Category Archives: Art & Aesthetics

Imaginary Landscape No. 4 0

When I wrote the Imag­i­nary Land­scape for twelve radios,” Cage explained, “it was not for the pur­pose of shock or as a joke but rather to increase the unpre­dictabil­ity already inher­ent in the sit­u­a­tion through the toss­ing of coins. Chance, to be pre­cise, is a leap, pro­vides a leap out of reach of one’s own grasp of oneself.”

In a roomful of shouting people 0

Peter Schmidt’s water­color still-lifes and land­scapes embody what I find most inter­est­ing about his work: its indif­fer­ence to the mon­u­men­tal and the superla­tive, and its focus on the quiet, the “insignif­i­cant,” the intimate.

Peter Schmidt gallery 2

This gallery con­tains a selec­tion of water color paint­ings by Peter Schmidt.

The mystique of the optical 0

Tra­di­tion­ally the win­dow has been used as a fram­ing device intended to guide the viewer’s eye to an essen­tial part of the pic­ture. When it came to the “Win­dow Paint­ings,” how­ever, Schlem­mer took a slightly dif­fer­ent approach.

Reading “A Humument,” page 1 0

The first page of Tom Phillips’ A Humu­ment is emblem­atic of the entire work. Tex­tu­ally and graph­i­cally it touches on some of the book’s cen­tral con­cerns and pro­vides clues to cer­tain of its mysteries.

Leopards in the Temple 0

Kafka’s para­ble of leop­ards in the tem­ple has always struck me as a per­fect alle­gory of the avant-garde in that it points out the tru­ism that in art the trans­gres­sive is ulti­mately absorbed into the canon.

The miracle of the visible 1

In spring of 1942 Oskar Schlem­mer began a series of new paint­ings rep­re­sent­ing scenes glimpsed from his win­dow at night­fall. Unsur­pris­ingly per­haps, he gave the paint­ings the col­lec­tive title Fen­ster­bilder or “Win­dow Paintings.”

Fensterbild gallery 0

This gallery con­tains a selec­tion of nine Fen­ster­bilder or “Win­dow Paint­ings” by Oskar Schlemmer.