Italian translation of "Morgan the Fairy"’
‘Through a glass, darkly’
‘To see “through a glass” — a mirror — “darkly” is to have an obscure or imperfect vision of reality’For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Corinthians 13:12
Silver coin of Malcom IV of Scotland 1153-65 found by a metal detectorist in Cockairnie, Fife
Pop Inflection
Zazou Roddam, 16 November – 16 December 2023 Brunette Coleman gallery
‘Pop Inflection (The City) reconstructs segments from the popular HBO television series ‘Sex and the City’ which aired between 1998 to 2004. The video isolates only ‘the City’ – removing its famous quartet of female characters, to focus instead on spliced together clips of New York. Sequenced in chronological order, Pop Inflection (The City) presents a passage of time witnessed from the perspective of the urban metropolis. Beginning in 1998, the video opens with a multitude of aerial shots, panning the glittering Manhattan skyline that New York is so well-known. As time progresses, and crosses into the new millennium, we witness a subtle shift in the city’s rhythm. Transitioning away from sprawling skylines, the perspective narrows – becoming increasingly intimate and insular. Parks, churches, sidewalks and public sculptures begin dominating the screen, reducing the city to a more generic portrait. Accompanied by an original score produced by musician Luca Mantero, the video is a phantasmagoric unfolding of time, charting the change and inflections of a city’
march
Enid Yandell Artist and social activist
‘Enid Yandell was the first woman to be inducted into the National Sculpture Society in 1898.
Born in 1869, she defied norms as a pioneering sculptor from Louisville, Kentucky. At just 21, she gained fame for her work at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
Her crowning achievement was a monumental statue of Pallas Athena for the Nashville Exposition. Commissioned at just 27 years old for the 1897 Nashville Exposition, her work symbolized the city’s moniker, “Athens of the South.” Crafted in sections in her Paris studio, the sculpture stood tall in front of the Fine Arts Building, a replica of the Parthenon’
Born in 1869, she defied norms as a pioneering sculptor from Louisville, Kentucky. At just 21, she gained fame for her work at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
Her crowning achievement was a monumental statue of Pallas Athena for the Nashville Exposition. Commissioned at just 27 years old for the 1897 Nashville Exposition, her work symbolized the city’s moniker, “Athens of the South.” Crafted in sections in her Paris studio, the sculpture stood tall in front of the Fine Arts Building, a replica of the Parthenon’
Do Ho Suh Tracing Time
Edinburgh Modern One
Do Ho Suh,Wielandstr. 18, 12159 Berlin, Germany-3 corridors, 2011
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William N. Boyle (1956)
The 120-miles between Winchester and Canterbury pass through some of the south-east England's prettiest towns, villages and pastures. Between 1956 and today plenty has changed, but despite the narrator's grumblings about urban encroachment much is timeless. Like a good hike, the film is not a race and takes its time to pause and wonder at its surroundings.Halfway through the film there are some great scenes of a mass pilgrimage through the streets of Guildford to the site of the new Cathedral The event, which took place on the 4th April 1955, marked thmuch delayed start of the construction of the nave, and was clearly a celebratory occasion for the town and its surroundings’
‘A group from Glasgow’s Countryside Club visit the North Norfolk Coast, exploring Blakeney National Nature Reserve before the National Trail Path was established’
🔗
Castle Semple
‘Dating from shortly after the building of Castle Semple house in the early 1730s, the purpose of the ‘temple’ has been romanticised and lost. Ideas range from a place for viewing hunts to a local lovers’ meeting place.
