being weird together

words and images assuaging loneliness

[sfmoma]

SubmissionFriday 

on the shortness of life, Ink, graphite, & acrylic on Bristol vellum. 24 x 19 in.

troypassey.com

thefungame.tumblr.com

instagram.com/troypasseyart

[ktotheltothep]

The end of an obsession

[sfmoma]

SubmissionFriday 

metaproducer 

dock

digital photo by R.

[ktotheltothep]

I can smell this scene.

[blackcontemporaryart]

Adrian Piper: A Retrospective at New Museum, October 27, 2000 - January 21, 2001

Bringing together more than forty artworks, these exhibitions offer the opportunity to experience Piper’s adept use of several media and to consider the complex yet resonant concerns that have preoccupied the artist for many years, namely bigotry, stereotyping, and xenophobia. Most important, this retrospective illuminates Piper’s unflinching integrity and gives each of us pause to reflect on our personal beliefs and behaviors. Piper’s work demands a high level of engagement as she unapologetically positions viewers in a relationship to the work that encourages them to evaluate their responses to the imagery and text she presents.

[ktotheltothep]

Everyone needs to know about Adrian Piper.

[bombmagazine]

Maria Callas once said, When you perform, half of the brain has to be in complete control and the other half of the brain has to be at a complete loss. That is the essence of what I want to say. You have to balance these two.

Marina Abramović (via bombmagazine)

[thehammermuseum]

A colorful #NotOnView selection to brighten your Monday:

Jean Milant, Rose Twist, 1968. 6 x 6 in. (15.2 x 15.2 cm). Collection UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum. Gift of the UCLA Art Council.

[ktotheltothep]

Nonwhite clouds

[heteroglossia]

In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (via heteroglossia)

Bakhtin making sense

[wordsonmusik]

Small, 1998

“If we think about music primarily as action rather than as thing and about the action as concerned with relationships, then we see that whatever meaning a musical work has lies in the relationships that are brought into existence when the piece is performed.” i. There are relationships among the sounds themselves–the intervalic play between notes, how symphonic sections relate–and those reflect certain conventions about our narrative culture. The way you tell a story tells everything.

ii. There are, perhaps with greater significance, the relationships among the people taking part in a performance: players, owners, managers, paying audience members. This might have transformed the modern concert hall into “that other contemporary leisure phenomenon, the theme park, whose archetype is the various Disneylands,” but while you go to the park to be merely amused, you go to a performance to be refreshed and restored. It both includes and transcends capitalist power dynamics.

iii. The embedded expectations of modern musical culture are a gestural, ceremonial practice that “affirms, explores, and celebrates” a larger set of relationships that both contain and supersede the ones above. As in all art, they are a ritual, and that ritual is actualized metaphor. And what is metaphor but our translation of myth, our articulation of identity?

          Myth –> metaphor –> metaphorical action –> ritual –> art. iv. And so it is that music as action–“musicking”–is about “relationships, not so much those that actually exist in our lives, as about those that we desire to exist and long to experience.”

____________

Cramming 200 pages of very worthwhile cultural studies into a paragraph–not recommended. Quote italics are my own. Read it in full: Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

[ktotheltothep]

Literary music

[ktotheltothep]

“There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes.”

[ktotheltothep]

"We are in the Zone when we believe we are there."

[ktotheltothep]

Reading Zona and thinking about finitude.

[ktotheltothep]

"The problem with cat birthdays is that you never really know who the guest of honor is,"

[thehammermuseum]

“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.” –Frank Lloyd Wright, born on this day in 1867 Today is also World Oceans Day, the United Nations-recognized day of ocean celebration and action. The Next Wave, our yearlong lecture series on the current and future state of water, continues on June 18 with a discussion on women and water in the developing world led by Chevenee Reavis of Water.org.

This week’s #NotOnView selection is Vija Celmins’s Ocean Surface Wood Engraving.

[ktotheltothep]

My daughter tells me at bedtime: I love you more than there are waves in the ocean.

[ktotheltothep]

Found in the P’s, ostensibly differentiating from the automatic sources.

[thegetty]

A silk textile curtain sewed into this 13th-century bible to protect the delicate gold leaf illumination of the Stoning of Jeremiah.

[ktotheltothep]

Upholstered manuscript

[thegetty]

It’s World Turtle Day! ‘Nuff said.

Pendant bell: turtle, A.D. 800 - 1200, Pre-Columbian. Gold. Dallas Museum of Art

Turtle Group, early 19th century, Kano Tomokazu. Wood with inlays. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, lacma

The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark, 1613, Jan Brueghel the Elder. J. Paul Getty Museum

[ktotheltothep]

Turtles!

[thehammermuseum]

Look up.

Today’s #NotOnView is Hiram Williams, The Sky, n.d.

[ktotheltothep]

Don't look down.