07w30:1 The Notebook Posted July 23rd, 2007 by timothy. 2 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2007 week 30 number 1 (The Notebook) Truth be told, I prepped this Goodread a day before the hardrive on my notebook computer crashed, and so I’ve had to do it all over again. Which I think is worth sharing, given the subject matter of this GR – the traditional paper notebooks, a medium endangered by fire but not by mechanical failure and magnets. It’s now become a cliché statement to say that as our the data of our world moves further and further toward the digital, the danger of losing it all one day becomes greater and greater. Nevertheless, it is statement worth repeating given that notebooks have always been about the repition of passages and quotes that can become cliché through their preservation. This GR is celebrating the digitization of some notebooks, particularly those of Leonardo Da Vinci, a hardcopy of which is now viewable at the Art Gallery of Ontario over the summer. This notebook (Codex Forster I) having achieved Da Vinci’s dream of flight to arrive here from London’s Victoria & Albert Museum last visited our city when it was exhibited at the ROM during the summer of 1998, where I first got the chance to see it. Going by the poster and mismemory, I thought the AGO was exhibiting the same spread as the ROM had, and yet, through one of the links below, I was able to remember correctly and see that the AGO is exhibiting pages 6v|7r while the ROM had shown 15v|16r. Further, the ROM had kept the pages open with a clear vinyl strap, whereas the AGO has the book displayed in an angled cradle, in its own illuminated box, beneath a piece of glass without a transparent vinyl holder. At the AGO it is accompanied by a flash animation (‘Geometrical Solids’), which can aslo be accessed at the same link. Secondly, a section on commonplace books, the old name for what we now call notebooks, or as some have argued, blogs. This selection was inspired by hearing Anthony Grafton’s wonderful lecture on the Slought Foundation website, which is there available as an AAC file, and which I’ve also made available as an MP3.-Timothy —————————————- Leonardo’s Notebooks Leonardo da Vinci Notebooks | V&A Museum http://goodreads.ca/shorty/ac/forstercodices/ e-Leo | Biblioteca Leonardiana http://www.leonardodigitale.com/login.html // sign in (‘accedi’) with user: goodreads pass: goodreads and then click on `sfoglia i manoscritti` and the chose the notebook from the left hand menu (`Madrid I, Madrid II, and Atlantico) Commonplace Books Literary Honeycombs: Storage and Retrieval of Texts Before Modern Times | Anthony Grafton AAC file (from Slought Foundation) MP3 file (Goodreads Mirror) Commonplace | Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace “Commonplace books (or commonplaces) emerged in the 15th century with the availability of cheap paper for writing, mainly in England. They were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests”. Long S | Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s The long, medial or descending s (Å¿) is a form of the minuscule letter ‘s’ formerly used where ‘s’ occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word, for example Å¿infulneÅ¿s (“sinfulness”). The modern letterform was called the terminal or short s. From Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library Commonplace Books | Beinecke Rare Book Library http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/compb.htm Osbourne b205 | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/Osbourne/ William Hill’s Commonplace Book | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/hill/ Sartaine most holsome meditations | Peter Mowie http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/sartain/ Johann Sigmund Kusser’s Commonplacebook http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/Kusser/ Tobias Alston’s CPB | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/alston/ Robert Herrick’s CPB | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/herrick/ Richard Cromleholm’s CPB | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/Cromleholm/ William Camden’s CPB | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/camden/ The Book of Brome | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/bookofbrome/ Manuscript Guide MS327 | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library http://goodreads.ca/shorty/yale/ms327/ —————————————- Long links made short by using Shorty (http://get-shorty.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com
04w09:1 The Gates Roundup Posted February 28th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 9 number 1 (The Gates roundup) ——————————————————————— The closer you got, the worse it looked | Sarah Milroy http://tinyurl.com/5j6vm “By any estimation, as an intervention into public space, The Gates must be measured a triumph, unleashing a frolicsome joie de vivre in the direst depths of winter — no mean feat. The vibe even swept over the 49th parallel to engulf our own northern breed of pale, thin-lipped hibernators, many of whom migrated south en masse to check out the great event. […]What has been revealed in New York over the past few weeks is that Christo and Jean-Claude are brilliant strategists, passionate advocates for freedom of expression, with an unparalleled ability to mobilize the public behind an idea. But they are not strictly speaking sculptors, in the traditional sense of being form makers. Their wrapping and draping projects have been great because they adhere to, and enhance, three-dimensional forms that exist already. The artists then lay claim to these forms, designating them as things of beauty, drawing our attention to their historical or topographical resonances, and setting them alight with shimmering fabrics as a way of declaring their transcendence, and the transcendence of the human imagination. These works are works of genius. The Gates, alas, was something rather less.” With $3.50 and a Dream, the ‘Anti-Christo’ Is Born | Sarah Boxer http://tinyurl.com/4jcnp “You’ve seen Christo’s ‘Gates’ in Central Park. But what about Hargo’s ‘Gates’ in Somerville, Mass.? Sure, Hargo is unabashedly riding on the coattails of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. But it did take him some time to make his gates: 0.002 years, he estimates. That’s a good chunk of a day. You may as well take a look: not-rocket-science.com/gates.htm” Gated | Peter Schjeldahl http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?talk/050228ta_talk_schjeldahl “Of course, ‘The Gates’ is art, because what else would it be? Art used to mean paintings and statues. Now it means practically anything human-made that is unclassifiable otherwise. This loss of a commonsense definition is a big art-critical problem, but not in Central Park, not this week. What the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been doing for three and a half decades is self-evident. They propose a grandiose, entirely pointless alteration of a public place, then advance their plan in the face of a predictable public and bureaucratic resistance, which gradually comes to seem mean-spirited and foolish for want of