Adieu

Maxfield Parrish - The Lantern Bearers, c. 1910

Oh, little prince! Bit by bit I came to understand the secrets of your sad little life . . . For a long time you had found your only entertainment in the quiet pleasure of looking at the sunset.

I learned that new detail on the morning of the fourth day, when you said to me:

"I am very fond of sunsets. Come, let us go look at a sunset now."

"But we must wait," I said.

"Wait? For what?"

"For the sunset. We must wait until it is time."

At first you seemed to be very much surprised. And then you laughed to yourself. You said to me: "I am always thinking that I am at home!"

Just so. Everybody knows that when it is noon in the United States the sun is setting over France. If you could fly to France in one minute, you could go straight into the sunset, right from noon. Unfortunately, France is too far away for that. But on your tiny planet, my little prince, all you need do is move your chair a few steps. You can see the day end and the twilight falling whenever you like . . .

"One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!"

And a little later you added: "You know, one loves the sunset, when one is so sad . . ."

"Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?"

But the little prince made no reply.

From The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Ripples Of Reflection

Doug Aitken - don't think twice II, 2006

Reflection is the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our goals into the things that most deserve to be called into question.

Martin Heidegger

The Zen Commandments (Gerhard Richter)

Three Sisters, 1965

Forest Piece, 1965

Deer II, 1966

Shadow Picture, 1968

Sternbild Constellation, 1970

180 Colours, 1971

Three Candles, 1982

Apples, 1984

Dead, 1988

Tulips, 1995

Musique Du Jour: Farewell to Philosophy, Gavin Bryars

Tender Miseries

Gerhard Richter - I.G., 1993

alone with everybody

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

Charles Bukowski

Musique Du Jour: Song To The Siren, The Czars (The My Flash Fetish player does have a track for you to play today. Unfortunately, the operators of the widget have been toying with it again and disabled the listing function. Just click on the [blank] gray strip - where the words 'musique du jour' would normally be seen - if you want to hear Song To The Siren. For some reason, they have also made 'replay' the default setting. If you want to stop the track repeating, click 'play/pause'.)

Aesthetics, Year Zero

Brett Whiteley - Self Portrait in the Studio, 1976


There is no art without eyes that see it as art.

Jacques Rancière

Musique Du Jour: Blue Honey, Pop Levi

The Tenth Gate

Salvador Dalí - Illumined Pleasures, 1929

Musique Du Jour: White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane

Nine Gates

Dale Frank - a selection from the Transient Ischaemic Attack Painting series, 2005

Musique Du Jour: Spontaneous Sound, Christopher Tree

The Fairest Corpses Of All

Vanessa Beecroft - VB 43.005.te., 200o

This place that Proust slowly, anxiously comes to occupy anew every time he awakens: from that place, as soon as my eyes are open, I can no longer escape. Not that I am nailed down by it, since after all I can not only move, shift, but I can also move it, shift it, change its place. The only thing is this: I cannot move without it. I cannot leave it here where it is, so that I, myself, may go elsewhere; I can hide in the morning under the covers, make myself as small as possible, I can even let myself melt under the sun at the beach - it will always be there. Where I am. It is here, irreparably: it is never elsewhere. My body, it's the opposite of a utopia: that which is never under different skies. It is the absolute place, the little fragment of space where I am, literally, embodied [faire corps].

And what if by chance I lived with it, in a kind of worn familiarity, as with a shadow, or as with those everyday things that ultimately I no longer see, that life had grayed out, like those chimneys, those roofs that line the sky every night in front of my window? Still, every morning: same presence, same wounds. In front of my eyes the same unavoidable images are drawn, imposed by the mirror: thin face, slouching shoulders, myopic gaze, no more hair - not handsome at all. And it is in this ugly shell of my head, in this cage I do not like, that I will have to reveal myself and walk around; through this grill I must speak, look and be looked at; under this skin I will have to rot.

