082703 Tahoe | Jonathan Lasker | Steve Mumford | Bloglines
Tahoe
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Steve Mumford has another installment of his Baghdad Journal, drawings and text, at Artnet.
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Excerpt from an interview by Hans Michael Herzog with Jonathan Lasker from Jonathan Lasker Gemälde | Paintings 1977-1997:
Hans-Michael Herzog So you don't consider abstraction any longer to be ideologically loaded? 
Jonathan Lasker Not presently. Abstraction is no longer the representation of an modernist ideal.
Herzog You said once that your paintings depict abstraction. That is a very good way to put it. Do you still hold to that?
Lasker No, I might say it's the other way around. I use abstraction to depict other things. I use abstract images as figures, as forms, as potential real world space such as a landscape or interior space. I use abstract forms to represent.
Herzog Do you think that abstraction is a more adequate means of depicting life and reality today than figurative painting?
Lasker No, it's just that it's useful in the sense that it creates a threshhold into something pictorial. If you use an abstract image to talk about the notion of making a picture, then you think more about how you make a picture than about the picture itself. It's a way of protecting yourself against fully engaging the narrative of an image. Creating a narrative which is more analytical than it is fictional.
Herzog In what sense?
Lasker I think that abstraction prevents you from fully entering a fiction. A picture is a fiction. Abstraction keeps you away from that fiction and gives you a means of approaching a narrative in an analytical manner.
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A just OK article about weblogs is in today's Daily Cal: UC Berkeley Students Find a New Voice in Blogs.
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I decided to try out bloglines today to see if reading weblogs in a central place using RSS is nicer or easier than actually going to weblogs. My first reaction: yes, it's nicer, and it's sort of Scholar's Boxish.
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Lloyd asks, "...who are the figures in the San Felipe beach drawing, and what were they doing?"
This is a pretty literal drawing. The two figure are immersed in the environment of the beach and ocean, and are intensely "being" together in a new, deepening relationship. They are away from the rest of the world. I wrote about this in the first piece I wrote for Rudolf's Diner, "She Has Remedies." In the same piece I wrote about the Death Valley/San Bernadino trip which I drew on 20030826.
I find I'm constantly shifting back and forth in what I draw and write between present and past, so Lloyd, when you say, "It's all of a piece anyway, isn't it?" I have to say absolutely. My life becomes bigger and rounder and more full of reference points. As Neil Young has said a few times when someone in the crowd shouts out a song request, "It's all the same song." In other words, it's not about the one song, it's about the body of work.
Say...
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