Category: language

“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.”

–Rita Dove, Heart to Heart

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 The Waiting 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)