October 31, 2006
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ART WARS continued
To Announce a FaithFrom 7/07, an art review from The New York Times:
Endgame Art?
It's Borrow, Sample and Multiply
in an Exhibition at Bard College"The show has an endgame, end-time mood....
I
would call all these strategies fear of form.... the dismissal of
originality is perhaps the oldest ploy in the postmodern playbook. To
call yourself an artist at all is by definition to announce a faith,
however unacknowledged, in some form of originality, first for
yourself, second, perhaps, for the rest of us.Fear of form above
all means fear of compression-- of an artistic focus that condenses
experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and
visually comprehensible."-- Roberta Smith
It is doubtful that Smith
would consider the
following "found" art an
example of originality.It nevertheless does
"announce a faith."
"First for yourself"Today's mid-day
Pennsylvania number:
707See Log24 on 7/07
and the above review.
"Second, perhaps,
for the rest of us"Today's evening
Pennsylvania number:
384This number is an
"an artistic focus that condenses
example of what the
reviewer calls "compression"--
experiences, ideas and feelings
into something
whole, committed
and visually comprehensible.""Experiences"
See (for instance)
Joan Didion's writings
(1160 pages, 2.35 pounds)
on "the shifting phantasmagoria
which is our actual experience.""Ideas"
"Feelings"
See A Wrinkle in Time.
"Whole"
The automorphisms
of the tesseract
form a group
of order 384."Committed"
See the discussions of
groups of degree 16 in
R. D. Carmichael's classic
Introduction to the Theory
of Groups of Finite Order.
"Visually comprehensible"See "Diamond Theory in 1937,"
an excerpt from which
is shown below.
The "faith" announced by
the above lottery numbers
on All Hallows' Eve is
perhaps that of the artist
Madeleine L'Engle:
"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
