Ode To The Most Mature Child Of My Acquaintance

Fig. 1. Kees Van Dongen - The Spotted Chimera, 1895-1907


'It takes a long time to become young.'

Pablo Picasso

Private Regrets And Hopes Of The Man Love Forgot

Fig. 1. Damien Hirst - Requiem, White Roses and Butterflies, 2008


'Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living.'

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Once Upon A Time In A Little Place Called Optimism

Fig. 1. Wassily Kandinsky - Krass und Mild (Dramatic and Mild), 1932


'Being an artist means not having to avert one's eyes.'

Akira Kurosawa

My Body's A Room In Which Everyone Is Whispering

Fig. 1. Marlene Dumas - Death of the Author, 2003


'Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can tell. He had borrowed his authority from death.'

Walter Benjamin

Hopefully, There Will Always Be An Artist At My Table

Fig. 1. Vincent Van Gogh - Still Life with a Plate of Onions, 1889


'Yesterday I sent you [Theo] a wire asking you for another 20 francs, I shall have nothing but that for my food all the week, but I have my frames at last and some stretchers.'

Vincent van Gogh (9th October 1888)

There Are Many Ways To Hate The Things You Love

Fig. 1. Sam Riley (as Ian Curtis) in Control - d. Anton Corbijn, 2007


'People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.'

Elias Canetti

Addendum #1: Music Video (click)

Joy Division - Transmission

Addendum #2: The Sunday Six (Relatively Recent)

Fig. 1. Mohamed Bourouissa - La fenêtre, 2005

Fig. 2. Mona Hatoum - Nature morte aux grenades, 2006-07

Fig. 3. Jeff Koons - Girl with Dolphin and Monkey, 2006

Fig. 4. Doug Aitken - Migration (still), 2008

Fig. 5. Gottfried Helnwein - Red Mouse 2, 2008

Fig. 6. Wim Delvoye - Torre, 2009

When There Are No More Hells To Come Back From

Fig. 1. Frida Kahlo - The Little Deer, 1946

'Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.'

Simone Weil

Horizons Are Not Limits, They Are Virgin Thresholds

Fig. 1. Joan Miró (1893-1983) - Blue I, 1962


'The blue of the sky, if we were to examine its many image values, would require a long study in which we would see all the types of material imagination being determined according to the basic elements of water, fire, earth, and air. In other words, we could divide poets into four classifications by their response to the single theme of celestial blue:

Those who see in an immobile sky a flowing liquid that comes to life with the smallest cloud.

Those who experience the blue sky as though it were and enormous flame - "searing" blue, as the Comtesse de Noailles describes it.

Those who contemplate the sky as if it were a solidified blue, a painted vault - "compact and hard azure", as the Comtesse de Noailles again says.

Finally those who can truly participate in the aerial nature of celestial blue.

Of course, besides the great poets who instinctively follow these basic inspirations, it would be easy to discover, with such a common image, all the rhymers for whom "blue sky" is always a concept, never a primary image. Poetry about the blue sky suffers an enormous loss on this account. We can almost appreciate Musset's scorn when he called "blue" the stupid colour. In the works of artificial poets, at least, it is the colour of pretentious innocence from which come sapphires or flax blossoms. Such images are not, of course, banned: poetry is just as much the participation of the large in the small as it is the small in the large. But no one experiences this participation by juxtaposing a terrestrial and an aerial name. Only a great poet can discover naturally, without copying a literary example, blue sky in a wildflower.

