A marvelous talk today at Stanford from Tim Flohr Sørensen (Copenhagen) about his project – Insignificants – [Link]. So much in a short report on such a beautifully simple experiment. Archaeologists often pride themselves on taking up what is overlooked, insignificant, discarded as irrelevant, detritus, mere traces, garbage. But what does this involve? What happens…
archaeological imagination
in the alchemist’s studio – 01
Polished copper and brass. Seaweed. The archaeological circuit – [Link]
Anselm Kiefer’s archaeological sensibility
Four new works from Anselm Kiefer go on exhibition at Gagosian Le Bourget, Paris, February 7. Marvelous manifestations of the archaeological imagination – [Link] What interests me is the transformation, not the monument. I don’t construct ruins, but I feel ruins are moments when things show themselves. A ruin is not a catastrophe. It is…
fictive realism – Ray Harryhausen’s model making
There’s an exhibition of the stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen running at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – [Link]. I vividly remember first seeing his magical movies in the 60s and 70s. The infamous fighting skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963); Pegasus the winged horse in Clash of the Titans (1981). Paul Noble…
resonating pasts – Alan Moore
In our exploration of historical narrative, Gary Devore and I have been looking at the work of Alan Moore, graphic novelist. Of note is his Voice of the Fire (1996), a concatenation of voices echoing over 6000 years through Northampton, England, his home town. Here are a couple of pages in From Hell (1989-1996) conveying…
the valencies of Neo-Classical
I have been avoiding giving any attention to the last days of Trump. Jody Maxmin, however, directed me to an executive order this last weekend concerning classical architecture. Here’s the report in the New York Times: Trump Makes Classical Style the Default for Federal Buildings An executive order stopped short of banning modernist architecture, but…