The Wit of the Staircase

Mind If I Smoke?

The Smoking Museum, below.

Link: The Smoking Museum.

Via: Design Observer: writings about design & culture.

Performance Based On A Dream

"17 year old Bianca Passarge of Hamburg dresses up as a cat, complete with furry tail and dances on wine bottles, June 1958. Her performance was based on a dream and she practiced for eight hours every day in order to perfect her dance."

Link: Vintage Photographs.

An Account On The Psychogeographical Warfare In Venice

On the occasion of the opening this week of the 2007 edition. As regular readers will remember, Wit is a psychogeographical warrior of the other Venice--Venice, CA.

THE RALPH RUMNEY'S REVENGE AND OTHER SCAMS

An account on the psychogeographical warfare in Venice during the 1995 Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Arts

by Luther Blissett

0. WHY VENICE?

"Venice is a ghost-town, and there is no longer any moonshine to kill, either. From the Fifties the native population has been reduced to a half by an increasing commodification and an advance in the cost of living which remodelled and standardised the town at tourists disposal and sentenced many Venetians to deportation to the inland. Those who remained became "walk-ons" in a never ending show, without even being paid.

Out of season, the calli (characteristical narrow streets) are empty and nights are sad and desolating. There are also serious problems of pollution, and the town runs the risk of gradually sinking into the sea owing to the building of a methane pipe-line in the gulf."

Link: [ L u t h e r B l i s s e t t . n e t ].

Link: ::: wood s lot ::: "the fitful tracing of a portal".

Flaming June

A little summer beauty for Wit's readers on the first truly perfect June day in New York City.

"Flaming June is a painting by Frederic Leighton, produced in 1895. Painted with oil paints on a 47" x 47" square canvas, it is widely considered to be Leighton's crowning work, showing Leighton's classicist nature.

It is thought that the woman portrayed gestures to the sleeping figures the Greek would often paint which were collectively referred to as Venus.

Flaming June was auctioned in the 1960s, during a period of time known to be difficult for selling Victorian era paintings, where it failed to sell for its low reserve price of $140.00 USD (about $840.00 in 2000 dollars). Afterward, it was promptly purchased by the Ponce Museum of Art in Puerto Rico where it currently resides.

The painting was honored in song by Paul Weller on his Stanley Road album."

Link: Flaming June - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Anne Frank, Oddly Naked

Taken by her father, Otto Frank.

Cool outfit, we've got to admit.

Via: un regard oblique.

Jason Meadows' Bouquet Of Slain Consumer Trifles

Empathy is always the genie in Jason Meadows' work. Voice writer Jessica Baran gets it exactly right in this short, deft piece of art writing.

"It's the consistent mark of slowly plotted put-togetherness that sustains this show's air of
tragic affection. You sense not only the artist, but Frank himself hoisting four coffins into a towering, free-standing frame anchored in dirt, or thrusting PVC pikes into the 'heads' of old- man scare-masks, all the while thinking, 'This is a really good idea.'

You'd be almost inhuman not to identify with this creature, so sincerely taken in by his quixotic creative crusades. Dead Heads, a post-sacred-rite bouquet of slain consumer trifles—faux-leather fabric samples, chunks of flame-orange bungee cord, torn strips of camouflage—distills what this show seems to be about: the soft, mutual victimization that occurs in the course of our incurable love for our own ideas—when our flashes of superiority land us with the dubious distinction of having, say, pumpkin-carved a basketball and cast it in bronze."

Link: village voice > art > Sculptor Jason Meadows Evokes Frankenstein by Jessica Baran.

Check out the show. It's open in New York's Chelsea until mid-June.

Link: tanya bonakdar gallery :: exhibitions.

Witchy Atavism v. Lines Of Flight

Vaguely condescending but mostly respectful review of Wit favorite Karen Kilimnik's survey show at the ICA in Philadelphia by New York Times critic Roberta Smith, below. For we of Wit all Kilimnik's artistic devices and guises are brilliant ways to get past the mystification of female sexuality and female intelligence in culture, something that high culture is still as guilty of as low culture. (High culture is in fact now perhaps more guilty of this than low, which permits more of certain liberties freed from the class restraints of the former.)

The vaguely anti-social (or undersocialized; or as Smith puts it "woman-child") Kilimnik has the nuts or stupidity to keep pointing out this mystification. Artists like Smith favorite Cindy Sherman are the adolescent ones to we of Wit, as they have childishly made a bargain with this system rather than creating a space outside it. We of Wit are not fans of Sherman's work because it participates in creating a nostalgic (or retrograde, if you wish) aura of witchy atavism around women. Kilimnik's adolescent tinge is uncomprising and bold--the stance of a Deleuzian madwoman describing new "lines of flight."

Smith herself also seems to deliberately rely on this kind of mystificiation and Hellfire-style social S & M in her career as a female art critic. That's not power to we of Wit, it's a pose. One that is designed to make other people (call them "child-men", if you please) comfortable.

"Karen Kilimnik has gotten the survey that her strange, still difficult achievement deserves. For one thing, her show at the Institute of Contemporary Art is appropriately strange itself, beginning with a barren, seemingly empty, party’s-over gallery. It goes deep into her woman-child imagination, touching an all-too-American sense of emptiness. It also makes her efforts in installation art, which encompass materials as various as glitter, fake snow and blood, stuffed animals, ballet shoes and piles of party drugs, feel of a piece with her painting, photography, video and drawing."

Link: Karen Kilimnik - Art - Review - Philadelphia - New York Times.

One Need Not Be A Chamber To Be Haunted: Ghost Photos For Sale

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted; / One need not be a house; /The brain has corridors surpassing / Material place.”

--Emily Dickinson

"In the mid 19th century, two powerful forces--the march of technology and the gaining momentum of the Spiritualist movement--led to a strange alliance of photography and the supernatural and the birth of 'spirit photography'.

From the 1860s carte-de-visites of William Mumler to the present day, photography has been used to both prove and debunk the existence of ghosts and spirits. Jack and Beverly Wilgus, a collecting team for 30 years and the creative force behind the Bright Byte Studio, have a remarkable collection of spirit photography. In the following interview, they discuss their collection and this mysterious aspect of ephemera...."

Link: ephemera: Spirit Photography Collectors Ain't Afriad of No Ghosts.

Via: Professor Hex.

The Creative Process

"The more we create, the more we love and lose those whom we love, the more we escape from death. With every new work we round and finish, we escape into the work we have created, the soul we have loved, the soul that has left us. When all is told, Rome is not in Rome; the best of a man lies outside himself."

--Romain Rolland

Via: whiskey river.

Between American Vogue And A Seaside Freak Show: J.G. Ballard On Salavador Dali

"A strong factor in Dali's ostracism from the critical fold was always his exhibitionism: the absurd moustachios, the gigolo manner, the preposterous English in which he yoked together rhinoceros horns and concepts from nuclear physics, his department-store window stunts, his playing up to the American news media, his strangely asexual devotion to his wife, Gala ('she has the look that pierces walls'), the bizarre space he occupied somewhere between American Vogue and a seaside freak show. The paintings came and went, as original and voluptuous as ever, but their seriousness was diminished by the stunts and tomfoolery. Only now are people beginning to look earnestly at the entirety of his lifetime's work and judge him as a painter rather than a performer."

Link: JG Ballard on Dali and film | Features | Guardian Unlimited Film.