Wabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom from things. (59)
An objecWabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom from things. (59)
An object obstains the state of wabi-sabi only for the moment it is appreciated as such. In the tea room, therefore things come into existence only when they express their wabi-sabi qualities. (61)
Things wabi-sabi are usually small and compact, quiet and inward-oriented. They beckon: get close, touch, relate. They inspire a reduction of the psychic distance between one thing and another thing; between people and things. (67)
What makes photography a strange invention -- with unforeseeable consequences -- is that its primary raw materials are light and time. (85)
And in lifeWhat makes photography a strange invention -- with unforeseeable consequences -- is that its primary raw materials are light and time. (85)
And in life, meaning is not instantaneous. Meaning is discovered in what connects, and cannot exist without development. Without a story, without an unfolding, there is no meaning. Facts, information, do not in themselves constitute meaning. Facts can be fed into a computer and become factors in a calculation. No meaning, however, comes out fo computers, for when we give meaning to an event, that meaning is a response, not only to the known, but also to the unknown: meaning and mystery are inseparable, and neither can exist without the passing of time. (89)
Even a pure landscape breaks a continuity: that of the light and the weather. Discontinuity always produces ambiguity. (91)
Barthes, writing about photography, talked of "humanity encountering for the first time in its history messages without a code. Hence the phtoograph is not the last (improved) term of the great family of images; it corresponds to a decisive mutation of informational economics." The mutation being that photographs supply information without having a language of their own. (96)
The camera was invented in 1839. Auguse Comte was just finishing his Cours de Philosophie Positive. Positivism and the camera and sociology grew up together. What sustained them all as practices was the belief that observable quantifiable facts, recorded by scientists and experts, would one day offer man such a total knowledge about nature and society that he would be able to order them both. (99)
If no theoretical distinction has been made between the photograph as scientific evidence and the photograph as a means of communication, this has been not so much an oversight as a proposal. (100)
Public photography has remained the child of the hopes of positivism. Orphaned -- because these hopes are now dead -- it has been adopted by the opportunism of corporate capitalism. It seems likely that the denial of the innate ambiguity of the photograph is closely connected with the denial of the social function of subjectivity. (100)
Before time and history were conflated, the rate of historical change was slow enough for an individual's awareness of time passing to remain quite distinct from her or his awareness of historical change. The sequences of an individual life were surrounded by the relatively changeless, and the relatively changeless (history) was in its turn surrounded by the timeless. (106)
The principle of historical progress insisted that the elimination of all other views of history save its own was part of that progress. Superstition, embedded conservatism, so-called eternal laws, fatalism, social passivity, the fear of eternity so skilfully used by churches to intimidate, repetition and ignorance: all these had to be swept away and replaced by the proposal that man could make his own history. And indeed this did -- and does -- represent progress, in that social justice cannot be fully achieved without such an awareness of the historical possibility, and this awareness depends upon historical explanations being given. Nevertheless a deep violence was done to subjective experience. And to argue that this is unimportant in comparison with the bjective historical possibilities created is to miss the point because, precisely, the modern anguished form of the distinction subjective/objective begins and develops with this violence. (107)
consequently the common experience of those moments which defy time is now denied by everything which surrounds them. Such moments have ceased to be like windows looking across history towards the timeless. Experiences which prompt the term for ever have now to be assumed alone and privately. Their role has been changed: instead of transcending, they isolate. The period in which photography has developed corresponds to the period in which this uniquely modern anguish has become commonplace. (108)
The private photograph is treated and valued today as if it were the materialisation of that glimpse through the window which looked across history towards that which was outside time. (108)
All cultures previous to our own treated appearances as signs addressed to the living. All was legend: all was there to be read by the eye. Appearances revealed resemblances, analogies, sympathies, antipathies, and each of these conveyed a message. The sum total of these messages explained the universe. The Cartesian revolution overthrew the basis for any such explanation. It was no longer the relation between the look of things which mattered. What mattered was measurement and difference, rather than visual correspondences. The purely physical could no longer in itself reveal meaning, it could do so only if investigated by reason, which was the probe of the spiritual. Appearances ceased to be double-faced like the words of a dialogue. They became dense and opaque, requiring dissection. Modern science became possible. The visible, hoewver, deprived of any ontological function, was philosophically reduced to the area of aesthetics. Aesthetics was the study of sensuous perceptions as they affected an individual's feelings. Thus, the reading of appearances became fragmented; they were no longer treated as a signifying whole. Appearances were reduced to contingency, whose meaning was purely personal. The development may help to explain the fitfulness and erratic history of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century visual art. For the first time ever, visual art was severed from the belief that it was in the very nature of appearances to be meaningful. (115)
