23 May 2015
17 May 2015
The Apu Trilogy comprises Piri' Miri Muli's best ever adapted screenplay,* best film about being a writer,** and perhaps the best romance (for the last episode). I have vhs copies of it somewhere but it hasn't been on dvd for a while. This predicament has come to a happy end, as the Criterion restoration made from four different sources and a negative that was burned in the 1990s is out, and I got to Film Forum this week to see Aparajito (The Unvanquished). My favorite has always been no. 3, The World of Apu, but watching Subrata Mitra's tracking shots of Varanasi projected helped me get into the sad beauty of no. 2. They had a little bit of a budget after making the first on a shoestring and put it on to the screen. There are crowd scenes of the ghats but no crowd scenes in Calcutta - the Calcutta sequences happen in studios, with two scenes on architecturally interesting street corners and one scene loafing on a big lawn in front of what appears to be Victoria Memorial.
Of the novels, the childhood memoir Pather Panchali was the biggest hit in Bengal, and Ray filmed it with borrowed money on Sundays between his advertising gig not knowing he would make a sequel. Translator T.W. Clark doesn't believe an English word exists for panchali: "These poems (panchali) were transmitted from generation to generation by strangers who chanted them with musical accompaniment at the appropriate ceremonies, which often lasted for ten days or more, or by actors who produced them in popular form on the stage of the indigenous theatre. The heroes, and the episodes in which they figure, were part and parcel of the Bengali cultural inheritance, and still are." Apu's initiation in the Trilogy follows novelist Bebhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's own life very closely, a sort of diary imagined as an oral epic eventually to become the main inspriration for Akira Kurasawa's reflection "Never having seen a Satyajit Ray film is like never having seen the sun or moon." They'll be showing in rotation there for the rest of the month and are to make their way to Philly soon and then to dvd land.
* The four films on my top 15 list that would be considered for this would be Stalker, Apu, and A Passage to India. I vouch for the last as an adaptation but Lean probably wouldn't even compare it to Apu. Stalker, like Solaris, was Tarkovsky's literary reworking of a sci fi concept;
** Followed closely by La Notte by Antonioni who said "My admiration for Ray is total" with Ray's 1964 The Lonely Wife, one of many of his films in need of restoration, not far behind.
Update 5-31: Film forum is holding over the Trilogy til June 16 and they are in rotation in Philly's Ritz at the Bourse now.
Of the novels, the childhood memoir Pather Panchali was the biggest hit in Bengal, and Ray filmed it with borrowed money on Sundays between his advertising gig not knowing he would make a sequel. Translator T.W. Clark doesn't believe an English word exists for panchali: "These poems (panchali) were transmitted from generation to generation by strangers who chanted them with musical accompaniment at the appropriate ceremonies, which often lasted for ten days or more, or by actors who produced them in popular form on the stage of the indigenous theatre. The heroes, and the episodes in which they figure, were part and parcel of the Bengali cultural inheritance, and still are." Apu's initiation in the Trilogy follows novelist Bebhutibhushan Bandopadhyay's own life very closely, a sort of diary imagined as an oral epic eventually to become the main inspriration for Akira Kurasawa's reflection "Never having seen a Satyajit Ray film is like never having seen the sun or moon." They'll be showing in rotation there for the rest of the month and are to make their way to Philly soon and then to dvd land.
* The four films on my top 15 list that would be considered for this would be Stalker, Apu, and A Passage to India. I vouch for the last as an adaptation but Lean probably wouldn't even compare it to Apu. Stalker, like Solaris, was Tarkovsky's literary reworking of a sci fi concept;
** Followed closely by La Notte by Antonioni who said "My admiration for Ray is total" with Ray's 1964 The Lonely Wife, one of many of his films in need of restoration, not far behind.
Update 5-31: Film forum is holding over the Trilogy til June 16 and they are in rotation in Philly's Ritz at the Bourse now.
19 April 2015
What's up for six more days, v. XVI
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| Brian Maguire, Erika |
Molly Malloy, who has collaborated with Bowden, has offered the rejoinder after years of research that although Bowden, as intended, appropriately brought attention to the increasing violence in the city, by her count females were not a proportionately high percentage of the victims,* stating in an interview last year, "It’s almost like we’re fetishizing these dead women. To always be looking back at these women as if their bodies are this kind of sacrificial host—I find that to be troubling, in terms of our culture and our focus on life and death and what it means. In other words, if you’re constantly focusing on women as if they’re this symbol for suffering, you never move beyond that particular death to look at the social conditions that gave that kind of life, and that kind of death, for so, so many people." Malloy states in that interview "the violence associated with organized crime escalated" in 2008, and that "Nothing has been done to address the economic suffering that came from [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. Nothing has been done to address the issues of drug trafficking, and why it’s so appealing for people in Juárez to become a part of these criminal enterprises. No one has really created a public school system in Juárez that serves all of the children that need to be going to school rather than working in factories or joining gangs." Maguire reports a higher percentage of female victims than Malloy: 1,400 since 1994 out of a total of over 5,000, and joins others in describing a distinct phenomenon of legal impunity for the perps of feminicidio.
Several years before Bowden's article in Harper's, Roberto Bolaño developed a sustained, obsessive interest in the femicides that he intended from the start to be central to an upcoming novel. Any intention to link the murders to social and economic factors was an non-starter for Bolaño, whose mind was firmly planted in crime genre conventions. "[Sergio] González Rodríguez [reporter and reviewer for a Carlos Monsiváis-edited publication] told Bolaño how his findings suggested that the killings in Juárez were connected to the local police and politicians and to the mercenary gangs maintained by the drug cartels. The police don't seriously investigate the murders, he explained, because they're badly trained, or they're misogynists, or they've made deals that allow the narcos to operate with impunity.
