grad friends

Writing a bit each day is wonderful. I actually am remembering where I left my art practice. Sounds strange... but I tend to terrible forgetfulness, especially with all the geographical shifts.

I have been thinking very much of my four graduate school colleagues. They are all wonderful artists. Here is an image of the project called Smile Generator by Peter Goff who went to Malawi in 2009 on a Fulbright Grant. He has a talk today on the project: good luck to him! From what I gather in the writing, the Smile Generator was a goat. I am smiling. The other image of the sculpture is from our graduate show at the Weatherspoon. Peter always has a delicate line somewhere...

Peter Goff, Smile Generator (Eating), 2009

Peter Goff, chew-drive-comb, 2008

I think of Katie's drawings and painting all the time nowadays. She had such a light touch, and in my memory she spent her entire graduate career taming the ephemerality of space in her work--well taming it enough so she could catch an image of it, but the space it seems (inside and outside a body) will always be wild and intimate at the same time. I wanted to post her drawings too, but can't get a link to them...

Katie Claibourne, 2008 (can't find title)

Katie Claibourne, Self Portrait, 2007, oil on paper, 12 x15

Jeff has a new body of work since graduate school as well. His sculptures are an amalgamation of memory and material. Even though Jeff and I probably had vastly different childhoods, there is something about his work that makes me nostalgic for  my toys and fantasies from when I was little. I always wanted his sculpture the 'Rider' (pictured below) for myself. I wish I wasn't always moving all over, so I could carry and keep my friends' work with me. Soon perhaps...

Jeff Bell, Recent Work (Divide) (2010) wood, fabric.

Jeff Bell, Rogue Series (Rider) (2007) steel, paint.

Kelly's work just is. I remember how she even stuck feathers and sequence on her painting once--it was like a painted party! Very intelligent, honest, and colorful. Kelly's studio was right next to mine and whenever I would step in Kelly was of on some other adventure in space and form, sometimes a large painting sometimes little tiny ones. Latest from her blog post, she was gathering text into her paintings.

Kelly Queener, 2010, (can't find the title)

Kelly Queener, 2010, (can't find the title)

Have to exchange and collect my friends works soon!

catching up with art in india

Akshay 
Rathore, 
Chorpai 
2010,
 Barbed Wire,
 Milled
 Steel,
 Wood.

Something about the white elephant in the room: what are the connections and distinctions, between art from one country and another? By all mean it will take forever to figure this out, much more than one post at least. For me the countries being compared will be India, America, Nepal, and now the Netherlands.

It is clear that tendencies in art can and are differentiated by the trajectories, histories, and traditions of art and artists that emerged in a country. Room is also made for transnational influences as artist practices are informed by artists and movements from all over the world. Presently, media allows images and news to be exchanged very quickly, and museums and especially galleries have a new found reach across countries. In her article Modernity And Its Visual Response: The Last Six Decades, Shukla Sawant (artist and academician) writes about art in India and outlines the movement of Indian artists across, inside, and outside the country's boundaries after independence; 'modern', 'folk', formal, narrative, and nature influences on their work; development of new art schools, collectives, and organizations in the country, and even the relations between 'First World' and 'Third World' countries. A highly recommendable article to those interested in Indian art!

Also, in my experience, artists from India or Pakistan, for instance, might opt for a graduate education outside their birth-lands. For me (I've studied in too many places perhaps) this process of variables, exaggerated by other instabilities or subversions and choices, suggested a terrain of communication that was constantly being re-negotiated. Painting and drawing took a back seat during my graduate career because my primary concerns of the time--language, translation, communication, hospitality, and food--were most malleable in my hands when dealt in video, performance, poetry etc.

It is interesting now, how there is such a remarkable presence of artists from India (or even Pakistan or China) in the transnational art scene. I can't say too much about the subject, because I am introducing myself to it as I write these posts. On a side note, I am starting many lists in the periphery of this posts that will gather gallery paces and artist organizations from all the countries in my network.

