33 posts tagged “history”
The return is particularly significant as it marks the first time that an American collecting institution has independently initiated the return of a secret/ sacred object to Australia.
Secret/sacred objects of the type being returned are typically used in religious ceremonies by central Australian Aboriginal men. They are considered to be physical manifestations of sacred ancestral beings and as such have great spiritual power.
The National Museum of Australia has been providing advice and assistance to the Seattle Art Museum and will store the object temporarily while consultations proceed regarding its final repatriation.
“The National Museum of Australia is honoured to have been able to assist in this way. The Seattle Art Museum has shown great responsibility, as well as compassion and respect for Aboriginal culture, in deciding to repatriate this object. It is to be commended for its initiative and leadership,” said Craddock Morton, Director of the National Museum of Australia.
According to custom, central Australian mens’ secret/sacred objects are not allowed to be viewed by uninitiated men, or women and children. Their public display is a cause of great distress to Aboriginal elders, who have been seeking their return for many years.
"We appreciate The National Museum of Australia's guidance through this return process," said Maryann Jordan, Seattle Art Museum's Interim Director. "The Seattle Art Museum is one of the few places in the U.S. for Australian Aboriginal art to be seen and discussed. We have a deep respect for Aboriginal heritage and understand the importance of this object to the culture that created it. We are proud to return it to its rightful home."
The Director of the National Museum of Australia’s Repatriation Program, Dr Michael Pickering, said that the object will be housed in a restricted store while the Museum consults with central Australian Elders and their representatives to determine the culturally appropriate management and return of the object.
The object was first collected in 1970, and has been in the Seattle Art Museum’s collections since 1971 but has never been publicly exhibited
Interesting link from Boing Boing this morning. Artist Adie Russell as Ginsberg, Kerouac, and even Nixon. Worth a trip.
"I thought you might be interested in a 'Covers' project I've been working on. I lip-synch to audio from the 50s and 60s, all male voices (I'm a woman.) The project is really about pointing at a moment in history, recontextualizing the ideas of that era in contemporary terms. I'm also interested in illusion, how we believe what we see even when we know it's not true."
In 2003, Craig Kalpakjian proposed a series of Earthworks-style drawings that would be executed on the surface of the moon, like the Nazca Lines or 60's bad boys Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim's desert drawings. He called them Moonworks.
Now I find out there was already an entire Moon Museum, with drawings by six leading contemporary artists of the day: Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest "Frosty" Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain. The Moon Museum was supposedly installed on the moon in 1969 as part of the Apollo 12 mission.
I say supposedly, because NASA has no official record of it; according to Frosty Myers, the artist who initiated the project, the Moon Museum was secretly installed on a hatch on a leg of the Intrepid landing module with the help of an unnamed engineer at the Grumman Corporation after attempts to move the project forward through NASA's official channels were unsuccessful.
Myers revealed the exhibition's existence to the New York Times, which published the story Nov. 22, 1969, two days after the Apollo 12 crew had left the moon--and the Intrepid--and two days before they arrived back on earth.
According to Myers, who was involved with E.A.T. on the Pepsi Pavilion project at the time, the six drawings were miniaturized and baked onto an iridium-plated ceramic wafer measuring just 3/4" x 1/2" x 1/40", with the assistance of engineers at Bell Labs.
According to the Times, the artworks are, clockwise from the top center: Rauschenberg's wavy line; Novros' black square bisected by thin white lines [in 1969, Novros also created the incredibly rich, minimalist fresco on the second floor of Judd's 101 Spring St]; a computer-generated drawing by Myers; a geometric mouse by Oldenburg, "the subject of a sculpture in his current show at the Museum of Modern Art" [a sculpture which is in MoMA's permanent collection, btw]; and a template pattern by Chamberlain, "similar to one he used to produce paintings done with automobile lacquer." Warhol's contribution, which is obscured by the thumb above, is described as "a calligraphic squiggle made up of the initials of his signature."
Actually, it's a drawing of a penis. Here are some other photos by Frosty Myers, published, I believe, with a 1985 Omni Magazine article by the arts writer Phoebe Hoban. That would be the Warhol Penis there in the upper right.
