Eugene Atget: photos of Paris

Here, by a remarkable regression, we have come back to the level of expression of the Egyptians
. . . Pictorial language has not yet matured because our eyes have not yet adjusted to it.
There is as yet insufficient respect for, insufficient cult of, what it expresses. - Abel
Gance

What art has been granted a dream more poetical and more real at the same time! Approached
in this fashion the film might represent an incomparable means of expression. Only the most
high-minded persons, in the most perfect and mysterious moments of their lives, should be
allowed to enter its ambience. - Severin-Mars

Sources:
Text: W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Images:
http://quintessentialruminations.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/atget2.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_SwKfl4Jngo/UJ6hmjV55NI/AAAAAAAACVY/_zTMbwFfOMg/s1600/eugene+atget-2.jpeg
http://www.alleyconnoisseur.com/wp-content/gallery/atget/la_cour_du_dragon_paris_vie1913.jpg

Medway street - a sketch from Autumn

A4, paper cut, pencil

Notes from Linda Colley, Rank and file

• engraving of the "great chain of being" from the Rhetorica Christiana of 1579
• frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651)
• One reason why print-makers and engravers were often interested in depicting the social hierarchy, it is suggested, is because - as artists who were also craftsmen - they were obliged to occupy an ambiguous position within it. 
• William Powell Frith's painting Derby Day (1856-58)
• "an unacknowledged conspiracy" since the 1970s on the part of both Labour and the Conservatives  "to pretend [that] the mighty inherited social differences of previous ages are dead and gone".
•  
•  London as the "Great Wen"
• the split between north and south has been widening at a faster rate since the 1970s, not just because of de-industrialisation and the drain of money and talent southwards, but also because mass awareness of these things seems to have deepened
• extreme economic disparities that exist between different parts of the UK
• ownsfolk in Scotland and the north of England were disproportionately likely to see themselves as "happy". 
• The Full Monty (1997)
•  
• Yet perhaps what is most and unavoidably missing from Rank is the politics of it all. 
• The United States was founded on a revolution that abolished the monarchy, aristocracy, titles and primogeniture. Britain may be able in the future to become a more equal and open society while retaining all of these things. But this has yet to be proved.

Notes from B.Anderson, Imagined Communitites

Page 3. Marxist movements and states have tended to become national not only in form but in substance, i.e., nationalist
Page 4. the 'end of the era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight.
Page 4. Hugh Seton-Watson
Page 4. No "scientific definition" of the nation can be devised;
Page 5: ‘nation-ness’ and ‘nationalism’ are cultural artefacts of a particular kind.
Page 5: Hans Kohn and Carleton Hayes,'founding fathers'
Page 6: easier if one treated [nationalism] as if it belonged with 'kinship' and 'religion', rather than with 'liberalism' or fascism'.or
Page 7: nation is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.
Page 7. Gellner: 'Nationalism invents nations where they do not exist’.
Page 7: all communities are imagined.
Page 7: nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.'
Page 8: The nation is imagined as limited
Page 8: It is imagined as sovereign
Page 8: It is imagined as a community,
Page 8: reasons for sacrifices lie in the cultural roots of nationalism.

Notes from: Dieter Lesage, The Academy is Back (2009)

Very often, the academic turn seems to be a way to turn away from the academy: indeed, if the art field becomes an academic one, then what an academy has to offer can also be found elsewhere, at other institutions and self-organized initiatives constituting the field of expanded academia. The suggestion seems clear: we don’t need the academy.

Why should there be a doctorate in the arts, rather than nothing? Weren’t we happy without it? It is no secret that many people see neither the socio-economic necessity nor the artistic relevance of a doctorate in the arts. There is fierce opposition to it from people within higher arts education, universities, and the arts field—at least in so far as it still makes sense to draw a clear-cut distinction between higher arts education, universities, and the arts. Indeed, among many other things, the Bologna Process could be described as a deconstruction of the old demarcations between precisely these three sectors.

The time of academy-bashing is over. Indeed, the academy is back, almost. It’s absolutely fine to situate yourself outside the academy. But one shouldn’t hesitate to play a role within an academy, as many former outsiders today do quite successfully. It is my bet that the art academy is going to be the defining innovative institution within the art field in the next twenty years, much more so than museums, galleries, biennials, whatever.

