David Weiss, who with Peter Fischli made art under the collaborative name Fischli and Weiss, died last April at age sixty-five. The duo had worked together for several decades, making videos, films, photographs, and sculptures that were conceptually sophisticated and often ravishingly beautiful. Though the latter phrase may be most often applied to their double-exposure photographs of brightly colored flowers, I find their moody pictures of airports, taken regularly on their worldwide travels, to be equally exquisite. Now Buchhandlung Walther König has published a thick collection of these images with the deadpan title 800 Views of Airports. It is available directly from the publisher or, in New York, via Dashwood Books.
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800 Views of Airports
Charles Simic on “memory traps”
The poet Charles Simic has written a short essay on “memory traps”–places that have vanished but which linger in the mind, and which anyone who has lived in a city for a long time will recognize:
It doesn’t take much. A deserted street at dusk, with the summer sunlight lingering on the upper floors of a row of buildings and the sidewalks down below already deep in shadow, may get some old movie in our heads rolling again. Since we are ordinarily better at forgetting than remembering, it is often a mystery why some such sight has stamped itself on our memory, when countless others that ought to have far greater meaning can hardly be said to exist for us anymore. It makes me suspect that a richer and less predictable account of our lives would eschew chronology and any attempt to fit a lifetime into a coherent narrative and instead be made up of a series of fragments, spur-of-the-moment reminiscences occasioned by whatever gets our imagination working.
To read more, click here.
Support Nosara’s New Recycling Center
Nosara’s new Recycling Center got off to a good start in summer 2012. Now the students hope to return to Costa Rica to complete it. Architect Tobias Holler explains how you can help on their new Kickstarter campaign:
This past summer my absolute favorite building project, the Nosara Recycling and Education Center, made a huge step toward reality. With the generous support of almost 200 people who backed our first kickstarter campaign, we were able to bring over 30 NYIT architecture students to Costa Rica in July and August who donated their time and skills to help build this important community project.
Under the supervision of local construction professionals we were able to set up the construction site, complete the site grading, concrete foundations and concrete block walls, and even built the first wooden roof truss. The students gained invaluable construction site experience. (more…)
WAX Surf Film Sandy Benefit
Please join us for an evening of surf films for hurricane relief!
Hosted by Mikey DeTemple and Jon Rose
All proceeds will go to Waves for Water
INFO
Monday, November 26, 7:30pm
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue, New York, NY
Tickets: nysurfstories.eventbrite.com
NEW YORK SURF STORIES
Produced by SMASH, WAX Magazine,
NYC Surfrider Foundation & York Surf.
FEATURING
Shadows of the Same Sun by Thomas Brookins
Stacked by EJ Mcleavey-Fisher & Patrick Cummings
Rockaway Picaresque by Mikey DeTemple
Nine to Five by Justin Mackin
Rockaway Opera by Sean Greene & Zach Halberd
Hurricane Sandy Relief by Paul De Luna
Don’t Feed The Bear Crabs by Toddy Stewart
Queens Museum Rockaway Fundraiser
Following up on Deborah’s posts, there’s a fundraiser this Sunday at the Queens Museum of Art. More details below and here.
Forthcoming Exhibition on “Pressing Environmental Issues” at MoMA
Midway through a New York Times human-interest story on curator Klaus Biesenbach’s hurricane-relief efforts comes word of a new exhibition of interest to Harmony Blog readers:
The bus unloaded at the Rockaway Beach Surf Club on Beach 87th Street, discharging a group of volunteers that included waifish artists, MoMA members, surfers and a film crew gathering footage for an exhibition that Mr. Biesenbach is curating on pressing environmental issues in the spring at MoMA P.S. 1.
It doesn’t yet appear on the museum’s schedule of upcoming exhibitions, but surely will soon.
Climate Change & Sandy
The latest natural disaster presents an opportunity to better understand climate change. The Huffington Post ran an interesting piece about the relationship between natural disasters and climate change. Has anyone seen other good articles on the topic?
Occupy Sandy
Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
I continue to be amazed by the Occupy Sandy movement. From the NYT:
After its encampment in Zuccotti Park, which changed the public discourse about economic inequality and introduced the nation to the trope of the 1 percent, the Occupy movement has wandered in a desert of more intellectual, less visible projects, like farming, fighting debt and theorizing on banking. While several nouns have been occupied — from summer camp to health care — it is only with Hurricane Sandy that the times have conspired to deliver an event that fully calls upon the movement’s talents and caters to its strengths.
Maligned for months for its purported ineffectiveness, Occupy Wall Street has managed through its storm-related efforts not only to renew the impromptu passions of Zuccotti, but also to tap into an unfulfilled desire among the residents of the city to assist in the recovery. This altruistic urge was initially unmet by larger, more established charity groups, which seemed slow to deliver aid and turned away potential volunteers in droves during the early days of the disaster.
In the past two weeks, Occupy Sandy has set up distribution sites at a pair of Brooklyn churches where hundreds of New Yorkers muster daily to cook hot meals for the afflicted and to sort through a medieval marketplace of donated blankets, clothes and food. There is an Occupy motor pool of borrowed cars and pickup trucks that ferries volunteers to ravaged areas. An Occupy weatherman sits at his computer and issues regular forecasts. Occupy construction teams and medical committees have been formed.