"So there's no serial killer? González Rodríguez recalls Bolaño asked him... This revelation, González Rodríguez says, disconcerted Bolaño. By then, the writer had already devised an elaborate, ingenious structure for his novel, a structure that in some ways depends on the idea of a single serial killer."
Bolaño proceeded to fill 300 pages with graphic forensic details of murders of women, suggesting at one point that the murderer is Benno von Archimboldi, a novelist hailed by several literary critics in another section of the book, who symbolizes the effect created by the 16thC painter Giuseppe Arcimboldi when forms of vegetation combine to form a human face at a distance, similar to Salvador Dali's "paranoiac-critical method" and the garbage that forms Art History figures in the work of Vik Muniz, who refers to the 'magic' that takes place when seemingly unrelated objects take on a different form when stepping back. Revisions prevented by Bolaño's death leave us with the genre-induced intent of this portrait more than its refinement and realization, but the inaccurate, merciless caricature of Mexicans written in Spain and signed, conveniently, with a Chilean name, intentionally oblivious to the underlying social and political causes of the crimes, helped make 2666 a rousing success amongst Anglophone critics who would never praise the novels of, say, Monsiváis, too close for comfort to the actual people and their struggles.
Maguire moved to Juárez around the time of 2666's publication and got an NGO to introduce him to the victims' families on the condition that he teach their children, which led to the practice, chronicled in the documentary, of presenting portraits of the victims to their families. For whatever reason, the gallery show contains none of these portraits, but does include five large canvases of severed heads and limbs of male victims left dramatically by drug cartels. The deference given these cartels inspired the 2015 canvas Cash, a portrait of wads hung opposite the screening of Blood Rising, and the 2014 3x4 meter Police Graduation 2012 (Juárez) (above), as well as a lithograph series with the image of academy recruits giving a Nazi salute without the irony imbued on the gesture by Kiefer early in his career, while spare acrylic strokes and selective coloring remind me of Daniel Richter a decade ago, especially Richter's works on paper. Whatever the influences, Maguire's skill as a representational painter is evidenced in acrylics like Cardona Bridge (Juárez), depicting what appears to be real Mexican eagle on a sculptural pedastal.
If you want to see a film of birds flying without the tragic symbolism, Etel Adnan's birds and other scenes of nature are screened next door at Lelong 528 w26th til May 8, along with two ink and watercolor accordion books (below) and various pastels.
At 547 w25th Cheim & Reid has abstract paintings by Bill Jensen, who paints with Piri' Miri Muli's favorite artist film, Andrei Rublev, running, canvases full of references to Michelangelo's Last Judgement and Chinese poetry anthologies, til May 9.
Also up til the 25th are seven white sculptures of polyurethane resin by Janine Antoni that combine internal and external body parts at 531 West 24th Street.
* I recall in Zacatecas a young Mexican woman talking about how her friends wanted to move to Juárez and what a 'fun' city it was, at which time a chorus of gringo men recited what they had heard of the feminocidio which she downplayed, realizing then the mythological divide over the murders.
18 April 2015
What's up for one more day, v. XXXIV
If you are looking for a stroll on this pleasant day there are four shows at quite prominent Chelsea galleries ending today I have neglected to note for several of the common reasons that have created that tendency in this space. First of all, Mitchell-Innes & Nash at 534 West 26th St has "the most significant collection of Beuys multiples to be shown in New York to date," a claim I am in no position to dispute and indeed there are a lot of Beuys multiples packed into two rooms for your enjoyment, the second and larger of two sets assembled by collector Reinhard Schlegel. Beuys apparently created 557 multiples in his lifetime, affordable works quickly rendered out of common materials, of which there are dozens and dozens here.
One of the prototypes for the multiple (not in this show) was the 1968 box that he sold for two dollars with a penciled line drawn inside with the word "intuition" written above it, which would seem to me to be an illustration of Vedic texts, though Beuys was a devout Christian throughout his life that criticized the passivity of Eastern religion. Beuys' "When a human has self-confidence and pays no attention to the surrounding political structure, he can decide for himself how the future looks" suggests a preference for the synthetic rather than the analytical. His sculptures were more synthetic while his less famous works on paper more representational. He was influenced by Tàpies who was influenced by the East, both using crosses frequently but doing so, I believe, initially unaware of each other. I may have mentioned before that I regard Duchamp's readymades, like all of Duchamp's art, to be representational - which goes to the heart of the subconscious, passionate tension that led to Beuys' The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated, created seveal years before Intuition. Duchamp said he derived his view of the artist from the Sanskrit, which led him to seek a precise rendering of the world that demanded, at times, passivity and contemplation, crucially adverse to Beuys frenetic creations. Duchamp was the primary inspiration for the multiples.
Gagosian's In the Studio: Paintings (522 West 21st St, we're going N to S) is an all-star show in which the theme lets you compare/contrast to your heart's content. Three paintings in the exhibition's central room were very striking to me (conveniently all in the thumbnails): James Ensor's Skeleton Painter of 1896 strikes me as a combination of a Vanitas and Las Meninas, as the skeleton headed painter looks at the viewer by the easel, painted the same year as his famous etching Death Pursuing a Flock of People. Other etchings of this period reflected Ensor's identification with the Christ figure, right before he was to attain recognition and see the originality of his subject matter decline thereafter. The painter of the first known Vanitas, Jacques de Gheyn II, and his teacher, early Vanitas painter Hendrick Goltzius were both born near Ensor in Antwerp in 1565 and 1558, respectively, while Pieter Claesz, another exemplar of the Vanitas, was born outside Antwerp in 1597, but all three moved to Haarlem to become artists, despite Rubens, Jordaens, and Teniers sticking around Antwerp at the time to go for a Baroque which itself made its way into Ensor's canvases. Diego Rivera's 1954 The Painter’s Studio or Lucila and the Judas Dolls has an actress friend recline beneath papier-mâché dolls traditionally burnt in Easter rituals, a model airplane, a dove, and pre-Columbian sculptures, in which the flesh tones of her face flow into the red doll above her amongst the white, lifeless figures of the center.