The images in this post are from an interesting show (by Indian or Pakistani artists? ) being held at Nature Morte in Berlin. Looking at the latest contemporary art from India is an entry point to many new discourses to me. For instance the discourse of material. I really love the use of silk in the Gahlot's 'When you leave me' (pictured below)--vibrant colors and you can almost feel the luscious stuffed organs in your hands. Even the use of barb wire in Rathor's 'Chorpai' pictured above is a visceral connection between materials and experiences for those who have slept on a charpai (khat or cot) or jumped over barb wire in India. Visceral indeed!

Suchitra Gahlot, When You Leave Me, 2010, Installation in Silk, Velvet, Glass & Steel.

studio jan 19 weaving surface

For a while I forgot where the idea in these images was going... I worked on it a little more today and remembered something new. I imagine a surface woven and detailed.

Having recently focused my energies for the development of my art practice, I face the awesome question of what exactly is my practice? This has always been a rather complicated query for me, and never have I located an answer. Arjun Appadurai, a cultural studies academic who studies globalization, writes about the cultural reproduction of self or the enculturation of a family in his essay "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy" from his book Modernity at Large (thanks to my M.Phil program for linking me to all these important writers). He says,

As families move to new locations, or as children move before older generations, or as grown sons and daughters return from time spent in strange parts of the world, family relationships can become volatile, new commodity patterns are negotiated, debts and obligations are recalibrated, and rumors and fantasies about the new settings are maneuvered into existing repertoires of knowledge and practice...

It is in this atmosphere that the invention of tradition (and of ethnicity, kinship, and other identity markers) can become slippery, as search for certainties is regularly frustrated by the fluidities of transnational communication. As a group pasts become increasingly parts of museums, exhibits, and collections, both in national and transnational spectacles, culture becomes less what Pierre Bourdieu would have called a habitus (a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) and more an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation, the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences. (Appadurai, 1997, 43-44)

Because of this constant stress of what Appadurai calls 'consciously choosing', perhaps I have forgotten that one actually doesn't choose an art practice, it in some way happens to the artist. That is the only way art can ever truly just be, and remain present, unconscious of itself.

 I have a project brewing in my mind and will keep posting pictures as and when it gets along.

studio jan 18

Incomplete Still Life, GSaxena, acrylic, Jan 18 2011

 I have to play catch up with everything that comprises my imagined practice. As you can see painting and drawing form a large part of that imagination. I am trying to pick up where I left off.

This still life composition became on its own. A flowering bulb of mine had dried up in its pot (placed inside a glass cup). I was just rearranging and cleaning when the colors in the composition seemed to become important for me. The internet never reproduces reds and pinks justifiably... but still one gets an idea.

kahlo and the self

Frida Kahlo - Self-portrait, The broken column, 1944

Frida Kahlo in her studio with The Two Fridas, Coyoacán, Mexico

It is a tumultuous affair to merely look at her paintings, or read about Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), let alone--I imagine--to have been Frida Kahlo. She underwent 30 surgeries in her life (related to impediments she had since birth and a major accident when she was 18), had 3 abortions and no children, her one leg was eventually amputated, and she had a torrential emotional life. Painting came to her at a time she was physically impaired unable to move. Because of her work, life, and the inspiration she was visited with,  a great romantic imagination surrounds Ms. Kahlo today. Her paintings are straight forward, personal, representational, sometimes full of pain.  She embodies the popular concept of an Artist with a capital A.

What is the place that representation holds in painting and drawing today? And what is it relation to me? Pain and love and the story of the self were important for Ms. Kahlo's work. But such intensities are not present in all art one sees. Are they?

Language can evaporate the ephemeral. And today my ideas are ephemeral or perhaps non-present. Best to start a new drawing...

In the painting below titled, "What the Water Gave Me" Kahlo has painted a vision perhaps she had while bathing. In the middle of the painting one can see a naked Kahlo being strangled indirectly as the rope goes through various nodes before reaching its end, or wrapping itself around Kahlo's neck. Insects and figures do a tight rope walk on this very strangling device. Her dress floats away close by, a bird lies dead on a tree top, a building is consumed by a fire volcano, a couple hides behind a bush, a ship is close by this imagination, one woman comforts another. It is a fragile system, a vulnerable system... Maybe it is a spider that has trapped Kahlo.

