Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center in
Goshen, N.Y
1. I know many of my favorite buildings: the Federal Reserve Bank Building by Kohn Pederson Fox in Dallas, The Kimbell Art Museum by Louis Kahn, The Norton Simon by Frank Gehry, and the Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles. I rarely think, however, of my most hated buildings, though, they are probably doctor's offices and DMVs. The New York Times Magazine has a great little piece where famous architects defend the so called "World's Most Hated Buildings." I enjoyed the piece thoroughly.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/05/t-magazine/architects-libeskind-zaha-hadid-selldorf-norman-foster.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150605&nlid=50096062&tntemail0=y&_r=0
2. Mostly a tribute to Alma Ruiz's great work at MOCA over her years at the museum, I have fallen in love with the art of Latin America, and so it excites me to see the Getty taking such an active interest in video from the region. Carolina Miranda reports:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-the-getty-series-recent-video-art-from-latin-america-20150601-column.html
3. Dan Piepenbring has a wonderful recurring column with the Paris Review called "The Poem Stuck in My Head," which makes me want to do a column called "The Painting Burned into My Eye." Anyway, I love personal reactions to art and I think the finest and most revealing encounters with culture involves someone with a deep understanding of a subject finding his/herself surprised by something he/she never saw before. Piepenbring speaks of the great Robert Creeley's The Dishonest Mailman in the most recent column:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/05/21/robert-creeley-the-dishonest-mailmen/
Video of the week:
4. In Carolina Miranda's above article, Glenn Philips of the Getty calls Columbian video artist José Alejandro Restrepo "the Gary Hill of Latin American video art." For context, I thought I would post Purgatorio, 2011 by the artist, a very strange, Kafkaesque effort involving the crushing everyday environment of a working office:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fLr7MhDZz4
Poem for the week:
Franz Wright died on May 19th, but unfortunately, I was too slow with a post on his work. His Bees of Eleusis is a terrifying poem about some of the more violent and unfortunate rituals that plague our world. There is so much to this poem, it is difficult to know where to start, but I will say it is about secrets, it is about knowledge that is thought to be lost. However, the secret is somehow able to passed from generation to generation, perhaps unconsciously or perhaps because it is a secret we know so well that it doesn't even need the articulation of language:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/240956
One Click Deeper:
For those unfamiliar with the work of Franz Wright, here is a link to a 2001 New Yorker interview with the poet:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/07/09/in-the-beforelife-franz-wright