Source: e-flux

Clement Greenberg on kitsch

"Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time." (Greenberg, Clement. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Partisan Review. 6:5 (1939) 34–49)

Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism, is there no alternative

- p1 - 2006 film Children of men, 2005, V for Vendetta

- p2 - It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism

- p3 - the new defines itself in response to what's already established; at the same time, the established has to reconfigure itself in response to the new

- p7 - postmodernism=capitalist realism.

- p8 - the horror about the ways that capitalism has seeped into the very unconscious

- p9 - Kurt Cobain and his struggling with realisation that he is a part of mainstream

- p2 - the film performes our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity

- p10 - Simon Reynolds, 1996, The Wire

- p.15 - what needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. 

 - p.16 - Michael Schudson, Advertising, the uneasy persuasion, 1984

- p.17 - Badiou, modernisation;Zizek

 Zupancic: the rally principle is... ideologically mediated

- For Lacan, the Real is what any 'reality' must suppress

- p.18 - green issues, capitalism destroys the environment

- p.19 - privatisation of stress. Bureaucracy changed its form, didn't disappear

- 20. - education is the dominating imperative in capitalist realism

- p 21 - reflexive impotence, knowing that things are bad, but we can't do anything about it

- p22 - inability to pursue anything but pleasure, hedonism

- p22 - Kafka's The Trial, Ostensible acquittal and Indefinite postponement

 Working from home, homing from work.

 - 24 students: Post-literate 'new flesh' that is 'too wired' to concentrate

Page 33 - If the figure of discipline was the worker-prisoner, the figure of control is the debtor-addict

Page 33 - The attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Page 33 -C apitalism is profoundly illiterate

Page 34 - Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians

Page 34 - Control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure;

Page 35 - combine rapacious pursuit of profit with the rhetoric of ecological concern and social responsi- bility

Page 35 - Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralized bureaucracy

Page 36 - The persistent association of neoliberalism with the term ‘Restoration'

Page 39 - Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat, ’

- p32 - R.Sennet. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

- p33 - the situation of family in post-Fordist capitalism is contradictory. It requires the family, even as it undermines it.

Notes from The Book Trust Prospectus, 2010

P79 - L. V. Deursen: I also don't like it when publishing is meant to just satisfy a small group. Book publishing is interesting because a book can travel easily, because it can be purchased cheaply, and because it's actually the best device to distribute thoughts and ideas.

P84 - you can talk about the book and you can make dummies, but to all of a sudden have it back from the printer is often quite a shock. Especially the way this book came back - sort of purposefully casual, not very expensive-looking or particularly beautiful.

P86 - I quite like when there are some restrictions in a given project; I think that's actually quite healthy.

P88 - I can imagine a lot of people study graphic design because they have an interest in books and their content; in that sense, maybe it's not to weird that this field is now somehow new and more inhabited by designers.

Why do people want to look alike? Why do they want to do the same thing? 

P90 - I can't really say that every graphic designer is a good publisher. Not every graphic designer is a good writer, far from it. Not every graphic designer is a good designer, even! [laughs]

-p91 - creating your own content is a good exercise and it can be really helpful when you have to make work for clients.

 - p.98 - Goods allegedly exchange for a single bulb [of tulip]: two lasts of wheat, for lasts of rye, for fat oxen, wit day swine, twelve fat sheep, two hogshead of wine, for tuns of beer, two tons of butter, 1,000 pounds of cheese, a complete bed, a suit of clothes, a silver drinking cup.

One fragment from Drawing Unlimited

Pen and ink, cut-out shapes, ruler, compasses, typography. 7X8cm, 2015

Notes from De Duve, When Form Has Become Attitude

LP. 21 - creativity= ability to perceive + imagination (gestalt). Allows art to be taught, not only the technical skill

Pedagogues: Froebel, Montessori, Decroly. School reformers, Rudolf Steiner, John Dewey. Great modern theorists of art: Herbert Read, E.H.Gombrich, Rudolf Arnheim.