The original purpose of the temple was simply a landscape feature or ‘folly’, designed to be seen from the mansion house and by visitors arriving at Castle Semple. It also served as a summer house with panoramic views. The design of the building probably comes from James Gibbs ‘Book of Architecture’, published in 1728, a sort of architect’s scrapbook of ideas. Gibbs described his designs as ‘summer houses in the form of temples of an octagonal form’ 🔗
Martin Boyce Before Behind
Between Above Below
Fruitmarket Gallery
Pilgrim’s Way
William N. Boyle (1956)The 120-miles between Winchester and Canterbury pass through some of the south-east England's prettiest towns, villages and pastures. Between 1956 and today plenty has changed, but despite the narrator's grumblings about urban encroachment much is timeless. Like a good hike, the film is not a race and takes its time to pause and wonder at its surroundings.Halfway through the film there are some great scenes of a mass pilgrimage through the streets of Guildford to the site of the new Cathedral The event, which took place on the 4th April 1955, marked thmuch delayed start of the construction of the nave, and was clearly a celebratory occasion for the town and its surroundings’
Holiday on the North Norfolk Coast
‘A group from Glasgow’s Countryside Club visit the North Norfolk Coast, exploring Blakeney National Nature Reserve before the National Trail Path was established’
🔗
Castle Semple
‘Dating from shortly after the building of Castle Semple house in the early 1730s, the purpose of the ‘temple’ has been romanticised and lost. Ideas range from a place for viewing hunts to a local lovers’ meeting place.The original purpose of the temple was simply a landscape feature or ‘folly’, designed to be seen from the mansion house and by visitors arriving at Castle Semple. It also served as a summer house with panoramic views. The design of the building probably comes from James Gibbs ‘Book of Architecture’, published in 1728, a sort of architect’s scrapbook of ideas. Gibbs described his designs as ‘summer houses in the form of temples of an octagonal form’ 🔗
‘folly’
‘A costly but useless structure built to satisfy the whim of some eccentric and thought to show his folly; usually a tower or a sham Gothic or classical ruin in a landscape park intended to enhance the view or picturesque effect’‘The term 'folly' comes from the French 'folie', meaning 'foolish'. The definition of a folly in the Dictionary of Architecture by Pevsner’
Batty Langley, the Temple of Modern Virtue vs the Temple of Ancient Virtue, The Sleeping Pavilion, Stowe. 🔗 🔗
Ratcliffe’s Folly or Ecton Castle
‘Arthur Ratcliffe owned a building firm and built a house for himself on a hill at Ecton in Staffordshire, about 12 miles from the town of Leek. It became known as "Ratcliffe's Folly", or "The Castle" because of its copper spire and battlements’
Brutalism
‘The term originates from the use by modern architect and painter Le Corbusier, of 'beton brut' – raw concrete in French. Banham gave the French word a punning twist to express the general horror with which this concrete architecture was greeted in Britain’
Anonymous / Significant objects
‘Anonymous Objects: Inscrutable Photographs and the Unknown suggests that unidentifiable things in photographs point towards larger questions about the limits of knowledge. In a world that seems to give up images of itself more freely every day, there’s very little left to the unknown. Inscrutable photographs keep ambiguity alive. They make room for curiosity and wonder by resisting our facile attempts to know the world by naming it’
‘Significant Objects was a literary and anthropological experiment that "demonstrated that the effect of narrative on any given object's subjective value can be measured objectively." For this experiment, Walker and Glenn asked 100 creative writers to invent stories about $129 worth of items and then sold them on eBay’
february
The Future Tense
Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy (2022)‘Staged as a series of voiceover sessions, The Future Tense unfolds as a poignant tale of tales, exploring the filmmakers' own experiences in aging, parenting, mental illness, and the brutal history beneath Ireland’s heavy earth’
Folded Map™ Project
‘Tonika Lewis Johnson’s Folded Map™ Project visually connects residents who live at corresponding addresses on the North and South Sides of Chicago. She investigates what urban segregation looks like and how it impacts Chicago residents’ Address pair- 6327 S. Hermitage and 6333 N. Hermitage
Kicking and Screaming
Noah Baumbach (1995)‘Paralyzed by postgraduation angst, four preppy young men dig in their heels to avoid the adulthood that the women in their lives confidently approach. Instead, they fill their empty days with endless talk that reveals an expert knowledge of high and low culture—and a quiet terror of what lies ahead’
Coalesence
The Glasgow School of Art Exhibitions‘Coalesence is a celebratory exhibition bringing together the creative work of technicians and associated staff at The Glasgow School of Art. Work is from across the disciplines, including sculpture, photography, textiles, painting, printmaking and digital’
Bitches be Bingeing
émergent magazine, Robert Frost on Skylar Haskard.Below UNTITLED, (KNOW YOUR LIMITS), 2022.
Heart of the Angel
Molly Dineen, 40 Minutes documentary (1989)‘Acclaimed documentary that follows 48 hours in the life of London’s Angel tube station in the days before its refurbishment’ The lift is always broken, the workers are disenchanted.
