Stig Lindberg (1916-1982)

Stig Lindberg was a Swedish ceramic designer, glass designer, textile designer, industrial designer, painter, and illustrator. In 1962, Lindberg won the Gold Medal at the First International Ceramics Festival in Prague.

One of Sweden's most important postwar designers, Lindberg created whimsical studio ceramics and graceful tableware lines during a long career with the Gustavsberg pottery factory. Stig Lindberg studied painting at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. In 1937, he went to work at Gustavsberg under Wilhelm Kåge. In 1949, he was named Kåge's successor as art director. From this period until he left Gustavsberg in 1980, he designed individual ceramic items, as well as factory produced ranges and lines of dinnerware. He achieved fame for his eccentric forms and whimsical decoration. -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stig_Lindberg


Berndt Friberg (1899-1981)

Sweden’s master potter, Berndt Friberg was originally employed as thrower to Wilhelm Kåge and Stig Lindberg at Gustavsberg’s pottery. His work is sensuous and at it’s best when treated with his characteristic matt glazes in the oriental manner, which were painstakingly applied to achieve an astonishing structure and depth. 

Friberg was born to a family of pottery makers and started his career as a youth at Höganäs pottery. From 1944 to his death, he produced ceramics for the legendary Gustavsberg Studio. This workshop was created by Wilhelm Kåge as a platform for artists to independently create unique ceramic art ware. 

Friberg threw and glazed all his stoneware vessels himself. He was a perfectionist and did not keep any pieces which were not to his satisfaction. 

Berndt Friberg was inspired by traditional Chinese and Japanese glazes when experimenting his way to his significant rabbit’s fur glaze. 

Friberg participated in not less than 40 exhibitions, and during his career, that lasted almost half a century, he received many awards including the gold medals at the Milan Triennale in 1948, 1951 and 1954. -http://www.modernity.se/en/tag/berndt-friberg

Published on Aug 1, 2012

02/07/2011 - Frontline Club Exclusive: Julian Assange in conversation with Slavoj Žižek moderated by Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman

Last year, whistleblower website WikiLeaks released three of the biggest ever leaks of classified information in history: the Iraq War Logs, the Afghanistan War Logs and Cablegate.

Since then the world has undoubtedly changed. Ambassadors have resigned amid scandals exposed by leaked cables; the UK government has ordered a review of computer security; and, at the same time, a huge wave of protest has swept the Middle East and North Africa -- in part fuelled, some believe, by WikiLeaks revelations.

Discussing the impact of WikiLeaks on the world and what it means for the future, for this very special event WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange will be in conversation with renowned Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek.

Focusing on the ethics and philosophy behind WikiLeaks' work, the talk will provide a rare opportunity to hear two of the world's most prominent thinkers discuss some of the most pressing issues of our time.

It will also mark the publication of the paperback edition of Living in the End Times, in which Žižek argues that new ways of using and sharing information, in particular WikiLeaks, are one of a number of harbingers of the end of global capitalism as we know it.

The event will be chaired by Amy Goodman, the award-winning investigative journalist and host of Democracy Now!, a daily, independent news hour which airs on the internet and more than 900 public television and radio stations worldwide.

For over half a century, the American artist James Turrell has worked directly with light and space to create artworks that engage viewers with the limits and wonder of human perception. Turrell, an avid pilot who has logged over twelve thousand hours flying, considers the sky as his studio, material and canvas. New Yorker critic Calvin Tompkins writes, “His work is not about light, or a record of light; it is light — the physical presence of light made manifest in sensory form.”

Informed by his training in perceptual psychology and a childhood fascination with light, Turrell began experimenting with light as a medium in southern California in the mid-1960's. The Pasadena Art Museum mounted a one-man show of his Projection Pieces, created with high-intensity projectors and precisely modified spaces, in 1967. Mendota Stoppages, a series of light works created and exhibited in his Santa Monica studio, paired Projection Pieces with structural cuts in the building, creating apertures open to the light outside. These investigations aligning and mixing interior and exterior, formed the groundwork for the open sky spaces found in his later Skyspace, Tunnel and Crater artworks. 

Turrell often cites the Parable of Plato’s Cave to introduce the notion that we are living in a reality of our own creation, subject to our human sensory limitations as well as contextual and cultural norms. This is evident in Turrell’s over eighty Skyspaces, chambers with an aperture in the ceiling open to the sky. The simple act of witnessing the sky from within a Turrell Skyspace, notably at dawn and dusk, reveals how we internally create the colors we see and thus, our perceived reality.

In 1974 Turrell began a monumental project at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in northern Arizona. Continuing the practice begun in his Ocean Park studio, Turrell has sculpted the dimensions of the crater bowl and cut a series of chambers, tunnels and apertures within the volcano that heighten our sense of the heavens and earth. While Roden Crater is not yet open to the public, Turrell has installed works in twenty-two countries and in fourteen US states that are open to the public or can be viewed by appointment. Agua de Luz, a series of Skyspaces and pools constructed within a pyramid in the Yucatán, and forthcoming projects around the world, from Ras al-Khaimah to Tasmania, integrate many of the principles and features embedded within Roden Crater.

Turrell’s medium is pure light. He says, “My work has no object, no image and no focus. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of wordless thought.”

http://jamesturrell.com/about/introduction/

Remembering Alan Watts: 1/6/1915 - 11/16/73
By Greg Johnson

1,500 words

Alan Watts is one of my favorite writers. Born in Chislehurst, Kent, England, Watts was raised an Anglican, but became a Buddhist at age 15. In 1941, while Watts was living in New York City, his first wife Eleanor had a mystical vision of Jesus. This led him to return to Anglicanism.

Watts skipped undergraduate study, but later earned an MA in theology and a doctorate in divinity and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1945. For several years, he was the Anglican chaplain at Northwestern University, renowned for his accessibility and innovative rituals. In 1950, he left the priesthood, primarily due to the breakup of his first marriage. (Watts had a recognized gift for “ritual magic,” which he continued to perform as a shaman once he was finished being a priest.)

- But there was a dark side to his sensualism: a dimension of compulsion and addiction. Watts married three times, divorced twice, and fathered seven children. But as a family man, he was a success only in the most minimal Darwinian sense. He was a compulsive womanizer and a neglectful father, which caused his wives and children much pain. Like many products of the British Public School system, with its repulsive traditions of beatings and bullying, Watts had a streak of sexual masochism. He began smoking as a child and never stopped. He was also a serious alcoholic. Watts’ father lived into his 90s, thus it was a very real possibility that Alan Watts could have celebrated his 96th birthday with us today, with 50 more books to his name, had he been just a bit of an ascetic, had he controlled his sensualism rather than letting it control him.
 - Greg Johnson
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