Athens Community in the Kibbutz

Athens Community in the Kibbutz
(paper, marble, ceramic, wood, acrylic, brick, 2011)


Kibbutz Geva - Assembly Hall
The citizens of the kibbutz cast their vote on basic decisions

The Mystique Of The Manual

One of her “big ideas” was that the sickness of the modern world is caused by “uprootedness.” We are, Simone Weil believed, lost. The only antidote is a social order grounded in physical labor. Only manual work can save us.

Weil herself was preternaturally a worker by brain, not by hand. Small, myopic, physically awkward and weak, it is difficult to think of anyone less suited to toil in a factory, workshop or field. Weil was a French intellectual of the purest sort. Considered a prodigy from childhood alongside her brother Andre, who went on to become one of the twentieth century’s greatest mathematicians, she had mastered classical Greek by age twelve, was steeped in advanced mathematical physics by fifteen and at twenty came top in the entrance exam to the super-elite École Normale Supérieure. That was the same year, 1928, that Simone de Beauvoir had finished second.

Part philosopher, part activist, part mystic, Weil is almost impossible to classify. A youthful Marxist who abandoned the faith in favor of liberal pluralism. A lover of all things ancient Greek who equated the Roman Empire with Nazi Germany and Hitler with Caesa, she was a mass of contradictions. Yet her reputation has grown over time as one of the most original and uncomfortable thinkers of the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot, a great admirer, considered her “a woman of genius, a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” “A genius,” added one of her many anthologists, “of immense revolutionary range.”

Born into a comfortable, secular Jewish home, she repudiated this already threadbare link to her ancestral roots, carrying on in later life—following a vision at the age of twenty-eight in the chapel of St Francis in Assisi—a mystical love affair with Jesus. In words that were deeply disturbing to many, written in wartime London in the same year Hitler’s Final Solution went into full effect, she described the Jewish faith, the faith of her fathers as a “Great Beast” of religion, and ancient Rome as a “Great Beast” of materialism, declaring both dislikeable. It was from her own highly idiosyncratic reading of the Greeks—Homer, Sophocles, Euripides and above all Plato—that Weil derived her ideas about the mystique of manual work. “For the Greeks”, she wrote, “physical labor is the direct expression of religious faith…And willingly consented to…it is the most perfect form of obedience.”

In 1931 she received a brilliant aggregation in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure, and was sent forth into the world as a newly minted high school teacher, a career for which she was almost comically unsuited. Eased out of several lycées in provincial France by anxious parents and outraged administrators for failing to get her often adoring pupils to pass the requisite exams, she spent her evenings hanging out with workers, debating, organizing and taking part in strikes. Known around the Left Bank of Paris as “The Red Virgin,” she seems to have been blessed —or cursed—with an almost unendurable empathy for the downtrodden. Eventually Weil applied for a leave of absence from teaching to study at first hand the condition of the French industrial working class. Her uncompromising attitudes, disheveled physical appearance, monotonous voice and lack of almost all conventional social grace did her few favors, but she eventually managed to find employment in a steel plant, an experience that proved physically, emotionally and spiritually shattering. It seared her like a branding iron.

“What a factory ought to be” she wrote to a friend, “is a place where one makes hard painful but joyous contact with real life. Not the gloomy place it is.” She was fired from three such factory jobs in quick succession, unable, with her small misshapen hands and weak arms, to master the minimal requisite mechanical skill to fulfill her quota.

