1.
Joseph Kosuth
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Joseph Kosuth is an American conceptual artist. He lives in New York and London, after residing in cities in Europe, including Ghent. Born in Toledo, Ohio, Kosuth had an American mother, Joseph Kosuth attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963 Kosuth enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art on a scholarship and he spent the following year in Paris and traveled throughout Europe and North Africa. He moved to New York in 1965 and attended the School of Visual Arts there until 1967, from 1971 he studied anthropology and philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. Along with Lawrence Weiner, On Kawara, Hanne Darboven and others and his art generally strives to explore the nature of art rather than producing what is traditionally called art. He remarked in 1969, The value of artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art. Kosuths works frequently reference Sigmund Freuds psycho-analysis and Ludwig Wittgensteins philosophy of language and his first conceptual work Leaning Glass, consisted of an object, a photograph of it and dictionary definitions of the words denoting it. In 1966 Kosuth also embarked upon a series of works entitled Art as Idea as Idea, involving texts, the works in this series took the form of photostat reproductions of dictionary definitions of words such as water, meaning, and idea. Accompanying these photographic images are certificates of documentation and ownership indicating that the works can be made and remade for exhibition purposes, One of his most famous works is One and Three Chairs. The piece features a chair, a photograph of that chair. The photograph is a representation of the actual chair situated on the floor, the definition, posted on the same wall as the photograph, delineates in words the concept of what a chair is, in its various incarnations. In this and other, similar works, Five Words in Blue Neon and Glass One and Three, Kosuth forwards tautological statements, a collaboration with independent filmmaker Marion Cajori, Sept.11,1972 was a Minimalist portrait of sunlight in Cajoris studio. In the early 1970s, concerned with his ethnocentricity as a white, male artist and he visited the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific, and the Huallaga Indians in the Peruvian Amazon. Hung on walls painted his signature dark gray, Kosuths later, large photomontages trace a kind of artistic, in 1992, Kosuth designed the album cover for Fragments of a Rainy Season by John Cale. For the installation of his 2007 exhibition at La Casa Encendida in Madrid, since 1990 Kosuth has also begun working on various permanent public commissions. In 1994, for the city of Tachikawa, Kosuth designed Words of a Spell, for Noëma, in 2011, celebrating the work of Charles Darwin, Kosuth created a commission in the library where Darwin was inspired to pursue his evolutionary theory. His students have included, among others, Michel Majerus, Kosuth became the American editor of the Art & Language journal in 1969
2.
Conceptual art
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Conceptual art, sometimes simply called conceptualism, is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Some works of art, sometimes called installations, may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. The notion that art should examine its own nature was already a potent aspect of the art critic Clement Greenbergs vision of Modern art during the 1950s. One of the first and most important things they questioned was the assumption that the role of the artist was to create special kinds of material objects. Thus, in describing or defining a work of art as conceptual it is important not to confuse what is referred to as conceptual with an artists intention. The French artist Marcel Duchamp paved the way for the conceptualists, providing them examples of prototypically conceptual works — the readymades. The artistic tradition does not see an object as art because it is not made by an artist or with any intention of being art. This concept, also called Art esthapériste, derived from the infinitesimals of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - quantities which could not actually exist except conceptually, the current incarnation of the Isouian movement, Excoördism, self-defines as the art of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. In 1961 the term art, coined by the artist Henry Flynt in his article bearing the term as its title. By the mid-1970s they had produced publications, indices, performances, texts, in 1970 Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, the first dedicated conceptual-art exhibition, took place at the New York Cultural Center. Conceptual art emerged as a movement during the 1960s - in part as a reaction against formalism as then articulated by the influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg. According to Greenberg Modern art followed a process of progressive reduction and those elements that ran counter to this nature were to be reduced. The task of painting, for example, was to define precisely what kind of object a painting truly is, later artists continued to share a preference for art to be self-critical, as well as a distaste for illusion. Lawrence Weiner said, Once you know about a work of mine you own it, theres no way I can climb inside somebodys head and remove it. It is sometimes reduced to a set of written instructions describing a work, Language was a central concern for the first wave of conceptual artists of the 1960s and early 1970s. This linguistic turn reinforced and legitimized the direction the artists took. Osborne also notes that the early conceptualists were the first generation of artists to complete degree-based university training in art, osborne later made the observation that contemporary art is post-conceptual in a public lecture delivered at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Villa Sucota in Como on July 9,2010. It is a claim made at the level of the ontology of the work of art
3.
