v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Details

Vallejo Nocturno 2010-Baltimore Museum Painting Details

Mark Cunningham

[specimen]

They had the Word That Must Not Be Spoken, we had the word that no one could figure out how to pronounce. He said he was going to make some sweeping changes; we asked him to make a commercial when he was done so we’d know. I am my own worst enemy and I will overcome this problem through self-reliance: interesting things happen if you get depressed enough. The first thing the lab ape drew with the pencils we gave it was the bars of its cage, which struck us all as pathetic, so we made it some eyeglasses.

from RobotMelon Issue 10

Before the Tsunami

Vallejo nocturno 2010 - foto time

From Pessoa's Book of Disquiet

From pages 149-151 of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet:

Just as, whether we know it or not, we all have a metaphysics, so also, whether we like it or not, we all have a morality. I have a very simple morality - to do neither good nor evil to anyone. To do no evil because I not only recognize in others the same right I judge myself to have, which is not to be bothered by them, but also because I think there are enough natural evils in the world without my adding to them. In this world we're all travellers on the same ship that has set sail from one unknown port en route to another equally foreign to us ; we should treat each other therefore with the friendliness due to fellow travellers. And I choose to do no good because I don't know what good is, nor whether I really am doing good when I think I am. How am I to know what evils I may cause when I give alms, or if I attempt to educate or instruct? In case of doubt, I abstain. I believe, moreover, that to help or clarify is, in a way, to commit the evil of intervening in someone else's life. Kindness is a temperamental caprice and we do not have the right to make others the victims of our caprice however humane or tender-hearted. Favours are things imposed on others ; that's why I so thoroughly detest them.

If, for moral reasons, I choose to do no good, neither do I demand that anyone else should do good to me. What I hate most when I fall ill is obliging someone to look after me because it's something I would hate to do for someone else. I've never once visited a sick friend. Whenever I've been ill and people have visited me, I felt each visit to be an inconvenience, an insult, an unjustifiable violation of my chosen privacy. I don't like people giving me things ; they seem then to be obliging me to give them something too - to them or to others, it doesn't matter to whom.

I'm extremely sociable in an extremely negative manner. I'm inoffensiveness incarnate. But I'm no more than that, I don't want to be more than that, nor can I be more than that. I feel for everything that exists a visual tenderness, an intelligent affection, but nothing heartfelt. I have no faith in anything, no hope in anything, no charity for anything. I feel nothing but aversion and disgust for the sincere adherents of every kind of sincerity and for the mystics of every kind of mysticism or rather for the sincerities of all sincere people and for the mysticisms of all mystics. I feel an almost physical nausea when those mysticisms turn evangelical, when they try to convince another intelligence or another will to find the truth or change the world.

I consider myself fortunate no longer to have any relatives, for I am thus free of the obligation, which would inevitably weigh on me, of having to love someone. My only nostalgias are literary ones. My eyes fill with tears at the memory of my childhood but they are rhythmical tears in which some piece of prose is already in preparation. I remember it as something external to me and remember it through external things ; I remember only external things. It isn't the cosy warmth of provincial evenings that fills me with tender feelings for my childhood but the way the table was laid for tea, the shapes of the furniture placed around the house, people's faces and physical gestures. My nostalgia is for certain pictures of the past. That's why I feel as much tenderness for my own childhood as for someone else's : lost in some indefinite past, they are both purely visual phenomena that I perceive with my literary mind. I do feel tenderness, not because I remember, but because I see.

I've never loved anyone. What I have loved most have been sensations - the scenes recorded by my conscious vision, the impressions captured by attentive ears, the perfumes by which the humble things of the external world speak to me and tell me tales of the past (so easily evoked by smells) - that is, their gift to me of a reality and emotion more intense than the loaf baking in the depths of the bakery as it was on that far-off afternoon on my way back from the funeral of the uncle who so adored me and when all I felt was the vague tenderness of relief, about what I don't know.

That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself : a passer-by in everything, even in my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world. I don't know if this makes me happy or unhappy, and I don't much care.

