Saturday, March 31, 2007

The Brotherhood Of Men And Cabbages




Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-93) - Vertumnus, c. 1590-1


'[Arcimboldo] imposes a system of substitution (an apple comes to stand for a cheek, as in a coded message...), and, in the same way, a system of transposition (the whole figure is somehow drawn back toward the detail). However, and this is Arcimboldo's peculiarity, what is remarkable about the composite heads is that the picture hesitates between coding and decoding: even when we have displaced the screen of substitution and of transposition in order to perceive the head composed as an effect, our eyes retain the tracery of the first meanings which have served to produce this effect.'

From 'Arcimboldo or Magician and Rhétoriqueur' (in The Responsibility of Forms) by Roland Barthes

Friday, March 30, 2007

A Blondie Joke




Ricky Swallow - iMan Prototypes, 2005


'I don't mind if my skull ends up on a shelf as long as it's got my name on it.'

Debbie Harry

Thursday, March 29, 2007

The Oblivion Seeker




Mark Rothko - Chapel, 1971


'If my doctor told me I only had six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.'

Isaac Isamov

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Black Hole Son




Charles Burns - Black Hole, 2005


"The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

The Doorway Of Gradiva




Jerry N. Uelsmann (b. 1934) - Untitled, 1976


'We conceived the idea of a repository, an ageless place located anywhere outside the world of reason. In that space would be stored those manmade objects that have lost their utilitarian purpose, or have not yet found it, or have markedly deviated from it and that therefore conceal some internal secret lock. Those objects could then emerge in an elective way and continuously from the river of the ever-thickening sand that blurs adult vision, restoring to it the transparency that children enjoy. They would alternate with highly singular natural objects, primarily those whose structure corresponds to a most unfathomable necessity, those whose very appearance is enough to cast a new light on the problem of that necessity. Both categories of objects could exert a rather mysterious attraction, arouse ideas of possession, and especially help to reveal to each individual his own desire, or at least as an intercessor between that desire and its true or often unknown object.'

André Breton - Gradiva

Monday, March 26, 2007

Back - And Very Black




Charles Burns - Tears (date unknown)


I took a long break from this blog, thinking I no longer needed it. Things have changed.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Why Being Bad Can Feel So Good




Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, 1989 - Paula Rego (b. 1935)


'I've needed an impulse from within, a lot of emotional energy to do this stuff, and a kind of desire. It's a very aggressive thing . . . It's not an aggression like you're hitting it; it's a sensual aggression, if you like.'

Paula Rego


'Marina Warner, who senses Goya's influence and a 'post-Freudian mordancy', says: 'They're beyond morality; she's more interested in the power of feeling than in good conduct. She sees sexuality everywhere'. For Rego, 'there is adulthood in childhood; children have uncommonly strong desires and fears; they're very aware of their own bodies and sexual feelings. We only put a name to it later'. She is sometimes compared to Balthus . . . [Yet] for Warner, 'Balthus is voyeuristic, looking at little girls who are unaware of their sexuality. But Paula's are in possession of their own feelings, which we are invited to feel too.''

From Secret Histories by Maya Jaggi


'The remarkable thing about the sex taboo is that it is fully seen in transgression. It is inculcated partly through education but never resolutely formulated. Education proceeds as much by silence as by muffled warnings. The taboo is discovered directly by a furtive and at first partial exploration of the forbidden territory. At first nothing could be more mysterious. We are admitted into the knowledge of a pleasure in which the notion of pleasure is mingled with mystery, suggestive of the taboo that fashions that pleasure at the same time as it condemns it. The revelation through transgression has certainly not remained constant throughout the ages. Fifty years ago the irony of sex education was more obvious still. But everywhere - and doubtless from the earliest times - our sexual activity is sworn to secrecy, and everywhere, though to a variable degree, it appears contrary to our dignity so that the essence of eroticism is to be found in the inextricable confusion of sexual pleasure and taboo. In human terms the taboo never makes an appearance without suggesting sexual pleasure, nor does the pleasure without evoking the taboo. The basis is a natural urge and in childhood the natural urge acts alone.'

