domingo, 30 de janeiro de 2011

Christo Javacheff

 Fonte: http://serurbano.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/christo-javacheff/

segunda-feira, 24 de janeiro de 2011

quinta-feira, 20 de janeiro de 2011

"Para ser grande, sê inteiro" - Fernando Pessoa

Para ser grande, sê inteiro
Para ser grande, sê inteiro: nada
Teu exagera ou exclui.
Sê todo em cada coisa. Põe quanto és
No mínimo que fazes.
Assim em cada lago a lua toda
Brilha, porque alta vive.

terça-feira, 18 de janeiro de 2011

Works by Carolina Quirino - ARTFORUMUAE

LINK:  Works by Carolina Quirino - ARTFORUMUAE

Works by Carolina Quirino

Carolina Quirino born 1985 in Lisboa (Portugal)

I am graduated in Painting/Visual Arts at the Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa (2008) and...

sexta-feira, 14 de janeiro de 2011

Sam Taylor-Wood

Perfect shot: Sam Taylor-Wood uses harnesses, which are later digitally removed, to create graceful images of herself suspended
 
Suffering for her art: Sam Taylor-Wood suspended

Making a Drama Out of a Crisis

The photography of Sam Taylor-Wood
Sometimes you just don’t know what to do. You’re in a situation so unbearable that you want to disengage from it completely; you just want it to be in the past. It’s hard to know how to respond when you feel that anything you might say or do will only prolong your discomfort, keep you there longer, make things worse. At times like these it’s best to be somebody else, someone with fewer dimensions, someone a little further away - like an actor or a character in a novel - whose responses are more measured, more predictable and somehow less yours.
Being someone else is useful in all sorts of situations: when you just can’t cope with the emotional trauma of a disintegrating relationship; when your life seems insignificant and peripheral; or when you live at a time when there is nothing left to believe in and belief itself is reassuringly nostalgic but seemingly unobtainable. Perhaps there is a moment, as you walk down the street, when you feel like somebody else. A person from a film, someone in a photograph. At this moment, it becomes possible to frame your life and see it from the outside, as somehow making sense, as being comfortably familiar - a readymade. You know how to react because your thoughts, your feelings and your responses can now be given parameters, defined and freed from uncertainty. The world surrounding you then becomes your world. The pavement, buildings, shop-fronts, furniture, even the people around you, become part of a set - no longer alien or resistant, but absorbed into the space in which your drama is unfolding.
In Sam Taylor-Wood’s series ‘Five Revolutionary Seconds’, various events take place in a selection of interiors. Each panoramic image comprises isolated incidents that may or may not be related to each other in a narrative sense. On one level, the photographs have a similar feeling to footage of Warhol’s Factory: self-absorbed individuals, either singly or in uncommunicative groups, apparently unknowingly go about their activities while the camera observes and pans across space. Unlike shots of Warhol’s Factory though, the figures populating Taylor-Wood’s images are not celebrities or even ‘personalities’. They do have a very particular appearance, however. They look like ‘other’ people - people from magazines, the kind of people you are supposed to network with, important people; the kind of boys and girls you are supposed to find attractive and who know that they are. But there is something peculiarly inbred about it all: a kind of upper middle-class British malaise that fetches you up in Weston Super Mare or hanging self-suffocated in your basement somewhere in the stockbroker belt. It is hard to say what it is that is so empty about these people and what is so unnervingly alien about the spaces they inhabit. It is perhaps a lack of life (and maybe that is what everyone is thinking about or trying not to think about) in their narcissistic introspections. No one looks remotely happy. Even the couple having sex in Five Revolutionary Seconds III (1996) don’t seem to be enjoying themselves enough to work up a sweat. It is as if sex is something that couples are meant to do, so they go through the motions in a dispassionate dress rehearsal.
Perhaps it’s the interiors that make everything seem so viciously bleak. They frequently look like film sets of the kind of places where ‘creative professionals’ live: designer furniture, bad contemporary art, lots of empty, expensive space. Everything’s very muted in a Next catalogue kind of way; there is a lot of calm, diffused white light bleeding through large windows (windows through which a glimpse of green foliage can be seen); there are shelves full of books (big books with lots of pictures); there are glassy grand pianos and acoustic guitars; there is arbitrary domestic nudity. Sometimes they are reminiscent of a Helmut Newton fashion plate, especially at the moments when the outside world intrudes - the arrival of a courier - or in the sparks of activity - an argument, a girl in her underwear dragging a boy into the light of a room beyond. It is as if the moments at which the figures escape their own inertia have to be exaggerated to draw attention to themselves - look, we’re alive, really! Newton’s imagery has a way of constructing a facade of activity, vibrancy and liveliness over a heart of vapid, meaningless, inner death. Fuck to prove you’re alive and you could create life (if only you had the free time and the commitment). Argue to prove you are a free-thinking individual with your own identity and opinions, needs and desires (if only you knew what they were). Many of the figures in these photographs have a look that verges on arrogance; it seems to be saying that what they are doing is more serious, more important, than the things that you, the viewer, do. They seem to be claiming the world they occupy as the real world, a centre that revolves around the axes of urban wealth and bohemianism. It might be a question of power, or affluence, or class. Or it might simply be a question of aesthetic decisions; having the right look.
In her most recent series, entitled ‘Soliloquy’, the panoramic image has become a satellite to a much larger, more composed image of an individual. Perhaps the first response might be to see the panorama as a representation of the interior world of the figure presented above, but it works the other way around as well: the upper image reflecting the self-image of the isolated figure above as they are absorbed into the cyclical scene illustrated below. Several of the individual portraits are remakes of well-known paintings in the manner of Taylor-Wood’s earlier Wrecked (1996), a reconstruction of da Vinci’s Last Supper (1497). Soliloquy I and III (1998) recreate Henry Wallis’ Death of Chatterton (1854) and Velászquez’ Toilet of Venus (1650) respectively, and both play upon personality clichés - the misunderstood genius and the narcissistic femme fatale - that can be conveniently adopted to deal with failure. Perhaps you are just too far ahead of your time to achieve

