AG2024111100331a or of flying and bilocating

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111100331a or s–.

How should we interpret these stories of flying and bilocating, of demons and chapped nipples? Of the body and its impossible desires? Eire’s approach is idiosyncratic. Across his scholarship he has aimed to “re-enchant” history, in the words of Ronald Rittgers. Eire understands modern secularism as its own kind of methodology, with its own interpretive shortcomings. Atheism, as much as faith, shapes the questions we ask of our sources and limits the possibilities of interpretation.

[…]

Faith—and especially lived faith, not abstract theology—can make history, too. “Belief is the immortal soul of the imagination,” Eire writes at the close of They Flew, and the power of belief to make history “can be limitless.”
As Eire and others have argued, secularism involves its own, often unacknowledged assumptions about historical interpretation.

Wings of Desire, Erin Maglaque, NYRB

AG2022_2110497a

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AG2022_2110497a

Serra’s career remains marked by the controversy surrounding Tilted Arc (1981). Since its dismantling by the authorities in 1989 following a lengthy court battle, Tilted Arc has become the defining instance of site specificity, the example given of this category in seminar rooms and art history lectures across the West. But in mentioning this work it is also worth noting its difficulty. Too frequently site specificity is envisaged as artworks made and almost tidily housed in a particular spatial context, akin to how a hand may perfectly fit a tailor-made glove. Tilted Arc was more obdurate and antagonistic than that; it worked to barricade, divide and unsettle an urban space that was ostensibly ‘public’. The trial unintentionally had the consequence of highlighting the intersubjective difficulties site-specific artworks might expose and bear witness to.

Matthew Bowman 28 March 2024 artreview.com

PXL_20240327_183506136 transposes and upends

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No by Anne Boyer (2017)

“History is full of people who just didn’t.  They said no thank you, turned away, ran away

[…]

Of all the poems of no, Venezuelan poet Miguel James’s Against the Police, as translated by Guillermo Parra, refuses most elegantly

[…]

It’s stealthy, portable, and unslouching. It presides over the logic of my art, and even when it is uttered erringly there is something admirable in its articulation. But even the greatest refusialists of the poets might be a somewhat ironic deployers of that refusal, for what is refused often amplifies what is not. The no of a poet is so often a yes in the carapace of no.  The no of a poet is sometimes but rarely a no to a poem itself, but more usually a no to all dismal aggregations and landscapes outside of the poem.  It’s a no to chemical banalities and wars, a no to employment and legalisms, a no to the wretched arrangements of history and the tattered and Bannon-laminated earth.

[…]

Transpositions and upendings refuse and then reorder the world.

[…]

There is a lot of meaning-space inside a “no” spoken in the tremendous logic of a refused order of the world. Poetry’s no can protect a potential yes—or more precisely, poetry’s no is the one that can protect the hell yeah, or every hell yeah’s multiple variations. In this way, a poem against the police is also and always a guardian of love for the world.

Dolce pensero

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Amor mi manda quel dolce pensero
che secretario anticho è fra noi due,
et mi conforta, et dice che non fue
mai come or presto a quel ch’io bramo et spero.

Io, che talor menzogna et talor vero
ò ritrovato le parole sue,
non so s’i’ ‘l creda, et vivomi intra due,
né sí né no nel cor mi sona intero.

In questa passa ‘l tempo, et ne lo specchio
mi veggio andar ver’ la stagion contraria
a sua impromessa, et a la mia speranza.

Or sia che pò: già sol io non invecchio;
già per etate il mio desir non varia;
ben temo il viver breve che n’avanza.

Petrarch, Canzoniere, 168

Love sends me a sweet thought,
an ancient messenger between us two,
to comfort me, saying he was never
readier than now to grant what I hope and wish.

I, who have found his words sometimes true,
and sometimes false, still not certain
whether to believe him, live between the two,
neither yes nor no sounds wholly in my heart.

In this way time flies, and in the mirror
I see I near the season that opposes
his promise, and my hopes.

Now come what must: I’m not alone in growing old:
only my longing does not alter with the years:
truly I fear the brief life that cannot last.

Translated by A.S. Kline.

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