Life After Gravity

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) - Mlle La La at the Circus Fernando, 1879


'The greatest danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.'

Michelangelo

The Mother Of All Virgins

Damien Hirst (b. 1965) - Virgin Mother (10.7 metres), 2006


'What I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect.'

Damien Hirst

Déjà Lu

Gregory Crewdson (b. 1962) - Untitled (from the series 'Twilight'), 2001


'Literature is the question minus the answer.'

Roland Barthes

The Doyens Of Damnation

Hieronymous Bosch (c. 1450-1516) - The Temptation of St. Anthony (central panel), 1500


'Saintliness is also a temptation.'

Jean Anouilh

Sex Is Not The Enemy

Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004) - Great American Nude, #92, 1967


'I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer.'

Woody Allen

The Heart Is A Lonely Punter

Caspar David Friedrich (1770-1840) - Man and Woman Contemplate the Moon, c. 1824


'We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.'

Orson Welles

Twinkle, Twinkle

Tony Oursler (b. 1957) - Star, 2005


'I wish that I was where I am.'

Gertrude Stein

Darkness Visible

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) - Olive Trees in the Sun, 1889


'I became insane. With long intervals of horrible sanity.'

Edgar Allan Poe

The Genius Of Infirmity

Max Klinger (1857-1920) - Plague, 1898


'I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile.'

George Bernard Shaw

Lux Aeterna

Robert Longo (b. 1953) - Untitled (Hot Sun), 2006


'When you possess light within, you see it externally.'

Anaïs Nin

The Contours Of Cognition

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) - The Singer Yvette Guilbert, 1894


'Drawing is putting a line around an idea.'

Henri Matisse

Love's Antidote Is You

Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) - Untitled #305, 1994


'Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.'

Sigmund Freud

At The Crossroads Of Art And Philosophy

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) - A Walk at Dusk, c. 1830-35


'We have art in order not to die of truth.'

Friedrich Nietzsche

'The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.'

Gilles Deleuze

'Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance. '

Arthur Schopenhauer

Madness Became Him

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)


'Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.'

Voltaire

'It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.'

Herman Melville

'Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.'

Salvador Dalí

The Bitterness Of Sweet Memories

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - The Lemon, 1880


'There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.'

Dante Alighieri

Everybody Knows The Square Of Zero

Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) - The Survival Series: The Conversation Always Turns To Living Long Enough To Have Fun, 1983-5


'I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words bother me.'

Winnie the Pooh

The Gift Of Banishment

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarotti Simoni (1475-1564) - The Fall and The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1509-10


'The only paradise is paradise lost.'

Marcel Proust

Industrial Light Sans Magic

Dan Flavin (1933-1996) - greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green), 1966


'I like my use of light to be openly situational in the sense that there is no invitation to meditate, to contemplate.'

'My icons do not raise up the blessed saviour in elaborate cathedrals. They are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light.'

'One might not think of light as matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.'

Dan Flavin

A Freudian Photo Finish

Man Ray (1890-1976) - La Marquise Casati, 1922


'The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.'

Walter Benjamin

I See Red

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) - The Red Studio, 1911


'Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.'

Oscar Wilde

The Icy Maze

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) - Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue, 1921


'Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.'

Theodor Adorno

The Enigma Of Everyday Objects

Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) - Pipes and Drinking Pitcher, 1737


'The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Four Fanciful Seasons (April Special)

Giuseppe Arcimboldo - Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring, 1573

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.

Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream

I Come To Bury History, Not To Paint It

André Bauchant (1873-1958) - Cleopatra's Barge, 1939


'History is the science of what never happens twice.'

Paul Valéry

Two Deaths And Only One Life

Piero do Cosimo (1462-1521) - The Death of Procris, c. 1500


'If I was strange, and strange were my figures,
Such strangeness is a source both of grace and art;
And whoever adds strangeness here and there to his style,
Gives life, force and spirit to his paintings.'

(Piero di Cosimo's epitaph.)

I Shot Frida Kahlo

Yasumasa Morimura (b. 1951) - An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Collar of Thorns), 2001

"Transcendental guarantees of truth are dead; in the agonal struggle of language games there is no commensurability; there are no criteria of truth transcending local discourses, but only the endless struggle of local narratives vying with one another for legitimation."

From Situating the Self by Selya Benhabib

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I've Got That Floating Feeling

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


'Love is metaphysical gravity.'

R. Buckminster Fuller