Friday, July 31, 2015


A small room behind a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

A literary anthology I found in a cafe, a reader from my high school days. It includes a 1910 short story by William Fryer Harvey, entitled "August Heat."

It ends like this:

The air seems charged with thunder. I am writing this at a shaky table before the open window. The leg is cracked, and Atkinson, who seems a handy man with his tools, is going to mend it as soon as he has finished putting an edge on his chisel.

It is after eleven now. I shall be gone in less than an hour.

But the heat is stifling.

It is enough to send a man mad.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Having Never Written a Note for Percussion (1971)



Four years later, Tenney gave us his best known composition, written on the back of a postcard.

Ten years after that, his "Septet" (1981) for six electric guitars and bass.

(Oh, and tonight at Selectors' Records, Luke Fowler, Sarah Davachi and Joshua Stevenson pay tribute to Martin Bartlett in their performance entitled "Music from the Black Box".)

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

"A House of Dust" (1967)



A poem written by Allison Knowles, James Tenney and a Siemens 4004 computer in 1967 (the same year Tenney appeared in Carolee Schneemann's cine-poem Fuses). Stanzas were created through "iterations of lines with changing words from a finite vocabulary list."

Monday, July 27, 2015

Go To Folder



/

/b/
/
/v/
/ emoticon

//

//plugins chrome
//extensions
//survey.walmart.ca
/// emoticon

///

/// emoticon
/// summary c#
/// emoticon meaning
/// c#

////

//// emoticon
////.com
////facebook
////y

/////

Your search -- ///// -- did not match any documents.

Suggestions:

    try different keywords



Michael Turner
in collaboration with the robots at Google Autocomplete
Wednesday August 7, 2013, 4:30PM

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Two Pictures



In Umberto Boccioni's painting The Street Pavers (1914), it is the formal foundation of Futurism that is the focus. In Stephen Waddell's Asphalt Layer 1 (2001), it is not the form this worker's labour takes that contributes to the completion of this picture, but our recognition -- and admiration -- of it.


Friday, July 24, 2015

Blaise Cendrars



In 1950 Michel Manoll conducted a series of radio interviews with Blaise Cendrars (above), parts of which were later translated and published in Paris Review No. 38.

INTERVIEWER
And Faulkner, you know him?  
CENDRARS
No, I don’t know Faulkner. I’ve never met him. Malraux asked me to do a preface for the translation of Light in August; I didn’t want to do it, finding it too regional, too literary, and written as one doesn’t write any more, too well.  

Thursday, July 23, 2015


A small room inside a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

I awoke this morning with a small hut atop my chest -- the book I fell asleep reading.

I turn it over, curious to see where I left off.

"Sentence, Image, History" from the English translation of Jacques Rancière's  The Future of the Image (2007).

Here is the first half of the first paragraph that appears under the banner THE SENTENCE-IMAGE AND THE GREAT PARATAXIS:

"Let us call this the great parataxis. In Flaubert's time, it could take the form of the collapse of all the systems of rationales for emotions and actions in favour of the vagaries of indifferent intermixture of atoms. A little dust shining in the sun, a drop of melted snow falling from the moiré silk of a parasol, a blade of foliage on the muzzle of a donkey -- these are the tropes of matter that invent love by ranking its rationale with the great absence of any rationale for things. In Zola's time, it was piles of vegetables, charcuterie, fish and cheeses in Le Ventre de Paris, or the cascades of white cloth set ablaze by the fire of the consummation in Au Bonheur des dames. In the time of Apollinaire or Blaise Cendrars, or Boccioni, Schwitters or Varese, it is a world where all the histories have dissolved into sentences, which have themselves dissolved into words, exchangeable with the lines, strokes or 'dynamisms' that any pictorial subject has dissolved into; or with the sound intensities in which the notes of a melody merge with ship horns, car noise and the rattle of machine-guns.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Monday, July 20, 2015

Artist Talk




A talk by Jimmie Durham given last year at London's Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Below, documentation of Durham's Smashing (2014) (seen recently at SFU Audain Gallery's Geometry of Knowing, Part 2).