domingo, 9 de janeiro de 2011

"Tolerância às Opiniões" - Agostinho da Silva

 
Tolerância às Opiniões
"Para que os homens possam sentir-se felizes com a minha companhia, é necessário antes de tudo que eu tenha a grande força de ver como prováveis as opiniões a que aderiram, desde que as não venham contradizer os factos que posso observar; não devo supor-me infalível; não devo considerar-me a inteligência superior e única entre o bando de pobres seres incapazes de pensar; cumpre-me abafar todo o ímpeto que possa haver dentro de mim para lhes restringir o direito de pensarem e de exprimirem, como souberem e quiserem, os resultados a que puderam chegar; de outro modo, nada mais faria de que contribuir para matar o universo: porque ele só vive da vida que lhe insufla o pensamento poderoso e livre."

Agostinho da Silva, in 'Diário de Alcestes '

sábado, 8 de janeiro de 2011

Aby Warburg - "An introduction to the planetary gods in the Warburg Institute Library"


This video is an introduction/tutorial to four large plates which you can download at: http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/mnemosyne/gods/guide.html





Exposição "ATLAS. Cómo llevar el mundo a cuestas?" - Entrevista con Georges Didi-Huberman

www.youtube.com

Museo Guggenheim Bilbao

"Sombras do (In)visível" - Carolina Quirino

Carolina Quirino
"Sombras do (In)visível"
Esmalte acetinado sobre lona
7.50 m x 1.50 m
Museu Municipal de Estremoz - 15 Set./15 Out. 2010
2010

"Sombras Implícitas" - Carolina Quirino

Carolina Quirino
"Sombras Implícitas"
PVC pintado com tinta de esmalte
2.84 m x 2.50 m x 2.90 m
Estação Metropolitana Baixa-Chiado, entrada Largo do Chiado, Lisboa

1 Junho 2010 - 4 Agosto 2010

More photos and info's in: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=157366120941696&set=a.157365977608377.30571.100000049275824#!/album.php?fbid=157365977608377&id=100000049275824&aid=30571

