#marias.javier

[aamjp]

Another quick portrait test of Javier Marias // tried to emphasise the drawing aspects of my technique.  

[aamjp]

“One of the things I’ve tried to do,” says the Spanish author Javier Marías, dragging cheerfully on the latest in a long line of cigarettes in the middle of a Barcelona heatwave, “is to allow to exist, in a novel, the time that doesn’t have the time to exist.” He gestures impatiently with the smouldering end. “That is … when things are happening we don’t really know what’s going on. You can spend a whole night doing something, having an argument with your well-beloved, for instance, and in the end, the only thing you will have that shall stay in memory will be a glance, or a minute, or some sentence, or some image, or how the light of dawn at a given moment was entering through the window. In a novel, you can make those things have their real duration – the one they shall have, maybe, almost, for the rest of your life.”

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Relationship between things and names:

The expression of unambiguous substantive meaning therefore, cannot be accomplished without the word. Language, while incapable of defining an individual object of reality unmistakably — being able at best to approach it through the process of naming — can indeed precisely specify emotional or intellectual content and provoke questions." — Hapkemeyer, ‘Image and Word, Photo and Text' in photo text text photo, p. 10

"[...] as everyone knows or, at least, senses, things only exist once they have been named" — Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow, p. 14

Perhaps Hawking is trying to be reassuring. What he seems to mean is that human language has a limit. We (or at least the rest of us) reach this boundary whenever we ponder the cosmic. We imagine by analogy and metaphor: that strange and vast thing is like this smaller, more familiar thing. The universe is a cathedral, a clockworks, an egg. But the parallels ultimately diverge; only an egg is an egg. Such analogies appeal precisely because they are tangible elements of the universe. As terms, they are self-contained — but they cannot contain the container that holds them. So it is with time. Whenever we talk about it, we do so in terms of something lesser. We find or lose time, like a set of keys; we save and spend it, like money. Time creeps, crawls, flies, flees, flows, and stands still; it is abundant or scarce; it weighs on us with palpable heft. — Maria Popova

“But a few days later he discovered that he had trouble remembering almost every object in the laboratory then he marked them with their respective names so that all he had to do was read the inscription in order to identify them. When his father told him about his alarm at having forgotten even the most impressive happenings of his childhood, Aureliano explained his method to him, and José Arcadio Buendía put it into practice all through the house and later on imposed it on the whole village. With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana. Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use. Then he was more explicit. The sign that he hung on the neck of the cow was an exemplary proof of the way in which the inhabitants of Macondo were prepared to fight against loss of memory: This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk. Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.“ — Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude, pp. 48-49

We can understand this conjunction of name and object [within Robert Macpherson's Frog Poems] in two ways. The relationship between the species name and the object MacPherson chooses is what Linguists would call 'motivated': it isn't arbitrary. At the same time, the principle of conjunction recalls the French writer, the Comte de Lautreamont's, famous 'chance encounter of the sewing machine and the umbrella on the dissecting table', which underwrote French Surrealism's ideal of 'the marvellous'. We have then, on the one hand, a 'system' holding the two parts of the work together— something we have seen many times in MacPherson's practice — and on the other, a sense that this system can open out into potentially limitless avenues of play, linguistic and otherwise. — Ingrid Perez, Robert MacPherson — The Painter’s Reach, pp. 28-9

[aamjp]

Venice: from the point of view of eternity

Paintings of Venice in the Louvre ^^ [the first is where we arrived]. 

[…] the views you get in the paintings of those eighteenth century vedutisti [i.e. Canaletto, Guardi, Marieschi, Carlevaris, Bellotto, Migliara] are, astonishingly, exactly the same as those you will see on emerging from the Galleria dell’Accademia or Ca’ Rezzonico or Museo Correr. This strange sensation produces gn equally strange mixture of euphoria and unease. [...] For you discover that nothing has changed, not just in two hundred and fifty years, but in almost five hundred. The canvases from the cinquecento will show almost the same views as were painted in the settecento; and in the novecento, you stagger, exhausted, out of the museums, only to be confronted by the same scenes outside.

[...]

The visitor knows this beforehand, and to some degree it is precisely this ‘archaeological’ aspect of the city that has impelled him to travel here. And yet it’s still impossible not to be a little surprised when you stop and think about it, or if you try the simple experiment of looking at a couple of paintings and then at your surroundings. Venice is the only city in the world whose past you do not have to glimpse or intuit or guess at, it’s there before you, at least its past appearance is, which is also its present appearance. Even more exciting and disquieting is the fact that the city's present appearance is also the city’s future appearance. Looking at Venice now, not only do you see it as it was one hundred, two hundred and even five hundred years ago, you see it as it will be in one hundred, two hundred probably even 500 years’ time. Just as it is the inhabited place in the world with a visible past, so it is the only one with its future already on display. (22-24)

And this, somehow, seems true.

