quarta-feira, agosto 28, 2013

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

sábado, agosto 24, 2013

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politics, as well as a necessary counter to a situation in which ‘the old myth that photographs tell the truth has been replaced by the new myth that they lie’.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.

domingo, agosto 11, 2013

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.

sábado, agosto 03, 2013

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.