My body: it is the place without recourse to which I am condemned. And actually I think it is against this body (as if to erase it) that all these utopias have come into being. The prestige of utopia - to what does utopia owe its beauty, its marvel? Utopia is a place outside of all places, but it is a place where I will have a body without body, a body that will be beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous, speedy, colossal in its power, infinite in its duration. Untethered, invisible, protected - always transfigured. It may very well be that the first utopia, the one most deeply rooted in the hearts of men, is precisely the utopia of an incorporeal body.

Michel Foucault

Musique Du Jour: Model, Alexander Balanescu Quartet (Kraftwerk)

When White Was The New Black

Adolphe Gottlieb - Man Looking at Woman, 1949

Musique Du Jour: Play That Funky Music, White Boy, Sly and the Family Stone

Kiss My Art

Constantin Brancusi - The Kiss, 1907

Musique Du Jour: The Kiss, Michael Nyman

When Camille Met Auguste: Part Two

Camille Claudel - La Valse (detail), 1889-95

[Claudel] remained confident that in time her talent would be publicly recognised. Time, though, was running out. At her age, Rodin hadn't made much more progress socially, nor acquired many more graces. But women reached a social zenith that lasted as long as their youthful beauty; men seemed ever more attractive as they aged. The asset Claudel might have parlayed into professional opportunities was diminishing, while Rodin's artistic success was beginning to glow with a sexual aura.

. . .

Rodin's identity after the 1880s merged aesthetics with sexuality. He believed that his art and his virility came from the same source, and so did his contemporaries.

. . .

The marks of vigorous modelling Rodin left in clay, or the swift signs on paper, his ability to combine human figures in endlessly new permutations, the sheer quantity of his output and, above all, the erotic themes of his sculpture, all became indistinguishable from his personal sexuality. No one seemed able to write about Rodin's work, least of all Rodin himself, without using sexual metaphors. Language conflated nature, masculinity, and creativity. Bourdelle called his teacher "the great penetrator of human forms," and the different ways we might read that epithet today all meant the same things then.

. . .

Rodin's meanings empowered [his] avant-garde audience, enhanced their identity, freed them from ordinary bourgeois social constraints, and gave women - among them, of course, Camille Claudel - a newly positive belief in their own potential.

Rodins' work, however, carried different sexual meanings to other audiences. Nor were the formal messages of his sculpture immune, even among their intended audience, from the social values then prevailing in Europe. To anyone not versed in the elaborate terminology and sophistication of the art world, and to more than a few intellectuals once they stopped talking aesthetics, the figure of a headless, limbless woman with her legs splayed was nothing but a cunt.

Auguste Rodin - Iris, 1890

When he represented women, Rodin sedulously separated all signs of agency, individuality, or thought from any signs of sexuality. Far from guaranteeing a complete potency, women's gender was understood as a biological limitation. In Rodin's work, sexuality promises to unite men, but differentiates among women. Rodin treated upper-class women as portraits and his hired models as anonymous sexual creatures. Of course, what woman would want to pay to be represented by her genitalia? But isn't that the point? No woman whose class or economic situation allowed her any control over Rodin's production would tolerate this interpretation of other women for herself, because she understood the current derogatory implications of those representations all too clearly, despite their formal beauty. And no amount of social power then available to any woman could make her into a Thinker.

. . .

Rodin could not fundamentally alter Claudel's problem. Both in her professional carer and in her personal life, she still had to choose between the rigidly distinct options of respectability or sexuality. But she refused to choose. Unwilling or unable to understand her situation, Claudel persisted in her utopian desire to live outside the matrimonial laws of patriarchy and, at the same time, to practice the traditionally elite art of sculpture with perfect liberty.

. . .

This situation was not Rodin's personal responsibility; nor were Claudel's individual decisions. On the contrary, no one artist, not even the world's greatest living artist (as he began to be so often called) could affect gender roles in any significant way. Both Rodin and Claudel played out mythic roles they could neither determine nor alter. Rodin's turned on his talent...Hers overwhelmed her.

. . .

