Adolf Loos, House for Josephine Baker 1928
…into the space of renunciation…
‘for language as the origin of the work of art proved to be an impossible origin, since its repetition undermined any possibility of origination outside its iteration […] a substantive shift away from the discussions of origins into one of essence pp171 […] nothing, but relation: that which gives being, but that iself is not. pp.179
‘The word gives being.’, ‘to the word gives:Being’. Nothing has been added but the simple mark of a pause or break, a ceasura, but in doing so the relation of the word to being has been suspended and thus its wording has appeared. It inscribes the space of being but withdraws from it, because it is nothing more than its spacing, its mark of lack and rupture by which it becomes a space, a neighbourhood in which relations can take place, thus Poeticizing and thinking are pp184 Continue reading
Gif reproduced from the Change the Thought, visit for more and if that’s not enough see Love Gifs or visit the visual china town of David Ope. Prepare to be mesmerised by a contemporary versions of Duchamp’s Rotorelief.
La combe II, 1950–51. Ellsworth Kelly
Ellsworth Kelly is among the most important protagonists of colour field painting. His paintings, in large format for the most part and consisting usually of several panels, are an impressive interplay of form, colour and space. Kelly’s works are notable for their very lean imagery: the forms are geometric or organic, the contours are drawn sharply, the colours are intense. Form, derived from real observation, is at the source of kelly’s creative process. The window of a museum, the floor of a paris café, the diagonal shadow of a garage entranceway – fragments of everyday reality that the artist translates into the simplest, most memorable forms, hence turning the quotidian into two-dimensional signs. Kelly does not find refuge in invented lines or shapes and is therefore liberated from the need to compose an image: “the things that interested me were always there”.
For more images of Ellsworth Kelly: black and white click here.
Text and image reproduced from www.artnews.org
Marcel Broodthaers Un Coup de des 1969
Alexandra Leykauf 2009
In 1969 Broodthaers re-staged Mallarme’s Un coup de des, to which Broodthaers added the title ‘(image)’. Replacing the lines of Mallarme’s poem with black rectangular blocks positioned and sized according to Mallarme’s instruction of the poem Broodthaers punctuates the space of the oversized page with a cool clinicism and translates the poem into a field of hard edged precision and fixed geometric forms.
Taking the line as an isolated visual unit, Broodthaers adheres to Mallarme’s injunction in ‘The Book: A Spritual Instrument. ‘Let us have no more of those successive, incessant back and forth motions of our eyes, tracking from one line to the next and beginning all over again. ‘(image)’ emphasizes the spatial dimensions of language while eliminating its reference. With this thorough illegibility, Broodthaers thus establishes what Jaques Derrida would call ‘a text, that is a readability without a signified.’
Robert Smithson also habitually equated words and rocks with a geololinguistics predicated on the realization that written language is an object with the same brute physicality of stone. Works such as the visual poem A Heap of Language (1966) and the ‘geophotographic fiction’ Strata 1970 embody this belief that […] writing should generate ideas into matter. Smithson reiterates elsewhere that he was interested in language as a material entity, later explaining that: ‘My sense of language is that it is matter and not ideas – i.e ‘printed matter.’
All text quoted from Fugitive_signs Craig Douglas Dworkin October, Vol. 95. (Winter, 2001), pp. 90-113. Images reproduced from Covers and Citations
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