Desperate for spiritual salvation and solitude, as well as a place to dry out, he secretly retreats to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's rustic cabin in the Big Sur woods. But his plan is foiled by his own inner demons, and what ensues that summer becomes the basis for Kerouac's gritty, yet lyrically told, semi-autobiographical novel, Big Sur.

One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur, takes the viewer back to Ferlinghetti's cabin and to the Beat haunts of San Francisco and New York City for an unflinching, cinematic look at the compelling events the book is based on. (...)

Thesis Project

An integrated branding campaign based around the illustrative reinterpretation of classic book covers directed toward junior-high-school students. You can check out more of the bits and pieces here. Done while at Kent State.

In the '60s a great many poets were working very hard to break through poetry's received tonalities and modes of address, but Spicer went at it in a way that undermined even the pieties of the avant-garde. It seemed there were things that only Jack Spicer would put in a poem, and these turned out to be a whole category of syntactical fake-outs and parodistic distortions, deliberately frustrated expectations and mood-changing intrusions. Was that last bit a joke or a prayer, an outburst of self-pity or something more like savage mockery? Or were all these surface skitterings and chasms merely traces of the earthling Jack Spicer being moved around the board by the entity transmitting the message, a message whose unmediated significance would be revealed only in the original Martian? "If this is dictation, it is driving / Me wild."

Spicer's sound is finally as naggingly persistent as the surf that haunts his work, as in these lines from "Thing Language":

This Is the End of the Poem - How Jack Spicer broke through the pieties of the avant-garde | Geoffrey O'Brien

via The Poetry Foundation

Read the article

Poems By Jack Spicer

"Any fool can get into an ocean..."

A Diamond

A Poem Without a Single Bird in It

A Second Train Song for Gary

Berkeley in Time of Plague

Concord Hymn

Ode For Walt Whitman

Orpheus in Hell

Six Poems for Poetry Chicago

Thing Language

~.~

"The poet Jack Spicer did more than simply write poems about aliens. He famously explained that his work was written by them. Much like Lorca's notion of Duende—the dark force poets struggle with which "must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood"—Spicer reported that his relationship to his poems was similar to that of a radio to incoming broadcasts and that it was Martians who sent his poems to him through space.

Whether searching in earnest for answers or simply gazing up at the stars, poets continue to engage what lies just outside of their humanity."

Read the article here.

     

Click here to download:

Cybernetic_Serendipity_tag_mus.zip (1047 KB)

Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots – the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as the science of "control and communication, in the animal and the machine." Words like "control" may seem to have creepy overtones, but at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. "Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking...a whole system is a living system is a learning system," as Stewart Brand put it in 1980. Cybernetic systems have been used to model all kinds of phenomena, with varying degrees of success – factories, societies, machines, ecosystems, brains -- and many noted artists and musicians derived inspiration from this powerful conceptual toolkit. Cybernetics may be one of the most interdisciplinary frameworks ever devised; its theories link engineering, math, physics, biology, psychology, and an array of other fields, and ideas from cybernetics inevitably infiltrated the arts. The musician and producer Brian Eno, for example, was a big fan of connecting ideas from cybernetics to the studio environment, and to music composition, in his work in the 1970s.

Eno was first exposed to concepts in cybernetics as a teenager in the mid-1960s, during his days as a student at Ipswich Art College. Several art schools in the UK in the '60s were incorporating ideas from cybernetics into their pedagogical approaches, mainly via Roy Ascott's infamous "Groundcourse" curriculum. Ipswich Art College, where Eno studied in the mid-'60s, was run by Ascott, an imposing presence who incorporated cutting-edge cybernetics principles into his offbeat teaching style. Before Ipswich, Ascott had been head tutor at Ealing, a nearby art school where a young Pete Townshend was studying. "The first term at Ipswich was devoted entirely to getting rid of those silly ideas about the nobility of the artist by a process of complete and relentless disorientation," Eno recalled some ten years later, in a guest lecture he gave at Trent Polytechnic. Ascott's teaching philosophy involved countless mandatory group collaboration exercises -- an echo of cybernetics' emphasis on "systems learning" -- and mental games. Very little of the teaching at Ipswich had anything to do with what the teenage Eno had ostensibly set out to do -- study the fine arts. Instead of daubing canvases with oil paints, Eno and his fellow students were instructed to create "mindmaps'' of each other.

