SECRET SAUNA SIRENS

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never. -Kafka, The Silence of the Sirens

2011-01-28T00:02:00.000+01:00

Still 44, © Secret Sauna Sirens

And when Ulysses approached them the potent songstresses actually did not sing, whether because they thought that this enemy could be vanquished only by their silence, or because of the look of bliss on the face of Ulysses, who was thinking of nothing but his wax and his chains, made them forget their singing. -Kafka

2010-12-12T12:11:00.000+01:00

Still, © Secret Sauna Sirens

But they--lovelier than ever--stretched their necks and turned, let their cold hair flutter free in the wind, and forgetting everything clung with their claws to the rocks. They no longer had any desire to allure; all that they wanted was to hold as long as they could the radiance that fell from Ulysses' great eyes. -Kafka

2010-12-11T12:14:00.004+01:00

Still, © Secret Sauna Sirens

2010-10-01T23:39:00.015+02:00

Thank you for coming out. See you in March!
Love you Kiirsti!
Matheus and Saara: Big hugs and gratitude.
Evaporating into the studio for solo projects and shameful pseudonymous commercial work for the winter...
Jonas is filming in Romania for the next ~~three~~ six months and would love visitors.
A. and M. will spend spring in NYC.
Dearest NYC hedgehogs,
So sad to say that Melancholy Maaret's planned performance with Gary Lucas at the Jeff Buckley tribute concert (Knitting Factory) was cancelled, due to unavoidable scheduling conflicts.

P.S. Philippe is now a doctor of philosophy!

P.P.S. Please continue to aid the good people of Haiti. The MSF medical teams are currently working in tandem with Haitian Ministry of Public Health, to control and treat hundreds of suspected cases of cholera. Donate.

Now is also a wonderful time to invest in a Haitian or Dominican entrepreneur via Kiva or Grameen.
Timothy Schwartz's Travesty in Haiti is a most brilliant book explaining the quagmire of corruption and ineptitude in many global NGOs, particularly in Haiti.

2010-09-01T02:16:00.002+02:00

EACH TIME YOU ARE A BEGINNER: HOW TO BUILD A COLLAGE FROM A BODY.

2010-08-20T01:30:00.002+02:00

LA DIVINA PINA

With every new project, you feel like an eager virgin. It's madness, beginning again, and there is no bed of laurels. Each rehearsal session is an expedition for the golden fish. The intellectual table conversation, the trust exercises, the cold reads. The carp is brass and the back is sore. Pina Bausch had the best way to start a rehearsal. Her collection of collages are guideposts for the company: wound sounds moving beyond the boundaries of thought and language.

How to Build a Collage, by Pina Bausch.

-Copy someone else's tic.

-Do something you are ashamed of.

-Write your name with movement.

-What would you do with a corpse?

-Move your favorite body part.

-How do you behave when you've lost something?

"When I do a new piece (praise) doesn't help me. Nothing helps me. Not what I have already done. It is done. Each time you are a beginner. I want to give up, actually, but I don't...It's complicated. It all takes so much strength. I'm so fragile. It's emotional. I get little sleep. You try to sleep, but you can't. I am thinking too much. It's like my head is in the way. It seems simple, but I make it so complicated."-Pina Bausch

2010-08-18T21:00:00.001+02:00

WHY WE STAY SINGLE

A: Nice to meet you. So what do you do?

B: I'm an ethical sensualist.

A: Um. So what do you do to pay the bills?

B: I'm an artist.

A: So what do you do to pay the bills?

B: I observe and tell stories.

A: Sounds like a difficult life.

2010-08-18T11:08:00.000+02:00

STAY HOMELY, SUCKERS!

Melancholy Maaret, enigmatic contemporary visual & performance artist,

and founder of Secret Sauna Sirens...

has some interesting insight into the subject of sadness.

In her poem “Paper Butterflies”, she solemnly urges us inward,

in lilting, bird-like tones and delicately rolling Finnish accent,

to examine our melancholia

and embrace these hermetic, suffocating feelings...

-COILHOUSE MAGAZINE (PROFILE HERE)

2010-08-18T01:00:00.004+02:00

The phantoms and broken dolls beneath your childhood bed...A phenotext. A semiotic. Nympholepsy. If my breast were made of glass, you could see my plasticine heart...Ulysses Syndrome. L'Inconnue de la Seine. The mathematics of grace and redemption. Elvira Madigan.

I cannot. You must. The rope is too high. Pack a picnic basket. Turtles breathe out of their asses.
Larkspur Lotion. Dressing gowns of dry rot. "Je me mis enfin à réfléchir, c'est à dire à écouter plus fort."
-Molloy... The bitter impetus of despair...

...The evanescence of desire. The Red Virgin. We go together like traffic and weather. Walser was right: Stay Tiny. Salvage. Seneca: Dare, dare, dare... Cut off the arms of a starfish, and he will grow new arms. The last chord of Robert Johnson...

All images © Melancholy Maaret and Secret Sauna Sirens

Jan Svankmajer's Alice. Open up Pandora's box...You'll get agoraphobia... A troll garden. Bresson used amateur actors. The first philosophy. The Born-Einstein letters. Endurantism. There are no temporal fragments in a fourth-dimension. All the dead actresses recite the Western Canon in Beckett's waiting room. A gentle reprieve...

New album, stories, films, collaborations, tour dates...Coming 2011-12.

Köszönöm. Thank you, István Horkay, for inclusion in the alchemy...(Films By István Horkay. Voice/Audio by Melancholy Maaret.)

2010-08-18T00:10:00.009+02:00

The House of Levi from Istvan Horkay on Vimeo.

Butterfly Effect from Istvan Horkay on Vimeo.

István Horkay

GRACIAS, NAU NUA MAGAZINE

2010-08-18T00:07:00.032+02:00

Profile of Melancholy Maaret.

Thank you, Juan Carlos!

♥♥♥♥

I AM A PAPER BUTTERFLY MADE OF STEEL AND GLASS...

2010-08-18T00:07:00.030+02:00

Max Frisinger, Paper Butterfly (Secret Sauna Sirens), mixed media.

Deeply honored that the brilliant Max Frisinger--exhibiting now in Berlin--has named one of his installations after yours truly. His collection of seven works for seven muses is at Contemporary Fine Arts until November 13. GRAZIE, Max. ♥

Max Frisinger, GRAZIE
Contemporary Fine Arts
Am Kupfergraben
1010117 Berlin

Melancholy Maaret narrates Leather-Bound Stories, the new film by Derek Ogbourne and Susana Medina, based on Medina's gorgeous novel, Philosophical Toys. January 18th, 7 PM, Goldsmiths, Hatchman House, 17-19 St. James, New Cross, London. February 17th, 7 PM, Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London.

2010-08-18T00:05:00.006+02:00

♥ You, Susana.

2010-08-17T23:52:00.000+02:00

George Seeley, The Firefly, 1907

Please go now to a most beautiful tumblr by a most beautiful friend.

THE TRUE HAS NO WINDOW

2010-08-17T01:11:00.000+02:00

Alone in my tomb, Darwin and George Price lead me to believe that biological altruism is devoid of intention and motivationally antithetical to spiritual altruism. The cost to the donor must be less than the benefit to the recipient, or worker bees are martyrs. I am lonely and my hands are dry.

Anna Akhmatova is an asteroid, discovered in 1982, at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory. Goethe's "exact sensorial imagination"

Psychologists and neuroscientists are now using fMRI imaging to gauge the emotional life of memory.

Stoicism and mild depression sharpen both acuity and the truth of memory.

Stephen Spender: "The Greatest Art is Moral"

Byron, Schiller, Goethe, Shelley...

Blake: Religion = Politics

Auden: "Poetry makes nothing happen"

Kindred by Choice = Elective Affinities

The mixing preferences of molecular entities. Duty or Passion, Ma?

If the mummy is grey, you are melancholy.