- p.22 The difference between talent and creativity is that the former is unequally distributed and the latter universally. 

- p.23 - the difference between metier and medium is that the former has a historical existence and the latter a transhistorical existence.

- p.24 - the difference between imitation and invention goes without saying. Whereas imitation reproduces, invention produces; whereas imitation generates sameness, invention generates otherness; whereas imitation seeks continuity, invention seeks novelty.

AA: process photos

Working on AA, a series of drawings instructed by random numbers. Spray paint, pen and ink, chalk, charcoal, collage.

Miscontinuum: two drawings

Drawings done during Miscontinuum opera at Barbican, February 2015. Biro pen, A4 paper sheets.

Richard Serra on drawing

“I have dealt with hand-eye coordination all my life – it’s another kind of language for me. To see is to think and drawing is another way of thinking"

(The artist on his drawing retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in an interview with Charlie Rose, 21 April 2011).

Source: Bildwerk

Salto dance drawings

Drawings from Salto gig in Moscow, February 2015. Biro pen in 10X15cm pocket sketchbook.

From S. Heller, The Art Direction Explained at last

The value of multiple entry points
Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it
John D Barrow, p. 56

The rewards of black and white
- Yosemite: one of the "565 world's 565 largest photographs", p. 63
- p.64, color was considered less real, truthful

The use of parallel narratives
- Glazer: I'm convinced the re's a link between all things... you could take two of the most random objects...  a chair and a skyscraper... and you will discover an uncanny series of relationships between them. p.68
It's his creative methodology,free associating in order to uncover hidden interconnections.
-Crossing words out, erasing

The difference between What and How
- p.83 Designers have to think about What, not How.
- P.84. African creation myth in which God gives Man a choice between a happy life as a cattle rancher and "What" - but His refuses to define what illusive "What" is. It's up to man to figure it out. Those who choose to pursue this question must leave their ancestral Africa forever, the same way Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden.

- p.121 Eike Konig, Hort: Every job is a completely new situation and needs to be considered in a new way. The is no room for self-actualisation, or giving your personal design profile a boost. It's about performing the task, learning from it and enjoying yourself in the process.

- p. 127, Vince Frost: Get used to being invisible. Never treat projects as if they are 'bread and butter'.

Art direction goes digital, Khoi Vinh
Art direction has traditionally meant controlling the narrative.
Art director's talent is ... high level of control. Good at direction is good storytelling. P.163
- options transform an audience of consumers into a constituency of users. Users want to retain at least some level of control. p.165
- the need for an art-director is not lost,... it has been re-distributed across many different fronts.p.166
- it is now a form of conversation, many-to-many paradigm
- see Roland Barthes, 1967 essay The Death of the Author
- good narrative gives rise to great conversation, p.169
- great digital art direction lets users shape their own experiences. P.170

At directing myself, Ross MacDonald
- p. 173 personal work - code for "I don't get many paid jobs these days" . Wow! What about rather "I have found an opportunity to finally do something for myself?!" 
- p. 178. It would make life a lot easier if I worked digitally, but what fun would that be? Oh, my!
- p.199. Any aspiring art director, no matter what you do or where you work, should read the book Allure by Diana Vreeland
- Movies on my list : Zelig, Shampoo, Sleepers, Day for Night, Andrei Rublev, My Favourite Year, Touch the Sound, Three Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Broadway Danny Rose, Once Upon a Time in the West, Death in Venice
- p.212, Annette Lens, Selina Konig.
I don't think that being creative should ever require me to 'direct' people and deprive them from certain inalienable rights.. Among them Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
So i don't want to be called an art director. I would never want to work with people who would agree to follow my directions.
-p218- so that's how i meet David Bowie, genius music legend and world's worst at director. Having said that, i worked with several hundred horrible art directors, and not one of them can sign "rebel, rebel" worth a damn.
-p232-   'the possibility of future work' - If you'll let us take advantage of you now, you'll win a chance for us to take  advantage of you in the future.

-p246- Milton Glaser likes to say his role is "to inform and delight" - an expression he borrowed from Horace

The Maze

Going through the maze in Crystal Palace park, following the rule that on every corner we should take left turn.