Chair
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A chair is a piece of furniture with a raised surface supported by legs, commonly used to seat a single person. Chairs are supported most often by four legs and have a back, however, Chairs are used in a number of rooms in homes, in schools and offices, and in various other workplaces. A chair without a back or arm rests is a stool, or when raised up, a chair with arms is an armchair and with upholstery, reclining action, and a fold-out footrest, a recliner. A permanently fixed chair in a train or theater is a seat or, in an airplane, airline seat, when riding, it is a saddle and bicycle saddle, and for an automobile, with wheels it is a wheelchair and when hung from above, a swing. An upholstered, padded chair for more one person is a couch, sofa, settee, or loveseat, or if is not upholstered. A separate footrest for a chair, usually upholstered, is known as an ottoman, the word chair comes from the early 13th century English word chaere, which came from Old French chaiere chair, seat, throne. The chair is used as the emblem of authority in the House of Commons in the United Kingdom and Canada. In keeping with this connotation of the chair as the symbol of authority, committees, boards of directors. Endowed professorships are referred to as chairs and it was not until the 16th century that chairs became common. Until then, people sat on chests, benches, and stools, the number of chairs which have survived from an earlier date is exceedingly limited, most examples are of ecclesiastical or seigneurial origin. Chairs were in existence since at least the Early Dynastic Period of Egypt and they were covered with cloth or leather, were made of carved wood, and were much lower than today’s chairs - chair seats were sometimes only 25 cm high. In ancient Egypt chairs appear to have been of great richness, generally speaking, the higher ranked an individual was, the taller and more sumptuous was the chair he sat on and the greater the honor. On state occasions the pharaoh sat on a throne, often with a footstool in front of it. The average Egyptian family seldom had chairs, and if they did, among the better off, the chairs might be painted to look like the ornate inlaid and carved chairs of the rich, but the craftsmanship was usually poor. The earliest images of chairs in China are from sixth-century Buddhist murals and stele and it was not until the twelfth century that chairs became widespread in China. Scholars disagree on the reasons for the adoption of the chair, in modern China, unlike Korea or Japan, it is no longer common to sit at floor level. In Europe, it was owing in great measure to the Renaissance that the chair ceased to be a privilege of state, once the idea of privilege faded the chair speedily came into general use. We find almost at once that the chair began to change every few years to reflect the fashions of the day, in the 1880s, chairs became more common in American households and usually there was a chair provided for every family member to sit down to dinner
4.
Fluxus
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Fluxus is an international and interdisciplinary group of artists, composers, designers and poets that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. Dutch gallerist and art critic Harry Ruhé describes Fluxus as the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties, Fluxus is known for experimental contributions to different artistic media and disciplines. Fluxus is also known for generating art forms that were new when Fluxus artists created them, Fluxus participants included artists, composers, designers, and architects, as well as economists, mathematicians, ballet dancers, chefs, and even a would-be theologian. Equally significant, they represented nations on three continents – Asia, Europe, and North America, many Fluxus artists share an anti-commercial and anti-art sensibility. Fluxus is sometimes described as intermedia, the process of creating was privileged over the finished product. Another influence was the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, a French artist who was active in Dada, George Maciunas, a co-founder of this fluid movement, coined the name Fluxus in 1961 to title a proposed magazine. The broad and varied nature of the involved in Fluxus involved a community of friends who worked together. They had different ideas about art and the role of art in society, the overlapping communities within Fluxus and the way that Fluxus developed in overlapping stages meant that participants had very different ideas about what Fluxus was. One Fluxus co-founder – George Maciunas – proposed a well known manifesto, but none of the artists agreed with it. Instead, a series of festivals in Wiesbaden, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Amsterdam, and New York, gave rise to a loose but robust community. In keeping with the reputation Fluxus earned as a forum of experimentation, Fluxus played an important role in the opening up of definitions of art. The origins of Fluxus lie in many of the concepts explored by composer John Cage in his music of the 1930s through the 1960s. After attending courses on Zen Buddhism taught by D. T, a major influence is found in the work of Marcel Duchamp. Also of importance was Dada Poets and Painters, edited by Robert Motherwell, the term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Duchamp around 1913, when he created his first readymades from found objects. Indifferently chosen, readymades and altered readymades challenged the notion of art as an inherently optical experience, the most famous example is Duchamps infamous altered readymade Fountain, a work which he signed R. Mutt. While taking refuge from WWI in New York, in 1915 Duchamp formed a Dada group with Francis Picabia, Other key members included Arthur Craven, Florine Stettheimer, and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, credited by some with proposing the idea for Fountain to Duchamp. By 1916 these artists, especially Duchamp, Man Ray, and their artworks would inform Fluxus and conceptual art in general. A number of contemporary events are credited as either anticipating Fluxus
5.
George Brecht
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He described his own art as a way of “ensuring that the details of everyday life, the random constellations of objects that surround us, stop going unnoticed. ”Brecht was born George Ellis MacDiarmid in New York, August 27,1926. After his fathers death from alcoholism when Brecht was 10 years old, he moved with his mother to Atlantic City, after World War II, he studied chemistry at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy & Science, finishing his degree and marrying his first wife Marceline in 1951. After working briefly for Charles Pfizer & Co as a quality inspector, he took a job as a research chemist for Johnson & Johnson in 1953. Over the next decade he would register 5 US patents and 2 co-patents including four patents for tampons and his only son Eric was born in New Jersey in 1953. Whilst working as a chemist, Brecht became increasingly interested in art that explored chance, the work was a systematic investigation of the role of chance in the 20th century in the fields of science and avant-garde art. Reveal his respect for Dadaist and surrealist projects as well as for the complex aspects of the work of Marcel Duchamp. Artworks in this period included bed-sheets stained with ink he called Chance Paintings, in 1957, Brecht sought out the artist Robert Watts, after seeing his work exhibited at Douglass College, Rutgers University, where Watts taught. This led to lunch once a week for a number of years at a cafe between the university and Brechts laboratory. Watts colleague Allan Kaprow would also attend these informal meetings. Discussions at these lunches would lead directly to the setting up of the Yam Festival, 1962–63, by Watts and Brecht, seen as one of the most important precursors to Fluxus. The meetings also led to both Brecht and Kaprow attending John Cages class at The New School for Social Research, New York, often driving down together from New Brunswick. Brecht studied with John Cage between 1958 and 1959, during which time he invented, and then refined, the Event Score which would become a feature of Fluxus. Typically, Event Scores are simple instructions to complete tasks which can be performed publicly, privately. These ideas would be taken up and expanded upon up by La Monte Young, Yoko Ono and many other avant-garde artists who passed through these classes. The two had met in 1957 when Brecht heard that Cage was planning to hunt mushrooms in the New Jersey area, he rang him up and invited him to stop by. So I thought, well, who cares if hes a musician and its the mind that transcends any medium. The rate of attrition was something fierce, the end result was that there were very few musician types and the event nature of the class became apparent. George Brechts understanding of a situation was far greater than mine
6.