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Jimmie Durham 1974 (2014)



In Jimmie Durham 1974 (2014), artist Amy Malbeuf takes a line attributed to another artist, Jimmie Durham, and beads it -- with centre-justified line breaks -- to a similarly coloured blue tarpaulin. The result is a monochromatic poem that is an homage to Durham, who at one point served on the American Indian Movement's Central Council, but also a critique of his statement.

In a 2014 interview with Canadian Art's Leah Sandals, Malbeuf says: "I do think that beadwork, or things such as beadwork and things that hold traditional value, are tools and weapons for change for a younger generation."

The image above is not from the current Custom Made/ Tsitslemte stem te ck’ultens-kuc exhibition at the Kamloops Art Gallery, but from a 2014 exhibition at Contemporary Calgary. The text on the tarpaulin reads:

AN INDIAN WHO SITS/ AND DOES BEADWORK,/ OR CONDUCTS BEADWORK CLASSES,/ OR TRADES BEADWORK/ WHEN HE OR SHE SHOULD BE/ ON THE FRONT LINE WITH A GUN,/ OR ORGANIZING HIS OR HER COMMUNITY/ IS PERFORMING/ A COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY ACT

Friday, July 17, 2015

Man in Mirror



A fairly recent George W. Bush.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Girl in Mirror (1963)



An early Lichtenstein.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Drawn to Curators



Last week 221A announced the hiring of Jesse McKee as Curator of Projects and Residencies. The press release was accompanied not by a photo of McKee, but by a drawing of him by Alison Yip (see above).

A couple days later, the curator of the 11th Gwangju Biennale was announced, and instead of a photo of ubiquity's Maria Lind, a drawing by Bernd Krauss (see below).


Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Art and Comics #3



It just so happens that Wendy art critic "Jack Sterling" and I have the same coat and hat.

Monday, July 13, 2015

Art and Comics #2



Ad Reinhardt's philistine-bashing 1946 cartoon.

Sunday, July 12, 2015

Art and Comics



Walter Scott's Wendy is the art world's current comic du jour. But Rex Morgan M.D. is not far behind!

Friday, July 10, 2015

From Cumberland



Downes Point, Hornby Island is thirty kilometres and two ferries from Cumberland.

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Albert "Ginger" Goodwin




Cumberland was once home to "some of the most dangerous mines in the world."

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Cumberland Legion



Across the street from an AirB&B.

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Camera Munda #2



Taken while driving slowly through the town of Lillooet last summer.

Saturday, July 4, 2015

Camera Munda



I was ridding my camera of unwanted images when I came upon this one of Instant Coffee's Jinhan Ko, taken at last year's Luminocity in Kamloops.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Bishop Strachan School



This is "one of Canada's oldest independent girl's schools."

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Herby's Surplus



Last Friday, while perusing the shelves of Surplus Herby's Vernon store, I came upon their discount book table. The first book I saw was The Ben Calder Story (2005) by Stephen Zeifman, which, according to its cover, is "Book Three of the Toronto Trilogy."

Here is the synopsis that appears at Goodreads:

Ben Calder, an artist teaching at one of Canada’s oldest independent girl’s schools, is beginning to unravel. After a female student arrives from Italy, he realizes that he was in love with her mother in high school. When the mother arrives in Toronto for her daughter’s 18th birthday, however, the daughter’s jealousy precipitates Ben’s fall. Probing the heart of contemporary malaise, this novel follows a man without faith, navigating through the moral and ethical dilemmas of modern life.

And here is Deirdre Kelly's Goodreads review:

Mr. Zeifman was my art teacher at a Toronto gilrs' school, the backdrop to this rather sorry portrait of a teacher on the verge of what seems to be a nervous breakdown. I admit being a tad shocked by it. I found the sexual portraits hard to stomach. My favourite scene was at the very beginning, a haunting re-creation of a Jewish camping experience in the hinterland of Ontario, which was mightily evocative. When things got graphic and weird, I lost my capacity for empathy. Call me old-fashioned.