even*cleveland: life of things

life of things

RO/LU : Surfaces On Which Your Setting and Sitting Will Be Uncertain:

RO/LU continues to explore “art history as a material” by starting with very literal information from existing works and reinventing through intuitive connections to others. A collage of the past and the present—Superstudio’s Quaderna line, environmental installations by Ettore Sottsass, Scott Burton and James Lee Byars’ utilization of man as a symbol object—along with intangible new ideas that emerge through action, then evolved. The objects, made from welded wire mesh, seem to change when one moves in their presence, in some way becoming different with each step taken around them.

Extending ideas embraced and explored by the Mono-ha movement in late sixties Japan, as well as current philosophers like Bruno Latour, RO/LU and Various explore the “life of things”—the belief that objects, images, and ideas included—have their own agency and won’t simply sit still under someone’s watch, on someone else’s terms. In fact, what makes them compelling is precisely what animates them, what they want, and how they behave when they are set loose into the world. In other words, objects, images, and ideas have lives to live. Suddenly we are interested in getting closer to these objects, establishing a poetic proximity that will allow these things to teach us in ways no person could.

More here. On view at Patrick Parrish from 9/4 to 10/4.

Can't wait to check it out.

Also on the to-see list: In Waves at Jack Hanley Gallery, opening Sunday. Always on the must-read list: rolublog.com.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

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