But, leaving aside the facile polemics against false or worn-out images, I would like to reflect on a fact that has often struck me. As I have read many different kinds of poets, what has surprised me was how rare were the images in which the blue sky was truly aerial. This rarity is due, first of all, to the fact that aerial imagination is much rarer than the imagination of fire, earth, or water. But even more important is the fact that, even when the immense, distant blue infinity is felt by an aerial soul, it needs to be materialised in order to be incorporated into a literary image. The word blue designates, but it does not render. The problem of the image of the blue sky is completely different for the painter than for the poet. For a writer, if the blue sky is not merely a background, if it is a poetic object, only a metaphor can bring it to life. The poet's task is not to translate a colour, but to make us dream the colour. The blue sky is so simple that no one thinks he can oneirise it without materialising it. But this process of materialisation goes too far. The blue sky is made too hard, too glaring, too searing, too compact, too burning, and too brilliant. Often the sky looks at us too fixedly. We attribute too much substance and constancy to it because the soul does not become a part of the life of primary substance. We tonalise the sky's blue by making it "vibrate" like a sonorous crystal, whereas, for truly aerial souls, there is only the sound of a breath. Thus, with excessive intensity, the Comtesse de Noailles writes: "Today the blue is so strong that it blinds you if you look at it too long; it crackles, it whirls, it becomes filled with golden tendrils, with hot frost, with sharp and radiant diamonds, with arrows, with silver flies . . . "

The hallmark of what is truly aerial is to be found, in my opinion, in another direction. It is, in fact, based on the dynamics of dematerialisation. the substantial imagination of air is truly active only on a dynamics of dematerialisation. The blue of the sky is aerial when it is dreamed as a colour that pales a bit, like a pallor that seeks finesse, a finesse that we imagine as yielding beneath our fingers like a delicate fabric as we caress, in Paul Valéry's words:

The mysterious texture of the utmost height.

That is when the blue sky counsels us to be as calm and as light as it is itself:

The sky above the roof, is
So blue, so calm!

sighs Verlaine from the depths of his prison where he is still under the weight of unforgiven memories. This calm can be filled with melancholy. The dreamer feels that the blue sky will never be a possessed good. "What good are the symbols of a basic and comforting mountaineering since I shall not, this evening, reach the blue, that blue which is so aptly called sky blue?"

But it is by following the scale of dematerialisation of celestial blue that we can see aerial reverie at work. Then we will understand that it is an aerial Einfühlung: the fusion of a dreamer with as undifferentiated a universe as possible, on that is blue and gentle, infinite and formless, with a minimum of substance.'

Gaston Bachelard

The Ripples Of Being Have No Alpha And No Omega

Fig. 1. Jasper Johns - Target, 1958


'Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.'

Blaise Pascal

Reasons Why The World Is Always Better In Colour

Fig. 1. David Park - The Jazz Musicians, 1954


'A goal is a dream with a finish line.'

Duke Ellington

Endless Begettings Of Mythologies And Apocalypses

Fig. 1. Nalini Malani - Listening to the Shades no. 7, 2008

Visions at Nightfall

How will we be told the worst? Who will tell us? Who will pay heed?

These questions are not being asked for the first time. They are being asked for our time - urgently. It is one in which there is every sign that they may be being asked for the last time, or, at best, the next to last time. If so we are at the tipping point when the worst still hangs in the balance, but after which we will be fully in its grip. From then on we will be left to watch the inevitable process unfold with only the suspense and mystery of irreversible devolution and the intimations of its final marvellous completeness to take our minds off the approaching conclusion of all that life depends on. And, in the unravelling, cutting and breaking off the bundled strands of cultures, communities and individual lives, the conclusion of all narratives.

Being the end of stories the Apocalypse has also been among the first of stories. From the start civilisation has been mesmerised by its own demise - has imagined it, contemplated it, waited for it, dreaded it, longed for it. In some cases the suspense has actually killed societies, or drove them to spiritual if not physical suicide with conquests destroying mighty empires that had launched them, or, conversely, withdrawal from the wider world crippling their means of survival.

But our epoch is from previous ones because annihilation will not be a whim of the Gods, or a punishment meted out by any avenging power on high, but instead the consequence of our own actions and inaction. We will drop the bombs - we are dropping them now. We will pollute the waters - with every toxin available we poison them now. Negligently or intentionally we will let masses of people starve - out of sight or in the open, they are starving now. Possessed of treatments we do not use, means of prevention we do not put into effect, scientific insights we choose not to pursue because money is spent on other things, we will let disease run rampant - crossing continents, going to ground in villages and cities, and leapfrogging oceans in first, business and economy class, it is doing so right now. To the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse we have added outriders capable of heretofore unimagined destruction. They are our creatures and they wield our inventions. In due course, they will prevail, leaving the world a tabula rasa with no one to tell the tale of last days, and no one to read it.

