Björn Braun, tree, material

Björn Braun, Untitled, 2009. Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe/Berlin.

From an article in Frieze:

'collages – usually unframed and mounted on the torn-off covers of hardback books'

'works use only what can be found in the original pictures: he cuts and tears things out, reforming or repositioning them in the finished piece.'

Frank Stella

Frank Stella. The Pequod meets the Bachelor (B-11, 2X)

I used to quite like Frank Stella's work because he used the tools of our trade: protractors, compasses and by the mid-1980s, french curves and something all the notes about Stella call railway curves.  When I was teaching in Halifax in the mid 1980s I bought a set of ship curves, it being a ship-building sort of place. One was about three feet long.  I was working on an architecture that would result if one did all the drawings using these curves: flat, gentle sweeps where even the intersections gave a slightly odd, open angle.

I saw Stella's Pequod series in New York, somewhere; all the pieces of a drawing that normally indicate some sort of coded ground plane, as in a site plan, were lifted off the ground and floated in a complex set of layers. These layers, which had shapes recognisably from french curves, were painted over with gaudy pattern.  These pieces cast wonderful shadows: another kind of drawing.  They were enchanting.

Thinking about these works and the legacy of the abstract expressionists of New York given that Frankenthaler and Chamberlain both died last week, and looking up the Pequod series (I had forgotten all the Moby-Dick chapter heading names: Pequod meets the Bachelor, Pequod meets the Virgin, and so on), I found this description: 'In this and other ways, they tackle the issue of narrative, visual metaphor and subject matter more directly than before.'  This was written in 1989, and god knows I was keen on narrative and textual matters then too, but looking at the work now, seeing everything as narrative and metaphor does the physicality of this work a disservice.  Pequod meets the Bachelor is a nice reference to an American classic about obsession and is perhaps a metaphor for the artist in an obvious sort of way, but it isn't inherent in the work. The work has a physical presence quite independent of the haze of words around it.  

Here he is in 1972, very articulate and 34 years old.  At one point he says he became interested in aluminum paint as it was fairly repellant, all the action is on the surface.  Surface was the issue, not metaphor.

John Chamberlain, 1927-2011

John Chamberlain. Chili Terlingua, 1972-1974, from a group of ten sculptures constructed on a ranch near Amarillo, Texas, between 1972 and 1975 and loosely named after towns and counties throughout the state. The works were purchased by the Dia Art Foundation and given to the Chinati Foundation in 1986.

Art - regardless of when it was made - is one of the few things in the world that is never boring, and, it costs nothing. You don't have to own it, you just have to perceive it; art is free. As an artist I give away more than I would if I ran a beauty shop.
                                  John Chamberlain, 1982

What an odd thing to choose as an alternative to being an artist – a beauty shop.  Chamberlain started working with car bodies in the late 1950s: new world collages of the built-in-obsolescent auto industry rather than in the tradition of European collagists whose work was, by the 1960s, inevitably browned and archival looking: the tram tickets of Schwitters, the futurist fascination with machine parts drafted by Duchamp.  When the  crash of car hoods and crushed doors appeared with Chamberlain, it all looked new and very American.  The earliest pieces are often rusted – cars found in fields, but later in the 60s and 70s when cars were beautifully enamelled in candy colours, these crushed car assemblages took on a painterly quality.

At the Chinati Foundation, the collection of old buildings and workshops in Marfa, Texas founded by Donald Judd in the mid -1980s to exhibit his own work and that of Dan Flavin and Chamberlain, there is a permanent building of Chamberlain's sculptures.  They tilt, they lean, they surge like Rodin's Burghers of Calais. They are noisy with parts and colours.  Chili Terlingua, above, lives there.

Helen Frankenthaler, 1928-2011

Helen Frankenthaler at work from the Ernst Haas Estate Portaits.

Helen Frankenthaler died last week.  She was, they say, the first, even before Morris Louis, to pour paint on unprimed canvas in great watery washes.  In the late 50s when this was happening she was 30 or so, a time when one is completely free and experimental.  All the training is done, there are few of the expectations that come with fame and age, rules are all of a sudden irrelevant. 