Dick Higgins
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Dick Higgins was a British composer, poet, printmaker, and early Fluxus artist. His younger brother Mark Huntington Higgins was murdered in the Congo in 1960, Higgins married fellow artist Alison Knowles in 1960. One daughter of Higgins and Knowles, Hannah Higgins, is the author of Fluxus Experience and her twin sister, Jessica Higgins, is a New York based intermedia artist closely associated with seminal curator Lance Fung. Higgins died of an attack while attending an event in Quebec. During this time Higgins began to produce the first scores for events that rework everyday activities into performances that may or may not incorporate music, Higgins and Alison both took part in the Wiesbaden, Germany Fluxus festival in 1962 that marked the founding of Fluxus activity. The Something Else Press series of Great Bear Pamphlets, documented the earliest Fluxus performances, Higgins coined the word intermedia to describe his artistic activities, defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name, published in the first number of the Something Else Newsletter. His most notable contributions include Danger Music scores and the Intermedia concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s. He was an early and ardent proponent and user of computers as a tool for art making, dating back to the mid-1960s and his A Book About Love & War & Death, a book-length aleatory poem published in 1972 included one of those. In his introduction, Higgins says, having finished the first three parts of the poem throwing dice, he wrote a FORTRAN IV program to produce part four, Higgins also created metadrama poems minimal emotional statements or narratives. Between 1976 and 1994 he collaborated with the Italian writer and visual artist Luciano Caruso through email correspondence and he saw Brunos essay on the art of memory also as an early text on intermedia. A Dialectic of Centuries, Notes towards a Theory of the New Arts collected many of his essays, in 1972 Higgins founded Unpublished Editions to publish his short novel Amigo, which was later renamed Printed Editions. Bern Porter Books, Calais, ME,1960, a Book About Love & War & Death. Canto 1, Something Else Press, A Great Bear Pamphlet, foew & ombwhnw, a grammar of the mind and a phenomenology of love and a science of the arts as seen by a stalker of the wild mushrooms, Something Else Press, New York,1969. Towards the 1970s, Abyss Publications, Somerville, MA,1969, a Book About Love & War & Death. A Book About Love & War & Death, Amigo, A Sexual Odyssey, Unpublished Editions,1972. For Eugene in Germany, Unpublished Editions,1973, Notes towards a Theory of the New Arts. Of Celebration of Morning, A Polysemantic Fiction, short Piano Pieces, 1962−1984 Printed Editions,1980. Horizons, The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia, carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press,1984
7.
Yoko Ono
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Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist who is also known for her work in performance art and filmmaking. She is the wife and widow of singer-songwriter John Lennon of the Beatles. Ono grew up in Tokyo, and studied at Gakushuin and she withdrew from her course after two years and rejoined her family in New York in 1953. She spent some time at Sarah Lawrence College, and then involved in New York Citys downtown artists scene. She first met Lennon in 1966 at her own art exhibition in London and she brought feminism to the forefront in her music, influencing artists as diverse as the B-52s and Meredith Monk. Ono achieved commercial and critical acclaim in 1980 with the chart-topping album Double Fantasy, public appreciation of Onos work has shifted over time, helped by a retrospective at a Whitney Museum branch in 1989 and the 1992 release of the six-disc box set Onobox. She received a Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement from the Venice Biennale in 2009, as Lennons widow, Ono works to preserve his legacy. She funded Strawberry Fields in New York City, the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland, and she has made significant philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace, Philippine and Japan disaster relief, and other causes. In 2012 Yoko Ono received the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Human Rights Award endowed by Alexandra Hildebrandt, the award is given annually in recognition of extraordinary, non-violent commitment to human rights. Ono continues her activism, inaugurating a biennial $50,000 LennonOno Grant for Peace in 2002. She has a daughter, Kyoko Chan Cox, from her marriage to Anthony Cox, Ono was born on February 18,1933, in Tokyo, to Isoko Ono and Eisuke Ono, a banker and former classical pianist. Isokos father was ennobled in 1915, isokos maternal grandfather Zenjiro Yasuda was an affiliate of the Yasuda clan and zaibatsu. Eisuke came from a line of samurai warrior-scholars. The kanji translation of Yokos first name Yoko means ocean child, Two weeks before Yokos birth, Eisuke was transferred to San Francisco by his employer, the Yokohama Specie Bank. The rest of the family followed soon after, with Yoko meeting Eisuke when she was two and her younger brother Keisuke was born in December 1936. Yoko was enrolled in piano lessons from the age of 4, in 1937, the family was transferred back to Japan and Ono enrolled at Tokyos Gakushuin, one of the most exclusive schools in Japan. In 1940, the moved to New York City. The next year, Eisuke was transferred from New York City to Hanoi, Ono was enrolled in Keimei Gakuen, an exclusive Christian primary school run by the Mitsui family
8.
