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It ain't easy

Those few folks who have survived a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge report that it takes about four seconds to hit the water, which is plenty of time to re-think and regret the decision.
(Source: The Amazing Fact Generator)

Relational Gunpowder

How was Baudelaire defining the modern artist for example? He was defining (the artist) as an idle man. An idle person, idleness must be eliminated, excluded from the working process. It has really to be excluded from people's daily life and it is something that deserves the least salary. For Henry Ford, every gesture that is done by a worker during his daily life, should produce something, in order words, it has to be equivalent of salary. The history of modern art is really a quarrel between the idleness and virtues of freedom and the rationalization, evaluation of time lived. The artist is always the person who struggles against this separation in work time. For this reason, many works of art have concentrated on idleness starting with the beginning of 20th century. Artists like Langert, Jack Lang and conceptual artists like Stanley Brown. Their works of art consist of idleness. For example, in 50's, 60's Thiery Moens was a member of the realists; he was also talking about a big idleness between signs. And we see how these two worlds are opposite to each other. Both of these two worlds are big and the quarrel between these two worlds will also constitute the history of modern art in 21st century.

On one hand there is an inclination for the realization of the gestures that should be done in the factory, the rationalization of mass production and the creation of consumption objects, and on the other hand, in spite this, we see the trends that try to decrease the importance of the objects against the gesture. In other words, on one hand gesture disappears in the name of object, on the other hand the object disappears in the name of gesture. At the same time, after the evaluation of this gesture, the prevention of any kind of waste, for example the prevention of energy and time waste, which is really a basic waste. In this case we can say this: There was a period in history, where those two worlds were not opposite to each other and the art was mostly included in the society. The society also was not in opposition , the producers were not contrary to their society. However that is not the case any more. In this regard, there are more interesting activities, applications and works in the shared area between these two parts.

From NICOLAS BOURRIAUD's lecture 'TODAY'S ART PRACTICE' - 21.09.2001

In between two years

⌛

To forget

(Image published in The ONION. 2008)

Deleuze sobre Herzog en Fitzcarraldo o "¿qué tanto es tantito?"

“En cuanto Ideas, lo Pequeño y lo Grande designan a la vez dos formas y dos concepciones distintas pero capaces también de pasar la una a la otra. (…) Y aunque esto sea aplicable a todos los autores que estamos estudiando, querríamos considerar el cine de acción de Herzog como un caso extremo. Porque esta obra se distribuye según dos temas obsesivos que constituyen una suerte de motivos visuales y musicales. En uno, el hombre de la desmesura frecuenta un medio también desmesurado, y concibe una acción tan grande como el medio. Es una forma SAS’, pero muy particular: en efecto, la acción no es requerida por la situación, es una empresa alocada, nacida en la cabeza de un iluminado y que parece ser la única que puede igualar al medio entero. O más bien la acción se desdobla: está la acción sublime, siempre más allá, pero ella misma engendra una acción diferente, una acción heroica, que por su cuenta se enfrenta con el medio, penetrando lo impenetrable, franqueando lo infranqueable. Hay, por tanto, a la vez una dimensión hipnótica alucinatoria en que el espíritu actuante se eleva hasta lo ilimitado en la Naturaleza, y una dimensión hipnótica en que el espíritu afronta los límites que la Naturaleza le opone. Y las dos son diferentes, tienen una relación figural. (…) en Fitzcarraldo, lo heroico (la travesía de la montaña por el pesado barco) es aún más directamente el medio de lo sublime: que la selva virgen entera se convierta en el templo de la Opera de Verdi y de la voz de Caruso” (Deleuze, La imagen movimiento: 259)

(Dziga Lovechild on Tim Davis)

Some day, the press releases of art exhibitions will be giggled over by stoned archaeology grad students as if they were myths about hippo-headed deities. The idea that Davis might connect this enormous crucifixless Piss Christ with our various gulf wars is as outlandish as much of the Book of Mormon. I feel safe saying that referentiality is the new good. Part of our successful adaptation to the information overload we were once so worried about is the flattening out of the value of information. For artists, if it references something, from politics to popular culture (and ideally Art History) it has value.

Excerpt from Cabinet Magazine, Issue 26, “Magic.” (Summer 2007)
http://www.davistim.com/writing/olive.html

Coleus blumei is the new invisible (2005)

road to ruin

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""

An irony.... which is that although the world that glitters inside the gates is mostly a sham, you can lose your soul trying to get there. Something real is at stake in pursuit of an illusion.
(Lionel Trilling on "The Liberal Imagination"/ The New Yorker Magazine 09/08)

C is for culture/ culture-as-encounter

I don't believe in culture, to some extent, but rather I believe in encounters. But these encounters don't occur with people. People always think that it's with people that encounters occur, which is why it's awful... Now, in this, that belongs to the domain of culture, intellectuals meeting one another, this disgusting practice of conferences, this infamy. So encounters, it's not between people that they happen, but with things... So I encounter a... painting, yes, or a piece of music, that's how I understand an encounter. When people want to connect encounters to themselves, with people, well, that doesn't work at all... That's not an encounter, and that's why encounters with people are so utterly, utterly disappointing. Encounters with people are always catastrophic.

(Gilles Deleuze interviewed by Claire Parnet, 1988)

one hit wonder

If you disagree

Here is Mars

An ant so unlike all other living ants that it was given an extraterrestrial name has been discovered in the Amazon rain forest, biologists announced today.

The tiny new species is the only known surviving member of an ant lineage that separated from the main family more than a hundred million years ago, DNA analysis revealed.

The pale, eyeless ant appears to be adapted to living underground, possibly surfacing at night to forage.

Its long mandibles suggest that the 0.08-inch-long (2-millimeter-long) animal is a predator, most likely of soft-bodied creatures such as termite larvae.

Christian Rabeling, a graduate student at the University of Texas in Austin, found a single specimen of the new species, thought to be a worker ant, in tropical soils near Manaus, Brazil.

Rabeling's team named the new creature Martialis heureka—"Martialis" means "of Mars"—after Harvard biologist and ant expert Edward O. Wilson, who was not part of the study team, commented on its unearthly appearance.

(Read a 2006 profile of Edward O. Wilson, who has been dubbed "Darwin's natural heir.")

"This beast is totally new to science," Rabeling said.

He and colleagues describe the new ant in a paper published online this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

(Source: Scott Norris on National Geographic News)

Museums are always right

Blue Line Swinger// Yo La Tengo. Live 1995, Santa Monica, Ca.

You, you won't talk about what we see when the lights are out
And I'm willing to hold your hand while you're lost,
while you're so full of doubt
Walk for miles, on your own loose ends, I'll find you there
I'll find you there

You, you walk up thin blue lines possible with reality
And I, I see through small red eyes,
glowing still at your uncertainty
Out of darkness you will come around, I know you will
I know you will
And I'll find you
And I'll find you there