The objects Hill chose to copy, which she could not fully ascertain until the machine had seen them, are visually transformed yet convey their intrinsic properties, as well as those of the copier. "It repeats my words perfectly as many times as I ask it to," Hill wrote, "but when I shot it a hair curler, it hands me back a space ship, and when I show it the inside of a straw hat it describes the eerie joys of a descent into a volcano."
Richard Torchia, "On Pati Hill (1921-2014)," originally published in Artforum, 12/18/2014, but found via Picpus Press Issue 32, Spring 2024. Hill used the copier to make images of a dead swan, heads of cabbage, thumbtacks, cobblestones, and "an espaliered pear tree, including its roots and the ants living inside them."
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Tacita Dean, "The Book End of Time," 2013. The book itself was just acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Roman brick from Cherchell, Algeria, with a perfect 2000-year-old imprint of a human hand, via Gareth Harney.
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“When I look at the world, I feel that something is being lost or actively undermined,” she told me. “Sometimes it feels like attention. Sometimes it feels like imagination. Sometimes it feels like”—she thought for a moment—“that thing you wanted when you became an English major, that sort of half-dreamed, half-real thing you thought you were going to be. Whatever that is: it’s under attack.”
Nathan Heller, "The Battle for Attention." The New Yorker, 4/29/2024.
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Related: In search of the third bird.
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I found myself continually occupied with the thought of how often, through not realizing the nature and strength of their own desires, men have been wrecked by them.
Marilyn Milner, from An Experiment in Leisure.
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[Marilyn] Milner was unable to tell what made her really happy, beyond a few blips of joy that quickly faded after the new purchase or minor accomplishment grew a little stale. So she fished around for ways to find an answer. It seems like a minor problem to have, this not knowing how to answer a simple question. And yet it’s a foundational issue: what you like, what you should do with your time, where you should pour your energy. It’s a problem that feeds into every other tributary of your life, from your job to the way you raise your children. Suddenly you realize that not knowing how to answer the question (beyond a few superficial remarks like “pineapple on pizza” and “those little gold ballet flats at the boutique”) leaves you on the surface of the Earth, easily blown around by the wind or led astray by outside forces.
Jessa Crispin, "What Makes You Happy?" The Smart Set, 3/1/2012.
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...Rereading the book this month, I was unnerved to discover how many fantasies, desires, impulses that I had thought my own were in fact informed by it. I saw that I had, for instance, unconsciously interpreted a number of difficult and very real events in my own family through its fictions; I saw too that several people with whom I’ve fallen in love share a glimmer of psychic resemblance to the girl Adam loves. I was unnerved to discover, in short, that a YA novel could be the source of a greater portion of my instincts and reflexes than seemed at all appropriate; that it could make desirable—so desirable, in fact, as to seem outside of desire—a whole array of emotional tendencies: toward shame, melancholy, irreverence, estrangement.
Timmy Straw, "Child Reading." The Paris Review, 11/7/2023.
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... a recurring image that Rohrwacher turns to is that of persons suddenly, and for no apparent reason, filmed upside down. When they fall, they fall up. It’s interesting to learn that Rohrwacher, writer and director of the work, rewrote her script after she had cast the 33-year-old [Josh] O’Connor. She said she had shifted away from the topic of a person in ‘the sunset of his life.’
But where to? Why would the younger person specialize in death, so to speak? The place where these people live is not exactly haunted but it is old, full of Etruscan ruins. Pirro and a group of local men are tomb-raiders, digging for treasures to sell. Arthur is very helpful in this venture because he has a special gift: he can divine hollow spaces underground the way others can divine water or gold. The film’s Italian phrase for this is ‘feeling the void’ (‘sentire il vuoto’) ...
Michael Wood, "At the Movies: La Chimera." London Review of Books, 5/23/2024.
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What am I looking for in contemporary art? Now it is very difficult to tell what is beautiful and what is not beautiful. For example, when I did La Chimera, it was very clear that the treasures hidden under the earth were beautiful things. It’s very different from the time we are living in now. There is no longer a common sense of beauty. And so, what is art for me? It’s a view, an eye, a point of view on reality from a perspective that I couldn’t imagine. The art of the past was a magnet for the eye. For me contemporary art is the opposite; it is one eye that looks at the world.
Alice Rohrwacher, interviewed in Gagosian Quarterly, fall 2023 issue.
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Have you ever bitten into a piece of fruit so delicious, so ripe and perfect in its flavor and sweetness, that you vibrated, just a little, with pleasure? The Franciscan beggar Salvador de Orta did. He sliced into a pomegranate and—seeing in the multitude of tiny seeds a microcosm of everything beautiful in God’s perfectly ordered world—rose into the air in ecstasy. God was there in the fruit.
He was in the kitchen, too. Teresa of Ávila told her spiritual daughters that “God walks amidst the pots and pans, helping you with what’s internal and external at the same time.” So when the nuns found Teresa suspended in the air, transfixed in ecstatic union with God, a frying pan still clenched in her hand above the cooking flames, they may not have been surprised. It was God, helping her with both the internal (lifting her soul up to heaven) and the external (the frying of, perhaps, an egg).
Erin Maglaque, "Wings of Desire." The New York Review, 4/4/2024.
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The point is, dammit, that they did have, as Iago griped about Othello, a daily beauty in their lives that makes ours ugly. In one of the stories in Pig Earth, a little old peasant lady goes out and gathers wild things in the mountains—wild cherries, lilies of the valley, mushrooms, mistletoe—and takes her booty into the city, where she sells it in the market for vast sums. She is selling not only delicious wild produce but glimpses of some lost greenness. She is the last remaining vendor of wild things, she is a kind of ghost.
Angela Carter, "Wolfing It." The London Review of Books, July 23, 1987.
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Everything that she needed was already there: pencils and paper collected over the years, and the flowers she’d planted herself. She had chosen them to be hardy, to grow in the shade, a few for their strange forms.
Beatrice Radden Keefe, "The Hortus Conclusus of Barbara Baum." Light Breaks, 11/24/2023.
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From me, for Syllabus: A rock collection.