Shared genetic markers and the hive preclude the possibility for spiritual altruism. Altruism in anonymity and isolation negates the embrace. Reciprocity is a photographic law: Film response is determined by exposure (intensity x time). Moods are accidental and situational; emotions are intentional.

George Price's equation was developed under the influence of Darwin and Hamilton. Price then absconded from the scientific world. A lifelong Atheist, he converted to Christianity. He devoted his life to altruism. He gave away his money, his clothing, his home. When he had nothing left to give, he slit his own throat. Reciprocity = intensity x time. Power = strength/time. Strength = grace/perdition.

This is the question

Mary

Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. — —better than a dog anyhow. — Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. — These things good for one's health. — ~~Forced to visit & receive relations~~ but terrible loss of time. —

W My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won't do. — Imagine living all one's day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro' St.

Marry — Marry — Marry Q.E.D.

Not Mary

No children, (no second life), no one to care for one in old age.— What is the use of working 'in' without sympathy from near & dear friends—who are near & dear friends to the old, except relatives

Freedom to go where one liked — choice of Society & little of it. — Conversation of clever men at clubs — Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle. — to have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling — Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one's bread. — (But then it is very bad for ones health to work too much)

Perhaps my wife wont like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool

-Darwin on Marriage

PAOLO GIOLI

2010-08-17T00:30:00.001+02:00

Confinato, 2007

Makes pinhole cameras from seashells and toast,

Untitled, 1981

Recycles devastated filmstrips,

Fiori Secchi, 1997

Recreates the universe in shreds of polaroids,

Photofinish Figures, still, 2009, 16mm, silent

Sees God in the measuring stick of a stenopeic camera.

I hold more and more surely to the conviction that the use of masks will be discovered eventually to be the freest solution of the modern dramatist's problem as to how -- with the greatest possible dramatic clarity and economy of means -- he can express those profound hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of psychology continue to disclose to us. -Eugene O'Neill, Memoranda on Masks

2010-08-17T00:28:00.000+02:00

Self portrait, 12. © Secret Sauna Sirens

2010-08-17T00:25:00.001+02:00

Illusions of Reality: Naturalist Painting, Photography, and Cinema from 1875-1918, recently arrived at Helsinki's Ateneum from Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum. The zenith of this extraordinarily curated exhibition--including masterworks by Jules Bastien-Lepage, Émile Friant, and Eero Järnefelt--is the continuous screening of André Antoine's (1858–1943) La Terre (1921). Antoine--actor, filmmaker, theatre director, iconoclast of Mise-en-scène--created his own stage company after no other contemporary French theatre wanted to tackle stagings of Zola's naturalistic masterpieces.

After abandoning theatre for film and critical writing, Antoine remained aesthetically and thematically influenced by Naturalism. The film, slightly damaged and made from the only surviving copy, is close to what Chris Marker calls "photo-roman." I gasped and swooned as I watched a dozen times, longing to cut every frame into a blown-up still, to cover the walls with suspended portraits of pastoral idyll and emoting faces...

NIEMAND SWIMS WITH FINS OF CHARCOAL ON MELANCHOLIA ISLAND

2010-08-17T00:10:00.001+02:00

Delicate and mesmeric, the art of Niemand (Corinne Chaufour) has astonished me for years. Her work is at once otherworldly and achingly familiar, like Kaspar Hauser's horse or Rene Char's Eloge d'une Soupçonnée. Now, a collection of inscribed sketches

forms a most beloved art book,

Shortness of Breath.

Drawing is not for me a description but rather an inscription;

within the unsettling

feeling of reality's deletion,

what I really need are

apparitions and not ideas.

Mystery then becomes the keystone to a mental attitude which gives the drawing a starting point,

erasing all the visible boundaries of a plausible space and time for the benefit of one ultimate moment:

a moment of perceptiveness before extinction,

the last gaze of a last vision.

Before a menace or an illusion,

something often appears from insignificance.

-Corinne Chaufour

Please buy the book here.

Please visit les cahiers de niemand here and here.

TEN THOUSAND YEARS OF LIGHT: THE RARE, UNCOMPROMISING BEAUTY OF FLORIAN GERBAUD'S BATS AND SWALLOWS

2010-08-17T00:00:00.000+02:00

Go here now: http://batsandswallows.blogspot.com/

NOT NATASHA

2010-08-16T01:26:00.001+02:00

Beyond Oscar Wilde, beyond notions of the amorality of good or bad art, there is, indeed, Moral art. Dana Popa is a Romanian-born, UK-based photo-journalist whose human rights photography straddles the line between testimony and aesthetics, between documentary and artistry. Not Natasha, published by Autograph ABP, London, 2009, is an unapologetically poetic affidavit of sex-trafficked women and girls.

www.danapopa.com

R.I.P. JIM NEU

2010-06-13T00:25:00.002+02:00

Hollis Frampton AVisitation of Insomnia

Susan

is this station one of your favorites?

Mary

well, it has a couple of attractions

the mosaic signs from the late-60s have been very well-maintained
and two lines stop here, so people think I’m waiting for the other one

Susan

how long do you do this?

Mary

how long is a mood?

it’s never quite the same
tonight I knew right where I was going
other times I just pick a direction and see what’s out there
-Alone Together, 2005

CLAUDE, TOUJOURS...

2010-05-24T02:22:00.003+02:00

I Suppose that Solipsism is Unavoidable...

2010-05-23T15:19:00.001+02:00

And also, I’m greatly interested in solipsism, which is only an extreme form of idealism. It is strange, though, that all the people who write on solipsism write about it in order to refute it. I haven’t seen a single book in favor of solipsism. I know what you would want to say: since there is only one dreamer, why do you write a book? But if there is only one dreamer, why could you not dream about writing a book?
-Borges, 1977, Philosophy and Literature

Excellent interview here.

PARIS JE T'AIME: Un véritable trésor de tirages d'époque et des photographies rares

2010-03-22T00:51:00.008+01:00

Silvio Rey, Anatomy of a Mermaid, vintage silver print, 1950. (Thank you, Asha.)

Louis Tastenue, (Curiosité. Petit Ballet. Tirage argentique d'époque,) Circa 1950.

Louis Cyfer, Vanité, Nature morte et fausse blonde, tirage argentique d'époque, circa 1980.

Photo Verdeau is a treasure trove of vintage prints and rare, primitive photographs, meticulously maintained by owner and curator, Regis Besse, who has an aversion to contemporary photography and to the "egos" of today's photographers: "They are convinced that they’re incredibly talented even though 98 percent have no talent whatsoever. I don’t have time for that. Cartier-Bresson, Willy Ronis, Doisneau, Gustave Le Gray — they all took photos but they didn’t consider themselves artists."

Besse's collection includes ephemera, exquisite nudes circa 1875 (shades of burnt sienna and snuff), and hundreds of Asian and African landscapes, candids, and portraits from 1870 to the 1980s.

O, while studying the autopsy of a mermaid, please listen to Sibylle Baier's The End, John Cale's I keep a Close Watch, Pauline Oliveros' Sonic Meditations, or Karen Dalton's Katie Cruel...

Good post-autopsy reads:

I'm sorry that our lovemaking fizzled out in Devon, as you rightly noticed. I felt so tired each night through the relaxing air &, I suppose, being on holiday that the grasshopper became a burden very easily. And of course, qualify it how I may, I am not a highly-sexed person...On Larkin's letters

More and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused...On Beckett's Letters

Photo Verdeau

47 Passage Jouffroy

75009 Paris

www.verdeau.com

ONNI-BONHEUR-HAPPINESS AND SHAME

2010-01-26T23:35:00.004+01:00

The second chapter of Sanna Kekäläinen's solo exploration of the meaning, geographical location, and philosophical construction of happiness, premieres at Kiasma, Helsinki, in April.

