Sorry, We're Closed

Though this blog has reached its conclusion, please continue to enjoy what's here, what has been left behind, indefinitely.

Parallel (Repost)

Originally posted (without emphasis) in July 2008.

"He who lives for an encounter with the unseen becomes the instrument of the seen: he who would quarry the earth becomes the spokesman of its surfaces, the surveyor of its shades."

"To ask life of words is to run the risk of being crushed by them."

"As though from the point of null, we could at last move and find where we are."

"He moves from one place to another, and dreams continually of stopping."

"What changes our life... often seems improbable, as if it had come from nowhere."

"The act of writing is not so much an ordering of the real as a discovery of it."

"The world can never be assumed to exist. It comes into being only in the act of moving toward it."

"Seeing is the effort to create presence."

"It is as if each act of seeing were an attempt to establish a link between the one who sees and the thing that is seen."


-------
from The Art of Hunger, by Paul Auster

Arcanum 17 - The Woods

For the ones who live in and attend to the woods, the shadows, the rarely seen. For the ones compelled to "create pure night" inside themselves.

pp. 35-37 (bracketed):

Before I met you I'd known misfortune, despair. Before I met you, come on, those words mean nothing. You know very well that when I first laid eyes on you I recognized you without the slightest hesitation. And from what borders did you come, so fearfully protected against everyone, what initiation to which no one or almost no one was admitted has consecrated what you are. When I saw you, all that fog, that unspeakable fog, was still in your eyes. How can one be born again, and above all who can one be born again after the loss of a being, a child who is everything one cherishes, with even more reason when her death is accidental and when in this child, almost a young woman, were objectively embodied (and you're not the only one who has told me this) all the grace, all the gifts of the mind, all the eagerness to know and experience, which reflect back to life a bewitching image, always in motion, through a completely new game, insanely complicated and delicate, of sieves and prisms? I didn't know anything about this drama: I only saw you dressed in a blue shadow like the one reeds are bathed in at the break of dawn and I couldn't have suspected that you came from even farther away, that with the crumbling of those prospects, so dear to you, you would even have given up your own, you couldn't help wanting to create pure night inside yourself and you almost succeeded, and that just one breech was all it took to call you back against all hope. Each time you recall these atrocious events, in my love I have no other recourse but to keep watch in secret deep in your eyes over the signal that made that terrible railroad crossing do an abrupt about-face, while you were already so far away. It alone guarantees your omnipresence around me and the gradual receding, absolutely necessary, of zones whose contemplation at short range only reopens Medusa's eyelids. It alone has mastered everything appealing about the shadows. The halt to which it brought you was irrevocable and without appeal--whether you wanted it or not, you had been let off.

Since life wanted you against your will, you're not the kind who can only give it half of yourself. Even the pain and the dream of actually succumbing to it have only been doors for you, open to the always self-renewing need to bend, to sensitize, to embellish this cruel life. You know how I see it in you, nightingale feathers in its pageboy haircut. Its quivering has a hold on you, I know of nothing more touching than the idea that it completely recaptured you. The offense was so serious that only an equally powerful pardon could match it. More beautiful, the solution to this most dangerous enigma was to be more beautiful than you'd ever been. More beautiful for having pushed aside the Dominions of Angels. More beautiful for still knowing how to accept the day hour by hour, the grass blade by blade [emphasis mine]. More beautiful for taking a love potion again and for being well-bred enough to have brought it to your lips without reservation, disregarding what terrible bitterness it may have contained. It required nothing less than all the forces that appear in fairy tales to make the fragrant flower emerge from the cinders, to make the white beast leap, its long eye unveiling the mystery of the woods.

pp. 78-79 (underlined):

This life is beyond the life of beings and very few are capable of understanding its reality, much less living it, although it constantly intrudes on the other. That other is made to be ground down, it is terribly exposed and fragile: it also happens that entire sections crack from it and that is never so true as when one loses without warning what one cherishes most in the world, made worse by the haunting enigma left when a life is struck down in its bloom. No greater cruelty enters our consciousness than this frightful void, following a fullness of heart without the slightest transition. In this state of instantaneous and total wreckage, it still rests on you, genies, to reach this heart, and without any of it transpiring outside for its own sake, to get your alembics working on it. And if the operation you begin requires days and is paid for with the prism of tears, nevertheless the conjuring does still take place and life does end up, if not with a re-entry into grace, at least by being tolerable again. But then that life is not merely life blindly surrendered to and trusted in but rather life laden with all it can gather from the feeling of its concrete negation, it is a life which succeeds in continuing after having come full circle, life that has enlarged its domains to include regions inhabited by unforgettable beings who have left us and whose destiny, as opposed to our own, seems to be to maintain themselves at the zenith of what they were capable of being.

