This week, Rem Koolhaas will build Marina’s temple to performance art, Gaudí’s unfinished masterpiece, Renaissance art murder mystery, a new arts center in Utah, a review of Niall Ferguson’s Civilization, best-designed newspapers, Banksy authentication, drawing with chalk, burger grease and ketchup.
February 19, 2012
Posted inArt
What Comes After “Paintant?”
In the 1990s, Fabian Marcaccio coined the word “paintant” by fusing “painting” and “mutant.” In his “paintants,” he would sometimes carve and expose the stretcher bars. He worked on burlap and fabric. He used photographic images and applied various mediums to digitally printed surfaces. His materials included oil paint, silicone, acrylics and sand. He made relief-like brushstrokes out of silicon and attached them to the surface of his work. Sometimes they extended out onto the wall, like an extra limb. They were neither natural nor artificial, but a hybrid combination.
Posted inBooks
Torn Curtain: Gombrowicz and the Europe That Used To Be
When I read Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke in the late 1980s the Soviet empire was beginning to totter and crack. An English version of the book, published in 1961 in the UK, had been re-issued in 1986 as part of Penguin’s Writers from the Other Europe series, edited by Philip Roth. The project aimed to disseminate Eastern European writers in the Anglophone world: a worthy endeavor, though judging from the cobbled-together edition of Ferdydurke — an offset duplication of the 1961 text, with a Czeslaw Milosz essay from another occasion tacked on as an introduction — one with a limited budget.