9.4 19:00

11.4 19:00

14.4 19:00

16.4 19:00

18.4 15:00

Häpeämättömät - Shameless, part 2 of the Shame Project premieres at K&C Space, Cable Factory, in November. In the work group with Kekäläinen are Andrius Katinas, Lilja Lehmuskallio, Laura Norppa and Panu Varstala. Lighting design is by Heikki Paasonen.

SCULPTING IN TIME

2010-01-04T06:42:00.001+01:00

"The beautiful is hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth, for whom it is contra-indicated. But the profound lack of spirituality of those people who see art and condemn it, the fact that they are neither willing nor ready to consider the aim of their existence in any higher sense, is often masked by the vulgarly simplistic cry, 'I don't like it! It's boring!' It is not a point that one can argue; but it's like the utterance of a man born blind who is being told about a rainbow. He simply remains deaf to the pain undergone by the artist in order to share with others the truth he has reached."

-Tarkovsky's Sculpting in Time

I AM SYNTHETICALLY HAPPY.

2010-01-04T00:56:00.001+01:00

FRANCOISE HAS THE RIGHT IDEA.

ONE YEAR AFTER THE RESPECTIVE ACCIDENTS,

THE PARALYTIC AND THE LOTTERY WINNER

ARE EQUALLY HAPPY.

SYNTHETIC HAPPINESS=

SELF-CREATED JOY DELUSION, WHEN YOU DON'T GET WHAT YOU WANT.

NATURAL HAPPINESS=

YOU GOT WHAT YOU WANTED. HUZZAH.

YOU NEED A NEW PREFRONTAL CORTEX OR A BRAND NEW DRUG. ANIMALS DON'T THINK THIS MUCH. HEDGEHOGS DON'T MAKE WORST CASE SCENARIOS. BUT YOU ARE A HUMAN. YOU HAVE AN IMPACT BIAS. THIS IS NOT YOUR FAULT. YOU CAN SHRINK YOUR MAMMALIAN AMYGDALA AND YOUR TANGO SKELETONS. HAPPINESS IS JUST WHAT YOU TELL YOURSELF ON POST-IT NOTES STUCK TO YOUR MIRROR. HAPPINESS WILL BOOST YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM. GOOD THOUGHTS WILL KEEP YOU FROM GETTING PIG FLU. SYNTHETIC HAPPINESS IS JUST AS REAL AS REAL HAPPINESS.

(WE HAVE JUST SAVED YOU THE TROUBLE OF READING DAN GILBERT'S BOOK, STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS. HE'S A HARVARD SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGIST. HE MUST BE PRETTY SMART. BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE SMART TO BE HAPPY. SO STOP READING. JUST TELL YOURSELF YOU ARE ALREADY HAPPY. IF YOU STILL FEEL SAD, TRY HARDER!)

2010-01-03T17:28:00.000+01:00

A SUBLIME, PURGING TRAUMA

2010-01-03T05:48:00.000+01:00

polaroids © Tarkovsky Foundation

BRIGHT, BRIGHT DAY

Andrei Tarkovsky

Limited Edition Portfolio

25 Polaroids

Published by:

White Space Gallery

Tarkovsky Foundation

"TOUCHED BY A MASTERPIECE, A PERSON BEGINS TO HEAR IN HIMSELF THAT SAME CALL OF TRUTH WHICH PROMPTED THE ARTIST TO HIS CREATIVE ACT. WHEN THE LINK IS ESTABLISHED BETWEEN THE WORK AND ITS BEHOLDER, THE LATTER EXPERIENCES A SUBLIME, PURGING TRAUMA. WITHIN THAT AURA WHICH UNITES MASTERPIECES AND AND AUDIENCE, THE BEST SIDES OF OUR SOULS ARE MADE KNOWN, AND WE LONG FOR THEM TO BE FREED. IN THOSE MOMENTS WE RECOGNIZE AND DISCOVER OURSELVES, THE UNFATHOMABLE DEPTHS OF OUR OWN POTENTIAL, AND THE FURTHEST REACHES OF OUR EMOTIONS."

-Tarkovsky's Sculpting in Time

2010-01-02T17:13:00.000+01:00

THE ANNALS OF POVERTY EPICUREANISM AND ENTERTAINMENT 325

2009-11-20T14:54:00.001+01:00

Daughters are a burden! Thirty-five years ago, in New Delhi, Kailash Singh fathered his seventh daughter. Fearing seven hells of a dowry, Singh went to a seer, to procure a son-siring spell. The seer told Singh that his son would arrive if Singh stopped bathing. Singh has not bathed in thirty-five years. Instead, every night, Singh lights up a joint and dances on one leg before a bonfire. He is very relaxed, but he has no son, and he stinks. His daughters have left him. His wife won't sleep with him. He just keeps dancing.

PLEASE WATCH:

Renoir's La Fille de L'eau (Watch it after eating reindeer pancakes.)
Patricio Guzman's La Batalla de Chile (All three parts.)

Wendell B. Harris Jr.'s Chameleon Street (If you haven't seen this masterpiece, enter hungry and don't speak while watching, please.)
Kurosawa's Dreams

Lance Hammer's Ballast (The most haunting and underrated American film of 2008.)

PLEASE READ:

Erik Satie's A Mammal's Notebook ("SEUL, PENDANT UN INSTANT...")

Martha Nussbaum's Hiding From Humanity

Amelie Nothomb's Sulphuric Acid (Elle est mieux en francais.)

Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct
Sergei Dovlatov's Affiliate

PLEASE LISTEN:

Toumani Diabate's New Ancient Strings (His kora is magic.)

Vintage Röyskopp: 49 percent
Leigh Wiley's Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere
Vanessa Daou's Zipless
Veljo Tormis' Piispa ja Pakana
Paavoharju's Laulu Laakson Kukista

PLEASE SMELL:

TokyoMilk's Poe's Tobacco Parfum

(Tea leaves, Humphrey Bogart, a forest of amber)

Serge Lutens' Bois de Violette

(Crushed violets, gingerbread men, Bali)

Your Grandmama's sauna
(Arthritis creme, tar soap, cardamom)
A baby's ear

"When you are an old lady,

you will talk just like you do now.

You will never age,

and I will never tire of listening to you.

You have something untouchable."

-Henri-Pierre Roché to Beatrice Wood

Please steal this book if you find it and send it to us.
We accept mail delivery by the grave of Tove Jansson.

We ain't docents here. Just trust us, and do what we say.

THE BEAUTY OF THE INKBLOT

2009-11-09T10:10:00.000+01:00

If you see William Blake as a vampire,

you are a psychotic.

If you see copulating sea horses,

you are a neurotic.

If you see meditating gnomes,

you are a bed-wetting-shoe-licker.

James Heilman, an ER doctor from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, used Wikipedia to post the ten Rorschach plates and their secretly guarded "correct responses." After a violent editing war began between psychologists who view the test as charlatanism, and therapists who use the images as a diagnostic tool, Wikipedia locked the Rorschach page.

I'M NOT UGLY, I'M JUST FINNISH.

2009-11-08T10:33:00.003+01:00

Moika! Yeah, some Finns are homely. I have feet like loaves of peasant bread, but I swim just fine. Last week, I swam to my cottage. Now I work in silence and beat my expensive skin with birch branches. In winter's blackness, I need my U.V. lamp and a salty embrace. But in the light, I feel such violent enthusiasm, I must wear Ray Bans and run to the forest. Artists absorb all of their environmental energy. This springtime, the chants of haggard Helsinki drunkards crescendoed in my ears. I can hear the taxi-sonatas and lawn-chairs in Times Square. In Reykjavik, someone is watching season one of "The Wire." When I was a student, obsessed with Satie, I only ate white food-chicken, popcorn, white-fish, melon. I made my boyfriend get a Gymnopedies tatoo. This did not go very well.

