You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
Contemporary Art Library – Park McArthur at mumok, Vienna and Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
Images courtesy of the artist, MUMOK, Vienna; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach. Photos by Simon Vogel.
You won’t feel like this forever, unless
forever is here.
From “De Jure Sanguinis”, Kiki Petrosino
You should know
that after you ready
to meet the far,
stony shore, it is not hope
but the strange fire
of forgiveness
that flares & fights
_____
there—not wanting
to go, hoping only
you’d said so
long to all you know—
to the elms
who also know what it means
to be told you’d die
& survive.
Hereafter, Kevin Young
Access to food is extremely difficult. In Gaza. Please help them, those not ready.
On Being with Krista Tippett, Ross Gay, On the Insistence of Joy (Original Air Date : July 25, 2019)
Tippett: Well, what also strikes me when you write about the garden is public space is also something you care about, you go around looking for, thinking about. I share that with you. And it strikes me that the gardening flows into that in interesting ways, because it’s also when you write about it — here’s a place where you’re writing about that it’s such a study in the interrelationship of things, and how if you put something here, it might not happen, and if you put it near this, it might not happen; but if you put these two things together — so there’s this kind of — there’s this real rigor and sophistication that goes into it. And then there’s also so much unexpected that happens.
Gay: Totally. And actually, when you said that, it made me think too, talk about public space, that — it’s also a thing that the orchard, you can always walk into the orchard. I want to say that because so much space becomes private these days — that to have a space that you can just go there, you just go there, no just go there — it’s a big deal.
Tippett: Well, just how the garden, the complexity — well, it is. It’s a little microcosm of wholeness and the complexity of wholeness and the interrelationship of things.
Gay: Yeah. Totally, right. And you’re constantly imagining, “Well, what if this was here? And what if this was here? And what if —” I’m always trying to think of ways to interact with bugs, say, that eat my plants, and “What if we had these things here? What if we invited these things into the garden?”
[…]
Tippett: I wanted to talk to you about justice and how you grapple with that reality, that aspiration, that concept. And there has been an evolution of that. You have brought together the idea of longing for justice and working for justice with also exalting the beautiful and tending to what one loves, as much as what one must fight.
Gay: Tending to what one loves feels like the crux. Yeah, I’m very confused about justice, I think. I feel like the way we think of justice is absolutely inadequate, often. Often. Not everyone. I am curious about a notion of justice that is in the process of exalting what it loves.
Tippett: So here’s something you wrote somewhere. You said, “I often think the gap in our speaking about and for justice, or working for justice, is that we forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. We are good at fighting, but imagining, and holding in one’s imagination what is wonderful and to be adored and preserved and exalted is harder for us, it seems.”
Bring Sexy Back, Kate Wagner, Lux, Issue 14. A text on eroticism and privacy, in the contemporary moment.
“It’s a kind of casual blackmail that warns everyone to conform or be exposed; a way of saying if you don’t cave to my point of view, redefine yourself in my image of what sexuality is or should be, and (most importantly) apologize to me and the public, I will subject you to my large following and there will be hell to pay. Such unproductive and antisocial behavior is justified as a step toward liberation from predation, misogyny, or any number of other harms. But the punitive mindset we’ve developed towards relationships is indicative of an inability to imagine a future of gendered or sexual relations without subjugation. To couch that in the language of harm reduction and trauma delegitimizes both.”
In short, all good things are wild and free. Walking, Thoreau.
somewhere swimming inside me is a question
I don’t want to answer. it’s not my name I hear,
but something else, drowning in its own fluid.
a girl on the ferry smiles at me. I smile back—
& it seems to mean the world to her.
Somewhere Swimming, Kyla Marshell
TEXTE ZUR KUNST Issue No. 138 / June 2025 “Exhibition Politics”
195 CALL AND RESPONSE / Cecilia Bien on Christine Sun Kim at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (ACCESS RIDER Christine Sun Kim – Herunterladen via secession)
201 THE EXHIBITION IS ELSEWHERE / Barbara Reisinger on Park McArthur at mumok, Vienna, and Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
Observations on the Long Take, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1967)
Translated by Norman MacAfee and Craig Owens
As long as such actions remain unrelated, be it the language of Kennedy’s last action or that of his assassins, they are fragmentary and incomplete languages, all but incomprehensible. What is needed to make them complete and comprehensible? The relationship which each of them, groping and stammering, seeks with the others must be established. Not through a simple multiplication of presents–as in the juxtaposition of various subjective views–but through their coordination. Unlike their juxtaposition, their coordination is not, in fact, limited to destroying and emptying the concept of the present (as in the hypothetical projection one after the other of the various films at FBI headquarters) but to rendering the present past.
Only completed acts may be coordinated among themselves and thus acquire meaning
[…]
The substance of cinema is therefore an endless long take, as is reality to our senses for as long as we are able to see and feel (a long take that ends with the end of our lives); and this long take is nothing but the reproduction of the language of reality. In other words it is the reproduction of the present.
But as soon as montage intervenes, when we pass from cinema to film (they are very different, just as langue is different from parole), the present becomes past: a past that, for cinematographic and not aesthetic reasons, is always in the present mode (that is, it is a historic present).
[…]
It is thus absolutely necessary to die, because while living we lack meaning, and the language of our lives (with which we express ourselves and to which we attribute the greatest importance) is untranslatable: a chaos of possibilities, a search for relations among discontinuous meanings. Death performs a lightning-quick montage on our lives; that is, it chooses our truly significant moments (no longer changeable by other possible contrary or incoherent moments) and places them in sequence, converting our present, which is infinite, unstable, and uncertain, and thus linguistically indescribable, into a clear, stable, certain, and thus linguistically describable past (precisely in the sphere of a general semiology). It is thanks to death that our lives become expressive.
Montage thus accomplishes for the material of film (constituted of fragments, the longest or the shortest, of as many long takes as there are subjectivities) what death accomplishes for life.
via Pasolini, P., 1967, Observations on the Long Take, in The Cinematic, D. Campany (ed.), 2007. London: Whitechapel and The MIT Press.
Eliza Swann aka Emerald.
“Your love goes to the centerline of the branch
But you desire all the water.
There is no way of knowing
What I tell you about love is true.
Go by the signs.”
Frank Stanford, from “Directions from a Madman,”