Land.
A short and compelling video about the pre-production of the feature film Land. here! “Taha sets out on an epic 600 km journey along the Moroccan Atlantic coast to Europe—on a windsurfboard. More about the film.
On Kawara, Pure Consciousness
In Pure Consciousness, a traveling exhibition initiated in 1998, Kawara lent seven Date paintings (January 1 to January 7, 1997) to kindergartens and schools in Madagascar, Australia, Bhutan, Ivory Coast, Columbia, Turkey, Japan, Finland, Iceland, Israel, and the United States. At all schools they hang in classrooms, bearing dates that fall within the lifespans of the children.[15] Kawara does [...]
Fred Sandback, Conceptual Constructions
A highlight from this weekend’s Frieze Art Fair on Randall’s Island, from David Zwirner‘s booth: Thanks to Katie Holten for the image.
Brice Marden, Joined
Reflecting the light and landscape of Greece, these paintings feature vibrant colors and geometric compositions, which subtly incorporate each piece of marble’s natural variations. Marden’s earlier series of paintings on marble, completed over a six-year period between 1981 and 1987, played a principal role in the transition from his early monochromatic paintings to the later [...]
Polly Apfelbaum, Flatterland Funkytown
I’m either trying to get to abstraction or beginning with it. There has always been a tension between those elements in my work. In the past few years, I have changed the way I work in my studio. I spend more time thinking about how to make the work and how to play with elements [...]
Sheila Hicks, Demenageur
MS. LÉVI-STRAUSS: You do a lot with your hands. MS. HICKS: I’m working every day. Even if I don’t feel like working, I know that some people are coming to work today. I’ll go into the studio – I used to live right in the studio and just do whatever comes to mind. Just begin [...]
We Are All Radioactive
We Are All Radioactive, a documentary series, tells the story of one seaside community’s efforts to rebuild in the wake of the 2011 disaster. Motoyoshi, a small town and surf spot about 100 miles from Fukushima, was devastated by the earthquake and tsunami, and now it’s unclear how damaging the effects of the Fukushima meltdown could be. We Are [...]
THE END IS THERE
The short film THE END IS THERE began as a personal return on investment analysis of weekend summer surf in Montauk. Shot entirely on an iPhone, the footage catalogs the weekend waves at Ditch Plains Beach from Memorial Day to Labor Day, 2010. Within the course of the summer the project evolved into a video [...]
Stacked
A short documentary on the 2011 Quiksilver Pro New York and local surf star, Balaram Stack. Coming soon! Interview with the filmmakers here.
A Sontag Sampler
From the New York Times: Art Is Boring Schopenhauer ranks boredom with “pain” as one of the twin evils of life. (Pain for have-nots, boredom for haves — it’s a question of affluence.) People say “it’s boring” — as if that were a final standard of appeal, and no work of art had the right [...]
Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme
From a recent interview with Franck André Jamme for the Paris Review‘s blog: It could be a cult classic: the debut edition of Siglio Press’s Tantra Song—one of the only books to survey the elusive tradition of abstract Tantric painting from Rajasthan, India—sold out in a swift six weeks. Rendered by hand on found pieces of paper [...]
David Thorne & elysian
I recently interviewed artist and cook David Thorne about an event space and occasional restaurant he’s running in Los Angeles: elysian. His background includes farming in Vermont and working with the famed Bread and Puppet Theater, as well as participating in the Whitney Independent Study program and producing very interesting work with his wife Julia Meltzer (among [...]
WAX Magazine
A new magazine about urban surfing, community, and art is on the horizon. Support them here.
James Welling, Torso 3
So too in Welling’s photogram series Torsos (2005–08) do complexities manifest. He cut screening, of the same type used for windows, to follow bodily contours and placed them on chromogenic paper before exposing them. Folded, curled, and billowing up from the paper ground, the wavy-edged mesh scraps produce lushly variegated passages while also revealing an obdurate materiality [...]
“Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series”
What’s striking is the way they record the mysterious and unquenchable activity of an artist at work in his studio. In precisely the years when Diebenkorn was making the Ocean Park paintings, art busted out of what had become an admittedly airless and confining realm. The work from a new era characterized by experimental and [...]
Anne Truitt, Summer 96
Truitt would later distill these places, events and memories into her work. She believed experiences—particularly difficult or painful ones—were “the ground out of which art grows,” as she said in her oral history interview. “People talk as if art were something that you did with your eyes and your brain, but it’s not. It’s something [...]
Mary Heilmann talks about “Visions, Waves & Roads”
THE WAVES have always been in my life and work. My father was a bodysurfer and as a kid I would join him on the beach in San Francisco. I have a very early memory of watching him in the huge, crashing, cold surf. Whenever I’m in the Bay Area, I go to the beach and [...]
Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water [...]
Lydia Davis on Joan Mitchell’s Les Bluets
I start with the fact that Les Bluets (The cornflowers) is the painting I think of first when I think of one that has had particular significance in my life. Then I have to figure out why. I am not even certain that Les Bluets was the actual painting I saw. What I did see [...]
Robert Smithson, Mirror and Crushed Shells
On July 9, 1969 Robert Smithson wrote the following letter to Andy Warhol about Mirror and Crushed Shells: Dear Andy, This is to certify that the Mirror with Crushed Shells (Sanibel Island) is an original work of art. It consists of three mirrors which may be restored if broken, and one burlap bag of crushed shells collected by the artist at Sanibel [...]
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets
In German, to be blue—blau sein—means to be drunk. Delerium tremens used to be called the “blue devils” (Burns, 1787.) In England “the blue hour” is happy hour at the pub. Joan Mitchell—abstract painter of the first order, American expatriate living on Monet’s property in France, dedicated chromophile and drunk, possessor of a famously nasty tongue, and [...]
Anonymous Tantra Painter, Shiva Linga, 2002
I have noticed in the Tantric works how the simplicity of their conventional, geometric forms is complemented by the infinite complexity of their particular execution: water stains, flaws in the handmade paper, fragments of unrelated text combine to make each work not only unique but somehow perfect. These images would clearly not have the same [...]
Michael Krebber, astrorock
It seems Michael Krebber has been on a raw foods diet, or maybe some plan of specific separation, Kosher or macrobiotic-style. Here he took a group of mainly German-made (who knew?) windsurfing boards, and made a group photo, seven boards lined up like brahs. Then he made a poster, folded it up, and hid it [...]
