Hopper in the land of Larkin

“In a sense, I’m painting my own departure – to keep going, until the final painting is empty, and you’re no longer casting any shadow on it.”

Exceptions

When the art of perspective was rediscovered in the 14th century, multidimensionality of representation was lost, and religious art, like the doctrine that was its cultural context, ceased to have the transparency and multivalence of icons, and took on the opacity of image that arises from the illusion of control over three dimensions. 

--Maggie Ross.

'Notable exceptions..Rembrandt's..'

Fall

Fall [
..
][
[.

[why.

[don't

..]

[you]

Sketches

Misc.

One of the above was valued at $450 million. I'm sure you can guess which.

There's something to be said about preservation here-the desire to keep things from the distant past intact. The defacement of the sleeping Buddha is a tragedy (being 1,700 years old makes it the oldest of its kind). Horrible as that it is there's still some hope in the fact that it has been restored and that it will (hopefully) be exhibited. 

But the sale of the Leonardo is also a symbol of the astronomical wealth of some people, the vast inequalities of late capitalism, and not simply bout the love of art. In effect, the commodification of art is what this is all about. Will the painting be viewed by the public or will it just be an investment, part of someone's private collection?  

~~~

Point of order.

Do rats in a maze follow a strict map (if rewarded then turn right; if not, keep going straight) or do they form a complete cognitive map? And humans? Does reliance on GPS result in us losing that map since, like the rat we simply turn left or right depending on what the electronic voice tells us to do? And does our ability to notice the environment we live in subsequently dwindle? How will we ever find home?

~~~

How to Think.

Not in isolation but with others, for others. This seems like a radical overturning of centuries of a false sense of autonomy. An autonomy, incidentally-and to join up the dots-that is leading to more reliance on machines.

~~~

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.

--Machiavelli.

Crow stood on the mounds of earth, peering darkly into the shallow tunnels that furrowed the old cricket ground. "This is new, this is new". What kind of kingdom is this, he wondered to himself. And who could have done all this work in one single night?

Which animal has left its imprint here? Where do these long lines lead to? Crow was so full of questions this morning. Everything else was the same, the sun, the trees, the guards high up in the towers, with their sad, blue uniforms. His own friends would join him soon to ponder this great mystery, this irruption of the ludicrous into their ordered world.  

Crow looked at me, puzzled, as I ran past him on my third lap. "It was you, wasn't it?" he asked me inquisitively. There was no answer. But he did wonder, being formed by so many curves of the world, why human beings were so haunted by shallow graves.

Crow, formally ageless, understood for a moment what it was to be human, and something dark grew in his heart.  

Faraway one

~~~

Slow it is
a slow business
to grow a few words 
to say love
----Anselm Hollo

How long it took, the tens of thousands of generations to produce this clumsy hand. And how quickly things unravel! It took all this time to find you. What can seem most certain in life turns out to be as fleeting as a cloud, as short lived as the dance of a gnat. Where are you now? And why do you sigh, my soul? 

~~~

Where is the world in which I dream?

~~~
Will I cease to be
or will I remember
beyond the world
our last meeting together?
will I cease to be,
or will I remember
beyond the world,
our last meeting together?

Will iiiiiii

Will       

Will       

Will       

  i  wwww 

            

Where is the world in which I dream, if not here? And yet, in the dreamworld there is no world, only a remembrance of it. When you meet someone after a long time it is customary to say, "Where in the world have you been"? As if that person had crossed some invisible frontier and has come back disheveled, bringing with them a look, a word, a sentiment from that other place. 

