ART AND POETRY
"Once,halfway through the journey of our life,
I found myself inside a shadowy wood,
Because the proper road had dissappeared."
Dante's INFERNO a verse translation by Sean O'Brien
Maybe paintings should be like Poetry ":offering redemption through its own fragile brilliance even when all seems lost."
David Bowden Culture Wars 2nd Cctober 2007
ART POETRY AND PATTERN
"We are patterning animals - pattern-hungry, pattern-seeing. We believe (and hope) that pattern gives meaning. Once people had seen pattern in the stars, they could sail by them, plant grain by them, use them as models in geometry."
"Experience is complex; the truths which pattern reveals or suggests are likely to be complex so pattern must be, too. That's the paradox. Pattern gives meaning but is also artiface."
Ruth Padel The Poem and the Journey 2007
ART AND WRITING
Vladimir Nabokov: The Structure of Literary Desire. By David Packman 1982
Literature today, like all art, is in crisis. It is quite clear that the artistic representation of the world can no longer be regarded in terms of mimesis. The problem for the writer has ceased to be one of subject, or even of treatment, but of writing itself. What does it mean to write about the world, and what is the relationship of the artistically constructed world to the world itself? The struggle of contemporary literature to pose and answer this question is mirrored in a crisis of criticism in which the critical function of interpretation has been complicated by the realisation that criticism is a construction not unlike the one engaged in by the object of its inquiry. In these terms, both literature and criticism are creative acts involving the reconstitution of a preexisting entity, one of the world and the other of an author and a text.
Michael Cunningham: The Hours
"I have. I'm not looking for sympathy. Not really. i just feel so sad. What I wanted to do seemed so simple. I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness."
ART
From the Saturday Independant 31st January 2009
Enigma Variations The Curious World of Roni Horn - Jeanette Winterson
"But what's out there is water, is weather, is the simple beauty of the material world that has nothing to do with materialism, is a reagrd for natural forms, a satisfaction with what is. And creativity "is". Horn's offering of the "is" the actual, which includes imagined, but not the virtual, is a love-gift to life."
From TATE ETC Issue 12 - Spring 2008
Taking the Most Extreme Liberties to Fashion an Alternative World
By Lyle Rexter
The Italian sculptor Pietro Consagra once remarked that art (he meant painting and scupture) could not survive without its myths, either originary or Utopian. Doig proves that it can, as a kind of atavism, a reponse to something incommunicable, almost but never quite meaningless, like dreaming." (my bold highlight)
".....painting is an absurd vice, having been stripped of its pretence to cultural centrality and hedged in by photography. No transcendence, and it's so much work. But he offers the lure of the image and the promise of transubstantiation, all the while demonstrating that this antiquated art is totallly, onanistically free, free to occupy a margin of comment - on itself, on the world, on nothing at all."
ART AND MUSIC
"Murail's music celebrates the uncanny, it revels in bliss. It can be understood as giving part satisfaction to Susan Sontag's plea for art to rail against hermeneutics in favour of pursuing the erotic, transcendent aspect of aesthetic experience. The sounds Murail designs, at their best (in terms of their creator and transmitter's achievements), appear in one sense as if they are spontaneous, naturally occurring shudderings of the earth. Primal tremors and oceanic tumbles abound."
ART AND SILENCE
"Nearly half a century after it was performed 4'33'' rightly strikes us as hacneyed and worn, a postmodern cliche intent on bluring a line (between art and non-art, order and disorder, formal structure and random influence) that has long since been erased. As simple theater, however, it still has power. Cage's portrait of the artist frozen before his medium, intensely aware of his allotted time, unable to draw a shape out of the universe of possibilities, carries a certain allegorical charge, because we recognize its symbolism-so apparently childlike, so starkly Manichaean-a lesson worthy of Euripedes: art, whatever its medium, attempts to force a wedge beneath the closed lid of the world, and fails; the artist, in his or her minutes and seconds, attempts to say-to paint, to carve; in sum, to communicate-what ultimately cannot be communicated. In the end, the wedge breaks; the lid stays shut. The Artist looks at his watch and leaves the stage, his "success" measurable only by the relative depth of his failure. Too bad. There are worse things.
But if silence is the enemy of art, it is also its motivation and medium: the greatest works not only draw on silence for inspiration but use it, flirt with it, turn it ,for a time against itself. To suceed at all, in other words, art must partake of its opposite, suggest its own dissolution."
Listening for Silence - Mark Slouka - Audio Culture - Continuum 2004