Furniture

“It has to look antique. It has to look original”.  People are collaborating again. Collaboration seems useful for contemporary artists. The skills of a craftsman are well applied to fine art.

“Experience means going across danger”. It is out of struggle that things emerge and that progress is made, insofar as one can believe in progress in the 21st century and in the wake of two world wars, Vietnam, and an endless supply of crises. Violence and suffering force action, whether for better or worse.

Absurd gestures are beautiful. Sacrificing for a collapsed narrative is beautiful. It is a way of coping with defeat and loss. Losers need to find a way to live, too. It is a sentiment that I associate with being Japanese.

She is making things out of the flesh of cows. Depictions of shoes. Violence is sometimes the only option, but rarely seems like a good one.

Removing things from their contexts is disconcerting. It is a jolt on some level that forces one to reconsider what an object is or become aware of the contexts it lacks or gains.

How are cracks made? People’s lives crack open. Narratives crack open. Things fall through these cracks. Things deteriorate. Fragility is terrifying and damage is permanent, whether one recognizes it or not.

Modernity is not solely participated in by European men, but the process of domination is. Whiteness is toxic. Borders are another form of domination.

“it’s like opening up a can of worms”

Text on glass on bodies. They are lit dimly, red on a black that dissolves into the darkness of the background. People are angry that she reveals the racism in their history. Harvard does. People don’t like critically examining themselves. Privilege asserts its domination wherever it can and however it can. Harvard asks her to pay for her use of its texts and purchases her art from her. Hello to the bourgeois.

Family is a strong component of anyone’s lives, and I feel that it is especially so for people who have to struggle against the rest of the world. History is part of the present.

Actions intimidate me. Having a direct effect on the world and participating in a place that is not made safe by art is frightening to me.

President Obama stands atop history. So do the rest of us. These photographs attempt to recognize it. People are taken into the past and posed in the same situations. The past is real. We need to recognize it as real. Touching this situation even in a constructed place draws people in. Diving from the present into the past.  I question whether President Obama is capable of challenging the past of the White House.

People become vehicles for the past. “It’s not about you”.  It is full empathy, full compassion to disappear into another.

http://video.pbs.org/video/1281748949

Playing along via telephone

Music seems rather magical. William Kentridge is a conductor of sorts.  They speak of “play” and experimentation. I think that this is a very important aspect. Video and audio move together. Pieces of paper are blown about and reassembled. Charcoal lines develop and are erased atop a piece of paper. Words accompany it. He is making a moving drawing. It seems dark. Doing something for one’s own pleasure reflects darkly on one’s pleasure when the sky is drawn grey and the people disinterested or despairing. Compassion comes in with his discussion of fighting apartheid. He is trying to recognize the ways that he is flawed. Critically examining and deconstructing himself. “Self Portrait in the third person”. Charcoal lines leave their ghosts even when erased. One can improvise and it can be okay as long as you’re there and focused.

The world is process rather than fact. This seems true. “Her absence filled the world”. I have written poems about nothingness being large, being able to drown out everything else. I feel justified.

He is doing drawings on curved surfaces that move. Non euclidean geometry is fucked up on many levels. He is doing 3d images. He speaks of the “agency” we have to make sense of the world.

Modernism and Constructivism have a place in his art. I have been reading about these things in AHIS3. I suspect that modernism is less fundamentally compatible with Compassion. He enjoys physicality- tactile sensation and the imprecision of reality.

“It has always been between the things I thought I was doing that the real work has happened”. That’s what reality consists of. Things that are not reducible to quantifiable or intentional things.