What the Water Gave Me, Frida Kahlo, 1938

Self-Portrait with Monkey, Kahlo Frida,  1938

studio jan 17

4 Studies (Not in the order they were made) , Jan 2011, GSaxena, acrylic, 7"x5"

Agnes Martin, in the previously posted interview, said something about how inspiration will pass through the artist, if the artist is still enough. And if the artist is still enough they can catch the inspiration, and should then let it be just as it is, without their ego affecting it. She also rallied a bit against the education system that asked its students to overproduce, to mold themselves, to experiment etc etc.

To be honest, if I were to follow Martin's principles, it would be hard for me to know what to do, how long to wait, and then perhaps stillness would be of great value. Currently I am thinking of everything from installations, to drawings, to fabric, to paintings, to illustrations (is that experimentation? it is not without inspiration...) I am thinking of the prolific. I just have to do it that way at the moment, get it all out of my system. Sort of like when I clean a very cluttered room.

Speaking of clutter, my instinct is to either clean if I have the energy. I throw things if I am racing against time and space, if i have to move away, or if i am upset. If I feel ill, I just let things be, and spaces become overwhelming. If I am to have people over, according to me instincts I am inclined to clean. It was the same when I used to have studio visits in graduate school. If I knew someone would be about to visit me, I would clean and sweep up. I became nervous about cleaning eventually, especially when I was made aware of over designed qualities in my work. I wondered if cleaning was a facade--sort of like sweeping something embarrassing away. Maybe I was sweeping away some important incompleteness each time. In the case of such self doubt, something inside collapsed. I started to resist the urge to clean, but along with that certain other things became resisted/repressed as well due to self consciousness. I didn't produce much work, I believe, after that.

However, I feel ready to face that something or incompleteness now. I stand behind a closed door, eager. As far as what form my practice should take... I will try to do it all, and as when it comes to me. Even if it means drawing something representational, weaving a form, taking a picture etc etc. I have to know what is there, and it won't do to edit.

Multiplicity, polyphony are there.

studio jan 13

New Work, Jan 14 2011, Gsaxena

agnes martin and ideas

Agnes Martin, Stars, 1963, 12x12 inches, ink and watercolor.

Agnes Martin (1912-2004) was a very interesting artist, in that she spent her life mostly by herself. Her art, in itself, is interesting because it is known to primarily comprise of painted, printed, and drawn grids--very beautiful ones. In a longer version of the video above, Martin says something about experimentation that is frustrating and revealing. I paraphrasing her: "Art was never made by experimentation, as if it were a science." She firmly believes that art comes from inspiration, that art can not be spoken about, only felt, and that ideas could only hinder the process of making.

I think something of her beliefs are actually lost in language once she phrased them. For instance, as most of her body of work comprises grids, one can say her whole career in a way dealt with an experimentation with the grid form. Martin would fervently deny such a statement... and she would be right. The unavoidable problem is in using language/words to frame the art process. I think Martin was able to achieve an empty mind-- and in that emptiness those grids glided gracefully, finding a space to occupy with dignity and beauty. It wouldn't have been possible if she thought, "Now I must create as many forms of the grid as possible."

Also, Martin's work does comprise other images than grids...

Agnes Martin, "Untitled" (2004). 
Ink on paper. 3 1/2" × 2 3/4".

a gambit of equal value

There are a lot of things on my mind. Since the morning I worked on a collage, cleaned up pictures, looked at other artist images, spoke to my family oversees, and... decided to withdraw from my M.Phil program (cinema studies)... I just wrote to my guide and explained the circumstances.

Nowadays, my mind is bursting with a creative fervor; more often than not I find myself drifting into my art studio/practice everyday--looking at artist work, making work of my own, guilty escapes--rather than focusing on my thesis. It is a well thought and fair decision to leave the program, and my heart and vision feels lighter. Now I await what my guide says...

I learned quite a bit from the M.Phil program. Through it I was able to connect to a world of philosophy and cultural studies--to the Frankfurt school, the Marxist, the structuralist, post-structuralist, phenomenologists, ethnographers, film theorists, postmodernists, etc--that I found intimidating to study on my own. Those fields are so vast however that I have merely scratched their surface, but at least I have an entry-point now.