Behind our sides

Vallejo Nocturno 2010 - dusk

Gerhardt Richter

Abstract Painting (894-7)

Gerhardt Richter

Image after image

From Art Forum 2002 :

To my way of thinking, Richter's work presents the viewer with an extraordinary thought experiment: How would Western culture appear to someone from Mars? Or someone parachuted into the West with no preparation whatever? Richter is that someone--trained in East Germany on a diet of socialist realism and utterly unprepared for the complex developments of the twentieth-century avant-garde. When he came to the West in the early '60s he ended up in Dusseldorf, the capital of Germany's modernist art world, and was exposed to the full display of all those phenomena that seem so obvious to us--Pop art, Photorealism, collage, abstraction--but would strike an outsider with a special force of uncanniness.

One of the aspects of this sudden immersion was that Richter saw all cultural production processed through the intervening layers of the media--illustrated magazines, newspapers, television, etc. It's as though he were a permanent snorkeler experiencing everything on earth through gallons of undulating water. The gray color and blurred surface of many of the paintings are the equivalent of this mass of water--the distancing, alienating business of promotion and interpretation. The few paintings in which such intervention is absent (such as Betty, 1988, or the series of candle images) are able to take on a particular force and glow, producing a strong sense (in distinction to their fellows) of what immediacy, its sharp focus and searing color, looks like.

To get to the details of the thought experiment is to see how Richter was struck by paradigms of modernism for which he had no precedent. For example, what would monochrome painting look like to a total outsider? Richter's answer--produced in his monochrome gray panels--is a mirror: a materially uniform surface broken by random interventions as the viewers in the galleries are reflected in the gray fields. This was also Rauschenberg's interpretation, with his white monochromes, which John Cage called landing strips for shadows. But Richter's reading (which I am inferring from the analysis made by his most important critic, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh) is, in its literalness, more transgressive.

Further, how would the outsider see Frank Stella's paintings? Richter saw them as surfaces of water into which a stone is thrown, causing concentric rings to spread outward. The idea of deductive structure, with its emphasis on the framing edge as origin of the resulting pattern, simply fell away, as in Grauschlieren (Gray streaks), 1968. In fact, the importance of the framing edge within the whole of modernist painting is more or less absent from Richter's pictorial identikit.

Dominican Celebration

Vallejo Nocturno 2010 - at the Hyatt

Conflict of Interests

From Counterpunch:

Recent exposés revealing that Ethan Bronner, the New York Times' Israel-Palestine bureau chief, has a son in the Israeli military have caused a storm of controversy that continues to swirl and generate further revelations. (See my piece for CounterPunch, The NYT's Ethan Bronner's Conflict With Impartiality.)

Many people find such a sign of family partisanship in an editor covering a foreign conflict troubling – especially given the Times’ record of Israel-centric journalism.

Times management at first refused to confirm Bronner’s situation, then refused to comment on it. Finally, public outcry forced Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt to confront the problem in a February 7th column.

After bending over backwards to praise the institution that employs him, Hoyt ultimately opined that Bronner should be re-assigned to a different sphere of reporting to avoid the “appearance” of bias. Times Editor Bill Keller declined to do so, however, instead writing a column calling Bronner’s connections to Israel valuable because they “supply a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack.”

More

Salad Scuffleupagus

“No green peppers?” I ask.

“Fuck off,” the salad bar side-jaws.

“Eat the yellow ones.”

“I hate the yellow ones.”

”Fuck off.”

I dropkick the salad bar in the walnuts. Broccoli and bacon fat and carrot shrapnel fly at my neck, but these situations are why obese men grow ponytails. I turn and my ponytail applies some Judo submission on the vegetables—a gogoplata, I believe …

———

We scuffle past the hostess and into the parking lot. This is They Live and I am Roddy Piper. Teenagers with dyed bowl-cuts and flat asses follow and so do their flat-assed parents. Croutons are Tommy-gunned toward me, but I take cover under a parked Chevrolet Tahoe, and so the innocent flat-asses are mauled and feasted on and cranberries breakdance around us, maybe raisins. It was clear I was dealing with Russians, or ex-Russians, or …

———

My ponytail, who is trying out new cleat orthotics, dropkicks the salad bar into a Ford Taurus windshield. It doesn’t move. This is They Live and I am Roddy Piper and I have just defeated Keith David.

I return to the diner and order sautéed girl. The meat is tough. She tastes Russian. I return the girl. I’m hungry. The salad bar limps up and vomits cherry tomatoes on my corduroys.

“Fuck off,” it says.

I make a plate of yellow ones and do just that.

From dreampeople.org