Finally someone’s paying attention to this doctor’s advice.

Or rather, someone scanned in the first few pages of the book before either they lost interest, the scanner died, or they could resist temptation no longer and had to go break out the Faber-Castells.

Few outside of Sweden know that the playwright August Strindberg had periods of intense engagement with painting and photography in the 1890s, when his literary creativity had reached a deadlock. In an essay from 1894 called “Chance in Artistic Creation,” he describes the methods that he employs, speaking about his wish to “imitate […] nature’s way of creating.”* …

Strindberg distrusted camera lenses, since he considered them to give a distorted representation of reality. Over the years he built several simple lens-less cameras made from cigar boxes or similar containers with a cardboard front in which he had used a needle to prick a minute hole. But the celestographs were produced by an even more direct method using neither lens nor camera. The experiments involved quite simply placing his photographic plates on a window sill or perhaps directly on the ground (sometimes, he tells us, already lying in the developing bath) and letting them be exposed to the starry sky.

More about Strindberg’s Celestographs can be found at Cabinet, along with a translation of “On Chance in Artistic Creation“. (Found via greg.org.)

* A quote remarkably similar to John Cage’s “The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation,” a thought to which he returned throughout his later life. Cage got this idea from reading Ananda Coomaraswamy’s The Transformation of Nature in Art. I don’t remember Cage making any references to Strindberg, and I don’t know how far east Strindberg extended his interest in exotic forms of spirituality.

On Monday, Indianapolis Museum of Art director Max Anderson proposed wagering an IMA loan of an Ingrid Calame painting to the New Orleans Museum of Art, should the New Orleans Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts.

That was a nice choice… but apparently Anderson wasn’t too worried about having to pay off the bet: “We’re already spackling the wall where the NOMA loan will hang,” he tweeted.

Over the past few days, the two directors have been locked in a cycle of calling and raising their bets, with plenty of trash talk about each other’s teams, cities, and taste in art. The full coverage is here.

The design of the pavilion, which housed a presentation of Edgar Varèse’s tape composition Poème Electronique, was attributed to Le Corbusier at the time. The title was in fact Le Corbusier’s idea: “I shall not create a pavilion, but a poème électronique. Everything will happen inside: sound, light, color, rhythm…” He then got Iannis Xenakis, his assistant, to design it for him.

At ANABlog you can see a photograph of the World Fair site, showing the size of the Philips Pavilion, compared to those of the USA and the USSR, along with surprising photographs of the pavilion other than the iconic image on the left. There are also more details about how Varèse tried to exploit the acoustic properties of the pavilion’s interior to the fullest, creating an immersive, spatialised sonic experience (and nixed Le Corbusier’s plans to lecture the audience over the top of his music.)

Plenty more goodies at the Virtual Electronic Poem site, including a Dutch documentary made at the time of the pavilion’s construction, and photographs of the other pavilions at the fair. There’s a lot of retro-futuristic architecture, but there are also the names: Atomium, the USSR, the Tobacco Pavilion, Kodak, Pan Am. Watch the film, and see the world in which the pavilion was built, and the fact that this all happened over a half a century ago really hits home. This temple to modernity was planned by hat-wearing men, built by workmen driving creaky lorries and spraying asbestos like it was whipped cream. It’s a future that never happened, but it’s amazing that it got as far as it did.

After the ceremony there’s a dinner hosted by the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose name is Rocco. He wears handcrafted alligator cowboy boots with his black tuxedo. Marcel [Proost] asks him about the boots, which are, of course, a major conversation piece.

“You wrassle that ‘gator yourself?”

No, says the Chairman. He bought them in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I had not known that they had alligators in Jackson Hole, but it could be they’ve migrated there to work in the hotel or food service business.

The Chairman is reputed to be a very wealthy man and a fan of theater, baseball, horse racing and country music, in other words our indigenous American beaux arts, our native Kunstwerke. Someone there tells me he contemplated buying the Cincinnati Reds but thought the asking price of one billion too high. Perhaps he could just buy the NEA for half that amount and not have to deal with the flamers in Congress. That would be an exemplary form of the great American tradition of privatizing.

That’s an excerpt from a recent entry in John Adams‘ blog, Hell Mouth. Yes. John “Nixon In China, Short Ride In A Fast Machine” Adams. (Note to self: check out some music he’s written in the past fifteen years or so.)

Between 1954 and 1961, Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross worked on a machine called the Electric Eye Tone Tool. Years later, I was looking at the diagram of the Electric Eye machine in the Grainger Museum and I said, “That should be fairly easy to rebuild.” Well, it turns out it’s not fairly easy to rebuild but it was rebuildable.

The Electric Eye Tone Tool seems to be the first light-controlled synthesizer. Its oscillator circuits were transistorised (more stable than the old valve technology) and could be controlled graphically, simply by painting a score onto a transparent plastic sheet which could then be passed over the instrument’s array of photoelectric cells. Take that, UPIC.

Burt has written a brief study of the history of experimental music in Australia, reprinted at the Australian Music Centre website.