Rear center, being shown from a permanent collection in Poznań for the first time in New York, is Jacek Malczewski's Melancholia (above),the most famous paintiing associated with Poland's resistence to Czarist occupation during the late 19thC. Figures in flight in the style of Goya's etchings can be seen also in a slightly later nationalist canvas of his, Vicious Circle. From the canvas fly children brandishing swords, leading to fallen soldiers and the disillusioned elderly, as Malczewski perhaps intends to show the compulsive heroism of the nationalist cause, "whirling in a weird dance of hope and death they struggle in vain towards the window of freedom, with no will to win."
I confided my distaste of portraits after Dubuffet a while back here but the Alice Neel show on the second floor of 20th Street Zwirner has numerous dramatic tableau from the 30s, my favorite period of hers, including eight ink drawings of The Brothers Karamazov, which can be enjoyed on the web site if you can't make it out.
On 19th St, Zwirner's System and Vision show includes three or four small portraits by Margarethe Held, about whom I found this text on a web site: "In 1925 Margarethe Held entered in contact with the spirits and communicated with her deceased husband and her father. In 1950, at the age of fifty-six, she began drawing : four hundred pastel drawings in four months - all dictated by spirits. Siwa ordered her to show to other mortals, through her compositions, that the universe contained secrets, that every being had a destiny and that nothing happened without a reason. Later on, the spirits made her write a book in which she described the messages she received, her travels to Jupiter and other planets.
"The faces drawn by Margarethe Held have the appearance of masks, representing the dead, gods, spirits and elves. There are the 'good dead', who possess a magical protective power, but also the 'bad dead' who cause calamities and disasters. There are male or female elves, whose function is to help people in their work."
Gagosian's In the Studio: Paintings (522 West 21st St, we're going N to S) is an all-star show in which the theme lets you compare/contrast to your heart's content. Three paintings in the exhibition's central room were very striking to me (conveniently all in the thumbnails): James Ensor's Skeleton Painter of 1896 strikes me as a combination of a Vanitas and Las Meninas, as the skeleton headed painter looks at the viewer by the easel, painted the same year as his famous etching Death Pursuing a Flock of People. Other etchings of this period reflected Ensor's identification with the Christ figure, right before he was to attain recognition and see the originality of his subject matter decline thereafter. The painter of the first known Vanitas, Jacques de Gheyn II, and his teacher, early Vanitas painter Hendrick Goltzius were both born near Ensor in Antwerp in 1565 and 1558, respectively, while Pieter Claesz, another exemplar of the Vanitas, was born outside Antwerp in 1597, but all three moved to Haarlem to become artists, despite Rubens, Jordaens, and Teniers sticking around Antwerp at the time to go for a Baroque which itself made its way into Ensor's canvases. Diego Rivera's 1954 The Painter’s Studio or Lucila and the Judas Dolls has an actress friend recline beneath papier-mâché dolls traditionally burnt in Easter rituals, a model airplane, a dove, and pre-Columbian sculptures, in which the flesh tones of her face flow into the red doll above her amongst the white, lifeless figures of the center.
Rear center, being shown from a permanent collection in Poznań for the first time in New York, is Jacek Malczewski's Melancholia (above),the most famous paintiing associated with Poland's resistence to Czarist occupation during the late 19thC. Figures in flight in the style of Goya's etchings can be seen also in a slightly later nationalist canvas of his, Vicious Circle. From the canvas fly children brandishing swords, leading to fallen soldiers and the disillusioned elderly, as Malczewski perhaps intends to show the compulsive heroism of the nationalist cause, "whirling in a weird dance of hope and death they struggle in vain towards the window of freedom, with no will to win."
On 19th St, Zwirner's System and Vision show includes three or four small portraits by Margarethe Held, about whom I found this text on a web site: "In 1925 Margarethe Held entered in contact with the spirits and communicated with her deceased husband and her father. In 1950, at the age of fifty-six, she began drawing : four hundred pastel drawings in four months - all dictated by spirits. Siwa ordered her to show to other mortals, through her compositions, that the universe contained secrets, that every being had a destiny and that nothing happened without a reason. Later on, the spirits made her write a book in which she described the messages she received, her travels to Jupiter and other planets.
"The faces drawn by Margarethe Held have the appearance of masks, representing the dead, gods, spirits and elves. There are the 'good dead', who possess a magical protective power, but also the 'bad dead' who cause calamities and disasters. There are male or female elves, whose function is to help people in their work."
04 April 2015
More saetas
These first two had been uploaded when I wrote my post on Easter Week saetas, but I hadn't seen them at the time.. first from cantoaora María Toledo to the Lady of Sorrows in the city of her birth, Toledo..
I found at least two of appeal from Huelva province, noted before here as producing the fandango of Alosno "248 miles from Cadiz, closer to the Portuguese border than Seville" west of the more famous flamenco heartland.. First from Huelva's home town girl Regina to what looks like Seville's more famous La Esperanza but I think is theirs, with the head bended more to the left..
.. also in Huelva, an upload by Beatriz Romero from a year ago, born in nearby Palos de la Frontera seventeen years previous ..
from this year's Semana Santa, TV footage of Manuel Cuevas, hailing from Osuna 88km East of Seville Cathedral..