Why on earth would a frail intellectual woman from a well-off bourgeois background wish to subject herself to such torment? With Weil, nothing was simple. Her motives were twofold. At first, the political Simone wanted to understand—from the inside, from the bottom up—why the French industrial workers of the 1930s were so docile. Why they did not rise up and smash the capitalist system as the radical left had predicted, especially at a time of economic turmoil and the distant thunder of encroaching war? The news Simone Weil brought back from the “icy pandemonium of industrial life,” as she called it, was that, to be a worker meant losing all dignity, all autonomy. This crushed state rendered thought—let alone action—moot. While she was employed on the assembly-line she came to see herself and her fellow workers, women in particular, as slaves. “In the factory,” she wrote in a letter to a militant syndicalist, “all the reasons upon which my self-respect were based were destroyed by weeks of brutal restraint.” Nearly a century earlier, Karl Marx had urged the workers of the world to unite and lose their chains. It was religion—“the opium of the people”—that befuddled their minds, preventing them from seizing destiny by the throat. Weil, based on her participant observation of the mentality and actual conditions of French workers, begged to differ, turning Marx on his head. It was in fact the unrealizable prospect and promise of revolution, not religion, that was the true opium. Change would never come from “below”. This insight led her to repudiate the radical left to the eternal disgust of many of her revolutionary friends, and former mentors—among them Trotsky.

At the same time the spiritual Simone was becoming increasingly mystical and Christian —she drew close to the Catholic Church in her later years, but resisted the final baptismal step. This led her to crave release from academia and the abstract life of the mind and lose herself in obedience. Like early medieval mystics, Saint Teresa of Avila or Saint John of the Cross, she prayed that her individuality be obliterated by the necessities of toil, that her intelligence might be extinguished through punishing physical fatigue. At times she turned for solace and inspiration to the Bhagavad-Gita and other sacred Hindu texts. These notions—anathema to left-wing French intellectuals then and now—became her vocation. Like Leo Tolstoy, she saw a connection between physical fatigue and spirituality, and hoped, however foolishly, to have a religious experience on the factory floor. “Physical work” she wrote in her best known book Gravity and Grace, “makes us experience in the most exhausting manner, the phenomenon of finality.” Workers, she wrote, “need poetry more than bread, and religion alone can be the source of it.”

Perhaps the purest expression of Weil’s mystical notion of the sanctity of physical labor comes at the end of her essay “La Condition Ouvrière,” published, as were most of her writings, long after her death. “If man’s vocation is to achieve pure joy through suffering, manual workers are better placed than all others to accomplish it in the truest way.”

Weil died at thirty-four by self-induced starvation in wartime London, the coroner recording a verdict of suicide “while the balance of her mind was disturbed.” Since her death, interest in her life and work has exploded. Some twenty volumes of posthumous writings have gradually appeared, and no less than thirty biographies. One would expect her to be embraced by Catholics—the reformist Pope, John XXIII, said of her “I love this soul.” Yet we find this difficult, awkward, and in many ways disturbing woman, whose ideas ran so counter to the dominant modern intellectual grain, revered in the most unexpected places. Mary McCarthy for instance, hardly someone interested in matters spiritual or religious, discovered and came to celebrate Weil early, translating Weil’s astonishing essay "The Poem of Force," on Homer’s Iliad in 1945.

As for Simone de Beauvoir—the atheistic high priestess of Saint Germain and all things left wing—she had already taken note of Weil as a child, when she was trounced by her in the ferociously competitive entrance exam to the École Normale. “Her intelligence, asceticism, and total commitment,” wrote de Beauvoir forty years later, “as well as her sheer courage, filled me with admiration…I especially envied her for her heart.”

Text by Peter Foges

Source:www.laphamsquarterly.org

The Voyage Limpid Sound's "The Tavern"

The Voyage Limpid Sound's "The Tavern", 2011

L’Echo de la Fabrique

Echo de la fabrique, n°1, 30 octobre 1831

Journal industriel de Lyon et du département du Rhône. Hebdomadaire publié du 30 octobre 1831 au 4 mai 1834, au moment des deux insurrections lyonnaises de 1831 et 1834, L’Echo de la Fabrique constitue l’organe de défense des canuts lyonnais. Il est considéré comme le tout premier journal ouvrier.
La Bibliothèque de Lyon possède l’une des très rare collection de ce journal. Une collaboration avec l’ENS (Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon) donne lieu, depuis 2004, à la publication en ligne de ce journal et des quelques feuilles qui lui ont succédées : L’Echo des Travailleurs (1833-1834), la Tribune Prolétaire (1834-1835 ; BML, 5714), l’Union des Travailleurs (1835 ; BM Lyon, 5714), le Nouvel Echo de la Fabrique (1835 ; BM Lyon, 5714) et l’Indicateur (1834-1835)

