199

199, Hydra Slaughterhouse until 1 Nov. 
Deste foundation/ National Historical Museum of Athens 

Photo by @chloeakrithaki  
#destefoundation #exhibition #kostisvelonis#sculpture #hydra ##filikietairia#greekrevolution #fighters #funerary #masks

Ηθική του σκοντάμματος /Ethics of Stumbling

Ηθική του σκοντάμματος /Ethics of Stumbling 

 

 

Ειδική βιβλιογραφία, σημειώσεις

References, works cited, notes 

 

Τέχνη στο συγκείμενο (Art in Context )

Αμφισβητήσεις της δεξιότητας στη νεωτερικότητα 

ΑΣΚΤ -Χειμερινό εξάμηνο/ Εαρινό εξάμηνο

Αμφιθέατρο νέας βιβλιοθήκης,  Πειραιώς 256

Κωστής Βελώνης

 

 

Αριστοφάνης, Οι Βάτραχοι

http://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/ancient_greek/bibliographies/translation/bibliography.html?t=ΑΡΙΣΤΟΦΑΝΗΣ

 

Das bucklige Männlein

https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=260

 

Bataille, Georges, "The Big Toe" (1929) μτφρ. Stoekl, Allan, Lovitt ,Carl R..  Leslie Donald M.  from Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Minneapolis: UMP, 1985 

https://jillsorensen.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/georges-bataille.pdf

https://supervert.com/elibrary/georges-bataille/the-big-toe

 

Benjamin, Walter, Τα παιδικά χρόνια στο Βερολίνο το χίλια εννιακόσια. Επίμετρο: Tiedmann, Rolf, Adorno, Theodo, μτφρ. Αβραμίδου, Ιωάννα, Αθήνα:  Αγρα, 2006

 

 

Γιατρομανωλάκης, Νικόλας . Ο Νικόλας Γιατρομανωλάκης εξηγεί γιατί η καρέκλα του Ρασίντ Τζόνσον στο ΕΜΣΤ είναι σημαντική. Lifo.gr, 15.10.20  https://www.lifo.gr/now/culture/299507/o-nikolas-giatromanolakis-gia-tin-karekla-toy-rasint-tzonson-sto-emst

 

Ciuraru, Carmela, Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, Harper Collins, 2011

https://poetrysociety.org/features/tributes/fernando-pessoa-his-heteronyms

Leslie, Esther, Walter Benjamin,  London : Reaktion Books, 2007

Costa Margaret Jull, A Little Fellow with a Big Head: On Fernando Pessoa, The Paris Review, July 27, 2020

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/07/27/a-little-fellow-with-a-big-head/

 

Hölderlin, Friedrich,  Ὑπερίων ἢ ὁ ἐρημίτης στὴν Ἑλλάδα, μτφρ. Λαυρέντιος Γκεμερέυ, Αθήνα:  Ηριδανός, 1982.

 

Hölderlin, Friedrich, Ελεγείες, Ύμνοι και άλλα Ποιήματα, μτφρ. Στέλλα Νικολούδη Αθήνα : Άγρα, 1996.

 

Hölderlin, Friedrich, Ύμνοι, ελεγεία και αποσπάσματα, Μετάφραση – Σχόλια: Θανάσης 

 

Josie, Glausiusz “ Living in imaginary world”,  Scientific American ,  January 1, 2014 ;https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/living-in-an-imaginary-world/

 

Θεοδωρόπουλος, Τάκης, Ποιος θα φτιάξει τη σπασμένη καρέκλα; Παρασκευή, 16 Οκτωβρίου 2020. Καθημερινή,  https://www.kathimerini.gr/opinion/561119629/poios-tha-ftiaxei-ti-spasmeni-karekla/

 

Land, Peter, Pink Space, 1995

https://nicolaiwallner.com/video/pink-space-1995/

 

Lowell, Amy, The Bungler

https://kostisvelonis.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-bungler_9.html

Ανθολογία ερωτικής ποίησης, Βλαβιανός,  Χάρης  (επιμ., μτφρ.) Αθήνα :Πατάκης, 2013. 