I need to be a sacred sponge, not a tract-house vacuum cleaner. Solitude and silence are necessary for work. When the voices become too loud, I go to the forest. In the evening, I watch films and let the landscapes choose my pallet. Charlotte Rampling's hooded eyes. Solveig Dommartin's wings. The stillness allows optimum absorption. But eroticism in Finnish cinema is steeped in brutality and verisimilitude. What is the point of human prettiness, when there is wood to chop and so much darkness? At night, in my cottage, all the noises are again so loud. If a birch tree turns into a specter of death in my forest, and no one hears her but me, is she the specter, or am I the specter?

I love to be frightened by nature.

The dead are serene. When I become too serene, I think of Cocteau:

"If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort.

He must relinquish it."

Then I put on my favorite scary films and I dance a jig with skeletons.

I always return to the Saami classic, Valkoinen Peura (1952, dir. Erik Blomberg).

The White Reindeer is a weird and terrifying brew of folklore, myth, stylized film-noir and Platonic Tragedy. When I say terrifying, I don't mean bloody. I mean anthropomorphism as a metaphor for loneliness. I mean Lapland in winter. Blomberg's wife, the great Finnish film star, Mirjami Kuosmanen, co-wrote the script. Kuosmanen plays on the myth of the Ugly Finn, and on the xenophobia of backwater life. She also stars as the demon-doe and her human counterpart, Pirita. Pirita is such an incongruously luminous girl, that she is naturally distrusted by the stout and homely Saamis. Blomberg is also the cinematographer. The contrast in lighting between the villagers and Pirita is manifest: it's like Ava Gardner walked into a Walker Evans photo of Tom Joad's family.

The white and silent Lappish winter makes everyone loony and stoic. But the ice turns Pirita into a carnivorous reindeer; a man eater with fangs. Only a bullet of tundra steel can stop her. The film is pagan poetry-not mere Camp-because of Blomberg's still-shots, his moody mise-en-scene, and Einar Englund's score.

The film's first subtitle reads:

"SHE WAS BORN A WITCH."

The film is faithful to Plato's Tragedy. Tragedy is a vehicle of Fate. Tragedy is pre-destiny-removed from will or choice. Don't blame her. She was born to be bad. In Kuosmanen's face, the viewer sees every variation of self-loathing and demonic-glee.
Also, I love the Swedish horror classic, Korkarlen, based on Selma Lagerlof's novella. I know, most Swedes are useless and pretty (just ask Doris Lessing). Make an exception. The Grim Reaper is better in Swedish! The double exposures are sublime. Gore is not terrifying. The anticipation, the imagined spook under the bed, a shameful life exposed; these are the things that go bump in the night. Korkarlen is so influential. Watch it before you see Bergman's The Seventh Seal. (Or watch it before that scene in The Shining,where Jack has the axe and Shelly Duvall looks like a Munch fetus.) Also, please listen to Mi and L'au's Good Morning Jokers. So tender and delicate. Hei-Hei.

I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always -- take any form -- drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! -Wuthering Heights

2009-10-04T20:35:00.018+02:00

Laurence Demaison, Visage spirite N°3 (2002)

(For Vero, Immanent Spirit.)

ROGER BALLEN'S BOARDING HOUSE

2009-10-01T22:35:00.000+02:00

2009-10-01T03:33:00.000+02:00

I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth. -Henry Miller

2009-09-20T13:12:00.001+02:00

After Effects

A series of architectural scale models constructed with black paper and covered with flour and a layer of mould to create the effect of old abandoned buildings.

My purpose is to talk about the sense of time and destiny of the planet after the human species, through the sense of restlessness which abandoned buildings are able to communicate.

-Daniele Delnero

JESUS AND HIS GOLDEN HAMMER: THE SCIENCE OF INFLUENCE

2009-09-20T06:55:00.000+02:00

A group of scientists administered electroshock therapy to two subject groups. The first group comprised devout Catholics. The second group was agnostic and atheist. The test subjects were presented religious icons, images and music, while being shocked. The Catholics felt less pain than the Naturalists.

Why didn't the scientists perform the same test with secular images or sounds of beauty?

Scientists and sociologists also say that people who pray recover from surgery and trauma faster than abstainers. Confessing Catholics live longer. Church goers are healthier. Twelve-steppers are better lovers.

Consistent rituals and institutional practices are easy to tally and quantify. How do scientists chart and graph the impact of art-making, of books or music? Where is the survey of impact of an agnosticism or atheism replete with a religious wonder for the natural world?

What is the equation of exultation from Wittgenstein or the smell of banana bread?

Would you feel shocks and stitches while looking at this?

Or hearing this?

The notion of solace--of beauty or consolation--is as potent from the earth as from the sky.

Consider Proust. Proust grew up in a secular home of books and art. Proust was the child of a scientist and an intellectual. There is no exact equation--no precise formula--for influence. If Proust had been born healthy, he might have become a neuroscientist or a baker. But his empathy and curiosity would still have been nourished by a childhood laden with books and ideas. If Proust's parents had been religious, Marcel might have prayed and read Genesis rather than Ruskin. If Proust had been born a poor laborer, he would never have had the time and freedom for contemplation, for dreamscapes and plates of chicken in a cork-lined bedroom.

There is no omniscient mapmaker

for the constellation of soul and intellect.

But we can know this: If Proust had never read Ruskin and Shakespeare, he would never have written In Search of Lost Time. Without Proust, there would be no Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing...

Without Proust as Proust, there would be no Man Ray gelatin silver-print.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: an ode to joy in deafness. The blind Milton orally dictating Paradise Lost. The spectrum of the humanities--of art, nature, science--is even vaster than a panacea in the sky. Without Proust as Proust, Deleuze would never have written Proust and Signs. And there would be no crazy Deleuzean description of Proust as the "Universal Schizophrenic." There would be no anti-Oedipus organ-machines. And a madeleine would be just another shitty cake.

2009-09-20T01:26:00.001+02:00

Kaikelta pahalta by Helvi Mustonen

http://www.helvimustonen.com/maalauksia.htm

Jonsi and Alex: Riceboy Sleeps

2009-09-19T23:45:00.000+02:00

A most beautiful book to buy here: http://jonsiandalex.com

SHE'S DOPER THAN YOUR MAMA

2009-09-19T01:03:00.000+02:00

One more night 1970 collection mamvp, Paris

27 nov 2010 - 27 feb 2011 :
Exhibition
"Une pièce de plus"

CCC
53 rue Marcel Tribut
37000 Tours, France
http://ccc-art.com

OFFICIALLY THE GREATEST THING WE SAW ONSTAGE ALL YEAR.

2009-09-19T00:21:00.001+02:00

(Well, this and Bonnie Prince Billy and Meredith Monk...)

BEAUTY, FEAR, POLITICS AND THE SUBLIME

2009-09-18T19:24:00.000+02:00

Bennett Morris: Climate Untamed

www.bennettmorris.com

Like the Spice

224 Roebling St.

Brooklyn

Wed.-Sun. 12-7

3+1

2009-09-15T19:44:00.001+02:00

Harmony Korine, Scumbag and Baby, 2010.

Dash Snow, Ryan McGinley, Harmony Korine, videos by Agnes B.

9 September-6 November

Galerie du Jour

44, rue Quincampoix

Paris 4ème

PAVLOVA EXPERIMENT

2009-09-15T00:00:00.000+02:00

How does this music make you feel?
What do you see when you stand there?
How do my words affect you?

How do we record dance and space with only our perceptions and dialogue as research equipment?

The Pavlova Experiment is a quasi-scientific performance project created by an artistic researcher, a dancer/choreographer, and two musicians/performers.

Kiasma,

Helsinki

Form, Function, Beauty=Gestalt

2009-09-08T23:12:00.000+02:00

Tilly Losch (Thank you, Asha, aesthete extraordinaire.)

La solitude n'est pas l'isolement.

On est toujours deux en un.

Il y a les autres en soi.

-Godard

Tilly Losch

Le cœur invisible

est encore entendu par des fantômes...

IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS: BAS JAN ADER (1942-1975)

2009-05-10T07:50:00.011+02:00

http://www.basjanader.com/

2009-05-10T06:54:00.003+02:00

Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus, made in the 70's, published in 1981, is a most hallucinatory, fascinating illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world where copulating humans become crocodiles, where deer heads grow from potted plants. Serafini wished to create the sensation, in readers, of young children, incapable of reading text, of deciphering images, who are awestruck by an oneiric and alien familiarity.

WASHINGTON POST'S 5 MYTHS ABOUT HEALTHCARE AROUND THE WORLD.

2009-05-09T09:56:00.000+02:00

5 Myths About Health Care Around the World

By T.R. Reid

WASHINGTON POST

As Americans search for the cure to what ails our health-care system, we've overlooked an invaluable source of ideas and solutions: the rest of the world. All the other industrialized democracies have faced problems like ours, yet they've found ways to cover everybody -- and still spend far less than we do.

I've traveled the world from Oslo to Osaka to see how other developed democracies provide health care. Instead of dismissing these models as "socialist," we could adapt their solutions to fix our problems. To do that, we first have to dispel a few myths about health care abroad:
1. It's all socialized medicine out there.
Not so. Some countries, such as Britain, New Zealand and Cuba, do provide health care in government hospitals, with the government paying the bills. Others -- for instance, Canada and Taiwan -- rely on private-sector providers, paid for by government-run insurance. But many wealthy countries -- including Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and Switzerland -- provide universal coverage using private doctors, private hospitals and private insurance plans.

In some ways, health care is less "socialized" overseas than in the United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance (Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet's purest examples of government-run health care.
2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.
Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation's 200 private health insurance plans -- a broader choice than any American has. If a German doesn't like her insurance company, she can switch to another, with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance plan in the country.
In France and Japan, you don't get a choice of insurance provider; you have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits such as "in-network" lists of doctors or "pre-authorization" for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get treatment -- and insurance has to pay.
Canadians have their choice of providers. In Austria and Germany, if a doctor diagnoses a person as "stressed," medical insurance pays for weekends at a health spa.
As for those notorious waiting lists, some countries are indeed plagued by them. Canada makes patients wait weeks or months for nonemergency care, as a way to keep costs down. But studies by the Commonwealth Fund and others report that many nations -- Germany, Britain, Austria -- outperform the United States on measures such as waiting times for appointments and for elective surgeries.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/21/AR2009082101778.html

HANNAH WILKE: THE GRAYER SOFTER CHAOS THAT IS TRAGEDY

2009-05-02T00:29:00.005+02:00

I become my art, my art becomes me...
My heart is hard to handle, my art is too.
Feel the folds; one-fold, two-fold, expressive, precise gestural symbols...
Eat a fortune cookie, don't ask me to sign it.
Kneaded erasers; the grayer softer chaos that is tragedy...
Needed erase her? Don't...
Laundry lint; residual magic rearranging the touch of sensuality.
Terra Cotta; the tragedy of multiple romances; latex rubber, the loose arrangements of love vulnerably exposed...
A performance;
Starification,
or S.O.S...
object-I Object...
The double-folded gestural drawings made from gum...

These drawings, like Morse code across the wall,
relate the many individuals who touched me,
and I am touched by their lives, not their death.

(Excerpts from Hannah Wilke Letter in Art: A Woman's Sensibility, Feminist Art Program, California Institute of the Arts, 1975.)

2009-05-01T05:40:00.000+02:00

2009-05-01T05:23:00.004+02:00

THE MATHEMATICS OF AESTHETICS

2009-04-20T07:36:00.020+02:00

Beauty is not a gift from the Gods.

Physical beauty is a perverse marriage

of conventional aesthetic perception

and ancient mathematical symmetry.

We see beauty in the face of Garbo because of phi.

THE GOLDEN RATIO.

SECTIO AUREA.

PHI.

JOHANNES KEPLER'S

"PRECIOUS JEWEL."

THE HARMONY OF THE MIDDLE BETWEEN TWO EXTREMES.

THE FOUNDATION OF ALL NOTIONS OF PHYSICAL BEAUTY.

THE GOLDEN RECTANGLE AND THE FIBONACCI SPIRAL.

(Euclid defined the Golden Ratio in Elements.)

DA VINCI'S VITRUVIAN MAN.

The human body, in its perfect proportions, mirrors the Golden Ratio. Fibonacci Numbers and phi are evident in Phidias' Parthenon, in the Pyramids, in Botticelli's Venus, and in the opus of da Vinci. Look at the Renaissance polymath's work in Pacioli's De Divina Porpotione. Look at Michelangelo's David or The Sistene Chapel. The context is religious, but the structure is secular perfection.

ISAAC NEWTON'S COLOR WHEEL.

Logic is not anathema to Romance. Chopin's Nocturnes and Etudes were composed with Fibonacci Numbers. Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy and Bartok, all created within the guidelines of the Golden Ratio.

SEE THE GOLDEN RECTANGLES?

NOTRE-DAME-DU-HAUT.

Le Corbusier's iconoclastic architecture, furniture design and urban planning, were all inspired by the rigor and harmony of phi and Vitruvius.

THIS IS MY HAPPY FACE.

2009-04-19T23:38:00.003+02:00

A: Are you excited?

B: Yes.

A: You don't look excited.

B: This is my happy face.

A: Why don't you smile?

B: I'm smiling on the inside.

A: Why are you looking at my feet?

B: I'm feeling extroverted.

2009-04-19T01:25:00.004+02:00

The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction.

It is not surprising that the innocent are killed, tortured, driven from their country, made destitute, or reduced to slavery, imprisoned in camps or cells, since there are criminals to perform such actions.

It is not surprising either that disease is the cause of long sufferings, which paralyze life and make it into an image of death, since nature is at the mercy of the blind play of mechanical necessities.

But it is surprising that God should have given affliction the power to seize the very souls of the innocent and to

take possession of them as their sovereign lord.

At the very best, he who is branded by affliction will keep only half his soul.

-Simone Weil

JOEL-PETER WITKIN

2009-04-19T01:24:00.001+02:00

Face of a Woman (2004)

The Poet (2005)

Ars Moriendi (2007)

Objects Near a Window, Paris (2007)

Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé

2009-04-19T01:23:00.001+02:00

ANNE BRIGMAN: THE GLORY OF THE OPEN

2009-04-19T01:22:00.003+02:00

In all of my years of work with the lens (since 1906) I’ve dreamed of and loved to work with the human figure – to embody it in rocks and trees, to make it part of the elements, not apart from them, even as Edward Carpenter writes:

“How the human body bathed in the sheen

and wet, steeped in sun and air,

Moving near and nude among the element

Matches somehow and interprets the whole of nature.

How from shoulder to foot of mountain and man

alike the lines of grace run on;

How, as the Greeks dreamed, in rock and rill

divinest forms lie shrined, or in the wild woods lurk embodied.”

Rare humans, rare in their minds as well as in their slim, fine bodies, have given me of their simple beauty and freedom, that I might weave them into the sagas of these wind swept trees on high peaks.

I knew no one, and, as I said a while back, cared nothing. Then came the storm weather and with it, the joy of working – light on a dark mountain lake, glories of sunrise, cloud masses, and strange trees. One day on one of my wanderings I found a juniper – the most wonderful juniper that I’ve met in my eighteen years of friendship among them. It had the glorious strength, the uplift, and the wind-kissed motion of the Victory of Samothrace. I sat down a short distance from it. It was a great character like the Man of Gallilee or Moses the Law-giver, or the Lord Buddha, or Abraham Lincoln – on the ground, tailor wise – the knapsack beside me – looking up to my beautiful friend. After a while I walked around the wonder tree not so tall but lovely in proportion – looked at its battleship wedge-front and its broad back base.

Away from the weather its bark was shining and tawny as a lion’s mane. Green-yellow moss grew along its branches and into the foliage, while the delicate gray-ivory front of the tree shone with a rippling satiny radiance of its own. Storm and stress well borne made it strong and beautiful. I climbed into it. Here was the perfect place for a figure; here the place for the right arm to rest, and even though my feet were made clumsy by boots, I could see and feel where the feet would fit perfectly into the cleft that went to its base.

