bridge-tarp...: August 2018

Saturday, August 25, 2018

Musée de Cluny & the Praying Mantis

All pictures by A/Z (for more see here);

"At some point became clear that that figure could only be approached through bassesse, through lowering, through going beneath the figure into the terrain of formlessness. And it also became clear that the act of lowering could, itself, only register through the vehicle of a trace of index, through, that is, the stain that would fissure the event from within into an act of aggression, and mark, or residue — a clutch!" (Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious);

"Rigid, immobile, wraithlike, the mantis's posture in life is to mime the inanimate. But its drive to imitate doesn't stop with the defense of its organism, Caillois says... For even decapitated the praying mantis continues to function and thus to perform a hideously robotic dance of life... 'have coitus, lay eggs, build a cocoon... fall into a fake, cadaverous immobility... dead, the mantis can simulate death'" (Rosalind Krauss, The Visual Unconscious);
"Dès les premiers versets de la Bible, la première fois que l'homme est nommé, il est appelé 'image'... Dé entrée de jeu, la question de l'image se trouve ainsi inscrite dans le drame de l'histoire de l'humanité... projet d'une restitution pleine de la ressemblance perdue qui ne demeure qu'à l'état de trace (vestigium)... Le désir qu'a l'ermite de voir l'image a une dimension fantasmatique et obsessionnelle..." (Jean-Claude Schmitt);
"Disons donc simplement que la religion étant la plus haute fiction de l'esprit humain (je parle exprès comme parlerait un athée professeur de beaux-arts, et rien n'en doit être conclu contre ma foi), elle réclame de ceux qui se vouent à l'expression de ses actes et de ses sentiments l'imagination la plus vigoureuse et les efforts le plus tendus" (Baudelaire, Salon de 1859);
"Daß ich Pascal nicht lese, sondern liebe, als das lehrreichste Opfer des Christenthums, langsam hingemordet, erst leiblich, dann psychologisch, die ganze Logik dieser schauderhaftesten Form unmenschlicher Grausamkeit..."
"Der Begriff Offenbarung, in dem Sinn, dass plötzlich, mit unsäglicher Sicherheit und Feinheit, Etwas sichtbar, hörbar wird, Etwas, das Einen im Tiefsten erschüttert und umwirft, beschreibt einfach den Thatbestand" (Nietzsche);
"I was decided to film 'Charlotte Sometimes'in Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water, Surrey. The institution was the 'summit of high Victorian design'... When we arrived, we were ushered into the grand entrance hall [which] had elaborate murals. Looking at them casually, I thought they might be depictions of angels and other heavenly beings. On closer inspection it turned out that the murals portrayed some frightening-looking demons..." (Lol Tolhurst, Cured: the tale of two imaginary boys);

Friday, August 10, 2018

pick a soul (ass you wish)

Musée Picasso, Paris/jan 2018, all pictures by A/Z (for more see here);

Image from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958);

Medieval mosaic, from Lisa Randall's Warped Passages (but contrary to what she seems to say, the effect is three- not two-dimensional);

Hypercube rotating (Noll/Bell Labs, 1966);

The Hypercube: Projections and Slicings (Banchoff's & Strauss, 1978);

Dancing with the Virtual Dervish (Diane Gromola, Yacov Sharir 1991-94);

"The Great Abyss Inframince" (by A/Z, for more see here);

"Deve ter uma outra vida!" (Danuza Leão in Glauber Rocha's The Age of the Earth);

"When Futurism and Cubism appeared, many psychiatrists said that Futurists and Cubists suffered from a morbid disruption in the ability to perceive phenomena as a whole... Critics tried to compare all new forms of art to a series of illnesses... Now they attribute them to class illness, saying it is bourgeois, mystical, idealistic, and, most importantly, incomprehensible to the masses..."

Kazimir Malevich, The World as objectlessness (Hatje Cantz 2014)

"Ce n'est plus le monde de l'astral, c'est celui de la création directe qui est repris ainsi..."

A. Artaud

"La mère contient alors les angoisses destructrices et, tel un objet contenant, elle étaie l'intégration du moi... Klein glisse du terme de moi à celui de self qui comprend non seulement le moi mais toute la vie pulsionnelle... unité dynamique et néanmoins hétéroclite... un sujet qui se fait et se défait dans les crises entre le surmoi et ses objets..."

J. Kristeva (Le génie féminin 2)
"Sauf deux ou trois exceptions qu'il est inutile de nommer, la plupart des artistes sont, il faut bien le dire, des brutes très adroites, de purs manoeuvres, des intelligences de village, des cervelles de hameau. Leur conversation, forcément bornée à un cercle très étroit, devient très vite insupportable à l'homme du monde, au citoyen spirituel de l'univers."
C. Baudelaire

"With their Neo-Impressionist broken brushstrokes strongly suggesting particulate emissions, both Picasso's and Boccioni's paitings suggest the interpenetration of figures and a vibrating, ether-filled space in a state of continuous cohesion and dissolution" (Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ˜Reintroduction˜, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, revised edition, MIT Press, 2013, p 25).

***Linda Henderson (translates and) quotes this very interesting passage of Poincaré: "... apart from the data of sight [involving already convergence and accommodation of the two ocular globes] and touch, there are other sensations which contribute as much and more than they to the genesis of the notions of space... muscular sensations. The corresponding frame constitutes what may be called motor space [which] would have as many dimensions as we have muscles..." (Henderson, p 185).

Actually, it would perhaps be even more interesting to think in terms of a neural net and muscle fibres. Just very few fibres need to be ignited through the net while the many others stay static (a gravitational champ), in an electrical process that perhaps involve just 4 dimensions, or a kind of spatialization of time through the moving of a tesseract (or at least I think one feels something like that while, for instance, playing the piano).

The fourth dimension would already be present in the third, powerful but very subtle. Hinton sustained that dimensions interpenetrate, and in A Primer of Higher Space, Bragdon says that "whatever the number of dimensions in space, everything must have that number of dimensions too." In his Four-dimensional vistas, we read "let us remove ourselves in imagination only far enough from the earth for human beings thereon to appear as minute moving things... insects infesting an apple... [they] have a freedom of which the larger unit [the earth] is not possessed... with each transfer of our attention from greater units to smaller, we appear to be dealing with a power of movement in an additional dimension... It has been suggested that in the infinitely minute of organic bodies there is a power of movement in the fourth dimension."

Duchamp talks about the inframince...

Then, instead of trying to get out from Plato's cave, why not plunging into it, where less is (infinitely) more (& never a bore)?!

***In order to experience more about how 4th dimensional objects can be projected onto a 3rd dimensional space, see Drew Olbrich's The Fourth Dimension app. I don't know him personally, but I have a strong intuition he might be a reincarnation of Rose Sélavy or even Hinton (Drew is also available on twitter).

You can also download and read the following classics:
Charles Hinton's A New Era of Thought;
Claude Bragdon's A Primer of Higher Space;
Claude Bragdon's Four-dimensional vistas;