Existentialist Aspects of Modern Art

"Painting will reveal some of the innermost motives of existentialism if we are able to analyze the creations since the turn of the century in the right way."


This very compact statement from Paul Tillich is worth reading. His view of existentialism as revealed in art should provoke further thought today.

Existentialist Aspects of Modern Art

Being and Nothingness, by Jean Paul Sartre

The actual book can be read online, translated into English, at Google Books. In the opening paragraph Sartre states the problem clearly. At the end of the long road, you are forced to find your own solution. Although it is free and online, some important sections are missing and the translation is less than elegant. Who will suggest a better translation?

My Science Teacher Died on The Racquetball Court

Shit, I have to hurry up and dig some holes for my tarragon, which has grown out of its pots and needs to be planted today or else, but this is important. Take a moment to remember a great man, if only for his patience.

Mr. Johnston did indeed fall dead on the racquetball court.
It would have been a great loss regardless of venue: he had his Moment.

He gave up the idea of teaching me science at Square One, but shared my love of Impressionism and especially Debussy's "Images". I remember one day in my starched shirt, off in the corner of his oversized classroom, from behind a labyrinth of glassware, I walked as calmly and quickly as I could right up to him while he taught class:

"We have to get out of here. I'll help you open the windows".

It's true. read more

Send it back to New York

How many great minds continue to waste time, sending their best to "The New Yorker"? Stop. Send it instead to "The National Lampoon". Do you like peacocks? Please, read more

Rain, not words

N. Raghavan, Rain V (2009)

One reason I like zapping through artist's pages instead of always looking carefuly at their artist's statements and curator's notes is that I don't need to undo the damage of their own thoughts about their work.
The latter often makes the experience of the work dull, as if our aesthetic wings were cut by the discursive blade. It is not that it isn't informative, which it often is. It's that it is rarely inspiring.
(Then again, this very blog may also be seen at such an angle).

We cannot go back

Maybe art, maybe some art, maybe this art, maybe some of this art, serves turning the absence opaque, that is, making it at once palpable and impenetrable, so we cannot go back, so we are stuck in the appreciation of this strange, utopic now, and any attempt to overcome it, to look for the actual empty space, meets the opacity of an object, an image, a substitute, substitute not of a reality, but of what ceased to be, of the void that hence remains beyond us, happily or unhappily, hard to say, replaced by the fundamentally meager and helplessly sublime moment of a hesitant, aesthetic, experience, too private to be credible, too credible to be intimate, and yet ours, because we want it to be, because we claim it as such, because we know we inherited it from the silence that came before.

The picture - entitled (...) - is by Marek Wykowski. (Found by Gocha)

When movement becomes dance

11 min, 16 mm film, B/W, no sound
Camera: Bill Rowley
Edit: Elaine Summers
Dir: Elaine Summers
Prod: Hans Breder, Iowa University

There are two things about this short fragment I love.
The first is the choreography of joy. The slow-motion allows us to better appreciate the flow of the common movement, the combining of the bodies, the contrast between them and everything that happens around them.
But there is something else. The dance becomes obvious at the end, when the movement continues beyond what we expected. Yet there is one earlier moment, one step of the girl coming from "our" side, which makes that clear. At a very precise point, she deviates from the way she has been running, her body bends like a bow and then moves sideways. That is when the simple vectors of meeting become something else - something more complex, less obvious. The bodies, now, create a space for our meeting to go beyond the embrace.