Eno became very interested in cybernetics, and possible ways to apply those ideas to music. As an art school student, he had gotten into observing life on a "meta" level, and looked at his own creative process with a bird's eye view. Cybernetics concepts challenged Eno to think in different ways about the process of making music, and these ideas infiltrated Eno's thinking on many of his 1970s albums in key ways. Groups of musicians working in the studio could be conceptualized, in some general sense, as cybernetic systems. A piece of music composed using feedback, or tape loops, could be construed using cybernetics principles, too. One of Eno's favorite quotes, from the managerial-cybernetics theorist Stafford Beer, would become a fundamental guiding principle for his work: ''Instead of trying to specify it in full detail," Beer wrote in his book The Brain of the Firm, "you specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go." Eno also derived inspiration from Stafford Beer's related definition of a "heuristic." "To use Beer's example: If you wish to tell someone how to reach the top of a mountain that is shrouded in mist, the heuristic 'keep going up' will get him there," Eno wrote. Eno connected Beer's concept of a "heuristic" to music.

(...)

Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics

by Geeta Dayal

Read the article | Rhizome

Dino Buzzati's Restless Nights

Michael Mandiberg has just finished assembling a handsome installation of his work at Eyebeam.

Mandiberg's one dozen separate pieces consist primarily of old, found books cut with a laser, handsomely shown individually or assembled in groups of two or more and placed on the artist's own constructions.

Mandiberg goes where no laser cutter has ever gone before. Some of the work physically and dramatically distinguishes important newly-established contemporary technologies from their aging or defunct antecedents (many of which could once have been described as cutting edge themselves), The result is a visual dialogue charged with the passage of time and composed in the empty spaces we see "written" in and on various kinds of reference books.

         

Click here to download:

Michael_Mandiberg_tag_art_book.zip (443 KB)

One piece, a work in progress (surprisingly, lasers take their time), is titled "We have never had a year of peace". When finished it will comprise the three volumes of the "Encyclopedia of the Third World", lying on their spines next to each other, open at a random page in the middle where the artist has deeply burned the name and year of every war fought by this peace-loving republic since 1890.

Another body of work consists of a wall display of cast-off volumes describing how to make money. Mandiberg has "whittled" with a laser into their hard front covers to describe the logos of, according to the artist, "all of the failed banks of the Great Recession" (...)

via James Wagner

Images:  Mandiberg | Wagner | LolaLulu

Late in 1962 Warhol started to transfer silk-screen images onto canvas to make paintings. Other American artists, notably Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist, were already painting images they found in comic strips and on billboards. It was not, therefore, Warhol's subject matter that constituted the significant breakthrough in his early work but his decision to make fine art using a technique primarily associated with printmaking and with cheap commercial products such as T-shirts and greeting cards. Warhol's friend Henry Geldzahler, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recognized that the artist's two great innovations were "to bring commercial art into fine art" and "to take printing techniques into painting. Andy's prints and paintings are exactly the same thing. No one had ever done that before. It was an amazing thing to do."

After his early experiments painting cartoon characters and Coca-Cola bottles in the loose, drippy style of the Abstract Expressionists, Warhol liked the grainy, slightly out-of-register images produced by a silk screen because, he said, "I wanted something...that gave more of an assembly-line effect." Warhol's new paintings didn't look as though they were painted by hand; they looked like mechanically reproduced photos in cheap tabloid newspapers.

A silk-screened image is flat, and without depth or volume. This perfectly suited Warhol because in painting Marilyn Monroe he wasn't painting a woman of flesh, blood, and psychological complexity but a publicity photograph of a commodity created in a Hollywood studio. As Colin Clark's anecdote suggests, you can't look at Warhol's Marilyn in the same way that you look at a painting by Rembrandt or Titian because Warhol isn't interested in any of the things those artists were—the representation of material reality, the exploration of character, or the creation of pictorial illusion.

Warhol asked different questions about art. How does it differ from any other commodity? What value do we place on originality, invention, rarity, and the uniqueness of the art object? To do this he revisited long-neglected artistic genres such as history painting in his disaster series, still life in his soup cans and Brillo boxes, and the society portrait in Ethel Scull Thirty-Six Times. Though Warhol isn't always seen as a conceptual artist, his most perceptive critic, Arthur C. Danto, calls him "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced."

Silk screen also enabled Warhol to produce serial images—that is, to choose a motif and then reproduce it repeatedly by silk-screening it in different color combinations. In a conventional printmaking process like etching, the artist makes a limited number of impressions, then destroys the copper plate. But Warhol's series are not finite in this way. The number of finished works he made depended on how many he needed, or thought he could sell.

In Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol, their fascinating study of Warhol's rise from commercial artist to the most celebrated painter and filmmaker in 1960s America, Tony Scherman and David Dalton are clear that Warhol's move from painting his pictures by hand to photo silk-screening was at the heart of his artistic achievement:

Traditional, manual virtuosity no longer mattered. The fact that Warhol could draw had no bearing on his art now: how an artwork was made ceased to be a criterion of its quality. The result alone mattered: whether or not it was a striking image. Making art became a series of mental decisions, the most crucial of which was choosing the right source image:—as Warhol would contend some years later, "The selection of the images is the most important and is the fruit of the imagination."

Throughout the 1960s Warhol was personally involved in choosing, mixing, and applying the paint in most of the silk-screened works. But it was also his frequent practice to delegate the manual task of silk-screening an image onto canvas to his assistants Gerard Malanga and Billy Name. Malanga has said that in the summer of 1963 he was responsible for painting several canvases, including some Electric Chairs, entirely by himself. The following year Warhol told a journalist from Glamour magazine, "I'm becoming a factory," and of course the building he worked in wasn't called the "Studio" but the "Factory."

Those who witnessed Warhol at work on a daily basis in these years—Malanga, Billy Name, his manager Paul Morrissey, and his primary assistant from 1972 to 1982, Ronnie Cutrone—all attest that, just as you'd expect from a mind as restless, inventive, and original as Warhol's, the degree of his intervention in the creation of a painting varied—not only from series to series, but also from painting to painting within the same series.

By the 1970s Warhol no longer had any sustained involvement in the mass production of his paintings. In his book about Warhol, Holy Terror, Bob Colacello quotes Warhol's longtime printer Rupert Smith:

We had so much work that even Augusto [the security man] was doing the painting. We were so busy, Andy and I did everything over the phone. We called it "art by telephone."

One person they were calling was Horst Weber von Beeren, who was responsible for painting many of Warhol's later works in a studio in Tribeca (and not at the Factory in Union Square). He has said that Warhol's primary role in the creation of these paintings was simply to sign them when they were sold. The artist had come to realize that a painting could be an original Andy Warhol whether or not he ever touched it.

In fact, Warhol had long been familiar with this arm's-length working method. In his days as a successful commercial fashion illustrator, his job was simply to make the drawing and hand it over to the art director, not to become involved in the layout. Scherman and Dalton quote Tina Fredericks, the art director at Glamour who gave Warhol his first New York job: "He didn't care about that stuff—'Will my drawing be displayed big enough? Are you going to shrink it down?' You could say to him, 'We want this,' and he'd just do it, he'd understand."

Moreover, in his early fashion drawings Warhol developed a technique of blotting his initial design onto high-quality paper in such a way that his pen nib never touched the final drawing. "In fact," Scherman and Dalton continue,

the original mattered so little to Warhol that he didn't even draw it—his longtime assistant Nathan Gluck made the first sketch, rubbed it down to make the tracing, and hinged the tracing to the Strathmore [a brand of high quality drawing paper]. Andy entered only for the coup de grâce, the inking and blotting.... What remained constant throughout Warhol's career, whether he drew, painted, or silk-screened photographs, was his fascination with the simulacrum, the copy, the second-generation image. In commercial art, the division of labor is the norm. When Andy began using it in fine art in the sixties, he undermined the myth of the auteur, the sole, and solitary, fount of art.

In this conceptual approach to making art, Warhol inherited the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, an artist he knew, admired, painted, and filmed. Like Duchamp's ready-mades, the ultimate importance of a work by Warhol is not who physically made each object, but the ideas it generates. As the son of immigrants, Warhol in his early works returned again and again to the theme of America itself. What else are the paintings of cheap advertisements for nose jobs and dance lessons concerned with if not the American dream and the price of conformity it exacts? As soon as he'd examined the American obsession with celebrity and glamour in the portraits of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, he was quick to show its race riots and electric chair. Unlike Duchamp's, his was a highly public art, one that criss-crossed between high art, popular culture, commerce, and daily life.

Everything that passed before Warhol's basilisk gaze—celebrities, socialites, speed freaks, rock bands, film, and fashion—he imprinted with his deadpan mixture of glamour and humor, then cast them back into the world as narcissistic reflections of his own personality. This is what makes him one of the most complex and elusive figures in the history of art. As Danto explains in his brilliant short study of Warhol, the question Warhol asked is not "What is art?" but "What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?"