2025.10.21
point/counterpoint
 
 
. . . since I'm now beginning to imagine Étant donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as the counterpoint to the Barberini Faun at the Munich Glyptothek, I wonder if the hole in Étant donnés's brick wall references the post-WWII bombed out Glyptothek--remember, Duchamp started working on Étant donnés in 1946.
2024.10.21
451 Rhawn Gallery
2017.10.21
POPICA 003
2009.10.21
Really, what boundaries have you pushed?
Getting back towards Logan Circle, I go into the Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul, where I haven't been in over ten years, and haven't been in while empty in 25 years. For some reason, I found it to be enormous inside. I guess it just is enormous, and actually quite nice architecturally, very Renaissance Rome. I notice within one of the side chapels is the chair used by Pope John Paul II while he was in Philadelphia 1979. Since no one else was around and the railing to the chapel was only 2 feet tall, I decided to go sit in the chair myself. I found those few seconds sitting to be quite intense, so I got up quickly because otherwise I would have gotten way too comfortable.
Well, what do you do after having sat in one of the Pope's chairs? To be honest, I was in a very good mood the rest of the day.
Really, what boundaries have you pushed?
...maybe there's a subconscious trend.
16 August 1977
There's that open door at the end of St. Peter's Colonnade which opens up to a long corridor and ultimately the Scala Regia. As usual, a Swiss Guard was there standing at attention. I walked up the few steps anyway. The guard remained motionless until I reached the threshold, when he very subtly dipped that spear/ax thing about a quarter inch in my direction. Then I winked at him and returned back to the crowd.
Really, what boundaries have you pushed?
And the Laszlo Toth Award for Pushing Boundaries goes to...
2008.10.21
californication
Did Ruskin really say something like 'there would be no memory without architecture'?
So young, attractive, underemployed-West-Coast-transplant-architects go around quoting Ruskin? REALLY!?!
The guy I sat next to in fourth grade went into the movie business--lighting--first in New York and then Hollywood. Last time I saw him was circa Christmas 1987 at Dirty Frank's in Philly. Funny thing is, he came back talking just like they do in the show.
2003.10.21
Re: human apparent asymmetry
What's interesting about the double organs of the kidneys and the lungs is that both organs carry out a lot of osmosis, thus it might just be that the design of these organs reflect the balancing operation that they largely perform.
osmosis : diffusion of fluid through a semipermeable membrane from a solution with a low solute concentration to a solution with a higher solute concentration until there is an equal concentration of fluid on both sides of the membrane.
artist's statement about his least proficient art
Basically a curatorial exercise giving the stupid stuff that I haven't actually thrown away or destroyed a chance at having an audience, or at least making it more visible.
2002
Denis Diderot "Encyclopedia"
Diderot, Denis. "Encyclopedia." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Philip Stewart. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.004 (accessed 21 October 2026). Originally published as "Encyclopédie," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 5:635–648A (Paris, 1755).
101/192
If the editor has his entire manuscript in hand, he will take a section of it, and follow it in all of its ramifications. It will either contain everything that enters into its object, or it will be incomplete; if it is incomplete, it is most unlikely he will fail to be alerted to the omissions by the references made in other sections to the one he is examining, just as its own references to other sections will indicate what is in them, or what needs to be added. If a word were so unusual that it was nowhere mentioned, either in the discussion or in a reference, I dare assert it could be omitted without consequence. But are there likely to be many such, even among individual and particular things? It could only be if the thing in question held no notable place in the sciences, no useful species, no practical application in the arts. The horse chestnut tree, that tree that so abounds in useless fruits, is not even in this situation. There is nothing extant in nature or understanding, nothing that is practiced or employed in workshops, but what is linked by many threads to a general system of human knowledge. If on the contrary the item omitted were important, in order for the omission to be neither noticed, nor corrected, one would have to assume at a minimum one other omission, which would entail at least a third, and so forth, out to one solitary, isolated entity located at the outer limits of the system. There would be an entire order of entities or notions suppressed, which is metaphysically impossible. If there remains along the line just one such entity, or one such notion, one will be led from there, either by descending or by ascending, to the restitution of another, and so forth, until the entire empty interval is filled, the chain completed, and the encyclopedic order unbroken.
102/192
By detailing in this way how a genuine encyclopedia ought to be made, we are establishing very severe rules, for examining and judging the one we are publishing. Whatever use is made of these rules whether for or against us, they prove at least that no one was better placed than the authors to criticize their own product. It remains to be seen whether our enemies, after furnishing heretofore strong enough evidence of their ignorance, will not determine to give evidence of cowardice by attacking us with weapons we have not feared to place in their hands.
103/192
Repeated advance reading of the complete manuscript would doubtless obviate the need for three sorts of supplements: material, verbal, and for cross-referencing. How many terms, sometimes defined, sometimes merely mentioned in the course of an article, could take their place in the alphabetic order! How much knowledge announced in a place where it would not be sought in vain! How many principles that remain isolated, which could have been brought into conjunction by a catchword! The references in an article are like toothing stones awaiting their ornaments, which one sees sticking out at odd intervals on the vertical extremes of a long wall, or inside a convex vault, whose spacing anticipates elsewhere similar spacing and similar toothing stones.
