Francesca J

[francescajblog]

[pleoros]

[mythologyofblue]

Niina Vatanen, Cloud Hunter’s Eyes, 2013 (via pleoros)

[francescajblog]

“Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling.”

― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

[firstofficial]

[egressions-archive-deactivated2]

Poems to the Sea by Cy Twombly I-IV 1959

[madinkbeard]

Always room for more Twombly.

[francescajblog]

Ceramicist Edmund de Waal explains how Cy Twombly’s photographs turn everyday objects into haunting testimonies.

Edmund de Waal on Cy Twombly - Telegraph

[francescajblog]

"I will lose you. It is written into this poem the way the fisherman’s wife knits his death into the sweater."

 Gregory Orr, "The Sweater," from The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

[francescajblog]

Sky — Matthew Dickman

I remember when the sky

was all the rage, like last night and how it felt like a bundle of letters flung into the air over the apartment where you and I slept like two keys in someone’s pocket, the same sky as this morning but now it’s more like a sheet that’s been lifted like rice over a wedding party. Jumbo jets are swimming through the clouds and you are driving to California with your son asleep in the back, every microcosm of his body is initialed with your name, with the sound and wet mouth of your skin. I’m getting ready to walk through this city for the tenth billion time, getting ready to be a person who is not like an empty building, who is not like an emergency kit, the swabs and needles, the antiseptic and Band-Aids, today I will be the way I always wanted to be, someone drinking coffee and being kind of knowing the difference between making love and putting on  his shoes. The way I smile, with the dental dam of death clouding up my teeth is something you always knew about me, something you liked a little in the left part of your body which is the part that has water and trees, puddles of blood and planets of organs. I want to know just what kind of a person goes to sleep with one name and wakes up with another, my inner life has so many passports I don’t think it belongs to any particular Nation, nor would it be saved if all out war were to appear over the hedges like a mother appearing in the middle of a Mall where her lost child has been watching a strange man do a trick with a quarter, a pin, and his thick hands. Whenever you go, I am sawed in half in front of an audience of one, before the two boxes of myself are wheeled back together and I get to stand up again, and bow, and walk away.

[francescajblog]

"I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood."

 Rainier Maria Rilke, opening strophe to “Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelstunden,” from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, tran. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)

[francescajblog]

“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.” — Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

[francescajblog]

My Sister's Wedding: I Never Want to Forget the Moments Between the Photographs.

There will always be the photos of the ceremony and the speeches, of the dinner and the dancing, and of my sister and her husband, newly-wed and beaming for all eternity in the Spanish sun. But nobody takes photos of the cracks, which is why we have to make sure we remember them. 

[francescajblog]

Meshes of the Afternoon

Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the "trance film," in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted "to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately."

[francescajblog]

John Ashbery

[francescajblog]

For the past two years, Argentinean artist Guillermo Kuitca has created an extensive body of large-scale paintings and meticulously detailed graphite works, which is presented for the first time at Hauser & Wirth’s Savile Row gallery. Shifting from gestural mark-making to acute linear precision and incorporating diverse motifs central to Kuitca’s practice – fragmented cartographies and architectural plans – the works explore many different histories, all linked together by Kuitca’s unique painterly language.

[francescajblog]

The map shows a geography entirely based around the theme of love according to the Précieuses of that era.

'The way through this pastoral country of the affections begins at Nouvelle Amitié and leads (ignoring dead-ends such as the Lake of Indifference) by three alternative routes to either Tendre-sur-Reconnaissance, Tendre-sur-Inclination, or Tendre-sur-Estime.

On the map the river of Inclination flows directly to Tendre-sur-Inclination, showing mutual affection as the shortest way to love. Unsuccessful suitors, however, have to find their way to love ("Tendre") through two possible routes. One leads through the villages of "Billet Doux" (Love Letter), "Petits Soins" (Little Trinkets) and so forth and ends at "Tendre-sur-Estime", the suitor having successfully convinced the lady of his worth. The other route leads to "Tendre-sur-Reconnaissance", the names of the villages showing how patience, faithfulness, and constant attention will eventually soften a lady's heart.

Straying from those routes is not recommended, as one might fall into the "lake of Indifference".

Passion by contrast was left on the fringes, where 'lies La Mer Dangereuse, rocky but otherwise uncharted, and beyond that again are Terres Inconnues '

'The enormously popular and much imitated Carte de Tendre...became a symbol for the politically and culturally independent, aristocraticsalonnières '.

From a later, feminist perspective, 'in this geography of sentiment the personal is indeed political...placing the female prerogative at the center of civilization' by privileging 'the private amorous contract contingent on woman's inclination'.

[francescajblog]

Traditionally, the right hemisphere of the brain is known to relate to emotions and intuitional affect, whereas the left one is supposed to express reason and scientific logic. Following the duality of this simple neurological understanding, the space of the gallery has been divided between two entities: a light room and a dark one. All of the pieces presented bear the tension of reason versus passion, while, using internal symmetries and palimpestic forms, they gravitate around the axis of the central wall.

[francescajblog]

if something is meaningful, maybe it’s more meaningful said ten times […] if something is absurd, it’s much more absurd if it’s repeated.’

Eva Hesse

[francescajblog]

‘The word Merz denotes essentially the combination, for artistic purposes, of all conceivable materials, and, technically, the principle of the equal distribution of the individual materials …. A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint’ ‘Every form is the frozen instantaneous picture of a process.’

Kurt Schwitters