 

Empusa & Lamiae: Vampires , demons, monsters: Greek legend, 12 May 2016

https://www.theoi.com/Phasma/Empousai.html

 

Plath, Sylvia, “I am Vertical”

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Sylvia-Plath-I-Am-Vertical-1961-Plath-1981-162-Courtesy-of-Faber-Faber-Ltd-and_fig4_301703200

 

Μίλτος Σαχτούρης, Ο γάμος πού δεν έγινε

https://saxtouris.wordpress.com/poitikes-suloges/anapoda-gyrisan-ta-rologia/

 

Σεφέρης Γιώργος,  Δοκιμές Ι (1936-1947) Αθήνα: Ίκαρος, 1999

Τζιρτζιλάκης, Γιώργος.  Υπο-νεωτερικότητα και εργασία του πένθους, Αθήνα:  Καστανιώτης, Αθήνα 2014

 

Velonis, Kostis, “Hyperion Has Stumbled”, in Puppet Sun, Athens : NEON: City Project, 2019      

https://www.academia.edu/38565604/Hyperion_Has_Stumbled

 

Waters, Michael, Movement That Accidentally Became Legitimate, Atlas Obscura, June 28, 2017  
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/spectra-poetry-hoax-witter-bynner

 

autoprogettazione

Addio Maestro

Enzo Mari 1932-2020

#enzomari #autoprogettazione #diy #italiandesign #labour #making

Fragment

Michael Longley 

 

DEMO

A midcentury modern house in Southern California is purchased for the sole purpose of destruction. An Alpine family vacation home is dismantled brick-by-brick by the daughter of the builder. City blocks crumble and spaces become debris. In one generation, fully-formed built environments are supplanted by others. 

Exploring the lines between demolition, transformation, and extinction, this group exhibition—DEMO—engages four artists’ approaches to reckoning psychologically with the erasure of history that comes with the destruction of both iconic and vernacular architecture. In Southern California, where buildings are regularly thrown away and “touchstones of identity” can no longer be touched (in the words of critic Robert Bevan), how can artists move past well-tread memorializing tendencies to suggest new critical engagement with and resistance to this definitive contemporary force?

Four different records and results of four different spatial ruinations will be situated in the landmark R.M. Schindler Kings Road House: one in each studio, each suggesting that wrecking balls are not final acts. Tehran-based artist Nazgol Ansarinia works with the three-dimensional documents of bulldozer-induced change, as interior is forced to exterior. Innsbruck-based artist Margarethe Drexel prepares to disassemble a house in Austria and “inter” it within its own basement, repurposing the house underground as a mausoleum/terrace. Los Angeles-based artist and journalist Lexis-Olivier Ray captures the decisive moment when place is obliterated by real estate. Paris-based artist Yan Tomaszewski psychoanalyzes, through film and sculpture, the demolition of Richard Neutra’s 1962 Maslon House in Rancho Mirage, CA.  

DEMO is co-curated by MAK Center director Priscilla Fraser and Anthony Carfello. A series of remote discussion programs will be run concurrent with the exhibition and feature urbanists, historians, and artists engaging with the notions of demolition highlighted within the show.

This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the MaddocksBrown Foundation, FORT:LA, Pasadena Art Alliance and the City of West Hollywood

 

Saturday, October 17, 2020 – Sunday, January 10, 2021

Schindler House

835 N Kings Road
West Hollywood

 

https://makcenter.org

Indestructible ( broken)

Indestructible (broken), 2020 

Marble, wood, stones 

199

#Destefoundation, #gravity #masonry#petrification  #sculpture #kostisvelonis #hydra #hydraslaughterhouse,# exhibition #199 

 

The Schooner Flight

1  Adios, Carenage

In idle August, while the sea soft,
and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim
of this Carribean, I blow out the light
by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion
to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.
Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn,
I stood like a stone and nothing else move
but the cold sea rippling like galvanize
and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof,
till a wind start to interfere with the trees.
I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard
as I went downhill, and I nearly said:
"Sweep soft, you witch, 'cause she don't sleep hard,"
but the bitch look through me like I was dead.
A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on.
The driver size up my bags with a grin:
"This time, Shabine, like you really gone!"
I ain't answer the ass, I simply pile in
the back seat and watch the sky burn
above Laventille pink as the gown
in which the woman I left was sleeping,
and I look in the rearview and see a man
exactly like me, and the man was weeping
for the houses, the street, that whole fucking island.

Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!
From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road
to when I was a dog on these streets;
if loving these islands must be my load.
out of corruption my soul takes wings,
But they had started to poison my soul
with their big house, big car, big time bohbohl,
coolie, nigger, Syrian and French Creole,
so I leave it for them and their carnival - 
I taking a sea bath, I gone down the road.
I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,
a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes
that they nickname Shabine, the patois for
any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw
when these slums of empire was paradise.
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation,

But Maria Concepcion was all my thought
watching the sea heaving up and down
as the port side of dories, schooners, and yachts
was painted afresh by the strokes of the sun
signing her name with every reflection;
I knew when dark-haired evening put on
her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea,
sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh,
that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting.
Is like telling mourners round the graveside
about resurrection, they want the dead back,
so I smile to myself as the bow rope untied
and the Flight swing seaward:"Is no use repeating
that the sea have more fish. I ain't want her
dressed in the sexless light of a seraph,
I want those round brown eyes like a marmoset, and
till the day when I can lean back and laugh,
those claws that tickled my back on sweating
Sunday afternoons, like a crab on wet sand."

As I worked, watching the rotting waves come
past the bow that scissor the sea like milk,
I swear to you all, by my mother's milk,
by the stars that shall fly from tonight's furnace,
that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home;
I loved them as poets love the poetry
that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.

You ever look up from some lonely beach
and see a far schooner? Well, when I write
this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;
I go draw and knot every line as tight
as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech
my common language go be the wind,
my pages the sails of the schooner Flight.
But let me tell you how this business begin.


2  Raptures of the Deep

Smuggled Scotch for O'Hara, big government man,
between Cedros and the Main, so the Coast Guard couldn't touch us,
and the Spanish pirogues always met us halfway,
but a voice kept saying: "Shabine, see this business
of playing pirate?" Well, so said, so done!
That whole racket crash. And I for a woman,
for her laces and silks, Maria Concepcion.
Ay, ay! Next thing I hear, some Commission of Enquiry
was being organized to conduct a big quiz,
with himself as chairman investigating himself.
Well, I knew damn well who the suckers would be,
not that shark in shark skin, but his pilot fish,
khaki-pants red nigger like you or me.
What worse, I fighting with Maria Concepcion,
plates flying and thing, so I swear: "Not again!"
It was mashing up my house and my family.
I was so broke all I needed was shades and a cup
or four shades and four cups in four-cup Port of Spain;
all the silver I had was the coins on the sea.

You saw them ministers in The Express,
guardians of the poor - one hand at their back,
and one set o'police only guarding their house,
and the Scotch pouring in through the back door.
As for that minister-monster who smuggled the booze,
that half-Syrian saurian, I got so vex to see
that face thick with powder, the warts, the stone lids
like a dinosaur caked with primordial ooze
by the lightning of flashbulbs sinking in wealth,
that I said: "Shabine, this is shit, understand!"
But he get somebody to kick my crutch out his office
like I was some artist! That bitch was so grand,
couldn't get off his high horse and kick me himself.
I have seen things that would make a slave sick
in this Trinidad, the Limers' Republic.

I couldn't shake the sea noise out of my head,
the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion,
so I start salvage diving with a crazy Mick,
name O'Shaugnessy, and a limey named Head;
but this Caribbean so choke with the dead
that when I would melt in emerald water,
whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent,
I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans,
dead-men's-fingers, and then, the dead men.
I saw that the powdery sand was their bones
ground white from Senegal to San Salvador,
so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month
in the Seamen's Hostel. Fish broth and sermons.
When I thought of the woe I had brought my wife,
when I saw my worries with that other woman,
I wept under water, salt seeking salt,
for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword
cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh!