Frankenthaler's work was part of an explosion of American abstraction in the 1950s and 60s and formed my own way of seeing.  By time I was reading Harold Rosenberg's The Tradition of the New in the very early 70s – my then bible for everything, Frankenthaler, Twombly, Rauschenberg were washing away de Kooning, Pollock and Franz Kline who had just preceded them.  This new unprimed abstraction seemed more romantic, more minimal, astoundingly beautiful – it wasn't all about manly force, sturm und drang. Even now, looking back at it all, it appears more lyrical and even in the sweep of the body, above, more like handwriting.  Above all, Frankenthaler's work, no matter how simple the image, never implies a rush of action, instead the marks of her actions are slow and thoughtful. 

Helen Frankenthaler. Other generations, 1957. oil on canvas 174.7 (h) x 177.9 (w) cm signed and dated lower right, red oil, "Frankenthaler/ '57" National Gallery of Australia 1973.330

Fernando Brízio at the Antigo Convento da Trindade

From EXD'11 in Lisbon.  Click on the image to go to David Pereira's beautiful sequence of photographs of this exhibition.

David Pereira, photographer. Don't Look Back | Fernando Brízio | Desenho Habitado | Antigo Convento da Trindade

Troy Nickle: nature as culture

So very tired of the bloody wars, environmental collapse, the 99%, the bad news.  Troy Nickle's exhibition in Lethbridge calms the mind somewhat.

the impossibility of dissidence

Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell's defaced library covers. The Guardian. Comment is Free, October 14, 2011

Click on the image and it will take you to an article by Jonathan Jones on the impossibility of dissidence in art today.  Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, young unpublished writers in the early 1960s used to take dull dustjackets in the library and change them into something subversive, definitely something very funny.  They were sent to prison for it.

Jones points out that outrage has become such a general condition of art that it is impossible to actually be outrageous.  One just has to read The Daily Mail, that stalwart of conservative ladies of middle England, to see how far outrageous celebrity culture has penetrated a most unlikely society.  

Something in this reminds me of the architectural conversations of thirty years ago, when modernism all of a sudden was named a rupture in a more organic development of traditional spatiality.  Modernism was the outrage, and the radical position was to excise it.  Yet the very notion of radical acts is itself a species of modernity.  

Is it more that there is nothing one can do in art, or architecture or design that is so offensive, so radical, that it shakes the viewer out of complacency?  Is it that we are immune to shock as the time-space continuum is so compressed that we have seen it all?  This would seen to indicate that the passivity of consumption has rendered us complacent on a grand scale.

Will the Occupy movement be consumed in the same way?  Perhaps, and it is this that will drive people to violence – the impossibility of dissidence in a 'liberal' society.

later, this very same morning, I came across Chloé Roubert's post on just how riots are being commodified. 

Nick Cave's Soundsuits

Nick Cave, Soundsuit 1, socks, paint, dryer lint, wood, wool, 2006

Nick Cave, not the singer, but the artist from Missouri who was with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and is now director of the fashion program at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Above, is a Soundsuit.  Soundsuits' references are wide and deep, they are sculptures, costumes, installations.  They are assemblages, they make sounds, they refer historically to various African ceremonial garments.  They appear in performances and in art museums.

I lived in the middle of Kansas for a year, my first teaching gig, and spent a lot of time driving back country roads and finding installations of what was known as folk art then, outsider art now.  What they all had in common is their obsessive convictions and their marginal relationship to orthodox art and architecture – the Watts Towers in Los Angeles were not unlike Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in their mad-builder concentration.  

More recently, Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg project in Detroit has rejuvenated a despairing neighbourhood by saying, your house is yours, make it into something that is you.  And because this is an economically challenged place, such transformations inevitably are done with discarded and then re-found materials: the essence of folk art: all invention, no money.

What is interesting about this and where it comes back to Nick Cave and Soundsuits is that these projects cannot be included under the patronising rubric of outsider art: Nick Cave is firmly in the centre of American art production, and Heidelberg is a well-documented demonstration project of urban renewal that does not involve mass destruction.

Last week Gloria Steinem in an interview on Q  said it takes about a hundred years for a social change to really become an embedded part of the social fabric. Second wave feminism is about 40 years old and so, no, we are not in a post-feminist era, we still have 60 years of feminist struggle ahead.  The civil rights movement in the USA happened in the 1960s, just 50 years ago.  We are only now starting to find work that is  embedded in the orthodoxy of contemporary art discourse: it is not post-racial, for it is so very African American, an identity that is critical to the work.  But it is allowed to take its place within the discourse, and that is new.