Only in her sculpture itself did she manoeuvre around social expectations. Even in her wok she seemed preoccupied with her own gender inasmuch as the majority of her figures represent women. Yet her version of gender is different - different from Rodin's, from that of his more sexually conservative peers, and from the earlier work of notable women sculptors, such as Marcello, or Harriet Hosmer. More importantly, in her sculptures of women we can discern no clear boundary between sexual and asexual...She represented the very young and the very old, the exultant and the despairing, the destitute and the wealthy. She sculpted women alone and in groups, meditative or addressing each other. None is the object of pity, sentimentality, or jest.

. . .

Claudel, whose work escaped the rules of femininity, succumbed to their retributions in her life. After her break with Rodin around 1893, she became increasingly reclusive and paranoid. Although critics like Gustave Kahn and the ever-loyal Morhardt, along with her brother, the poet Paul Claudel, wrote in her favour, and though the dealer Eugene Blot promoted what she produced as best he could through exhibitions and editions, she produces less and less, especially after 1905. She shut herself in an unkempt studio, collected cats, annoyed the neighbours. She raved about Rodin, accused him of stealing her ideas, of maligning her, of spying on her. The imbalance in their relationship had been magnified into madness. She had become merely an episode in his private life, whereas he had become a specter that haunted her and made her unable to distinguish between past and present, between her career and her psyche.

On March 2, 1913, Claudel's father died. His support of her had never wavered. Three days later, her brother Paul obtained a certificate from a doctor that authorised him, under an 1839 French law, to incarcerate his sister against her will. On March 10, Camille Claudel was seized in her studio and confined to an asylum for the insane. In asylums she remained for the rest of her life, first at Ville-Evrard and then at Monedevergues, near Avignon. She pleaded by letter to be released, but to no avail. Her mother answered one letter by writing to Claudel's doctor, "She has all the vices, I don't want to see her again." Claudel died in 1943 after thirty years of imprisonment.

Camille Claudel - The Age of Maturity, c. 1893-99

From Myths of Creation: Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin by Anne Higonnet

Musique Du Jour: Tristan and Isolde, Richard Wagner

A Fistful Of Levinas

Oscar Muñoz (b. 1951) - Line of Destiny, 2006 (single screen projection)

1. The object which presents itself to the thinker determines the thinker. But it determines the thinker without touching the thinker, without weighing down on him; in such a manner that the thinker submits to the imposed content of thought ‘in good grace’, as if he had anticipated the object right down to the surprises it holds in store for knowledge.

2. [Every] loss of time, every lapse, holds on to itself, or is recuperated in the memory, finds itself again, or is reconstructed; it adheres to an ensemble through the agency of memory or historiography. Consciousness in reminiscence glorifies the ultimate resilience of presence. The time of consciousness lends itself to [self-] representation – this is more strongly synchrony that diachrony.

3. To represent is not simply to render present ‘again’, it is to fetch back to the present itself an actual perception which is flowing away . . . to fetch back to the instantaneity of thought everything which seems independent of it.

4. The Same, in its relation to Alterity, refuses what is exterior to its own instant, to its identity in order to rediscover in that free-floating instant . . . as conferred sense, as a noema, everything which had been rejected.

5. Admittedly, the self which conducts its thoughts becomes (or, more exactly, ages) in the time in which are spread out its [the self’s] successive thoughts throughout which the self thinks in the present. But this becoming does not appear on the level of representation.

Emmanuel Levinas

Musique Du Jour: Pendulum Music, Steve Reich

Build It And They Will Muse (Redux)

Nike Savvas - Atomic: full of love, full of wonder, 2005

. . . in all time
Calm or convuls'd - in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving; - boundless, endless, and sublime -
The image of Eternity . . .

Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation". Creative viewing.

William S. Burroughs

Expressing what exists is an endless task.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Musique Du Jour: Across the Universe, Fiona Apple

This Is Not A Paint(h)ing: Part Two (Redux)

Hiraki Sawa (b. 1977) - Going Places Sitting Down (video still), 2004

I believe a leaf of grass is not less than the
journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand,
and the egg of the wren,
And the tree toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours
0f heaven . . .

