July 25 - August 14, 2008

Michel Foucault

This Is Not a Pipe

25th Anniversary edition, 1982, paperback

11 cards

While I'm just starting this summer to read books by Foucault I was surprised that I had not heard about this one before discovering it on a shelf in a DC bookstore. Foucault takes as his subject Magritte's infamous painting as his subject, discussing it with the complexity that it deserves but in a way that doesn't overwhelm. Foucault discusses two pipes (a 1926 drawing, and a 1966 painting) that both contain the phrase "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," however there seem to be even more. It was surprising to me that he didn't mention the 1964 painting at the Art Institute of Chicago (part of the Bergman collection) also containing this phrase but titled "L'Air et la Chanson." It makes me wonder how many additional paintings with this phrase were made by Magritte and their titles. Foucault's comments on Klee and Kandinsky broadens my understanding of elements of both artists' work.

Selected notes:

Translator's Introduction:

2- de Chirico's "The Song of Love"- Magritte claimed to have realized "the ascendancy of poetry of painting.

4- Borges

9- Magritte: "it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say."

Foucault:

15- handwritten script

20- "what misleads us is the inevitability of connecting the text to the drawing"

-calligram

21- "As a sign, the letter permits us to fix words; as line, it lets us give shape to things."

24- "The text must say nothing to this gazing subject who is a viewer, not a reader. As soon as he begins to read, in fact, shape dissipates."

25- "They very things that is both seen and read is hushed in the vision, hidden in the reading."

-"Magritte redistributed the text and the image in space."

33- Klee

34- "The essential point is that resemblance and affirmation cannot be dissociated."

-"the colors that Kandinsky called 'things.'"

36- Magritte: "The titles are chosen in such a way as to keep anyone from assigning my paintings to the familiar region that habitual thought appeals to in order to escape perplexity."

37- "Magritte secretly mines a space he seems to maintain in the old arrangement. But he excavates it with words..."

38- Magritte: "Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life."

40- "the sort of things that cannot be names and that in fact 'name' themselves bear an exact and familiar name. The painting is the converse of a rebus, that chain of shapes so easily recognized as to be immediately identifiable..."

41- "In order to deploy his plastic signs, Klee wove a new space. Magritte allows the old space of representation to rule, but only at the surface...beneath, nothing."

43- resemblance and affirmation

44- "To me it appears that Magritte dissociated similitude from resemblance, and brought the former into play against the latter."

-"Resemblance presupposes a primary reference that prescribes and classes."

-"Resemblance serves representation, which rules over it; similitude serves repetition, which ranges across it."

46- (resemblance)- "...reveals the clearly visible; similitude reveals what recognizable objects, familiar silhouettes hide, prevent from being seen, render invisible."

-"Resemblance makes a unique assertions, always the same: This thing, that thing, yet another thing

46-47- Magritte: "Only thought can resemble. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it."

-"Thought resembles without similitude...."

47- "Magritte's painting doubtless rests here, where thought in the mode of resemblance and things in relations of similitude have just vertically intersected.

-networks

48- "Who speaks in the statement?"

49- infinite games

51- mirror- Les Liaisons dangereuses

54 "...Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell."

57-58- letters from Magritte to Foucault

57- "Las Meninas is the visible image of Velazquez's invisible thought. Then is the invisible sometimes visible?"

July 10 - August 2, 2008

Everything That Rises A Book of Convergences
Lawrence Weschler
2006 Hardcover
10 cards



I was aware of this book when McSweeney's released it, but at the time I didn't have time to read it. This fall I had time to listen to Weschler's talk from U of M's Penny Stamps lecture series and now by August I've finally finished reading the book. There are four very different sections of this book. I found the first two the most interesting in the connections the essays explore between works of art and other things. One of my favorites is a photo of the moon that Weschler compares to a late Mark Rothko painting. I also appreciate that he also puts forward such observations without trying to tie them up into perfect explanations or lines of influence.



Before this book I've experience synchronicities with material I've read and things in daily life, but this book led to a great one. On page 99 there's a reproduction of Velazquez's Aesop. Unfamiliar with this painting until encountering it here, while reading this book I saw a copy of Aesop's face by John Singer Sargent (a copy of the original Velazquez) at the Ackland Museum of Art. (I also have some photos from when I was younger that look somewhat similar to the photo on page 79 which is just creepy.)

Some excerpts:

15- "What's interesting to me is that history repeats itself, not only in how people arrange themselves but in how the portraits of them stands in relation to them."

22- Joel Meyerowitz: "...one is always carrying a chapbook of images around. ...For a street photographer like myself, randomness is everything, because that's one thin the world has in abundance and I am just passing through it with my share."