sexta-feira, 7 de janeiro de 2011

Patti Smith

Patti Smith: The Artist’s Edge
A conversation with the great godmother of punk — now a National Book Award winner — on art, friendship, and the courage to create.
Patti Smith, writer, performer, and artist. Her seminal album “Horses,” bearing Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous photograph on the cover (left), has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.
Her book Just Kids won this year’s National Book Award for nonfiction.
An excerpt from Just Kids:
When I was very young, my mother took me for walks in Humboldt Park, along the edge of the Prairie River. I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates, of an old boathouse, a circular band shell, an arched stone bridge. The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle. A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage.
Swan, my mother said, sensing my excitement. It pattered the bright water, flapping its great wings, and lifted into the sky.
The word alone hardly attested to its magnificence nor conveyed the emotion it produced. The sight of it generated an urge I had no words for, a desire to speak of the swan, to say something of its whiteness, the explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings.
The swan became one with the sky. I struggled to find words to describe my own sense of it. Swan, I repeated, not entirely satisfied, and I felt a twinge, a curious yearning, imperceptible to passersby, my mother, the trees, or the clouds.
I was born on a Monday, in the North Side of Chicago during the Great Blizzard of 1946. I came along a day too soon, as babies born on New Year’s Eve left the hospital with a new refrigerator. Despite my mother’s effort to hold me in, she went into heavy labor as the taxi crawled along Lake Michigan through a vortex of snow and wind. By my father’s account, I arrived a long skinny thing with bronchial pneumonia, and he kept me alive by holding me over a steaming washtub.
My sister Linda followed during yet another blizzard in 1948. By necessity I was obliged to measure up quickly. My mother took in ironing as I sat on the stoop of our rooming house waiting for the iceman and the last of the horse-drawn wagons. He gave me slivers of ice wrapped in brown paper. I would slip one in my pocket for my baby sister, but when I later reached for it, I discovered it was gone.
When my mother became pregnant with my brother, Todd, we left our cramped quarters in Logan Square and migrated to Germantown, Pennsylvania. For the next few years we lived in temporary housing set up for servicemen and their children — whitewashed barracks overlooking an abandoned field alive with wildflowers. We called the field The Patch, and in summertime the grown-ups would sit and talk, smoke cigarettes, and pass around jars of dandelion wine while we children played. My mother taught us the games of her childhood: Statues, Red Rover, and Simon Says. We made daisy chains to adorn our necks and crown our heads. In the evenings we collected fireflies in mason jars, extracting their lights and making rings for our fingers.
My mother taught me to pray; she taught me the prayer her mother taught her. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. At nightfall, I knelt before my little bed as she stood, with her ever-present cigarette, listening as I recited after her. I wished nothing more than to say my prayers, yet these words troubled me and I plagued her with questions. What is the soul? What color is it? I suspected my soul, being mischievous, might slip away while I was dreaming and fail to return. I did my best not to fall asleep, to keep it inside of me where it belonged.
Perhaps to satisfy my curiosity, my mother enrolled me in Sunday school. We were taught by rote, Bible verses and the words of Jesus. Afterward we stood in line and were rewarded with a spoonful of comb honey. There was only one spoon in the jar to serve many coughing children. I instinctively shied from the spoon but I swiftly accepted the notion of God. It pleased me to imagine a presence above us, in continual motion, like liquid stars.
Not contented with my child’s prayer, I soon petitioned my mother to let me make my own. I was relieved when I no longer had to repeat the words If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take and could say instead what was in my heart. Thus freed, I would lie in my bed by the coal stove vigorously mouthing long letters to God. I was not much of a sleeper and I must have vexed him with my endless vows, visions, and schemes. But as time passed I came to experience a different kind of prayer, a silent one, requiring more listening than speaking.
My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chicken pox, and mumps. I had them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven’s kaleidoscope.
My love of prayer was gradually rivaled by my love for the book. I would sit at my mother’s feet watching her drink coffee and smoke cigarettes with a book on her lap. Her absorption intrigued me. Though not yet in nursery school, I liked to look at her books, feel their paper, and lift the tissues from the frontispieces. I wanted to know what was in them, what captured her attention so deeply. When my mother discovered that I had hidden her crimson copy of Foxe ’s Book of Martyrs beneath my pillow, with hopes of absorbing its meaning, she sat me down and began the laborious process of teaching me to read. With great effort we moved through Mother Goose to Dr. Seuss. When I advanced past the need for instruction, I was permitted to join her on our overstuffed sofa, she reading The Shoes of the Fisherman and I The Red Shoes.
