Numerous, Things

The automatic organ tucked away in the church is in the process of playing John Cage’s “As Slow As Possible,” a piece of music that will last for 639 years if played continuously. Started on September 5, 2001, the piece is expected to finish in the year 2640.

Cage wrote the piece back in 1985, but with no indication of how long it was meant to last. Some organists became interested in how it could connect to the lifespan of the instrument, which for an organ with its changing parts can be infinite, and the idea was put into practice in Halberstadt. Comprised of just six pipes, the organ at Sankt Burchardi was built specifically for this piece of music, and is constantly maintained while it continues to produce notes. In fact, it wasn’t even completed until 2009.

“As Slow As Possible” opened with 17 months of silence. So though it started at the Sankt Burchardi in September of 2001, the first note wasn’t heard until February of 2003. Individual chords last for several months or years, with weights being shifted to different pedals when a new chord is called for in the score.

Sankt Burchardi Church Organ Constantly maintained, this organ is playing a six-century long composition by John Cage.

Address: 1F Suzuki Building, 1-28-15 Ginza, Chuo-ku, TOKYO
Open: 13：00〜20：00 (Closed on Mondays)
Telephone: 03-3535-5020

Morioka Shoten is a tiny bookstore of “a Single Room with a Single Book” in Tokyo. It sells only one book; more precisely, multiple copies of one title that changes weekly, with a small book-inspired art exhibition on the walls. Its challenging, minimalistic philosophy and well-curated shows attract numerous visitors from all over the world.

Morioka Shoten Morioka Shoten is a tiny bookstore of “a Single Room with a Single Book” in Tokyo. It sells only one book; more precisely, multiple copies of one title that changes weekly, with a small book-inspired art exhibition on the walls. Its challenging, minimalistic philosophy and well-curated shows attract...

Claes Oldenburg American, b. Sweden, 1929

Sculpture in the Form of a Fried Egg

1966/1971

Canvas, dyed cotton, and expanded polystyrene Diameter: 122 in. (309.9 cm)

Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Gift of Anne and William J. Hokin 1986.65

MCA – Collection: Claes Oldenburg, Sculpture in the Form of a Fried Egg, 1966/1971

This work is a black and white photograph by the Argentinian artist David Lamelas that documents the first enactment of a performance by Lamelas entitled Time 1970 (Tate T12208). The image shows eighteen people standing in a long row amid a snowy landscape. The figures appear in the foreground and a white, snow-covered hill slopes upwards behind them, towards an area across the top of the picture that is mostly densely filled with dark trees. In the centre-right of the photograph are a house, a telegraph pole and three more people, but aside from this, the group of eighteen in the foreground appear to be alone in the landscape. These figures are pictured from a distance and so cannot be seen in detail, but they mostly appear to be wearing dark clothes and their bodies are all facing the camera or each other, in some cases turning or gesturing towards one another. The photograph is a silver gelatin print in a glazed, black wooden frame and was acquired by Tate along with the performance in 2006.

David Lamelas, 'Time' 1970

"I borrowed metaphors from the library and began thinking of my photography in terms of reading and writing. The library offered a reprieve from the often strict conventions of architectural photography. Without abandoning my objective of describing each branch in pictures, I took license to shoot in long and short sentences: big, overall views full of tables and chairs, but also plants, bathroom graffiti, pencil sharpeners (a lot of them), magazine covers, people waiting in line outside. No shot list was applied: I photographed what struck me, following tangents, filling out categories that emerged on their own over the course of the project. The richness of the process was the richness of the branches themselves. I found them beautiful, even and sometimes especially the most neglected, with their layers of use, fragments of earlier arrangements, updates, familiar elements, improvisations, accidents, incongruities: in short, places that look something like what everyday thinking feels like."

How One Woman Photographed Every Library in New York When architectural photographer Elizabeth Felicella was not working for clients, she spent her free time photographing all 210 branches of New York City’s Public Library system. Five years later, t…

The Whole
Wassily Kandisky
1940

TC: I think a certain toughness, a certain querulousness, is the common contemporary pose. But I’m deeply interested in tenderness, in intimacy. I want this softness to come through in my work. It doesn’t cancel out the politics, but it goes out well ahead of it. And for that tenderness to come across, no matter how knotty the argument at hand, I have to set myself into an attitude of tenderness when I’m making the work.

Teju Cole talks to Taiye Selasi: ‘Afropolitan, American, African. Whatever’ The authors discuss translation, ‘travelling while black’ and how to avoid classification

Stano Filko: Poetry on Space – Cosmos (2016) [Slovak/English]

Stano Filko (1937-2015) was a key figure in the Slovak neo-avant-garde, associated primarily with environment, installation, happening, and action. In his work he developed a cosmology structured by three principles: red (biology, eroticism, life, 3D), blue (cosmos, the unknown, 4D), and white (transcendence, God, 5D). He spent the 1980s as an émigré in the United States.

This catalogue documents an exhibition focusing on his work from the 1960s-70s, held at the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava from June-September 2016.

https://monoskop.org/log/?p=17146

Mined diamonds are typically between one and three billion years old, but this one had been created in six months from Barragán’s ashes by a company that specializes in compressing cremated human remains so that they can be worn as jewelry. The diamond sat in a fireproof safe in Magid’s apartment for the next two weeks. At the end of the month, she flew with it to Guadalajara, Barragán’s home town. She hadn’t slept the night before she left, and she kept rummaging through her purse like a person convinced that she’s lost her passport. She laughed at herself as she did so. “I just need to make sure he’s still in there,” she said.

The Architect Who Became a Diamond A conceptual artist devises an ingenious plan for negotiating access to a hidden archive.

https://mladenstilinovic.com/works/5-2/

FOOTWRITING

The subject of my work is the language of politics, i.e. its reflection in everyday life. These works are not just made up. I would like to paint. I paint, but the painting betrays me. I write, but the written word betrays me. The pictures and words become not-my-pictures, not-my-words, and this is what I want to achieve with my work not-my- painting. If the language (the colour, the image, etc.) is possessed by ideology, I too want to become the owner of such a language. I want to think it with consequences. This is neither criticism nor ambiguity. What is imposed to me is imposed as a question, as an experience, as a consequence. If colors, words and materials have several meanings, which is the one that is imposed, what does it mean and does it mean anything – or is it just idle run a delusion? The question is how to manipulate that which manipulates you, so obviously, so shamelessly, but I am not innocent either – there is no art without consequences.

Mladen Stilinovic, 1984

First time published in the catalogue of the solo show, Studio of the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 1984

(Translated by Maja Šoljan)