There was this barge from St. Vincent, but she was too deep
to float her again. When we drank, the limey
got tired of my sobbing for Maria Concepcion.
He said he was getting the bends. Good for him!
The pain in my heart for Maria Concepcion,
the hurt I had done to my wife and children,
was worse than the bends. In the rapturous deep
there was no cleft rock where my soul could hide
like the boobies each sunset, no sandbar of light
where I could rest, like the pelicans know,
so I got raptures once, and I saw God
like a harpooned grouper bleeding, and a far
voice was rumbling, "Shabine, if you leave her,
if you leave her, I shall give you the morning star."
When I left the madhouse I tried other women
but, once they stripped naked, their spiky cunts
bristled like sea eggs and I couldn't dive.
The chaplain came round. I paid him no mind.
Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbor?
Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for,
and the window I can look from that frames my life?


3  Shabine Leaves the Republic

I had no nation now but the imagination.
After the white man, the niggers didn't want me
when the power swing to their side.
The first chain my hands and apologize, "History";
the next said I wasn't black enough for their pride.
Tell me, what power, on these unknown rocks -
a spray-plane Air Force, the Fire Brigade,
the Red Cross, the Regiment, two, three police dogs
that pass before you finish bawling "Parade!"?
I met History once, but he ain't recognize me,
a parchment Creole, with warts
like an old sea bottle, crawling like a crab
through the holes of shadow cast by the net
of a grille balcony ; cream linen, cream hat.
I confront him and shout, "Sir, is Shabine!
They say I'se your grandson. You remember Grandma,
your black cook, at all?" The bitch hawk and spat.
A spit like that worth any number of words.
But that's all them bastards have left us: words.

I no longer believed in the revolution.
I was losing faith in the love of my woman.
I had seen that moment Aleksandr Blok
crystallize in The Twelve. Was between
the Police Marine Branch and Hotel Venezuelan
one Sunday at noon. Young men without flags
using shirts, their chests waiting for holes.
They kept marching into the mountains, and their
noise ceased as foam sinks into sand.
They sank in the bright hills like rain, every one
with his own nimbus, leaving shirts in the streets,
and the echo of power at the end of the street.
Propeller-blade fans turn over the Senate;
the judges, they say, still sweat in carmine,
on Frederick Street the idlers all marching
by standing still, the Budget turns a new leaf.
In the 12.30 movies the projectors best
not break down, or you go see revolution. Aleksandr Blok
enters and sits in the third row of pit eating choc-
olate cone, waiting for a spaghetti West-
ern with Clint Eastwood and featuring Lee Van Cleef.


4  The Flight, Passing 
    Blanchisseuse.

Dusk. The Flight passing Blanchisseuse.
Gulls wheel like from a gun again,
and foam gone amber that was white,
lighthouse and star start making friends,
down every beach the long day ends,
and there, on that last stretch of sand,
on a beach bare of all but light,
dark hands start pulling in the seine
of the dark sea, deep, deep inland.


5    Shabine Encounters the
      Middle Passage

Man, I brisk in the galley first thing next dawn,
brewing li'l coffee; fog coil from the sea
like the kettle steaming when I put it down
slow, slow, 'cause I couldn't believe what I see:
where the horizon was one silver haze,
the fog swirl and swell into sails, so close
that I saw it was sails, my hair grip my skull,
it was horrors, but it was beautiful.
We float through a rustling forest of ships
with sails dry like paper, behind the glass
I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons,
and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun,
right through their tissue, you traced their bones
like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barkentines,
the backward-moving current swept them on,
and high on their decks I saw great admirals,
Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse, I heard the hoarse orders
they gave those Shabines, and that forest
of masts sail right through the Flight,
and all you could hear was the ghostly sound
of waves rustling like grass in a low wind
and the hissing weds they trail from the stern;
slowly they heaved past from east to west
like this round world was some cranked water wheel,
every ship pouring like a wooden bucket
dredged from the deep; my memory revolve
on all sailors before me, then the sun
heat the horizon's ring and they was mist.