"Ce journal [...] comprendra dans chaque numéro un article d’historique de la fabrication de la soierie, toutes les découvertes utiles qui y ont trait, tous les griefs imputés aux divers chefs de commerce et appuyés de preuves authentiques, les débats détaillés de tous ce que les séances des prud’hommes offrirons de plus piquant, quelques articles de localité, et enfin une colonne d’annonces pour les insertions de tous ce qui peut intéresser la fabrique des étoffes de soie, au prix de 10 c. la ligne."

"Prospectus", L’Echo de la Fabrique, s.d. (ca. octobre 1831).

Source: www.pointsdactu.org

Head of Ezra Pound

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska carving Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, photographed by Walter Benington, c.1914,Courtesy the Benington Archive

The World of Wrestling

The grandiloquent truth of gestures

on life's great occasions.

Baudelaire

The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theaters. And in fact wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky (a romantic value suited rather to fashionable occasions), it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.* Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight; this is of no interest. True wrestling, wrongly called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema. Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy). The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.

This public knows very well the distinction between wrestling and boxing; it knows that boxing is a Jansenist sport, based on a demonstration of excellence. One can bet on the outcome of a boxing-match: with wrestling, it would make no sense. A boxing- match is a story which is constructed before the eyes of the spectator; in wrestling, on the contrary, it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time. The spectator is not interested in the rise and fall of fortunes; he expects the transient image of certain passions. Wrestling therefore demands an immediate reading of the juxtaposed meanings, so that there is no need to connect them. The logical conclusion of the contest does not interest the wrestling-fan, while on the contrary a boxing-match always implies a science of the future. In other words, wrestling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result.

Thus the function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him. It is said that judo contains a hidden symbolic aspect; even in the midst of efficiency, its gestures are measured, precise but restricted, drawn accurately but by a stroke without volume. Wrestling, on the contrary, offers excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of their meaning. In judo, a man who is down is hardly down at all, he rolls over, he draws back, he eludes defeat, or, if the latter is obvious, he immediately disappears; in wrestling, a man who is down is exaggeratedly so, and completely fills the eyes of the spectators with the intolerable spectacle of his powerlessness.

This function of grandiloquence is indeed the same as that of ancient theater, whose principle, language and props (masks and buskins) concurred in the exaggeratedly visible explanation of a Necessity. The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from disguising, he emphasizes and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle. In wrestling, as on the stage in antiquity, one is not ashamed of one's suffering, one knows how to cry, one has a liking for tears.

Each sign in wrestling is therefore endowed with an absolute clarity, since one must always understand everything on the spot. As soon as the adversaries are in the ring, the public is overwhelmed with the obviousness of the roles. As in the theater, each physical type expresses to excess the part which has been assigned to the contestant. Thauvin, a fifty-year-old with an obese and sagging body, whose type of asexual hideousness always inspires feminine nicknames, displays in his flesh the characters of baseness, for his part is to represent what, in the classical concept of the salaud, the 'bastard' (the key-concept of any wrestling-match), appears as organically repugnant. The nausea voluntarily provoked by Thauvin shows therefore a very extended use of signs: not only is ugliness used here in order to signify baseness, but in addition ugliness is wholly gathered into a particularly repulsive quality of matter: the pallid collapse of dead flesh (the public calls Thauvin la barbaque, 'stinking meat'), so that the passionate condemnation of the crowd no longer stems from its judgment, but instead from the very depth of its humours. It will thereafter let itself be frenetically embroiled in an idea of Thauvin which will conform entirely with this physical origin: his actions will perfectly correspond to the essential viscosity of his personage.