Gerhard Richter's panoramas

Gerhard Richter. 
Stadtbild Paris, 1968 200 cm x 200 cm. Oil on canvas. Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart, Germany

The Tate Modern is holding a Gerhard Richter exhibition, Panorama, this fall.  He painted a townscape series in the late 1960s and early 70s, taking mostly aerial photos of cities and painting them on canvases in a way that the scale of the buildings is completely lost: one brushstroke, with all the scale of the hand and brush that made it, perhaps equals one side of a 30-storey building.  Yet the work retains its photographic clarity, mostly because of the high contrast between shadows and sunlight in the original photos, and because of the recognisable patterns that cities have, that no other organism shares (the actual patterns, not the ability to become abstract pattern).  

This, in the context of Piano's Shard in London, a kind of architecture where clarity is paramount, makes one wonder why we value clarity so much.  Complex urban landscapes are often not legible for a number of reasons, mediaeval security for one, such as one finds even today in Rio's favelas.  Or the illegibility of the POPOS landscape: privately owned public outdoor spaces presaged by Richter's blurred and ambiguous renderings.   

Yet, we understand such complexities if it is our own city.  We do not need a tourist map all laid out in graphic clarity telling us where we should and should not go.  Cities at ground level have millions of small clues that keep a kind of social order.  When something such as the Shard, or almost any new project crashes into this fairly delicate understanding, something is sterilised, made very clear.  It takes decades, if not centuries, for a re-colonisation of the area by the complexity of everyday life.

the Wilton Diptych

The Wilton Diptych (c. 1395–99), tempera on wood, each section 57 cm × 29.2 cm. National Gallery, London

The Wilton Diptych has come up a few times recently, on tv and yesterday as I was reading Alan Bennett's Untold Stories.  It is a fairly mysterious small pair of paintings, just 12 x 11" each, hinged, a personal altarpiece for Richard II, painted near the end of his reign.  He was born in 1367 and became king at ten in 1377, deposed in 1399 and died at 33 in 1400 of starvation, the imprisoned last of the Plantagenets.  

Not sure why it keeps popping up in public view all of a sudden unless it is part of a general reclamation of the past that underpins European's problems with multiculturalism.  'They want to change our culture', or our way of life, or our laws, or whatever it is.  I'm sure the British don't mean the culture of binge drinking and football hooliganism, no, it is glorious culture, safely lodged in places such as the National Gallery.  Genius, the series on British scientists introduced by Stephen Hawking, Downton Abbey, the bloody History of Scotland — Britain is intent on reminding itself, on television, just what it was that made it Great.

The diptych is a lovely thing.  On the left panel, the boy king kneels, flanked by his patron saints Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr, both once kings of England, and John the Baptist carrying the lamb of God.  Richard kneels on stoney ground, not unlike Sudbury.  
On the right panel is a phalanx of angels, all wearing Richard's emblem, a white hart lying on the ground.  They, and Mary, stand on a carpet of flowers, their blue robes are Marian blue, the blue of heaven.  Their crowns are English roses, their powerful wings a fractal of feathers on a wing.

Richard's earthly life is being sanctioned by something on a completely different scale.  This is the power of faith, earthly life may be hell, but there's an end to it, and a field of flowers will be achieved.  This encourages endurance; a lack of faith perhaps encourages impatience with an unsatisfactory life in the here and now.
Our touching faith in technology as a solution to the energy crisis is cast as a kind of achievable heaven, but on such a different scale that there will be many generations whose lives are sacrificed while we plan for a future none of us will see.

Eduardo Paolozzi: lil dolink

British Museum Press, 1985

While I was looking up the history of the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh yesterday, I found it contains a large number of works by Eduardo Paolozzi, who was born in Leith in 1924.  Italians in small Scottish and Irish towns — it is a culture that includes Paolo Nutini, born in Paisley, a third generation of Italian-Scots and hopefully more accepted than those of Paolozzi's generation who were interned at the start of WWII.  Paolozzi's grandfather, uncle and 446 other internees died when the ship taking them to internment camps in Canada was sunk by a U-boat.

However, Eddy Paolozzi, maker of collages, dense works of many layers, assembled the Krazy Kat Arkive, thousands of items that represent popular culture, the machine age and the iconography of the hero, and gave it to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

It is all of a piece with his collages: assemblages that act as archives, illogical collections of diverse things assembled within a certain era.  He once was given free rein in the Ethnography Museum in London, to take things from the collections and to curate an exhibit from them, in which he intervened with material of his own.  I saw this-- it was in the mid-1980s, with an accompanying book, Lost Magic Kingdoms and Six Paper Moons from Nahuatl.  Not dissimilar to Picasso's discovery of artifacts at the Trocadéro in Paris in 1907, it is the kind of appropriation of cultural  property that can't be done today; the material culture of the world is not curious material for the making of European art.  

But there is an enchantment in looking at things that through one's own ignorance are pure sensual form without a cultural reading.  Lost Magic Kingdoms was perhaps the last instance of this, not that Paolozzi was unaware of cultural meaning, but he was a sculptor whose work used component parts according to different rules.  Krazy Kat rules.  

George Herriman. Detail of a Sunday page in which Ignatz, disguised as a painting, hurls a brick at Krazy Kat who interprets it as an expression of love. Published November 7, 1937

Richard Wright: The Stairwell Project

Thomas Hamilton. Dean Orphan Hospital, Edinburgh,1933. Photograph from 1850

If there was ever a meditative painter it is Richard Wright, Scottish, who paints directly on walls.  He received the Turner Prize in 2009 exhibiting at that time No Title (05.10.09), a gold leafed baroque pattern blown up the size of a gallery wall, in fact laid onto the gallery wall and necessarily ephemeral.  

The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art commissioned Wright to do a permanent work in the public stairwell of gallery, previously the Dean Orphan Hospital built in 1833.  Terry Farrell + Partners did the conversion in 1999, but it remains a classical Georgian building, tilting into the Victorian era, still full of light and space.

The Stairwell Project consists of small black twisting fleur-de-lys each positioned about  4" apart, but in no discernably regular pattern.  As the flowers are directional, it gives the surface of this stairwell a tension and a liveliness that paradoxically isn't actually determined by the architecture, although literally painted on it.  Rather, Wright's painting seems to sit on the surface, but is not of the surface.  

Now, clearly I'm intuiting all this from the photographs, but what strikes me about the project is that in its conceptual simplicity so many things happen: the moire patterns of any semi-regular array of marks, the references to death and the death of children: the flowers are black, the are small, they are faintly disturbing.  The daunting nature of the interior architecture, which has been considered inviolable for the last fifty years: Georgian classicism is considered a near perfect case of mathematical and cultural elegance.  The obvious quiet of the actual painting (small brushes, close work, unvarying marks: not expressionistic, narrative or biographical), just the process of painting each small  figure.  

It is meditative in the way that artisanal craft is meditative: there is a goal, and one's hands get you there, no matter how slowly.

Cy Twombly (1929-2011)

Cy Twombly. Leda and the Swan (Part III), 1980. Oil on reverse of an artist's proof on handmade paper. 64.7 x 50.3 cm

Cy Twombly, died Tuesday at 83.  I had a note about him last fall  in the context of artists' lists.   Tacita Dean made a film about him recently, Edwin Parker (2011) showing all this summer at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London.
Of all the artists of the 1960s, Ad Rheinhart's black canvases, Rauschenberg's dense messy collages, Frankenthaler's stains and Morris Louis's pours plus pop and op art – all exploring the carrying capacity of the canvas surface, Twombly was the most calligraphic, the most like writing and drawing: no erasure of the hand here.
The early work was so delicate, it seems to get louder and in a way angrier with each decade.  Young man's work in these two pieces.

Cy Twombly. Untitled 1970. Distemper and chalk on canvas. 70.5 x 100 cm

Virgil's muse

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. The Reader Wreathed with Flowers (Virgil's Muse), 1845. 34 x 47 cm. Louvre, Paris.

This is the painting for July on my calendar: Corot, The Reader Wreathed With Flowers (Virgil's Muse).  A realist portrait of a mythical subject: how tenderly it is painted.  Can one imagine going outside to read a bit, wearing a delicate circlet of ivy on one's heid?  well no, but why couldn't we?  Why couldn't we wrap our brows with cool leaves?  a garden crown.