104/192
If I so insist on the necessity of possessing the entire text, it is because omissions are, in my opinion, the gravest defects in a dictionary. It is even better for an article to be badly done, than not done at all. Nothing so annoys a reader as not finding the word he is looking for. Here is a striking example, which I report all the more freely that I must share in the blame. A nice man buys a book on which I have worked: he was tormented by cramps, and was most eager to read the article cramp: he finds the word, but with a reference to convulsion; he goes to convulsion, from whence he is referred to muscle, and from there to spasm , where he finds nothing on cramps. That, I confess, is a most foolish mistake; and I doubt not but that we have committed it twenty times in the Encyclopedia . But we are entitled to insist upon some indulgence. The work on which we labor is not of our choosing: we did not arrange its primary materials which were furnished us, and they were so to speak thrown in our lap in a state of disorder which would have disheartened anyone either less honest, or less courageous. Our colleagues are witness to the pains we have taken and are still taking: no one knows like them what effort it has taken, and still takes, to bestow on the work all the perfection of a first attempt; and we planned, if not to obviate, at least to satisfy whatever objections we might elicit, by rereading our dictionary, once it was completed, with the intention of complementing the word list, the material, and the references.
105/192
Nothing in the execution of a great work is minute; the slightest negligence has important consequences: the manuscript will serve as an example: being filled with personal names, terms of the arts, characters, numbers, letters, citations, references, etc., when published it will swarm with errors if it is not scrupulously exact. I would therefore like to invite the encyclopedists to write in capital letters words which it would be easy to mistake. In this way we would avoid almost all the typographical errors; the articles would be correct, the authors would have no reason to complain, and the reader would never be confused. Although we have not had the advantage of possessing a manuscript such as we would have wished, nevertheless there are few works printed with more care or elegance than ours. The attention and skill of the typographer have surpassed the disorder and imperfections of the copy; and we will offend none of our colleagues by asserting that among the many who have played some role in the Encyclopedia, none has better fulfilled his commitments than the printer. From this standpoint, which has struck and will strike people of taste and book collectors of any era, subsequent editions will be hard-pressed to equal the first.
106/192
We think we are aware of all the advantages of an enterprise such as the one we pursue. We think we have had only too many opportunities to realize how difficult it was to emerge with some success from a first attempt, and how much the talents of a single man, whoever he be, were unequal to this project. On that score, long before we began we had some of the insight and all the diffidence that long reflection could inspire. Experience has not diminished these dispositions. We have seen, as we labored, the material expand, the word list become more recondite, contents reintroduced under a host of different names, instruments, machines, and operations multiply beyond measure, and the numerous turns of an extricable labyrinth become ever more complicated. We have seen what application it took to confirm that the same things were the same, and how difficult to confirm that others which seemed quite different, were not different. We have seen that this alphabetical form, which afforded us constant pauses, provided so much variety in the labor, and from these points of view appeared so advantageous to follow in a long work, had its difficulties for us to overcome at every moment. We have seen that it risked making crucial articles immensely long, if everything one could naturally hope to find in them was included; or make them dry and impoverished, if, thanks to references, we pruned them, and we eliminated from them many objects that could have lent themselves to separation. We have seen how important and difficult it was to keep to a happy medium. We have seen how many incorrect and false things escape notice; how many true ones we overlooked. We have seen that only the labor of several centuries could introduce into such a mass of collected materials, the true form that suited them; could give to each section its dimension; reduce each article to its appropriate length; suppress what was bad; supply the good that was missing, and finish an opus that could fulfill the design we had of it when we undertook it. But we have seen that of all the difficulties, one of the most considerable was to produce it just once, however amorphous it be, and that no one could ever take from us the honor of having overcome that obstacle. We have seen that the Encyclopedia could only be the effort of a philosophical century; that that century had come; that fame, by conferring immortality on the names of those who would bring it to fruition, would perhaps not refuse to take up ours; and we have felt inspired by the pleasant and consoling thought that people would talk about us when we were gone; by the sensual whisper that made us hear, in the mouths of a few of our contemporaries, what men to whose instruction and happiness we were sacrificing ourselves would say about us, men we esteemed and loved, even though they did not yet exist. We have felt grow in ourselves the seed of emulation, which at death envies the best part of ourselves, and snatches from oblivion the only moments of our existence that were genuinely charmed. Indeed, man reveals himself to his contemporaries and sees himself as he is, a strange composite of sublime qualities and shameful weaknesses. But the weaknesses follow the mortal remains into the tomb, and disappear with them; the same earth covers them both: all that remains are the qualities made everlasting by the monuments he has raised to himself, or which he owes to public veneration and gratitude: honors of which the conscience of his own merit gives him advance delight; delight as pure, as strong, as real as any other delight, and in which nothing can be imaginary except the titles on which one grounds one's pretensions. Ours are deposited in this work; posterity will judge them.