Interviewer- It sounds like you are depressed.
Derek Perkins (Ticket Seller)- I’m not depressed at all. Realistic, I think, is more the term.
Ray Stocker (Foreman) ‘The whole pace of life is stupid. I get the impression that they’re running out of time’
Ray dreams of living in Yorkshire.
Interviewer- Do you like wild places?
Ray- Mm. Lonely places. (laughs)
He goes on to show photos of paintings he’s done (below)
‘That’s the last one that I done and the wife didn’t like it. So I never done any more’
Jill, uncredited
Anthony Ing (2022)‘At first you do not even notice her, she is one of many. But, little by little, you begin to become aware of her and her special presence. As a background artist, Jill Goldston has worked on countless films.
This collage of fifty years of cinema and television history is a tribute to her and to all the figures in the background without whom those in the foreground would be unable to take centre stage’
It is fancy which decks reality and if imagination does not lend its charm to that which touches our senses, our barren pleasure is confined to the senses alone, while the heart remains cold - J.J. Rousseau
Paisley Provident Co-Operative Society building
The building was designed by architect Robert B Miller in 1907-8 and considered to be in the free Renaissance style. This style is attributed to English architect, Charles Eastlake (1868-1890) with his tendency for rich surface ornamentation’
(renews mubi subscription section)
It dropped so low—in my Regard—
Emily Dickinson (1896)It dropped so low — in my Regard
I heard it hit the Ground
And go to pieces on the Stones
At bottom of my Mind
Yet blamed the Fate that flung it — less
Than I denounced Myself,
For entertaining Plated Wares
Upon My Silver Shelf
january
An accidentally entropic collection, especially for a January, 3rd spaces and community no longerexisting due to the global market (The Town that ..., Silicon Glen) and spaces lost or losing (A House in Bayswater, A Bunch of Amateurs) and the fragments of monuments that remain (Apollo Pavilion, Tribune Tower).A few gallery visits including The Scottish Portrait Award opening at our Glasgow Art club and the New Glasgow Society members’ social, but honestly the weather was poor and I was poorer. (Poor Things was grand though, Mr Gray)
Tribune Tower:
Fragments of history
‘Nearly 150 fragments from famous structures and historic sites around the world are embedded in Tribune Tower's first story walls. They include chunks of the Great Wall of China, the Great Pyramid of Cheops and the Berlin Wall. The tradition began in 1914 when Col. Robert R. McCormick, the Chicago Tribune's longtime editor and publisher, was covering WWI. Touring a medieval cathedral in Ypres, France, that had been damaged by German shelling, he grabbed a piece for himself. Many of the pieces were gifts to Col. McCormick and some were brought back to Chicago by foreign correspondents’
Yes, questionable regarding the displacement of architectural features for one man’s endevour, giving British Museum a little bit, but interesting in the idea of ‘borrowing’ elements to concrete an outdoor museum of sorts. Away from the neo-gothic foundations of the Tribune Tower’s design, it’s a collage or collaboration with other elements of buit heritage. One of the more modern additions is a twisted steel beam from the World Trade Centre- I’d be interested to know what the requirements for a new addition are and equally, if they are still adding to it- or is the collaboration now sealed?
The Town that Floored the World
How did the Scottish east coast port town of Kirkcaldy become the world centre for linoleum? The Town That Floored the World traces the history of that 'magic material’
Jennifer Leigh Blaine, Half a Longing
New Glasgow SocietyDescribed by the artist ‘quiet and shadow’, the exhibition was shaped by stills from the film Housekeeping (1987) ‘Based on Marilynne Robinson's 1980 novel Housekeeping, it is about two young sisters growing up in Idaho in the 1950s. After being abandoned by their mother and raised by elderly relatives, the sisters are looked after by their eccentric aunt whose unconventional and unpredictable ways affect their lives’
Frances Ha
Noah Baumbach‘A New York woman apprentices for a dance company and throws herself headlong into her dreams, even as the possibility of realizing them dwindles.’
“But I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.”