Henry Flynt
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Henry Flynt is a philosopher, avant-garde musician, anti-art activist and exhibited artist often associated with Conceptual Art, Fluxus and Nihilism. Henry Flynt’s work devolves from what he calls cognitive nihilism, a concept he developed, the 1961 draft was published in Milan with other early work in his book Blueprint for a Higher Civilization in 1975. Flynt refined these dispensations in the essay Is there language and that was published as Primary Study in 1964. In 1961 Flynt coined the concept art in the Neo-Dada. An Anthology of Chance Operations contained seminal works by Fluxus artists such as George Brecht, Flynts concept art, he maintained, devolved from cognitive nihilism, from insights about the vulnerabilities of logic and mathematics. Drawing on an exclusively syntactical paradigm of logic and mathematics, concept art was meant jointly to supersede mathematics, therefore, Flynt maintained, to merit the label concept art, a work had to be an object-critique of logic or mathematics or objective structure. In 1962 Flynt began to campaign for an anti-art position, thus he demonstrated against cultural institutions in New York City with Tony Conrad and Jack Smith in 1963 and against the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen twice in 1964. Flynt wanted avant-garde art to become superseded by the terms of veramusement, Flynt read publicly from his text From Culture to Veramusment at Walter De Marias loft on February 28, 1963—an act which can be considered performance art. From about 1980, Flynt has given a deal of time to two endeavors which did not achieve the notoriety of the early actions, his concepts of meta-technology. In 1987 he revived his concept art for tactical reasons, following that period, Flynt began to publish recorded but unreleased musical compositions. Over 10 audio CDs have appeared as of 2007, in 1966, he recorded several rehearsal demo tapes with Henry Flynt & The Insurrections, a garage rock and folk rock band, which were later compiled and released in 2004 on Locust Music. Much of Henry Flynts subsequent recorded output has been release on the Recorded and his first CD release was You Are My Everlovin/Celestial Power on Recorded, quickly followed by Spindizzy and Hillbilly Tape Music also on Recorded. Later Recorded released NAEM4, Ascent to The Sun, recently, Flynts Glissando No.1 was published by Recorded. The Locust Music releases showcase the range of his musical interestes from minimalism, hillbilly country. C Tune documents a 1980 live improvisation with Catherine Christer Hennix on tamboura, Raga Electric, Experimental Music 1963-1971 is the seminal anthology of Flynts most challenging avant-garde work that includes Raga Electric and Free Alto. I Dont Wanna documents a band, the Insurrections, that Flynt led in 1966 with Walter De Maria. Purified by the Fire, recorded in December 1981, repeats the format of C Tune, Catherine Christer Hennix on tamboura, the 41-minute raga is dominated by the languid phrases of the violin that tests the border between melodic fragments and distorted tones. Dharma Warriors showcases another meeting between Catherine Christer Hennix & Flynt recorded in 1980 in Woodstock, New York, online reading, Henry Flynts text The Meaning of My Avant-Garde Hillbilly and Blues Music
9.