It is therefore in the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest. I know from the start that all of Thauvin's actions, his treacheries, cruelties and acts of cowardice, will not fail to measure up to the first image of ignobility he gave me; I can trust him to carry out intelligently and to the last detail all the gestures of a kind of amorphous baseness, and thus fill to the brim the image of the most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus. Wrestlers therefore have a physique as peremptory as those of the characters of the Commedia dell'Arte, who display in advance, in their costumes and attitudes, the future contents of their parts: just as Pantaloon can never be anything but a ridiculous cuckold, Harlequin an astute servant and the Doctor a stupid pedant, in the same way Thauvin will never be anything but an ignoble traitor, Reinieres (a tall blond fellow with a limp body and unkempt hair) the moving image of passivity, Mazaud (short and arrogant like a cock) that of grotesque conceit, and Orsano (an effeminate teddy-boy first seen in a blue- and-pink dressing-gown) that, doubly humorous, of a vindictive salope, or bitch (for I do not think that the public of the Elysee- Montmartre, like Littre, believes the word "salope" to be a masculine).

The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight. But this seed proliferates, for it is at every turn during the fight, in each new situation, that the body of the wrestler casts to the public the magical entertainment of a temperament which finds its natural expression in a gesture. The different strata of meaning throw light on each other, and form the most intelligible of spectacles. Wrestling is like a diacritic writing: above the fundamental meaning of his body, the wrestler arranges comments which are episodic but always opportune, and constantly help the reading of the fight by means of gestures, attitudes and mimicry which make the intention utterly obvious. Sometimes the wrestler triumphs with a repulsive sneer while kneeling on the good sportsman; sometimes he gives the crowd a conceited smile which forebodes an early revenge; sometimes, pinned to the ground, he hits the floor ostentatiously to make evident toall the intolerable nature of his situation; and sometimes he erects a complicated set of signs meant to make the public understand that he legitimately personifies the ever- entertaining image of the grumbler, endlessly confabulating about his displeasure.

We are therefore dealing with a real Human Comedy, where the most socially-inspired nuances of passion (conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, a sense of 'paying one's debts') always felicitously find the clearest sign which can receive them, express them and triumphantly carry them to the confines of the hall. It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theater. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art. Wrestling is an immediate pantomime, infinitely more efficient than the dramatic pantomime, for the wrestler's gesture needs no anecdote, no decor, in short no transference in order to appear true.

Each moment in wrestling is therefore like an algebra which instantaneously unveils the relationship between a cause and its represented effect. Wrestling fans certainly experience a kind of intellectual pleasure in seeing the moral mechanism function so perfectly. Some wrestlers, who are great comedians, entertain as much as a Moliere character, because they succeed in imposing an immediate reading of their inner nature: Armand Mazaud, a wrestler of an arrogant and ridiculous character (as one says that Harpagon** is a character), always delights the audience by the mathematical rigor of his transcriptions, carrying the form of his gestures to the furthest reaches of their meaning, and giving to his manner of fighting the kind of vehemence and precision found in a great scholastic disputation, in which what is at stake is at once the triumph of pride and the formal concern with truth.

What is thus displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. Wrestling presents man's suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks. The wrestler who suffers in a hold which is reputedly cruel (an arm- lock, a twisted leg) offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering; like a primitive Pieta, he exhibits for all to see his face, exaggeratedly contorted by an intolerable affliction. It is obvious, of course, that in wrestling reserve would be out of place, since it is opposed to the voluntary ostentation of the spectacle, to this Exhibition of Suffering which is the very aim of the fight. This is why all the actions which produce suffering are particularly spectacular, like the gesture of a conjuror who holds out his cards clearly to the public. Suffering which appeared without intelligible cause would not be understood; a concealed action that was actually cruel would transgress the unwritten rules of wrestling and would have no more sociological efficacy than a mad or parasitic gesture. On the contrary suffering appears as inflicted with emphasis and conviction, for everyone must not only see that the man suffers, but also and above all understand why he suffers. What wrestlers call a hold, that is, any figure which allows one to immobilize the adversary indefinitely and to have him at one's mercy, has precisely the function of preparing in a conventional, therefore intelligible, fashion the spectacle of suffering, of methodically establishing the conditions of suffering. The inertia of the vanquished allows the (temporary) victor to settle in his cruelty and to convey to the public this terrifying slowness of the torturer who is certain about the outcome of his actions; to grind the face of one's powerless adversary or to scrape his spine with one's fist with a deep and regular movement, or at least to produce the superficial appearance of such gestures: wrestling is the only sport which gives such an externalized image of torture. But here again, only the image is involved in the game, and the spectator does not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection of an iconography. It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle.

