The goal of the situationists is immediate participation in a passionate abundance of life by means of deliberately arranged variations of ephemeral moments. The success of these moments can reside in nothing other than their fleeting effect. The situationists consider cultural activity in its totality as an experimental method for constructing everyday life, a method that can and should be continually developed with the extension of leisure and the withering away of the division of labor (beginning with the division of artistic labor).
Dialectical method excludes the possibility that there can be nothing more to say about the human or about any domain of human activity. On the contrary, it supposes that the knowledge of man and his realization are mutually inseparable and constitute a total process. To penetrate ever more deeply into the content of life, to seize it in its shifting reality, to be ever more lucid about the lessons it has to teach is—this is the essential precept of research.
“Kees, The King of the Sand Track”. Author: Norbertus Franciscus (‘Nor’) Heerkens (1906 – 1991). Illustrated by Charles Boost, a Dutch cartoonist / illustrator / film journalist (1907 – 1990).
Nor Heerkens wrote a large number of boys’ books in the 1930s. One of these was the successful “Kees, The King of the Sand Track” which was published in 1933. In the same year Heerkens published a sequel to this: “His first Six Days”.
Quarter books are a Dutch phenomenon of the crisis years 1930s.
In those years you could buy childrens’s books for the price of one quarter (f 0.25; about € 2,00 today), issued by the Dutch Children’s library Helmond.
Quarter books were a complete adventure in book form; simple in execution, usually 144 pages printed on poor, woody paper. There were Quarter books aimed at young children (kindergarten), at boys and at girls; plus several series of novels, most detectives.
A Patient observer of his sitters’ slumps and bulges, Lucian Freud prefers not to subject himself to scrutiny. He rarely gives interviews. But Martin Gayford, an art critic who Mr Freud transformed into the painting “Man With a Blue Scarf”, enjoyed several months of uninhibited access to the painter. His tightly framed study of the portraitist is an unexpectedly moving investigation of the artistic process.
Mr Freud is an indoor artist. Fittingly, the book is set in the large Georgian room that is one of the painter’s two studios. The space is paint-smeared because he cleans his palette knife on the walls. Mr Gayford describes it as “a nest that LF has slowly, almost accidentally, constructed through the routines of his work.”
Now aged 87, Mr Freud never takes a holiday. He is usually working on five or six paintings at the same time, always in the presence of his subject. He maintains firm distinctions between morning, afternoon and night pictures. Mr Gayford sat for his painting in the evening. In the morning Mr Freud worked on a painting of a horse; in the afternoon he painted Andrew Parker Bowles and a nude. He calls his nudes “naked portraits”. Professional models are rarely suitable because Mr Freud wants the effect of “My God, you haven’t got your clothes on!”
In an age of fast, factory-like studios, Mr Freud’s pace is deliberate and unhurried. When Mr Gayford gets up to stretch, he takes a peek at the painting. “Despite what seemed to be plenty of vigorous activity with the brush”, he writes, “little seems to have changed on the canvas. By the end of the evening two eyebrows have appeared, and a little flesh around the bridge of my nose.” Mr Freud works up small sections to near completion; the surrounding canvas remains white. “The advantage of taking so long is that it allows me to include more than one expression,” he explains.
The painter has an “omnivorous” exploratory gaze. He is searching for the awkward truth, the “weight, texture and irreducible uniqueness of what he sees.” Determined that his paintings should emanate from his sitters rather than himself, Mr Freud seeks to capture their individuality. “Quality in art is inextricably bound up with emotional honesty,” he says. At the same time, “a good likeness has nothing to do with its quality as a picture.”
Mr Gayford’s personal experience of sitting contributes a thread to the narrative. He likens posing for a portrait to a cross between “transcendental meditation and a visit to the barber’s.” When his eyes appear on the canvas, he senses that “there are now three of us in the studio.” As the work progresses, the painting becomes an alter ego and he worries about the “Dorian Gray possibility” that it will “reveal secrets—ageing, ugliness, faults—that I imagine…I am hiding from the world.” Then, the painting completed, Mr Freud says simply, “I think I’ll stop now.”