Here is an image/object fresh from the studio:

pfaff and scale

Judy Pfaff, "Umidum", 2011, honeycomb cardboard, wire frame, expanded
foam, shellac, sunflowers, tree fungus, paper lanterns, approx. 128 x 162
x 36 in. Courtesy of the artist and Ameringer, McEnery, and Yohe, New
York.


Judy Pfaff, Flusso E Riflusso 1992 Steel, wire,
wood and paint 12 feet x 25 feet x 20 feet
Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY


Judy Pfaff will have a show at the Weatherspoon Museum soon. Since I am thinking of starting a large scale drawing, her work seems very relevant to look at. Materials ooze out of Ms. Pfaff--varying in color and density. I am not sure whether her drawings are like landscapes, or have a dynamic movement in them--perhaps they are shifting. An interesting one to look at is her 2009 drawing Rosie's Bed. Her sculptures and installations are tense with momentum. Aware of space, they seem to crystallize the concept of aggressive and graceful growth in nature (and otherwise?). Each surface of her drawing, individually deserves to be called prolific.

Her studio looks amazing as well... so large. I can only imagine all the material skills she has acquired through her approximately 30 years of artistic career. I am slightly envious! Some very interesting videos of Pfaff at work can be seen on the Art 21 website.


Judy Pfaff, . . . all of the above
2007 Ameringer/Yohe Fine Art, New York, NY.

one out of many

I did another drawing marathon yesterday. This time I'm choosing to post only one image. This is again a very small drawing done in my sketchbook. I liked it because its mark making wasn't abrasive. I was able to get a dark line with paint and water, and the lines still contain in themselves the fluidity of their initial gesture.

Actually one of the main problems with the other drawings was that their pictures and post-production didn't turn out well. Also, perhaps their surfaces were overworked...

plans

A new erasing...

This space is becoming for me a room to educate myself in. In grad school, art as a whole and drawing in particular seemed difficult to look in the eye. My mind is lighter now, the route to the studio a little more straight forward (also I probably needed some sort of incubation time... to let inconsistencies, anxieties, and types of love stew together). This blog is helping: looking at other artist works, drawing a little something everyday. It is more than likely that what I draw is influenced by what I look at. To borrow a bit of an admired artist's language/mark is essential, I think, as a learning tool: it improves ones understanding of the mark, and one can delve deeper into process.

I bought a giant roll of drawing paper over the weekend. I am planning on doing one Sol Lewitt style, intricate geometry like drawing (should do it on the wall but my walls are rented!)... and planning to create one giant sketchbook of mark making on the other... I wonder what the paper will be like (I can't read these dutch product labels... should carry around a dictionary... i asked the shopkeeper whether the paper was cold or hot pressed (it was smooth so i though hot press)... he said it was no press... perhaps he mistook that I was asking whether the paper would be suitable for printing etchings or something. or maybe there are some papers that are really not pressed!? hmmm...)

twombly and need

Untitled 1961, Cy Twombly, Oil, house paint, and pencil on canvas
8' 4 3/4" by 10' 7/8" (Private Collection)

A week ago, I posted this painting above and didn't know who the artist was... thought it was Eva Hesse because of erroneous internet research. Of course now I know it is by Cy Twombly. My goodness, I like his drawings/paintings. There is a wonderful website dedicated to Cy Twombly's work where one can go through his paintings and sculptures by decades. (I am looking through the galleries as I type this post).

Barthes wrote a lovely essay on Cy Twombly's paintings called "The Wisdom of Art" (I can't say whether this version on the internet is wholly accurate, having recently suffered web deception). I am still in the process of reading the essay. I like reading about art. It gives a language and an importance to that which is visible but may often be unsaid: the process. In an essay like Barthes wrote, Barthes is sort of a detective gathering evidence (he lists the types of marks--scratching, smudging, smearing-- the written inscriptions etc) in order to direct his visuality through the artist's process of making... To see clearly, the read about that process, gives me proof of the vital need to make art...