Another from the two unidentified Sevillana girls of the previous post
another from Diana Navarro
I found at least two of appeal from Huelva province, noted before here as producing the fandango of Alosno "248 miles from Cadiz, closer to the Portuguese border than Seville" west of the more famous flamenco heartland.. First from Huelva's home town girl Regina to what looks like Seville's more famous La Esperanza but I think is theirs, with the head bended more to the left..
.. also in Huelva, an upload by Beatriz Romero from a year ago, born in nearby Palos de la Frontera seventeen years previous ..
from this year's Semana Santa, TV footage of Manuel Cuevas, hailing from Osuna 88km East of Seville Cathedral..
Another from the two unidentified Sevillana girls of the previous post
another from Diana Navarro
17 February 2015
Shrove Tuesday, Ottana, Sardinia
The pre-Lenten Carnevale of Ottana near Nuoro in Italy's Sardinia dates to the Pagan era, eluding all conclusive historical explanation and appearing to have changed little; the costumed Mamuthones have been speculatively likened to Dionysian cults but are believed to descend from a pre-Christian harvest ritual. This camera angle foregrounds the two species connected to a cord, one brandishing a whip, defying Bataille's "There is nothing in animal life that introduces the relation of the master to the one he commands" in Theory of Religion, which springs from a quotation that begins Kojève's lectures on Hegel for Parisians: "The very being of man, the self-conscious being, therefore implies and presupposes Desire. Consequently, the known reality can be formed and maintained only wheitin a biological reality, an animal life. But, if animal Desire is the necessary condition of self-consciousness, it is not the sufficient condition. By itself, the Desire constitutes only the Sentiment of self." Kojève's lectures move to the comparison of the master/ slave dialectic in the Christian world, in which the Lamb of God undergoes the human sacrifice of Lent, where 'the Christian Slave can affirm his equality with the Master only by accepting the existence of an "other world" and a transcendent God... the pagan State recognized only Masters as citizens.' Bataille gathers from that 'we must confine ourselves to regard animality, from the outside, in light of an absence of transcendence. Unavoidably, in our eyes, the animal is in the world like water in water.' Bataille quoting Ecce Homo "Have you understood? Dionysus facing the Crucified" evokes the ritual.. "Goethe.. served Nietzsche as the model of that Paganism he opposed to Christianity: here was the 'new barbarian' - the overman with the 'Dionysian faith.'"
A few years ago a man on the vantage point of the raised walkway above the elephants at the DC zoo held fort to his wife a reductive view of animal consciousness forcing me to move away from him quickly to dissipate my anger. As Kundera says the common man is closer to an animal than Goethe, the domesticated animal that performs at a circus is more akin to the standard shorthand of Goethe or Hegel than the animal that, somewhere in the wilderness, develops a consciousness as sublimely alien to mine as Goethe is alien to it. Ergo I am allied against Hegel and Bataille's contrivance of the conscious and dialectical human seperated from perceived animal 'sentiment,' in agreement with Frank O'Hara who begins with ("Animals")
Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
....
the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
ascending to ("Heroic Sculpture") 'We join the animals/ not when we fuck/ or shit/ not when a tear falls// but when/ staring into light/ we think'
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| Wifredo Lam, The Third World, 1965 |
15 February 2015
What's up
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Djordje Ozbolt: "I've had three or four shows in New York, but I had a gap of like five years. This time I felt like presenting something that is the essential Ozbolt." Whether this is in fact the essential Ozbolt I can't say, but this first show of his I've seen quite enjoyably fills up three floors at Hauser & Wirth (32 e 69th St, til Feb 21) . There is a tendency to one-off humor, seeking surface reactions, a tendency of painters from the Southern or Western US, as Ozbolt resides in London, along with no shortage of art-historical references (shorthand of Guston and Picasso; Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe) but there are depths here as well, along the lines of Breton finding in Magritte "the great semantic bridge which allows us to pass from the proper meaning to the figurative meaning." Visitors are greeted with the visual pun of a cross-eyed Karl Marx with the two gazes fixed on a sculptural hammer and sickle, titled "Before they Met," (above) inviting multiple interpretations. "Ye Olde Shrunken Head" fills a tiny wood block inside seven frames that suggest forms of psychoanalytical perception. A Serb, "I went to London in '91 to visit my brother, the war started, and I stayed in England. I couldn't go back because there was a draft for the army. I realized once in London that I wanted to study art," estranging him from what he describes as an insular Belgrade scene. The series "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover," a title apparently arrived at after the series was begun, offers variations of painterly decontextualization from cultural myths with cartoon Primitism of Easter Island guys getting hammered, etc, as well as octopus heads and color fields. The juxtaposed images in a series recalls recently Clemente's miniatures, as Ozbolt "lived in India and was obsessed with India for a certain period of time." Also for those who associate Conceptualism with the objectives of some of its recent practitioners (I, II), Hauser & Wirth's London galleries feature Mira Schendel's monotypes (til March 7) from the early years of the Brazilian military government.
If one remains concerned that cultural products will wind up in the hands of the 1% there's the 'Honoring Political Freedom Fighters' poster at the best place to eat in NYC (I will take Thomas Keller more seriously when he puts up such a poster), B&B's African American (165 West 26th, 24 hrs). I am there constantly, and in my last visit all the customers seemed to be, like the kitchen staff, from French-speaking Guinea, "The most corrupt country in the world" in the words of one diner who went on to ask, after a long political conversation in Fula, his English better than his chat partner, "Why do we kill our heroes? Why do we kill Lumumba?"
"Whenever there is good, there is bad behind."
