No society that loved its children would divorce them so completely from contact with soils, forests, streams, and wildlife. No society that loved its children would create places like the typical suburb or shopping mall. No society that loved its children would casually destroy real neighborhoods and communities in order to build even more highways... No society that loved its children would build more shopping malls than high schools. No society that loved its children would leave behind a legacy of ugliness...
Loving Children: A Design Problem by David Orr
via Stork Bites Man
Ruth On The Phone
by Nigel Shafran
Previously: Hard Light and/or This is Not My Wife
After lunch I went over to the Whitney. For some reason I wanted to see the biennial. I'm not sure why. Before checking it out I went up to the fifth floor. That's where they hang work that's in the permanent collection. I'm glad I did. There was gorgeous late fifties Lee Krasner painting hanging in a room of it's own. After staring, I walked down to the fourth floor and it looked like people were exercising on a huge black rubber matt that took up the entire floor. There were maybe fifteen people following the commands of a woman who was talking into a microphone... telling the fifteen people what to do. I think the fifteen people following the commands were people who had walked off the street. They kind of just "joined in". I've heard this type of activity in the art world is called "relational aesthetics"... or something like that... It felt like I was interrupting the "relation". I quickly got out of there. I walked down to the third floor and in the back there was a room filled with an artist's junk. There seems to be a room filled with an aritst's junk in every biennial I've ever been to. I'm not sure why this artist's junk was there. I walked around the corner and there were fifty Dana Shultz paintings on the wall. At least I think they were Shultz's paintings. (I walked by pretty fast). I skipped the second floor and went down to the lobby. What happened to the bookstore? There was none. There were some catalogues thrown out on tables that looked "remaindered"... what was there looked like a bake sale. I walked out of the Whitney having spent less than twenty minutes... fifteen of those standing in front of the Krasner.
From Richard Prince's "blog" (links added).
My Pie Town
Debbie Grossman
"...I loved the opportunity to look at Doris on her own and imagine a different life for her. I thought it would be fun to remake the whole town in a way that reflected my own family, and I imagined a Pie Town filled with women."
More: here (via kottke)
Top: Lumpy leather and stone paperweight by Carl Auböck (eBay). Bottom: Similar lump on Walter Gropius' desk photographed by Leslie Williamson.
A lot has happened since the first post on this blog. I'm not sure what's next for Reference Library, but I know I'm having just as much fun now as when I started — five years ago today.
Above: portrait of me by my daughter Elsa.