There is no need to disinter ancient religious and magical beliefs which held that the visible is nothing except a coded messaeg. These beliefs, being ahistorical, ignored the coincidence of the historical development of eye and brain. They also ignored the coincidence that both seeing and organic life are dependent upon light. Yet the enigma of appearances remains, whatever our historical explanations. Philosophically, ew can evade the enigma. But we cannot look away from it. (116)
Revelations do not usually come easily. Appearances are so complex that only the search which is inherent in the act of looking can draw a reading out of their underlying coherence. If, for the sake of a temporary clarification, one artifially separates appearances from vision (and we have seen that in fact this is impossible), one might say that in appearances everything that can be read is alerady there, but undifferentiated. It is the search, with its choices, which differentiates. And the seen, the revealed, is the child of both appearances and the search. (118)
It is necessary to repeat that the length of the quotation [of time through a photograph] is in no sense a temporal length. It is not time that is prolonged but meaning. (120)
The appearances of the event photographed implicate other events. It is the energy of these simultaneous connections and cross-references which enlarge the circle beyond the dimension of instantaneous information. (121)
How is it possible for appearances to "give birth" to ideas? Through their specific coherence at a given instant, they articulate a set of correspondences which provoke in the viewer a recognition of some past experiences. This recognition may remain at the level of a tacit agreement with memory, or it may become conscious. When this happens, it is formulated as an idea. (122)
The event instigates the idea. And the idea, confronting the event, urges it to go beyond itself and to represent the generalisation (what Hegel calls the abstraction) carried within the idea. (124)
When isolated, photographed gestures and expressions become either mute or caricatural. Here, however, they arenot isolated. Theyn contain and are confronted by an idea. (126)
We are far from wanting to mystify. Yet it is impossible for us to give a verbal key or storyline to this sequence of photographs. To do so would be to impose a single verbal meaning upon appearances and thus to inhibit or deny their own language. In themselves appearances are ambiguous, with multiple meanings. This is why the visual is astonishing and why memory based upon the visual, is freer than reason. (133)
Surprisingly, photographs are the opposite of films. Photographs are retrospective and are received as such: films are anticipatory. Before a photograph you search for what was there. In a cinema you wait for what is to come next. All film narratives are, in this sense, adventures: they advance, they arrive. The term flashback is an admission of the inexorable impatience of the film to move forward. (279)
Both the photograph and the remembered depend upon and equally oppose the passing of time. Both preserve moments, and propose their own form of simultaneity, in which all their images can coexist. Both stimulate, and are stimulated by, the inter-connectedness of events. Both seek instants of revelation, for it is only such instants which give full reason to their own capacity to withstand the flow of time. (280)
The dog came out of the forest is a simple statement. When that sentence is followed by The man left the door open, the possibility of a narrative has begun. If the tense of the second sentence is changed into The man had left the door open, the possibility becomes almost a promise. Every narrative propofses an agreement about the unstated but assumed connections existing between events. (284)
The essence of that childhood experience remains in the power and appeal of any story which has authority. A story is not simply an exercise in empathy. Nor is it merely a meeting-place for the protagonists, the listener and the teller. A story being told is a unique process which fuses these three categories into one. And ultimately what fuses them, within the process, are the discontinuities, the silent connections, agreed upon in common. (286)
If, despite these changes of role, there is still the fusion, the amalgam of the reflecting subject, one can still talk of a narrative form. Every kind of narrative situates its reflecting subject differently. The epic form placed it before fate, before destiny. The nineteenth century novel placed it before the individual choices to be made in the area where public and private life overlap. (The novel could not narrate the lievs of those who virtually had no choice.) The photographic narrative form places it before the task of memory: the task of continually resuming a life being lived in the world. (287)
In fact, the energy of the montage of attractions in a sequence of still photographs destroys the very notion of sequences -- the word which, up to now, I hav ebeen using for the sake of convenience. The sequence has become a field of coexistence like the field of memory. (288)...more
Paris VI(e), 29, Rue Cassette, October 8, 1907: (on a portrait with a capuchin in the Louvre by Rosalba Carriera) "This is so full of one period that iParis VI(e), 29, Rue Cassette, October 8, 1907: (on a portrait with a capuchin in the Louvre by Rosalba Carriera) "This is so full of one period that it is valid for all times. And it is lovely and lightly painted, but really painted. . . . And I noticed that this blue is that special eighteenth-century blue that you can find everywhere, in La Tour, in Peronnet, and which even in Chardin does not cease to be elegant, even though here, as the ribbon of his particular hood (in the self-portrait with the horn-rimmed pince-nez), it is used quite recklessly. (I could imagine someone writing a monograph on the color blue, from the dense waxy blue of the Pompeiian wall paintings to Chardin and further to Cezanne: what a biography!) For Cezanne's very unique blue is descended from these, it comes from the eighteenth-century blue which Chardin stripped of its pretension and which now, in Cezanne, no longer carries any secondary significance. Chardin was the intermediary in other respects, too; his fruits are no longer thinking of a gala dinner, they're scattered about on kitchen tables and don't care whether they are eaten beautifully or not. In Cezanne they cease to be edible altogether, that's how thing-like and real they become, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness."