ABSTRACT: JOURNAL excerpts by Roland Barthes about mourning his mother, Henriette, who died at eighty-four, in October, 1977.
October 27th Every morning, around six-thirty, in the darkness outside, the metallic racket of the garbage cans. She would say with relief: the night is finally over (she suffered during the night, alone, a cruel business).
October 31st I don’t want to talk about it, for fear of making literature out of it—or without being sure of not doing so—although as a matter of fact literature originates within these truths.
November 5th Sad afternoon. Shopping. Purchase (frivolity) of a tea cake at the bakery. Taking care of the customer ahead of me, the girl behind the counter says Voilà. The expression I used when I brought maman something, when I was taking care of her. Once, toward the end, half-conscious, she repeated, faintly, Voilà “I’m here,” a word we used with each other all our lives). The word spoken by the girl at the bakery brought tears to my eyes. I kept on crying quite a while back in the silent apartment.
November 9th —Less and less to write, to say, except this (which I can tell no one).
November 11th Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say, I’ll be back at a specific time, or whom you can call to say (or to whom you can just say), Voilà, I’m home now.
April 3rdDespair: the word is too theatrical, a part of the language. A stone.
June 15th Everything began all over again immediately: arrival of manuscripts, requests, people’s stories, each person mercilessly pushing ahead his own little demand (for love, for gratitude): no sooner has she departed than the world deafens me with its continuance.
God no longer has any place in theories on the creation of the Universe due to a series of developments in physics, British scientist Stephen Hawking said in extracts published Thursday from a new book.
In a hardening of the more accommodating position on religion that he took in his 1988 international best-seller A Brief History of Time, Hawking said the Big Bang was merely the consequence of the law of gravity.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist,” he writes in The Grand Design, which is being serialized by The Times newspaper.
“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”
Hawking has achieved worldwide fame for his research, writing and television documentaries despite suffering since the age of 21 motor neurone disease that has left him disabled and dependent on a voice synthesiser.
In A Brief History of Time, Hawking had suggested that the idea of God or a divine being was not necessarily incompatible with a scientific understanding of the Universe.
But in his latest work, Hawking cites the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star outside our own Solar System as a turning point against Isaac Newton’s belief that the Universe could not have arisen out of chaos.
“That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions—the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass—far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings,” he wrote.
In premodern China, elite painters used imagery not to mirror the world around them, but to evoke unfathomable experience. Considering their art alongside the philosophical traditions that inform it, The Great Image Has No Form explores the “nonobject”—a notion exemplified by paintings that do not seek to represent observable surroundings.
François Jullien argues that this nonobjectifying approach stems from the painters’ deeply held belief in a continuum of existence, in which art is not distinct from reality. Contrasting this perspective with the Western notion of art as separate from the world it represents, Jullien investigates the theoretical conditions that allow us to apprehend, isolate, and abstract objects. His comparative method lays bare the assumptions of Chinese and European thought, revitalizing the questions of what painting is, where it comes from, and what it does. Provocative and intellectually vigorous, this sweeping inquiry introduces new ways of thinking about the relationship of art to the ideas in which it is rooted.
Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.
If there is a consistent thread throughout this book, and indeed Kwinter’s entire intellectual output, it is a fear of the remorseless routinization and rationalization of modern life. Surveying and probing the contemporary urban environment in order to reveal where and how its generating forces might be engaged and redirected, abstaining from positivist, empirical research in favor of a kind of abstract anthropology, he implicitly rebukes the bad faith of those architects who present their designs as irrefutable outcomes of statistical analyses and external exigencies. At the same time, he cautions against the blind faith in the voodoo of self-organization that purports to nurture the inherent vitality of cities, yet so often enables the animation of unwelcome zombies (whether the insidious injustices of laissez-faire economic development or the spontaneous formation of slums). Perhaps it is not so much that Kwinter believes the city has died, but that inattention or complacency is causing plausible, preferable alternatives to remain forever unborn, shimmering in virtual limbo at exponentially increasing distances along the paths not taken.
RT @Criterion: Amazing footage of Miles Davis improvising his ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS score while watching the film: ow.ly/baNxd9 hours ago
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