Edith Wharton, The Fullness of Life, 1893
Humourism
16th-century German illustration of the four humors: Flegmat (phlegm), Sanguin(blood), Coleric (yellow bile) and Melanc (black bile), divided between the male and female sexes
Read:
The Idea of North, Peter Davidson
Why I Do What I Do: Global Curators Speak: 4, (Sternberg Press / Thoughts on Curating)
Essays:
Image and Inventory: Picture Post and the British View of Scotland, 1938-1957, Andrew Blaikie
"The Intolerable Ugliness of New York": Architecture and Society in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Cynthia G. Falk
Bewildered Remembrance: W. B. Yeats's ‘The Dreaming of the Bones’ and 1916, Christopher Morash Contemporary Art’s Twin Follies, Mike Pepi
Cesare Ripa
Fig. 238. Pazzia : Folly
Iconologia, or, Moral emblems, 1709
‘Person at Mans Estate, in a long, black Garment; laughing ; riding upon a Hobby-horse; holding, in one Hand, a Whirligig of Past-board; and plays the Fool with Children, who make him twirl it by the Wind. Folly is only acting contrary to due decorum, and the common Custom of Men, delighting in childish Toys, and Things of little Moment’
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Showing the way
Anton Ginter, Consideratio emblems, 1711
Showing the way
firmitas, utilitas, venustas
Writing near the end of the first century B.C.E., Roman architect Vitruvius Pollio identified three elements necessary for a well-designed building: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas. Firmness or physical strength secured the building's structural integrity. Utility provided an efficient arrangement of spaces and mechanical systems to meet the functional needs of its occupants. And venustas, the aesthetic quality associated with the goddess Venus, imparted style, proportion, and visual beauty.
📎
Venice Biennale 2024 notes
You’ll never work in this town again, Phil Collins
‘’Berlin-based, British-born contemporary artist Phil Collins—no relation—strives to hit the same note between righteous criticality and swagger in his project you’ll never work in this town again (2004-ongoing). The work, in which Collins slaps willing protagonists of the art world across the face and then photographs them against a blank white background, keeps with his subtly evocative brand of socially engaged practice ... You’ll never work in this town again ostensibly offers catharsis to the participants. These subjects, however, are not the postcolonial oppressed, but rather the curators, critics, and writers (and, occasionally, dealers and collectors) who form the cadres of contemporary art production’
Dearest Fiona, Fiona Tan
‘Offscreen we hear a man’s gentle voice talking. It is the late 1980s, the young art student Tan has just moved to Amsterdam. Approximately once a fortnight, her father in Australia writes to her. In parallel Tan combines her father’s letters with documentary film images from the silent era in an evocative soundscape. In a voice-over spoken by actor Ian Henderson, we get to know him, his life, his relationship with his daughter, and increasingly, the times he lives in. Effortlessly he switches from the minutiae of domestic life or local politics to momentous historical events of the time: the Tiananmen Square massacre, the end the communism in Eastern Europe, Mandela’s election in South Africa. Events which, to this day, cast long shadows.As the film unfolds we see rare and little known images of daily life in The Netherlands from 100 years ago, selected from the archives of the Netherlands Eye Filmmuseum. Unforgettable scenes – often tinted, sometimes even painstakingly coloured by hand – which offer entry into a world both familiar and unknown. The juxtaposition between word and image is striking. Embracing both small and large – the personal and the universal – it is as if the letter-writer discovers these images together with us, the viewer. Windmills, clogs, fishing boats, cows and tulips, they are all there. But mainly we see people at work. The resulting film is a hypnotic montage – an unexpectedly emotional voyage through time and place, questioning the current status quo while hovering somewhere between dream and reality’
Studies of the History of the Renaissance,Walter Pater
‘In the last paragraph of Walter Pater's Studies of the History of the Renaissance, Pater makes an existential analysis of how the way in which we view things matter to people individually, based on each of our personal experiences in life. Although this sounds obvious in the surface, Pater goes more in-depth: he argues that there is a difference between what we perceive things to be, and what things really are. That everything, from objects, to sounds, to emotions, are uniquely particular to the value that we choose to bestow upon them.If we are not careful, we risk the chance of allotting value and importance to things that do not deserve it. As a result, we may end up being trapped in personal and psychological limitations that we impose upon ourselves merely because of the value that we choose to give things. This message is obvious when he concludes:
To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves’
The Doll, Ernst Lubitsch
A Dirge Without Music, Edna St Vincent Millay
...Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost...
