small and real

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The Post keeps standing, filling space emptied out by more ethical actors. It’s just one example of a larger American problem. The people who insist on making sense speak in small, prim voices, trusting their listeners to understand subtleties of tone. After all, everybody’s off carving out his own personal city, made up of small but real impressions. Why try? The Post screams on, and—by the evidence of our last national election, in which almost every demographic in the city veered right, toward Donald Trump, whose profile was created, in part, in Murdoch’s pages—New York keeps hearing it out.

Maybe I read the Post because, as Ramona Garnes said, it leaves its malice naked and, therefore, shows me a more complete picture of where I and people like me really stand.

Vinson Cunningham enjoys The Post

Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage,” from 1973, is the greatest artistic exploration of the vicissitudes of marital loneliness. It consists of six roughly hour-long episodes, in which a married couple—Johan and Marianne—try and mostly fail to connect to each other.

[…]

It is a profound insight on Bergman’s part to notice that loneliness involves a detachment not only from other people but from reality in general.

[…]

It is a profound insight on Bergman’s part to notice that loneliness involves a detachment not only from other people but from reality in general.

[…]

Can any marriage survive an honest reckoning with itself? Can you get close enough to any person for life to feel real? These are Bergman’s questions

New Yorker, 2021.

To watch: “Summer in the City” (1969, Christian Blackwood and Robert Leacock).

Evelyn Sosa

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Mahara+Co is pleased to present No Place is Far Away , a solo exhibition by Cuban photographer Evelyn Sosa, on view from May 10 – June 6, 2025. In this deeply intimate and political series, Sosa constructs a living archive of the migratory experience. The exhibition emerges from a project supported by the Cuban Migrant Artists Resilience Fellowship, granted by Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) and PEN International.

Rooted in a seemingly simple question — “What object did you take with you when you emigrated?“ — Sosa opens a window into memory, loss, and the emotional gravity of displacement. Each image in the series portrays a personal belonging filled with history and significance: a piece of clothing, a photograph, a letter, a seed. These modest, almost minimal objects serve as emotional anchors — fragments of home that persist across time and distance. They are not merely material remnants, but silent witnesses to identities that refuse to vanish.

Far from a purely documentary approach, No Place is Far Away delves into the sensory and emotional dimensions of migration. Photography becomes a mode of listening: portraits of objects are interwoven with fragments of real-life testimonies, creating a liminal space where past and present gently meet. As Paul Ricoeur once wrote, “memory is not a neutral archive,” a sentiment Sosa affirms in each image — each one an act of evocation, resistance, and care.

While firmly rooted in the Cuban migratory experience, the series resonates on a universal level. In a world increasingly shaped by displacement, this body of work asks: How does identity transform when territory disappears? What remains when everything else is gone?

https://www.tumblr.com/birdbird/783926454178234368/evelyn-sosa-no-place-is-far-away-mahara-co-is

Ningún lugar está lejos reviewed in Artburst, 050725.

AG2023_1120451a or d’où jaillira l’éclair de sa mort

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Nous n’écrivions ni pour le romantisme de la vie d’écrivain – il s’est caricaturé –, ni pour l’argent – ce serait suicidaire –, ni pour la gloire – valeur démodée, à laquelle l’époque préfère la célébrité –, ni pour le futur – il n’avait rien demandé –, ni pour transformer le monde – ce n’est pas le monde qu’il faut transformer –, ni pour changer la vie – elle ne change jamais –, pas pour l’engagement – laissons ça aux écrivains héroïques –, non plus que nous ne célébrions l’art gratuit – qui est une illusion puisque l’art se paie toujours. Alors pour quelle raison ? On ne savait pas ; et là était peut-être notre réponse : nous écrivions parce que nous ne savions rien, nous écrivions pour dire que nous ne savions plus ce qu’il fallait faire au monde, sinon écrire, sans espoir mais sans résignation facile, avec obstination et épuisement et joie, dans le seul but de finir le mieux possible, c’est-à-dire les yeux ouverts : tout voir, ne rien rater, ne pas ciller, ne pas s’abriter sous les paupières, courir le risque d’avoir les yeux crevés à force de tout vouloir voir, pas comme voit un témoin ou un prophète, non, mais comme désire voir une sentinelle, la sentinelle seule et tremblante d’une cité misérable et perdue, qui scrute pourtant l’ombre d’où jaillira l’éclair de sa mort et la fin de sa cité.

