[11plateaus]

In this respect artists are like philosophers. What little health they possess is often too fragile, not because of their illnesses or neuroses but because they have seen something in life that is too much for anyone, too much for themselves, and that has put on them the quiet mark of death. But this something is also the source or breath that supports them through the illnesses of the lived (what Nietzsche called health). “Perhaps one day we will know that there wasn’t any art but only medicine.

Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1991)

[ochyming-deactivated20220410]

Jean Dubuffet 

L'Arbre de fluides, 1950   

Oil paint on canvas 1161 x 890 mm

[11plateaus]

“This is painting that no longer has any background because the “underneath” comes through: the surface can be furrowed or the plane of composition can take on thickness insofar as the material rises up, independently of depth or perspective, independently of shadows and even of the chromatic order of color (the arbitrary colorist). One no longer covers over; one raises, accumulates, piles up, goes through, stirs up, folds. It is a promotion of the ground, and sculpture can become flat since the plane is stratified. One no longer paints “on” but “under”. These new powers of texture, that ascent of the ground with Dubuffet, have been pushed a long way by informal art, and by abstract expressionism and minimal art also, when they work with saturations, fibers and layers, or when they use tarlatan or tulle in such a way that the painter can paint behind the picture in a state of blindness.”

Deleuze & Guatarri, What is Philosophy? (1991), 194-5

[11plateaus]

“We require just a little order to protect us from the chaos.

Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. These are infinite variabilities, the appearing and disappearing of which coincide. They are infinite speeds that bled into the immobility of the colorless and silent nothingness they traverse, without nature or thought. This is the instant of which we do not know whether it is too long or too short for time. We receive sudden jolts that beat like arteries. We constantly lose our ideas. That is why we want to hang on to fixed opinions so much. We ask only that our ideas are linked together according to a minimum of constant rules. All that the association of ideas has ever meant is providing us with these protective rules - resemblance, contiguity, causality - which enable us to put some order into ideas, preventing our “fantasy” (delirium, madness) from crossing the universe in an instant, producing winged horses and dragons breathing fire.”

Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1991) 201-2

[nobrashfestivity]

Eduard Artemyev on composing music for Andrei Tarkovsky

[acogitoforthedissolvedself]

“Perhaps art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house ... the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, of sensibilia that cease to be merely functional and become expressive features . . . No doubt this expressiveness is already diffused in life, and the simple field of lilies might be said to celebrate the glory of the skies. But with the territory and the house, it becomes constructive and erects ritual monuments of an animal mass that celebrates qualities before extracting new causalities and finalities from them. This emergence of pure sensory qualities is already art, not only in the treatment of external materials but in the body’s postures and colors, in the songs and cries that mark out the territory . . . In this respect art is continually haunted by the animal.” (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1994) pp. 183–6) Vogelkop Bowerbird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1zmfTr2d4c

[acogitoforthedissolvedself]

Le Souffle au Coeur, Louis Malle (1971)

[acogitoforthedissolvedself]

“We have to see creation as the tracing of a path between impossibilities ... Kafka explained how it was impossible for a Jewish writer to speak German, impossible for him to speak Czech and impossible for him not to speak. Perrault comes upon the same problem: the impossibility of not speaking, of speaking English, of speaking French. Creation takes places in strangled channels. Even in some particular language, even in French, for example, a new syntax is a foreign language within the language. A creation who isn’t seized by the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator. A creator is someone who creates his own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities. It’s by banging your head against the wall that you find an answer. You have to work on the wall, because without a set of impossibilities, you won’t have the line of flight, the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth. You have to be liquid or gaseous, precisely because normal perception and opinion are solid, geometric. It’s what Bergson did in philosophy, Virginia Woolf or Henry James with the novel, Jean Renoir in cinema (and experimental cinema, which has gone a long way exploring the states of matter). Not leaving Earth, at all - but becoming all the more earthly by inventing laws of liquids and gases on which the Earth depends.”

Gilles Deleuze, L’autre Journal 8 (October 1985)

[oo111111]

[cinemawithoutpeople]

Cinema without people: Pierrot le Fou (1965, Jean-Luc Godard, dir.)

[gnossienne]

“A vortex of emotional trouble seems to swirl around this woman. Yet once she sits at the piano, disorder and doubt fall away. She plays piano the way a gazelle leaps from one crag to another, with mesmerising natural mastery.” (x)

[occultclassicalbright]

Details after “Fruit piece” by Jan van Huijsum Ed. and Digital Restoration Orig.

[artist-cezanne]

Portrait of Marie Cezanne, the Artist’s Sister, 1867, Paul Cezanne

Medium: oil,canvas

[proustiansleep]

The word and the history are only paper. But the experience, especially the experience of suffering. Open your eyes and ears, open your door, open the leaves of your table, open your heart, open your homes, your arms. Open what philosophers most often seek to close. Everything but the mouth. Give what they hold back.

Michel Serres, The Parasite (via bergmans-ghost)

[dailyrothko]

[dailyrothko]

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Green, Blue, Green on Blue), 1968

Acrylic on paper mounted on canvas

Estate of Charles Evans 

© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), Courtesy of The Mark Rothko Foundation

[proustiansleep]

[acogitoforthedissolvedself]

José Mauro, Obnoxius (1969)

[abridurif]

L’émotion ne dit pas « je ». Vous le dites vous-même, on est hors de soi. L’émotion n’est pas de l’ordre du moi, mais de l’événement. Il est très difficile de saisir un événement, mais je ne crois pas que cette saisie implique la première personne. Il faudrait plutôt avoir recours, comme Maurice Blanchot, à la troisième personne, quand il dit qu’il y a plus d’intensité dans la proposition « il souffre » que dans « je souffre ».

Hervé Guibert, Entretien avec Gilles Deleuze (3 mai 1981), in Articles intrépides, Gallimard, 2008 (via abridurif)