From Erotism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille


The Week in Review

Films:

Bullit, 1968 - d. Peter Yates
Cool Hand Luke, 1967 - d. Stuart Rosenberg
Death Wish, 1974 - d. Michael Winner
Death Wish 2, 1982 - d. Michael Winner
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972 - d. Luis Buñuel
Easy Rider, 1969 - d. Dennis Hopper
The French Connection, 1971 - d. William Friedkin
Midnight Cowboy, 1969 - d. John Schlesinger
Patton, 1970 - d. Franklin J. Schaffner
Red River, 1948 - d. Howard Hawks
Three Colours: Red, 1994 - d. Krzysztof Kieslowski
The Wild Bunch, 1969 - d. Sam Peckinpah

Books:

The Monk - Matthew Gregory Lewis
The Story of the Eye - Georges Bataille
Story of O - Pauline Réage (Anne Desclos)
Venus in Furs - Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch

Saturday, March 24, 2007

How To Introduce A Four Star Twat In Twelve Easy Steps















Patton, 1970 - d. Franklin J. Schaffner


'Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country . . . Americans, traditionally, love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle . . . Americans love a winner, and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. Now, I don't give a hoot in hell for a man who loses and laughs. That's why Americans have never lost - and will never lose - a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.'

Gen. George S. Patton Jnr. (George C. Scott) - Patton (1970), d. Franklin J. Schaffner

Friday, March 23, 2007

I've Got That Floating Feeling




The Kiss
, 1907-08 - Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)


'Love is metaphysical gravity.'

R. Buckminster Fuller

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Twilight In The West




Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969 - d. George Roy Hill


BUTCH CASSIDY: What happened to the old bank? It was beautiful!
BANK GUARD: Kept gettin' robbed.
BUTCH CASSIDY: Small price to pay for beauty!

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Buñuel De Jour




Brothel Customer (Iska Kahn) and "Belle de Jour" (Catherine Deneuve) - Belle de jour, d. Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), 1967


'[Extreme] seductiveness is probably at the boundary of horror.'

Georges Bataille

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Gun/Man






Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) - Dirty Harry, 1971 (d. Don Siegel)


'I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.'

Clarence Darrow

Monday, March 19, 2007

The Devil We Know




Faust (1994) - d. Jan Svankmajer (b. 1934)


'In proposing a new etiquette for seeing, Surrealism often harks back to Romantic and occultist cosmologies which posit a latent harmony beneath the discontinuities of the world's surface. Always eager to startle and often to mystify, Surrealism typically postulates bewilderment as a precondition of insight. Its approach to creativity tends to grapple with jagged elements of disparity, of prolixity, of sheer unprocessed excess, in the hope of eliciting a more thrilling - because delayed - vision of equilibrium and clarity. A Surrealist typically distrusts any revelation which lacks a complementary aura of enigma: the naked truth cannot be embraced without its veils.'

From Thinking Through Things: The Presence of Objects in the Early Films of Jan Svankmajer by Roger Cardinal

Sunday, March 18, 2007

A Conference Of Organs




Tony Oursler (b. 1957) - Station, 2002


'We are all haunted houses.'

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)


The Week in Review

Films:

Dirty Harry, 1971 - d. Don Siegel
Magnum Force, 1973 - d. Ted Post
The Enforcer, 1976 - d. James Fargo

Television:

The Mighty Boosh: Series 1 and 2

Books:

My Last Sigh - Luis Buñuel
Diary of a Genius - Salvador Dalí

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Ghostly Machines




Man Ray (1890-1976) - Indestructible Object, 1923


'Dreams have no titles.'

Man Ray

Friday, March 16, 2007

The Beauty of Butchery




Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) - La Poupée, 1935


'One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.'

Marquis de Sade

Thursday, March 15, 2007

All That Is Solid Melts Into Art




Urs Lüthi (b. 1947) - Hope, Despair and Reason, Desire, both 1989


'There is a theory which states that if ever for any reason anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another that states that this has already happened.'

Douglas Adams

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Grim Reapings




Timothy H. O'Sullivan (c. 1840-1882) - The Harvest of Death, July 4th, 1863


'The view proposed in On Photography [Sontag, 1977] - that our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images - might be called the conservative critique of the diffusion of such images.

I call this argument conservative because it is the sense of reality that is eroded. There is still a reality that exists independent of the attempts to weaken its authority. The argument is in fact a defence of reality and the imperilled standards for responding more fully to it.

In the more radical - cynical - spin on this critique, there is nothing to defend: the vast maw of modernity has chewed up reality and spat the whole mess out as images. According to a highly influential analysis, we live in a "society of the spectacle". Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real - that is, interesting - to us. People themselves aspire to becoming images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media.

