Hi Ian
That reminds me of a story Muriel Rukeyser tells in The Life of Art.
"I remember a visit that Charles Biederman, the 'abstract' artist in
metals and plastics and concrete, made to the early work in Chicago on
the cyclotron. Biederman was shown through by a friend of his, a
scientist who out of courtesy asked him what he thought of the
structural design. The scientist expected an uncritical answer and was
startled into rudeness when the arts said, 'It would be very good,
according to my standards, except for one thing: that joint - if you
put a sphere in, just there, it could really be called perfect.' On
his next visit, months later, he met the scientist who said, 'Do you
remember what happened last time? Well, you'd better know what
happened. Things kept going wrong, and the trouble was traced to just
that joint. The put a sphere in, everything's smooth now."
(She talks about workshops too - graphics/poetry workshops, writing
workshops. That wonderful energy when modernism was so optimistic. But
were people speaking of those kinds of workshops, or of the
commodification of the idea of the workshop that is now a dominant
thing, the selling of creativity? I think they were.)
xA
On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 7:31 PM, ian davidson<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> And all these trades do have aesthetic considerations. Look at the curve of
> the pipes in your home, the way the wires bend around your electricity
> meter, the siting of switches and sockets. And the aesthetics of large scale
> industrial applications. And how bad it looks if its wrong. I was following
> a conversation on joining cables on an electrician's online forum recently,
> and the comments were on how it looked as much as how it functioned. Really.
> Comments were just as scathing and temperatures as high as any poetic
> conversation.
>
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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