Once again I stood away from the tree. I might not see it again, but to know it was worthwhile. It was about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, I noticed its half lights, its few big shadows, the superb mass of its foliage and the lovely convolution of the branches. I’d clear away the debris about its base, even though I’d never see it again. There was a husky log, an old pine giant weary of life and gone long ago. It was rolled over the cliff, and some fair sized boulders followed; there were white pebbles and sticks, little high lights that had no meaning in the scheme of things, and here and there in the tree itself small extraneous branches and cross-purpose ones. These were removed, and I told my tree adios and went back to camp through the evening light.

Perhaps, because I wasn’t in sackcloth and ashes about this tree, or concerned as to what would happen in these two weeks, the Gods of the Mountain in their inscrutable ways brought to me everything, and to crown all, a lovely human.

This human knew nothing of my work with mountain trees, but was willing to go to the wonder-tree and there, in this high, lone place, with the lame duck camera, between hail showers from racing clouds and glorious sunlight, the film of the print INVICTUS came to birth.

Camera Craft, Vol. 33, No. 4, April 1926
The Glory of the Open - by Anne Brigman, 1926

FOR MAURIZIO

2009-04-19T01:21:00.004+02:00

Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? (2003) by Robert Cauble from Why + Wherefore on Vimeo.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN: Bunny bun I'm in the photo lab come fetch me if the mood or a rock should strike you

2009-04-19T01:21:00.003+02:00

Quietly.

I want to pass where no one yet has passed

quietly!

— After you, dearest language.

-Andre Breton

György Kepes: Language of Vision

2009-04-19T01:00:00.011+02:00

Today we experience chaos. The waste of human and material resources

and the canalization of almost all creative effort into blind alleys bear

witness to the fact that our common life has lost its coherency. In the focus

of this eclipse of a healthy human existence is the individual, torn by the

shattered fragments of his formless world, incapable of organizing his

physical and psychological needs.

This tragic formlessness is the result of a contradiction in our social ex-

istence. It indicates our failure in the organization of that new equipment

with which we must function if we are to maintain our equilibrium in a

dynamic world.

Advances in science and technology have created a new dimension. Today,

all people of the world are neighbors, and natural resources on a hitherto

undreamed of scale are within the potential reach of all. The inherited

structure of a smaller, outgrown world, however, stands in the way of the

integration of our lives in the terms of the present wider dimension. To-

talitarian aggression, as the most destructive aspect of the resistance of the

past, sought to direct the present and future toward an obsolete organization,

of a necessity employing force in order to accomplish what was diametri-

cally opposed to the principles of growth and development. These destruc-

tive forces, on the other hand, inevitably prepare the way for reconstruction.

The more unbearable the strains and stresses caused by the contradiction

between the potentialities of the present and the outlived forms of the past,

the stronger is the compulsion toward equilibrating our life in the con-

temporary dimension. To achieve a livable life today, then, we must reorient

ourselves, and create forms in terms of present historical conditions. In-

stead of allowing both a further haphazard accumulation of scientific dis-

coveries and a planless technological expansion, it is our task to establish

an organic interconnection of the new frontiers of knowledge. Integration,

planning, and form are the key words of all progressive efforts today; the

goal is a new vital structure-order, a new form on a social plane, in which

all present knowledge and technological posessions may function unhind-

ered as a whole.

This new structure-order can be achieved only if man of today becomes

truly contemporary and fully able to use his capacities. To be contempo-

rary in a true sense demands a most advanced knowledge of the facts govern-

ing life of today. The understanding of vital aspects of our life, however, to

most of us is still at the same stage as it was a hundred years ago. In the past,

lightning, plague, and famine were believed to be visitations of Providence,

but today, through knowledge and understanding, we are able to control

them. In like fashion, if we should make social application of scientific

knowledge, present obstacles to a contemporary human existence would be

eliminated. We must dissipate the belief that war, economic crises, or

psychological disintegration is unavoidable and due to blind, inimical

forces of nature. The collective efforts of scientists have given us a richer

and safer life in the biological and physical realms; we must meet them in socio-economic and psychological realms. Education on an unprecedented

scale is imperative if man, who now lives in a wider world, is to be really

contemporary.

But this new knowledge can only be the living fibre of integration if man

experiences it with the wholeness of his being. Human faculties, however,

have been dulled and have disintegrated in a climate of frustration. Ex-

perience has tended to become only a stepping-stone to an exploitation of

nature and of man. Experiences are isolated pigeon-holes; they display

only single aspects of human beings. To function in his fullest scope man

must restore the unity of his experiences so that he can register sensory,

emotional, and intellectual dimensions of the present in an indivisible whole.

-György Kepes

language of vision

With introductory essays by S. GIEDION and S. I. HAYAKAWA

Paul Theobald 1951.

2009-04-19T01:00:00.006+02:00

21/10-Columbia Halle, Berlin.

25/10-Palais de congres, Paris.

Kim and Thurston love gossip girl.

INTENTIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS: PHILOSOPHICAL FICTION AS CONVERSATION by Jukka Mikkonen

2009-04-18T23:30:00.002+02:00

The Beckettian–Foucauldian question, what does it matter who is speaking, is different in literary and philosophical approaches to fiction. When a fiction is approached from a philosophical point of view, that is, focusing on its philosophical purport, the author's final intentions manifested in the work and our information about her are important in determining what the work conveys or suggests and which views can be attributed to the author. An intentionalist approach aims at solving whether she, say, "only" portrays a character who expresses certain kind of beliefs or uses the character as a mouthpiece for advancing claims; which of a fictional character's beliefs and views are about the fictional world and which are genuinely supported by the author; how reliable is the narrator, and so on.

AGNES MARTIN: THE INTELLECTUAL IS IN FACT DEATH.

2009-04-18T23:28:00.002+02:00

Classicists are people that look out with their back to the world.

It represents something that isn’t possible in the world

More perfection than is possible in the world

it’s as unsubjective as possible

The ideal in America is the natural man

The conquerer, the one that can accumulate

The one who overcomes disadvantages, strength, courage

Whereas inspiration, classical art depends on inspiration

The Sylphides.

I depend on the muses

Muses come and help me now.

It exists in the mind

Before it’s represented on paper it exists in the mind

The point.

It doesn’t exist in the world.

The classic is cool

a classical period

it is cool because it is impersonal

the detached and impersonal.

If a person goes walking in the mountains that is not detached

and impersonal, he’s just looking back.

Being detached and impersonal is related to freedom

That’s the answer for inspiration

The untroubled mind.

(Thank-You, Matthew Ames.)

By the use of the intellect we have created a world of ideas that does not actually exist. The political world is a structure conceived and agreed to us by us but it is not a reality. You have been conditioned to believe that this political world is in fact real. With this conception it is believed that we have come into ownership of the world and that we are responsible for creating it and with this concept

we have placed ourselves in a condition of perpetual responsibility and reform.
But since we are not creating the world, since it was created before us and we are merely in it, and since we do not own it, our whole political concept is false.

It is untrue. It is not based on reality or true life.

An artist must see this and give up all reform and political considerations. The world evolves due to changes that take place in individuals. By individuals I mean all living things.

The world evolves due to a growing awareness in the lives of all things and expressed in their actions. The actions of all things are guided by a growing awareness of life.

We call it inspiration. Living by inspiration is living. Living by intellect – by comparisons, calculations, schemes, concepts, ideas – is all a structure of pride in which there is not beauty or happiness – no life. The intellectual is in fact death.