Next we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations,
our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose,
to hear us shouting. So we stop shouting. Who knows
who his grandfather is, much less his name?
Tomorrow our landfall will be the Barbados.


6  The Sailor Sings Back to the
    Casuarinas

You see them on the low hills of Barbados
bracing like windbreaks, needles for hurricanes,
trailing, like masts, the cirrus of torn sails;
when I was green like them, I used to think
those cypresses, leaning against the sea,
that take the sea noise up into their branches,
are not real cypresses but casuarinas.
Now captain just call them Canadian cedars.
But cedars, cypresses, or casuarinas,
whoever called them so had a good cause,
watching their bending bodies wail like women
after a storm, when some schooner came home
with news of one more sailor drowned again.
Once the sound "cypress" used to make more sense
than the green "casuarinas", though, to the wind
whatever grief bent them was all the same,
since they were trees with nothing else in mind
but heavenly leaping or to guard a grave;
but we live like our names and you would have
to be colonial to know the difference,
to know the pain of history words contain,
to love those trees with an inferior love,
and to believe: "Those casuarinas bend
like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain
like sailors' wives. They're classic trees, and we,
if we live like the names our masters please,
by careful mimicry might become men."


7  The Flight Anchors in
    Castries Harbor

When the stars self were young over Castries,
I loved you alone and I loved the whole world.
What does it matter that our lives are different?
Burdened with the loves of our different children?
When I think of your young face washed by the wind
and your voice that chuckles in the slap of the sea?
The lights are out on La Toc promontory,
except for the hospital. Across at Vigie
the marina arcs keep vigil. I have kept my own
promise, to leave you the one thing I own,
you whom I loved first: my poetry.
We here for one night. Tomorrow, the Flight will be gone.


8  Fight with the Crew

It had one bitch on board, like he had me mark -
that was the cook, some Vincentian arse
with a skin like a gommier tree, red peeling bark,
and wash-out blue eyes; he wouldn't give me a ease,
like he feel he was white. Had an exercise book,
this same one here, that I was using to write
my poetry, so one day this man snatch it
from my hand, and start throwing it left and right
to the rest of the crew,bawling out, "Catch it,"
and start mincing me like I was some hen
because of the poems. Some case is for fist,
some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife -
this one was for knife. Well, I beg him first,
but he kept reading, "O my children, my wife,"
and playing he crying, to make the crew laugh;
it move like a flying fish, the silver knife
that catch him right in the plump of his calf,
and he faint so slowly, and he turn more white
than he thought he was. I suppose among men
you need that sort of thing. It ain't right
but that's how it is. There wasn't much pain,
just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend,
but none of them go fuck with my poetry again.


9  Maria Concepcion & the Book of Dreams

The jet that was screeching over the Flight
was opening a curtain into the past.
"Dominica ahead!"
                              "It still have Caribs there."
"One day go be planes only, no more boat."
"Vince, God ain't made nigger to fly through the air."
"Progress, Shabine, that's what it's all about.
Progress leaving all we small islands behind."
I was at the wheel, Vince sitting next to me
gaffing. Crisp, bracing day. A high-running sea.
"Progress is something to ask Caribs about.
They kill them by millions, some in war,
some by forced labor dying in the mines
looking for silver, after that niggers; more
progress. Until I see definite signs
that mankind change, Vince, I ain't want to hear.
Progress is history's dirty joke.
Ask that sad green island getting nearer."
Green islands, like mangoes pickled in brine.
In such fierce salt let my wound be healed,
me, in my freshness as a seafarer.

