Rufino Tamayo, The Watermelons, 1977

Mary Bauermeister 1934-2023

 

Square Memories, 1965
ink, glass, glass lens, wood, stones, paper collage, graphite, felt-tip pen, painted canvas and painted wood construction
18 5/8 x 18 5/8 x 6 1/2 inches / 47.3 x 47.3 x 16.5 cm 

Do try to catch "the first public exhibition of Bauermeister’s earliest mature body of work, a series of abstract, psychedelic pastels dating to the 1950s... ..Bauermeister’s limitless imagination ... would soon nurture the environment where the first Fluxus happenings took place between 1960 and 1961 in her Cologne studio. The avant-garde that gathered there included John Cage, Christo, Merce Cunningham, Nam June Paik, David Tudor, and others who would go on to form a vanguard scene of musicians, dancers, and performance artists who thrived in New York throughout the 1960s, a milieu now known as Neo-Dada" at Michael Rosenberg Gallery, 100 11th Ave at West 19th Street, til January 20th.

 

Fuck the System (Dürer Madonna), 1972
18 5/8 x 18 5/8 x 6 1/2 inches / 47.3 x 47.3 x 16.5 cm 

“I could never execute the Madonna picture if I titled it in German—the work is named Fuck the System—that doesn’t work in German but in American English it’s more casual, and the Madonna personifies ‘fuck the system.’ She is the first iconic, revolutionary feminist whose immaculate conception we still celebrate today; she is a glimpse into the future, she is a woman of the future…”
—Mary Bauermeister

 

 

Antonio Negri 1933-2023

Reality is always ordered toward the infinite determination, but the converse also is true: This tendency toward the infinite must also invert itself, expressing itself as a plural determination of things produced, without which the infinite world would be seen as divisible.  The ontological totality is the endpoint of the spontaneous expression of reality; reality is the product of the spontaneity of the infinite totality. To the spontaneity of existence corresponds the spontaneity of production. The spontaneous and complete correspondence of the singular existence and the total existence, within the tension of expression as well as within the nexus of production, is the beginning and the end of philosophy.

Philosophy speaks because being is not mute. Philosophy is silent only where being is mute. [Spinoza's] Ethics, I, D1: "By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing." D3 "By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed." .... Being tells of its necessary correspondences.

(L'anomalia selvaggia, 1981, tr. Michael Hardt, pp. 45-6)

Refaat Alareer 1979-2023

 

Rise! Rise!
No matter how neglectful you are,
You will remain in my eyes and flesh an angel.
And you remain as our love wants you to be:
Your breeze is amber, 
Your land bliss— 
And I love you more. 
Your hands are trees
But I do not sing
Like other nightingales.
The chains teach me to fight and fight,
Because I love you more. 
My singing is daggers of roses,
My silence the birth of thunder,
And a lily of my own blood.
You are the soil and the sky
And your heart is evergreen.
Your love when at a low ebb is a flow; 
How, then, can I not love you more?
And you are as our love wants you to be:
I am your beloved child;
On your sweet lap
I grow, and rise.

 

(Mahmoud Darwish, I Love You More,  translated by Refaat Alareer "with the help of Ghada Ahmed, Sarah Ali, Hanan Habashi and the amazing Mohamed Shamaa)"

“If I must die, you must live, to tell my story.”

- @itranslate123 pic.twitter.com/ZHld8ZPWLy

— Yasser (@Yasser_Gaza) December 9, 2023

Shane MacGowan 1957-2023