One off: Justin Thomas Leonard.

April 5, 2013

— “Pink Eye” from Zulu Time by Justin Thomas Leonard.

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One off: Daniel Shea.

April 5, 2013

From Coal Work, by Daniel Shea.

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One off: Tall Poppy Syndrome, by Amy Stein & Stacey Arezou Mehrfar

March 1, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Miner II, Peak Gold Mines, Cobar, New South Wales, by Amy Stein & Stacey Arezou Mehrfar, from the recently released book Tall Poppy Syndrome.

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Tagg on Documentary photography

February 15, 2013

“Documentary is not documentation. While documentary practice may have traded rhetorically with the quasi-scientifc techniques of nineteenth-century documentation, it no longer functioned as a jealously guarded technical discourse produced by experts for experts. While the authority of documentary may have played on the evidential status of the document, its truth claims rested on a populist rhetoric—an emotionalized drama of witness—that worked to wed its audiences to its realism, its viewers to its look, sealing them into its system of enacted truth. The place into which the identifying viewer was to be called, however, was not only that of a subject of performative meaning. It was above all that of a subject of the State: a civic subject of liberal democracy whose conscription was all the more urgent in the midst of the crises of the 1930s in which documentary’s strategy of recruitment was fused.”

— John Tagg “The Plane of Decent Seeing: Documentary and the Rhetoric of Recruitment” in The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning

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Kiefer on Art

February 8, 2013

“All of painting, but also Literature, and all that goes with it, is merely a process of going round and round something inexpressible, round a black hole or crater whose centre one cannot penetrate. And those things one seizes on as subject matter, they have merely the character of pebbles at the foot of the crater — they mark our a circle which, one hopes, draws ever closer to the centre.”

— Anselm Kiefer, Works on Paper (1999)

Nuremburg, Anselm Kiefer (1982).

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Mauron on Mallarmé

February 8, 2013

“All who remember the day when first they looked into the Poems or the Divagations will testify to that curious feeling of exclusion which put them, in the face of a text written with their words (and moreover, as they could somehow feel, magnificently written), suddenly outside their own language, deprived of their rights in a common speech, and, as it were, rejected by their oldest friends.”

— Literary critic Charles Mauron, writing about the earliest experiences of discovering the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé

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The Blindness of Needles, by Bruce Bond

February 1, 2013

When a maker of images goes deaf,
he sees a world clarified by silence,
a lens wept over the things unspoken.
Doubtless this is why we find the man
facedown on a drawing table, hands
on his head to shelter him from flocks
that feast on sleep. The blood in his hair,
the lynx, the bats, more than beast, less
than human, all dark fuel for the lantern.
The etcher’s needle shines as it cuts.
It takes enormous care, to draw the curve
of a manacle, to rust it shut,
not with neglect, but with the precision
of a scar. Night sweeps the avenues
into brothels, asylums. These sure proportions,
they give to nightmare a logic, an edge
to deepen the line where the acid pours.
Across the cobblestones of Madrid,
lamps beat the laundry of their shadows.
The hearts of the city loosen their fists.
If reason sleeps, as the etching says,
it dreams. Like any theater, the blacker
the wings, the more fiercely we believe.
— Bruce Bond

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Steiner on Art

February 1, 2013

“Whatever enriches the adult imagination, whatever complicates consciousness and thus corrodes the clichés of daily reflex, is a high moral act. Art is privileged, indeed obliged, to perform this act; it is the live current which splinters and regroups the frozen units of conventional feeling.”

- George Steiner, from “Eros and Idiom” in On Difficulty and Other Essays

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One off: Mirka Laura Severa

February 1, 2013

From Swallow, by Mirka Laura Severa.

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Foucault on Language

February 1, 2013

“At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon to me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path — a slender gap — the point of its possible disappearance.“

— Michel Foucault The Discourse on Language

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