Poems Found in A Pioneer Museum, Susan Howe, 2009: 32 letterpress cards printed on Canaletto Liscio paper, in binders box 130 x 100. 300 copies. Susan Howe writes: "I copied these poems, almost verbatim, from typed identification cards placed beside items in display cases at Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Memorial Museum founded in 1901 by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers. The artifacts and memorabilia in their collection date from 1847 when Mormon settlers first entered the Valley of the Great Salt Lake until the joining of the railroads at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869." More...
Showing posts with label ephemeral art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ephemeral art. Show all posts
Sunday, November 29, 2009
pioneer ID cards = poems
Poems Found in A Pioneer Museum, Susan Howe, 2009: 32 letterpress cards printed on Canaletto Liscio paper, in binders box 130 x 100. 300 copies. Susan Howe writes: "I copied these poems, almost verbatim, from typed identification cards placed beside items in display cases at Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Memorial Museum founded in 1901 by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers. The artifacts and memorabilia in their collection date from 1847 when Mormon settlers first entered the Valley of the Great Salt Lake until the joining of the railroads at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869." More...
Saturday, May 31, 2008
when Paik TV goes on the fritz
How do we preserve art that wasn't created to be preserved? Such a category would include, let's say, an artwork made partly or wholly of organic materials such as chocolate or beeswax. Or an artwork constructed of a then-old or a now-old form of technology that is difficult now to replace or even repair. I began by asking how we preserve such art, but the apter question might be should we? What becomes of art consciously ephemeral if years later we decide it must be preserved (because of its sheer dollar value; because of its canonicity)?
Starting with the problem presented in Los Angeles by the failure of some old television sets, an article in the Christian Science Monitor reports on this difficulty.
Above at right: a Nam June Paik piece dated 1965. This is not the L.A. failure mentioned above and so far as I know this Paik piece still works.
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"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
