“… did not need much To make us laugh instead, and touch,”
-A.E. Stallings, “Recitative,” from Poetry (April 2005).
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, The booze and the neon and Saturday night, The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons? Why should the Devil get all the good tunes? Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite? Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, The booze and the neon and Saturday night?
Tar babies are not the children of tar people. It is far worse. The tar baby occurs spontaneously nor do we adhere at first. There is an especially unperverse attractiveness to the tar baby– although currently she is a little sick. When you start to help her is when she start to stick.
“It doesn’t melt or turn over, break or harden, so it can’t feel pain, yearning, regret. […] Here, it’s all yours, now— but you’ll have to take me, too.”
Tom Whyman on Michael Rakowitz’s Waiting Gardens at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. (ArtReview)
“At their best, such shows can really become a part of your life … I could see myself making a habit of dwelling in TheWaiting Gardens of the North – not necessarily to play …, but perhaps just to sit, to read, to be. This, as I say, is a dream of public space: exactly the sort of place one wishes would be there to occupy, whenever one wanted to, in a city. Contrast this with the actual public spaces we tend to get: increasingly dirty, poorly maintained, or just exclusive; public-private space where in theory you could be booted out at any time, actual public space where the architecture has been designed to be hostile to certain members of the public (most obviously, people experiencing homelessness).
Wouldn’t it be good, if at least some of these experiments were able to make at least some sort of permanent impact on our physical, public reality? The art shows us something new: some different way our public space might be. […] Here the art suffers from a problem endemic, I think, to society in general: we can see the better, we know we might be able to arrange, and to live in, a better world. And yet we have absolutely no clue as to how we might get there [permanently]
If Waiting Gardens is able to suggest an answer, I think it lies in the sensory experiences the exhibition presents us with, the immediacy of its sights and smells. This temporary space enlivens us to what reality has to offer”
“an explosion brought down Prigozhin’s private jet as it was flying” over Russian territory. Everyone reports as Putin’s revenge. The Prigozhin affair reads partly as fiction that I don’t like, where characters’ hubris lead them to take actions that can’t possibly end well nor offer good lessons. (New Yorker)
Joshua Yaffa’s long and though article on Yevgeny Prigozhin and Wagner. (New Yorker)
“everyday life is situated somewhere in the rift opened up between the subjective, phenomenological, sensory apparatus of the individual and the reified institution.
[…]
To read everyday life, … is therefore to become engaged in an act of poesis.”
-(Kristin Ross, The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life)
“This was a place with a very different material and mythological past and present. […] The notion of a more-than-human world further intimates that these things are beings: not passive props in the drama of our own preoccupations, but active participants in our collective becoming. […] Art has a role to play here”
-(JB)
“Of course”
Glass: Four Movements for Two Pianos – IV. — · Katia & Marielle Labèque. 2013 KML Recordings Released on: 2016-09-16 Composer: Philip Glass
“the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian” (SH)
Benrubi Gallery is pleased to present Beautiful Night, curated by Jude Broughan, featuring artists Karen Azoulay, Adler Guerrier, John Lehr, Reiner Leist, Daminico Lynch, Jasmine Murrell, Beuford Smith, Jenna Westra, and Jess Willa Wheaton. [The show runs September 8 through October 28, 2023.]
Photography is about light (originally sunlight), and sometimes nighttime photography feels unexpected. Neon lights, camera flash, street lights, spot lights, tungsten lamps, high contrast, misty silhouettes. Nighttime is a restful time, when we unwind, hug each other, and look after ourselves, loved ones. Maybe go out and meet up, have some fun. Night is when we sleep and when we grow, our bodies relax and a time for healing. That inky blue twilight, then the star-filled dark night sky, souls gone before, and an as yet unmanifested void of exciting potential.
Beautiful Night is a synthesis of finely intertwined visual narratives. Jasmine Murrell’s low-light long exposures with halos and glowing light traces, speak about miracles that happen in the worst of times and in the most invisible places, and transformative experience around historical erasures. The car headlights and streetlights glow in Daminico Lynch’s “Lonely City”, a still from his 2022 short film “A Woman in the City”, illuminating modern people in their everyday lives in the streets of New York, focusing on the connection between people and exploring human and universal connections.
In John Lehr’s “Burger King, CT”, street light illuminates the bubbled vinyl graphic sign – a photograph from his Low Relief series depicting the skin of the city, surfaces and facades that have been transformed by human interaction and reimagined through subjective perception. In Adler Guerrier’s photograph “Untitled (Wander and Errancies–memories within; citrus in Saint Augustine”, the camera flash spotlight on a citrus tree is an unexpected focusing, an engagement in poetics of place and landscape.
Karen Azoulay foregrounds botanicals in “Dreaming of the Chamomiles”, where the white and yellow chamomile flowers play across the child’s face, and inky blues of the figure and ground, with floral symbolism and secret messages imbedded within. The inky blues flow through Jess Willa Wheaton’s piece “Drawing in the Dark”, where she combines disparate found images in radically unified ways, through a slow complex processes of observation and adjustment – in deep contrast to our widely shared experience of viewing images in rapid succession on screens.
In Reiner Leist’s “Window, 4 DEC 2022” the night exposure is several hours long, perhaps analogous to the time it might take to make a sketch. This photograph is part of a serial ongoing long-term photographic project begun in March 1995 – “Window” involves a ritual of photographing the view from Leist’s New York City apartment with two antique large format cameras making exposures on contemporary film.
Jenna Westra’s “Aperture Self Portrait (Jump)” takes aesthetic cues from performance documentation and postmodern dance, and invites the viewer to re-examine their role in the dynamics of image production and consumption. And of Beuford Smith’s iconic black and white silver gelatin photograph “Two Bass Hit”, the photographer states “Photography is a call and respond medium. The call is the subject and respond is the creative process in capturing the image.”
