dig

Dig

  • Apichatpong Weerasethakul

    Films to watch; via The Metaphysical World of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Movies by Hilton Als.

    Also, in ArtPapers.

  • Birds

    Bird sightings are reported at ebird and also, at Tropical Audubon. I would have liked to see or hear a Vermilion Flycatcher.

    I did spot a murder of crows passing over, of American crow or fish cow.

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  • around which a vast edifice of human responses has arisen

    ‘… where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, […], who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”

    “… a particular kind of flower around which a vast edifice of human responses has arisen”

    “Even as ornament, flowers represent life itself, as fertility, mortality, transience, extravagance, and as such they enter our art, rites, and language.” – Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses.

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  • Poetics of Relation

    Exhibition at Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2015, curated Tumelo Mosaka and Tobias Ostrander.

    “Over the past several decades, many artistic investigations of identity have engaged the human figure as the site for negotiating these historical and contemporary dynamics. Representations of the body have often propagated these binary positions by specifically looking to structure, for the viewer, an experience of inclusion or exclusion from the cultural identities depicted.
    Our attraction as curators to the writings of Glissant and his theory of Relation derives from the richly nonbinary character of his articulation of identity. His interest in multiplicity and the stress he places on seeking encounters with an other-or with many others as an integral part of our own understanding of self feels congruent with our contemporary moment. His emphasis on our “mutual mutations by this interplay of relations,” resonates in a globalized world defined by migrations that merge our varied homelands with one another and with foreign, often conflicting contexts. Landscape, as a subject and form through which to address identity, offers unique and perhaps more open-ended aesthetic options for artists to pursue currently. Compared with figuration, landscape can offer greater points of entry today and multiple layers of signification to both artists and viewers. As the artworks in this exhibition demonstrate, the form can subtly generate the experience of both beauty and trauma simultaneously, of histories negotiated and lived in the present and understood as representations of identities in continual flux and formation.” – Tobias Ostrander.

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    … site for the lyrical arrangement of forms.

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    Interview -Beatriz Cortez and Candice Lin

    CORTEZ: In your work there’s a certain irreverence towards the Western humanist concept of the human as sacred. It is one of the things about your work that blows my mind. It makes me think not in terms of hyper objects but micro-objects: about all the worlds that already live inside our bodies and about how our bodies will disperse, not only to become cosmic dust but also to become lots of microbes and nutrients for other bodies, and not only when we become compost but also as we move around, each of us a porous body secreting its liquids throughout the world.

    LIN: That is really fascinating that you are thinking about “what is not meant for us” as a way to shift scale, to think of justice beyond the political human sphere. I usually associate such scalar arguments, such as the idea that the Earth will survive us but we will not survive what we’ve done to the Earth, as arguments for nonaction—apolitical inertia. But you seem to be activating this reframing as a way to care more, to be more invested, while aware that we are neither master nor subject of the narratives unfolding. This reminds me of something that seems like a contradiction but perhaps is not, that I have been thinking about in both of our work. I think we share a desire or openness to learn from the materials—how they resist us, what their will asserts, and how we might embrace things that rust, mold, or change as part of the work.

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    […] an indispensable, neat, and useful […] still point of the turning world

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    For if life, wisely lived, ought to be, as I firmly believe, nothing but a long act of courtship

    Hortus Vitae Essays on the Gardening of Life, Vernon Lee

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    miséricorde (larousse.fr) misericord (wordsense.eu) or mercy

    nom féminin

    (latin misericordia, de misereri, avoir pitié, et cor, cordis, cœur)

    • 1. Pitié qui pousse à pardonner à un coupable, à un vaincu ; pardon accordé par pure bonté : Implorer miséricorde.
    • 2. Sorte de console placée sous le siège relevable d’une stalle d’église et servant, quand ce siège est relevé, à s’appuyer tout en ayant l’air d’être debout. (Les menuisiers des xve et xvie s. les ont sculptées de mascarons ou de petites scènes d’une grande fantaisie.) Synonyme : patience
    • 3. Disposition à venir en aide à celui qui est dans le besoin.

    via wordnik – [Middle English, pity, from Old French, from Latin misericordia, from misericors, misericord-, merciful : miser?r?, to feel pity; see miserere + cor, cord-, heart; see kerd- in Indo-European roots.]

    grace –

    • That element or quality of form, manner, movement, carriage, deportment, language, etc., which renders it pleasing or agreeable; elegance or beauty of form, outline, manner, motion, or act; pleasing harmony or appropriateness; that quality in a thing or an act which charms or delights: as, to move with easy grace.
    • Favor; good will; friendship; favorable disposition to another; favorable regard: as, to be in one? s good graces; to reign by the grace of God.