Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions

It’s good to be neuter.
I want to have meaningless legs.
There are things unbearable.
One can evade them a long time.
Then you die.

The ocean reminds me of your green room.
There are things unbearable.
Scorn, princes, this little size
of dying.

My personal poetry is a failure.
I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Lover to lover, the greenness of love.
Cool, cooling.

Earth bears no such plant.
Who does not end up
a female impersonator?
Drink all the sex there is.
Still die.

I tempt you.
I blush.
There are things unbearable.
Legs, alas.
Legs die.

Rocking themselves down,
crazy slow,
some ballet term for it —
fragment of foil, little
spin, little drunk, little do, little oh, alas.

Anne Carson

Understand meaning

Allan Sekula. Koreatown, Los Angeles. Da série Fish Story, Chapter One. 1992

For Sekula, a ‘critical representational art … that points openly to the social world and to possibilities of social transformation’ remains the only art worthy of an oppositional politics, as well as a necessary counter to a situation in which ‘the old myth that photographs tell the truth has been replaced by the new myth that they lie’. In other words, to understand the notion of the play of signifiers as licensing some absolute elasticity of signification is no less false than a belief in photography’s total and transparent objectivity. The task is, rather, to insist on the historical, social and institutional inscription of photographic meaning, of the place of photographs within different discourses and image regimes; in short, to understand meaning as delimited within changeable and overlapping contexts.

A universal language

For nineteenth-century positivists, photography doubly fulfilled the Enlightenment dream of a universal language: the universal mimetic language of the camera yielded up a higher, more cerebral truth, a truth that could be uttered in the universal abstract language of mathematics. For this reason, photography could be accommodated to a Galilean vision of the world as a book "written in the language of mathematics." Photography promised more than a wealth of detail; it promised to reduce nature to its geometrical essence.

Allan Sekula. The Body and the Archive. October, 39 (1986); 3-64.

Movimento

Kazimir Malevich. Black Square on a White Ground, 1915. 

É uma obra extremamente corajosa e uma fortíssima pedrada no charco nesta velha mania que as pessoas têm de que o cinema é movimento. Pois o filme que vi é o movimento por excelência. Porque só a palavra e o pensamento – que não são fixas, como as pinturas nos quadros e nos museus – são verdadeiro movimento.

Manoel de Oliveira, no Público de 11 de novembro 2000, sobre "Branca de Neve" de João César Monteiro.

Subúrbio dentro de subúrbios

Broken Ground. Ana Catarina Pinho.

As fotografias são elas próprias um subúrbio dentro de subúrbios, uma zona dentro de zonas, nas quais Ana Catarina Pinho desenvolve a percepção de um lugar (da sensação da improbabilidade da mudança expressa nos braços caídos de quase todos os retratos e na ruína?) através do ajuntamento de vários retratos de uma juventude em suspensão, ela própria, na “fronteira” para o futuro de se ser adulto. O objectivo dos retratos leva-nos não para a representação exterior da juventude, mas sim para o seu significado interno, o dos receios e sinais daí manifestados, tais como os recados de papel que Catarina recebe e onde se podem ler pequenos discursos de inquietação, na primeira pessoa. Ana Catarina torna-se mensageira, mas já o era com a fotografia.

Baseada no Porto, Ana Catarina Pinho.

From this general turbulence

The Typographische Monatsblätter was one of the most important journals to successfully disseminate the phenomenon of ‘Swiss typography’ to an international audience. With more than 70 years in existence, the journal witnessed significant moments in the history of typography and graphic design. Its contributors include some of the most influential designers. Although the issues before 1960 are extremely rich in revealing the development of modernist typography, the years 1960–90 correspond to a period of transition in which many factors such as technology, socio-political contexts and aesthetic ideologies, profoundly affected and transformed the fields of typography and graphic design. From this general turbulence, new forms emerged and new models were explicitly manifested. The examination of the Typographische Monatsblätter during these specific years enables a greater understanding of the development of late 20th century typography and graphic design.

Talvez o mais interessante seja essa riqueza da visão do conjunto, mas os trabalhos da década de 60 são absolutamente apaixonantes. Typographische Monatsblätter Research Archive, para me perder.

Somehow both tragic and elegant

I haven’t lived in Oklahoma in about ten years, but I visit yearly to see family. The annual drive down, now familiar, has endeared me to the area: once I was no longer forced to live there, it became nostalgic—and once it became nostalgic, I could find a way to love it. The landscape has remained essentially the same, aside from a few new convenience stores, but, as the years go by, I’ve started to notice the beauty in that wide expanse of sky, those deserted stretches of highway, all the small towns in Southern Oklahoma where the bait shops sell the coldest beer in town along with miniature bibles on key chains. To the Wonder shows Oklahoma in the ways I’ve learned to see it in the decade since I’ve left—beautiful, expansive, and empty. The sky in Oklahoma is enormous, the fields endless, the lawns moist and green. Malick shot the film’s Oklahoma scenes in Bartlesville, a town north of Tulsa, and manages to make the treeless lots of manufactured homes look somehow both tragic and elegant.

Sobre voltar aos sítios de onde nunca se pode sair, de onde nunca se deve sair.

Meaning

What is new is not that the world lacks meaning, or has little meaning, or less that it used to have; it is that we seem to feel an explicit and intense daily need to give it meaning: to give meaning to the world, not just some village or lineage. This need to give a meaning to the present, if not the past, is the price we pay for the over abundance of events corresponding to a situation we could call 'supermodern' to express its essential quality: excess.

Marc Augé, Non-places: an introduction to supermodernity.

An operating code

T. Saul Leiter, 1950.

The fragment is always infinitely more mysterious and suggestive than the whole and the T liberated from whatever dull ordinary thing it was trying to say becomes an operating code, a statement of aesthetic intent, for the images that Leiter would conjure from the chaos of the streets in the decade to come.

via.