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Whispering through a Stone.

AG2025_1156335a as an evident condition of

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In terms of the development of “democracy,” it is difficult to overestimate the enormous gain Western governments managed to consolidate when they successfully advanced democracy as the opposing counterweight to communism. They had actually gained control of the entire word for themselves, leaving nary a trace of its former emancipatory resonance. Indeed, democracy had become a class ideology justifying systems that allowed a very small number of people to govern—and to govern without the people, so to speak; systems that seem to exclude any other possibility than the infinite reproduction of their own functioning. To be able to call an unchecked and deregulated free market economy, a ruthless, no-holds-barred opposition to communism, a right to intervene, militarily and otherwise, in countless sovereign nations and their internal affairs—to succeed in calling all this democracy was an incredible feat. To successfully present the market as an evident condition of democracy and to have democracy viewed as inexorably calling forth the market, is an astounding accomplishment. (Kristin Ross)

It is about a play of variations and even monstrosities. McKenzie Wark on Asger Jorn

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Jorn thought the aesthetic task was to reignite sensation through experiments in emergent form. His was an aesthetics of accidents, experiments, elaborations rather than purification. He opposed any return to Hellenic idealism and insisted that art needed to keep abreast of the latest developments in the natural sciences. He thought that the evolution of form in any domain took place through dissymmetry. Jorn: “ugliness is no less rare than beauty.”

Jorn was opposed to that strand of modernism that sought only a purification of form and which tended to fetishize the geometric. Nature isn’t a matter of pure forms for Jorn. It is about a play of variations and even monstrosities. Jornian aesthetics does not seek a balance between the disinterested appreciation of Apollonian rigor and the immersive passions of Dionysian play. For Jorn, the tension between the figures of Apollo and Dionysus is actually a class struggle between aristocratic and folk life. Rather than the war on monsters that constitute the mythic life of every ruling class, Jorn is on the side of the monsters. Or as Michele Bernstein says apropos Jorn, “monsters of all lands unite!”

[…]

Art is experimental social practice. Ruling class art is Apollonian and represents the world as made in its own image. What it fears is the alignment of popular power with the forces of nature in an open-ended process, as the capacity to reinvent form, including social and political forms. Art is playful; play is social. To modify Lautréamont: “poetry should be played by all.”

[…]

Jorn saw a way forward in the practices of the Letterist International, perhaps one of the most marginal and inconsequential avant-gardes of the time – at least from the art world’s point of view. A shorthand way of explaining what he saw in them might be to think about the name of the movement they would found together: the Situationist International. It was Sartre who had put the category of situation back into play. In Sartre, the situation was where a free consciousness came up against the inertia of a facticity it could not know about in advance. But in Sartre the situation is given, a stage for an individual encounter. For the situationists, the collaborative and playful labor of the production of situations might yield a renewed consciousness, unknown ambiences and affect, a playful reconstruction of the world.

Thus, the Letterist practices of dérive, potlatch and détournement might point the way forward, to a reinvention of art as collaborative, experimental practice, meant to make new myths, new avatars, a whole way of life. Of course, all of this will be absorbed back into the art world as an archive. As images and concepts to be processed into the making of more of the same. But Jorn wanted more than that. Now that we know that this is the Anthropocene, that things can’t just go on as they are, perhaps we need more than art-world Asger Jorn. We need Jorn the thinker and activist of the materialist attitude to life. Or so I argued in The Beach Beneath the Street.

Asger Jorn: Monsters of all lands unite!, McKenzie Wark, September 11, 2016.

Asger Jorn, Conte du Nord (Northern Count) (Modification), 1959. Oil on canvas on found painting. 31.7 x 21.1 inches. via Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modification Paintings, curated by Axel Heil and Roberto Ohrt, Petzel, March 5 – April 13, 2019.

Valentin Guerrier.