There is another figure, more spectacular still than a hold; it is the forearm smash, this loud slap of the forearm, this embryonic punch with which one clouts the chest of one's adversary, and which is accompanied by a dull noise and the exaggerated sagging of a vanquished body. In the forearm smash, catastrophe is brought to the point of maximum obviousness, so much so that ultimately the gesture appears as no more than a symbol; this is going too far, this is transgressing the moral rules of wrestling, where all signs must be excessively clear, but must not let the intention of clarity be seen. The public then shouts 'He's laying it on!', not because it regrets the absence of real suffering, but because it condemns artifice: as in the theater, one fails to put the part across as much by an excess of sincerity as by an excess of formalism.

We have already seen to what extent wrestlers exploit the resources of a given physical style, developed and put to use in order to unfold before the eyes of the public a total image of Defeat. The flaccidity of tall white bodies which collapse with one blow or crash into the ropes with arms flailing, the inertia of massive wrestlers rebounding pitiably off all the elastic surfaces of the ring, nothing can signify more clearly and more passionately the exemplary abasement of the vanquished. Deprived of all resilience, the wrestler's flesh is no longer anything but an unspeakable heap spread out on the floor, where it solicits relentless reviling and jubilation. There is here a paroxysm of meaning in the style of antiquity, which can only recall the heavily underlined intentions in Roman triumphs. At other times, there is another ancient posture which appears in the coupling of the wrestlers, that of the suppliant who, at the mercy of his opponent, on bended knees, his arms raised above his head, is slowly brought down by the vertical pressure of the victor. In wrestling, unlike judo, Defeat is not a conventional sign, abandoned as soon as it is understood; it is not an outcome, but quite the contrary, it is a duration, a display, it takes up the ancient myths of public Suffering and Humiliation: the cross and the pillory. It is as if the wrestler is crucified in broad daylight and in the sight of all. I have heard it said of a wrestler stretched on the ground: 'He is dead, little Jesus, there, on the cross,' and these ironic words revealed the hidden roots of a spectacle which enacts the exact gestures of the most ancient purifications.

But what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice. The idea of 'paying' is essential to wrestling, and the crowd's 'Give it to him' means above all else 'Make him pay'. This is therefore, needless to say, an immanent justice. The baser the action of the 'bastard', the more delighted the public is by the blow which he justly receives in return. If the villain--who is of course a coward-- takes refuge behind the ropes, claiming unfairly to have a right to do so by a brazen mimicry, he is inexorably pursued there and caught, and the crowd is jubilant at seeing the rules broken for the sake of a deserved punishment. Wrestlers know very well how to play up to the capacity for indignation of the public by presenting the very limit of the concept of Justice, this outermost zone of confrontation where it is enough to infringe the rules a little more to open the gates of a world without restraints. For a wrestling-fan, nothing is finer than the revengeful fury of a betrayed fighter who throws himself vehemently not on a successful opponent but on the smarting image of foul play. Naturally, it is the pattern of Justice which matters here, much more than its content: wrestling is above all a quantitative sequence of compensations (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth). This explains why sudden changes of circumstances have in the eyes of wrestling habitues a sort of moral beauty: they enjoy them as they would enjoy an inspired episode in a novel, and the greater the contrast between the success of a move and the reversal of fortune, the nearer the good luck of a contestant to his downfall, the more satisfying the dramatic mime is felt to be. Justice is therefore the embodiment of a possible transgression; it is from the fact that there is a Law that the spectacle of the passions which infringe it derives its value.

