Going through the Discogs database recalled this racy LP cover (how could anyone forget this?):
That was briefly in stores in the US, but by the end of the year (1974) the "censored version" appeared:
Kind of eerie! If you're concerned about a transgressive female image, don't use half-measures. Just show some trees. This was decades before the erased-in-Photoshop genre appeared (e.g. removing the victims of the Kent State shooting using the "clone tool") so it seems almost presciently eerie.
Elise Ferguson
Double A
14" x 11", pigmented plaster on paper
Signed edition of 20
The edition was already sold by the time I looked at the press release. I might have shelled out!
According to the print dealer, Exhibition A, "to create Double A, Ferguson ... directly silkscreen[ed] pigmented plaster onto coldpress paper, the [same] process [used] when creating her larger body of work." It's a handsome image, jpeg-ishly speaking. I haven't seen Ferguson's work IRL in quite a few years but it was always materially tasty and historically smart. In this instance she looks back to Louis Kahn and "concrete as a primary medium," with her plaster standing in, symbolically, for the Kahn-crete.
Just learned that one of my favorite teachers, Daniel Albright, died a couple of years ago.
A memorial with readings, music, and reminiscences was posted: [YouTube]
The drawing comes from a series of pictures projected on the auditorium screen, interpreting a passage from one of Albright's books. (It reminds me a bit of Erika Somogyi's work)
I'll have more to say about him -- I just ordered a few of his tomes that I hadn't read yet. I've plugged him a few times on the blahg over the years.
Several of the reminiscers describe him as a genius and there's really no other word. When he lectured he held you spellbound -- you could feel your brain expanding.
In his younger years (when I had him as an undergrad advisor and my brain was still expanding) he primarily focused on English lit. He was in his mid-20s when he wrote a book on "Yeats' creative imagination in old age." That's one I ordered -- I've always been curious about it but never found it in a library or bookstore.
Gradually he broadened his criticism to include music and painting. At the end of his life his focus was interdisciplinary studies. His pursuits took him from Virginia to Rochester to (after 2003) Harvard, whether I gather his courses were popular.
I like his writing on poetry and music and modernist theory in general. I don't really care much about the interrelationships of the arts but appreciated that he would also take the flip side of the argument, explaining why and when it was good for a discipline to remain entrenched in its area of competence (to use a phrase of Greenberg's, a critic he admired but didn't agree with).
An astute Am*zon commenter said, regarding Albright's last book Putting Modernism Together: "A great project but this original and talented thinker is finally unable to let go of the canon." You could do a lot worse having someone to explain the canon to you, but the frustration isn't with Albright's conservatism so much as it is selfishly wanting to see that brilliant mind probing outside the established greats.
The creator of the shabby-chic meme above, Chris Duncan, quit dumping long before Dump.fm died but this makes a nice memorial. Duncan went on to an excellent career as a Vine troll, harassing random urbanites and uploading their reactions. E.g., "You ride your motorcycle like a real weenie!" Duncan's dump memes were noteworthy for being made in MSPaint and saved as degraded jpegs. This one is missing the characteristic artifacts. The football jersey font was typical.
Comments to Joe Milutis' Hyperallergic article on Dump.fm slowly trickle in (hat tip stage for upset "I Don't Get It Guy"):
sara • 15 days ago
Rene sucks d*nkey d*ck [asterisks in the original --tm]
Ross L. Gould • 2 days ago
No mention of deal with it??? Did you ever even dump bro?
tom moody • 11 hours ago
Thanks to Joe Milutis for this eulogy. Dump is hard to write about, and anyone who attempts to nail the experience risks becoming the IDGI Guy (a grumpy stock photo actor who, in real life, was one of the first people not to get Dump -- he and the photographer complained loudly until Jeanette Hayes painted IDGI Guy's portrait in oils -- then they got it). In fact, every dumper thinks they "get it" and will greet another's theories with sllence or abuse, hence this comment section. I said to one dumper that "Rene sucks d*nkey d*ck" was kind of a lame response and the dumper said the comment was "probably about the aspects of dump Milutis forgot to mention or couldn't fit in." And I said, "You're reading a lot into 'Rene sucks d*nkey d*ck.'"
tom moody • 5 minutes ago
And as for not covering "deal with it," the answer is -- [slowly descending sunglasses] -- "deal with it."