ZHU MING: LUMINESCENT MAN

2009-04-18T23:24:00.000+02:00

RANDOM SOLILOQUY

I AM ALIVE BUT I DO NOT KNOW WHERE MY DESTINATION IS, HOWEVER I DO KNOW THE PROCESS WHICH IS MORE CRUCIAL. CONSEQUENCES ARE TRIVIAL. AS A PARTICIPANT AND A PRACTITIONER, WALKING ALONE IS THE ONLY OPTION, AN ENDLESS PURSUIT
TO LIVE IS A RESPONSIBILITY AND ENDURANCE. THE MOTIVATION OF LIVING IN REALITY IS THINKING WITHOUT ANY PRACTICAL PURPOSE. TO LIVE NEEDS COURAGE
I HAVE NAMED ALL MY WORK WITH TIME. TIME IS A MAN-MADE NOTION. THE TITLES OF MY WORK ARE POINTS IN THE TIME LINE, THEY ARE THE BEGINNING, AND THEY ARE THE END. IT IS JUST LIKE THE TWO ENDS OF A LINE. HOW CAN WE APPROACH ONE END TO ANOTHER WITHOUT ANY TIME DIFFERENCES? MAYBE ONLY WHEN ONE END MEETS ANOTHER, OR PUT IT THIS WAY, WHEN THE LINE BECOMES AN “O”, THERE WOULD NOT BE ANY TIME DIFFERENCE WHICH MEANS BOTH ENDS ARE THE BEGINNING AND THE END. THEREFORE THIS MEETING POINT IS THE POINT I HAVE CHOSEN, ANY POINT ON THE ‘O’ GIVES THE TIME A MEANING
NIHILITY IS OMNIPRESENT, IT CAN BE SENSED FROM DIFFERENT INFORMATION OF THE WORLD, IT CAN BE SENSED WHEN YOU SLEEP, IT CAN BE SENSED IN THE RELATIONSHIPS AMONG PEOPLE, IT COULD BE SENSED IN A PROCESS OF AN ALTERNATION OF LIFE AND DEATH AND SO ON AND SO FORTH. BUBBLES CARRY THIS NATURE OF JUXTAPOSING THE EMPTINESS AND MATTER
A SOUL INFORMS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A LIFE, IT IS AS INVISIBLE AS THE FLUX OF AIR IN BUBBLES, IT COMES AND GOES, IT COULD INHABIT A LIFE BUT ALSO FLEET BY. IT IS AN INVISIBLE REALITY
BUBBLES APPEAR AND DISAPPEAR. THIS PROCESS INVOLVES A RELATIONSHIP OF CONVECTION THROUGH A CONSTANT FLUX OF AIR. IT ALSO LEADS TO THE NOTION OF ‘BREATH’, THE WAY OF EXISTING. A BUBBLE DOES NOT ONLY MEAN AN EXISTENCE OF AN OBJECT BUT A PROCESS

‘TO LIVE - TO DIE’ IS A TRANSFORMATION FROM MATERIALITY TO INTANGIBILITY WHILE THE ESSENCE OF AN ENTITY NEVER CHANGES. MATERIALITY EXISTS IN THE REALITY WHILE INTANGIBILITY INHABITS MINDS
MY BRAIN IS THE PLACE WHERE I CAN PRODUCE MY WORK WITHOUT CONSIDERING THE REQUIREMENTS OF REALITY. IT IS A SIMPLER WORLD WHERE I CAN HAVE THE POSSIBLE FREEDOM TO CONTEMPLATE FREELY. THINKING IS FREE, ACTING IS RELATIVE. THE SPIRITUAL WORLD IS A VAGUE INTERSECTION OF LIFE AND ART. TO REVEAL THE REALITY IS THE CONTENT OF MY WORK. THE SPIRITUAL WORLD IS SHOWN THROUGH MATERIALS AND ACTS. I WOULD GO EXTREME UNCONSCIOUSLY. I BELIEVE THAT I SHOULD DO WHAT I AM DOING AS I WAS BORN FOR IT

AN ARTIST MUST BE A HUMAN FIRST. I HAVE MY OWN PRINCIPLES TO BE A HUMAN BEING THEREFORE I NEED TO FACE LIMITS. THIS IS CALLED THE CONTRADICTION OF BEING. I HAVE BEEN DREAMiNG TO HAVE A GROUP OF PEOPLE TO DO WHAT WE ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT TOGETHER SIMPLY WITHOUT ANY CONFLICTS WHICH COULD ONLY BE A DREAM. HOWEVER I BELIEVE THAT THINGS DO GO EASIER WHEN THERE IS NO TOO MUCH DESIRE.

I AM EXTREME. I AM EXTREMELY CONCERNED ABOUT ART, WHICH MEANS I WILL NOT ONLY LIVE A MEANINGFUL LIFE BUT ALSO A COMPLICATED AND HOPELESS ONE / ZHU MING

I wish to blur the firm boundaries which we self-certain people tend to delineate around all we can achieve. -Hannah Hoch

2009-04-18T23:20:00.026+02:00

Half Castle, 1924

WILHELM STAEHLE'S SILHOUETTE MASTERPIECE THEATRE

2009-04-18T23:04:00.005+02:00

Wilhelm is actually very dapper. Please visit his art and emporium of Victorian-inspired treasures now.

HOW WINGS ARE ATTACHED TO THE BACKS OF ANGELS

2009-04-18T22:23:00.000+02:00

UNICA ZURN

2009-04-18T22:00:00.006+02:00

Pale sieves a tired

Ax in the tree's bosom.

In the foliage's broom there is

Seed-blood-silk. Bites

in the lovenest of the building.

Sweetly fogs in its ice-bath

the Ibis's blood. Masses

in the dust of this life.

In the Dust of This Life, Montpellier, 1955

Nuns go by Quiet as Lust -Toni Morrison

2009-04-17T12:26:00.001+02:00

Video Art in Public Space

Atopia is accepting proposals for the third season of Vitrine Project, 2010-11. Artists of all lands may apply.

Vitrine is an outdoor project of Atopia specifically designed for its windows on the street level of Sannergata in Oslo. Sannergata is a busy route for traffic moving in and out of the city, and the Vitrine has the potential of reaching thousands of viewers everyday.

Vitrine is a dedicated site for artists’ video works in public space. It investigates multi-screen environments and it is engaged with the development of the discourse of video art in public space. Transience – moving images and moving public is the fundamental concept of Vitrine Project.

We seek proposals from individual artists for site-specific, 4-screen video installations that are innovative in their approach and daring in their exploration. Sound is not an option for Vitrine and we prioritize non-narrative and non-violent imagery.

Proposals should include the following:

Visual description of the work in the form of DVD or other video files.
Project description (limited to one A4 page)
CV of the artist

Selected works will go on exhibition between November 2010 and February 2011, when it is dark enough to project outdoors in Oslo. Vitrine uses rear projection, and we have the capability of synchronizing the four video projections.

Selected proposals will receive € 1.000.

BATAILLE: LITERATURE AND EVIL

2009-04-17T11:47:00.000+02:00

ANNALS OF POVERTY EPICUREANISM AND ENTERTAINMENT 33 1/2: MUSIIKKI JA HILJAISUUS: WALSER FOR THE GREEN SEASON

2009-04-17T11:00:00.006+02:00

Kai Althoff

Green how I want you green. Green Wind. Green branches... -Lorca

Knut the polar bear lives in the Berlin zoo. One day a man seized by the blue devil vapors jumped into Knut's cage. The bear-keeper asked why the man would be so reckless. The man told him, "the bear looked lonely, too."

If you are lonely and evaporated in the fire season, take an ice bath, stay small and avoid feral foxes.

“One of the profoundest products of modern literature.”

—Walter Benjamin

“Incredibly interesting and beautiful.”

—John Ashbery

“[These] painstakingly transcribed texts brought to light some of Walser’s most beautiful and haunting writing . . . . The incredible shrinking writer is a major 20th-century prose artist who, for all that the modern world seems to have passed him by, fulfills the modern criterion: he sounds like nobody else.”

—Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker

W.G. Sebald called Robert Walser “a clairvoyant of the small,” and nowhere is the phrase more apt than in his “microscripts.”

