the way in which everyday space is organized …
AG2024_1133727b or an organization
to be an idealist
18 Years of The Marginalian.
16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.
14. Choose joy.
9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist.
8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit.
7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.
I might have chose well.
We are nothing, let us be everything!
T.J. Clark on Fanon via Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, in LRB.
Fanon’s prose defies translation: even his titles are obscure. Les Damnés de la terre doesn’t mean The Wretched of the Earth. Not really. Not unless you know what ‘la terre’ signifies to the French (too much, alas) and where the whole phrase fits in the history of class struggle:
Debout! les damnés de la terre
Debout! les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère,
C’est l’éruption de la fin.
Du passé faisons table rase
Foule esclave, debout! debout!
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!Arise! Damned of the earth
Arise! Prisoners of hunger
Reason thunders in its crater
It is the eruption of the end.
Let’s make a tabula rasa of the past
Slave crowd, arise! arise!
The world is going to change its basis
We are nothing, let us be everything!
How the British and Americans have struggled with Eugène Pottier’s great hymn. All those imperative exclamation marks!
The International, Pottier.
AG2022_2110701a or cultivation of contemplation
Contemplation is crucial for art, philosophy, and politics. It gives one the thinking space to parse out what matters and to discover unexpected connections. It gives thought time to mature. Many philosophers, poets, mathematicians, and scientists have been ardent walkers. Han also notes how contemplative repose can lead to a deep sleep of fecund dreams, another possible source of inspiration or insight. While most philosophers champion a vigilant wakefulness against numb, oblivious slumber, Han is one of the few who champion the generativity of restful sleep. He juxtaposes such sleep against an anxious, restless insomnia on the one hand and an instrumentalized “power nap” on the other, both of which are common in achievement-cum-burnout society and neither of which allows for a deep visit to the “true internal world” of dreams. Han turns to Marcel Proust, who meditates on how both dreams and waking contemplation allow unbidden memories to resurface in epiphanic fashion. Such sleep, like profound boredom, is a state of deep relaxation ready to receive such gifts. Contemplative silence, Han holds, “enables us to say something unheard of.” In contrast with frenetic activity in which one continually reacts, contemplation prepares one to act decisively.
[…]
Han’s brief discussions of a “politics of inactivity” in Vita Contemplativa will likely deepen this frustration rather than dispel it. But Han leaves little doubt in his concern for societal problems and democracy that he is not politically quietist and that he thinks the cultivation of contemplation can be politically transformative. This cultivation is meant to be countercultural, clearing new space and opening a new sense of possibilities, in individual lives but also in communities both small and large.
Byung-Chul Han: Vita Contemplativa by Steven Knepper, Mousse 89.
IMG_2268 or nodes of locality
nodes of locality, materiality, and in gravitas.
AG2024_1133721b or centrally located in the quotidian
this study adds to African diasporic art history by recentering the quotidian.
[…]
Most important, this book builds on the belief that while Black image makers operate in contexts in which their visibility and invisibility within dominant structures of meaning and value endlessly fluctuate, there has always been a rich tradition of visuality among Black viewers, creatives, and patrons, for whom a Black tradition of the visual is centrally located in the quotidian. As scholars of African American studies
A nimble arc : James Van Der Zee and photography / Emilie Boone
may term this space as part of a Black interiority, this book is indebted to a commitment to understanding the ordinary as part of the extraordinary, a space that reflects the richness of Black quotidian life.
AG2024_1133719b que anima e impulsiona
em uma forma… que anima e impulsiona
Carmen Argote uses her own body as a prism to metabolize her surroundings. Walking and exploring environs—familiar and foreign—are seminal to her practice. Commonwealth and Council
Jill Magid – The entrance to the booth is framed by an installation of Market Flowers, fresh-cut from open-air markets near the center of Paris, diverted from circulation and recontextualized as art.
Collage de deux formes et de deux espaces, entrelacés par une pluie acide et accessoirisés de voiles en dentelle, de boas et de charms, Lies poursuit les recherches conceptuelles et formelles de Mimosa Echard sur la photographie en tant que médium intrinsèquement vulnérable, à la fois surface pénétrée et théâtre de projections artificielles. En juxtaposant les « architectures du plaisir » des deux derniers siècles — le fantasme d’un safe space sans radiations et les origines de l’expérience urbaine consumériste — l’artiste examine l’érotisme de la chair contemporaine et son désir inéluctable de devenir image. Crousel
Pour cette première exposition personnelle au Centre Pompidou (elle a déjà présenté ses œuvres à Montréal, Varsovie, Los Angeles, La Havane ou Istanbul), Gaëlle Choisne propose un voyage temporel et sensoriel dans un espace recomposé. Au sol, des concrétions de liège teintes en noir, façon plage volcanique ; aux murs, de grands panneaux peints où s’agrègent divers éléments collectés. Et au centre, des sortes de « ruches », elles aussi en liège, depuis lesquelles sont projetées des images vidéo. Avec cette installation hybride, qui est aussi « un îlot, un archipel, un lieu où différentes réalités se cumulent pour être réinventées et réparées », l’artiste nous invite à « changer de perspective sur le monde et devenir l’observateur de sa propre espèce ». Centre Pompidou
unfurl their thoughts at their own pace
poetry may not change the world, but might change you – Evie Shockley
Anahid Nersessian reviews Virginie Despentes’s Dear Dickhead (“Cher Connard”) in the New Yorker.
“… the letter, even when it arrives as an e-mail, is the opposite of the social Internet: a medium that invites each correspondent to read carefully what the other has to say, and to respond in a way that will keep the conversation going as opposed to shutting it down. Most importantly, it is not intended for a public audience. We don’t write letters to get clicks or win followers; we write them, as Rousseau suggests, to discover what we think and what we want, to give an account of ourselves and to make it available to others, risking the discomfort of their close attention.”