BEYOND-SEA (ULTRAMARINE)

So that, to take Sarah's proposition about the radicalization of craft seriously, we'd have to divine, canalize, reconduct the channels that have come to dominate facture: that "MADE IN ITALY" may well mean wrought out of secret sweatshops in the outskirts of Naples by Chinese workers, no less sketchy for their being in supposed situ: that thus an extraterritorial poesis incorporating distances might not be de facto worse. Apocalyptic yes. What would a robot-wrought "Carrara" sculpture look like which engaged and responded to the globalized networks of its fabrication, vis-a-vis form? Ruskin's own embrace of and exquisite sensitivity to the results of reproduction technology: "In the year 1840 I first drew it [the destroyed Spina Chapel at Pisa referred to in yesterday's post], then as perfect as when it was built. Six hundred and ten years had only given the marble of it a tempered glow, or touched its sculpture here and there, with softer shade. I daguerreotyped the eastern end of it some years later, (photography being then unknown), and copied the daguerreotype, that people might not be plagued in looking, by the lustre."

Nervi's prefab '57 Pantheon, its earnestly prefab flying buttresses, an inspiration—