Orpheus Unbound

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


'Exterminate all rational thought.'

Bill Lee

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

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

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)

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)

More Marvellous Max

Max Ernst (1891-1976) - The Teetering Woman, 1923

'[The] marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful.'

André Breton (1896-1966)

Marvellous Max

Max Ernst (1891-1976) - Célèbes, 1921


'The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.'

André Breton (1896-1966)

Only The Dreamer Dies

Max Ernst (1891-1976) - Oedipus Rex, 1922


'Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all.'

André Breton (1896-1966)

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition IV

Kiki Smith (b. 1954): A Girl's Own Misadventure

Pool of Tears I, 2002




Pool of Tears II, 2002




Ave, 2000




Wolf Girl, 1999




Lying with the Wolf, 2001

Born, 2002


Links:

Mortal Coils - Faye Hirsch (Art in America, May, 2004)
Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
SFOMA Press Release
Kiki Smith Interview (The Brooklyn Rail)
Biography (Guggenheim Museum)

The Week in Review

Films:

2001, A Space Odyssey, 1968 - d. Stanley Kubrick
Au Hasard Balthazar, 1966 - d. Robert Bresson
Fantômas, 1913 - d. Louis Feuillade
The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964 - d. Pier Paolo Pasolini
The Naked Lunch, 1991 - d. David Cronenberg
Les Vampires, 1915 - d. Louis Feuillade

Television:

Twin Peaks: Pilot, 1990 - d. David Lynch
Twin Peaks: First Season, 1990 - d. David Lynch et. al.

Books:

Manifestos of Surrealism - André Breton
Poetics of Cinema - Raúl Ruiz

Music:

Bluebeard's Castle, 1911 - Belá Bartók
Lulu, 1937 (and 1979) - Alban Berg
Wozzek, 1925 - Alban Berg

Exhibitions:

Olafur Eliasson: The Cubic Structural Evolution Project, 2004 - NGV
Rosemary Laing - Tolarno Galleries

Three Monstrous Morphs (March Special)

Ernesto Neto (b. 1964) - Humanóides - 2001

Ernesto Neto (b. 1964) - We Stopped Just Here - 2002

Ernesto Neto (b. 1964) - The Dangerous Logic of Wooing - 2002


'[It] seems that Neto's work tries to form itself simultaneously in two dimensions: on the one hand, in the will to promote a materialisation of the body, which the work would reveal as a multiplicity composed of tensions and resistances, a physics of desire; on the other hand, in the intention of provoking the most complete dematerialisation of the physical elements that constitute the work, what could be called an "Aesthetics of Dream" to quote the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha. Work that is carried out within the parameters of modernity founded on a contamination between emotion and rationality. A modernism, or rather a reading of modernity, whose radicalness would consist not only in not excluding emotions, but in attempting to incorporate them into a constructive design.'

TRANS e-zine

All In The Split Of An Eye

Un chien andalou, 1929 - d. Luis Buñuel (1900-1983)


'What a beautiful thing is a film booed by the crowd! I have only heard the public laugh at the movies. It is time that their faces be whipped so that we may know if there is blood under the skin. The cinema still lacks the consecration of catcalls in order to have the attention of men of heart. Obtain that, so finally the purity may appear which inspires spit.'

Louis Aragon (1897-1982)

The Other Bush Tea

Méret Oppenheim (1913-1985) - The Fur Luncheon, 1936

'If the provocation of Dejeuner sur l'herbe [Manet] consisted in its exhibition of nakedness . . . then Méret Oppenheim's teacup issues its challenge by covering its object seamlessly in precious fur, and thereby turning away the gaze from its 'naked' surface. The artist thus launches not only a simple reversal of relations, but uses the material that she has selected for her camouflage to ignite a double desire: for a glimpse of that which is hidden from view, and, above all, for a feel of that which is exhibited. '

Ursula Sennreich

Impossible Dreams

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarotti Simoni (1475-1564) - Moses (detail), 1515



'I hope that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.'

Michelangelo

Somewhere Between Certainty And Oblivion

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)


'The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been. This distinction is decisive. In front of a photograph, our consciousness does not necessarily take the nostalgic path of memory (how many photographs are outside of individual time), but for every photograph existing in the world, the path of certainty: the Photograph's essence is to ratify what it presents. One day I received from a photographer a picture of myself [not the one shown above, by the way] which I could not remember being taken, for all my efforts; I inspected the tie, the sweater, to discover in what circumstances I had worn them; to no avail. And yet, because it was a photograph I could not deny that I had been there (even if I did not know where). This distinction between certainty and oblivion gave me a kind of vertigo, something of a detective "anguish" (the theme of Blow-Up was not far off); I went on to the photographer's show as to a police investigation, to learn at last what I no longer knew about myself.'

From Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

Silently Stealing The World

Robert Capa, born Endre Ernö Friedmann (1913-1954) - Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936


'To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge - and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handsome visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality . . . '

From On Photography by Susan Sontag

Six Objects in Search Of An Exhibition II

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972): Thinking Inside The Box

Untitled (Soap Bubble Set), 1936

Untitled (Paul and Virginia), c. 1946-48

L'Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode, cours élémentaire d'histoire naturelle, 1940

Untitled (Solar Set), c. 1956-58

Untitled (Medici Boy), 1942-52

Setting for a Fairytale, 1942

The Week in Review

Films:

A Hard Day's Night, 1964 - d. Richard Lester
Help!, 1965 - d. Richard Lester
Magical Mystery Tour, 1967 - d. Bernard Knowles
Yellow Submarine, 1968 - d. George Dunning
Let it Be, 1970 - d. Michael Lindsay-Hogg

Rebel Without a Cause, 1955 - d. Nicholas Ray
Bitter Victory, 1957 - d. Nicholas Ray

Television:

Smallville: Season Five

Books:

Joseph Cornell - ed. Kynaston McShine
Joseph Cornell: Art and Metaphysics - Sandra Leonard Starr
Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams - Diane Waldman
Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay, Eterniday - Lynda Roscoe Hartigan et. al.
Joseph Cornell's Vision of Spiritual Order - Lindsay Blair
Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell - Deborah Solomon

Exhibitions:

Heroes and Villains: Australian Comics and their Creators - State Library of Victoria

Music:

Medulla, 2004 - Björk
Vespertine, 2001 - Björk
Homogenic, 1997 - Björk
Post, 1995 - Björk
Debut, 1993 - Björk

Bonus Quote

Magicians Of The Mundane

Joseph Cornell



'Every serious work of art contains two different lonelinesses. The first might be called "plastic loneliness", that is the beatitude of contemplation produced by the ingenious construction and combination of forms, whether they be still lifes come alive or figures become still - the double life of a still life, not as a pictorial subject but in its supersensory aspect, so that even a supposedly living figure might be included. The second loneliness is that of lines and signals; it is a metaphysical loneliness for which no logical training exists, visually or psychically.'

Giorgio de Chirico

Rotten Johnny

A Hard Day's Night - d. Richard Lester, 1964


'You have to be a bastard to make it, and that's a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.'

John Lennon

Live To Be Old, But Die Young

James Dean - Rebel Without a Cause, 1955 (d. Nicholas Ray)


'Dream as if you'll live forever; live as if you'll die tomorrow.'

James Dean

Supremely Simple

Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) - Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918




Richard Hamilton (b. 1922) - White Album cover, 1968


'Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.'

Leonardo da Vinci

Phyllosophy

Aristotle Ridden by Phyllis (Aquamanile), late 14th Century


'That women are thought to hold power over men . . . and that it is sexual power, is made explicit in [artworks] depicting the "Power of Woman" topos. In Phyllis Riding Aristotle, a key representation, the august and wise philosopher is shown down on all fours, like a beast, a situation to which he has been brought by having lusted after Phyllis. It was men, during the Renaissance and baroque periods, who were considered to have the capacity for the highest forms of reason. The humiliation of Aristotle, paradigmatic man of reason, clearly conveys the dangers of women.'

H. Diane Russell

Down At The End Of Lonely Street

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) - Evening on Karl Johan, 1892

Ghosts

Some ghosts are women,
neither abstract nor pale,
their breasts as limp as killed fish.
Not witches, but ghosts
who come, moving their useless arms
like forsaken servants.

Not all ghosts are women,
I have seen others;
fat, white-bellied men,
wearing their genitals like old rags.
Not devils, but ghosts.
This one thumps barefoot, lurching
above my bed.

But that isn't all.
Some ghosts are children.
Not angels, but ghosts;
curling like pink tea cups
on any pillow, or kicking,
showing their innocent bottoms, wailing
for Lucifer.

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

Best We Regret

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976) - Head of Christ, 1918

Anthem For Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)