My vocation [his sense, as a child, that he would be a writer] changed everything: the sword-strokes fly off, the writing remains; I discovered in belles-lettres that the Giver can be transformed into his own Gift, that is, into a pure object. Chance had made me a man, generosity would make me a book.
—Jean-Paul Sartre (quoted in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift)
Bruce Nauman Pinch Neck 1968 (via mabsurda)
TateShots Issue 2 – Dan Graham (via tate)
THE NEW LITERATURE OF ARTIST BOOKS – JUDITH HOFFBERG
A lovely, and typical, essay by Judith. Her knowledge and enthusiasm are palpable.
Librarian, archivist, lecturer, a curator and art writer, and editor and publisher of Umbrella, a newsletter on artists’ books, mail art, and Fluxus. Rest in peace.
http://www.umbrellaeditions.com/issue.php?page=125&issue=12
excerpt from the film Meredith Monk; especially great is the performance of Dolmen Music
(courtesy braisinhussy)
Ad Reinhardt, Black Painting
courtesy www.artinfo.com
My age, my beast, is there anyone
Who can peer into your eyes
And with his own blood fuse
Two centuries’ worth of vertebrae?
The creating blood gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
And the parasite just trembles
On the threshold of new days.
While the creature still has life,
The spine must be delivered,
While with the unseen backbone
A wave distracts itself.
Again they’ve brought the peak of life
Like a sacrificial lamb,
Like a child’s supple cartilage—
The age of infant earth.
To free the age from its confinement,
To instigate a brand new world,
The discordant, tangled days
Must be linked, as with a flute.
It’s the age that rocks the swells
With humanity’s despair,
And in the undergrowth a serpent breathes
The golden measure of the age.
Still the shoots will swell
And the green buds sprout
But your spinal cord is crushed,
My fantastic, wretched age!
And in lunatic beatitude
You look back, cruel and weak,
Like a beast that once was agile,
At the tracks left by your feet.
The creating blood gushes
From the throat of earthly things,
The lukewarm cartilage of oceans
Splashes like a seething fish ashore.
And from the bird net spread on high
From the humid azure stones,
Streams a flood of helpless apathy
On your single, fatal wound.
—Osip Mandelstam
The Age, translated by Marc Adler
courtesy wood s lot
http://web.ncf.ca/ek867/wood_s_lot.html
“Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet
courtesy http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke
Paul Thek, Teaching Notes – 4 Dimensional Design
Click on the image to see the next three pages.