Plato
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Plato was a philosopher in Classical Greece and the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. He is widely considered the most pivotal figure in the development of philosophy, unlike nearly all of his philosophical contemporaries, Platos entire work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years. Along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle, Plato laid the foundations of Western philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead once noted, the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. In addition to being a figure for Western science, philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche, amongst other scholars, called Christianity, Platonism for the people, Plato was the innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms in philosophy, which originate with him. He was not the first thinker or writer to whom the word “philosopher” should be applied, few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth and range, perhaps only Aristotle, Aquinas and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank. Due to a lack of surviving accounts, little is known about Platos early life, the philosopher came from one of the wealthiest and most politically active families in Athens. Ancient sources describe him as a bright though modest boy who excelled in his studies, the exact time and place of Platos birth are unknown, but it is certain that he belonged to an aristocratic and influential family. Based on ancient sources, most modern scholars believe that he was born in Athens or Aegina between 429 and 423 BCE. According to a tradition, reported by Diogenes Laertius, Ariston traced his descent from the king of Athens, Codrus. Platos mother was Perictione, whose family boasted of a relationship with the famous Athenian lawmaker, besides Plato himself, Ariston and Perictione had three other children, these were two sons, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a daughter Potone, the mother of Speusippus. The brothers Adeimantus and Glaucon are mentioned in the Republic as sons of Ariston, and presumably brothers of Plato, but in a scenario in the Memorabilia, Xenophon confused the issue by presenting a Glaucon much younger than Plato. Then, at twenty-eight, Hermodorus says, went to Euclides in Megara, as Debra Nails argues, The text itself gives no reason to infer that Plato left immediately for Megara and implies the very opposite. Thus, Nails dates Platos birth to 424/423, another legend related that, when Plato was an infant, bees settled on his lips while he was sleeping, an augury of the sweetness of style in which he would discourse about philosophy. Ariston appears to have died in Platos childhood, although the dating of his death is difficult. Perictione then married Pyrilampes, her mothers brother, who had served many times as an ambassador to the Persian court and was a friend of Pericles, Pyrilampes had a son from a previous marriage, Demus, who was famous for his beauty. Perictione gave birth to Pyrilampes second son, Antiphon, the half-brother of Plato and these and other references suggest a considerable amount of family pride and enable us to reconstruct Platos family tree
10.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge, during his lifetime he published just one slim book, the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one article, one book review and a childrens dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously, Philosophical Investigations appeared as a book in 1953, and has since come to be recognised as one of the most important works of philosophy in the twentieth century. His teacher Bertrand Russell described Wittgenstein as the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, born in Vienna into one of Europes richest families, he inherited a large fortune from his father in 1913. Three of his brothers committed suicide, with Wittgenstein contemplating it too and he described philosophy as the only work that gives me real satisfaction. His philosophy is divided into an early period, exemplified by the Tractatus. The later Wittgenstein rejected many of the assumptions of the Tractatus, ludwigs grandmother Fanny was a first cousin of the famous violinist Joseph Joachim. They had 11 children—among them Wittgensteins father, Karl Otto Clemens Wittgenstein became an industrial tycoon, and by the late 1880s was one of the richest men in Europe, with an effective monopoly on Austrias steel cartel. Thanks to Karl, the Wittgensteins became the second wealthiest family in Austria-Hungary, however, their wealth diminished due to post-1918 hyperinflation and subsequently during the Great Depression, although even as late as 1938 they owned 13 mansions in Vienna alone. Wittgensteins mother was Leopoldine Maria Josefa Kalmus, known among friends as Poldi and her father was a Bohemian Jew and her mother was Austrian-Slovene Catholic—she was Wittgensteins only non-Jewish grandparent. She was an aunt of the Nobel Prize laureate Friedrich Hayek on her maternal side, Wittgenstein was born at 8,30 pm on 26 April 1889 in the so-called Wittgenstein Palace at Alleegasse 16, now the Argentinierstrasse, near the Karlskirche. Karl and Poldi had nine children in all, the children were baptized as Catholics, received formal Catholic instruction, and raised in an exceptionally intense environment. The family was at the center of Viennas cultural life, Bruno Walter described the life at the Wittgensteins palace as an atmosphere of humanity. Karl was a patron of the arts, commissioning works by Auguste Rodin and financing the citys exhibition hall and art gallery. Gustav Klimt painted Wittgensteins sister for her portrait, and Johannes Brahms. For Wittgenstein, who highly valued precision and discipline, contemporary music was never considered acceptable at all, music, he said to his friend Drury in 1930, came to a full stop with Brahms, and even in Brahms I can begin to hear the noise of machinery. He also learnt to play the clarinet in his thirties, a fragment of music, composed by Wittgenstein, was discovered in one of his 1931 notebooks, by Michael Nedo, Director of the Wittgenstein Institute in Cambridge. Three of the five brothers would commit suicide
