Last week I visited Tipografia Damasceno with João Bicker from FBA and Joana Monteiro. This is a letterpress and offset printers in Coimbra, Portugal. A family business that has been running for over 35 years. One of the two sons in the family was João Damasceno, a poet, who unfortunately died quiet recently. However, FBA are going to design a book of his work that will be hand set and printed by his brother and mother.
Physics and engineering into spectacle.
I visited the joint exhibition of Nairy Baghramian and Phyllida Barlow at the Sperpentine. The image on the invitation is not from the show, (although there was some similar ramp like objects) but I like it a lot. Particularly in that sickly green. I wonder if it is a reference to the infamous slant step.
I have been planning to write something more about dark humour, and then I discovered quite a gem today. Robert Morris’ proposal for his own Mausoleum:
‘A sealed aluminum tube three miles long, inside which he wishes to be put, housed in an iron coffin suspended from pulleys. Every three months the position of the coffin is to be changed by an attendant who will move along the outside of the tube holding a magnet. On a gravel walk leading to the entrance are swooning maidens, carved in marble in the style of Canova’. Quoted in Barbara Rose, ‘ABC Art’, Art in America, October-November 1965.
(For example, The Three Graces by Antonio Canova 1814-1817)
For the past week I have been enjoying dipping in and out of Uncorporate Identity, the first book from design speculation office Metahaven. Although the book includes much of Metahaven’s design work and research, the book cannot be categorized as a monograph, it exists in a grey area that is particularly suitable, as the work of these designers rarely fits into a category that could easily be called ‘graphic design’.
Robert Smithson on laughter in his ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’ essay:
‘Fuller was told by certain scientists that the fourth dimension was “ha-ha,” in other words, that it is laughter. Perhaps it is… Laughter is in a sense of kind of entropic “verbalization.” How could artists translate this verbal entropy, that is “ha-ha,” into “solid-models”? ‘
I found Smithson’s alignment of minimalist sculpture movement with laughter surprising, as are his references to horror and science fiction. The latter is more easily explained by the difference in time and context. Of course, to see the work he refers to in 1966 would be a completely different experience than seeing them now. However, the idea that these sculptures have could have a humorous reading is an unexpected and welcome reminder that art, and art criticism does not need to be po-faced.
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This morning I read ‘Entropy and the New Monuments‘, an essay by Robert Smithson from 1966. ‘Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments cause us to forget the future.’ The essay is filled with references, some familiar, such as to the ‘Jabberwocky’ and the work of Flavin, Le Witt, Judd etc, but there are also many others that are rather more obscure, I though I would collect some of these here. Firstly, the ‘Park Place Group’, a group of artists working together in New York from 1963 onwards. These included: Anthony Magar:
