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Category: language

  • Seeks out the edges of things, of understanding

    “Art seeks out the edges of things, of understanding; therefore its favourite modes are irony, negation, deadpan, the pretence of ignorance or innocence. It prefers the unfinished: the syntactically unstable, the semantically malformed. It produces and savours discrepancy in what it shows and how it shows it, since the highest wisdom is knowing that things and pictures do not add up.” –T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, 1984.

    Epigraph of Sue Graze’s essay for Concentrations 17: Vernon Fisher, Lost for Words, Dallas Museum of Art from January 23 – April 17, 1988.

  • Saidiya Hartman on Moma’s Books That Matter

    …blackness is in an antagonistic relationship with the proper…

    via Moma magazine.

    Read an excerpt, A minor figure, on Longreads.

  • Son[i]a #279 – Élisabeth Lebovici

    Silenci i escriptura>

    MACBA shared a photo, by Gemma Planell, of Élisabeth Lebovici, when she was on Sonia. Lebocivi spoke on AIDS, silence, Zoe Leonard, lips, use of language, lessons from conceptual art, presence, and activism.

  • Legna Rodríguez Iglesias interviewed Tana Oshima.

    Text is published in Rialta.

    Tana Oshima offers interesting responses to Legna Rodríguez Iglesias‘s questions.

    A veces me gusta ir a lugares inhóspitos, sí. Con el objetivo de narrarlos, pero la narración que viene después de visitar esos lugares es sólo una vía para canalizar una exploración que es más emocional que intelectual. Me atraen los márgenes, los lugares marginales habitados por personas marginales. Hablo de los márgenes en un sentido social. Me atraen porque me muevo con cierta facilidad entre esas personas y me gusta comunicarme con ellas. Me atraen los márgenes porque una vez estuve ahí, por motivos distintos a la mayoría de los que están ahí, y siento mucha empatía por esas personas.

  • Our tasks

    Imagination, justice, beauty, art, misery eradication, repair and mend (what has been torn or a torn world), wisdom (“cold frugality of the wise”), openness to the world (in harmony with it), finding meaning in life, tending to friendship, cultivation of happiness.

    Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.

    Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays.

    via Popova. Also, Camus on meaning, Weil on attention as grace and generosity.

  • Supernatural

    Ghost stories can look like a nostalgic game, a trivial make-believe, played when it was no longer widely held, by readers of books, that the spirits of the dead return to the land of the living – mopping, mowing, gibbering, giving their owl’s cries, causing the tapers to burn blue, sheeted, but never in any circumstances nude.

    Hamlet and the Ghost both say that the weak imagine things.

    Women imagine things. And they have been able to imagine and describe what it is that women imagine, what their weakness is, and to say how it could be defended. Enter the feminist ghost story. Edith Wharton and Vernon Lee belong to a ghostly sisterhood which, from the 1880s onwards, was to be responsible for much of the most interesting terror fiction. Among the women writers in question are E. Nesbit and the Americans Charlotte Gilman and Mary Wilkins. ‘The Little Ghost’ by Mary Wilkins, which invokes an abused child, another orphan-ghost, is arguably the most moving story in the Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories …

    Karl Miller, Things, LRB, Vol. 9 No. 7 · 2 April 1987

  • Los Miamis mutables.

    Legna Rodriguez Iglesias wrote about Miami, a view of its connection to the Caribbean, in relation to thought, literature, and art, and a productive use of IG. Text is publised in Rialta.

    ESTOY USANDO, POR CIERTO, LA OBRA DE UN ARTISTA, COMO APOYATURA PARA SUBRAYAR, ADEMÁS, LO QUE YA OTROS HAN DEMOSTRADO: QUE UNA POÉTICA DEL CARIBE SE PODRÍA REDEFINIR DESDE LA POÉTICA DE MIAMI. UN CARIBE MÁS REDONDO, MÁS EXPLOSIVO, MÁS COMPLETO Y POR TANTO, MÁS MEJOR.

    Legna Rodríguez Iglesias
    Untitled (Soundings of a cultivated landscape, cocorico) ii
    2017-2019. Installation of color photographs.

    It is a great honor to be included and to find kinship in fellow artist.

  • Feminist Art Coalition

    Feminist Art Coalition, a platform for art projects informed by feminisms*. FAC fosters collaborations between arts institutions that aim to make public their commitment to social justice and structural change. It seeks to generate cultural awareness of feminist thought, experience, and action.

    Notes on Feminisms, a series of newly commissioned essays : Saidiya Hartman – The Plot of Her Undoing .

    Participating Institutions, includes Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) with My Body, My Rules, October 9, 2020–May 9, 2021. and Women Photographers International Congress, a symposium, November 19–20, 2020, led by Aldeide Delgado.

    “Working collectively, various art museums and nonprofit institutions from across the United States will present a series of concurrent events—including commissions, exhibitions, performances, talks, and symposia—over the course of three months (September–November) in the fall of 2020, during the run-up to the next presidential election. This strategic endeavor takes feminist thought and practice as its point of departure and considers art as a catalyst for discourse and civic engagement.

    Motivated by the ethical imperative to effect change and promote equality within our institutions and beyond, these collective projects will advocate for inclusive and equitable access to social, cultural, and economic resources for people of all genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, classes, ages, and abilities. This cooperative effort stages a range of projects that together generate a cultural space for engagement, reflection, and action, while recognizing the constellation of differences and multiplicity among feminisms.“

    Resources.