As the NASA spokesman told the Times when asked about the Museum
infiltration, "I don't know about it. If we had been asked, it sounds
like something we'd have very much interested in [sic]. If it is true
that they've succeeded in doing it by some clandestine means, I hope that the work represents the best in contemporary American art."
[emphasis added for ironic amusement, though to Myers' credit, it
turned out to be a pretty good grouping of artists to have involved.]
But is it conceivable that someone could have smuggled dirty pictures onto a mission to the moon? Actually, yes. Even if Warhol hadn't sent that penis to the moon, Apollo 12 would still have achieved the first known incident of lunar nudity.
The back-up crew for the A12 mission surreptitiously inserted reduced photos of Playboy centerfolds into the flight crew's fireproof plastic cuff checklists which were only discovered about 2.5 hours into their first moon walk.
via greg.org | hat tip kottke.org | Michael Heizer Earth Art | Dennis Oppenheim Art & Sculpture | Craig Kalpakjian
Silent film footage taken in 1909 by Thomas Edison at Stormfield (Redding, CT) at Mark Twain’s estate. Twain is shown walking around his home and playing cards with his daughters Clara and Jean. This is the only known footage of the great author. [via History of Redding]
Musashino Plateau and Japan — a pair of 3D computer animations directed by Nobuo Takahashi — illustrate (in dramatic fashion) how Japan’s landscape changed during the postwar period of rapid economic growth. The animations begin slowly with the early postwar recovery years, but the pace quickens to a frenzy as explosive growth during the bubble years (late ’80s/early ’90s) transforms the cityscape into a chaotic, tightly packed jumble of single-family homes, large apartment complexes and high-rise buildings. In the end, development grinds to a halt with the collapse of the bubble.
via Pink Tentacle
In 1960, U.S. Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger flew 30km straight up into the sky using a pressurized, high-altitude balloon.
Then he jumped.
Kittinger free-fell for over twenty kilometers – at which point he was moving so fast he broke the sound barrier.
Noun 1. nix - a quantity of no importance; "it looked like nothing I had ever seen before"; "reduced to nil all the work we had done"; "we racked up a pathetic goose egg"; "it was all for naught"; "I didn't hear zilch about it"
Also, n. Mythology A water sprite of German mythology, usually in human form or half-human and half-fish.
| Verb | 1. | nix
- command against; "I forbid you to call me late at night" or "Dad nixed our plans." ban - prohibit especially by legal means or social pressure; "Smoking is banned in this building" enjoin - issue an injunction criminalise, illegalise, illegalize, outlaw, criminalize - declare illegal; outlaw; "Marijuana is criminalized in the U.S." |
cipher or cypher
n.
v. ci·phered, ci·pher·ing, ci·phers
The Emperor's New Clothes (Danish: Keiserens nye Klæder [original spelling]) is a Danish fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen and first published in 1837, as part of Eventyr, fortalte for Børn (Fairy Tales, Told for Children).
Many years ago, there lived an emperor who was quite an average fairy tale ruler, with one exception: he cared much about his clothes. One day he heard from two swindlers named Guido and Luigi Farabutto that they could make the finest suit of clothes from the most beautiful cloth. This cloth, they said, also had the special capability that it was invisible to anyone who was either stupid or not fit for his position.
Being a bit nervous about whether he himself would be able to see the cloth, the emperor first sent two of his trusted men to see it. Of course, neither would admit that they could not see the cloth and so praised it. All the townspeople had also heard of the cloth and were interested to learn how stupid their neighbors were.
The emperor then allowed himself to be dressed in the clothes for a procession through town, never admitting that he was too unfit and stupid to see what he was wearing. He was afraid that the other people would think that he was stupid.
Of course, all the townspeople wildly praised the magnificent clothes of the emperor, afraid to admit that they could not see them, until a small child said:
"But he has nothing on!"
This was whispered from person to person until everyone in the crowd was shouting that the emperor had nothing on. The emperor heard it and felt that they were correct, but held his head high and finished the procession.
---
This story of the little boy puncturing the pretensions of the emperor's court has parallels from other cultures, categorized as Aarne-Thompson folktale type 1620, although the tale itself has no identified oral sources.