Barthes writes about materiality in the essay:

"Twombly's art consist in making us see things: not those which he represents (this is another problem), but those which he manipulates: a few pencil strokes, this squared paper, this touch of pink, this brown smudge. This is an art with a secret, which is in general not that of spreading the substance (charcoal, ink, oils) but of letting its trail behind. One might think that in order to express the character of pencil, one has to press it against the paper, to reinforce its appearance, to make it thick, intensely black.

Twombly thinks the opposite: it is in holding check the pressure of matter, it letting is alight almost nonchalantly on the paper so that its grain is a little dispersed, that matter will show its essence and make us certain of its correct name: this is pencil. If we wanted to philosophize a little, we would say that the essence of things is not in their weight but in their lightness; and we would thereby perhaps confirm one of Nietzsche's statements: "What is good is light": and indeed, nothing is less Wagnerian than Twombly."

Twombly writes out lines of poetry (from what I have learned so far by poets such as Rilke and Virgil) in his paintings. Amazing. As far as the actual writing goes: there seems to be an acknowledgment of the inevitability of language and the word, and also at the same time how the word is in fact a drawing, or is truer as a drawing (similar to what Barthes says in his essay). Using actual poetry means introducing spoken history and affect to a form that may otherwise settle into abstraction and materiality... so it stretches a tense line from material to language, each becoming the other by turn.

Untitled 1954

Pan II, 1980.

Leda and the Swan (Part III), 1980

Apollo and the Artist, 1975

white clarity materiality

Suprematist Composition: White on White
Kazimir Malevich (Russian, born Ukraine. 1878-1935)
1918. Oil on canvas, 31 1/4 x 31 1/4" (79.4 x 79.4 cm). 1935. (MOMA Collection)

I have a lot of white going on in my drawings usually. I tend to leave the paper background untouched etc. This made me think of looking at some Malevich squares (just on the internet at the time). It is interesting how the use of white can lend itself to an investigation of materiality. I don't think it need always be the case, but there is a boiling down that white seeks... I like materiality, but I don't know whether I tend to white because of that interest, or whether sometimes I am just afraid of mucking things up. It is true when I overwork drawings, I, on a personal note, tend to loose clarity. Things become sort of a rant--they reveal something, but the intent becomes all jumbled up in lines and smudges. Hmm... Feels like the easy way is to either avoid mucking, or to just embrace it no questions asked. The more challenging thing might be to find an intent for each drawing. I like the challenge/tension of not knowing: should I muck up, control, what? 

drawing marathon

After discussing the prolific, I felt like doing a drawing marathon yesterday. I learned quite a bit. It is important not to judge a drawing... A marathon just lets you see it as they come.

Also, I really enjoyed drawing with a paint brush--it gave the lines a thickness, awkwardness, unpredictability that was nice. Also there was just something nice about a fat squishy paint mark that was exhilarating.

I've arranged the drawings in the order they were made in my sketchbook and haven't omitted drawings. There are some that I like more than others (judging judging), but i thought I would just look at them all together for awhile. I just spent 2-3 hours drawing. I should be working on my thesis... (Also will make better pictures/scans next time around.)

prolific hesse

It is amazing to see the work of prolific artists. I don't know what the painting above by Eva Hesse is called, or how large it is. I'll update this post once I find out. A city of marks made on this one surface. Each mark seems to be a note for a new sculpture. A city of sculptures. Here is a famous saying by Sol Lewitt to Hesse that seems to capture the prolific nature of her work.

The artist came to my mind because I overheard friends talking about this exhibition at the Hammer Museum called Eva Hesse Spectres 1960, and because her drawings were part of the On Line exhibition at MOMA. She is on the mind of many no doubt.

I love the little painting from the Spectres exhibition at the end of this post. The belly is made with a multicolored brush stroke--a whoosh. It belongs to the darker body, and becomes from the leg and merges into the arm...

line drawings

Vera Molnar, Interruptions, 1968/69, open series, 28.5 x 28.5 cm

I saw some very lovely drawings at the online MOMA drawing exhibition called "On Line-Drawing Through the Twentieth Century". The exhibition is divided into Surface Tension, Line Extension, and Confluence of Line and Plane.Beautiful collection! The image above is a generative line drawing by one of the artists Vera Molnar (not the image showcased in the MOMA exhibition).