Forty minutes should be set aside at the Met for Wolfgang Tillmans' Book for Architects which sequentially presents slides of architectural structures of different cultures and classes, causing a hushed silence, til July 5. Also there til July 25th is Motherwell's Lyric Suite, which I hope to type more about later.
02 February 2015
What's up
I promised I would post on the Clemente show at the Rubin again while it was still up and so I pass on this reminder that it ends today. I will post on it again soon, as I have assembled my own early 80s Theosophical Library here and don't want it to turn me out just yet. I have had a basic outline of my interpretation since seeing it.. I faintly recall when the Regina Silveira show was closing in mid-2013, I wanted to write something but had no idea what to say, but then it hit me a few weeks later.
Luisa Rabbia at Blum (20 w 57th) is ending this Saturday.. Rabbia in past years has sculpted homeless people, the 'minor figure, uprooted from any social context.. (in) a non-place where suspension and reticence prevail' (Achille Bonito Oliva). Unlike Francis Bacon's Popes, the isolation of Rabbia's homeless figures doesn't have to be proven or suggested by the composition so their appearance, in her earlier sculptures and paintings, in minimalist planes sound different tones of solitude with the frames around them. As Blanchot says the solitude of the writer is comical 'by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone,' Rabbia seems to seek externally what he calls 'the monster of desolation (who) needs the presence of another if his desolation is to have a meaning,' along with mortality and the will to live separated from historical materialism of which Schopenhauer wrote 'I cannot really imagine this will apart from my body.' 'Rabbia depicts (the body's) greatest depths, drawing attention to the membranous quality of our skin as it envelops us entirely, assisting in the animation of 'I' and 'we', as living membranes.. The body contitutes the hermetic vase that contains life - while at the same time separating it from that of others.. ' (Oliva)
The titles in this show suggest the cosmic body by inverting the appearance of one with the naming of another: two heads placed together are called 'Worlds,' a heart like image surrounded by veins in four directions is called 'NorthEastSouthWest,' patterns from her fingerprints are called 'Pathway.' The title of 'NorthEastSouthWest,' the large scale centerpiece of this show (shown above), resembles a Vastu-purusha mandala,* where the sides of the frame would represent the points on the compass, enclosing 'Brahma's body.. the vastu purusha or "person of the place," who fills the mandala.' (Dennis Hudson) The title suggests the movement of the sun from the rise to set, or from the northern winter solstice to the southern summer solstice. 'Kama (desire) came from the heart', one of nine sons of Brahma that Hudson cites, and what appears to be perpendicular arteries lead out from the central figure, perhaps another representation of the will in isolation.
Also JMW Turner's Liber Studiorum (Book of Studies) from between 1807 and 1819 is at the Public Library for another two weeks.. something about a movie out too..
* I am obviously looking at the thumbnails on the the early 80s Theosophical Library laptop.. hope to get to the show later this week
Luisa Rabbia at Blum (20 w 57th) is ending this Saturday.. Rabbia in past years has sculpted homeless people, the 'minor figure, uprooted from any social context.. (in) a non-place where suspension and reticence prevail' (Achille Bonito Oliva). Unlike Francis Bacon's Popes, the isolation of Rabbia's homeless figures doesn't have to be proven or suggested by the composition so their appearance, in her earlier sculptures and paintings, in minimalist planes sound different tones of solitude with the frames around them. As Blanchot says the solitude of the writer is comical 'by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone,' Rabbia seems to seek externally what he calls 'the monster of desolation (who) needs the presence of another if his desolation is to have a meaning,' along with mortality and the will to live separated from historical materialism of which Schopenhauer wrote 'I cannot really imagine this will apart from my body.' 'Rabbia depicts (the body's) greatest depths, drawing attention to the membranous quality of our skin as it envelops us entirely, assisting in the animation of 'I' and 'we', as living membranes.. The body contitutes the hermetic vase that contains life - while at the same time separating it from that of others.. ' (Oliva)
The titles in this show suggest the cosmic body by inverting the appearance of one with the naming of another: two heads placed together are called 'Worlds,' a heart like image surrounded by veins in four directions is called 'NorthEastSouthWest,' patterns from her fingerprints are called 'Pathway.' The title of 'NorthEastSouthWest,' the large scale centerpiece of this show (shown above), resembles a Vastu-purusha mandala,* where the sides of the frame would represent the points on the compass, enclosing 'Brahma's body.. the vastu purusha or "person of the place," who fills the mandala.' (Dennis Hudson) The title suggests the movement of the sun from the rise to set, or from the northern winter solstice to the southern summer solstice. 'Kama (desire) came from the heart', one of nine sons of Brahma that Hudson cites, and what appears to be perpendicular arteries lead out from the central figure, perhaps another representation of the will in isolation.
Also JMW Turner's Liber Studiorum (Book of Studies) from between 1807 and 1819 is at the Public Library for another two weeks.. something about a movie out too..
* I am obviously looking at the thumbnails on the the early 80s Theosophical Library laptop.. hope to get to the show later this week
19 January 2015
VOs from 'O Mundo de Lygia Clark'
When I was posting on Lygia Clark I relished the momentary opportunity to upload her son's film O Mundo de Lygia Clark and index most of the performance works shown in the film and their year of creation. As I said, I saw an excerpt from the film outside the installation before the MoMA show opened, after which I found an upload of the film in three parts from, I think, Argentina, which was up until after I got to the museum show. After I sequenced the titles to the times in O Mundo, the video was taken down by the Clark estate, but a few weeks later a full version was posted from somewhere else in South America (not Brazil) so I posted it, which was also taken down some time after I posted. I hope that the film is released online, on dvd, or in some form. I did, however, copy down the text of Clark's voice overs which I don't believe is online anywhere and will paste it here in the absence of objections..