For the present there are several ways of describing the cataclysm that appears to be in progress - since the modern concept of 'progress' is so deeply embedded in the fate about to befall us, we might as well retain the term with all its compound ironies - and several modes of posting a warning. The most common, and, arguably, the most direct and reasonable one, if, by appealing to reason one hopes to halt and even reverse our dire trajectory, is documentation. It is the format of the news media and of agit-prop art, which, in our era, has merged in the grain of printed texts and photographs as well as in the haze of pixels. This poses problems not just because editors editorialise and propagandists doctor facts, but because the 'look' of reportage has so permeated visual culture that it almost seems as if there is nothing to contrast it to, no aesthetic foil except another as yet unfamiliar deployment of mechanically recorded and reproduced imagery.

The further difficulty is that like everything that becomes familiar, images meant to shock the viewer into a new understanding sooner or later lose their immediacy and so declare the opposite. For in line with Roland Barthes' dictum that 'Death is the eidos of [the] Photograph,' in that what happens in it has happened only once and can never happen again, a photograph is intrinsically about a closed chapter rather than an impending event. Indeed, the harsh realities or quasi-realities portrayed in the news or in agit-prop exist at a doubled remove from viewers, the first is spatial and the second, more crucial to representations of the Apocalypse, is temporal. For not only are viewers spared having to witness the actual ruination or extinction of something or someone - it is not here but there - they can take comfort in the awareness that they are survivors of the precise pictorial moment that was the subject's last.

The Apocalypse leaves no survivors, no witnesses. It is a perfect crime committed against being. Unlike the death and destruction which precede it, but only once for each victim and, in their appalling aggregate, nevertheless occur seem puny by comparison, 'the End' is that which has never happened. Seeing it arrive, feeling its immensity, and conceiving of the vastness and variousness of everyone and everything it nullifies, cannot be documented. Moreover, documentary style fundamentally betrays 'the End' as a subject inasmuch as any given piece of information that might be thought to presage it simultaneously recalls - but with ever-growing vagueness - disasters past, 'the worst' we have transcended or simply forgotten. And what is 'the End'? Whimper or bang, it is a coming undone, a coming apart. Whether that disintegration occurs gradually or instantaneously, there is an interval in which the myriad fragments of formerly realities can be seen, as never before and after, in uncanny states of flux. It is an interval when ostensibly contradictory and incommensurable things miraculously coexist. The prophet is she or he who sees their intermingling and suspension first, and, recognising this weird syncretism for what it is, already cohesive never best measures their gathering (combustible) or dispersing (spent) energies.

As we know, prophets are without honour in their own land because their words and their images spell out what is unthinkable to all around them. Inasmuch as a vision is not a fact - though facts may enter into them and assume their true significance - dismissing in the name of common sense is the path of least resistance for those unable to assimilate the future foretold. Dismissing prophets as mad is easier still, and more categorical. Madness is an offense against rationality; it is Reason's untouchable 'Other'. That women are 'Other' to men in societies where men have traditionally ruled - and it is hard to name an example where that, in the long run, has not been the case - then female prophets are the definitive 'Other', madness itself in the gendered body of those already suspected of being deficient in higher orders of thought.

Cassandra is the archetype of such seers, and in Nalini Malani's eponymous series prophets of paintings she is the woman of the hour. Which, if reckoned on the Doomsday Clock created in 1947 by the Directors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, currently stands at five minutes to midnight. In the fraction of that hour remaining to us, Malani has had a vision of her own. The form it takes is paintings of the utmost fluidity, befitting the vertiginous contingency of the world around her - and around us. Thus figures from different times and different cultures, figures giving substance to the principle of difference in its essential polymorphousness are awash in tides and currents of evanescent colour. Some we will recognise without difficulty, reminiscent as they are of ancient deities and monsters. Others will be familiar from their dress or gestures as belonging to our own era. All the while that the clock ticks with agonising slowness toward a more agonising future without aftermath, the compass spins; East West, North meets South, but also East meets the other East - has Malani not spoken of 'Splitting the Other' - and West meets woman distinctly times meets the other West and so on North and South.