33- "The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual world."
-James Agee: "how deep and deft creative intelligence must be to recognize, foresee and make permanent [that world's] best moments."
42- Benjamin: "...There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."
47- Rothko: "The people who weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them."
-Rothko "If you are moved by the color relationships then you miss the point."
-"it draws you out and gives nothing back. Its presence, like that of a black hole, is of such density that you might lose your self there."
-"For those Rothkos do not make a statement; rather, they raise a demand, or more precisely maybe, a question."
-"There is a moment in looking at those paintings when we stop looking at them and they start looking at us- and if we are not careful, if there is not enough of us there, straight through us."
-"Rothko keeps bleeding out of aesthetical categories and into ethical ones. Not, is it beautiful? But rather, how should one lead one's life?"
-p. 46 and p. 49
-"And yet on the moon, there was nothing there...A vast interminable emptiness: a howling airless silence. A vacuum of meaning: absolute silence."
-W.H. Auden: "Out apparatniks will continue making/the usual squalid mess they call History:/all we can pray for is that artists,/chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it."
51- Eisenstein
-footnote- Larry McMurty (Lonesome Dove) (forefathers) "What they dreamed, we live and what they lived we dream."
53- "Funny the way mirrors (time or otherwise, canvas or crystal) are constantly doubling and redoubling possible significations in a vertiginous regress."
-Magritte, La reproduction interdite, 1937
54- Diebenkorn- solitary women
-"Abstraction: to be lost in thought, lost to thought transported out of oneself. But out of oneself toward what?"
57- trains- standard time
-Einstein- theory of relativity- trains- "one of the principal motifs in the exploration of simultaneity"
58- Einstein- day job- Swiss patent office- "mindless drudge work, something to help pay the bills while the real work of genius transpired late at night and around the margins."
-Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money, 1900
-GS: "The meaning of money lies in the fact that it will be given away."
59- "As a tangible item, money is the most ephemeral thing in the external practical world; yet its content is the most stable since it stands as the point of indifference and balance between all other phenomena in the world..."
69- (Edward Snow- Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring) LW- "Has she just turned toward us, Snow asks, by way of entry into the image, or is she just about to turn away?"
-"Capture and release. A punctum."
80- poster tribute to Bruno Schulz
89- (Herb) "He'd be my best reader and I was writing for him."
93 (Vermeer's Lacemaker) "...how everything in it is slightly out of focus, either too close or too far, except for the very thing the girl herself is focusing upon..."
133- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Midnight clock [currently it's 5 minutes to midnight]
159- (heart bumper stickers in 1981) "The phenomenon seemed at once naive and a bit hopeless- another American effort to single yourself out, to differentiate yourself (and your car) from the hordes of apparently identical beings and things. At the same time, it seemed like an attempt to reach out across the asphalt to signal your humanity (through what you hearted) to other souls..."
169- Persian proverb- "Fear those who fear you."
182- Rhonda Roland Shearer wrote in 1999 about Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q.- "Duchamp had subtly superimposed a photo of his own strangely feminine face onto Da Vinci's portrait, before pencilling in the wicked little moustache and goatee."
-decades speculation about Da Vinci superimposing his face on the Mona Lisa
218- Proust
220- every cell in our bodies replaced every 7 years
223- W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn- "The greater the distance, the clearer the view..."
232- Lao-Tzu- "...We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want..."

April 27 - May 8, 2008

Andy Warhol

Blow Job

Peter Gidal

Afterall Books, 2008

Part of their brilliant One Work series http://www.afterall.org/books_onework.html

11 cards

I think we're really getting into an interesting period of Warhol scholarship and this book is just one step in that direction. Warhol left a lot behind. There is a lot to deal with but in what has been dealt with, much has been overlooked. This type of focused approach to a single work is the best type of contribution to writing on Warhol since differences and minute details are integral to Warhol's practice. He left many clues but many remain to be found or deciphered to the extent of their full complexity. Gidal sets out a careful and thoughtful analysis of Blow Job while offering exciting jumps to connections between the film and Velazquez's Luncheon or Three Men at a Table as well as Duchamp's Large Glass. I love the MCA bookstore in Chicago and I was particularly excited to see that they had this new release.

Select notes/passages of interest:

1- Warhol's classic figment quote

-exploration of duration

-projected speed, flares, edge numbers, time for reel breaks

4- "...his courage in being prepared to act without denying his sexuality was no mean thing, then or now."

5- four agents in the space

7- Gertrude Stein

8- "no less real for not being seen"

-"The real world is appropriated by the film..."

11- "unendurable durations"

12- the paradox

14- Proust

15- "...not about time regained but time lost. 'In search of...' means not that you find it but that you don't."

18- "existing only in its absence"

19- Velazquez

22- "making nothing materially present"

24- mirror

26- Warhol's time

-"The fear of death doesn't need more than a moment."

-shadow

28- shadows "understanding the state of suspended or arrested recognition"

"Warhol's works are emphatically not iconic"

31- real time during the viewing

32- Proust again

-"extreme light can create an absence of image"

36- "We are unable to lose ourselves in the series of acts represented....'realism' of another kind."

37- machine and body

-"In that re-viewing, the repetition becomes a memory."

38- palimpsest

-"the taking up of time, its being filled, is what obliterates it"

40

-"Thus the subject of the film is never just what you 'see.'"

-silkscreens and squeegee marks

41- Warhol titles

45- boredom

46 (Warhol film) "you are left bereft"

59 Henri Bergson (via Bertrand Russell)

60- the subject and where it exists

61- adequateness and language

61-63-discussion of leaders

63- The Chelsea Girls- silent screen, indexical

64- Empire- "the skyscraper can be both itself and an image of a stable structure and fragile evanescence."

-printing of Sleep

-discussion of time and death towards the bottom of the page

65- "'You don't have sex with a name.'"

66- "So what."

69- time held- Suicide silkscreen

71- "In Warhol's films, meaning is, in the end, always determined by production not consumption. And in the beginning too."

73- Duchamp's Large Glass

73-74- concept of Marcel Duchamp

75- stillness

76- uttering a word- "no sooner spoken than unspoken"

78- moments only