Fancy rhetoric, this. And very persuasive to many, because one of the characteristics of modernity is that people feel they can anticipate their own experience. This view is associated in particular with the writings of the late Guy Debord, who thought he was describing an illusion, a hoax, and Jean Baudrillard, who claims to believe that images, simulated realities, are all that exist now; it seems to be something of a French speciality.) It is common to say that war, like everything else that appears to be real, is médiatique. . . Reports of the death of reality - like the death of reason, the death of the intellectual, the death of serious literature - seem to have been accepted without much reflection by many who are attempting to understand what feels wrong, or empty, or idiotically triumphant in contemporary politics and culture.

To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalises the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment - that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of "the modern", and a prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But is is absurd to identify the world with these zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain, just as it is absurd to generalise about the ability to respond to the suffering of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television viewers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronising reality.

It has become a cliché of the cosmopolitan discussion of images of atrocity to assume that they have little effect, and that there is something innately cynical about their diffusion. As important as people now believe images of war to be, this does not dispel the suspicion that lingers about the interest in these images, and the intentions of those who produce them. Such a reaction comes from two extremes of the spectrum: from cynics who have never been near a war, and from the war-weary who are enduring the miseries being photographed.

Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved. How much easier, from one's chair, far from danger, to claim the position of superiority.'

From Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Hell Is My Beloved




William Blake (1757-1827) - The Circle of the Lustful: Paolo and Francesca, c. 1824-27


'[Suffering] alone reveals the total significance of the beloved object. Possession of the beloved object does not imply death, but the idea of death is linked with the urge to possess. If the lover cannot possess the beloved he will sometimes think of killing her; often he would rather kill her than lose her. Or else he may wish to die himself. Behind these frenzied notions is the glimpse of a continuity possible through the beloved. Only the beloved, so it seems to the lover - because of affinities evading definition which match the union of bodies with that of souls - only the beloved can in this world bring about what our human limitations deny, a total blending of two beings, a continuity between two discontinuous creatures. Hence love spells suffering for us in so far as it is a quest for the impossible, and at a lower level, a quest for union at the mercy of circumstance. Yet it promises a way out of suffering. We suffer from our isolation in our individual separateness. Love reiterates: "If only you possessed the beloved one, your soul sick with loneliness would be one with the soul of the beloved." Partially at least this promise is a fraud. But in love the idea of such a union takes shape with frantic intensity, though differently perhaps for each of the lovers. And in any case, beyond the image it projects, that precarious fusion, allowing as it does for the survival of the individual, may in fact come to pass. That is beside the point; this fusion, precarious yet profound, is kept in the forefront of consciousness by suffering as often as not, by the threat of separation.'

From Erotism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille

Monday, March 12, 2007

Orpheus Unbound




Bill Lee (played by Peter Weller) - Naked Lunch, 1991 (d. David Cronenberg)


'Exterminate all rational thought.'

Bill Lee

Sunday, March 11, 2007

2001: An Inner Space Odyssey











2001, A Space Odyssey, 1968 - d. Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)


'A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.'

Stanley Kubrick



The Week in Review

Films:

Crash, 1996 - d. David Cronenberg
Dog Day Afternoon, 1975 - d. Sidney Lumet
Midnight Cowboy, 1969 - d. John Schlesinger
Three Colours: Blue, 1993 - d. Krzysztof Kieslowski
Yes, 2004 - d. Sally Potter

Television:

Family Guy: Season One

Books:

Camera Lucida - Roland Barthes
On Photography - Susan Sontag
Regarding the Pain of Others - Susan Sontag

Music:

Horses (1975) - Patti Smith
Radio Ethiopia (1976) - Patti Smith
Easter (1978) - Patti Smith
Wave (1979) - Patti Smith

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Relics Of The Universal Thaw




Loretta Lux (b. 1969) - The Drummer, 2004


'When we are afraid, we shoot. When we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.'

From On Photography by Susan Sontag

Friday, March 09, 2007

The Somatic City




Max Ernst (1891-1976) - The Entire City, 1935-37


'It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.'

André Breton (1896-1966)

Thursday, March 08, 2007

Rethinking The Real




Max Ernst (1891-1976) - The Eye of Silence, 1923


'No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.'

André Breton (1896-1966)