exploring the third space

between self & other, image & body, subject & object, memory & imagination... curated by: @suliqyre

[nevver]

Winter is coming, Daniel Arsham

[thirdity]

Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

[liquidskydrop-deactivated202201]

[mattatoio]

Euripides, Bacchae, National Theatre of Iceland, 2007. Mask/costume/set design: Thanos Vovolis. Stage director: Giorgos Zamboulakis. Photo © Thanos Vovolis.

[suliqyre]

As I experience the world, I automatically form desires, aversions, and beliefs. These intentions are neither good nor bad in themselves, but if I become attached to them, I will start to suffer. I will suffer because my attention is constrained to achieving my intended ideals and this prevents me from meeting my needs and the needs of the people around me.

The suffering produced by attachment not only consumes energy, but also limits my ability to respond to what is happening. To be compassionate, I need to be sensitive to everything and everyone. Such sensitivity is not possible when I am profoundly attached because my attention and actions will be concentrated on satisfying my desires, fleeing from my aversions, and confirming my beliefs.

Compassionate action requires that I be fully present and responsive to what is happening, while also maintaining the distance that allows me to remain free of attachment. There is no escaping the paradoxical nature of compassion, and perhaps the most challenging problem of awareness is to see that this paradox is livable and that I can adopt this seemingly contradictory position.

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[thirdity]

“Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

[henk-heijmans]

The hotel room, 2018 - by Esperanza Velmock, Spanish

[thirdity]

The “I” that considers is very different from the “I” that has fears. To have fears, to have, specifically, the fears on which Keats dwells, is to be immersed in acute sensation. The fear that one will cease to be is unlike the state of chronic fearfulness we call timidity. This fear halts and overtakes, it carries intimations of change or closure or collapse, it threatens to cancel the future. It is primal, unwilled, democratic, urgent; in its presence, all other function is suspended.

Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories

[softinvasions]

DIRECTOR'S NOTE • Nov. 2023

You can't go home. This play has a particular care for and interest in its victims. The resident

inciting event is endless. tragedy is much more concerned with footnotes than it is with gods.

well acquainted with what happens afterward, storytellers claim they can't diverge from what's

written: resist. rage against what must be. tell a story about war without talking

about love. survive its aftermath. fail to find resolution. make this suffering

a home. There's no breaking this chain— fate, as always, gets its way.

Poetry assembled from the program of an Oresteia production. Nov. 2023.

[thirdity]

“As children, we have all suspected it: perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were “perfectly natural,” quite different from the one that used to exasperate us. As children, we did not know if we were going to laugh or cry but, as adults, we “possess” this world, we make endless use of it, it is made of intelligible and utilizable objects. It is made of earth, stone, wood, plants, animals. We work the earth, we build houses, we eat bread and wine. We have forgotten, out of habit, our childish apprehensions. In a word, we have ceased to mistrust ourselves. Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us.”

— Georges Bataille, “The Cruel Practice of Art”

[thunderstruck9]

Wojciech Fangor (Polish, 1922-2015), M 12, 1966. Oil on canvas, 24 x 24⅛ in.

[thirdity]

Physics, my friend, is a narrow path drawn across a gulf that the human imagination cannot grasp. It is a set of answers to certain questions that we put to the world, and the world supplies the answers on the condition that we will not then ask it other questions, questions shouted out by common sense. And common sense? It is that which is understood by an intelligence using senses no different from those of a baboon. Such an intelligence wishes to know the world in terms that apply to its terrestrial, biological niche. But the world — outside that niche, that incubator of sapient apes — has properties that one cannot take in hand, see, sniff, gnaw, listen to, and in this way appropriate.

Stanisław Lem, Fiasco

[vizreef]

Tektronix // Cathode Ray Oscilloscopes //  built on the Island of Guernsey (!!) 1960s

via

[suliqyre]

For every historical artwork that is still revered and loved, there are countless others that now receive little attention or are seen only as minor stepping stones to something that came after. While these impressive works once garnered much appreciation and applause, they are now basically forgotten.

Realizing this, we might worry that a similar fate will befall our own greatest achievements. If even the most significant masterpieces are likely to be relegated to the dustbin of history, what point could there possibly be to our own creative efforts?

But to be surpassed is no failure. We will not have failed even if the collective output of our era becomes nothing more than a pile of dirt our successors climb to greater heights. For to contribute to the project of humanity in any way is a great accomplishment, and to create art that might one day become the tools and materials that help future artists make something even better is an enormous success.

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[thirdity]

“The unspeakable is, of course, not a boundary dividing a positive area of allowability from a complete and totalized negativity, a boundary located at least one step beyond the forbidden (and the forbidden, by definition — no? — must be speakable if its proscriptive power is to function). If we pursue the boundary as such, it will recede before us as a limit of mists and vapors. Certainly it is not a line drawn in any absolute way across speech or writing. It is not a fixed and locatable point of transgression that glows hotter and brighter as we approach it till, as we cross it, its searing heat burns away all possibility of further articulation. Rather it is a set of positive conventions governing what can be spoken of (or written about) in general; in particular, it comprises the endlessly specialized tropes (of analysis, of apology, of aesthetic distance) required to speak or write about various topics at various anomalous places in our complex social geography — places where such topics are specifically not usually (or ever) spoken of: What is speakable between client and accountant is unspeakable between newly introduced acquaintances at a formal dinner party. […] What is speakable between a magazine essayist and an audience concerned with art and analysis is unspeakable between a popular journalist and an audience concerned with “everyday” news.”

— Samuel R. Delany, “On the Unspeakable”

[robinboardman]

Etna Eruption, Sicily Photograph: Giuseppe Mario Famiani

[thirdity]

Readers of Baudelaire don’t have it easy in high school, or with their schoolmates, much less with their teachers. But their fragility is deceptive. So is their humor and the fickleness of their declarations of love. Behind these shadowy fronts are probably the toughest people in the world, and definitely the bravest. Not for nothing are they descended from Orpheus, who set the stroke for the Argonauts and who descended into hell and came up again, less alive than before his feat, but still alive. If I had to hold up the most heavily fortified bank in America, I’d take a gang of poets. The attempt would probably end in disaster, but it would be beautiful.

Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses

[funeral]

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments