❝ tu n'as rien vu à Hiroshima ❞

[mesogeios]

What happens to art when life is already a virtual sphere? Suddenly issues of value and contact become paramount. The model becomes a key symbol for art, and in the proc­ess suggests a new idea of beauty. To include the model in an account of art is to point not only to a real person outside the artwork but to her interaction with another real person, the artist. As an interaction, this proc­ess raises issues of power and justice. Many contemporary artists show model and artist communicating and collaborating as equals or even sharing each other’s roles. The viewers of art are part of this interaction, too. In Thomas Struth’s photographs, for example, the models are visitors in museums, people looking at artworks and often looking like the artworks they see. Struth connects the act of modeling, the artwork that results, and the experiencing of that artwork into a seamless whole, and since we are the audience gazing on those gazers, the circle of modeling and communicating keeps expanding. The gazers in the photos are as beautiful as figures in the paintings they might see, and we encounter the possibility of our own beauty as their analogs.

Wendy Steiner, “Beauty Is Shoe” from Lapham’s Quarterly (via mesogeios)

[kafkasapartment]

Magnolia Blossom, 1925. Imogen Cunningham. Gelatin silver

[mesogeios]

The beginnings of art are being continually pushed back in time. Sculpted rocks just discovered at Kununurra in Australia may date back seventy-five thousand years. The paintings of horses, rhinoceros, ibex, mammoths, lions, bears, bison, panthers, reindeer, aurochs, and an owl, found in 1994 in the Chauvet Cave in the French Ardèche, are probably fifteen thousand years older than those found in the Lascaux caves! The time separating us from these artists is at least twelve times longer than the time separating us from the pre-Socratic philosophers. What makes their age astounding is the sensitivity of perception they reveal. The thrust of an animal’s neck or the set of its mouth or the energy of its haunches were observed and recreated with a nervousness and control comparable to what we find in the works of a Fra Lippo Lippi, a Velázquez, or a Brancusi. Apparently art did not begin clumsily. The eyes and hands of the first painters and engravers were as fine as any that came later. There was a grace from the start. This is the mystery, isn’t it?

John Berger, Portraits (I: The Chauvet Cave Painters)

[fridatuori]

The light of the spring sun II

Spring 2015 by Frida Tuori

[yorps]

Visit Original Link

[sskeptical]

if i close my eyes and play this faintly, it’s like i’m in paris again ❤️

[memento-moring]

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.” Critic John Berger’s well-known quote has been true throughout the history of Western culture, and it is more true now than ever. Men are exposed to male fashion models but do not see them as role models. Why do women react so strongly to nothing, really—images, scraps of paper? Is their identity so weak? Why do they feel they must treat “models”—mannequins—as if they were “models”— paradigms? Why do women react to the “ideal,” whatever form she takes at that moment, as if she were a nonnegotiable commandment? It is not that women’s identities are naturally weak. But “ideal” imagery has become obsessively important to women because it was meant to become so. Women are mere “beauties” in men’s culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while “beauty” is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, “beauty” is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence—but it is not a moral act. From the “beauties” in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson—that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them. Since the fourteenth century, male culture has silenced women by taking them beautifully apart: The catalog of features, developed by the troubadours, first paralyzed the beloved woman into beauty’s silence. The poet Edmund Spenser perfected the catalog of features in his hymn the “Epithalamion”; we inherit that catalog in forms ranging from the list-your-good-points articles in women’s magazines to fantasies in mass culture that assemble the perfect women. Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

[sentimental-obsessions]

ferdinando scianna

[teacup-peony]

Visit Original Link

Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy - Tchaikovsky

[probablyasocialecologist]

Migration need not necessarily lead to tension or conflict. If it did, creating a “hostile environment” wouldn’t have to be active state policy. Our dystopia is not inevitable, and it does not make itself. The transnational, working class struggles grounded in solidarity work against it; and the work the state puts in close those down are key to its reproduction: a violent, material anti-utopianism. Nor, we should stress, does climate change produce conflict or displacement by itself. It does so via political-economic institutions: from food markets to neglected public housing to private ‘security’ apparatuses. As Neil Smith has noted “there’s no such thing as a natural disaster’”; and even as the climate becomes more adverse to our sustaining ecologies—from the food we grow, to extremes of precipitation and drought—it is states and markets that make the environment hostile. Amartya Sen showed long ago that famines are not so much characterized by a decline in available food, but by a collapse in rural incomes. Under market conditions food follows the money out of the area hit by (for example) drought. Meanwhile, fresh water is a renewable transnational resource—it becomes a source of conflict, when states impose national borders on its flows.

