100 =

Where is everybody going?

From an exhibition at the Russel Industrial....errr...

Correction... it's a video by 11 year old boys. But who can tell the difference these days?

a semi private letter about poetry

a paragraph by Milosz, pertaining to criticism:

Every author should be sensitive to criticism, should ponder it for a long time and draw conclusions from it. This statement is not as obvious as it might seem. There have been periods in the history of literature when a dismissive attitude towards criticism was part of the writer's toolbox and progress was made despite it. Critics are sometimes more susceptible to stylish and purely transitory slogans than the authors they discuss, and flogging their 'isms', they construct a ponderous machine which is slow to move forward. Finally, young writers, if they are too responsive to criticism, lose more than than they gain, because their vision, strongly felt but imperfectly conceived, draws upon them thunderbolts, which they may easily attribute to the vision itself, rather than to its flawed execution.

Pretty Dyana

"An intimate look at Gypsy refugees in Belgrade suburb who make a living by transfoming Citroen's classic 2cv and Dyana cars into MadMax-like recycling vehicles, with which they ollect cardoard, bottles and scrap metal. These modern horses are much more efficient than the cart-pushing competition, but more important - they also mean freedom, hope and style for their crafty owners."

Video Link

from a short interview of james trimarco in the morning news

"Much of my recent work is about the emotional texture of technological experience: using Google Earth to revisit places you once lived, for example."

being in the right place at the right time (always): peter sutherland

"Peter Sutherland is a New York City based artist. His work employs some of the techniques of traditional documentary photography to capture the hidden beauty of ordinary objects and everyday situations." Sutherland's Website

after estrangement: the staring

I've been thinking a bout that lately: estrangement. I love that wiktionary defines estrangement as "the state of being alien", and I laugh at my old resident alien card. It looked identical to the above, except it had a picture of an eight-year-old on it.
The thought of a picture of an eight-year-old on a green card depresses me. How much time has been spent analyzing the politics of (e)(im)migration and its deep influence upon the migrant psyche. What about the eight-year-olds? The six-year-olds? Their experience of immigration is at least equally acidic: following people you trust, like when the police tell you 'come with us', ending in a place no one prepared you for, being stared at with concern by adults and with distrust by other children. It really does leave you feeling just a touch mad, not being able to perceive or interact with the world correctly. There is a Polish phrase: sam jak palec (alone like a finger). I never understood it because I thought 'jesus, but they aren't alone. There are surrounded by other fingers', and then I tried to push them together to no effect. Each finger was still alone.

Miroslaw Balka

(stands & hair)

From White Cube Gallery: "Comprising installation, sculpture and video, Miroslaw Balka’s work has a bare and elegiac quality that is underlined by the careful, minimalist placement of objects, as well as the gaps and pauses between them. Often using his own body and his studio as a template or first point of reference, Balka’s work might incorporate personal or self-referential substances such as ash, felt, salt, hair and soap. Balka’s work deals with both personal and collective memories, especially as they relate to his Catholic upbringing and the collective experience of Poland's fractured history. Through this investigation of domestic memories and public catastrophe, Balka explores how subjective traumas are translated into collective histories and vice versa. His materials are simple, everyday objects and things, but also powerfully resonant of ritual, hidden memories and the history of Nazi occupation in Poland."(photograph)

some photos and a short paragraph

Longing: strong persistent desire or craving, esp for something unattainable or distant.
Longing is in direct contrast to having- therefore is directly related to time.
PROSPECTIVE longing (longing stemming from not having) is entirely different than QUONDAM longing (stemming from no longer having).
Prospective longing is potentially exciting. It inspires the initiation of action (which may simultaneously be inhibited by the possibility of failure). Quondam longing is inapplicable in the same manner. It does not, by nature, inspire action other than the subduing of itself. It is quelled by two means- 1. the shifting of attention towards other manifestations of time (the banal or the future) or 2. the indulgence in memory which acts as a "wringing out of the rag".

"A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto"

I have been, noncommittaly, reading some work by Milosz, but doing so only in English. Today I read a piece of his in Polish, and simultaneously the translation into English. I found the translation to be pretty inadequate so I re-translated it, obviously with much help from the skeleton of the original translation. Here it is:

Bees build a casing over a red liver
Ants build a casing over a black bone
The tearing begins, the stomping of linen
The breaking of glass begins, of tress, iron, nickel, silver and foam
Gypsum, iron sheets, violin strings, trumpets, leaves, balls and crystals.
Poof! The phosphorous fire from yellow walls
Consumes human and animal hairs.

