Barthes: having been there (and then some) – thresholds of post-modernity
Gallery white: RGB: 241 240 234 LRV: 87
Ingold: ‘now’ generations assume the past was always wrong (seminar on Friday, 10th March 2023)
6257.5: Rawson’s concept of ‘time-taken-to-do’ (which includes ‘time-taken-to-read’) supplies graphic thought with conditionals and hypotheticals
Krauss: diagram of creative boldness
Additional note: Did we know what we were getting into? Something unwanted, non-conducive, and algorithmically incompressible that would have otherwise escaped our notice
6262.23: studio tools repeat the sense of surprise to no purpose
Additional note: I only ask that small actions happen each day as they do in France
Giacometti: in practice everything gets smaller and smaller
Rawson: in Seeing through Drawing, Philip Rawson sits at a Steenbeck editing table responding to extracts from the BBC film. At one point he picks up a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Enclosed Field with a Sower in the Rain. It ‘shows marvellously,’ he says, ‘what drawing can do and no other medium can.’
Additional note: Rawson continues: ‘It’s full of lines, chalk lines, which express movement and life, and that movement and life isn’t only in the figure of the sower who is sowing the seed, it’s actually in the field upon which he is working. You feel that the whole thing is imbued with the life of the soil which he was very much aware of. And, of course, there is even an attempt in the clouds to draw the weather. And to draw the weather not as a sort of stationary phenomenon, but of the weather actually doing it. It is this feeling of the man sowing, the field fielding, and the cottage cottaging, as verbs, doings, that Van Gogh was always capable of capturing. And many of his late drawings like this one are absolutely full of this extraordinary sense of life he felt in nature. And his letters are full of discussions of the difficulty he experienced in trying to find graphic equivalents before those feelings that he experienced in front of landscape, in front of the people who lived and worked in the landscape.’
Calasso: when I pack my tools away, this gesture ensures they can be unpacked again the next day. It is a way of finding out what to do.
Additional note: ‘Then the unprecedented gesture occurs. They do not sacrifice [the thousandth cow], they do not deliver it up to the priests as a ritual fee, but ‘they release it’. In that instant the whole sacrificial edifice is in danger of collapsing. How can a domestic animal, destined for sacrifice or to be offered as a ritual fee to the priests, be released – to wander about once again like a forest animal? If this happens, it becomes an ordeal. Without human interference, the direction chosen by the released cow determines the fate of the sacrificer: “If, not being goaded by anyone, it goes eastward, let him know that this sacrificer has been successful, that he has conquered the world of happiness. If it goes northward, let him know that the sacrificer will become more glorious in this world. If it goes westward, let him know that he will be rich in servants and crops. If it goes southward, let him know that the sacrificer will soon depart from this world. These are the ways of finding out.’ (Calasso, R. (2014) Ardor, London: Penguin Books, p. 212).
Calasso: surplus and residue are ever-present in ‘time-taken-to-do’.
Additional note: The viṣuvat (the time when night and day are equal) is the surplus 24 hours that prevents the year from falling into two equal halves. Without it each rite would have an identical counterpart in each half. Because the viṣuvat belongs neither to the months before, nor to those that follow after, this non-coding equinox disrupts the symmetry and maintains the creative character of time. (Calasso, R. (2014) Ardor, London: Penguin Books, p. 213).
Calasso: in the silence of the studio quietly give up.
Quote: The figure of the renouncer indicates the path by which a highly detailed ceremonial practice could become invisible, transforming itself into an act of knowledge. The samnyasin, thus, no longer kept fires, and withdrew from the community into the forest. Yet remaining a sacrificer, indeed enhancing this aspect of his character. Several thousand years later, with whom would we now associate this figure? With all those who are driven by a powerful urge – they often prefer not to call it duty, but it is certainly something they feel obliged to do for someone, someone they may never know – and they concentrate their energies on some form of composition, which in turn is offered to someone unknown. They are the artists, those who study. They all find the origin and purpose of what they do in the practice of their art, in their studies. They are Flaubert, who roars in the solitude of his room at Croisset. Without asking for what reason and for what purpose. But absorbed in working out ardor, tapas, in a form. (Calasso, R. (2014) Ardor, London: Penguin Books, p. 221).
Additional note: was Lee Lozano a better samnyasin than Flaubert?
