The end of the world

 

“And aware also, sitting in some comfort of body at last, that the lovely sorrowful terraces of Yaramera may contain within them the terraces of Darranda on Hain, roof below red roof, garden below green garden, dropping steep down to the shining harbor, the promenades and piers and sailboats. Out past the harbor the sea rises up, stands up as high as his house, as high as his eyes. Esi knows that books say the sea lies down. “The sea lies calm tonight,” says the poem, but he knows better. The sea stands, a wall, the blue-grey wall at the end of the world. If you sail out on it it will seem flat, but if you see it truly it’s as tall as the hills of Darranda, and if you sail truly on it you will sail through that wall to the other side, beyond the end of the world.

The sky is the roof that wall holds up. At night the stars shine through the glass air roof. You can sail to them, too, to the worlds beyond the world.”

 

Old Music and the slave women, Ursula Le Guin, The Birthday of the World and other stories, 1999

Virginia Woolf / Robert Smithson...

...have both wandered in the british countryside.

Chalk Mirror Displacement, Robert Smithson, 1969

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/nancy-holt-and-robert-smithson-england-1969

"To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought — to call it by a prouder name than it deserved — had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until — you know the little tug — the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say."
A room of one's own, Viginia Woolf

“If explanations exhausted my work, it would die and stop being art. [...] The artwork would be no more than a redundant illustration of a theory. It is possible that much of my work is no more than that. But if there is any part of it that survives beyond the reading of this text, it does so because of its inexplicability. Only this inexplicability is capable of an expansion of knowledge. Therefore, we find ourselves again in the realms of magic, of a surprised credulity, of passing mysteries as a validating condition for art. The creative process is lighted by theory, but true art stalks from shadows incompletely evanesced.” Luis Camnitzer, 1986.

Sade/Sacher-Masoch par Deleuze

"Plus généralement, il y a deux manières d’interpréter l’opération par laquelle la loi nous sépare d’un plaisir : ou bien nous pensons qu’elle le repousse et l’écarte uniformément, si bien que nous n’obtiendrons le plaisir que par une destruction de la loi (sadisme). Ou bien nous pensons que la loi a pris sur soi le plaisir, l’a gardé pour soi ; c’est donc en épousant la loi, en nous soumettant scrupuleusement à la loi et à ses conséquences, que nous goûterons le plaisir qu’elle nous interdit. Le masochiste va encore plus loin : c’est l’exécution de la punition qui devient première et nous introduit au plaisir défendu. "
Deleuze, De Sacher-Masoch au masochisme, 1961.

Thérèse Philosophe

To talk about it

"I am strongly drawn to ---, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion."

Sunsan Sontag, Notes on "Camp", 1964

Protester

"(...) la vie elle-même est si distordue, déformée, qu'au fond personne n'est en mesure d'y vivre une vraie vie, d'y accomplir sa propre destinée d'être humain – oui, j'irais presque jusqu'à dire : que le monde est organisé de telle sorte que même la revendication la plus élémentaire d'intégrité et de décence doit à dire vrai nécessairement conduire tout un chacun à protester".
Theodore Adorno dans Problèmes de philosophie morale, citation de Judith Butler.

"NO to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make-believe no to the glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator no to style no to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved."
Yvonne Rainer, No Manifesto, 1964

Bifo - Leçon d'insurrection

En sortant de Santa Croce

Le Syndrome de Stendhal, Dario Argento, 1996

"En sortant de Santa Croce, j'avais un battement de cœur, ce qu'on appelle des nerfs à Berlin ; la vie était épuisée chez moi, je marchais avec la crainte de tomber."

cit. Stendhal, Romes, Naples, Florence

Broodthaers again

"View, according to which an artistic theory will function for the artistic product in the same way as the artistic product itself functions as advertising for the order under which it is produced. There will be no other space than this view according to which, etc."

Quote from Voyage to the North Sea by Rosalind Krauss

Le critique d'art comme lubrifiant

The ultimate in paranoia

"is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you. Instead of 'my boss is plotting against me' it would be 'My boss's phone is plotting against me'. Objects sometimes seem to possess a will of their own anyhow, to the normal mind."
Philip K Dick

Encore des mots, toujours des mots, rien que des mots

Michael Snow, So is this, 1982
http://www.ubu.com/film/snow_so.html

Rien

Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard, Mallarmé

Derrière le miroir

"- Première mesure de précaution pour l'écrivain : vérifier dans chaque texte, chaque fragment, chaque paragraphe si le thème central ressort avec une netteté suffisante."

Adorno, Minima Moralia

Quand les statues sont mortes...

"Quand les hommes sont morts, ils entrent dans l'histoire. Quand les statues sont mortes, elles entrent dans l'art. Cette botanique de la mort, c'est ce que nous appelons la culture".
Les statues meurent aussi, Alain Resnais et Chris Marker, 1953.

Gertrud et la tragédie

"I had chosen the work of Hjalmar Söderberg because his conception of tragedy is more modern, he was overshadowed far too long by the other giants, Ibsen and Strindberg. Why did I say he was ‘more modern’? Well, instead of suicide and other grand gestures in the tradition of pathetic tragedy, Söderberg preferred the bitter tragedy of having to go on living even though ideals and happiness have been destroyed…[and he made] conflicts materialize out of apparently trivial conversations."
Carl T. Dreyer

extrait : http://youtu.be/7m6gPBen4cs

"Ideologies qui correspondent au monde d'hier"

Démocratie

"(...) il est possible de retrouver, derrière les tièdes amours d'hier et les déchaînements haineux d'aujourd'hui, la puissance subversive toujours neuve et toujours menacée de l'idée démocratique".

Résumé, La Haine de la démocratie, Jacques Rancière