That night, with the sky sparks frosty with fire,
I ran like a Carib through Dominica,
my nose holes choked with memory of smoke;
I heard the screams of my burning children,
I ate the brains of mushrooms, the fungi
of devil's parasols under white, leprous rocks;
my breakfast was leaf mold in leaking forests,
with leaves big as maps, and when I heard noise
of the soldiers' progress through the thick leaves,
though my heart was bursting, I get up and ran
through the blades of balisier sharper than spears:
with the blood of my race, I ran, boy, I ran
with moss-footed speed like a painted bird;
then I fall, but I fall by an icy stream under
cool fountains of fern, and a screaming parrot
catch the dry branches and I drowned at last
in big breakers of smoke; then when that ocean
of black smoke pass, and the sky turn white,
there was nothing but Progress, if Progress is
an iguana as still as a young leaf in sunlight.
I bawl for Maria, and her Book of Dreams.

It anchored her sleep, that insomniac's Bible,
a soiled orange booklet with a cyclop's eye
center, from the Dominican Republic.
Its coarse pages were black with the usual
symbols of prophecy, in excited Spanish:
an open palm upright, sectioned and numbered
like a butcher chart, delivered the future.
One night, in a fever, radiantly ill,
she say, "Bring me the book, the end has come."
She said, "I dreamt of whales and a storm,"
but for that dream, the book had no answer.
A next night I dreamed of three old women
featureless as silkworms, stitching my fate,
and I scream at them to come out of my house,
and I try beating them away with a broom,
but as they go out, so they crawl back again,
until I start screaming and crying, my flesh
raining with sweat, and she ravage the book
for the dream meaning, and there was nothing;
my nerves melt like a jellyfish - that was when I broke -
they found me round the Savannah, screaming:

All you see me talking to the wind, so you think I mad.
Well, Shabine has bridled the horses of the sea;
you see me watching the sun till my eyeballs seared,
so all you mad people feel Shabine crazy,
but all you ain't know my strength, hear? The coconuts
standing by in their regiments in yellow khaki,
they waiting for Shabine to take over these islands,
and all you best dread the day I am healed
of being a human. All you fate in my hand,
ministers, businessmen, Shabine have you, friend,
I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand,
I who have no weapon but poetry and
the lances of palms and the sea's shining shield!


10  Out of the Depths

Next day, dark sea. A arse-aching dawn.
"Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind."
The slow swell start cresting like some mountain range
with snow on the top.
                                      "Ay, skipper, sky dark!"
"This ain't right for August."
                                      "This light damn strange,
this season, sky should be clear as a field."

A stingray steeplechase across the sea,
tail whipping water, the high man-o'-wars
start reeling inland, quick, quick an archery
of flying fish miss us! Vince say: "You notice?"
and a black-mane squall pounce on the sail
like a dog on a pigeon, and it snap the neck
of the Flight and shake it from head to tail.
"Be Jesus, I never see sea get so rough
so fast! That wind come from God back pocket!"
"Where Cap'n headin? Like the man gone blind!"
"If we's to drong, we go drong, Vince, fock-it!"
"Shabine, say your prayers, if life leave you any!"

I have not loved those that I loved enough.
Worse than the mule kick of Kick-'Em-Jenny
Channel, rain start to pelt the Flight between
mountains of water. If I was frighten?
The tent poles of water spouts bracing the sky
start wobbling, clouds  unstitch at the seams
and sky water drench us, and I hear myself cry,
"I'm the drowned sailor in her Book of Dreams."
I remembered those ghost ships, I saw me corkscrewing
to the sea bed of sae worms, fathom past fathom,
my jaw clench like a fist, and only one thing
hold me, trembling, how my family safe home.
Then a strength like it seize me and the strength said:
"I from backward people who still fear God."
Let Him, in His might, heave Leviathan upward
by the winch of His will, the beast pouring lace
from his sea-bottom bed; and that was the faith
that had fade from a child in the Methodist chapel
in Chisel Street, Castries, when the whale-bell
sang service and, in hard pews ribbed like the whale,
proud with despair, we sang how our race
survive the sea's maw, our history, our peril,
and now I was ready for whatever death will.
But if that storm had strength, was in Cap'n face,
beard beading with spray, tears salting his eyes,
crucify to his post, that nigger hold fast
to that wheel, man, like the cross held Jesus,
and the wounds of his eyes like they crying for us,
and I feeding him white rum, while every crest
with Leviathan-lash made the Flight quail
like two criminal. Whole night, with no rest,
till red-eyed like dawn, we watch our travail
subsiding, subside, and there was no more storm.
And the noon sea get calm as Thy Kingdom come.