Virgil wrote Aeneid (29-19BC), a bloody legend about Aeneas's travelling wars from Troy in what is now Turkey, to found Rome by way of Carthage, just outside what is now Tunis.  It starts with an invocation to the Muse:

I sing of arms and the man, he who, exiled by fate,
first came from the coast of Troy to Italy, and to
Lavinian shores – hurled about endlessly by land and sea,
by the will of the gods, by cruel Juno’s remorseless anger,
long suffering also in war, until he founded a city
and brought his gods to Latium: from that the Latin people
came, the lords of Alba Longa, the walls of noble Rome.
Muse, tell me the cause: how was she offended in her divinity,
how was she grieved, the Queen of Heaven, to drive a man,
noted for virtue, to endure such dangers, to face so many
trials? Can there be such anger in the minds of the gods?

ah.  It was Juno's fault.  We mortals are simply blown hither and thither by a quarrelling pantheon.

The 1840s: Nash was building in London, Ingres painting in Paris, the Irish famine occurred and Charlotte Bronte published Jane Eyre.  Georgian elegance and French empire neoclassicism were about to be pushed aside by a rough gothic realism.  Corot is sited between neoclassicism (mythological landscapes and gods) and impressionism (actual landscapes and people drawn from real life).  Virgil's muse is a rhetorical figure, but the painting of her is of a very real, serene woman, her foot firmly places on the earth, her broad forehead wreathed in ivy.  In the language of flowers, a Victorian conceit, ivy indicated both endurance and fidelity – there is something about Corot's muse that is as solid and as still as a rock.  

Urbanbees: Fleur de sel

Urbanbees. Feur de sel, 2011. Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens Photo JM-1102

This year's International Garden Festival at Les Jardins de Métis includes Fleur de sel, a salt garden by Urbanbees, an international group which includes Farzaneh Bahrami who wrote on the use of public space in Tehran in On Site 25: identity, and Enrique Enriquez who wrote a meditation on exile in On Site 24: migration. 

Enrique describes Fleur de sel in a pitch for On Site 26: dirt – 'a contradiction thing that came to my mind using a material that it is considered for landscape designers as the first enemy for plants. But salt is a simple tiny material that can speak a lot about our maniac cleanness in the society we live in now.'

Going to Extremes is a Channel 4 documentary series running on Knowledge where Nick Middleton, an Oxford geographer, travels to the hottest, coldest, wettest, driest environments with particular cultures that have evolved, survived and even thrive. Last night Middleton went to a region called Dalloi in Ethiopia, once a sea which as it dried left a five metre deep crust of salt.  It is mined, hacked out in concrete-like slabs, loaded onto camels and walked out – a two day walk to the nearest source of water. 

It will be interesting to see how Fleur de sel at les Jardins de Métis fares over the summer. It will be in situ from June 25 - October 2, 2011, through rain storms, high humidity and dew.  Will it turn to a hard crust as happens with my lovely pink salt from Afghanistan, sitting in its salt cellar on my table?  Will it stay like sand?  Is it Morton's Salt: 'when it rains it pours', a slogan I heard all my life and only just got?  Will it create an eco-system of its own over the three months?  We shall wait and see. 

Katie Holten: drawing trees

Katie Holten. Paths of Desire.  Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2007.  mixed media, dimensions variable 

Katie Holten, Irish artist, currently in THE MODERNS, an exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.  Writing it up for the Irish Times, Aidan Dunne explains her thus: her work is generally informal and slightly alternative, looking to patterns and connections outside the mainstream. It is, in other words, rhizomatic – in the words of cultural theorists Deleuze and Guattari. Holten’s piece spreads and grows in the manner of a plant species finding a niche and expanding exponentially in a new slice of terrain – as tidy an encapsulation of a rhizomatic practice as ever read.  As with plants, some terrains are congenial, some hostile, some roots are hardy, some tender.  To be an artist is almost by definition to be hardy.

This video shows something of how and why Paths of Desire, above, was constructed.

