you have been here sometime

(let's) B U I L D a space within us....
aka....
attempts to realize "heaven(s) on earth"""...

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"If there is a single idea that holds these disparate utopians together, it is the notion of journeying. . . .



They believed that it was possible to redeem oneself by undertaking a journey, that migration in both a physical and a psychological sense could create community."

All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860-1914

Lee Ufan, via Lisson Gallery

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"...In a lot of ways, my work is a continuation of Modernism. It was artists such as Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich who simplified painting, reduced it to a concept. Then, in America, Minimalism went even further, reducing art to the very object itself.

But the irony is that when you reduce art to that level, then all of a sudden the viewer's attention shifts from the object itself to everything else. What kind of space is it in? What kind of time is it in? So the Minimalists ended up showing the opposite of what they wanted to show.

The aim of my work, from the outset, is to show everything else. The mark on the canvas is a trigger to get the viewer to imagine other things. "
interview with Lee Ufan here...
















"Back in the 1970s when space had the American imagination enthralled, figures like Gerard K. O'Neill and Buckminster Fuller began to imagine the next wave of Utopian experiments. Their remarks appear in an amazing book released by And/Or Press and the New Dimensions Foundation in 1978.

These experiments would be attempted with the realization that, if heaven could not be realized on earth, perhaps it should be put where it belongs: in the heavens. " (here)


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"If O'Neill wants to build his high-tech space Utopias, his enthusiasm is perhaps exceeded only by Timothy Leary, the psychedelic priest who wants the human race to SMI2LE (Space migration, exponential intelligence, and life extension) by the 21st century. Leary is notable for pointing out that "it will not be the bureaucrats, engineers, and technicians who settle out in space: instead it will be the 'heads'."


In other words, today's counterculture, the drug-taking dharma bums, will be the ones to escape out into space, even as Europe's counterculture sought their own "head trip" in America with Ephrata and the Woman in the Wilderness."

more here




















"Leary sees a connection between the 'dropped out', 'freaked out' youth disaffected by the world of the 1970s, and the world-weary, alternative-cosmos-seeking "trippers" of the 1690s.


And are not their California communes and "Jesus freak" tent-cities the first step in the recreation of Paradise, asks Leary?"






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(let's) B U I L D from the space within us....
aka.
attempts to realize "heaven(s) on earth"""...


images:



1. Carlo Scarpa
2. Lee Ufan
3. Lead pencil studio
4. Mattia Bonetti, via Paul Kasmin Gallery.








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