The expressions The Emperor's new clothes and said The Emperor has no clothes are often used with allusion to Andersen's tale. Most frequently, the metaphor involves a situation wherein the overwhelming (usually unempowered) majority of observers willingly share in a collective ignorance of an obvious fact, despite individually recognizing the absurdity. Such a case could be considered a classic example of groupthink, where individuals of a group agree with the majority rather than put themselves outside the comfort zone of what is accepted by the group. A similar twentieth-century metaphor is the Elephant in the room. A metaphor of the opposite, in which each individual insists on his or her own perspective in spite of the evidence of others, is shown in the various versions of the Blind Men and an Elephant story.
In one interpretation, the story is also used to express a concept of "truth seen by the eyes of a child", an idea that truth is often spoken by a person too naïve to understand group pressures to see contrary to the obvious. This is a general theme of "purity within innocence" throughout Andersen's fables and many similar works of literature.
In another interpretation, the child is not simply a naive person, but precisely a child, as the perspective of children is often unencumbered with the filtering "knowledge" and social conditioning that fills the heads of adults, warping their perspective.
"The Emperor Wears No Clothes" or "The Emperor Has No Clothes" is often used in political and social contexts for any obvious truth denied by the majority despite the evidence of their eyes, especially when proclaimed by the government.
[via Wikipedia]
The Emperor Wears No Clothes is a book written by Jack Herer. Starting in 1973, Jack Herer took the advice of his friend "Captain" Ed Adair and began compiling tidbits of information about cannabis and its numerous uses. In 1985, after 12 years, this data was published as The Emperor Wears No Clothes (ISBN 0-9524560-0-1). The book is in its eleventh edition, and is often used in cannabis rescheduling and re-legalization efforts.
The book, backed by H.E.M.P. (America), Hanf Haus (Germany), Sensi Seeds/Hash Marijuana Museum (Netherlands),
and T.H.C., the Texas Hemp Campaign (America), offers $100,000 to
anyone who can disprove the claims made within.
To quote the back cover:
If all fossil fuels and their derivatives, as well as trees for paper and construction were banned in order to save the planet, reverse the Greenhouse Effect and stop deforestation; then there is only one known annually renewable natural resource that is capable of providing the overall majority of the world's paper and textiles; meet all of the world's transportation, industrial and home energy needs, while simultaneously reducing pollution, rebuilding the soil, and cleaning the atmosphere all at the same time... and that substance is -- the same one that did it all before -- Cannabis Hemp... Marijuana!
The title of the book is a reference to Hans Christian Andersen's famous fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes.
Finally, a re-post from JewishJournal.com:
Remember Nixon's infamous inquiry into just how many Jews worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics? I don't, but that's because it happened well before I was born. (As for his ranting on the Jewish drug of marijuana, that rings more familiarly thanks to my interviews with Craig X Rubin.)
Anyway, the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia this week released the transcript of that conversation (Nixon really should have turned the tape off once in a while), and they shed new light on an infamous conversation. Slate has the run-down, beginning with this conversation with to-be imprisoned and later born-again Christian Chuck Colson.
Wow. Nixon really suffered from that other kind of Jewish paranoia.Nixon: Well, listen, are they all Jews over there?
Colson: Every one of them. Well, a couple of exceptions.
Nixon: See my point?
Colson: You know goddamn well they're out to kill us.
Also that day, Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, had the following conversation (this, too, is from the July 3, 1971, tape that was released in 1999):
Nixon: Now, point: [Fred] Malek is not Jewish.
Haldeman: No.
Nixon: All right, I want a look at any sensitive areas around where Jews are involved, Bob. See, the Jews are all through the government, and we have got to get in those areas. We've got to get a man in charge who is not Jewish to control the Jewish … do you understand?
Haldeman: I sure do.
Nixon: The government is full of Jews. Second, most Jews are disloyal. You know what I mean? You have a [White House Counsel Leonard] Garment and a [National Security Adviser Henry] Kissinger and, frankly, a [White House speechwriter William] Safire, and, by God, they're exceptions. But Bob, generally speaking, you can't trust the bastards. They turn on you. Am I wrong or right?
Haldeman: Their whole orientation is against you. In this administration, anyway. And they are smart. They have the ability to do what they want to do—which—is to hurt us.
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