Small flowers bloom in the waving grass And birds are singing in the pine Where once between tall columns rose The Zeus whom Phidias made divine. The thunderbolt was in his hand, Men dared not look upon his face, The fluted earth was but his throne, The bright sky was his dwelling-place.
Now his proud temple strews the ground, His altars are but broken stones, His gold-and-ivory flesh is dust Mixed with his violators’ bones. Brief is the hour of gods and men– Their carved fame falls that was so fair, While wilful beauty blooms in flowers And floats in song upon the air.
“I don’t know why I thought we were an exception. Maybe because sometimes we were. Artforum, for many years, was about as leftist as an elite publication could get. We really did play a role in holding weapons manufacturers and the engineers of the opioid crisis to account. We really did give jobs and bylines to some singular and brilliant people. We really were a brainy refuge of weird glamour married to principle, and sometimes I wonder if mine is the last generation to grow up thinking of the art world as a place for ungovernable outsiders and talented eccentrics, which doesn’t hear the word ‘art’ and think immediately of commerce.
[…]
For years we had been signing petitions for all kinds of social causes, calls for liberation – feminism, queer rights, climate justice, abolition – that were often taken up by the institutions that housed us. Until 2025, nearly every museum had a gay pride celebration. When George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, a parade of museums frantically marshalled committees of sacrificial minorities, staged unctuous exhibitions and asserted their commitments to “diversity, equity, and inclusion”.
Palestine is different. Even with broad public support, no major museum has taken up the genocide in Gaza. No large institution I know of has put on an exhibition about Palestinian artists or Palestinian lives.
[…]
The writing can’t keep pace. Every minute there’s another atrocity tidily packaged as a sedate number in a headline. At least 70,000 Palestinians have been murdered, but these are the underreported official counts. Around 30 percent of these have been children, with an estimated average of 28 children killed each day since October 2023. More than 98 percent of Gaza’s cropland has been damaged or made inaccessible, or both. It’s increasingly hard to hold in mind the scale of devastation.”
Upon a second viewing, Tenet is interesting mostly in its narrative sequences and choreography of bodies, moving and running, for the camera.
“Above all, there is Barbara’s instruction, as she ushers the Protagonist into the wonders of temporal inversion. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it,” she says to him. The echo is clear: “Do not try to understand. Just believe.” That is what the hero of Cocteau’s “Orpheus” (1950) is told as he prepares to pass through a mirror into the underworld. Like Nolan, Cocteau sprinkles his film with reverse-motion images, but each one of them gives off a lyrical shimmer, and when a dead woman, lying on a bed, is ordered to rise, her body springs to the perpendicular as if reborn, and the hearts of viewers lurch and lift in response.” Antony Lane, New Yorker, 2020.
“For minoritarian subjects, the discourse of attention has little relevance because it is structurally difficult to occupy the position of attentiveness, historically, we have always been the objects of others’ attention”
“Distraction is not opposed to attention but is a type of attention -it’s not individual and intrinsic but social and relational”
“medication seeks to treat biologically a set of behavioural and environmental conditions”
“greater collective happiness in all its wild plurality”
“This book … admits that it fiddles while Rome burns”
Disordered Attention, How We Look at Art and Performance Today, Claire Bishop (Verso)
Florida Prize in Contemporary Art 2016, The Orlando Museum of Art
_____
you who’ve read Dante in folio you let yourself drift through those little drawings so-called illuminated miniatures and you swallowed it all all from ay to bi
but it’s a lie
that hellish bin of complications is pure rubbish made on purpose to make you waste time calculating in which circle the bones of your soul will end up
and you know something? this famous inferno has an admirable simplicity it’s not for nothing, the master’s cunning
you get there and they tell you
you’re free go ahead and do as you like
The [preceding] poems come from Rebekah Smith’s […] translation (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) of Susana Thénon’s 1987 book Ova Completa.