11  After the Storm

There's a fresh light that follows a storm
while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake
I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion
marrying the ocean, then drifting away
in the widening lace of her bridal train
with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone.
I wanted nothing after that day.
Across my own face, like the face of the sun,
a light rain was falling, wih the sea calm.

Fall gently, rain, on the sea's upturned face
like a girl showering; make these islands fresh
as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace,
every hot road, smell like clothes she just press
and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream;
whatever the rain wash and the sun iron:
the white clouds, the sea and sky wih one seam,
is clothes enough for my nakedness.
Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide
of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs
of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied
if my hand gave voice to one people's grief.
Open the map. More islands there, man,
than peas on a tin plate, all different size,
one thousand in the Bahamas alone,
from mountains to low scrub with coral keys,
and from this bowsprit, I bless every town,
the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them,
and the one small road winding down them like twine
to the roofs below; I have only one theme:
The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart - 
the flight to a target whose aim we'll never know,
vain search for an island that heals with its harbor
and a guiltless horizon, where the almond's shadow
doesn't injure the sand. There are so many islands!
As many islands as the stars at night
like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.
But things must fall, and so it always was,
on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;
fall, and are one, just as this earth is one
island in archipelago's of stars.
My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.
I stop talking now. I work, then I read,
cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.
I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don't work, I study the stars.
Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam
as the deck turn white and the moon open
a cloud like a door, and the light over me
is a road in white moonlight taking me home.
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

 

 

Derek Walcott, "The Schooner Flight”, The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979)

 

 

 

Art in Context Course :Questioning Dexterity in Modernity

Art in Context Course 

Questioning Dexterity in Modernity  

 

Kostis Velonis, Associate Professor

ASFA Winter/Spring Semester 

Athens School of Fine Arts Library

Pireos 256, Agios Ioannis Rentis 182 33

 

 

 

The formation of the “official” history of modern art was defined by its insistence on being contemporaneous with the scientific, technological and ideological perspectives of a deterministic conception of the world and its counterpart, the notion of progress. At least, this is what the historiography of Western art argues, for its most part. In these lectures, the emphasis will be given on a parallel, although less visible tendency of self-criticism of the modern condition through the comic element in its pragmatic, slapstick and allusive form. 

The comical element will be analyzed with the intention to subvert the rhetoric of a cohesive narrative whether in the conceptual framework, through a rupture with the discourse of Enlightenment and of scientific objectivity, or in the constitution of form as such. It is not enough to simply study the gestures of the Dadaists and the Fluxists in order to situate the evident depreciations of rationalist modernism. Through the subterranean allusiveness of the comical and irony, we will bring to light the ways in which dominant narratives are transformed into vehicles of parody, touching even the most improbable and humorless avant-gardes. Even the most discreet references of the meta-language of avant-garde in contemporary production involve a critical relation that has to do with the failure of avant-gardist expectations. 

            Whereas any 20^th-century utopia (from the cult of mechanics in Italian Futurism to the propagandist podiums and pavilions of Russian Constructivism) makes the contemporary viewer smile condescendingly, we will focus instead on the details, where God or the Devil tends to hide; the details that betray the ironic smile of the creator, however featly hidden or repressed. This deficient, minor narrative, as opposed to the dominant reading of the work, is almost cryptic, in the sense of the enigmatic object-toy in its psychoanalytic projection, and also through the use of decrypting in its symbolic registry. Thus, if the comical smolders in every ambitious fraction of modernity, our research aims at activating the “deficiencies” of technology in post-Fordist production: from the slapstick corporeality of post-war sculpture, the latent functionality  of DIY works, the ambitious invention or failure of emergency solutions in design, to the deliberate relinquishment of the cognitive process of handicraft (objets trouvés, readymades) and the equally deliberate transition from skillfulness to deskilling. 