The simplicity and accessibility of a line, I find so comforting visually.

drawing dec 2010

Drawings arranged as a triptych, each is 5"x6.75"

I try to do little collages and drawings when i get time between writing. I wish I had more time to devote to making art. I'll be there soon.

art and tarkovsky

Stumbled on this video of Tarkovsky all over again when I was searching for a clip of his film Nostalghia (1983). I had started watching the film last year and couldn't continue. Tarkovsky is my favorite film maker, but this last year I have not returned to him. His silences had become loud. In the first sequence in Nostalghia I felt as if all his characters were not just acting, but acting for me specifically, that they would stop acting if I turned the movie off--sort of like the dilemma of the book that will loose its print once it is shut: who can say? I feel like watching the film once again today, but it sits far away in my old room.

Art as a tool to come closer to spiritual enlightenment: it is beautiful and lofty this thought by Tarkovsky. I agree with it, yet move to turn the volume down. Tarkovsky should laugh... (edit) but there is such a comfort in hie seriousness to the artist in me.

textile design

Textile of Purple Hare in Foliage, 4th-5th Century C.E., Egypt (Brooklyn Museum Collection)

On passing the surface of an ancient textile (or even a contemporary one) through a scanner: one can see the details of the weave and inner life of color. I am very excited about textile prints nowadays. More interesting than pieces of art, or rare prints even, I think are mass produced prints. I want to catch up on the story of mass produced prints. I know the history of fabric might be deeply entangled with the colonial past, and that the present of the industry probably deals with the reality of non-environmental friendly dyes... but prints are beautiful all the same! I am tempted to leave the image below at the high resolution I found it: it captures surface nuance so seductively. The man's face is haunting as well-- his the missing eye... I've left it quite large (although you can magnify it further if you click on it so it can fill the entire screen.)

I would love to write about these images, but I just keep staring at them instead. Thinking about "nothing or something": have the missing portions gone missing, or do they still haunt the design, and what about the interface where the missing is missed by the present as can be seen in the lower right corner of the violet hare.

Drawing of a man, 6th-7th century (Coptic Museum in Cairo Collection)

celan and heidegger

Paul Celan

Martin Heidegger

Here is an essay--CELAN / HEIDEGGER: TRANSLATION AT THE MOUNTAIN OF DEATH--from 1988 that interprets Paul Celan's poem "Todtnauberg" (1966) which was written after an encounter between Celan and Martin Heidegger at Todtnauberg: they went for a walk after meeting at Heidegger's cottage. Heidegger was a philosopher influenced by phenomenology and, sadly, a supporter of the Nazi National Socialist party. Pierre Joris interprets the poem as Celan--a German Jew--seeking some sort of closure from Heidegger regarding the Nazi movement. Unfortunately, according to Joris, the conversation (of which no transcript was made) gave no such closure to Celan. Joris puts forth the nuanced meaning of each word very thoughtfully and clearly in the essay.

I like Joris's description of the poem. He says it is "a single sentence, divided into eight stanzas, five of which have but two lines, and is essentially composed of parataxically juxtaposed nouns and noun-clauses commenting on those nouns, seperated by commas until a single period brings the poem to a close. One gets the feeling of something cut-up, stretched-out, retracting, fore-shortening itself: nearly not a poem, the sentence feels like the remainder, the residue, of an aborted or impossible narration or relation; gnomic, "quickly scribbled notes, hopes for a poem, a private aide-mémoire understandable only to the one who took them." Lacoue-Labarthe calls it "un poème exténué, pour tout dire, déçu" - "an exhausted, even disappointed poem"."

These intersections or moments between historic figures ties together so much for me. Otherwise their thoughts and views or, more truthfully, just their names float around in my mind without a sense of temporality. Even their photographs help to pin them down. And then I can see the poem more clearly and I can see why it would be a "disappointed poem."