October 13, 1907: "As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you; and if you stand among them as ready as possible, you get the impression that they are doing something for you. You also notice, a little mor clearly each time, how necessary it was to go beyond love, too; it's natural, after all, to love each of these things as one makes it: but if one shows this, one makes it less well; one judges it instead of saying it. One ceases to be impartial; and the best--love--stays outside the work, does not enter it, is left aside, untranslated: that's how the painting of moods came about (which is in no way better than the painting of things). They'd paint: I love this here; instead of painting: here it is. In which case everyone must see for himself whether or not I loved it. This is not shown at all, and some would even insist that it has nothing to do with love. The love is so thoroughly used up in the action of making that there is no residue. . . . He would certainly not have shown this love to another human being, had he been forced to conceive such a love; but with this disposition, which, thanks to his reclusive eccentricity, was fully ripened now, he turned to nature and knew how to swallow back his love for every apple and put it to rest in the painted apple forever."
October 16: "Human beings, how they play with everything. How blindly they misuse what has never been looked at, never experienced, distract themselves by displacing all that has been immeasurably gathered together. One cannot expect that a time that is capable of gratifying aesthetic requirements of this order should be able to admire Cezanne and grasp anything of his devotion and hidden splendor. The merchants make noise, that is all; and those who have a need to attach themselves to these things could be counted on the fingers of two hands, and they stand apart and are silent."
October 19: "After this devotion, in small ways at first, lies the beginning of saintood: the simple life of a love that endured; that, without ever boasting of it, approaches everything, unaccompanied, inconspicuous, wordless. The real work, the abundance of tasks, begins, all of it, after this enduring, and whoever has not been able tocome this far may well get to see the Virgin Mary iin Heaven, and certain saints and minor prophets as well, and King Saul and Charles le Temeraire--: but as for Hokusai and Lionardo, Li Tai Pe and Villon, Verhaeren, Rodin, Cezanne--of these, not to mention the good Lord, all he will ever learn, even there is hearsay. "And suddenly (and for the first time) I understand the fate of Malte Laurids. Isn't it this: that this test exceeded his capacities, that he failed the trial of reality, even though in his mind he was so convinced of his need for it that he instinctively sought it out until it embraced him and clung to him and never left him again? The book of Malte Laurids, once it is written, will be but the book of this insight, proven in the failure of one for whom it was too vast, too great. And perhaps he passed the test, after all: for he wrote the death of the chamberlain; but like Raskolnikov he was left behind, used up by his deed, ceasing to act tat the moment that called for action to begin, so that his new, hard-gained freedom turned against him and, finding him defenseless, tore him to pieces. "Ah, we compute the years and divide them here and there and stop and begin to hesitate between the two. But how very much of one piece is everything we encounter, how related one thing tis to the next, how it gave birth to itself and grows up and is educated in its own nature, and all we basically have to do is to be there, but simply, ardently, the way the earth simply is, consenting to the seasons, light and dark and altogether in space, not asking to rest upon anything other than the net of influences and forces in which the stars feel secure. "Some day the time and composure and patience must also be there to let me continue writing the Notebooks of Malte Laurids; I now know much more about him, or rather: the knowledge will be there when it is needed . . ."...more
Provocative and clever, but I would argue ultimately vapid. Something like an underground cultural icon for urban youth today. I only see three basic Provocative and clever, but I would argue ultimately vapid. Something like an underground cultural icon for urban youth today. I only see three basic techniques or themes in his methods:
Irony. Soldiers painting peace signs, zoo monkeys holding homeless signs, traffic signs warning of more (or less) serious things. They're all clever enough, but ultimately just artifacts of a stagnant, consumerist generation that's well aware of its stagnation and consumerism. Like television commercials that poke fun at the fact that they're a commercial: it's witty and self-protective. This either leads to people hating the content and calling it a bastardization of art, or people loving it because they're in on the joke and they "get it." There's basically no message except, "What's the message?"
Commentary on political decadence. Valid enough. But again there's no solution, no grappling with the actual complexity of issues. Just toting anarchy, non-hypocrisy, peace exclusively in terms of non-violence. His anonymity is fortunate because if Banksy were a real figurehead there might be some small shudders of revolution leading toward nothing real.
Pranks/daredevilism. Gets him more laughs than respect, I'd say, except among disenchanted youth. There's a lot of ego involved despite his claims to anonymity and unpaid, unpretentious art. Why spray your tag across the world in challenging places if you're really being anonymous?
He's an important figure for urban history, but he's not a hero and he's not a role model. He's full of talent (he wouldn't get this much attention if his art and stencils were ugly and untrained) and potential but ultimately has nothing to say and no real method of causing significant change. He's on a soapbox. On the other hand, though, because of the way he's popularizing the art, he's also an example of empowerment for the voiceless. But I would also suspect that his example has led to just as much useless or vapid graffiti as it has intelligent graffiti....more
Loading...