Conscience pile
‘In the archives of a small museum in the middle of nowhere, there are piles and piles of letters from remorseful senders dating as far back as 1938. These letters were accompanied in the mail by returned pieces of petrified wood, stolen from Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. Believing they are cursed and condemned by the karma of ancient hot rocks they stole on vacation one time, the writers report strange happenings, stories of sudden misfortune and express their urgent desire to be free of their ill gotten souvenirs’ Ryan Thompson, 2011
Katie Paterson, Future Library, 2014-2114
‘A forest has been planted in Norway, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in 100 years time. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unread and unpublished, until the year 2114. The manuscripts will be held in a specially designed room in the new public library, Oslo. Writers to date include Margaret Atwood (2014), David Mitchell (2015), Sjón (2016), Elif Shafak (2017), Han Kang (2018), Karl Ove Knausgård (2019), Ocean Vuong (2020) and Tsitsi Dangarembga (2021). Judith Schalansky is 2022’s author’
The Venice Biennale, 1895-1968; from Salon to Goldfish Bowl, Lawrence Alloway
‘The pavilions in the Giardini, where the exhibition is housed, are erected by each country and the styles are a vivid array of national self-images. As the pavilions are occasional architecture, they are more demonstrative than buildings pur up for continuous use; they are frivolous, but sensitive to the cultures from which they originate. At a large exhibition, the total effect, the sam of the physical plant and its content of individual works, has a meaning. To look only for the pure art content within the circus of material display at large-scale shows confuses this meaning. Such an approach leads to a constant antagonism between the containing system and the exhibirs contained. The exhibition itself, as we shall argue later, has a structure, and hence a message, as much as the art that it shows. Here we can approach the architecture as a model of nonverbal com-municacion, somewhar like an exhibition. The pavilions, buil and rebuile at various times, can be divided into categories of folkloric, classicizing, and international’ p17Gallery in the Central Pavilion 1928
Thames Embankment Dolphin / Sturgeon lamps
‘The building of Victoria, Albert and Chelsea Embankments would give Londoners new places to stroll down by the river and, in order for them to stroll safely, lighting was needed.The installation of the original 49 ornate cast iron ‘sturgeon’ lamp columns mounted on top of the Victoria embankment wall thus created the ‘Dolphin Zone’ occurring in 1870s.
The cast-iron lamps feature two dolphins (or sturgeons) with their bodies wrapped around the lamp column and were apparently inspired by the dolphin sculptures on the Fontana del Nettuno in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo.
Then, in 1977, City authorities had replicas placed on the North and South banks of the river to commemorate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, with ‘EIIR’ inscribed to honour Queen Elizabeth II’
George Richardson and Leon Scott-Engel walk into a bar, Plaster Magazine interview
‘Richardson says the material for his degree show was scavenged from a skip that his grandad (“the least sentimental man around”) had filled. I ask him, is he sentimental? “I’m still working out what I believe about lots of things.” Scott-Engel, by comparison, is. “I grew up surrounded by art, my parents are creative. They’re very sentimental people … You hold a sentimental place for your art, especially certain works, and then when you let them out into the world you give up control over the idea and you let other people experience it.”I go to the bar for a Guinness, a Meteor and a Campari soda for Scott-Engel. I leave them with another question: can sentimentality spill over into resentment? When you’re too close to your art, can you come to hate it?’
Quod non est in actis non est in mundo
What is not kept in the records, does not exist
John Cage, “ORGAN²/ASLSP.”
‘On first glance, the German town of Halberstadt may seem like any other. Winding rows of timbered houses line cobbled streets, broken up by the occasional remnant of gothic architecture. Within the quaint trappings of this berg, though, rests one of the most ambitious and odd musical experiments to see life: a six-century-long performance of legendary composer John Cage’s piece “ORGAN²/ASLSP.”’
Red rot
Red powdering’, ‘red decay’ and ‘red rot’ continue to be described in the literature of book conservation. 'Red rot' is as well known among historians as it is among archivists. A crumbling of leather in the form of an orangey-red powdering, it is said to be found particularly in East India leather, prepared with tannin of bark, wood or fruits.
The Flow Country
of Caithness and Sutherlandin the far north of Scotland covers almost 2,000 sq km (469,500 acres) of one of the most intact and extensive blanket bog systems in the world
Roni Horn, Still Water (The River Thames, for Example), 1999
Future Library 2014 - 2114