I was completely smitten by the book. I longed to read them all, and the things I read of produced new yearnings. Perhaps I might go off to Africa and offer my services to Albert Schweitzer or, decked in my coonskin cap and powder horn, I might defend the people like Davy Crockett. I could scale the Himalayas and live in a cave spinning a prayer wheel, keeping the earth turning. But the urge to express myself was my strongest desire, and my siblings were my first eager coconspirators in the harvesting of my imagination. They listened attentively to my stories, willingly performed in my plays, and fought valiantly in my wars. With them in my corner, anything seemed possible.
In the months of spring, I was often ill and so condemned to my bed, obliged to hear my comrades at play through the open window. In the months of summer, the younger ones reported bedside how much of our wild field had been secured in the face of the enemy. We lost many a battle in my absence and my weary troops would gather around my bed and I would offer a benediction from the child soldier’s bible, A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson.
In the winter, we built snow forts and I led our campaign, serving as general, making maps and drawing out strategies as we attacked and retreated. We fought the wars of our Irish grandfathers, the orange and the green. We wore the orange yet knew nothing of its meaning. They were simply our colors. When attention flagged, I would draw a truce and visit my friend Stephanie. She was convalescing from an illness I didn’t really understand, a form of leukemia. She was older than I, perhaps twelve to my eight. I didn’t have much to say to her and was perhaps little comfort, yet she seemed to delight in my presence. I believe that what really drew me to her was not my good heart, but a fascination with her belongings. Her older sister would hang up my wet garments and bring us cocoa and graham crackers on a tray. Stephanie would lie back on a mound of pillows and I would tell tall tales and read her comics.
I marveled at her comic-book collection, stacks of them earned from a childhood spent in bed, every issue of Superman, Little Lulu, Classic Comics, and House of Mystery. In her old cigar box were all the talismanic charms of 1953: a roulette wheel, a typewriter, an ice skater, the red Mobil winged horse, the Eiffel Tower, a ballet slipper, and charms in the shape of all forty-eight states. I could play with them endlessly and sometimes, if she had doubles, she would give one to me.
I had a secret compartment near my bed, beneath the floorboards. There I kept my stash — winnings from marbles, trading cards, religious artifacts I rescued from Catholic trash bins: old holy cards, worn scapulars, plaster saints with chipped hands and feet. I put my loot from Stephanie there. Something told me I shouldn’t take presents from a sick girl, but I did and hid them away, somewhat ashamed.
I had promised to visit her on Valentine ’s Day, but I didn’t. My duties as general to my troop of siblings and neighboring boys were very taxing and there was heavy snow to negotiate. It was a harsh winter that year. The following afternoon, I abandoned my post to sit with her and have cocoa. She was very quiet and begged me to stay even as she drifted off to sleep.
I rummaged through her jewel box. It was pink and when you opened it a ballerina turned like a sugarplum fairy. I was so taken with a particular skating pin that I slipped it in my mitten. I sat frozen next to her for a long time, leaving silently as she slept. I buried the pin amongst my stash. I slept fitfully through the night, feeling great remorse for what I had done. In the morning I was too ill to go to school and stayed in bed, ridden with guilt. I vowed to return the pin and ask her to forgive me.
The following day was my sister Linda’s birthday, but there was to be no party for her. Stephanie had taken a turn for the worse and my father and mother went to a hospital to give blood. When they returned my father was crying and my mother knelt down beside me to tell me Stephanie had died. Her grief was quickly replaced with concern as she felt my forehead. I was burning with fever.
Our apartment was quarantined. I had scarlet fever. In the fifties it was much feared since it often developed into a fatal form of rheumatic fever. The door to our apartment was painted yellow. Confined to bed, I could not attend Stephanie ’s funeral. Her mother brought me her stacks of comic books and her cigar box of charms. Now I had everything, all her treasures, but I was far too ill to even look at them. It was then that I experienced the weight of sin, even a sin as small as a stolen skater pin. I reflected on the fact that no matter how good I aspired to be, I was never going to achieve perfection. I also would never receive Stephanie ’s forgiveness. But as I lay there night after night, it occurred to me that it might be possible to speak with her by praying to her, or at least ask God to intercede on my behalf.
Robert was very taken with this story, and sometimes on a cold, languorous Sunday he would beg me to recount it. “Tell me the Stephanie story,” he would say. I would spare no details on our long mornings beneath the covers, reciting tales of my childhood, its sorrow and magic, as we tried to pretend we weren’t hungry. And always, when I got to the part where I opened the jewelry box, he would cry, “Patti, no …”
We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.
I was a dreamy somnambulant child. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with an inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical. One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else. Where that somewhere was I cannot say, but it often landed me in the corner sitting on a high stool in full view of all in a conical paper hat.
I would later make large detailed drawings of these humorously humiliating moments for Robert. He delighted in them, seeming to appreciate all the qualities that repelled or alienated me from others. Through this visual dialogue my youthful memories became his.
Excerpted from Just Kids by Patti Smith. Copyright 2010 by Patti Smith. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins. All rights reserved.

Fonte: http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/11/patti-smith