it’s good: this time of year gives the opportunity to draw flowers. it’s hot and in london the air becomes rancid.
rancid
Month: May 2012
A man can keep silence in such a ways that no one will even notice it. The whole point is that we say a good deal too much. If we limited ourselves to what is actually necessary, this alone would be keeping the silence. And it is the same with everything else, with food, with pleasures, with sleep; with everything there is a limit to what is necessary. After this “sin” begins. This is something that must be grasped, a “sin” is something which is not necessary.
G. I. Gurdjieff.
this is from a drawing of a baby in a painting by rembrandt hung in the rembrandt huus. rembrandt is always startling. there’s an inner glow.
make
I could buy myself paper, a pen, a pencil and a brush and could create pictures whenever and wherever I wanted. … That evening, in the spring of 1947, on the embankment of the Seine in Paris, at the age of thirty, I saw that it was possible to live and work in the world, and that I could participate in the exchange of ideas that was taking place all around, bound to no country.
Peter Weiss, Vanishing Point (1962)
thank you to independent dance for letting me sit in on a improv class: http://www.independentdance.co.uk/ led by nick parkin.
the watercolour is home made.
here
back from amsterdam. very beautiful place and amazing spaces.
personality
We are 1 percent ourselves and 99 percent sociological. The personality is the mask you have to hide your essence. The mask is very difficult to discover. Everyone has reasons for protecting himself.
P. D. Ouspensky.
wine
How do I know that the dead do not regret their previous longing for life? One who dreams of drinking wine may in the morning weep; one who dreams weeping may in the morning go out to hunt. During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. And yet fools think they are awake, presuming to know that they are rulers or herdsmen.
Zhuangzi (translated as Chuang Tzu on a book I had – since lent & lost).
i have been arguing the use of gallery space. seems like a direction-less argument. all space has its rules and ghosts and spirits. institutions on the other hand are nothing but a psychic bluff.
seeing the bauhaus exhibition in the barbican; peculiar to see those amazing pots & teapots & chairs behind glass. funny to see the place move from expressionist phase to utilitarian (to simplify it). great to see bits from the triadetic ballet though.
results
I know a lot before a start an action. I know a lot about the necessity of the general idea of sculpture, but I don’t know anything about the process in which the action will run. When the actions runs, my preparation works, because I am prepared to do a thing without knowing where it goes. You see, it would be a very uninteresting thing – it would have nothing to do with art – if it were not a new experiment for which I have no clear concept. If I had a clear concept of solving the problem, I would then speak about the concept and it wouldn’t be necessary to make an action. Every action, every artwork for me, every physical scene, drawings on the blackboard, performance, brings a new element in the whole, an unknown area, an unknown world.
Joseph Beuys. Interview with Kate Horsefield, 1980, as quoted in Energy Plan for the Western man – Joseph Beuys in America, compiled by Carin Kuoni, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1993, p. 73
hmm not concerned about where a thing will go…
mould
Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.
Antonin Artaud. Letter to the Chancellors of the European Universities. Collected Works, vol. 1, pt. 2 (1956, trans. 1968)
podge
interesting comparisons in exhibitions. two exhibitions; both slick and look good. one clearly focussed and the other more of a hodge-podge. the one clever and the other largely (but not necessarily) expressive…
perhaps both are self conscious.
analogy
according to an analogy used by joseph beuys; the revolution should be like a slowly blooming rose.
o 