After We've Smoked Another Silence

Nan Goldin (b. 1953) - Nan and Brian in Bed, NYC, 1983

To love another person you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.

Quentin Crisp

Musique Du Jour: Drive You Home, Garbage

Madness Became Him (Redux)

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)

God is just another artist, like me.

Salvador Dalí

Musique Du Jour: Soy Caminante, El Camarón de la Isla (and Salvador Dalí Interview, 1963)

Arresting The Unfurling Of Sensation

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906):

Midday at L'Estaque, c. 1876-1879

Chestnut Trees at the Jas de Bouffan in Winter, c. 1885-1886

Dovecote at Bellevue, 1889-1890

The Bibémus Quarry, c. 1895

Montagne Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bibémus, c. 1897

Château Noir, 1900-1904

[It] is Cézanne's genius that when the overall picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in normal vision, to the impression of emerging order, an object in the act of appearing, organising itself before our very eyes.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Musique Du Jour: Preludes, Claude Debussy

Sex Is Not The Enemy (Redux)

Patty Chang (b. 1972) - Doll, 2001

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

Woody Allen

Musique Du Jour: (1) Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?, The Revolting Cocks, (2) I'm Ready, The Twilight Singers (Low Fidelity Allstars Remix), (3) Big Dumb Sex, Soundgarden, (4) Throw Me On The Bed, Machine Gun Fellatio, (5) Fuckin', Hot One, (6) Too Drunk To Fuck, Nouvelle Vague

Take Your Soul For A Spin

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) - Whirling Dervishes, c. 1895

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.

The ultimate most holy form of theory is action.

Every perfect traveller always creates the country where he travels.

Nikos Kazantzakis

Musique Du Jour: Ya Rayah, Rachid Taha

The Other Black Orpheus

Bo Diddley (1928-2008)

I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob.

I was out to destroy the audience. I wanted to destroy 'em, just make the toughest dude in the crowd pat his foot. I'd find a groove to get 'em by watching feet, and once I got one guy moving, I'd start working on the dude sitting next to him.

I thank you in advance for the great round of applause I'm about to get.

Bo Diddley

Musique Du Jour: Ten tracks by Bo Diddley

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition XIII

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)

Picture in Remembrance of Johann Emanuel Bremer, 1817

Griefswald in Moonlight, c. 1817

Northern Sea in the Moonlight, 1823

Swans in the Reeds by Dawn's Early Light, c. 1832

Evening Landscape with Two Men, c. 1830-35

The Nets, c. 1830-35

Art stands as the mediator between nature and humanity. The original is too great and too sublime for the multitude to grasp.

Caspar David Friedrich

Musique Du Jour: String Quartet in C sharp minor, Op.131 - Adagio, Beethoven

The Paris Papers: Part Four

Vale, Yves Saint-Laurent (1936-2008)

Raoul Dufy (1887-1953) - The Eiffel Tower, 1935


Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theatre, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicoloured lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman's voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and think they were happy, that time.

Italo Calvino ('Cities & Memory', Invisible Cities)

Musique Du Jour: La Vie en Rose, Grace Jones

The (Dis)enchantments Of Love

Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) - Untitled (under the skin, thin skin, skin deep, thick skin, skin tight, skinned alive), 2003

1. Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

2. Discredited by modern opinion, love's sentimentality must be assumed by the amorous subject as a powerful transgression which leaves him alone and exposed; by a reversal of values, then, it is this sentimentality which today constitutes love's obscenity.

Roland Barthes

Musique Du Jour: I've Got You Under My Skin, The Sun Spots and This Is Not A Love Song, Nouvelle Vague

Addendum XI

Cruel, But Not To Be Kind

Olivia de Havilland (Catherine Soper) and Montgomery Clift (Morris Townsend) in The Heiress, 1949 (d. William Wyler)

Art Is Creation's Unfinished Business

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906): How To Remake A Mountain In 12 Easy Steps

Montagne Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Chemin de Valcros, 1878-1879

Montagne Sainte-Victoire Seen from Montbriand, c. 1882

Montagne Sainte-Victoire Seen from Montbriand, 1882-1885

Montagne Sainte-Victoire, c. 1885-1890

Montagne Sainte-Victoire, near Gardanne, c. 1887

Montagne Sainte-Victoire, c. 1887

Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1888-1890

Montagne Sainte-Victoire, c. 1890-1895

Montagne Sainte-Victoire above the Route du Tholonet, 1896-1898

Montagne Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves, 1902-06

Montagne Sainte-Victoire Seen from Château Noir, 1904

Montagne Sainte-Victoire Seen from Château Noir, 1904

I remain in the grip of sense-perceptions and, in spite of my age, riveted to painting.

Paul Cézanne (Aix, 27th June, 1904)

Musique Du Jour: Itaipu, Philip Glass

Replay VII

A Freudian Photo Finish (Redux)

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


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

Walter Benjamin

Musique Du Jour: I Put A Spell On You, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Nina Simone, Marilyn Manson, Clearance Clearwater Revival, Joe Cocker and Pete Townsend

Six Images In Search Of A Censor

Untitled (If Bill Henson's Images Are "Kiddie Porn", So Are These)

Correggio - Danaë, 1530

Bronzino - Venus, Cupid and Time (1545)

Alessandro Allori - Venus and Cupid

Caravaggio - Amor Vincit Omnia, c. 1601-2

Caesar van Everdingen - Bacchus with Nymphs and Cupid, c. 1660

Claude-Augustin Cayot - Cupid and Psyche, 1706

Would You Like To Leave A Message?

Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) - Untitled (Question), 1991


Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in. I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty. I want people to be drawn into the space of the work. And a lot of people are like me in that they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity.

Barbara Kruger

Musique Du Jour: America is Waiting, Brian Eno and David Byrne

Seven Kinds Of Sadness: Part Seven

Ophelia's Last Dance (Redux)

John Everett Millais (1829-1896) - Ophelia, 1851-2

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears.

Laertes, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene vii, Shakespeare

In this painting Millais renounced accepted conventions for Shakespearean tragedy by attempting a literal realisation of Gertrude's speech in Hamlet in which the queen reports the suicide of Ophelia. Widely regarded as one of the "most marvellously and completely accurate and elaborate studies of nature ever made by the hand of man", Ophelia has come to epitomise Pre-Raphaelite vision. Between July and November 1851 Millais and Hunt worked together at Ewell near Kingston in Surrey painting landscape backgrounds for their respective pictures Ophelia and The Hireling Shepherd. It was only upon his return to London in December that Millais introduced the figure of Ophelia thus significantly reversing the standard academic procedure of subordinating background elements to the main human drama. Millais's method differed in another respect in that, apart from a few preliminary studies, he evolved the composition on the canvas itself, painting a small section at a time direct from the motif. This decision relates partly to the artist's adoption of a white ground upon which he painted in wet for the plants which further accounts for the extraordinary luminosity of the colour, particularly the verdant green, a compound of chrome yellow and Prussian blue.

It has been estimated that at Ewell Millais and Hunt between them expended approximately fifteen hundred hours painting landscapes, far more time than they gave to the figures themselves, which also explains why Ophelia appears subsumed by the claustrophobic luxuriance of the vegetation that surrounds her. This plein air approach inevitably involved considerable perseverance and, as Millais relayed in his correspondence with Mrs Thomas Combe, he not only had to contend with accusations of trespassing, but also with the wind, the threat of a bull, the annoyance of flies and two swans who persisted in watching him from the very spot he wished to paint. By enduring such physical and mental discomforts in order to abide by the Pre-Raphaelite principle of scrupulous observation, Millais could aptly be classed as a naturalist of both field and closet varieties. Indeed analogies have been drawn between the disposition of specimens within the frame and the viewing practices of naturalists, especially their practice of exhibiting plants in cabinets or Wardian cases: "the moss and flowers and vegetable details, are positively mirrored as in a glass. The waterlily is the botanical study of a Linnaeus", declared the Atheneum; while the painter's son recalled that perhaps the greatest compliment ever paid to Ophelia was when "a certain professor of Botany, being unable to take his class into the country and lecture from the objects before him, took them to the Guildhall, where this work was being exhibited, and discoursed to them upon the flowers and plants before them, which were, he said, as instructive as nature herself".

Millais's knowledge of plants developed as he worked on the composition and was encouraged by certain friends, among them Mrs Combe, and Tennyson who advised Millais that the daffodils included were inconsistent with the summer flowers elsewhere in the painting, causing the artist to delete them. Although its inordinate concentration on natural detail could be seen as an extension of the botanical particularities in Millais's Ferdinand Lured by Ariel. Ophelia is more radical in its near-sightedness, denying spatial recession and any suggestion of environment or atmosphere. It is the individuality of each specimen that matters rather than specificity of site, so that compared with traditional landscape conventions Ophelia has appeared paradoxically "unnatural" to some. P.G. Hamerton, for example, noting that the leaves looked artificial as if "cut out of sheet metal painted green". Moreover, in maximising the clarity of each object, light and shaded areas are accorded equal importance, resulting in an all-over two-dimensionality that negates any sense of hierarchical organisation. By according the plants equal status with the protagonist, Millais was exposing himself to accusations of bathos and mere imitation; Richard Redgrave for one criticised the work for its "laborious idleness" implying that no thought or invention had gone into the composition. Indeed the sheer sentience and abundance of detail virtually neutralises any feeling of tragedy.

It is precisely Millas's awareness of the fragility and transience of existence that lends Ophelia its poignancy, a quality imparted through both a naturalness and an unnaturalness of vision. More recently the writer Carol Christ has discussed Ophelia in terms of its "morbid intensity of vision", and ultimately it is the equalising but scattered focus that creates the disturbing sense of decomposition which provides such an appropriate visual equivalent for the morbidity of the subject.

A. Smith (in Pre-Raphealite Vision: Truth to Nature, 2004)

Dance Me To The End Of Love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Leonard Cohen

Musique Du Jour: Kindertotenlieder: 'Nun seh' ich wohl, warum so dunkle flammen', Gustav Mahler

Seven Kinds Of Sadness: Part Six

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) - La Femme Inconnue (Redux)

Summer Interior, 1909

Eleven A.M., 1926

Automat, 1927

Hotel Room, 1931

Room in New York, 1932

Morning Sun, 1952


Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

Carl Gustav Jung

Musique du Jour: Pink Martini, Everywhere