“‘Venice is an interior’[…]  means that it is self-sufficient, that it has no need of anything outside itself and that this same self-sufficiency is what creates that ‘endless imaginary fragmentation’: the narrow becomes wide, the near becomes far, the limited becomes infinite, the identical becomes distinct, the timeless becomes transient.” (49)

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Munich

Brandhorst 

'Cy Twombly: In the Studio’, lots of drawings and photographs

Lepanto > awesome room, spent a lot of time there // set the alarm off a number of times // no photos allowed > guard was fairly officious 

Cervantes fought in the battle of Lepanto?

bought Brandhorst collection book

Alte Pinakhotek

Wasn’t really in the mood for this gallery

Venice still looks like this > cf. Javier Mariás 

New Pinakhotek

Honoré Daumier, Don Quixote, 1868 > cover image of my edition of DQ

Eugene Delacroix, The Death of Valentine, 1826 > inspiration for the woman holding the candle in Picasso’s Guernica?

★ Gabriel von Max > fucking wow.

The Ecstatic Virgin Anna Katharine Emmerich (1885) > Richter? (or maybe it’s just a candle *shrug*)

Monkeys as Judges of Art (1889) 

The Anatomist (1869)

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers > didn’t expect this to be so nice

Pinakhotek Moderne 

Kirchner, colour... phwoar

Luciano Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Olii (62 O 58), 1962 > interesting that it’s essentially a monochromatic painting, but the way it surface works the light via both the incisions and its material qualities makes it operate in a way that isn’t monochromatic at all

The Morandis are beautiful 

Twombly > the surface detail on Bolsena (1969) offer more than Lepanto // the simple compositional structures of Untitled (New York City) (1968) and Untitled (1971) are interesting > NNW says that landscapes like these would’ve been a better way of tackling drawing Venice

[aamjp]

Notes from Venice, An Interior, Javier Marías

St Mark's Square (2)

Ponte della Libertà, connection between the mainland and the group of islands that make up the city / conceived by Mussolini (3)

the "fairground-like Riva degli Schiavoni facing the lagoon" (5-6)

Locals: “at midday the Veneitian ladies and gentlemen drink their aperitif in Paolin, an unassuming ice-cream parlour-cum-bar; they take their evening stroll along the sublime Zattere; and after dark, night-owls and music-lovers can be found in the old-fashioned, hidden-away Salon Campiello, one of the few places that stays open after ten o’clock” (6).

Lido, beaches immortalised by Visconti in Death in Venice (11)

Sant'Erasmo is the city's garden; Vignole and Mazzorbo yield the fruit and vegetables (14)

“[...] St Hemingway, the patron saint of tourists, used to stay at La Locanda, existing for days on end on a diet of sandwiches and wine, large quantities of which (the wine) were taken up to him in his room” (16)

Torcerlo > cathedral, mosaic of lucifer )17)

San Michele, walled island, cemetery > Stravinsky, Pound

Galleria dell'Accademia, Ca' Rezzonico, Museo Correr each offer the same view outside as the paintings within (23)

Carlo Scarpa > Olivetti Showtoom in St Marks square, the doors of the faculties of architecture or literature, the old lecture hall in Ca' Foscari, the staircase in Cada Balboni, or the courtyard if the Foundazione Querini Stampalia (25-6)

Flood of 4 November 1966 (28)

Palazzo Grassi (31)

Riva degli Schiavoni or the Zattere > sites for walking at night without getting lost (33)

Harry's Bar > Hemingway (34)

Molino Stucky (38)

Six sestieri: San Marco, San Polo, Cannaregio, Santa Croce, Dorsoduro and Castello (42)

Della Madonna dell'Orto > 10 Tintorettos and Bellini's lunatic Christ child (44)

"In Venice, though, each fragment is a whole. Sometimes the streets are so narrow and tortuous that we can see very little, yet a fragment, any fragment, will form a momentary whole, and will be unmistakably Venice.” (47)

"From where I am writing, I can see the pillars of my balcony, the Rio Delle Muneghette, two boats, the shop selling toy windmills, and the Scuola di San Rocco in the background." (47)

“‘Venice is an interior’. [...] It means that it is self-sufficient, that it has no need of anything outside itself and that this same self-sufficiency is what creates that ‘endless imaginary fragmentation’: the narrow becomes wide, the near becomes far, the limited becomes infinite, the identical becomes distinct, the timeless becomes transient.” (49)

There, before me, was the house to which I once had the key, the address was San Polo 3089″. (5X)

[aamjp]

James Hall, The Self Portrait (up until the heading, “The Whole-Body Self-Portrait”). Thoughts:

James Ensor’s revisions suggest an idea of identity as cumulative.

Nietzsche’s comment that around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly sales, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives evinces the inherent tension within identity between that claimed (or expressed or exerted) by an individual and that imposed (or presupposed) upon the individual by another.

Freud: That’s correct, Wendy.

Reminded me of an article from a while back. Old notes:

"There is no fixed identity, only difference." // another can never truly be known, only deduced through acknowledging or admitting difference > this occurs through an individual assessing(?) another through the lens of their own self ("if we're talking about my dad's specific self, working in the book underscore how much of my sense of him would be informed by who I am") > possibly can be linked to the Hawthorn Effect, in which a person under observation may act out a version of themselves which they believe to conform to the observer's conception of them > does this rely on a power difference? what happens if the observers and observed were to meet? would they act out their respective roles (Stanton Prison Experiment?)

And, inevitably, Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear:

“How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when I am least expecting it?”