dig

Category: language

  • AG2021_2050839a

    AG2021_2050839a

    “Some soldiers with nuns behind them served as an example to explain what the punctum was to me… but when Bruce Gilden photographs a nun and some drag queens (New Orleans, 1973), the deliberate contrast produces no effect on me, except perhaps one of irritation. Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful… it does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object.”

    Fried quoting Barthes’s Camera Lucida, framing his argument linking punctum and anti-theatricality.

    “That is it; that is all Barthes has to say with respect to the punctum, about the point of view, the activity, of the photographer as distinct from the response of the viewer… it is enough to situate Camera Lucida in relation to the central current or tradition of anti-theatrical critical thought and pictorial practice that I have tried to show… Understood in this context, Barthes’s observation… that the detail that strikes him as a punctum could not do so had it been intended as such by the photographer is an anti-theatrical claim in that it implies a fundamental distinction, which goes back to Diderot, between ‘seeing’ and ‘being shown’.”

    Fried argues.

  • AG2021_2050707a

    AG2021_2050707a

    Benefits to think like a detective. “Practise: your brain needs training like any other muscle. Embrace doubt, start digging, stay humble, and continue educating yourself.”

  • In the garden, we perform the act of possessing

    Jamaica Kincaid via newyorker, published in the print edition of the September 7, 2020, issue, with the headline “A Heap of Disturbance.”

    And so there I was, a sickly child who could read but had no sense of consciousness, had no idea of how to understand and so make sense of the world into which she was born, a world that was always full of a yellow sun, green trees, a blue sea, and black people.

    and brought it into her own garden and tended to it in a careless, everyday way,

    For her, the wild and the cultivated were equal and yet separate, together and apart.

    the Tree of Life is agriculture and the Tree of Knowledge is horticulture. We cultivate food, and when there is a surplus of it, producing wealth, we cultivate the spaces of contemplation, a garden of plants not necessary for physical survival. The awareness of that fact is what gives the garden its special, powerful place in our lives and our imaginations. The Tree of Knowledge holds unknown, and therefore dangerous possibilities; the Tree of Life is eternally necessary, and the Tree of Knowledge is deeply and divinely dependent on it.

    Ownership of ourselves and of the ground on which we walk, ownership of the other beings with whom we share this and see that it is good, and ownership of the vegetable kingdom are all uncertain, too. Nevertheless, in the garden, we perform the act of possessing. To name is to possess;

    The garden makes managing an excess of feelings—good feelings, bad feelings—rewarding […]. The garden is a heap of disturbance

    “[…] (where did the people in a Rembrandt painting get all that stuff they are piling on?)” :: Horticultural surplus!

    […] in thickets of words.

    “where did plants, annual and perennial, pristinely set out in something called a border, and arranged sometimes according to color and sometimes according to height, come from?” :: Eden! (a notion of)

    I had acquired (and read) so many books that it put a strain on my family’s budget. Resentment, a not unfamiliar feeling relating to the garden, set in.

    “A new primrose is more special than meeting any conqueror.” :: True!!!

    reading—learning to read and reading books, the words a form of food, a form of life, and then knowledge.

    AG2021_2050356ab
    Roses on North Flores St.

    Related :

    “carry it always / on my person, concealed.”

    Roger Robinson, A Portable Paradise; Poetry Unbound.

  • AG2021_2050253a

    AG2021_2050253a

    Plenty of room, buckets, and vise with swivel base.

  • AG2021_2050209a

    AG2021_2050209a

    Provided to YouTube by Rhino Atlantic

    Valeria · The Modern Jazz Quartet · Laurindo Almeida

    Collaboration, 1964 Atlantic Records

    Composer: John Lewis

  • AG2021_2040684a

    AG2021_2040684a

  • AG2021_2050082a or presentness

    AG2021_2050082a

    KT – “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” And then James Baldwin says, “I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense, but as a state of being, or a state of grace, not in the infantile American sense of being made happy, but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

    SJ- So amazing. You hear James Baldwin, the son of a preacher. And for him, that love that he always saw and grasped for and had hope in — that he called that grace. And what grace grasps is the thing that it’s not just a given. It really is a gift, and it has political force. It’s quest. It’s daring. It’s exploration. And James Baldwin reminds us that if we give up that hope, that quest in love, then we’ve lost.

    On Being with Krista Tippett
    Serene Jones
    Grace in a Fractured World

    Original Air Date
    December 5, 2019

    Presentness is grace.

    Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 148-72. Originally published in Artforum 5 (June 1967): pp. 12-23.

    “Michael Fried pushed the question of presence to the fore in his famous (perhaps infamous) essay “Art and Objecthood.”[2] Fried distinguishes between, on the one hand, the presentness of modernist art—art that defeats its own objecthood, that displays a conviction which avoids theatricality, that at every moment renews a claim upon the viewer; and, on the other, the presence of Minimalist, or what he called literalist, art—art that embraces (“hypostasizes”) its own objecthood, that is fundamentally theatrical, that includes the viewer in its situation and requires her for its completion.

    […] At the end of his essay, Fried seems to turn from creation to fall and the hint of redemption. He writes, “I want to call attention to the utter pervasiveness—the virtual universality—of the sensibility or mode of being that I have characterized as corrupted or perverted by theater. We are all literalists most of our lives. Presentness is grace.”[5] I read Fried here as claiming that we live in a world where objects are usually present to us simply as objects, and that modernist art offers something extraordinary: an object becoming more than an object, carrying with it the presentness that comes to us as “grace.”

    Natalie Carnes, Presence, Presentness, and Grace: Reflections on Art and Theology with Michael Fried and Marina Abramovic, transpositions.co.uk.

    To avert one’s gaze from Piper is to refuse to hear the sound in her work of that quite specific objecthood that joins blackness and black performance. And the critique of Fried’s dismissal of objecthood and its complex, ambivalent grounding in Clement Greenberg’s in/famous assertion of the necessary optical purity of authentic modernist art is possible only by way of the exploration of that specifically black objecthood that it has been Piper’s project to inves-tigate. If, as Zora Neale Hurston suggests, the essence of the Negro is drama, theatricality, then perhaps this is how that theatricality works. (p.234)

    Perhaps the real importance of the frame /support /boundary is that it divides the work from the milieu that defines and contains what Fried describes as our quotidian literalism. The parergon is, here, the condition of possibility of what Fried valorizes and hopes for: presentness as grace, presentness as opposed to presence. The literalist work /object is without or in denial of the parergon. The two relations to be thought, here, are lack and denial, parergon and milieu. (p.243)

    Fred Moten, Resistance of the Object:Adrian Piper’s Theatricality, In the Break.

  • AG2021_2050068a

    AG2021_2050068a

    […] Inside the glass, the abstract
    tide of fortune turned
    from high to low overnight.

    “The Empty Glass” from The Seven Ages by Louise Glück.  Copyright © 2001 by Louise Glück. 

    Whirling in the dark universe,
    alone, afraid, unable to influence fate—

    What do we have really?
    Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,
    tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring
    attempts to build character.
    What do we have to appease the great forces?