11.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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Charles Sanders Peirce was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist who is sometimes known as the father of pragmatism. He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years, today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism. An innovator in mathematics, statistics, philosophy, research methodology, and various sciences, Peirce considered himself, first and foremost and he made major contributions to logic, but logic for him encompassed much of that which is now called epistemology and philosophy of science. As early as 1886 he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, in 1934, the philosopher Paul Weiss called Peirce the most original and versatile of American philosophers and Americas greatest logician. Websters Biographical Dictionary said in 1943 that Peirce was now regarded as the most original thinker, keith Devlin similarly referred to Peirce as one of the greatest philosophers ever. Peirce was born at 3 Phillips Place in Cambridge, Massachusetts and he was the son of Sarah Hunt Mills and Benjamin Peirce, himself a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University and perhaps the first serious research mathematician in America. At age 12, Charles read his older brothers copy of Richard Whatelys Elements of Logic, so began his lifelong fascination with logic and reasoning. At Harvard, he began lifelong friendships with Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Chauncey Wright, one of his Harvard instructors, Charles William Eliot, formed an unfavorable opinion of Peirce. This opinion proved fateful, because Eliot, while President of Harvard 1869–1909—a period encompassing nearly all of Peirces working life—repeatedly vetoed Harvards employing Peirce in any capacity. Peirce suffered from his late teens onward from a condition then known as facial neuralgia. Its consequences may have led to the isolation which made his lifes later years so tragic. That employment exempted Peirce from having to part in the Civil War, it would have been very awkward for him to do so. At the Survey, he worked mainly in geodesy and gravimetry and he was elected a resident fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in January 1867. From 1869 to 1872, he was employed as an Assistant in Harvards astronomical observatory, doing important work on determining the brightness of stars, on April 20,1877 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Also in 1877, he proposed measuring the meter as so many wavelengths of light of a certain frequency, during the 1880s, Peirces indifference to bureaucratic detail waxed while his Survey works quality and timeliness waned. Peirce took years to write reports that he should have completed in months, meanwhile, he wrote entries, ultimately thousands during 1883–1909, on philosophy, logic, science, and other subjects for the encyclopedic Century Dictionary. In 1885, an investigation by the Allison Commission exonerated Peirce, in 1891, Peirce resigned from the Coast Survey at Superintendent Thomas Corwin Mendenhalls request. He never again held regular employment, in 1879, Peirce was appointed Lecturer in logic at Johns Hopkins University, which had strong departments in a number of areas that interested him, such as philosophy, psychology, and mathematics
12.
Clement Greenberg
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In particular, he is best remembered for his promotion of the abstract expressionist movement and was among the first published critics to praise the work of painter Jackson Pollock. Clement Greenberg was born in the borough of the Bronx, NYC and his parents were middle-class Jewish immigrants, and he was the eldest of their three sons. Since childhood, Greenberg sketched compulsively, until becoming a young adult, Greenberg attended Erasmus Hall High School, the Marquand School for Boys, then Syracuse University, graduating with an A. B. in 1930, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. After college, already as fluent in Yiddish as English since childhood, Greenberg taught himself Italian and German in addition to French and Latin. During the next few years, Greenberg travelled the U. S. working for his fathers dry-goods business, Greenberg married in 1934, had a son the next year, and was divorced the year after that. It was then that Greenberg began to seriously, and soon after began getting published in a handful of small magazines. Greenberg writes, Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture and it is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas, Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same, Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time, for Greenberg, avant garde art was too innocent to be effectively used as propaganda or bent to a cause, while kitsch was ideal for stirring up false sentiment. Greenberg wrote several essays that defined his views on art history in the 20th century. In 1940, Greenberg joined Partisan Review as an editor and he became art critic for the Nation in 1942. He was associate editor of Commentary from 1945 until 1957, in December 1950, he joined the government funded American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Greenberg believed Modernism provided a commentary on experience. It was constantly changing to adapt to kitsch pseudo-culture, which was itself always developing, in the years after World War II, Greenberg pushed the position that the best avant-garde artists were emerging in America rather than Europe. Particularly, he championed Jackson Pollock as the greatest painter of his generation, Greenberg helped to articulate a concept of medium specificity. In Greenbergs view, after World War II the United States had become the guardian of advanced art and he was particularly impressed by the potential of painters William Ronald and Jack Bush, and later developed a close friendship with Bush. Greenberg expressed mixed feelings about pop art, on the one hand he expressed that pop art partook of a trend toward openness and clarity as against the turgidities of second generation Abstract Expressionism
13.