Do we only see our true selves in dreams nowadays?  


~~~

the dark swimmers
their heads in the sun

if time shd stand still

which way does the river go?

The day in the house
each room with its own time
the sun's light enters obliquely and falls 
away
and time is marked by absences
(a pluralist till the end).

Fifty Shades of Laughter

Not quite sure who Grayson Perry is..sounds like some kind of performer. Side note: give anyone a platform and they become an actor seeking out the laughter and 'companionship' of the audience. You can see academics at TED doing their best to throw in a joke here and there, cultivate some two-penny act, become a showman, an entertainer, a "communicator" (can anyone beat Reagan here?)..forget "relevance" and academic acclaim; nothing beats being a media whore-except, of course, for being a servant of the state as a public policy wonk, a self-styled expert who will sell his soul for some greenbacks and the dream of a comfortable life out in the sticks.

Anyway, some interesting thoughts in his Reith lectures:

"By the early 70s, you know most things have been at least sort of tried or suggested, and now we're in a state where anything can be."

There is something mildly irritating by the casual use of, you know, the language, like. It's all sort of, you know, vague, confessional-ly, kinda of like how a teenager speaks, you know, right, like we was in Essex or something.

But put that to one side and get to the meat..

"The avant-garde is now a period style."

And the art establishment sort of looks down and goes, oh yeah, nice rebellion! Welcome in!

[And take your clothes while your at it, luv]

We were now in a period where anything could go.

[Against that, cultivate some mode of thinking that is stuffy, arcane, esoteric and impossible for the plebs to understand-even if it is utter nonsense]

We've accepted a lot of things that were weird now are normal..."We're all bohemians now". [Or, as the like to say in late capitalism: "Everyone's a nomad!"]

[Rebel. I told you to rebel. Je suis Charlie..]

And if you think about it [no, don't] all the things that were once seen as subversive and dangerous like tattoos and piercings and drugs and interracial sex, fetishism, all these things sort of crop up on Saturday night on family viewing.

[Of course, we sort of don't want to think of subversiveness as independence of thought, or as a way of dealing with the fact that the political and media machines have worked us over].

But what they don't realise-by being all inventive and creative, they're actually playing into capitalism's hands. 

The art world is the perfect model of neo-liberalism..

So radical art of the 60s has become a kind of messy play lifestyle accessory for the Fifty Shades of Grey generation.(LAUGHTER). 

Outrage has become domesticated.

But realness is a thing, you know that has a high currency..the currency of a bohemian-ness, lefty, arty-fartiness..especially in the urban ecology.

A part of his [Graham Fagen] installation if you like was a pile of sweets and they [a group of students] all just started eating the sweets! (LAUGHTER). You know that's their argument.

I mean Piero Manzoni in 61 famously canned his own faeces and sold them for the weight, equivalent weight of gold. 

[Hey, you can't blame all of the decline of western civilisation on immigrants!]

And we should all say yes everything we do is really brilliant.

Theme park plus Sudoko. You know, people want an outrageous and exciting experience from art and then they want to slightly puzzle over what it's about. (LAUGHTER).

You know it might be art rather than just an interesting website when it has the grip of porn without the possibility of consummation or a happy ending.

baubles and babble

The gazing ball "represents the vastness of the universe and at the same time the intimacy of right here, right now". 

[And both are remarkably empty right here, right now]

'"This experience is about you," says Koons, your desires, your interests, your participation, your relationship with this image."

"Everybody enjoyed Titian."

"Everybody's in this dialogue of sharing enjoyment and pleasure." 

Two thousand years of civilisation and this is what it's come down to? The staged provocation doesn't even provoke any more since it's such old hat. At best it will elicit a smile which, despite everything, cannot hide a sense of pity for this imbecile and the culture that reduces everything to "enjoyment" (as the yanks are wont to say: "Enjoy!"). 

Of course, it's not joy but pleasure-and any kind of undistinguished pleasure (pushpin, poetry..it's only a matter of taste, it is said).

If a single line could encapsulate what it means to live in an era of late capitalism it is this: "your desires, your interests, your participation, your relationship with this image." The cult of the self, except like Oakland, when you get there there isn't any there there. There, there.

I suppose in an age when jokers like Trump and Carson can be the main candidates for the greatest democracy money can buy you shouldn't be too surprised. Koons, as someone said, is the Trump of the 'art world'.

Words of wisdom from the main man:

"So we have to be saying, how do we make them [ISIS] look like losers?" And you thought Walker was dumb?

Another perceptive commentator had this to say: "at least the Romans had orgies to distract them from the decline of their civilisation."

~

The Pope says that the church should shun conservatism an fundamentalism as solutions. Right on. But given the way religion has been reduced to an empty shell you don't see many prospects of that happening. And it remains to be seen whether it can engage with science and liberalism without its inner spirit being completely dissipated.

But these lines struck you nevertheless:

"I would like an Italian church that is unsettled, always closer to the abandoned, the forgotten, the imperfect."

~~

The naked eye

There was a rather strange and polemical article by Jonathan Jones in today's Guardian that caught your eye. 

"All great civilisations celebrate the naked beauty of women. 

(This was, believe it or not, an article that lamented the demise of Playboy). 

Okay, is that true of Islamic civilisation, or Jewish? If you don't like those terms then perhaps one might say the Islamic and Jewish contribution to civilisation. That is, even if one is not religious one can surely recognize the contribution of the Semitic faiths to civilisation (art, poetry, cathedrals, churches, mosques, scholarship, music...). Have they really "celebrated" the naked beauty of women?

What about Chinese or Buddhist civilisation? Just asking. 

The naked body is "part of how human beings communicate with one another". 

If that's true then why is it predominantly women's bodies that have, throughout recent history, been displayed? How, exactly, is that 'communication'? to me, that doesn't sound like much of a conversation. 

"Societies that praised naked beauty tend to be democratic..."

Okay, but Japan and India were never really very democratic. Greece? Perhaps. But if what we're really talking about is (women's) rights then Greece? Really? What is the relation between "praising" naked beauty and the actual conditions of women's freedom?