a reasonable argument against them. They build a constituency of supporters, including collectors who help finance the project by buying Christo’s drawings and collages of it. What then occurs is like an annual festival – Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a high-school prom – without the parts about its being annual or a festival. It feels vaguely religious. The zealous installers and minders, identifiable on site by their uniforms and chatty pride, are like acolytes. As with any ritual – though ‘The Gates’ can’t be a ritual, because it is performed just once – how people behave during the installation is what it is for and about. Then it’s gone, before it has a chance to become boring or, for that matter, interesting. “ The Gates on The Daily Show | The Daily Show http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/commentary/2005/02/gates-on-daily-show.html “Simply put, The Gates is a triumph Jon, an artistic milestone that may finally put New York on the cultural map. I don’t want to get ahead of myself here Jon, but I think this may do for the Big Apple what The West Wing has done for Washington DC, or what the band Asia did for that continent.” Conceptual Advertising | Timothy Comeau http://blogto.com/arts/2005/02/conceptual_advertising/ “In yesterday’s Globe and Mail [Simon Houpt wrote] ‘The most enlightening comment I’ve heard so far about The Gates came from a man who had no idea what it was,’ writes Houpt, ‘I don’t mean he couldn’t parse the meanings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 7,5000 five-metre high doorframes hung with fabric around Central Park, or that he didn’t know whether to call it conceptual art or environmental art or an installation. No, this guy didn’t even know it was art. […] He’d somehow missed all the pre-event press coverage. So as he gazed northward at the thousands of orange shower curtains flapping in the wind, he turned and asked me, ‘Are they advertising that fabric? ‘Christo and Jeanne-Claude call their piece ‘interventions’ because they intrude, or impose themselves and their works, on public spaces. This apparently freaks us out. We’re used to one very specific sort of intervention: commercial ones, otherwise known as advertisements. Indeed, many visitors to Central Park have quipped that it’s a shame the artists don’t accept sponsorships, since the nylon orange is a perfect match for the corporate colours of Home Depot’. ” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Monday 28 February 2005 @ 2:54 PM
04w46:2 Artist-Run Centres Posted November 12th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 46 number 2 (artist-run centres) Thanks again to AA Bronson and Andy Patterson for allowing me to publish their articles on the Goodreads site. – Timothy ——————————————————————— The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat | AA Bronson http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/aabronson/ “…wanting a Canadian art scene just like in New York, or London, or Paris in the thirties; as a Canadian artist typically unable to picture the reality of a Canadian art scene except as a dream projected upon the national landscape as a sea-to-shining-sea connective tissue; that is as a dream community connected by and reflected by the media; that is, authenticated by its own reflection in the media; as such a Canadian artist desiring to see not necessarily himself, but the picture of his art scene pictured on TV; and knowing the impossibility of an art scene without real museums (the Art Callery of Ontario was not a real museum for us), without real art magazines (and artscanada was not a real art magazine for us), without real artists (no, Harold Town was not a real artist for us, and we forgot that we ourselves were real artists, because we had not seen ourselves in the media – real artists, like Frank Stella, appeared in Artforum magazine), as such an artist desiring such a picture of such a scene, such a reality from sea-to-shining-sea, then, it was natural to call upon our national attributes – the bureaucratic tendency and the protestant work ethic – and working together, and working sometimes not together we laboured to structure, or rather to untangle from the messy post-Sixties spaghetti of our minds, artist-run galleries, artists’ video, and artist-run magazines. And that allowed us to allow ourselves to see ourselves as an art scene. And we did.” AA’s famous article on the history of artist-run centres in Canada, from 1983. Preface to “Money Value Art” | Andrew J. Patterson http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/andrewpatterson/ “If economic dependency on the United States was already a foregone conclusion by the beginning of the 1950s, then Canadian distinction from the expanding American empire had to be asserted in a different domain. The cultural realm provided an excellent opportunity. Beginning with the 1941 Artists’ Conference in Kingston, Ontario, the Federation of Canadian Artists and other arts-funding advocates ‘invoked the nati onal interest as the best strategy for defending and advancing the boundaries of what they understood as culture,’ perhaps with a utopian fervour and perhaps strategically. Indeed, coalitions of visual and performing artists of the time tended not to position themselves as autonomous modernist artists. Instead, they engaged in discourses concerning democracy, culture, nation building, and public space. They worked alongside agrarian and labour activists, proto-feminists, and even popular entertainers. It is worth noting that the Brief Concerning the Cultural Aspects of Canadian Reconstruction, presented to the 1944 federal Turgeon Special Committee on Reconstruction and Re-establishment, resolved that Canada’s National Gallery should be radically decentralized and reconstituted as a network of location-based centres and practices.” Artist-Run Centre posting | Sally McKay and Guests http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/comment/29074/ “It’s even more imperative that ARCs (or parallel galleries, as they used to be called) re-articulate their purpose, and do it in a language that inspires a new generation. Running an ARC is a ton of work. It requires a dedicated volunteer board with enthusiasm for the future and a vision for the programming. It requires staff who feel invested enough in the institution to put in extra hours making art shows happen on a shoestring. It’s a team effort that, when it works, works great. But inspiration is required and that inspiration seems to be in short supply. Institutions change internally and so does the cultural climate around them. In the 1970s artists needed ARCs because there was nowhere else to show their work. It was a let’s-put-the-show-on-right -here-in-the-barn mentality that drove the long hours and creative solutions to systemic an d structural problems. Now there’s a sort of entrenched misery, a doom and gloom attitude that we will all volunteer our energies, even if its no fun at all, to maintain a system that has become integral to visual art production in this country. But why?” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Friday 12 November 2004 @ 3:10 PM
