Icarus pondering # 18

Art for art's sake and all those other clichés, got me thinking and wondering and posing questions which I have wrestled with these past couple of days (years actually) and as Webb and I wrote, 'Walter Benjamin, has said:

To thinking belongs not only the movement of thoughts, but likewise their standstill. Where thinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives the constellation a shock, through which thinking crystallizes itself into a monad. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 4: 396-7

We take this quotation to be representative of both the work, and the product, of creative engagement. The making of a creative artifact is, after all, a sustained process of the movement of thought, and its arrest, both ‘actions’ contained within a constellation of tensions.'  

 And this got me thinking about Marina Abramović. In the 1970s she collaborated with the artist Ulay who was also her lover. Abramović and Ulay decided to make a spiritual journey which would end their relationship. Each of them walked the Great Wall of China, starting from the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle. As Abramović described it: "That walk became a complete personal drama. Ulay started from the Gobi Desert and I from the Yellow Sea. After each of us walked 2500 km, we met in the middle and said good-bye..." Their personal and working relationship ended with a performance on the Great Wall of China, that culminated in a last hug - I have probably posted this before but I was curious about how that last hug felt? Here is what Abramović said, : "[it was] one of the most painful moments of my life. I knew this is over, I knew it was the end of a very important period of my life. I just remember I could not stop crying." And then 40 years later, something curious happened. Abramović was involved in a performance piece at the MoMA in New York, called "The Artist is Present," a 736-hour and 30-minute static, silent piece, in which she sat immobile in the museum's atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her - and guess who showed up? This is an amazing resolution to the Great wall piece - and wow, what a performance, art is... what more can be said - watch this piece, its immensely moving...

Icarus pondering # 17

Caught (s)napping in a Koons, lah-di-dah, I got told off for doing this with my iPhone and I guess I can see why. The exhibition was a disappointment but today, ooh lah, I received a copy of Paul Hetherington's Six Different Windows, which is just divine - and there is a poem called 'Abstractions' for AM, which I am really chuffed about. Though I have to say one of my faves is, 'A Contemporary Icarus' for JW which is a good take on the Icarus theme and I particularly like it because the three of us have rummaged around with the Icarus theme for a while. But I am so looking forward to sitting with the book and a nice glass of claret on a warm summer evening in the garden. Which all serves to remind that while July zipped by, August could be a more creative and writing month, since I also have a Seven Sightings of Icarus plan in formation. But at the moment I am writing a song (or at least finishing something I started ages ago - so fingers crossed) - which is all good. The will to live is returning along with blood test results that say if I am not careful I could live for a very long time. I also got a copy of the Imagining Canberra catalogue and its such a good idea. I have plans to extend my wings this coming academic year and hope to extend collaboration with Hants CC and others - watch this space. But here is something I have been thinking about. David Hockney on said (in On Photography) 'All those attempts to bring everything in around you are part of a naive belief that you can recreate the whole world. Well, you can't. Where would you put it? Next to the whole world?' But isn't this beginning to happen? What are those myriad clouds of photographs doing. Everyone is a photographer these days and unless we are doing something different, like Webb and Hetherington's 'Circles and Intersections', what is the purpose of taking pictures of all we see - because everyone is doing it. Well I am just thinking this one through, out loud as it were. And I claim no moral high ground here, I am just as bad - and yet, too, pictures are also a snapshot of an event that will never be repeated, surely. Not a recreation of the world but a record of that millisecond  and that, and that, and that, and... at the end of this track Lenny says, 'I was 60 years old, just a kid with a crazy dream...' the man gives us all hope:

Icarus pondering # 16

Yesterday I strolled into town to see a Jeff Koons exhibition - well, exhibition was an inaccurate word, 5 - pieces hardly makes it that. And it wasn't worth the trip except I also managed to see a couple of Camden Town Group pictures too and that got me thinking about Roger Fry's seminal book (same period), Vision and Design, which I guess is very dated now. Though he does remind us that the fin de siècle signalled a scientific revolution that required a re-appraisal of aesthetic feeling and the spiritual existence of man (and woman - lest I offend) which is kind of ok by me. But in this scientific age the idea that ars est celare artem, trans., 'the art is to conceal the art', becomes harder to do - we just know so damn much don't we. I have a new picture to post, new things to say, new thoughts that are forming shapes in my head, but I just can't be bothered putting them down, here or anywhere else, may they live in the ellipses (for now)...

Icarus pondering # 15

I have been thinking about ferryboats,

soul searching light ships 

locked into moonbeams,

time slip dreams,

breathless imaginings of joy...

I heard the angels singing  

Icarus pondering # 14

ghosts

July has come and almost gone in a haze of heat and smoke and mirrors, one minute its there and the next it is a distant memory. And yet still I have little to say except I can't find the hash tag on my new Mac, how is that? I knew if I moved from PC to Mac I would have problems and sure enough, they are beginning to happen. But isn't life a little like that? Unless we confront changes all the time we become complacent. I know I became complacent about things, its only when they come back to bite you that you realise you have. Its mostly people actually, unpredictable, you think you know them and then you don't. But hey ho, life is for living and learning - the hash tag is alt3 - TFH! What I have come back with is a huge 'to do' list, isn't that just the way it is? But some of it is good and I am looking forward to doing it. One is the paper, 'The lyrical future of my nostalgia' with apologies to MK - and that is ticking away - but I'm hardly speaking a word.