"While walking, I lose authorship. I incorporate this act as a concept of existence. I dissolve into the collective. I lose my own image and my father and everyone becomes the same. I write all the time. I find the link of poetic transference between art and religion. I write texts negating the name as a personal identity of people. I am aware of that walking as the first passing of what is me to the world. I perceive the rhythm, from beach soccer to Mozart. I also perceive the general crisis of expression in literature, in the genres in decline, in theater. Perplexed, I feel the crowds in the subway in the cadence of the accumulation of footsteps, in the passing of bodies that almost touch, but move away, each one bent on the secret path of its private existence. I speak and no one understands. I cannot communicate this change of concept that for me, was so deep and radical as the elastic passage between what it was and what could be. I feel deeply the fall in the value of words which no longer have meaning such as genre, works, individualism. I think and I live death. I feel the crowd creating over my body. In my mouth, the taste of earth. I build my mausoleum and walk out into life to discover sounds with an impressive sharpness. Life was opening up like an affirmation of life but of life still with death. A total void. Fleeting moments of group integration with reality: leaning against the curve of a tree trunk, I feel as if I am the trunk itself. Running my hand over a stone, I become a pin on its cape. The day to day, nihilism, immobility.. I think of death as a solution.
"My face was smooth, unarchitectural, uncontoured, shallow. I perceive one point in the place of an eye. The possibility of recomposition by me, even drawing it. From the plane, the upturned soil. Earth moves continually with the beginning of the earth. I feel a heat that does not emanate from within as if I had swallowed a hot brick. I feel pregnant. A cab heading toward the beach has the perception of a long lost dream. I see myself in the cosmos seated on the back seat of the devil, upon a red parcel, looking down at the earth below. I lose sense of time and see that the earth goes on in the same process, constantly making and unmaking itself. Hours go by that are really seconds. I arrive at the beach. I spend the night in a state of total hallucination. Time goes on, elastic, vast. In one minute, I perceive centuries - a constant vision that seems to me the sum of two sexes, female and male. Within me a child cries in fear. I go to the bathroom. I see myself in the mirror, deformed. My skin is loose. The bones beneath are crooked. I am a 5,000 year old crone. I understand Goya at last. From the verandah, I see the sea, the earth, the air, and it all seems to me like mercury. Sounds penetrate me sharply. They run through my nerves and invade my whole body. The earth goes on recreating itself at every moment. A herd of black goats go by, staring at me with slanted, honey colored, black magic eyes. I am taken over by the unconscious. I crawl down the hill, I pick up the water, the sand, the soil and breathe the air. I feel like corking these elements in a bottle and labeling them to give them an identity. I eat some squids. It is like the landscape being swallowed by me. It is something sensational. Three days and nights without sleep. On the fourth day, I begin to weep, yawn, and collapse with exhaustion. And sleep. I awake and see myself in the mirror. I rediscover my face, the 'me' that was denied me was dissolved. I had seen myself as huge and naked. I was a landscape, a continent, the world. Around my pubis, little men have built a dam. A dam or a great lake into which they can all dive. I feel uncategorized. Where is my place in the world? I am horrified at being the catalyst of my own experiences and purposes. I want people to experience them and insert their own myths, independent of me.
"I feel we are about to make a great return to that epoch in which art was so anonymous and there was no artist as a name or as a myth. I think everyone has a potential for creation. But if the person is conditioned in an unfavorable milieu he/she will not create and the blockage is the consumer society and present-day conditioning that make many people keep their sensitivity to themselves. Via small worthless objects like elastic, stones, and plastic bags, I form sensorial objects, the touch of which causes sensations that identify themselves at once with the body. Hence the name 'Body Nostalgia,' an analytical phrase in which I would decompose the body into parts and mutilate it so as it might be recognized through highly sensual touch."
"While walking, I lose authorship. I incorporate this act as a concept of existence. I dissolve into the collective. I lose my own image and my father and everyone becomes the same. I write all the time. I find the link of poetic transference between art and religion. I write texts negating the name as a personal identity of people. I am aware of that walking as the first passing of what is me to the world. I perceive the rhythm, from beach soccer to Mozart. I also perceive the general crisis of expression in literature, in the genres in decline, in theater. Perplexed, I feel the crowds in the subway in the cadence of the accumulation of footsteps, in the passing of bodies that almost touch, but move away, each one bent on the secret path of its private existence. I speak and no one understands. I cannot communicate this change of concept that for me, was so deep and radical as the elastic passage between what it was and what could be. I feel deeply the fall in the value of words which no longer have meaning such as genre, works, individualism. I think and I live death. I feel the crowd creating over my body. In my mouth, the taste of earth. I build my mausoleum and walk out into life to discover sounds with an impressive sharpness. Life was opening up like an affirmation of life but of life still with death. A total void. Fleeting moments of group integration with reality: leaning against the curve of a tree trunk, I feel as if I am the trunk itself. Running my hand over a stone, I become a pin on its cape. The day to day, nihilism, immobility.. I think of death as a solution.