TODTNAUBERG

Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-die on top,

in the
Hütte,

written in the book
- whose name did it record
before mine - ?
in this book
the line about
a hope, today,
for a thinker's
word
to come,
in the heart,

forest sward, unleveled,
orchis and orchis, singly,

crudeness, later, while driving,
clearly,

he who drives us, the man,
he who also hears it,

the half-
trod log-
trails on the highmoor,
humidity,
much.

impossible reality

The Cholmondeley Sisters (1600-10)

"There is a famous painting of the English school, The Cholmondeley Sisters (1600-10), which represents two sisters side by side, each holding a baby in her arms. The two sisters look very much alike, as do the babies, sisters and babies are dressed almost identically, and so on. Confronted with this canvas, one is disturbed by a repetition that is not a repetition, by a contradictory repetition. What is here painted is the very subject of figurative painting: repetition, with, in this repetition, all the play of the innumerable differences which at once destroy it (from one figure to the other, nothing is identical) and assert it as violent effect. Panic and confusion of the look doubled and split. The image is in the image, the double is not the same, the repetition is a fiction: it makes us believe that it repeats itself just because it does not repeat itself. It is in the most "analogical" representation (never completely so), the most "faithful", the most "realistic", that the effects of representation can be most easily read. One must be fooled by the image in order to see it as such (and no longer as a projection of the world)." [Jean-Louis Comolli, Machines of the Visible, 1971]

I am reading this article by Comolli for my thesis, and this passage made me read it a few times over. I like the way that illusion, or "reality," or mimesis, or duplication all loose their threatening stance and become play when one can clearly see they are inevitably impossible.

This painting, in my memory, is an image in an art book that I used to have as a child. For me this image was just a marker of that time before I encountered it again in Comolli's essay. It meant nothing more to me as a child than the simple security of turning to art in a book. Yet the image had a formality that made me pass it by quickly, like hurrying from a room full of adults: there is something piercing about the eyes in the picture. Now that I am older, the image has a pleasing formality to it. I like the lace and intricacy of the clothing on both the women and the babies. I like the way the lady on the left sort of looks like Lauren Bacall; she seems to be in control, adept to the times she lives in. On the other hand, I am nervous for the lady on the right. She doesn't seem present, her eyes are outside he canvas, she isn't there... in the painting. I worry for her baby, but maybe I shouldn't: it looks more mature than she does. But it is a nervous painting isn't it? As a child I also hurried by it, because it seemed the ladies, babies and all, would fall right of the canvas at any moment. Strange that I had forgotten about that... the flattening of perspective (reminds me of Indian/Persian miniatures as well]. I guess I have 'learned' the painting by now. I don't look at it the way I used to: afresh without having a memory of it.

something and nothing

I saw this wonderful show that interviewed philosopher and professor Roy Sorenson. Sorenson talked about how nothing, empty spaces, darkness, etc. could in fact be though of as something. Amongst the numerous lovely clips he showed, I particularly liked one from an episode of a show called Night Galleries. The episode entitled "Eyes" [1969] directed by Spielberg stars Joan Crawford. Her character is blind but has--through devious ethical and moral medical means--acquired the ability to see: an ability that will last her a mere 11 hours. But when she opens her eyes vision doesn't quite turn out how she expected...



So much to think about in this clip. There is something about her orange dress which overflows with the expectation of looking... (My internet is hanging and I can't quite see the entire clip... it is as if my vision is just as suspended as Crawford's)

A place to come back to.

I am seeing so much nowadays, but it has long been a habit of mine to 'un'keep or 'mis'keep. I can hardly name the habit as something fortunate or otherwise, as it was/is the way things were/are. More usefully perhaps, the habit may be an index of experience, i.e. could the habit of 'un'keeping be an archive, or a tracing of, the restless activity of a body compelled to move? If so, then a relevant analogy is invisible ink--where experience in written but seems to disappear--in which case sight and experience are not 'un'kept but 'mis'kept, and I feel a revitalised hope and curiosity to recover something.

Physically I find the best way to recover, is actually to see and make more clearly in the present. I am currently writing my thesis on special effects and animation. The process will continue for another half a year. Till then I would like to archive things I see--in my work and work out there--so I at least keep tilling my art practice and my eye till I can return to it with more time. To write a little bit for myself and for art will be a strong support as well as an incentive to remain focused and productive in the present.