Christopher Adams: natural selection

Christopher Adams. Natural Selection. Installation view, 2011

CHRISTOPHER ADAMS
Natural Selection
Hosfelt Gallery, New York
23 June - 29 July
 
from the blurb —

Adams' art considers the concept in biological speciation called adaptive radiation, in which a pioneering organism enters a relatively untapped environment, reproducing profusely while differentiating rapidly and extensively.  At the same time, the organism never departs too dramatically from the original form.
 
Each of Adams' pieces starts with a common structure and evolves into an ornate form.  Some are broad and brightly-colored, others are mottled and shrunken or morphologically reduced.  Some appear floral, others cephalopodal, and others have no identifiable counterpart in nature.
 
Christopher Adams has a degree in organismic and evolutionary biology.

face hand camera | rock paper scissors

Richard Hamilton Swingeing London. 1968-9 Acrylic, collage and aluminium on canvas. 848 x 1030 x 100 mm. Tate Collection T01144

souvenirs: opening borders/opening objects

Sofia Isajiw. A plate from the Veselka Restaurant, New York.

Opening Borders/Opening Objects is an online curated exhibition from the University of Western Ontario: little information on it, such as who was the curator, just a map showing where the contributing artists are from and where they live now, a really interesting curatorial statement and a list of artists that link to a souvenir they chose to explain.

'Opening borders' refers to Bourriaud's 'fertile static on the borders between consumption and production'.  It questions the modernist view that artistic production somehow has an authenticity lacking in objects of consumption – souvenirs, tourist rubbish, reproductions, things from WalMart, or any sort of market anywhere.  Opening Borders/Opening Objects presents often mass-produced objects of little obvious inherent meaning as embedded in a number of very personal factors: who chose it, where was it, where does it live now, what memories does it trigger, what were the circumstances of its first sighting, what is it?

Opening Borders/Opening Objects also places the artist in the twenty-first century as among the most mobile people in our societies: they travel a lot.  They come home.  They bring things.  They give things away.  They get gifts.  What aesthetic or cultural values reside in these objects? for this isn't about money, rather it is about indifferent objects that conjure other worlds, other times, other places.  

There is a good reference list with the curatorial statement: a defining discussion of material culture theory in 2011.

The exhibition will be online from May 1, 2010 to August 30, 2010

Victor Trasov. An S-Bahn ticket from the Berlin of the DDR. Jamelie Hassan. A Syrian glass jug.

Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan: the illustrated dictionary of received ideas

Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan. The Illustrated Dictionary of Received Ideas.

Gustave Flaubert. Dictionnaire des Idees Reçues
1911-13
A dictionary of received wisdom: misguided, banal, what everyone thinks and never questions.  In 1852 Flaubert wrote 'It would be the justification of Whatever is, is right'.

Jorn Barger in 2002 did an analytic reorganisation of the dictionary into broad categories such as 'things to make fun of' (Philosophy: always snigger at it), things to thunder against' (Whitewash (on church walls) Thunder against it.  This aesthetic anger is extremely becoming). 'Things to pretend (Illusions: Pretend to have had a great many, and complain that you have lost them all).

The kind of person, or people, defined by this dictionary of admirable philistinism is familiar to anyone who has ever read a British novel about the class system but to find it so sharply defined in France is surprising when most of what we know of France is Proust (one must claim to have read it, a long time ago though), Sartre (did him in university – brilliant), de Beauvoir (unrequited lover/feminist – really responsible for Sartre's success) — this is catching, this received wisdom stuff. The clichés come so easily, they must be just below the surface.

Anyway, wouldn't have known about Flaubert's dictionnaire if I hadn't heard about Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan's ongoing project to illustrate the dictionary.   They hold public drawing sessions, one of which was at Artexte last October and another is today, June 1 at the Art Gallery of York University.   They've built a special desk to do these drawings on, taken from Flaubert's last and incomplete book, Bouvard and Pécuchet, so we are looking at a large project, part performance, part book making, for there are books, small, that come out of this – one is published by Artexte (edition of 150, $40), others in smaller editions from other venues. 

Flaubert on what everyone knows about architects: Architectes --- tous imbéciles.
--- oublient toujours l'escalier des maisons.

Gareth Long and Derek Sullivan. Illustrated Dictionary of Received ideas. here- Antiques: Are always of modern fabrication. Antiquities: Commonplace, boring.