It is therefore easy to understand why out of five wrestling matches, only about one is fair. One must realize, let it be repeated, that 'fairness' here is a role or a genre, as in the theater: the rules do not at all constitute a real constraint; they are the conventional appearance of fairness. So that in actual fact a fair fight is nothing but an exaggeratedly polite one: the contestants confront each other with zeal, not rage; they can remain in control of their passions, they do not punish their beaten opponent relentlessly, they stop fighting as soon as they are ordered to do so, and congratulate each other at the end of a particularly arduous episode, during which, however, they have not ceased to be fair. One must of course understand here that all these polite actions are brought to the notice of the public by the most conventional gestures of fairness: shaking hands, raising the arms, ostensibly avoiding a fruitless hold which would detract from the perfection of the contest.

Conversely, foul play exists only in its excessive signs: administering a big kick to one's beaten opponent, taking refuge behind the ropes while ostensibly invoking a purely formal right, refusing to shake hands with one's opponent before or after the fight, taking advantage of the end of the round to rush treacherously at theadversary from behind, fouling him while the referee is not looking (a move which obviously only has any value or function because in fact half the audience can see it and get indignant about it). Since Evil is the natural climate of wrestling, a fair fight has chiefly the value of being an exception. It surprises the aficionado, who greets it when he sees it as an anachronism and a rather sentimental throwback to the sporting tradition ('Aren't they playing fair, those two'); he feels suddenly moved at the sight of the general kindness of the world, but would probably die of boredom and indifference if wrestlers did not quickly return to the orgy of evil which alone makes good wrestling.

Extrapolated, fair wrestling could lead only to boxing or judo, whereas true wrestling derives its originality from all the excesses which make it a spectacle and not a sport. The ending of a boxing-match or a judo-contest is abrupt, like the full stop which closes a demonstration. The rhythm of wrestling is quite different, for its natural meaning is that of rhetorical amplification: the emotional magniloquence, the repeated paroxysms, the exasperation of the retorts can only find their natural outcome in the most baroque confusion. Some fights, among the most successful kind, are crowned by a final charivari, a sort of unrestrained fantasia where the rules, the laws of the genre, the referee's censuring and the limits of the ring are abolished, swept away by a triumphant disorder which overflows into the hall and carries off pell-mell wrestlers, seconds, referee and spectators.

It has already been noted that in America wrestling represents a sort of mythological fight between Good and Evil (of a quasi-political nature, the 'bad' wrestler always being supposed to be a Red). The process of creating heroes in French wrestling is very different, being based on ethics and not on politics. What the public is looking for here is the gradual construction of a highly moral image: that of the perfect 'bastard'. One comes to wrestling in order to attend the continuing adventures of a single major leading character, permanent and multiform like Punch or Scapino, inventive in unexpected figures and yet always faithful to his role. The 'bastard' is here revealed as a Moliere character or a 'portrait' by La Bruyere, that is to say as a classical entity, an essence, whose acts are only significant epiphenomena arranged in time. This stylized character does not belong to any particular nation or party, and whether the wrestler is called Kuzchenko (nicknamed Moustache after Stalin), Yerpazian, Gaspardi, Jo Vignola or Nollieres, the aficionado does not attribute to him any country except 'fairness'--observing the rules.

What then is a 'bastard' for this audience composed in part, we are told, of people who are themselves outside the rules of society ? Essentially someone unstable, who accepts the rules only when they are useful to him and transgresses the formal continuity of attitudes. He is unpredictable, therefore asocial. He takes refuge behind the law when he considers that it is in his favor, and breaks it when he finds it useful to do so. Sometimes he rejects the formal boundaries of the ring and goes on hitting an adversary legally protected by the ropes, sometimes he reestablishes these boundaries and claims the protection of what he did not respect a few minutes earlier. This inconsistency, far more than treachery or cruelty, sends the audience beside itself with rage: offended not in its morality but in its logic, it considers the contradiction of arguments as the basest of crimes. The forbidden move becomes dirty only when it destroys a quantitative equilibrium and disturbs the rigorous reckoning of compensations; what is condemned by the audience is not at all the transgression of insipid official rules, it is the lack of revenge, the absence of a punishment. So that there is nothing more exciting for a crowd than the grandiloquent kick given to a vanquished 'bastard'; the joy of punishing is at its climax when it is supported by a mathematical justification; contempt is then unrestrained. One is no longer dealing with a salaud but with a salope--the verbal gesture of the ultimate degradation.

Such a precise finality demands that wrestling should be exactly what the public expects of it. Wrestlers, who are very experienced, know perfectly how to direct the spontaneous episodes of the fight so as to make them conform to the image which the public has of the great legendary themes of its mythology. A wrestler can irritate or disgust, he never disappoints, for he always accomplishes completely, by a progressive solidification of signs, what the public expects of him. In wrestling, nothing exists except in the absolute, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively. Leaving nothing in the shade, each action discards all parasitic meanings and ceremonially offers to the public a pure and full signification, rounded like Nature. This grandiloquence is nothing but the popular and age-old image of the perfect intelligibility of reality. What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.

When the hero or the villain of the drama, the man who was seen a few minutes earlier possessed by moral rage, magnified into a sort of metaphysical sign, leaves the wrestling hall, impassive, anonymous, carrying a small suitcase and arm-in-arm with his wife, no one can doubt that wrestling holds that power of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle and to Religious Worship. In the ring, and even in the depths of their voluntary ignominy, wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.

*In Moliere's L'Ecole des Femmes and Racine's Andromaque.

**In Moliere's L'Avare.

Text by Roland Barthes

From: Mythologies by Roland Barthes, translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, New York, 1984, Copy-edited by Scott Atkins.

The “Heartbreak Kid” Shawn Michaels has left the Building

On the March 29 episode of Raw, Shawn Michaels gave an emotional farewell speech. The “Heartbreak Kid” announced his retirement from professional wrestling after his Wrestlemania 26 ‘Streak vs. Career’ match loss to The Undertaker.2010

Why sculptors live longer than painters

Sculptors famous enough to warrant their own entry in reference books lived three years longer than their equally famous painter colleagues. Researchers at the University of Georgia reveal this discovery in a study published in Age and Ageing. The researchers analyzed data on the age reached by 94 famous European painters and 68 sculptors.

They obtained their data from the Larousse Dictionary of Painters and the Encylopedia of Sculpture. They confined themselves to sculptors who worked in stone, and therefore had to hew their statues out of hard material. When they calculated the age that painters and sculptors reached, they noticed that the sculptors lived longer than the painters. Sculptors reached an average age of 67.4 and painters 63.6.

Painters died more often than sculptors up to the age of 40 and between 60 and 70, as shown in the graph below. The open bars represent the sculptors; the coloured bars the painters.




Where the painters and sculptors lived made no difference: in all the countries examined the sculptors lived longer than the painters.

The researchers think that the sculptors were protected by the physical nature of their profession. Sculpting is hard work. According to modern studies, a sculptor weighing 65 kg burns 6.5 to 9.1 calories a minute. A painter weighing the same gets no further than 2.3 to 3.9 calories per minute. By the way, both professions expend more calories than someone who earns a living sitting at a computer.

It's possible that the physical work protected the sculptors against cardiovascular disease. That is what many classic studies from the twentieth century concluded about physical work, in the period before doctors started to prescribe statins.

At the time when the artists were alive, however, it wasn't cardiovascular disease but infectious diseases that were the most common cause of death. The researchers think that the physical work stimulated the immune system of the sculptors, so they were more resistant to pathogens.

Source: www.ergo-log.com

Villa Besnus Today

The Villa Besnus in Vaucresson (suburban Paris) today.

