Friday, December 12, 2008

Solid Geometry

'Icosahedron II' by Richard Sweeney

'Gentlemen,' said Hunter, 'I must ask you to forgive this improper form of address, but I have something to tell you of the utmost importance. I have discovered the plane without a surface.' Amid derisive smiles and gentle bemused laughter, Hunter picked up from the table a large white sheet of paper. With a pocket-knife he made an incision along its surface about three inches long and slightly to one side of its centre. Then he made some rapid, complicated folds and, holding the paper aloft so all could see, he appeared to draw one corner of it through the incision, and as he did so it disappeared.
'Behold, gentlemen,' said Hunter, holding out his empty hands towards the company, 'the plane without a surface.'

from
'Solid Geometry' by Ian McEwan

Put downs and suck ups: Matthew Collings' weekly ventings on the art world


No 1: The Frieze Art Fair - One Day in the Art World
No 2: Get Sploshing - Laura Owens at Sadie Coles, London
No 3: The Turner Prize 2008
No 4: Happy Birthday Clement Greenberg
No 5: Another hot book about the YBA's

via www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon

James Howard Kunstler: The tragedy of suburbia



via www.ted.com

Towards Crash



"We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality. In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction – conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads."
- J. G. Ballard, 1995