"My face was smooth, unarchitectural, uncontoured, shallow. I perceive one point in the place of an eye. The possibility of recomposition by me, even drawing it. From the plane, the upturned soil. Earth moves continually with the beginning of the earth. I feel a heat that does not emanate from within as if I had swallowed a hot brick. I feel pregnant. A cab heading toward the beach has the perception of a long lost dream. I see myself in the cosmos seated on the back seat of the devil, upon a red parcel, looking down at the earth below. I lose sense of time and see that the earth goes on in the same process, constantly making and unmaking itself. Hours go by that are really seconds. I arrive at the beach. I spend the night in a state of total hallucination. Time goes on, elastic, vast. In one minute, I perceive centuries - a constant vision that seems to me the sum of two sexes, female and male. Within me a child cries in fear. I go to the bathroom. I see myself in the mirror, deformed. My skin is loose. The bones beneath are crooked. I am a 5,000 year old crone. I understand Goya at last. From the verandah, I see the sea, the earth, the air, and it all seems to me like mercury. Sounds penetrate me sharply. They run through my nerves and invade my whole body. The earth goes on recreating itself at every moment. A herd of black goats go by, staring at me with slanted, honey colored, black magic eyes. I am taken over by the unconscious. I crawl down the hill, I pick up the water, the sand, the soil and breathe the air. I feel like corking these elements in a bottle and labeling them to give them an identity. I eat some squids. It is like the landscape being swallowed by me. It is something sensational. Three days and nights without sleep. On the fourth day, I begin to weep, yawn, and collapse with exhaustion. And sleep. I awake and see myself in the mirror. I rediscover my face, the 'me' that was denied me was dissolved. I had seen myself as huge and naked. I was a landscape, a continent, the world. Around my pubis, little men have built a dam. A dam or a great lake into which they can all dive. I feel uncategorized. Where is my place in the world? I am horrified at being the catalyst of my own experiences and purposes. I want people to experience them and insert their own myths, independent of me.
"I feel we are about to make a great return to that epoch in which art was so anonymous and there was no artist as a name or as a myth. I think everyone has a potential for creation. But if the person is conditioned in an unfavorable milieu he/she will not create and the blockage is the consumer society and present-day conditioning that make many people keep their sensitivity to themselves. Via small worthless objects like elastic, stones, and plastic bags, I form sensorial objects, the touch of which causes sensations that identify themselves at once with the body. Hence the name 'Body Nostalgia,' an analytical phrase in which I would decompose the body into parts and mutilate it so as it might be recognized through highly sensual touch."
10 January 2015
What's up for two more days, v. XXV, I mean one more day..
Two of the sculptures in the Museo de Barrio's presentation of the relatively small but historic Marisol retrospective speak to the time and place of her birth; one is of Magritte who published his first essay in La Révolution surréaliste while she was in the womb,* and of whom she did numerous sculptures. Picasso is the other: one unintended link between this show and John Richardson's Picasso and the Camera is the depiction of underwater life, for just as she was becoming a hot art commodity in New York she disappeared to go scuba diving for a time - followed by other solitary meanderings - evidenced in this show by a large, smooth-edged fish. The Picasso show documents the influence of anarchist marine biologist Jean Painlevé around the time of Marisol's birth.
For me, speculation on the influence of Picasso on Marisol gets interesting when I wonder whether her given name, Maria Sol Escobar, was inspired by Picasso's Crucifixion finished several months before her birth, in advance of the Picasso issue of Documents which featured Bataille's essay "The Phantom Dawn," mentioning the Roman god Mithra - who "rode, and later killed, the life-giving cosmic bull, whose blood fertilizes all vegetation" then banquets with the Sun God. Picasso told Geneviève Laporte that he relished bullfights as they were the sole remaining ritual of Mihraism. Marisol's parents were wealthy Parisian art patrons and Documents was much discussed that Spring, coming out a month before her birth. Picasso would have likely discussed Bataille's essay with Michel Leiris before its publication. Mithra is the orange and red solar figure to the right of the cross (to the viewer)..
..in between three Marias: the Holy Mother in white before Christ, Marie-Thérèse Walter in the middle and the blue, skeletal head of Mary Magdalene below Mithra. The head of Stephaton to the left with his giant moon-like sponge "doubles as a crescent moon, an emblem of Virgin Mary." Marisol's parents hailed from Venezuela, whose first flag, flown on the mast of Francisco de Miranda's ship Leander in 1806, had on it a sun and a moon, the moon in this case symbolizing the Apollinian triumph over darkness.
Picasso's symbolic use of legs out of joint recurs in her primary later work on paper at El Museo, 1974's Lick the Tire of My Bicycle..
The bicycle precariously glides between pistols firing, perhaps reflecting the trauma over her mother committing suicide when she was eleven, leading to what she describes as ten years of total silence. The cyclist riding outside time and space is reminiscent of Duchamp's straining rider ascending a looped line on musical notation paper in 1914's To Have the Apprentice in the Sun**:
So if you are nearby the plants across the street in the Conservatory Gardens want you to keep them warm this Sunday. Within walking distance is her 30 foot long Self-Portrait Looking at The Last Supper at the Met, up til March. El Museo's collection has its enjoyable paintings but currently features Nuyorican Conceptual works amid some interesting sculptures.
* Just before returning to Belgium when the gallery repping him in Paris closed.
** Given to Philly by Walter Arensberg but never displayed..
For me, speculation on the influence of Picasso on Marisol gets interesting when I wonder whether her given name, Maria Sol Escobar, was inspired by Picasso's Crucifixion finished several months before her birth, in advance of the Picasso issue of Documents which featured Bataille's essay "The Phantom Dawn," mentioning the Roman god Mithra - who "rode, and later killed, the life-giving cosmic bull, whose blood fertilizes all vegetation" then banquets with the Sun God. Picasso told Geneviève Laporte that he relished bullfights as they were the sole remaining ritual of Mihraism. Marisol's parents were wealthy Parisian art patrons and Documents was much discussed that Spring, coming out a month before her birth. Picasso would have likely discussed Bataille's essay with Michel Leiris before its publication. Mithra is the orange and red solar figure to the right of the cross (to the viewer)..
