Warsaw, May 2022
[Modern art has to do with …] taking things apart and exposing. And traditional art , the art of the past, is a hidden art. And it could be that, temperamentally, the source of my difficulty here, if it is a difficulty, is a constant pulling, veering, between exposing and hiding.
— Philip Guston, I paint what I want to see
Warsaw, May 2023
. . . the workshop with its song and chatter; Chimneys and spires, those masts of the city, And the great skies making us dream of eternity.
— Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisienne
the photograph produces the past.
you cannot rescue photography out of the imperial project
ariella azoulay — the civil contract of photography
“Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, nails, hard transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelids, set with lashes – but open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon, then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit ; as though your dress maker’ s scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the small intestines’ alleged interior, the jejunum, the ileum, the duodenum, or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats’ wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins. Work as the sun does when you’re sunbathing or taking grass.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy
“Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, nails, hard transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelids, set with lashes – but open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon, then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit ; as though your dress maker’ s scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the small intestines’ alleged interior, the jejunum, the ileum, the duodenum, or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats’ wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins. Work as the sun does when you’re sunbathing or taking grass.”
― Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy
“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque.”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
Wir schwelgen, begann nun Alabanda wieder, wir töten im Rausche die Zeit.
— Hölderlin, Hyperion
We get lost. We all do.
Ich traf eine Frau in einem gelben Regenmantel, in der Hand trug sie eine halbleere Flasche mit Orangensaft, sie bat mich um einen Stift. Sie zeigte auf mein grün angestrichenes Fahrrad: Das ist schön, der Radkasten da soll das Haus sein.
Es war der erste kalte Tag im Oktober, der viel zu warm gewesen ist, wie jetzt alle Monate viel zu warm sein werden.
what if, instead of pressing on, pause for a moment?!
(and I fear, when I pause, I might just as well stop right away.)
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Processed with VSCO with p8 preset
You are all indicted; stand up! Stand up as you would for the Marseillaise or God Save the King….
Dada alone does not smell: it is nothing, nothing, nothing.
It is like your hopes: nothing.
like your paradise: nothing.
like your idols: nothing.
like your politicians: nothing.
like your heroes: nothing.
like your artists: nothing.
like your religions: nothing.
Hiss, shout, kick my teeth in, so what? I shall still tell you that you are half-wits. In three months my friends and I will be selling you our pictures for a few francs.
(Manifeste cannibale dada by Francis Picabia, read at the Dada soirée at the Théâtre de la Maison de l’Oeuvre, Paris, 27 March 1920.)