Author: dig

Tunga – A Bela e a Fera

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Tunga, A Bela e a Fera – La Belle et la Bête, 2001-2012 Copper plated cast bronze, cast iron and iron 106 1/4 x 98 3/8 x 90 1/2 inches (270 x 250 x 230 cm) Edition of 3 © Instituto Tunga, Rio de Janeiro – Photo: Farzad Owrang Courtesy Luhring Augustine, New York.

Luhring Augustine Sculpture Mar 22 – Apr 14, 2018.

Jillian McManemin links A Bela e a Fera to the devil card in tarot.

An earlier version (2001, sans chain) at Inhotim.

Tunga official–A Bela e a Fera (with chain, image is undated), Jewels, Mondrongo, Elective Affinities.

Related :

Janine Antoni, Caryatid (Crackled green glaze over red oxide on an ovoid bodied vase with a truncated neck), 2003 C-print and broken vessel photo: 29 3/4 x 91 1/4 inches; vessel: 11 x 12 x 18 inches; crate: 48 x 25 x 32 inches © Janine Antoni – Photo: Farzad Owrang Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

some fragments

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“… never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children”

“… he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle’s” To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf.

“.. ALL OF A SUDDEN they run at each other once more and if you have a better phrase than like thundering elephants insert it here [ ].”

“… cotton canvas of heartbreaking, variegated stains.” The Autograph Man: A Novel (Vintage International), Zadie Smith

“… In practice this requires prodigious coordination, precision, and the best efforts of several human minds and that of a Univac 418.” The White Album: Essays, Joan Didion

“The sacred is of us, of this network, of our wandering, our errantry.” Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant

“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.” The measure of our lives : a gathering of wisdom, Toni Morrison

Just as there is a Keatsian sentence and a Shakespearean one, so Morrison made a sentence distinctly hers, abundant in compulsive, self-generating metaphor, as full of sub-clauses as a piece of 19th century presidential oratory, and always faithful to the central belief that narrative language—inconclusive, non-definitive, ambivalent, twisting, metaphorical narrative language, with its roots in oral culture—can offer a form of wisdom distinct from and in opposition to, as she put it, the “calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science.” Daughters of Toni: A Remembrance, Zadie Smith, reprinted as the foreword of The measure of our lives : a gathering of wisdom.

AG2022_2090895a

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AG2022_2090895a

“…the language of philosophy has to come back from the abstract heights on which it so often lives to the richness of everyday discourse and humanity. It has to listen to the ways that people talk about themselves and what matters to them.

something very important about the human condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from its fragility.” Martha Nussbaum, via The Marginalian; posted earlier.

Related : Nussbaum in newyorker (2016).

Change misery

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… by tinkering in photosynthesis

“…microbes—the group known as cyanobacteria—had mastered a peculiarly powerful form of alchemy. They lived off sunlight, which they converted into sugar. As a waste product, they gave off oxygen. Cyanobacteria were so plentiful, and so good at what they did, that they changed the world. They altered the oceans’ chemistry, and then the atmosphere’s. Formerly in short supply, oxygen became abundant. Anything that couldn’t tolerate it either died off or retreated to some dark, airless corner.” – newyorker (in the print edition of the December 13, 2021)

“… if we can work out how to improve photosynthesis, we can boost yields. We won’t have to go on destroying yet more land for crops—we can try to produce more on the land we’re already using.”

Related:

The Hy1810 yeast in the Expanse.

“Prax worked on and surreptitiously leaked research for the modified yeast which contained an artificial chloroplast that was reverse-engineered from the protomolecule to make energy from a wider range of radiation than natural flora” – “The Expanse: Babylon’s Ashes“, Chapter 24.

… we can also make art–the poetic and the beautiful–more available.

Living with animals

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“Yet there’s a small subset of animals that are doing remarkably well. Known as synanthropes, these are the tiny minority of wild animals—not livestock or pets—that have adapted to thrive in the places that humans like and are forever building more of. City pigeons—the descendants of rock doves, birds that roost on steep cliff faces—are a good example. After the birds were partly domesticated as food and messengers, they learned to nest in the crevices of buildings and to eat our trash, and their numbers followed our skyscrapers upward. Other familiar examples include opossums, coyotes, raccoons, rats, wild turkeys, Canada geese, and crows. Some researchers have observed the latter using cars to crack walnuts, timing the stops between traffic-light changes in order to slip the nuts underneath the tires. Other birds have learned to line their nests with cigarette butts, whose residual nicotine keeps mites away. Some urban populations—such as lizards, whose toes are becoming more grippy, the better to climb glass and concrete instead of trees—seem to be actively evolving to live in the habitats that we’re creating. Mice in Central Park have developed genes that allow them to metabolize fatty foods and rancid peanuts; mountain lions that live near the Seattle exurbs have shifted their predation from ungulates to rats, opossums, and raccoons. Studies have shown that many synanthropes are actually more successful—living at greater densities and achieving larger body sizes—in urban and suburban landscapes than they are in the wild.” – newyorker (in the print edition of the November 15, 2021).

“Many of our ideas about animals—which we eat, which we keep as pets, which we vilify or protect—are changeable with time and context and culture. These ideas sometimes lead us to odd and inconsistent places. New Zealand is famous for enthusiastically culling non-native predators in a large-scale effort to protect its endemic species, but feral cats, because of the close association with their domesticated relatives, haven’t been included in the purge. In the American West, the government shoots coyotes but rounds up wild horses and puts them up for adoption.

“…only a fraction of wildlife management is about biology.”