New Edition of Walser Microscripts with afterword by Walter Benjamin

Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper (many of them written during his hospitalization in the Waldau sanatorium), covered with tiny ant-like markings only a millimeter or two high, came to light only after the author’s death in 1956. At first considered a secret code, the microscripts were eventually discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of a German script: a whole story could fit on the back of a business card.

Microscripts gathers 40 short pieces — stories, poems, fragments, “dramolettes” — in this gorgeously illustrated co-publication with the Christine Burgin Gallery. Each microscript is reproduced in full color in its original form: the detached cover of a trashy crime novel, a disappointing telegram, the inside of a soap wrapper. Schnapps, rotten husbands, small-town life, the radio, pigs (and how none of us can deny being one), jealousy, Van Gogh and marriage proposals are some of Walser’s subjects. These texts take strength from Walser’s motto: “To be small and to stay small.”

PLEASE READ:
Walser, of course. Even in the nadir of summer, he makes you dream again.
The Assistant, The Tanners, and The Microscripts by Robert Walser
Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks
The Children of Uranium by Peter Greenaway

Greenaway's investment in and reverence for literature and pre-film culture as cinema's vertebrae are unmatched in the contemporary cinematic landscape. Greenaway and Saskia Boddeke's 2005 multimedia installation was shaped by the periodic table's 92 elements, the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima, the 100th anniversary of Einstein's relativity: The terror and illumination of of nuclear power. Greenaway designed the book as a production compendium and companion, with performance notes, drawings, photos, the installation's libretto, and stories and biographies of uranium's children: Curie, Newton, Bush, Gorbachev, Joseph Smith...

Please Listen:
Kath Bloom's Finally...She is the lambent bulb in a dusky world...
Scout Niblett's The Calcination of Scout Niblett
The Knife's (in collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock)
Tomorrow, in a Year
Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileras Nos. 1,2,5,& 9
with Victoria de los Angeles
(My papa says you must listen only to the version w/Victoria.)

PLEASE EAT RAW GREEN SUMMER SOUP:

3 handfuls of micro-greens
6 handfuls of fresh, organic spinach
2 heads of fresh lettuce
2 cucumbers
3 celery stalks
1 ripe avocado
1 green apple
2 lemons, juiced
3-4 shakes of cayenne
2 cups of water
Salt from a fresh, wild sea

Chop the greens and place in blender. Add the liquid and seasoning. Puree until creamy and liquid. Add dashes of olive or evening primrose oil. This soup will cure a love hangover or heat-wave anomie.

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own. -Goethe

2009-04-17T10:46:00.000+02:00

Light Industry at NO SOUL FOR SALE

Tate Modern

Bankside, London

May 14-16, 2010

Light Industry will be one of over 70 alternative spaces and collectives participating in NO SOUL FOR SALE at Tate Modern. Our program for the exhibition will be the presentation of three screenings which first took place at our venue in Brooklyn, New York: V.I. Pudovkin's Mechanics of the Brain, originally introduced by Annette Michelson; Stanley Milgram's Obedience, originally introduced by Zoe Beloff; and Wakefield Poole'sBijou, originally introduced by Eileen Myles. We also commissioned Amy Sillman, Dash Shaw, and Paul Chan to design posters (silkscreened by Bread and Butter Collective) for the Pudovkin, Milgram, and Poole films, respectively. These prints will be on view in Tate's Turbine Hall along with many other projects organized by the groups in the festival.

P.S.

THE PLACEBO EFFECT OF SHOE FETISHISM.

2009-04-17T10:29:00.000+02:00

THE OPACITY OF OBJECTS.

THE PLACEBO EFFECT OF OBJECTS:

GOOD FOR THE TEMPORARY RELIEF OF MILD PAIN.

THEN THE VOID, THEN TRYING TO AVOID THE VOID.

-Philosophical Toys

Right now, you should be reading the brilliant Susana Medina's Philosophical Toys. Right after, you should watch her short, Bunuel's Philosophical Toys. Click the title for erotic inanimate marble toes.

AINO SAYS: PLAIN RIDE AND PUDDING AND THE PARETO PRINCIPLE.

2009-04-17T00:45:00.002+02:00

PUUTARHA by Kristina Isola for Marimekko

FOCUS by Anna Danielson for Marimekko

Plain Ride. Giddy-up.

Moika. Every time I finish a project and come home to Helsinki, I do three things:

1. I eat fried herring, wild mushroom salad, licorice pudding and cold beer for breakfast. (Some cliches are banal, delicious truths!)

2. I hunt for vintage Marimekko caftans and antique folk rings at flea markets.

3. I go to a pub or club to hear a great local band.

By the time I get to number 3, I usually start to think about how few great contemporary Finnish artists are known outside of Finland or Scandinavia. Take this band I love called Plain Ride. I just heard them live, and I'm always playing them at dinner parties to rapturous applause. They should be internationally famous and adored! Plain Ride is fronted by Janne Westerlund, who is influenced by old-school American folk-country, Krautrock and a hippy-happy underbelly of psychedelia. They're fierce, son!

During my last project, my producer became obsessed with this thing called the Pareto Principle. It was originally a method of gauging disparities in global wealth distribution-20% owning 80% of the total world wealth. This application is outdated. (The top 1% owns, like, everything now.) But the principle has validity to the artist's life:

20% of the artist's life and effort

is responsible for 80% of his creative output.

OR:

20% of the artist's life and effort

is responsible for 80% of his income.

In today's art market, I think only 5% of the 20% is really spent on art-making by most economically viable artists. The remaining 15% is spent on surrounding oneself with a good team, with marketing, networking, and possessing an unflappable resilience and persistence.

Here is where the problem and the pride lies. Here is why I leave Finland even though I'm subsidized here: We Finns suck at marketing. We are wild and quiet people, and we are suspicious of praise and self-promotion. (Also hugs. Americans hug a lot.)

When I'm in California or Berlin, I'm a Mimosa, and I can spend my time going to parties and charming people with my vintage Marimekko textiles and reindeer stories. When I'm in Finland, I never tell strangers I am an artist. I like to say I'm the garbage collector.

I may not wear Marimekko in Helsinki, because the connotation is a bit bougie, but I love and grew up with their designs, and I sport them in foreign lands. I get pissed and weirdly nationalistic when I spot these gorgeous Finnish textiles in the remainder bins of chain design shops all over the U.S. (Or when I see Fazer mints on clearance at Duane Reade. Or when I involuntarily cringe at Lumene's cheesy global cosmetic campaigns.)

I still get bumble bees in my ribcage when my creative team makes me network. Every art is a craft that must be honed and mastered. To me, the life in art is a symbiosis of daily craft and beckoning the Genius Loci. To me, listening to that sacred muse requires engagement in the senses and protection from vulgarity and cynicism. But every art and craft is also a business. And business can be vulgar. I deconstruct my private altars for my art. Then, I swallow all my vulnerability with spring water, and I do my business dance. Then, I go home and put on my favorite cult music and beckon the furies.

2009-04-16T02:01:00.003+02:00

2009-04-12T01:31:00.000+02:00

THE SPLENDID RUTH BERNHARD

ART NOIR 4: AKSELI GALLEN-KALLELA

2009-04-11T10:30:00.000+02:00

MASAI WARRIOR, Kahara Mountains, 1910

"I can always reach the point where my country will be content with my achievements. But my ambition reaches much further!

Everything or nothing, first or last.

That is the motto I want to keep for the rest of my life."

-Gallen-Kallela

MARY GALLEN AS LEMMINKAINEN'S MOTHER, Kalela, 1907

KEEPER OF THE SAMPO, Kalela, 19o4

The Sampo is the meta-clover.

A philosopher's stone.

A bread baker.

The cloud of gold.

A virgin maker!

HERBERT PFOSTL'S PAPER GRAVEYARD

2009-04-10T23:30:00.000+02:00

All Sorts Of Remedies

Observatory

543 Union Street at Nevins