Florence

The “tails” sides of British coins less than £1 can be arranged to depict the Royal Shield from the monarch’s coat of arms.

The full Royal Shield appears on the £1 coin.

Expressions banned from use in New Zealand parliamentary debate:

1933
Blowfly-minded

1943
Retardate worm

1946
Clown of the House
Idle vapourings of a mind diseased
I would cut the honourable gentleman’s throat if I had the chance

1949
His brains could revolve inside a peanut shell for a thousand years without touching the sides

1957
Kind of animal that gnaws holes

1959
Member not fit to lick the shoes of the Prime Minister

1963
Energy of a tired snail returning home from a funeral

1966
Shut up yourself, you great ape
Snotty-nosed little boy
You are a cheap little twerp
Ridiculous mouse

1974
Could go down the Mount Eden sewer and come up cleaner than he went in
Dreamed the bill up in the bath
Frustrated warlord

The full list is here. In brighter news, saying that a fellow member “scuttles for his political funk hole” was deemed allowable in 1974.

Noelle Industrielle, Helimax Powermoon Dirigible Light Source, 2005

Vico Magistretti, Library

anemocracy
n. a government by the wind

Frank Hurley took the photo above during Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911. “The figure is actually leaning on a constant 100 miles per hour wind while picking ice for culinary purposes.”

In 2005 Toronto artist Brian Joseph Davis assembled more than 5,000 film taglines into one long narrative.

This version, read by voice-over artist Scott Taylor, is only an excerpt — the whole thing runs to 22 pages (PDF).

The Cat Show. Curated by Rhonda Lieberman. With real cats (some for adoption!) at White Columns in NYC. June 14 – July 27, 2013.

Participating artists/contributors include:

Michele Abeles, Rita Ackermann, Antonio Adams, Bill Adams, Laura Aldridge, Graham Anderson, Araki, Cory Arcangel, Atelier E.B. (Lucy McKenzie, Beca Lipscombe, Marc Camille Chaimowicz), Michel Auder, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Matthew Barney, Will Benedict, Olaf Breuning, Janet Burchill, Kathe Burkhart, Carter, Antoine Catala, David Colman, Ann Craven, Cynthia Daignault, Lucky DeBellevue, Jake Ewert, Bella Foster, Magdalena Frimkess, Jeff Funnell, Rainer Ganahl, Paul Georges, Eric Ginsburg, Karin Gulbran, Tamar Halpern, Michelle Handelman, June Hamper, Michelle Handelman, Daniel Heidkamp, Robert Heinecken, John Hiltunen, Ann Cathrin November Hoibo, Jonathan Horowitz, Marc Hundley, Gary Indiana, Jane Kaplowitz, Nina Katchadourian, Matt Keegan, Mike Kelley, Wayne Koestenbaum, Barbara Kruger, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Sadie Laska, Elad Lassry, Mark Leckey, Cary Leibowitz, Rhonda Lieberman, Cassandra MacLeod, Alissa McKendrick, Ryan McNamara, Matthias Merkel-Hess, Siobhan Meow, Marilyn Minter, Dave Muller, Takeshi Murata, Eileen Neff, Laura Owens, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Prince, Rob Pruitt, Eileen Quinlan, , T. Cole Rachel, Jennifer Rochlin, Sam Roeck, Ruth Root, Kay Rosen, Jason Rosenberg, Theo Rosenblum and Chelsea Seltzer, Gus Van Sant, Joe Scanlan, Steven Shearer, David Shrigley, Patti Smith, Frances Stark, Amy Taubin, Nicola Tyson, Andy Warhol, Jordan Wolfson, B. Wurtz, Rob Wynne, and Freecell with Gia Wolff.

Wordplay maven Dave Morice discovered something strange in 1992: Write out the three-letter word ONE, and beneath it write out the next odd number whose name is spelled with four letters, then the next spelled with five letters, and so on up to TWENTY-ONE, which has nine letters. Then, in a separate column, do the same with even numbers, from the three-letter TWO to the nine-letter TWENTY-TWO — but list these in reverse order:

Now each line contains 12 letters — and in each instance the numbers named total 23! What does this mean?

Artist: Mel Bochner

Venue: Peter Freeman

Exhibition Title: Proposition and Process: A Theory of Sculpture (1968 – 1973)

Date: May 10 – June 29, 2013

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Peter Freeman, New York. Photos by James Powers

Press Release:

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present its fourth solo exhibition of work by Mel Bochner, which will be the largest survey of Bochner’s sculpture ever assembled. All from the years 1968 to 1973, these works represent the complete range of the artist’s investigations into the underlying conceptual foundations of sculpture; most have not been shown in New York since 1972.

About these works, Bochner wrote “Thoughts Reinstalling A Theory of Sculpture”:

A Theory of Sculpture is sculpture-as-self-representation. In these “self-representations” any material (pebble, nut, coin, match stick, glass shard, etc.) is replaceable without changing the intention. When an object loses its uniqueness, identity is denied an equivalence with presence. Any individual piece exists only as an “example of itself ”. Paradoxically, without the object there would be no idea, but without the idea there would be no object.

Number constitutes a mental class of objects. Numbers do not need concrete entities in order to exist. In Latin the word for counting is “calculus”, which translates, literally, as stone. By juxtaposing the numbers with the stones A Theory of Sculpture forces a confrontation between matter (“raw” material) and mind (categories of thought).

Sculpture, as opposed to painting, is defined by its alteration of the real world. In Latin the word for number is “digit”, which translates, literally, as finger. A Theory of Sculpture represents the hand (or agent of alteration), by the use of the numbers 5 and 10. Therefore, even though nothing is carved, cast, welded, constructed, or assembled, the manual aspect of sculpture is thematized. The concerns in A Theory of Sculpture are not abstract. I am not interested in sculpture in any formal sense. The numbers and the stones exist on parallel but contradictory planes. While they appear to demonstrate the same thing there is a rupture between them. The map is not the landscape. An enormous abyss separates the space of statements from the space of objects. A Theory of Sculpture is the intention not to bridge that abyss.

(Mel Bochner, New York)

Link: Mel Bochner at Peter Freeman

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