 

In the heyday of the Taylorist organization of labour, and against the suggestions of a disciplined and controlled environment, clumsiness, blunder, the sense of incompetence, the awkwardness caused by the “clownish” subject against herself, inspired the beginnings of avant-garde (Les Arts incohérents, Postimpressionism, , Symbolism, Dada), thus explaining the Surrealists’ obsession with Mack Sennett’s comedies and the fondness for the theatre of the absurd, and also confirming the actuality of the tradition of Commedia de l’arte and puppet theater in performing arts  as well as in 21^st-century painting and sculpture. This sign of “failure” in avant-gardism, which did not remain insusceptible to the spirit and the anxieties of the time, would regenerate and enrich older and new antiheroes, caricatures of buffoons, numerous kinds ofPierrot le Fou, as well as paranoid bourgeois such as Ubu Roi, among other neurotic and psychotic metropolitan denizens (Evil Clowns, Jokers). 

These descriptions of personality disorder turn the comical into a reversed tragedy, where it is the artists that identify themselves with the outcast and sorrowful clowns, who, lost in their personal dead-ends, live somewhere between the dream-world and reality. The new “obscure” hero of modern societies is not Odysseus anymore, but the nameless soldier, the reckless and clumsy Elpenor, who falls from the roof of Circe’s palace and breaks his neck, and none of his comrades takes notice of his absence when Odysseus’s ship departs.  Among other blunders, misfortunes and glitches, we will examine asymmetry in rationalist movements such as Bauhaus, Barnett Newman’s contemptuous description of the experience of stumbling on sculptures, the prank behind Kazimierz Malewicz’s Black Square, and the contemporary return of sculpture to the archaic clumsiness of the xoanon. 

 

 

Although the context of the lectures will be the “histories” of modern and contemporary art, each lecture will be organized in thematic and conceptual, not chronological terms. Drawing from the classic and contemporary literature on the paradoxes and the self-evidence of the comic experience, we will touch upon the field of epistemological intersections with Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud,Jacques Lacan, Sarah Kofman, Julia Kristeva), Philosophy and ethics (Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, John Gray), the theory of literature (Αριστοτέλης,  Heinrich Von Kleist ,  Gianni Rodari, UmbertoEco, Robert F Storey, Maria Oikonomou, Jean Starobinski, Dimitris Polichronakis, Simon Critchley), Critical theory (Adorno,  Siegfried Kracauer , Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Κarel Kosik, Jean Baudrillard) , Feminist studies (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray), Film Studies (Lotte Eisner, Laura Mulvey,Gilles Deleuze, Berger John, Malcolm Turvey) Aesthetics and Politics  (Leon Trotsky, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, Bruno Latour, Giorgio Agamben) Poetry (Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ezra Pound, Jules Laforgue, Dionysios Solomos, Charles Baudelaire, Amy Lowell,  Sylvia Plath, Romos Filiras, Giorgos Seferis) and Art theory (Jean-Yves Jouannais, Christine Buci Glucksmann, Giorgos Tzirtzilakis, Steven Connor, Jean Clair, Rosalind Krauss).

 

 

The content of the students’ artistic production will be the main part of the research process even beyond the “content” of the lectures themselves, since the students will be called to actively participate in structuring these lectures. The students will document their theses with specific examples from art histories; these narratives are considered to be essential since they provide students with a map that enables them to follow their own trajectory to a particular point in the map where they would like to find themselves. The course aims at enabling them to conceive a possible genealogy of their own work. 

 

The students will be called to combine context and practice, through joint presentations of their artistic production, including an introduction where they will be asked to report, develop and broaden their questionings. After every presentation, an open collective discussion will follow, as well as individual collaborations with the students that will enable each and every one of them to have an independent qualitative familiarization with the subject matter.