Sicario. Denis Villeneuve, director. Roger Deakins, cinemaphotogapher. Jóhann Jóhannsson, composer.
asking me how a watch works. For now we’ll just keep an eye on the time.
Dig
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You dream of
Sitting in silence, as we watch the birds fly by
Come dance with me into the dark, blue night[…]
In your arms flowers
Turn to promises
That linger into dawnYou Dream (ft. Tara Nome Doyle) | Munich – The Edge of War (Soundtrack from the Netflix Film) Music by Isobel Waller-Bridge
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AG2023_1011876a or feels soft and always
We sing the familiar because it feels soft and always.
Corazón in Fall, Emma Trelles
when something taken for granted
is suddenly over, the pause when you take stockand realize you’ll never have as much,
that change is always a lesseningThe Way Words Echo in Our Heads, James Cihlar
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AG2023_1011863a or the relief of having something
The relief of having something to focus our attention.
[…]
The future refuses [or is slow] to happen, so where else should I turn?
Prefer crossed out, scribbled over monuments
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A loss/entry/return
Recently auctioned, a work from the series Untitled (loss/entry/return) #00005, 2005, Xerox [solvent] transfer, ink and graphite on watercolor paper; and an exhibition at Frederic Snitzer Gallery.
Loss/ Entry/ Return offers works based on a journey of perception. Drawings, photos, sculpture and sound are the tangible manifestations of moments along the way. What we experience is the process of voyaging from indeterminacy to clarity, from vastness to specific identity. Ideas of guidance and presence are constant throughout the works.
From an email sent to the gallery for the press release.
With “loss/entry/return” Guerrier shifts ground. You see the artist looking through binoculars at the expanse of the metropolis. But it’s not a real city. This is more like a superimposition of events, black blotches and green tempera splashes (with directional tentacles) moving near the background of the metropolis’s silhouette. Amid these images you find linear sentence fragments, silent remarks as if coming from a lost century of ideologies.
Then one discovers this conspicuous cantilevered solid structure — a sort of corbel — that the artist draws in most of his pieces. I read a bit into it: In architecture, cantilevers separate themselves from the ground; they are singular, impulsive. What’s more important, they don’t subjugate the territory.
Guerrier is slowly moving away from the dense existential “feel” of reality expressed in his earlier photos. He has become a more gregarious, unconventional observer, exploring his own situation in relation to the rest of us. Now he should incorporate into his photography some of the new elements present in this series.
At the exhibit, an important local curator helped me see a bit of French theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord in Guerrier’s work. Suddenly the seemingly disconnected one-liners inside the drawings made more sense.
In his 1967 Society of the Spectacle,Debord warned that our lives had become transactional relationships. Spectacle was a key concept for Debord, who borrowed from Marx’s idea of alienation. We become alienated from ourselves when everything we do, we do for the sake of abundance. The spectacle then becomes the sad and endless race to own more, which, paradoxically, turns into an abundance of dispossession. Some of this message is already present in Guerrier’s promising cityscapes.
Alfredo Triff, City Views and Latin News, Miami New Times, April 21, 2005. -
AG2023_1120034a or think capaciously about the affective dimensions
Berlant’s work is underpinned by a pressing desire for new forms of relationality and alternative ways to flourish. There is an urgency to their writing: feelings are political, affective life sustains the possibilities for other life-worlds.
[…]
What Berlant proposes then is ‘an affective register which recognises the relationship between the joy-giving parts and the parts that require a kind of patience with the way things do not fit. The out-of-synchness of being matters’ (Berlant & Hardt, 2012, n.p.
[…]
queer theory presumes the affective incoherence of the subject with respect to the objects that anchor it or to which they’re attached. (Berlant & Hardt, 2012, n.p.)
[…]
Berlant helps us think about affective life through the lens of ambivalence, contradiction, and incoherence, rather than certainty and singularity. It is this that makes Berlant’s social theory so generative: an invitation to always ask questions, to unravel our own objects of attachment and fantasies of political transformation.
[…]
think capaciously about the affective dimensions it will take to rebuild the world from the fragments of the present.
Eleanor Wilkinson, 11 | AMBIVALENT LOVE, Encountering Berlant part 1: Concepts otherwise. -
Wiley, fleeting postures
Kehinde Wiley, The Painter and his court in New Yorker.
Wiley, who once described himself as a manufacturer of “high-priced luxury goods for wealthy consumers,” never promised anyone empowerment. In a way, his has been the classic fate of the court painter: conscripted as a propagandist—by the royalists, the reformers, and the revolutionaries—when his real passion is for capturing the fleeting postures of his era.
[…]
Last winter at the National Gallery in London, I saw Wiley’s exhibition “The Prelude,” an exploration of nature and the sublime which envisions Black wanderers amid the mountains and seascapes of such nineteenth-century Romantics as J. M. W. Turner, Winslow Homer, and Caspar David Friedrich. For most of his career, Wiley conspicuously omitted landscape from his paintings, pointedly substituting decorative patterns for the land and chattels that loom behind many Old Master portraits. It was a liberation of style from property and privilege. Recently, though, he’s abandoned the constraint. The shift is a call for Black people to take up space in the world, which doubles as a wink at his own vertiginous climb.
Julian Lucas, Newyorker January 2 & 9, 2023.
