When I was in Houston I also went to Kaboom Books and picked up a whole stack of musty sci fi. Here’s the first sample:

I really wish that they had “Horizon Alpha”, but I couldn’t find it there and there aren’t any large images of the cover on the internet, unfortunately.

from twi-ny.com’s flickr

I went to Houston this past weekend and saw the “Color into Light” show at the MFAH. There was some pretty amazing work but the highlight was the installation “Cromosaturacion” (the above image is from a different version in another location). Glade and I at first thought that there was a fog machine in there but no, the light transformed the space so completely that it just seemed like we were walking through a dreamscape. And this was from the mid sixties! Truly a surreal experience.

But beyond that, I recommend the whole show highly. A nice multigenerational, multicultural spectrum of highly aestheticized yet still conceptual work, including some interesting Latin American artists that I had never heard of before, two early 70s Frank Stella paintings, and interactive pieces built in processing/JavaScript/C++. Check it out y’all.

via victor timofeev

Timofeev’s drawings of fantastic, geometric architectural scenes are amazing. The Rubik’s cube and other, more platonic forms are constantly being transformed, sliced, and placed in strange topologies. Although related to the tradition of abstraction (and pop art, with the Rubik’s), they most strongly recall the drawings of visionary architects. Its interesting to see similar drawings being made without the same intent; namely, to construct something (no matter how improbable that construction may be). These drawings liberate that tradition from ideology so that they can be explored apart from the problematic idea of a utopia. They allow us to enter a world of pure geometric play.

via Eric Rudd’s website.

I just finished The Art World Dream: Alternative Strategies for Working Artists by Eric Rudd. The idea behind the book is that artists can (and should?) work outside of institutional support to produce great art. You don’t need gallery shows to make major installations, and you don’t need your work to end up in a museum for your work to be preserved for future generations.

And what is the key to freedom? Real estate, and lots of it. The more studio space that you have, he argues, the greater art that you can make (because you have the space to think big). If you own that real estate, you don’t have to worry about gentrification-through-aestheticization raising your rent prices, and you can rent part of it out to fellow artists. A central concept here is that an artist doesn’t really want to be rich – an artist just wants to make enough money to be able to live in some sort of comfort and to keep funding their artwork. Although Rudd mentions the Internet (capital i) several times throughout the book, the one thing he doesn’t mention is perhaps the most important of all – the digital studio is limitless.