No wonder the Apocalypse is wonderment pure, the climactic paradox of issuing from deformation and disembodiment, from an irrevocable denaturing of the natural in which humanity's power is consummated and then consumed leaving only a Confronted by this prospect the artist's license is correspondingly unlimited, but, as history shows, virtually inexhaustible as well. at any rate, Malani's work indicates that she has tapped into fathomless reserves of imagery, reference and metaphor. And from those depths arise painterly effects that invite us to luxuriate in colours, strokes and textures of disorienting but arresting strangeness. Her iconography is equally captivating. Not only does she conjure with as we experience it daily - though less so than in previous work - in a disenchanted period she reaches back to myth, but not in order to re-enchant the world - we are well past the point where anachronistic symbolism will heal the wounds of modernity - but in order to draw attention to the fact that in the war between Eros and Thanatos, the antagonists have not changed their essential characters but only their aspects. And only to the extent that we can no longer escape a collective awareness that the seeds of our own destruction were not divinely but sown by ourselves.

That Malani is not alone among wakeful soothsayers and tough-minded doomsayers in taking recourse to myth to articulate the full magnitude of their vision, nor alone in crossing cultural divides in choosing a particular myth for that purpose, is demonstrated by the fascination that J. Robert Oppenheimer had with the Bhagavad Gita. Observing the detonation of the first atom bomb, Oppenheimer reportedly paraphrased lines from that sacred text saying: 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' Later, in an attempt to describe the experience, he again resorted to scripture saying: 'If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the mighty one.'

However, for all that he could logically predict its terminal phase, Oppenheimer could not stop the advent of the Nuclear Age his genius ushered in, any more than Cassandra could prevent the levelling of Troy by foreseeing it.

Still, before the radiance of a thousand suns and the absolute darkness that follows, it seems that there is a kind of brilliant dusk in which spectres of human consciousness and traces of human history coalesce with inexplicable vividness. That transitional space and time are Malani's element.

We would do well to pay heed to the luminous figments she has brought back from that twilight zone.'

Robert Storr (from Nalini Malani: Listening to the Shades, 2008)

It's A Monday Thing: The Fiery Poetics Of Sensation

Fig. 1. J. M. W. Turner - The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 1835

'Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematical form, from every abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of the body.'

William Butler Yeats

It's A Sunday Thing: Juan Gris (Anything But Grey)

Fig. 1. Pears and Grapes on a Table, 1913

Fig. 2. Teacups, 1914

Fig. 3. Fantomas (Pipe and Newspaper), 1915

Fig. 4. Guitar and Score, 1915

Fig. 5. Still Life, 1915-16

Fig. 6. Still Life with Flask of Bordeaux, 1919

Fig. 7. Guitar and Clarinet, 1920

Fig. 8. The Mountain (Le Canigou), 1921

Fig. 9. The Open Window, 1921

Fig. 10. Guitar and Music Paper, 1926

'In aesthetics, as in all areas of philosophy, one can begin almost anywhere - with the objects of nature or the objects of art; with aesthetic production or reception; with aesthetic judgement or artistic imagination; with concepts of things or concepts of signs; with the existential, cognitive, or ethical meaning of aesthetic states. However one begins aesthetics, the important thing is to consider the interrelatedness of these and other phenomena. This also applies when when we are concerned predominantly with special phenomena - that is, in aesthetics, with literature or film, ornament or design, monochrome painting or minimal music. One type of aesthetic object enjoys its distinctiveness only in relation to other types, against which it stands out, to which it is related, with which it is in a process of exchange. Ultimately, this holds even for every individual aesthetic object - for this landscape, this building, this installation. Each enjoys its particularity in contrast to other (types of) objects. Theory can support this particularity (and thereby fulfil its most important task) only if it shows in what more general relations this particularity is located. It is only together with a sense of the general that the sense of the particular is there; only together with a concept of this general that it is possible to have an understanding of the multiplicity of aesthetic objects and opportunities. No matter how one begins aesthetics, what always matters in the end is to have a sense of the richness of aesthetic states.'