Out of the Woods, A Hostile Environment

[wonders-of-the-cosmos]

Aldebaran conjunction

by Robert Ćwikliński

[aguitada]

How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream. Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often, or forever, when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all? Do we forgive our fathers for marrying, or not marrying, our mothers? Or divorcing, or not divorcing, our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing, or leaning? For shutting doors or speaking through walls? For never speaking, or never being silent? Do we forgive our fathers in our age, or in theirs? Or in their deaths, saying it to them or not saying it. If we forgive our fathers, what is left?

Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Smoke Signals

[oblivion-soave]

KHAITE by Sebastian Sabal-Bruce

[mesogeios]

We often have to explain to young people why study is useful. It’s pointless telling them that it’s for the sake of knowledge, if they don’t care about knowledge. Nor is there any point in telling them that an educated person gets through life better than an ignoramus, because they can always point to some genius who, from their standpoint, leads a wretched life. And so the only answer is that the exercise of knowledge creates relationships, continuity, and emotional attachments. It introduces us to parents other than our biological ones. It allows us to live longer, because we don’t just remember our own life but also those of others. It creates an unbroken thread that runs from our adolescence (and sometimes from infancy) to the present day. And all this is very beautiful.

Umberto Eco

[baxmbi]

[mechanyst-deactivated20180810]

Second, the initial stages of learning a skill invariably involve tedium. Yet rather than avoiding this inevitable tedium, you must accept and embrace it. The pain and boredom we experience in the initial stages of learning a skill toughens our minds, much like physical exercise. Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuit the learning process. The pain is a kind of challenge your mind presents - will you learn how to focus and move past the boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction? Much as with physical exercise, you can even get a kind of perverse pleasure out of this pain, knowing the benefits it will bring you. In any event, you must meet any boredom head-on and not try to avoid or repress it. Throughout you life you will encounter tedious situations, and you must cultivate the ability to handle them with discipline.

Robert Greene, Mastery

[houndeye]

[days-of-reading]

Near the close of the Metamorphoses, Ovid wrote, “Time itself flows on with constant motion, just like a river, for no more than a river can the fleeting hour stand still. As wave is driven on by a wave, and, itself pursued, pursues the one before, so the moments of time at once flee and follow, are ever new.” He describes how every minute gives place to another, how night passes into day, morning into night, the sky passes through its colors from red at sunrise to red at sunset, the moon waxes and wanes, the seasons change, human bodies pass from infancy to youth to middle and old age, earth and water are heavy and sink down, fire and air are light and rise up, the earth becomes liquid, water becomes wind, air flashes into the fiery atmosphere of the heavens, fire condenses and thickens into air, air into water, and water, under pressure, turns into earth. Rivers appear and disappear, marshes become deserts and deserts marshes, seashells lie far from the ocean, volcanoes become extinct, bees are born in the rotting carcasses of bulls, hornets in the carcasses of war horses; within the silence of the tomb, the rotting marrow forms into a snake. Ovid realizes that his own account is taking place in time and that as he has seemed to embrace time within his writing, so time will eventually overcome that inscription: “The day will end, and Phoebus sink his panting horses in the deep, before I recount all the things that have been altered to a different shape. So we see times change, and some nations gain strength, while others sink into obscurity.” In our everyday experience of time, we similarly think of both the past and the future as commensurable infinities. But we have traces of the past, memories and records, and no traces of the future.

Susan Stewart, The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics