Marc Z. Yang, Imagining a Letter from Robinson Crusoe: Experiencing Constant Becoming
International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 5, No. 8(1); August 2015
Saturday, May 26, 2018
Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin América (1934–1973)
Suárez, Osiel, García, María Amalia; Agnew, Michael (translations) (2011). Witschey, Erica; Fundación Juan March, eds. Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin América (1934–1973) Madrid: Fundación Juan March.Exhibition catalog of Cold America, Geometric Abstraction in Latin America (1934–1973), Fundación Juan March, Madrid, February 11-May 15, 2011
Wednesday, May 23, 2018
Oh that I had a thousand tongues
Oh that I had a thousand tongues is a group exhibition that emerges from language, but diverges from its immediate association with communicability by analyzing and breaking with the processes of its construction.
Within various though similarly constructed political and social landscapes, throughout (art) history, images and concepts have been constantly created to follow direct—or fictional—narrative traces and signs. The question could be, how can a quest for a new language be initiated that breaks loose from the constraints set by predominant forms of society? This could happen involuntarily, as a “slip of the tongue” so the English saying goes, causing a rupture in the usual course of things. This could materialize from a creative field where the act of disorganizing language provokes separations and gaps that compels art to speak another language. If contemporary art aspires to anything, it is to turn the rules of the game around so as to free itself from the permanences assigned to meaning. It might attempt to grasp the one in the many of intentions attached to words, separating out the different voices speaking, so as to reflect on the social/political implications of different tongues possibly graduating to one becoming the other.
The artists in the exhibition focus very directly on the voice as opinion openly expressed. They refer to the methods through which peoples’ voices are manifested—as they bring forward their histories and memories—in an effort to connect to new or uncertain environments and ever changing conditions. These factors seem even more pertinent in remote locations like an island where the many particularities of a place and its time become its specific carrier, where its pasts are embedded in singular details appearing in the present, prompting translation to both admit the subjective and court the sensitive.
The exhibition acknowledges the potential of the contradictory and the incomplete in a story, of (mis)translation and (mis)interpretation as a rich source the artists mine. The more voices speaking over a time, about an event, a feeling, the richer and fuller history becomes. The more narratives, possibilities, or other truths that are unearthed and given voice the more uncontrollable the story becomes, inviting yet unknown qualities to flourish.
Artists: Olga Balema, Gerry Bibby, Juliette Blightman, Anders Clausen, Maria Georgoula, Morag Keil, Anna Lascari, Maria Loboda, Henrik Olesen / Gerry Bibby, Emanuel Rossetti, Petros Touloudis
Curated by Nikola Dietrich
Curated by Nikola Dietrich
Opening: 26.05.2018, 18:30
with the lecture performance Year of the Dog by Juliette Blightman
and Soundscapes by Paolo Thorsen-Nagel
Cultural Foundation of Tinos in Khora, Tinos, Greece
27.05. – 15.09.2018
with the lecture performance Year of the Dog by Juliette Blightman
and Soundscapes by Paolo Thorsen-Nagel
Cultural Foundation of Tinos in Khora, Tinos, Greece
27.05. – 15.09.2018
Sunday, May 13, 2018
The Crowing of the Repressed
The Crowing of the Repressed (‘The Court Jesters’ series), 2017
acrylic, oil, pencil and oil pastel on canvas
150 x 150 cm
Saturday, May 12, 2018
Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi
When Death Comes, It Will Have Your Eyes
When death comes, it will have your eyes-
This death that is always with us,
From morning till evening, sleepless,
Deaf, like an old remorse
Or some senseless bad habit. Your eyes
Will be an empty word,
A stifled cry, a silence;
The way they appear to you each morning,
When you lean into yourself, alone,
In the mirror. Sweet hope,
That day we too shall know
That you are life and you are nothingness.
This death that is always with us,
From morning till evening, sleepless,
Deaf, like an old remorse
Or some senseless bad habit. Your eyes
Will be an empty word,
A stifled cry, a silence;
The way they appear to you each morning,
When you lean into yourself, alone,
In the mirror. Sweet hope,
That day we too shall know
That you are life and you are nothingness.
For each of us, death has a face.
When death comes, it will have your eyes.
It will be like quitting some bad habit,
Like seeing a dead face
Resurface out of the mirror,
Like listening to shut lips.
We’ll go down into the vortex in silence.
When death comes, it will have your eyes.
It will be like quitting some bad habit,
Like seeing a dead face
Resurface out of the mirror,
Like listening to shut lips.
We’ll go down into the vortex in silence.
-Cesare Pavese (1950)
https://julianpeterscomics.com/2013/02/02/cesare-pavese-when-death-comes-itll-have-your-eyes-verra-la-morte-e-avra-i-tuoi-occhi/
Sunday, May 6, 2018
The Number of Inches Between Them
Gordon Hall, The Number of Inches Between Them, performance at Winter Street Warehouse, 2017.
Photograph of the original bench in Clinton, New Jersey, made by Dennis Croteau (date unknown)
Books, They Are the Finest Thing
Petrarch, Letter to Giovanni dell’Incisa:
“One insatiable desire has me in its grip: I was not able to rein it in, nor did I wish to. I flatter myself that the lust for noble things is not itself ignoble. Are you waiting to hear the nature of my malady? I am unable to be fully sated with books, and I have perhaps more than is proper. But just as in other matters of life, so too in the world of books: success in getting them is really just a spur to further avarice. There is, rather, something singular in books: gold, silver, gems, fine clothes, marble houses, cultivated fields, fine paintings, decked-out horses, and other things of the sort have a dull and superficial pleasure about them, but books delight us to the very marrow of our bones, they converse with us, they advise us, and the are joined to us with a real living and finely-fashioned familiarity. Not only does every book insinuate itself deep into its readers, but it brings forth the names of other books, and every book creates a desire for yet another.”
Saturday, May 5, 2018
Prehistories of Commodity Branding
By David Wengrow
Source: Current Anthropology,
Vol. 49, No. 1 (February 2008), pp. 7-34
Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" & the Robinsonades
Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" & the Robinsonades is a collection of various editions of Robinson Crusoe and similarly themed texts such as the popular The Swiss Family Robinson. The term "Robinsonades" is used to describe literary works about survival without the aid of civilization, frequently on a deserted island. This genre takes is name from the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
In the archetypical Robinsonade, the protagonist is suddenly isolated from the comforts of civilization, usually shipwrecked or marooned on a secluded and uninhabited island. He must improvise the means of his survival from the limited resources at hand. The protagonist survives by his wits and the qualities of his cultural upbringing, which also enable him to prevail in conflicts with fellow castaways or over local peoples he may encounter. Some of the titles here may appear more tangentially related; for instance, collections of stories that include Robinsonades.
Robinson Crusoe was influential in creating a colonialization mythology - As novelist James Joyce eloquently noted the true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe: "He is the true prototype of the British colonist… ". Later works expanded on and explored this mythology. Though Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is set within tropical environs, several of the Robinsonades collected here tell the Crusoe story in settings as different as the Arctic, the American west, and other global locations.
This collection of Robinsonades is valued as much for it popularity as its popular use in enculturation and language learning. Variant editions available here, for example, retell the tale for children in words of one syllable which serves as an aid to learning the language and provides early exposure to the highly regarded cultural values of courage, independence, inventiveness, creativity and resourcefulness.
Friday, May 4, 2018
Janiform kantharos
Janiform kantharos: heads of Greek female and African male
Ceramic. Greek, Attic, ca. 480 - 460 B.C.
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