dig

Category: art

  • AG2024_1088819a or too dumbfounded to move

    AG2024_1088819a

    “perhaps the muse was always a critic, always a builder of stacks of things “interesting to look at”

    “always a mind in relation to another.”

    “Inside every critic is a coach or, to use Isabelle Graw’s image, “a sort of amplifier.””

    “deferential, wry, combative. Humorous. Detached. At sea.”

    Art’s stupidity, Mayer suggests, is the reason for its persistence in her memory: it is too dumbfounded to move.

    But what first punched art in the face? Probably life. Or, as Mayer says, “fucked up time.””

    “They are, at their best, avenues of grace within fucked-up time, languages of perpetual inquiry and curiosity, poses of submission and dominance and everything in between, a practice of turn-taking in a world that runs on theft and greed.”

    Anahid Nersessian. Originally published in Mousse 86.

  • AG2023_1078359a or a figure, a field guide

    AG2023_1078359a

    a figure must be invented who can be superimposed on the society as a whole, whose routine and life-pattern serve somehow to tie its separate and isolated parts together. The equivalent is the picaresque novel, where a single character moves from one background to another, linking “picturesque” but not intrinsically related episodes together. In doing this the detective in a sense once again fulfills the demands of the function of knowledge rather than that of lived experience: through him we are able to see, to know, the society as a whole

    Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality by Fredric Jameson

  • AG2023_1033576a or a possibility in life

    AG2023_1033576a

    “Each of us has to find our question.”
    “You look for it so you can confront the silence of a pure and uncompromising question.”
    “Other possibilities in life.”
    “Admire from afar, in silence”

    –Sarr

  • Beauty calls forth meaning, order, calm

    Tippett: It was actually in your book that I first realized, and I had never thought about this, that the root — the Greek root for the word “beauty” is related to the word for “calling”; to “kalon” and “kalein.”

    O’Donohue: That’s right. That’s it exactly.

    Tippett: That’s fascinating.

    O’Donohue: It is, actually, and it means that, actually, in the presence of beauty, it’s not a neutral thing, but it’s actually calling you. And I feel that one could write a wonderful psychology just based on the notion of being called — being called to be yourself and called to transfigure what has hardened or got wounded within you. And it’s also, of course, the heart of creativity, this calling forth all the time, because, like in the work that I do, trying to write a few poems, you never write the same poem twice. You’re always at a new place, and then you’re suddenly surprised by where you get taken to.

    On Being with Krista Tippett, John O’Donohue : The Inner Landscape of Beauty

    Original Air Date : February 28, 2008

    “Pleasure … can fortify us. The pleasure that is beauty, the beauty that is meaning, order, calm” (RS)

    IMG 4359
    Studio in Miami Design District, 2011.

  • IMG_20160831_064152_01

    IMG_20160831_064152_01
    Atlanta Biennial, 2016.

  • US museums face a funding crisis as new generation of donors comes of age

    As the baby-boomer generation of major donors pulls back or dies off, museums are struggling to attract their heirs’ interest

    … next-gen donors want to tackle big global issues, from climate change to racial justice. And those who do recognise the arts’ ability to strengthen social cohesion, improve health outcomes and encourage critical thinking are likely to eschew legacy institutions in favour of smaller organisations where their money can make a bigger impact.

    Source: Julia Halperin, The Art Newspaper 011924

  • Betye Saar

    Celestial Universe (1988), which has been part of a number of installations over the decades. Hand-painted on silk taffeta, this large, dark blue banner displays a star map from 1840 complete with zodiac signs and figures of the constellations originating from Greco-Roman mythology. Suspended from the ceiling to hover like a canopy above a candle-lined canoe, the work premiered in ‘Voyages: Dreams and Destinations’at the National Taiwan Museum of Art in Taichung in 1988, evoking the use of constellations for nautical navigation.

    […]

    …the night sky of Celestial Universe may symbolize a space of liberatory potential that reaches beyond the limited map of the past and present

    Stephanie Seidel in Frieze
    Betye Saar, Celestial Universe, 1988. Dye on silk, 95 x 139 in. via icamiami
    https://www.tumblr.com/lisamarie-vee/691216989620977664
    https://www.tumblr.com/birdbird/740081240635473920/via-betye-saar-celestial-scene-1966-moma

  • AG2021_1880278aa or and for running after spinning top

    AG2021_1880278aa

    Untitled (A place to stand and stare, recalling tunes of ballads in a minor key)

    It is “the running after the spinning top” or “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.” Carson via Enns.