Image above: Robert Murray, Duet (Homage to David Smith), 1965
Good morning art reads:
1. In 1965, Cal State Long Beach hosted the 12 week California International Sculpture Symposium. 50 years later, the Getty teams up with the university on a large restoration project aimed at continuing the symposium's legacy. Carolina Miranda of the L.A. Times writes of this exciting and geeky collaboration.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-getty-cal-state-long-beach-sculpture-park-20150324-column.html
2. I've always found the work of Lucas Blalock to be both enigmatic and overly familiar, as though he was bringing the pursuits of 1970s experimental photographers like Barbara Kasten, Jo Ann Callis, and Jim Welling to bear a personal narrative that always remains hidden. Brian Solis, associate curator of photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum, takes us a bit deeper in Frieze.
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the-retouch/
A video to set the tone:
3. I've always admired Robert Hughes. I love how seriously he takes culture and how he relates little things like paintings and sculptures to the wider narrative of history and what it means to be alive. What a joy it was to discover that he did a one hour reprise of Shock of the New, ten years after its initial air date. He gets into Anselm Kiefer, David Hockney, Paula Rego, Lucian Freud, and Sean Scully and has a wonderful retort to the painting is dead morons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmHLIVsx658
Poem for the Week:
4. I've been reading Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens, and while at work on that brief but illuminating book, I discovered that George Orwell liked a singular line from Milton that he would quote both in private and in public: "By the known rules of ancient liberty." The line comes from Milton's Sonnet 12 and the poem is well worth your time, both in terms of Orwell and in thinking through the more surprising outcomes of revolution. and can be found here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174011
One click deeper:
5. I was a bit confused in the Milton poem about the line:
"As when those hinds that were transform'd to frogs
Rail'd at Latona's twin-born progeny
Which after held the sun and moon in fee."
It refers to a scene in Ovid's Metamorphoses that, once again, explicates the virtue of hospitality in Greek thinking and the penalty of not being a good host. Studying the story of Latona a bit, Orwell led to Milton led to Greek mythology led to French neo-classicism led to a fountain at Versailles:
http://latone.chateauversailles.fr/en/page/the-latona-fountain/the-legend-of-latona