Robert Smithson
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Robert Smithson was an American artist who used photography in relation to sculpture and land art. Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and early on lived mostly in Rutherford, in Rutherford, William Carlos Williams was Smithsons pediatrician. When Smithson was nine his family moved to the Allwood section of Clifton and he studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York from 1955 to 1956 and then briefly at the Brooklyn Museum School. His early exhibited artworks were collage works influenced by drawings and clippings from beefcake magazines, science fiction. He primarily identified himself as a painter during this time, but after a three-year rest from the art world and his new work abandoned the preoccupation with the body that had been common in his earlier work. Instead he began to use glass sheet and neon lighting tubes to explore visual refraction and mirroring, crystalline structures and the concept of entropy became of particular interest to him, and informed a number of sculptures completed during this period, including Alogon 2. In Smithson’s eyes entropy was the law of thermodynamics, which exploits the range of energy by telling us that energy is easier lost than obtained. He said that in the future the universe will burn out into an all encompassing sameness. Smithson used the idea of entropy to explore ideas of decay and renewal, chaos and order, non-sites and earthworks, trying to find equilibrium between these opposites. His ideas on entropy also branched out into culture, “the urban sprawl, Smithson did not see entropy as a disadvantage, he saw it as a form of transformation of society and culture, which is shown in his artwork like his non-site pieces. Smithson became affiliated with artists who were identified with the minimalist or Primary Structures movement, such as Nancy Holt, Robert Morris, some of Smithsons later writings recovered 18th- and 19th-century conceptions of landscape architecture which influenced the pivotal earthwork explorations which characterized his later work. He eventually joined the Dwan Gallery, whose owner Virginia Dwan was a supporter of his work. This resulted in the series of non-sites in which earth and rocks collected from an area are installed in the gallery as sculptures. As well as works of art, Smithson produced a good deal of theoretical and critical writing, including the 2D paper work A Heap of Language, which sought to show how writing might become an artwork. In his essay Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan Smithson documents a series of sculptures made with mirrors at particular locations around the Yucatan peninsula. Part travelogue, part critical rumination, the article highlights Smithsons concern with the temporal as a cornerstone of his work, Smithsons interest in the temporal is explored in his writings in part through the recovery of the ideas of the picturesque. Now the Ramble has grown up into a jungle, and lurking in its thickets are “hoods, hobos, hustlers. Walking east, I passed graffiti on boulders… On the base of the Obelisk along with the hieroglyphs there are also graffiti, …In the spillway that pours out of the Wollman Memorial Ice Rink, I noticed a metal grocery cart and a trash basket half-submerged in the water
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The Treachery of Images
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The Treachery of Images is a painting by the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. Below it, Magritte painted, Ceci nest pas une pipe, french for This is not a pipe. How people reproached me for it, and yet, could you stuff my pipe. No, its just a representation, is it not, so if I had written on my picture This is a pipe, Id have been lying. Magritte painted The Treachery of Images when he was 30 years old and it is currently on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His statement is taken to mean that the painting itself is not a pipe, hence, the description, this is not a pipe. The theme of pipes with the text Ceci nest pas une pipe is extended in his 1966 painting, the painting is sometimes given as an example of meta message conveyed by paralanguage. Compare with Korzybskis The word is not the thing and The map is not the territory, representative realism Self-reference Simulacra and Simulation Subtext Theory of Forms Allmer, Patricia. René Magritte, Beyond Painting, Manchester University Press,2009 and this could be a pipe, Foucault, irrealism and Ceci nest pas une pipe essay in irreal views