Martin Seel

For Lovers Young And Old Of A Certain Nothingness

René Magritte (1898-1967) - The Treason of Images, 1928-9


'In order to understand Sartre's thought regarding the imagination, it is necessary to examine first an aspect of Husserl's phenomenology, the noetic/noematic structure of awareness. According to Husserl, it is a fact that we can be aware of the same object in different ways, of different objects in the same way, and also of different objects in different ways. For example, with respect to the object, I can perceive a table, a pen, and a framed picture; with respect to the mode of awareness, I can perceive a table, I can imagine a table, and I can remember a table - in each case, the same table. Husserl termed the object of awareness the noema and the mode of awareness of the object, the noesis. To understand Husserl's phenomenology on the problem of the imagination it is important to keep in mind that when I perceive this table or when I imagine this same table, I am aware of the same noema in two different modes. Of course, the image of he table is not the table, but by means of my apprehending the image of the table I have a secondary apprehension of the table itself. Sartre concerns himself with studying the essential difference between perception and imagination with respect to the modes in which each of these presents its object, rather than distinguishing as Husserl does between a primary and secondary apprehension. The object of perception is posited as real; that is, the object perceived is, in virtue of its being perceived, taken to be a real object. But in the case of the imagination either the object is posited as non-existent, as absent, as exiting elsewhere, or, in the neutral case, the object simply may not be posited as existing at all. Thus the characteristic possessed by an image that distinguishes the image from the object of perception is that, according to Sartre, the image ". . . involves a certain nothingness":

Alive, appealing and strong as an image is, it presents its object as not being. This does not prevent us from reacting to the image as if it were before us . . .

Regarding this distinction between perception and imagination, Sartre makes two observations. The first is that, in the case of perception, the object perceived is given against a background of total reality; the object is, as it were, the figure, and reality is the ground. The top of the desk now visible is part of the desk, itself part of what is in the room, and so on. In contrast to this mode of givenness of the perceived object is that of the imagined object. Instead of being given against the ground of the totality of the real, the imagined object is given (to take only one of the four possible modes listed above) precisely as absent, which is to say, the imagined object is given as something which is nothing in relation to the background of real things.

In virtue of this nothingness of the imagined object, it is necessary to take up the question: How is the nature of consciousness to be construed so that it will be possible to understand how consciousness can posit an image; that is, how consciousness can bring before itself an object that is nothing in relation to the contents of reality? It is Sartre's contention that, if consciousness were but one event among others in the world, and if it were also in thoroughgoing casual interaction with these other events, that there could be no awareness of images as images, as representations:

If we assume a consciousness placed at the very bosom of the world as one existence among others, we must conceive it hypothetically as completely subjected to the action of a variety of realities - without its being able to avoid the detail of these realities by an intuition which would embrace their totality. This consciousness could therefore contain only real modifications aroused by real actions and all imagination would be prohibited to it, exactly in the degree to which it would be engulfed by the real.

Sartre's thesis is that, in order for an image to be entertained as an image, consciousness must set the image over against the totality of the real, since the image is not one real item among others but merely a representation. But, in order for the imagination to posit the image as over against reality, it is necessary that consciousness not be "engulfed in the real" and determined in all its aspects by the causal efficacy of reality upon it. Consciousness has to disentangle itself from reality in order to posit the image as nothing in relation to the real, since, if such a disentanglement were not effected, the image could only be one other real item among others. As such, it would not be an image, but merely another item presented to consciousness because of the activity on consciousness of the other events that constitute reality. And it is just this ability to set itself over against the totality of the real that constitutes the freedom of consciousness:

For a consciousness to be able to imagine it must be able to escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able to by its own efforts to withdraw from the world. In a word it must be free.

