A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
Martin Lewis had a thing for New York City rooftops. They made excellent vantage points for this Australia-born artist’s drypoint prints, allowing him to depict nuanced moments on the streets of the 1920s and 1930s city: kids at play under the glow of shop lights, young women on the town illuminated by street lamps, and […]
The mysterious woman on the “little penthouse” of a 1930s tenement roof — Ephemeral New York
In Vienna there are shadows. The city is black and everything is done by rote. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest. May, June, July, August, September, October. I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers. I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour…
— Egon Schiele, as quoted by Reinhard Steiner in Egon Schiele, 1890-1918: The Midnight Soul of the Artist. (Taschen; Revised edition May 17, 2000) Originally Published February 1st 1994.
The first people to hang out at the red brick, Queen Anne–style building that opened in 1885 at 222 Bowery were working-class men. At the time, the Bowery was a cacophonous circus of vaudeville theaters, beer gardens, pawnbrokers, rowdies, and streetcars all under the screeching rails of the Third Avenue elevated train. Much of New […]
The past lives of the “bunker” on the Bowery — Ephemeral New York
See also my related post on ‘The Bunker’:
The Bunker: John Giorno and The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs by Marcus D. Niski
The incantatory prose poem What I Believe from 1984 is a crystallised distillation of Ballard’s artistic credo. Here are all the signature trade-marks and obsessions: car crashes, deserted beaches and abandoned hotels as well as his extraordinarily odd musings on the real appeal of celebrities. It is, as always with Ballard, idiosyncratic, bizarre and strangely beautiful. The […]
What I Believe by J.G Ballard — cakeordeathsite
Cigarette ads, a burlesque house, a struggling theater, a flea circus and freak show (likely Hubert’s Museum): If you visited 42nd Street on the west side of Broadway at Times Square in 1932, this is what you’d find. “42nd Street West of Broadway” was painted that year by Edmund Yaghjian, an Armenian immigrant who depicted […]
The seedier side of Broadway by a 1930s painter — Ephemeral New York
Image © Marcus D. Niski 2018
For half a century Hans Haacke has devoted his art practice to unsparing critiques of wealthy and powerful institutions. His work has never been more relevant.
Read on Places Journal …
A System Is Not Imagined — Places Journal
Nearly all reality is pain.
– From an Interview with Melwyn Bragg for The South Bank Show.
[Quotation taken from my Writer’s Notebooks 2015]
Chaos for me breeds images.
– From an Interview with Melwyn Bragg for The South Bank Show.
[Quotation taken from my Writer’s Notebooks 2015]
“I see drawing as thinking, as evidence of thinking, evidence of going from one place to another. One draws to define one thing from another. Draws proportions, adjusts scale. It is impossible to paint without drawing.” Vija Celmins, painter, draftsman, Latvian, American
via “I see drawing as thinking, as evidence of thinking, evidence of …” — Art of Quotation
Naked Cities Journal 
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