Villa Besnus

Villa Besnus, "Ker-Ka-Ré", Vaucresson, France, 1922

This design was the direct practical outcome of the Town-Planning Stand at the Paris "Salon d'Automne" of 1922. It dates from a period when every kind of difficulty presented itself simultaneously. Though theories had been put forward and principles developed for clearing the ground in "L'Esprit Nouveau", everything in this house had, architecturally speaking, to be created anew : methods of construction, an efficient structural solution of the roof problem and of the window-surrounds, parapet, etc. The design reveals its free planning - the bathroom being placed in the centre of the floor area. It likewise defines the form of the window and its proportions, which are correctly adjusted to the human scale.

Here, for instance, is an example which is only one among many others that could be taken from this house of care bestowed on aesthetic considerations : One sketch shows the rounded staircase-cage, which it will be seen is placed perpendicular to the facade. Le Corbusier has told how when he had just come out of the Velodrome d'Hiver one evening during "Les Six jours" (relay cycle races) - "a magnificent spectacle combining grandeur and coordination" - he suddenly realized "in the mental silence of the street" that this perpendicular staircase was a discordant rhythm which destroyed the basic unity of his design. He therefore readjusted the position of the staircase to make it take a quarter turn along the facade, thereby emphasizing and amplifying the latter. Intense moments such as these, he says, teach us a lifelong lesson. "They make us turn our backs on mere accident, impel us to sacrifice a pleasing detail, and force us to seek coherent unity. We must use all our ground to the full and invariably realize the widest possible dimensions. It will be seen that in architecture we can engage in plastic speculations in which - from the purely plastic point of view - we may do either well or badly."

Source:www.fondationlecorbusier.fr

Touches Its Depths and Is Stirred Up

A wave of solid light, its fire intact.
A current, a soft breeze
that arouses everything, that scorches and unravels everything,
that refines everything
back to its pure lines. A high tide waterfall
that the sun throws down (its stars
breaking free, its joyfulness,
sustained
falling, its rootballs
of crystals, formed by fire: opening furrows, opening wakes,
wading across, sinking down). Depth opens
on the surface.
-All
the ocean and the calm
of soothing itself, all that burning thickness of sand,
of plough-turned land, of salt, touches its depths
and is stirred up.


Coral Bracho

Dirty Humanism

Andreas Empirikos, 1956

Curated by Nadja Argyropoulou, the show will bring together an exceptional group of twenty artists working across a broad range of mediums, from photography, sculpture, painting, embroidery and performance art, revealing the extraordinary vibrancy of the Greek art scene. Pieces will range from the 1920s to the present day with a focus on the contemporary.

Combining renowned classics and iconic modern pieces with new commissions,Ντέρτι Humanism scavenges a fresh artistic interpretation of the continuous quest for a new Greek identity, exemplified in the philosophy of renowned architect,Dimitris Pikionis; an identity that sheds its fixation with Greece’s creative and cultural legacy to explore its hectic present and international perspective.

A densely constructed exhibition, each work in Ντέρτι Humanism will invade the space of its neighbour to trigger new visual interpretations and narratives. The artists are brought together under a new constellation; while allowing their individual flair, Ντέρτι Humanism locates a commonality between competing dialogues. These works all perform an archaeological dismantling of the modern and share an understanding of coexistence between past and present.

The exhibition will showcase the works of Alexis Akrithakis; Athanasios Argianas; Vlassis Caniaris; Savvas Christodoulides; Andreas Embiricos; Haris Epaminonda; Stelios Faitakis; Vassilis Patmios Karouk; Dionisis Kavallieratos; Rallou Panagiotou; Dimitris Pikionis; Yorgos Sapountzis; Christiana Soulou; Elli Souyioultzoglou-Seraidari (a.k.a. Nelly's); Lakis & Aris Ionas - The Callas; Thanassis Totsikas; Nanos Valaoritis; Jannis Varelas; Kostis Velonis; and Tassos Vrettos.

*The greek word 'Ντέρτι', pronounced like the English 'dirty', is a folk word of Turkish origin that means 'worry', 'trouble', 'anguish', 'torment' or 'vasanos'.

Faggionato Fine Arts - Ντέρτι* Humanism (Dirty Humanism)
London. 9 June- 12 August