Bees build a casing over the honeycomb lung
Ants build a casing over the white bone
Torn is the paper, rubber, canvass, skin and flax
Fiber, fabrics, cellulose, hair, snakeskin, wire
In flames, the ceiling falls, then the wall and fiery heat engulfs the foundation.
All that is left is, sandy and trampled down, with one leafless tree,
The earth.

Slowly, boring a tunnel, moves the guardian mole
With a small red lantern strapped to his forehead
He touches the buried bodies, counts, and digs on
Distinguishing human ashes by their luminous vapor,
Each one's remnants a different hue of the spectrum.
Bees build a casing over a red trace,
Ants build a casing over the place left behind by my body.

I fear; so deeply do I fear the guardian mole
His swollen eyelids like a Patriarch
Who frequently sat among the glimmer of candles
Reading the great book of the species

What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament
Waiting for two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus?
My broken body will deliver me to his sight
And he will count me among the helpers of death:
The uncircumcised.

Czeslaw Milosz

My book arrived today. "To Begin Where I am" by Czeslaw Milosz. It came used with an inscription.
"Dear Professor Carol Lambert, Every time I'll go to the office of International Affairs, I'll remember you; when people complement my English, I know deep inside that your courses brought my English skills on a higher level. But now, it's time to thank you for all your help, and wish you a very happy, wonderful time on your retirement. To you and your family My best wishes, Anna Mostowa."

Here is the most amazing excerpt from the book:

SPACE
Imagination, always spatial, points north, south, east and west of some central, privileged place, which is probably a village from one's childhood or native region. As long as a writer lives in his country, the privileged place, by centrifugally enlarging itself, becomes more or less identified with his country as a whole. Exile displaces that center or rather creates two centers. Imagination relates everything in one's surroundings to "over there"-- in my case, somewhere on the European continent. It even continues to designate the four cardinal points, as if I still stood there. At the same time the north, south, east and west are determined by the place in which I write these words.
Imagination tending towards the distant region of one's childhood is typical of literature of nostalgia (a distance in space often serves as a disguise for a Proustian distance in time.) Although quite common, literature of nostalgia is only one among many modes of coping with the estrangement from one's native land. The new point which orients space in respect to iteslf cannot be eliminated, i.e. one cannot abstract from one's physical presence in a definite spot on the Earth. That is why a curious phenomenon appears: the two centers and the two spaces arranged around themselves interfere with each other or--and this is a happy solution--coalesce.

opening paragraph

"Our indulgence in fantasy disconnects us from the anchor of the banal.
Our indulgence in the banal disconnects us from the pull of fantasy."

Just an opening paragraph to a statement I'm writing. It's similar to the essay below, but really stretches further to encompass a more broad body of work.
___
The body of work is the study of the relationships of individuals to time- in its trinity of the present, banal moment and the illusions of the past and the future. It observes and, at times, attempts to elicit, the constant teetering between the three states of awareness.

It explores four general concepts:

1. The role of fantasy as a mode of disconnecting from the present moment.
2. The use of sensuality to heighten and/or elongate the experience of the banal.
3. The breakdown of fantasy when prefabricated expectation or hope is confronted with the arrival of the new present.

4. Human response to entropy and the ephemeral: attempts at preservation.

___

"The internet serves as more than a medium for the exchange of facts, it is also one for the sharing of these fantasies, creating what I call, with some hesitation, a very rough draft of a universal consciousness- of our thinking, of our memories and of our longing."

Jiří Černický

But I wanted them whole, including the roots- no rarity should ever be destroyed. So I asked him to use my cerulean hair brush to comb out his hair during the rest of my stay in Berlin. Six months later I received the brush with the last strands of hair.
- Cernicky
Jiri, in his art and writing, is a perfect example of sweet, sincere, unadulterated communication. He makes intensely personal work so accessible and interesting. Besides that, his website is one of the most enjoyable I've come across in a hell of a long time. His work spans so many different discussions, from ideas of memory and sentimentality, to, for those of your more politically inclined, extensive social commentary. Most of his artistic endeavors are accompanied by really fantastic stories.

He writes:
Once I had a quarrel with my girlfriend. She was sad and had a pretty bad bout of depression. I wanted to make it up to her and please her. I tried by decorating the hood of a limousine, rented from a company that loans out such fancy cars for weddings, with her glorious little body.
"...it becomes obvious that Černický is an original exponent of the contemporary Czech art scene. He is the winner of the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize and the Soros Prize. As regards art disciplines, Černický expresses himself with a broad spectrum of media, from classic painting through objects to videos. When not globetrotting, he can be reached in Prague." -Kontakt

homes

Last December, while looking for gifts I came across PREFAB, a book on modular housing. I was immediately smitten. I am always surprised by how much time people spend on their personal look and how little effort they put into the functionality and appearance of their homes, and more so, how strong of a hold traditional rules have on the way we arrange our living space. I've always seen a home as the place to be entirely selfish and indulgent. Now a new book, Spacecraft has been released and it looks fantastic.