-----------------
Excerpted from Arcanum 17, by Andre Breton.

Nicolas Delfosse - "California Stars"

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take... but by the number of moments that take our breath away... "

I'm pleased to present "California Stars," an Art on Wry special request, created by Belgian media artist and musician Nicolas Delfosse.

For full effect, press 'play' on the media player below images, wait for the song to load then sit back, relax, listen and watch. (You may have to wait several seconds before pressing 'play,' or may have to press play a few times? The player takes a while on my network. Try as you may, when you see the song title "California Stars" it's loaded and ready for playing. Enjoy.)

Merci.

-----------------------------

MySpace Playlist at MixPod.com

German Herrera - Between Here & Now

"Most of these images were felt, not thought. The reason for their creation is because they can be created.

Creative Principle at work, playing. I point in a certain direction for the viewer to complete the equation; she/he may recognize some aspect of the self in the piece, if so, two parts of the whole have communicated.

They are glimpses into The Vastness where everything comes from."

-- German Herrera

German Herrera Between Here And Now (Click on title at top of page to view slide show.) Or visit the artist's website: germanherrera.com

Germán Herrera (b. Mexico City, 1957) has had a long career as a photographer, working in both the tradition of the street photographer and as a constructor of symbolic images. The works on exhibition here, produced since 2001, represent an artist who has established a mature, richly eloquent voice. Using digital technology he merges images of an array of common and enigmatic objects, natural elements, historic references, and textures and atmospheres. In doing so, he conjures a world that is at once wholly real and imagined – a chronicle of the subconscious. Many photographers working with the formats of constructed imagery or photomontage do so with a keen sense of intentionality, as a means of conveying a specific statement or idea. Herrera, in contrast, relies greatly on intuition and emotion, more interested in the possibility of locating meaning outside the arenas or pure intellect and reason. READ FULL ARTICLE by Elizabeth Ferrer at De Santos Gallery.

---
Post images and content appear courtesy of their respective owners.

Art 21 : Kerry James Marshall on Museums

...an impenetrable wall of homogeneity, almost. He makes a good point.

Anguish of Fate - Pierre Reverdy & the Rise of the Avante-Garde

A brief introduction:

Reverdy became known in literary circles, frequenting the avant-garde group consisting of such wellknown artists and writers as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Georges Braque. With these and other artists, Reverdy helped develop cubism and surrealism. In 1917 he founded the monthly literary review, Nord-Sud, which drew together the first cubists and surrealists. The review featured many innovative authors, including Apollinaire, Jacob, Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, and Philippe Soupault. (Read More)

Suggested Poems:

• Anguish of Fate
• Path
• A Heart Divided

********
Source: PoetryFoundation.org
Image: Promotional Still from Robert Florey's 1927 film Love of Zero

The ABC's of DaDa (in 3 Parts)

The Dada movement was a protest against the barbarism of World War I, the bourgeois interests that Dada adherents believed inspired the war, and what they believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society. Dada was an international movement, and it is difficult to classify artists as being from any one particular country, as they were constantly moving from one place to another.

Dada thought that reason and logic had led people into the horrors of war, so the only route to salvation was to reject logic and embrace anarchy and irrationality. However, this could also be thought of as the logical side of anarchy and rejection of values and order; it is not irrational to embrace the systematic destruction of values, if one thinks them to be flawed.

According to its proponents, Dada was not art - it was "anti-art". It was anti-art in the sense that Dadaists protested against the contemporary academic and cultured values of art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art were to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strove to have no meaning - interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada is to offend. Ironically, Dada became an influential movement in modern art, a commentary on order and the carnage Dadaists believed it wreaked. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics they hoped to destroy them.

