By Benjamin Ducroz.
take a moment to look up
The biggest and brightest full moon of the year makes an appearance tonight:
The moon is, on average, 238,855 miles (384,400 km) from Earth. The moon's orbit around Earth – which causes it to go through all its phases once every 29.5 days – is not a perfect circle, but rather an ellipse. One side of the orbit is 31,070 miles (50,000 km) closer than the other.
imaginary outfit: variation on a theme
Lately, I've been trying to apply these skills outside my closet. Through whatever turn of events, I've never been one of those people who have found what they are meant to do. I've generally resorted to conventional methodologies to try and puzzle it out. I've worked at just about every job I have been offered, read ostensibly helpful books and articles, taken quizzes and personality tests, tried on different philosophies about the weight that a career should have in shaping and defining your identity, and in the end, I've come up empty. Nothing fits. I look at online job listings with a vague sense of panic and dread, unconvinced of my ability to be the person they are looking for, and yet unwilling to give up the idea that somehow I can fit into this marvelous machine of regulated human effort and toil, that I can find a job - a definition - that provides a pat answer at parties and a steady stream of income.
Clearly, I'm trapped in a pattern - something several degrees more pernicious than wearing cardigans and moccasins every day. A new angle is required, a different variation using the same notes. If I can find it, maybe a new pattern will snap into place - something spacious and elegant, ordered yet liberating ...
a hectic, silent, elfish bee-hive
It snowed outside. The wayfarers' footsteps were inaudible upon the thin layer of snow on the pavement; the earth was dumb and dead. But the air was intensely alive. In the dark intervals between the street lamps the falling snow made itself known to the wanderers in a multitudinous, crystalline, icy touch on eyelashes and mouth. But around the gas-lit lantern panes it sprang into sight, a whirl of little, transilluminated wings, which seemed to dance both up and down, a small white world-system, like a hectic, silent, elfish bee-hive.Isak Dinesen, A Consolatory Tale.
I just read this yesterday and it is indeed a small white world-system outside my window today.
assemblage
The Man Who Brings Death, 1928
Our Unnerving City, 1926
Help Out! (The Liberated Woman), 1926
controlled variation
Sol LeWitt, 1967In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.
from Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes, edited by Nicholas Baume.Sol LeWitt’s conceptualism is a powerful methodology of forgetting. It came into being as an answer to the creative paralysis induced by the triumph and subsequent enervation of American Abstract Expressionism. In order to make art new, its history had to be actively “forgotten.” Forgetting, in this sense, is not a literal amnesia, but an affirmation strategy to overcome the burden of history. The belief that one’s work was reinventing art by returning to ground zero has been one of the most productive fictions in twentieth century art. The conceptual approach gave LeWitt, whose ambitions exceeded those of second generation Abstract Expressionism, the permission he needed to make things again; to remove all self-censorship in the “perfunctory” execution of “art ideas.”
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.
this weekend
Happy weekend.
Edited to add: I forgot to mention this illustration is by Daniel Stolle for the NYT.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)