Also, why is there no discussion of pornification? Is this display of naked bodies in democratic countries and its huge consumption in non-democratic ones something to be celebrated? What kind of "communication" is that? 

~

When I think back to the art that has held me captivated it hasn't been the naked female body. Rubens and Titian are boring. (Of course, Jones's blurring of art with playboy is deeply disturbing). Is the voluptuousness one finds in Rubens the same as a selfie by Kim Kardashian? 

Rothko, of course. Stunning and serene at the same time. (Hammershoi, Auerbach, Poussin..yes!)

But if there was one single painting, I think it would have to be Rembrandt's gorgeous 'Jewish Bride'. (Note to self: must get K. Clark's 1974 lectures on him).

There is something profoundly intimate and gentle (almost fragile) in this painting: I-We. But when you actually see it in real life, what sets it apart is the dazzling gold on the sleeves, the brushwork. Dark and light. 

If Jones was simply a jackass that article would be excusable. But to deny so many other ways of looking-and not looking-as central to civilisation he has simply contributed to the denial of a profound human outlook. Of course, there is a political and polemical aspect to the article as well: freedom is only a freedom from constraints, a reduction of our lives to our bodies, as if to say that pleasure could be envisaged independently of the good. A body free from guilt. 

Yes, then why not Ibiza? 

"The selfie era is a golden age of the civilised nude. Humanity marches forward proud and naked".

Another man, you suspect, going through a mid-life crisis!

~

To look out for:

Idris

The patterns bordering each page are turned into a solid black frame so that the book becomes - as is often said of photography - a window on to the world. Inside this frame - rigid, unalterable, definitive - all is in flux. Fixed meaning dissolves in a blazing grey drizzle. Words, as one of Don DeLillo's narrators says when confronted by a swirl of Arabic script, are "design, not meant to be read, as though part of some unbearable revelation".

---G. Dyer on Idris Khan's image of the Qur'an.

_________________

Reading between the lines, reading into.

It is only when you listen to the Qur'an do you realize-and of course, this is not coming from someone with any sustained engagement with it-that the surahs have their own rhythm and cadences and that what seems repetitive in the written script is unique in another dimension. And it is the gravity and beauty of the word that catches you.

(All of this might seem odd or even shallow to the modern reader, but from within the tradition it has been recognized that there is a kind of blessing from looking or reading even when there isn't an attendant understanding-which is to say nothing of the relative merits of the two).

[And, of course, the word as a talisman, a protection against evil...]

In the beginning was the word, 'the Pen'-as every Muslim knows. But the word was recite! As if to say. As if to say: one must respond to a command, a calling. The commandments. 

Martin Lings on the beautiful Kufic script:

Beautiful is, perhaps, the wrong word: 'Jalal' and 'Jamal'. The reticence, the weight of the word (a 'burden to be taken up', by choice) but also a blessing ('a sending down'). There is always a 'darkness' to the word that cannot simply be explained by the rational mind. The conceit that without 'grace' and character there can be understanding. Again: the inexhaustibly of meaning: the ink, the unfathomable sea...

What you read into Dyer/Idris:

A fixed form without; an endless, infinite and interior 'text'. The Revelation occurs at a particular moment in time and is 'completed'. In another sense -after Levinas and 'his Jewish Revelation'-each new human being brings with them a unique possibility of understanding of Revelation: natality.

{this mirrors the well-known lines about how creation, from a certain perspective, takes place in the "blinking of an eye". Creation, life. But the Allama could also say: I hear kun faya kun now!}

A window into the world! The text is a bridge, a ladder. There is only return, time and again; the heart, a mirror, polished by remembrance.
   

winter sunshine

Lost girls and the shock of the new

Shock, it has to be admitted, is not chic. It is so often seen as juvenile, meretricious, boring. Even in 1865, shock was passé.

---The Guardian.

This was from an awfully written article but it did at least remind you of a point Robert Hughes raised in 'The Shock of the New': what happens when we're not shocked any more?

To think that the images (the ones that were released, anyway) of the abuse at Gitmo and other dark sites didn't really shock anyone. Or Steiner's question: what happens when there are no more limits to push up against? Against a background frat and porn culture are there any images that would truly disturb? What counts as extreme nowadays? You can bet your bottom dollar there's already a niche market for it out there.

To always revolt, to always seek out the other path seems, to me, to be less a matter of genuine choice and more a mechanical act, at best; at worst it is an approach that dovetails with, or is manipulated by, the forces of late capitalism.

The death of so many children in Gaza? Turn your face away (out of boredom, not out of horror). In the blink of any eye it will be replaced anyway, since no image is allowed to inhere in our lack-of-attention economy. 

Guenon, years ago, posed the question: in an age where the carnival is the norm what is the meaning of the carnival? 

Duchamps or Serrano: you're taking the piss!

But the question remains: when there are no settled convictions to dislodge what, exactly, is the point of the shocking, abrasive image? Does deviation make any sense without any norms? Does mockery count when the real power-today-is one that encourages us to "blacken all that shines"? And you can't but help connect this desire to shock, to tear up the past, with capitalism's need to turn the tables, uproot everyone and everything: "all that is solid..."

Grayson Perry:

I mean art in many ways, contemporary art, is almost synonymous with the idea of novelty..

By about the mid-60s, early 70s, you know most things have been at least sort of tried or suggested, and now we’re in a state where anything can be...But revolution and rebellion and this idea of upheaval is no longer what I would think of as a defining idea. You know if you’d have gone back a hundred years, art was almost synonymous with this idea...

And the art world sort of looks down and sort of goes oh yeah, nice rebellion! Welcome in!

We’ve accepted a lot of the things that were weird now are normal. 

And if you think about it, all the things that were once seen as subversive and dangerous like tattoos and piercings and drugs and interracial sex, fetishism, all these things - they sort of crop up on X Factor now on a Saturday night on family viewing..

And the creative rebel - they like to think they’re sticking it to the man, they’re sticking it to the capitalist system,.. But of course what they don’t realise - by being all inventive and creative, they’re actually playing into the capitalism’s hands because the lifeblood of capitalism is new ideas. They need new stuff to sell!  

But realness is a thing, you know that has a high currency.