A reviewer from the American Art News stated at the time that "The Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralyzing and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Art historians have described Dada as being, in large part, "in reaction to what many of these artists saw as nothing more than an insane spectacle of collective homicide."

Years later, Dada artists described the movement as "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path. It was a systematic work of destruction and demoralization...In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege."

While broad, the movement was unstable. By 1924 in Paris, Dada was melding into surrealism, and artists had gone on to other ideas and movements, including surrealism, social realism and other forms of modernism. Some theorists argue that Dada was actually the beginning of postmodern art.

By the dawn of World War II, many of the European Dadaists had fled or emigrated to the United States. Some died in death camps under Hitler, who persecuted the kind of "Degenerate art" that Dada represented. The movement became less active as post-World War II optimism led to new movements in art and literature.

Dada is a named influence and reference of various anti-art and political and cultural movements including the Lettrists and the Situationists.

Part 1

Part 2: "I say unto you: there is no beginning and we do not tremble, we are not sentimental. We are a furious Wind, tearing the dirty linen of clouds and prayers, preparing the great spectacle of disaster, fire, decomposition.* We will put an end to mourning and replace tears by sirens screeching from one continent to another. Pavilions of intense joy and widowers with the sadness of poison. Dada is the signboard of abstraction; advertising and business are also elements of poetry." (Read/See More)

Part 3: "I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don't expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you exist. You haven't the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my children happy. But in your hearts you know that isn't so. You will say: I exist to guard my country, against barbarian invasions. That's a fine reason. You will say: I exist because God wills. That's a fairy tale for children. You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life. You will never understand that life is a pun, for you will never be alone enough to reject hatred, judgments, all these things that require such an effort, in favor of a calm level state of mind that makes everything equal and without importance." (Read/See More)

Robert Sward - The Kite

THE KITE

I still heard Auntie Blue
After she did not want to come down
Again: she was skypaper, way up
Too high to pull down. The wind
Liked her a lot and she was lots of noise
And sky on the end of the string:
And the string jumped hard all of a sudden,
And the sky never even breathed,
But was like it always was, slow and close
Far-away blue, like poor dead Uncle Blue.

Auntie Blue was gone, and I could not
Think of her face; and the string fell down
Slowly for a long time. I was afraid to pull it
Down. Auntie Blue was in the sky,
Just like God. It was not my birthday
Anymore: and everybody knew, and dug
A hole, and put a stone on it
Next to Uncle Blue's stone and he died
Before I was even born; and it was too bad
It was so hard to pull her down; and flowers.

---

Letter – April 4, 2009

Funny that I cannot recall how I stumbled upon that web page [where I first read "The Kite"]. What I remember is being so enthralled that I immediately emailed the link to another poet-friend of mine recommending that he read your work. He, too, discovered what I had, and we spent a portion of a lengthy afternoon conversation discussing the potency of these lines:

Auntie Blue was gone, and I could not
Think of her face; and the string fell down
Slowly for a long time.

Especially when framed against the last:

It was so hard to pull her down; and flowers.

Your poems, in my view, seem to naturally prevail in that fundamental movement Jean-Michel Maulpois ascribed so eloquently in Modern French Literature to "Grand Vent," a poem by Jacques Dupin; i.e., "To move painfully towards the highest which is also the emptiest, to direct oneself towards the scarce, the rare, nay, the unbreathable. The purpose is to climb towards an air burrow or a kind of open sky deposit where the inside of man himself up there, very high, becomes a landscape where the obscure and the secret unfold in light."

............................................................................

Bibliographic Sources & Useful Links:

"The Kite", Robert Sward copyright (c) 2003, "Four Incarnations, New & Selected Poems," Coffee House Press, second printing.

"Collected Poems, 1957-2004," Black Moss Press.

Learn More:
RobertSward.com
The Red Room – Robert Sward
............................................................................

Sonata - An Animated Short

Sonata, an animated short film about a brief and fleeting moment in a man's life, was the thesis project of Vancouver Film School student Ryan McDougal.

The song "Comptine d'un autre été: l'après-midi" by Yann Tierson and can be found on the soundtrack for Amélie.