Happy weekend.
Frames from Hoarfrost by The Pornographic Barn Owl/Ian Huebert.
this weekend
Happy weekend.
Frames from Hoarfrost by The Pornographic Barn Owl/Ian Huebert.
seven of nine
"The disaster always takes place after having taken place." What Maurice Blanchot has written in reference to the Holocaust pertains as well to more recent human-generated cataclysms in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Bosnia, South Africa. Closure is unthinkable after such societal trauma, and Kentridge's work, startling yet suffused with familiar gestures and everyday rhythms, reflects this lack of fixity. With its transmutations and erasures - a cat metamorphoses into a telephone, cigar smoke materializes as a typewriter clicking out messages - Kentridge's work epitomizes the provisionality of being, how becoming necessitates both doing and undoing.
***
Even permanence is relative--a phenomenon that intrigues and troubles Kentridge, with the result that it permeates his densely packed work. When he was six, he saw on his father's desk photographs of victims of the Sharpeville massacre. (His father served as counsel for the victims' families.) The "shock of nonrecognition" he experienced, though painful, passed, and he has spent much of his artistic life attempting to revive what he remembers as a sense, immediately upon glimpsing the photos, of the world shifting irremediably. He has striven, he says, to hold onto the clarity of that moment, to resist the "compassion fatigue" that comes from repeated exposure to violence. One's sense of trauma gets dulled over time. Like Soho, we return to our desks and shuffle papers. If Kentridge's own images feel indelible, it is a condition they merit, but also one that we, as viewers, must continually strive to fulfill. In the name of responsibility, Breytenbach reminds both writer and reader, artist and viewer, "You have to spike the self incessantly, you have to probe and to prod the numbness, you must pickle the heart, you have to resist, you have to fight the leveling or the burying and the forgetting brought about by commonplaces."Leah Ollman - 'William Kentridge: Ghosts and Erasures,' Art in America, January 1999.
From top:
Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris (1989)
Monument (1990)
Mine (1991)
Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991)
Felix in Exile (1994)
History of the Main Complaint (1996)
Weighing ... and Waiting (1997)
Missing:
Stereoscope (1999)
Tide Table (2003)
a real job
I had a friend who used to ask me, jokingly, when I was going to get a real job. One day, he said, 'You are now unemployable. You're nearing thirty, you've never had a job, and no one will hire you, so do what you're doing and stop complaining.' Our first child, Alice, was born soon afterward, in 1984, and suddenly there was a big change of focus. I started drawing again. That's the point where I began to write 'artist' on application forms, rather than 'technician.' Sink or swim, I was reduced to being an artist.William Kentridge, as quoted by Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker.
winter flowers
Vintage embroidered Edwardian silk stockings on Etsy. Found via I'm Revolting, who has quite the eye.
schneelandschaft
Life goes stubbornly on despite the overbearing monumentality of this hostile environment. The thin tracks weaving through the fluffy brushstrokes show that the skier is pushing on, bent on reaching his invisible goal; although it is out of the picture, we doubt neither its existence nor the skier's ability to reach it. His determination tempers the impression of the man's fragility in this grandiose landscape.
In person, the texture of the snow is extraordinarily beautiful.
haiti
'Worse than a war zone.'
The news from Haiti just keeps getting more horrifying. Here's a list of ways to help.
the mountains have no “meaning,” they are meaning; the mountains are.
Thinking over this quote on Cold Splinters.
(I really need to read this book.)
that's a bird
He got to his feet, but sat down again and stared at me intently. Having described the externals of his life, he was not going to go without some comment on its inner motivation.
He then said slowly, with great seriousness:
It's like the tides was pulling you along the highway. I'm like the Arctic tern, guv'nor. That's a bird. A beautiful white bird what flies from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again.Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines.
Print by John James Audubon.
hudson river ice
Made like Caspar David Friedrich yesterday due to inspiration from Amanda. These are some views of the Hudson from Riverside Park. The ice makes a nice brittle grinding sound as the current pushes it around the pier.
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