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Lee Lozano and Tools

Hauser & Wirth is currently showing Lee Lozano’s Tools.  There is a slideshow of 24 images on their website. The exhibition ends Febuary 19, and according to the gallery press release-

On January 12, 2011, Hauser & Wirth New York will open the first exhibition ever organized to focus exclusively upon one of the pivotal passages of Lozano’s journey. ‘Lee Lozano Tools’ will bring together a group of important works from 1963 and 1964, paintings and drawings of everyday hardware – exaggerated hammers, razor blades, screwdrivers, and wrenches so anthropomorphized that they appear to be objects in sexualized motion.

Lee Lozano’s turbulent tool paintings and drawings can be understood as critiques of both sexual and art world decorum at a moment when the feminist movement had yet to coalesce and actively question either.

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From the Hand to the Machine. Nineteenth-century American Paper and Mediums: Technologies, Materials and Conservation

I wrote a review of Cathleen A. Baker’s new book, “From the Hand to the Machine.  Nineteenth-century American paper and mediums: technologies, materials, and conservation”  in the current issue of  The Bonefolder, Vol. 7, 2011.

Here’s the beginning-

“Until recently, I would have assumed that the readers of these words were reading them on paper. But the primacy of paper as the carrier of textually based information is gradually ending, and the words I am writing will likely be read on screens or other non-paper inventions. There seems, however, an inversely proportional relationship in the ways we regard paper itself: the less we look at what is on it, the more we look at paper itself: its substance, structure, tactile qualities and history. Cathleen A. Baker’s book explores in detail the technological artifact that once served quietly as substrate, and now emerges as subject– paper.

Baker has ventured into the enormously difficult and confusing world of 19th century papermaking history, and returned to give us a book that is important, readable, scholarly…” Read the rest of the review.

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Tool Doily

Wrench    2007    by Nathan Vincent

I never thought I would have the words “cool, doily and tool”  in the same sentence, but Nathan Vincent is making some very cool tool related crochet doilies.