This freedom from reality, this escaping from the world, is conceived by Sartre as definable correlatively to a (Heideggerian) being-in-the-world. In other words, consciousness can withdraw from the world on the ground of a logically prior being in the world. Consciousness, which has now been shown to be in essence imaginative, posits the image as a nothing in relation to the real in which consciousness is basically engaged but which, in virtue of its imaginativeness, it can transcend . . .

[The] concept of meaning for Sartre rests on his theory of imagination and therefore on the nature of freedom. Although consciousness is a being-in-the-world, there is yet a sense in which the concept of the world is not fundamental but rather derivative from the fact of the imaginativeness of consciousness. Simply stated, Sartre's point is that

The imaginary thus represents at each moment the implicit meaning of the real.

The real is what is simply there for awareness. Therefore, to apprehend the real as world, as a meaningful articulation of data, it is necessary that the real, the simply there, be surpassed toward the imaginary. The sense of this notion of surpassing toward the imaginary is that the situation directly confronted perceptually receives definition by having placed (metaphorically) alongside it an imaginative consciousness which is in an essential respect a reverse of the perceived situation. For example, I note the absence of my dictionary not simply because the dictionary is not perceptually encountered in the bookcase, but also because the imaginativeness of my consciousness places beside what I do perceive in the bookcase the image of the dictionary, an image which presents the dictionary as being absent. The real is what I immediately confront; the world is that same situation, meaningfully articulated by the imagination and set over against the consciousness that is there engaged:

. . . imagination, far from appearing as an actual characteristic of consciousness turns out to be an essential and transcendental condition of consciousness.

As well as of freedom in the world . . . '

F. Molina

Obituary: How Do You Say Goodbye To A Grasshopper?

Fig. 1. David Carradine (December 8, 1936 - June 3, 2009) - Kung Fu, 1972-1975

It Calls Out To Me, But I Don't Know How To Answer

Fig. 1. Agnes Martin - The Sea, 2003


'I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.'

Ingmar Bergman

Reprise #4: At Nightfall In The Forest Of Philosophy

Fig. 1. Caspar David Friedrich - Evening, 1820-21

'An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.'

Albert Camus

Reprise #1: Evicting The Soft Embalmer Of The Night

Fig. 1. Gustav Klimt - Danae, 1907-08


'The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.'

Gustav Klimt

Finally, There Is Only A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction*

Fig. 1. Vivienne Shark LeWitt - Diners Club, 1992

'A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope the picture might spring to life.'

Lucian Freud

* 'No artist is pleased. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.' (Martha Graham)

Addendum: The Sunday Six

Six different translations of the opening lines of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations:

1. It is in the nature of every advance, that it appears much greater than it actually is. (Malcolm, 1984)

2. It is in the nature of all progress, that it looks much greater than it really is. (Baker and Hacker, 1980)

3. The thing about progress is that it appears much greater than it actually is. (Barker, 1985)

4. In general, it is characteristic of progress that it looks much bigger that it really is. (Spielberg, 1978)

5. It is a thing about progress: it generally looks bigger than it really is. (von Wright, 1982)

6. Motto: 'Anyway, the thing about progress is that it looks much greater than it really is.' (Stern, 2004)

Don't Always Apologise For Talking About Painting*

Fig 1. Theo van Doesburg - Composition VIII (The Cow), c. 1918


'To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.'

Paul Valery

* 'We must always apologize for talking painting.' (Paul Valery)

The Sunday Six: Keep Moving - Nothing To See Here

Fig. 1. Al Held - Torquad II, 1985

Fig. 2. Blake Edwards - Untitled, 1987

Fig. 3. Peter Halley - The Acid Test, 1991-92

Fig. 4. Karen Kunc - The Wanting Pool, 2007

Fig. 5. Peter Zimmermann - Shess, 2007

Fig. 6. Parastou Forouhar - Red is my Name, Green is my Name, 2008


'What you see is what you see.'

Frank Stella