107/192
I have said that only a philosophical century could attempt an encyclopedia ; and I said this because this work everywhere requires more boldness of mind than is normally possessed in centuries of cowardly taste. One must examine and stir up everything, without exception and without cautiousness: one must dare to see, as we are beginning to be persuaded, that literary genres resemble the general compilation of laws, and the first formation of cities, in that they owe their birth to a singular chance, a strange circumstance, sometimes a flight of genius; that those who came after the first inventors, were for the most part merely their slaves; that productions that should be regarded as the first step, taken blindly as the final achievement, instead of advancing an art to its perfection, have served only to hold it back, reducing other men to the servile condition of imitators; that as soon as a name was given to a composition of a particular character, one had to model strictly upon that sketch all those that were made; that if there appeared from time to time a man of daring and original genius, who, weary of the yoke received, dared to shake it off, depart from the ordinary path, and give birth to some work to which the given name and prescribed laws were not exactly applicable, he dropped into oblivion, and remained there a very long time. We must trample under foot all that old foolishness; overturn barriers not put there by reason; restore to the sciences and arts their precious liberty, and tell the admirers of Antiquity: call the London Merchant anything you like, provided you concede that this play sparkles with sublime beauties. We needed a time of reasoning, when we no longer look for the rules in authors, but in nature, and when we can feel what is false and what true in all those arbitrary poetics; I am taking the term poetics in its most general sense, for a system of given rules, according to which, in whatever genre, people pretend you must work in order to succeed.
108/192
But this century was so long in coming, that I have sometimes thought a people would be fortunate never to find an extraordinary man among them, under whom an art made its initial steps too great and too rapidly, who interrupted its invisible, natural movement. That man's works would necessarily be monstrous composites, because genius and good taste are very different qualities. Nature gives one of them in an instant; the other is the product of centuries. Such monsters will become national models; they will determine a people's taste. The good minds who follow, will find a bias in favor of them which they will not dare challenge; and the notion of the beautiful will dim, as the notion of the good would dim among uncivilized peoples who had adopted an excessive veneration for some chief of dubious character, who has made himself prominent by important services and favorable vices. In morality, God alone can serve as man’s model; in the arts, only nature. If the sciences and arts progress imperceptibly, one man will not differ sufficiently from another to influence him, found a genre that is adopted, and give its taste to a nation; consequently nature and reason will maintain their rights. They had lost them; they are about to recover them; and we shall see how important it was for us to recognize and seize this moment.
109/192
As centuries pass by, the mass of works grows endlessly, and one can foresee a time when it will be almost as difficult to educate oneself in a library, as in the universe, and almost as fast to seek a truth subsisting in nature, as lost among an immense number of books; then one would have to undertake, out of necessity, a labor that had been neglected, because the need for it had not been felt.
110/192
If we think of the image of literature in times before the invention of printing, we see a small number of men of genius busy creating, and a countless throng of workers busy transcribing. If we anticipate centuries to come, and think of the image of literature once printing, which never rests, has filled huge buildings with books, we will find it once more split into two classes of men. There will be those who read little and immerse themselves in new research or what they take to be new (for if we already are ignorant of part of what is contained in so many books published in all sorts of languages, we will know still far less about what is in those books increased a hundred-, a thousand-fold); the others, workmen incapable of producing anything, will be busy leafing through those books night and day, and separating out what they deem worthy of being anthologized and preserved. Is this prediction not already being fulfilled? And are not several of our men of letters not already busy reducing all our large books to small ones in which we still find much that is superfluous? Let us now suppose that their analyses are correct, and are distributed in alphabetical form into a number of volumes organized by intelligent men, and we will have the materials of an encyclopedia.
2001.10.21
Institute of Contemporary Art
Rudi Gernreich: Fashion Will Go Out of Fashion installation
1993.10.21
Untitled
1958.10.21
1958. Tuesday, New York City
"Between ourselves, I am losing the kind of enthusiasm I had in Paris for a few weeks," Duchamp admits to Robert Lebel. "The profound indifference of Fawcus," Duchamp predicts, is likely to continue and he is awaiting instructions before going to see Braziller: "(there again, what indifference!)," Duchamp exclaims, "what beauty of indifference!"
Confirming to Lebel that "little Benoit's etching", Equilibre, is an original on celluloid, "but really of no importance," Duchamp begs him not to change the layout of the catalogue raisonné just for this item. "Otherwise," he threatens, "I will send you all my daily doodles made while waiting for a telephone number."
Made in June to illustrate a poem written in 1917 by Francis Picabia, which has recently been published in a limited edition by PAB at Alès, Duchamp explains: "if you look at it (the celluloid) in a mirror or against the light, you can barely read 'Et qui libre?'," a pun on the
title of the poem: L'Equilibre.
Ephemerides
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