"But not all of the buildings and installations are eligible for living in them. It's a broad range featured in this book: "We looked for outstanding international projects that are engaged in informal and unconventional ways of crafting space - found beyond architecture's beaten track. The book features on the one hand flexible, fleeting structures that only exist for a limited time such as artistic spatial interventions that live from their performative quality or mobile living units roaming freely beyond the paved routes of conventional architecture. On the other hand, Spacecraft focuses on spaces that are used temporarily. Whether vacation homes, urban hideouts, art pavillions or studios, all of the included work is distinguished by an challenging and poetic approach to spatial design."

comming soon

Jana Sterbak

I've been doing a little work on Czech art and literature. I'll be posting some information this weekend. I know it's been something like a month now since an update. I promise it will be exciting.

finalized essay

La Persistencia de la Memoria
The experience of time is one of transience, impermanence, and entropy- these are integral aspects of life regardless of culture and historical context. The sharp shifts in my life, the highlight of which was immigration, revealed this to me at a very early age.
Because of this, I have developed a particular interest in fantasy (defined as any mental incarnation which exists outside of the present moment) and its ability to create longing, therefore serving as a strong impetus for action. However, the yearning towards a potential future horizon lends itself to pursuit, while the experience of longing for the past does not. The past is a particularly fertile, yet confusing breeding-ground for fantasy and longing- one that relentlessly calls for an impossible act: the return.
Instead of indulging in that fantasy, I respond by dissecting the experience, studying the preservation of memory through the relification (the creation of relics) of objects and places, as well as the preventative preservation of relationships through communication, particularly the sharing of experiences and objects. I am simultaneously interested in the examination of memory itself and the extent of its ability to create fantastical, romanticized illusions.
In the study of my own longing, I have begun to disassemble objects of personal historical and sentimental value and to investigate my experience doing so. I try to note both the suffering and the moment of disconnect during the destruction process and observe the point at which the object becomes exclusively memory and is therefore subject to the process of romanticizing.
Simultaneously, I have, In my past installations, attempted to recreate these mental abstractions in a physical space, not to test the strength of my memory but to actualize these fantasies, permitting me to contrast them to the experience of the present moment; what I call the banal.
My third, concurrent pursuit has been the simplistic act of illustrating horizons and mountain ranges, imagery closely linked with the ever-present but inaccessible or, at least, the not readily accessible, creating metaphors for the experience of longing.
Finally, I am interested in electronic mediums as an extension of mental space for storing experiences (through video, audio and photography) and the role of current technology such as YouTube and Picasaweb in allowing a more immediate and multisensory experience of others' memories and, therefore, a more expansive understanding of subjective history and longing. Because, while the moment exists as an objective thing, our experience of it does not, and neither is our capturing of it through memory (or the extension of memory: the previously mentioned technology). That is what piqued my interest in collecting videos of sincere joy, communal singing..etc from the internet; because they allow me, in spite of barriers of distance or, perhaps, even language, as close to experiencing others' past as possible and give me the opportunity to observe, among other things, the types of scenarios chosen to be remembered.
The internet serves as more than a medium for the exchange of facts, it is also one for the sharing of these fantasies, creating what I call, with some hesitation, a very rough draft of a universal consciousness- of our thinking, of our memories and of our longing.

to read

"This is not to say that there are no brilliant, world-changing young architects and designers out there at this very moment developing the ideas that will transform the way we build and live in cities for the next 100 years. But add to the paradoxes raised by Glazer the paradoxes of working in the 21st century: Technology and global culture allow a limitless exchange of ideas, but they also facilitate instant cooptation and manipulation of those ideas. Never has the world been so ready for grand new ideas—and so willing to convert them into high-priced styles."

From "A New Social Construct" on The Morning News.

visual update

I know this is a bit redundant, but here are some recent pictures of the current endeavor.

David Aron

So I decided to check back with a gallery that I consider an indulgence(with an odd sense of guilt) Little Cakes and checking through some of their old shows I saw Mr. Aron. I don't feel at all thoughful enough to actually say why I liked it. I could say something about color and patterning and it relating to my interests in native and folk art....but we'll just omit all of that . There was no statement available and I can't find any information on him, but check out Little Cakes. They seem like a good bunch.

Though I have to say on a side note, I am really tired of artists turning their work into t-shirts and action figures. It just seems to cheapen the whole thing, lowering art to the level of chuck norris or something. Or am I being anal?