..in between three Marias: the Holy Mother in white before Christ, Marie-Thérèse Walter in the middle and the blue, skeletal head of Mary Magdalene below Mithra. The head of Stephaton to the left with his giant moon-like sponge "doubles as a crescent moon, an emblem of Virgin Mary." Marisol's parents hailed from Venezuela, whose first flag, flown on the mast of Francisco de Miranda's ship Leander in 1806, had on it a sun and a moon, the moon in this case symbolizing the Apollinian triumph over darkness.
Picasso's symbolic use of legs out of joint recurs in her primary later work on paper at El Museo, 1974's Lick the Tire of My Bicycle..
The bicycle precariously glides between pistols firing, perhaps reflecting the trauma over her mother committing suicide when she was eleven, leading to what she describes as ten years of total silence. The cyclist riding outside time and space is reminiscent of Duchamp's straining rider ascending a looped line on musical notation paper in 1914's To Have the Apprentice in the Sun**:
So if you are nearby the plants across the street in the Conservatory Gardens want you to keep them warm this Sunday. Within walking distance is her 30 foot long Self-Portrait Looking at The Last Supper at the Met, up til March. El Museo's collection has its enjoyable paintings but currently features Nuyorican Conceptual works amid some interesting sculptures.
* Just before returning to Belgium when the gallery repping him in Paris closed.
** Given to Philly by Walter Arensberg but never displayed..
03 January 2015
What's up for two more days, v. XXIV
Nam June Paik at the Asia Society fills up the entire gallery space of the museum, but as previously noted in this space, it's not much considering the many Paik holdings in nearby places and their permanent collection is not to be found amid such shows. The show focuses on his development of the robot, and fans of Paik's are treated to some of his earliest videos and has later 80s robots, which utilize carefully matched antique sets for robots ending with a large Li Po (above). As one enters a large video screen plays his 31 yo - almost to the day - one hour US/France mass market TV broadcast of Good Morning Mr. Orwell which I had never seen* including his films of Cage and Cunningham along with art pop luminaries.
Paik, to the NYTimes: ''I never read Orwell's book - it's boring. But he was the first media communications prophet. Orwell portrayed television as a negative medium, useful to dictators for one-way communication. Of course, he was half-right. Television is still a repressive medium. It controls you in many ways. You tend to adapt your schedule to it, and also you get from it stereotyped images.''But,'' he continued, gesturing with an arm on which a shirt cuff flapped listlessly open, ''I want to show its potential for interaction, its possibilities as a medium for peace and global understanding. It can spread out, cross international borders, provide liberating information, maybe eventually punch a hole in the Iron Curtain.''
That last phrase speaks to the location of Orwell's 1984 dystopia in the Soviet Union - spoken less than a year President Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech at the height of US-Soviet tensions. By coincidence, Raymond Williams wrote his book about television (1973) two years after his book on Orwell (1971), in which he said "the structural relations that we have since seen between a militarist economy and a controlled consumer affluence amount to more than a historical development that Orwell did not forsee." "Television" recalls "[The 1920s small family home] created both the need and the form of a new kind of 'communication': news from 'outside', from otherwise inaccessible sources. Already in the drama of the 1880s and 1890s (Ibsen, Chekhov) this structure had appeared: the center of dramatic interest was now for the first time the family home, but men and women stared from its windows, or waited anxiously for messages, to learn about forces, 'out there,' which would determine the conditions of their lives.. Some people spoke of the the new machines (radios) as gadgets, but they were always more than this. They were the applied technology of a set of emphasis and responses within the determining limits and pressures of industrial capitalist society." (27) Neither book addresses directly Orwell's view of the medium. Paik is credited for predicting the internet; people watching their friends' videos on their phones, transmitted by sattelite has created an operative decentralization at a time when military imperialism has refined its use of media for propagandizing. While the newspapers would be unlikely to publish the Pentagon Papers today, Assange and Snowden demystify centralized narratives from a transmission of their own making and become featured themselves in mainstream media, leading to a legislative vote that almost strips the NSA of its funding for surveillence.** Ginsberg and Beuys' music are featured in Good Morning but devoid of political statement, even as Beuys' "Sonne Statt Reagan" came out less than two years earlier "Ob Polen"..
Around the corner "Paik's possibly most famous video work".. "meant the Buddha now watched his videotaped image on the screen opposite".. "During the 'Projekt '74' exhibition in Cologne, Paik took the Buddha’s place in his recent creation.." Kay Larson suggests in her recent book about Cage that the rigor of Paik's Buddhism was enforced by John more than Paik's Korean upbringing, after Paik had cut the tie of his mentor during a piano performance, annoying Cage, a performance I saw Walter Lew amusingly re-enact with Aldon Nielson's wardrobe a while back. "Cage made it explicitly clear that Paik had no interest in seeing the truth contained in Suzuki's diagram on ego,*** much less in practicing the kind of discipline that had defined Cage's life and path." Cage did gush over Paik but this is perhaps another de Toquevillian case of the American selecting out spiritual content that another would associate with theocracy. Larson paraphrases Cage's early 60s Darmstadt lecture on Indeterminacy "Dualism is a serious intellectual flaw, from the Mahayana Buddhist standpoint, since it perpetuates the ego's sense that a world exists apart from the self. In Cage's recollection, dualistic thinking is a painful product of a mind divided against itself." Buddha TV, created a few years later, can be imagined as a provocative response to Cage's charge that Paik lacked consciousness of this dualism, showing the world that includes the sitter (Rodin's Thinker is another Paik subject) on the screen as Paik would affirm the usefulness of the medium.
* T'was up just a day or two ago but has a copyright block now;
** but doesn't; in the federal bailout vote, the two parties traded off which representatives would risk their incumbancy by voting for it since the calls came in against it 10-1, but assured its passage;
*** The ego described as the egg shell between the chick and the world that forms, in two dimensions, an unenclosed circle, filled with emotional content.
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