~~~

Rebel Sell.

Of course, in our own way the university's "cutting edge" falls into the same paradigm. Not just in the way that research is now tailored to, or used by corporate interests, but in the more day-to-day or prosaic way in which the idea of research is largely drawn to the fake thrill of debunking or tweaking what had for large periods of time seemed quite obvious. 

One must start with the presupposition that all those who came before you were either wrong, limited in their analytic skills or plain buffoons. Then through a series of marginal notes which are trumped up as a "groundbreaking" analysis, it is hoped that the whole bleedin' Establishment will topple down-except there isn't much of an Establishment beyond the institutionalized need to keep the ball rolling in order to convince ourselves that we are, at least in some sense, free.

~~~

What struck you in the Grayson lecture was how, on the one hand, there's a craving for what's real (not: the Real or even 'the Real') and yet how on the other hand that realism soon becomes a commodity, true grit against the showy fabrications of prime time t.v. and all the fake "reality t.v."

~~~

Grayson also claims that in one of the cave paintings two horses were painted in very similar styles but that the carbon dating indicated that the paintings were done separately over a 5,000 year gap.

Now, if that is true that raises a number of questions. Firstly, ability: did they have the same technical ability to repeat the original style? Secondly, why would they want to actually do that, for what purpose? This desire to stay close to the original, the first image, the first word, what, exactly, is that?

~~~

Lost girls: 

Entartete Kunst

We, we are people of dust. There is no more 'we'. We are no more. Did I say we? I...

The structure, the structure is there, more or less, the barest outline of some previous existence, the way my sad smile traces the same sad smile of my ancestors from all those years ago. For some unknown reasons that look was carried in my eyes, down to the bone. They'll find it one day in my DNA but never know...

He loved art more than he loved people. People were trash, dispensable. They fell, were often evicted from history; they were unreliable, were susceptible to disappearances. He loved ideas, he loved ideas more than anything else in the world. 

I do not watch television any more and haven't seen a movie-from start to finish-for a long time now. What's the latest? I have no clue. I live in my room and no-one knows my name or address. I have built myself a hole and live with my testament and my shadows. No record contains me. I think, therefore.

The keeper of the flame, the steward of the trash of the world, the accumulation of false steps, mutations, contagion. That ancient chaos that was there in the heart of the first man, twisted, his eyes glinting with transgression, is here, 360, in this boarded up room that is kept out of the sun's vengeful eye. 

"All I wanted was to live with my pictures".

He keeps them close to him, like so many dark memories. All that is not said or shown becomes more real with the passage of time.He will die and live this way. 

The pictures survived him, like Paul Celan's bottles tossed into the ocean, suddenly returned from oblivion, inevitable tokens of lives lost and reminders of art's endurance. 

The journeys made, the lives lost across the wide ocean. The condemned in their dark chains, the free, thirsty, all at sea. Already, before the mirror my image fades, my hands become heavy. For those without a land must take to the sea...

What shows up? This will make you laugh. A silver dish that could be redeemed for forty pieces of silver, a last act of stealing, to keep your name.

On a morning like this they will find me, a head full of straw. Ah, 'the strawness of straw,' said the poet, this old essence of man.