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Psychologists - and more especially philosophers - pay little attention to the play of miniature frequently introduced into fairytales. In the eyes of the psychologist, the writer is merely amusing himself when he creates houses that can be set on a pea. But this is a basic absurdity that places the tale on a level with the merest fantasy. And fantasy precludes the writer from entering, really, into the domain of the fantastic. Indeed he himself, when he develops his facile inventions, often quite ponderously, would appear not to believe in a psychological reality that corresponds to these miniature features. He lacks that little particle of dream which could be handed on from writer to reader. To make others believe, we must believe ourselves. Is it worthwhile, then, for a philosopher to raise a phenomenological problem with regard to these literary "miniatures", these objects that are so easily made smaller through literary means? Is it possible for the conscious - of both writer and reader - to play a sincere role in the very origin of images of this kind?

Yet we are obliged to grant these images a certain objectivity, from the mere fact that they both attract and interest many dreamers. One might say that these houses in miniature are false objects that possess a true psychological objectivity. Here the process of imagination is typical, and poses a problem that must be distinguished from the general problem of geometrical similarities. The geometrician sees exactly the same thing in two similar figures, drawn to different scales. The plan of a house drawn on a reduced scale implies none of the problems that are inherent to a philosophy of the imagination. There is even no need to consider it from the general standpoint of representation, although it would be important, from this standpoint, to study the phenomenology of similarity. Our study should be specified as belonging definitely under the imagination.

Everything will be clear, for instance, if, in order to enter into the domain where we imagine, we are forced to cross the threshold of absurdity, as in the case of [Bean Treasure] , Charles Nodier's hero, who gets into a fairy's coach the size of a bean. In fact, he gets into it with six "litrons" of beans on his shoulder. There is thus a contradiction in numbers as well as in the size of the space involved. Six thousand beans fit into one. And the same thing is true when Michael - who is oversize - finds himself, to his great surprise, in the house of the [Beggar Fairy], which is hidden under a tuft of grass. But he feels at home there, and settles down. Happy at being in a small place, he realises an experience of topohilia; that is, once inside the miniature house, he sees its vast number of rooms; from the interior he discovers interior beauty. Here we have an inversion of perspective, which is either fleeting or captivating, according to the talent of the narrator, or the reader's capacity for dream. Nodier, who was often too eager to be "agreeable", and too much amused to give full reign to his imagination, allows certain badly camouflaged rationalisations to subsist. In order to explain psychologically this entry into the tiny house, he recalls the little cardboard houses that children play with. In other words, the tiny things we imagine simply take us back to childhood, to familiarity with toys and the reality of toys.

But the imagination deserves better than that. In point of fact, imagination in miniature is natural imagination which appears at all ages in the daydreams of born dreamers. Indeed, the element of amusement must be removed, if we are to find its true psychological roots.

. . .

Representation becomes nothing but a body of expressions with which to communicate our own images to others. In line with a philosophy that accepts the imagination as a basic faculty, one could say, in the manner of Schopenhauer: "The world is my imagination." The cleverer I am at miniaturising the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this, it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature. Platonic dialectics of large and small do not suffice for us to become cognizant of the dynamic virtues of miniature thinking. One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small.

Gaston Bachelard

Musique Du Jour: Badlands, David Chesworth

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition XIV

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840): Landscapes Of The Soul

Before Sunrise, 1830-34

Hill and Ploughed Field Near Dresden, 1824

The Garden Terrace, 1811-12

Evening, 1824

The Evening Star, 1830-35

Moonrise over the Sea, 1821

By intuition, Mightiest Things
Assert themselves — and not by terms —
"I'm Midnight" — need the Midnight say —
"I'm Sunrise" — Need the Majesty?

Omnipotence — had not a Tongue —
His lisp — is Lightning — and the Sun —
His Conversation — with the Sea —
"How shall you know"?
Consult your Eye!

Emily Dickinson

Musique Du Jour: Symphoniae (Spiritual Songs), Hildegard von Bingen