Posts Tagged ‘mural’
NOTES TOWARD A NORTON LECTURE
In the new departing friend’s studio full at his facture of charcoal and bodies and blinking streaking green otherworldly light made grainy by lack in the archive machine.
OPEN STUDIOS @ THE AMERICAN ACADEMY IN ROME
Come see X Locus (Abluvion), a collaborative installation by Jennifer Scappettone (text/sound design), Paul Rudy (sound design), and Agency Architecture (environmental media), at the Open Studios event at the American Academy in Rome Wednesday, 25 May, 2011. Il consiglio di amministrazione dell’American Academy in Rome William B. Hart, Presidente del consiglio di amministrazione Adele Chatfield-Taylor, [...]
JANICULUM/LIMITLESSNESS
“YOU…SPACE WITHOUT LIMITS” Sensing exactly what the vandal means, gazing out beyond the cordoned Villas, cordoning Cupola and its arcade embrace, at this pastel haze in company.
X LOCUS
On Thursday, April 28 at 8 PM in the cortile of the McKim, Mead and White Building at the American Academy in Rome, there will be an opening reception for a collaborative installation titled X LOCUS, featuring environmental media by Founders Rome Prize winners in Architecture Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller, sound by Elliott Carter [...]
O RESTLESS MARBLE DEAD-FOR-SALE
“DIIS MANIBUS / To the spirits of the departed,” begins the lapidary message, marking the place, now our decor, of the woman making her deathbed and that of her nurse, securing her surname by reserving some space in the tomb as well for her slaves, anxious to underscore the sacred laws as she ends, “IT [...]
HERETIC COME BACK
That energy and courage of invention (oui, inventio, what heresy to the epoch of tied wrists) should infuse architectonic and ideological space as well on a cloudy 400th anniversary: after the coining of the “telescopio,” these studios hopeful, explosive: Galileo, Corey Brennan, brilliant comrades bearing keyboards, violias, keycards for piano, windchimes, and plan-B umbrellas, thanks. [...]
MELANCHOLY THEN & NOW
On the one hand, reproduction of a certain utopian scene that immeasurably enriched my life as an undergraduate—permitting a young student to imagine in greater detail the pantheon of possible ideal conversations. On the other, the certain melancholy that dawns when one is ushered out of the Sistine Chapel in barking English and ticketed signori—beings [...]
A NAME INTERMITTENT
Just as once at Pompeii, the name of a beloved grandfather appeared on a street sign, baffling and familiar, resonant of the claim that we could’ve been buried by Vesuvius had history cooperated to immortalize us, yesterday among the organized cracked lapidary list of relics of 2300 saints Pope Paschal housed in his version of [...]
MYSTERIES OF PUBLIC WORKS
O to walk down new streets in a place whose antiquity is beginning to rub off and be blessedly lost, after much time past in the uncertainty of revision rather than discovery: “Lavinia Oddi Baglioni–To Her Parents” and the lapidary inscription concerning a 1998 restoration is all we muster in the way of clues to [...]
“ANGELE; QUOD”
And the invention of punctuation, from an edition of Pietro Bembo’s “De Aetna” (“Of Etna”). Hasn’t anybody been bold enough in her tongue over the past half-millennium to invent breakages like the semicolon as Aldus & Griffo did? In any case out in Belgrade they’re inventing new saints to go alongside new cathedrals, tender, macaronic. [...]
PUNCTUM
As planes and trams move one through shifting tablesettings of alliances, in advance of a celebrated guest of the state cancelling flights, the street glimpsed in transit reliable as ever in rendering the difference in any e pluribus unum eloquent.
STREET SHIFT
In tandem with transfers of power and political fads, trading religious overtones in favor of interwar French alliance or communist and current nationalist gropings toward stability: a now-Serbian avenue’s changing names, alphabets, and purposes as the backdrop to more wildly changeful bids for attention 7 times over the past 139 years: is it the street [...]
A ROMAN ELEGY FOR JOSEPH BRODSKY
At the American Academy in Rome, this reader’s latecoming appreciation for a poet arriving to us largely through translation, now discussed in the mouths of his friends, in various vernaculars. Derek Walcott’s appreciation, commuovente, for the confirmed passion and quiet combined of these collective readings across Russian, English and Italian: “This unison would not have [...]
STONE IMPERMANENCE
In the handling of contemporary chiseler S. Verity, “one of the last in this strange trade, and that’s fine by me”: stone for an enclosing molding from Padova via England to Rome become palimpsest serving to remember the numbers of Fabio and others, as the rustic italics of Aldus serve to fit more names into [...]
ANXIOUS FUTURISM
Punctuating the approach to the grocery store, for example: An uncanny capacity to provoke as well as document the anxiety of a postutopian future become our heritage in scraps and sprawling damage: Jeremy Mende‘s installation now hitting the viali and vicoli of Rome, offering nothing, in spite of exquisite design skills, as spectacle and nothing [...]
PREVAILING, LOVE
Love cancelling love against all chancels, trespassing crossbars toward a serenade perch at the Capulets’.