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

Golnaz Fathi

From The 3rd Line:

A trained calligrapher, Fathi has turned the literary art-form on its head by skillfully transforming known language into form and composition.
 
She first discovered calligraphy while studying graphic design at Tehran’s Azad University, which she later left to train for six years at the Calligraphy Association of Iran. Practicing the script for over seven hours a day eventually paid off – she was the first woman to win an award for Ketabat (a genre of calligraphy) – but she soon tired of the discipline’s rules and regulations. Hence, she created a new form of expression in her paintings; an imaginary language deeply rooted in Persian tradition while simultaneously hinting at a social renaissance.

Vicente Huidobro-La Poesía es un atentado celeste

Yo estoy ausente pero en el fondo de esta ausencia
Hay la espera de mí mismo
Y esta espera es otro modo de presencia
La espera de mi retorno
Yo estoy en otros objetos
Ando en viaje dando un poco de mi vida
A ciertos árboles y a ciertas piedras
Que me han esperado muchos años

Se cansaron de esperarme y se sentaron

Yo no estoy y estoy
Estoy ausente y estoy presente en estado de espera
Ellos querrían mi lenguaje para expresarse
Y yo querría el de ellos para expresarlos
He aquí el equívoco el atroz equívoco

Angustioso lamentable
Me voy adentrando en estas plantas
Voy dejando mis ropas
Se me van cayendo las carnes
Y mi esqueleto se va revistiendo de cortezas
Me estoy haciendo árbol Cuántas cosas me he ido convirtiendo en otras cosas...
Es doloroso y lleno de ternura

Podría dar un grito pero se espantaría la transubstanciación
Hay que guardar silencio Esperar en silencio

 

I'm not here but at the depths of this not being here
There is a waiting for myself
And this vigil is another way of being here a waiting
For myself to come back into myself
While waiting I go out
Into other
Objects
In this going out I give away a little of my life
To certain trees certain stones
That have been waiting for me
All these years

Tired of waiting they have given up hope and fallen back
Into themselves

I'm not and I am
I'm not here and I am here
In a waiting
State
They wanted
My language
To express them
And I wanted theirs
To express
Them
And in this lay the mistake the great
Error

This pathetic state
Carving myself deeper into these plants
My clothes falling away from my bones
My bones reclothing themselves in bark
I'm beginning to feel like I've become
A tree I've been changing myself
Into so many other things how dolorous
How tender

I could cry out but this cry would frighten away the desired
Transubstantiation
Must keep silent Waiting completely
Silent

Tom Clark's Translation from Vanitas

In Mental Life. . .

From Dylan Trigg's blog, on a lecture regarding "ruins":

Freud’s usage of ruinous and archaeological metaphors shifts through his psychoanalytical thinking, beginning with something broadly equivalent to ruinlust and ending on a note of anxiety and melancholy. At the earliest stages of this relation, he assumes the role of an intrepid adventurer, keen to excavate the buried secrets lurking in the psychic and earthly unconscious. A passage from the 1896 essay “The Aetiology of Hysteria” reads thus:

Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions... He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory; the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure house; the fragments of columns can be filled out into a temple; the numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been deciphered and translated, yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate which the monuments were built (Freud 2001a, 192).

With this account, Freud indirectly gives us the foundations of analytic theory. In assuming the role of classical explorer, Freud elevates psychoanalysis to a mode of both retrieval and restoration. The dotted fragments and sketchy remains of a former civilization require careful work in order to bring them back the light of consciousness. Too abrasive, the explorer risks effacing the traces through driving them deeper into the buried earth. But with cautious probing, these same traces point to a past that is accessible through the work of reanimation and reconstruction.

Still in this early phase of his thinking on ruins, Freud expands upon his archaeological analysis, remarking that “This procedure was one of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city” (Freud 2001b, 139). In each account, the ruin is presented as material, which if disorderly, is also lodged in time and thus receptive to the work of excavation, interpretation, before subsequent reconstruction.

From the outset, then, Freud’s relation to ruins is laden with tremendous psychic value. Far from inert matter, devoid of substance, at all times, the materiality of the past assumes a latent meaning. Freud recognises here the value of the ruin as being imbued with a future life, making it clear that the appearance of inactivity is deceptive. In this way, the past in question is one that has an afterlife attached to it, its buried meaning waiting the emergence of a future psychoanalysis to restore it.

This rather uneven relationship between Freud and the ruin gives voice to the latter only by dint of a psychoanalytic intervention. The ruin, to put it in phenomenological terms, speaks less for itself and more through the method of analysis. The ruin does not decipher itself. As a fragment rather than a complete work of materiality, it requires analysis for the ruin to reach a state of reconstructed completion, begging the question of where the ruin ends and the psychoanalysis begins. I leave this important question unanswered for the moment.

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Metá Metá in Video

Metá-Metá | "Sozinho"(Douglas Germano) from fernando on Vimeo.

Mingus Review

An excellent review at NYRB blog of the latest historical Mingus find:

Charles Mingus’s audiences never knew quite what they were going to get, and this kept them coming. Mingus, the bassist, composer, and bandleader who reached the height of his fame in the mid-1960s, was notoriously mercurial. He was known to fire and rehire band members over the course of a set, and was once fired himself for chasing a trombonist across the stage with an axe. His reactions to noisy crowds ranged from announcing, “Isaac Stern doesn’t have to put up with this shit,” to ordering his band to read books onstage. His music, which drew omnivorously on the blues, gospel, Dixieland, Duke Ellington, bebop, and classical music, among much else, was similarly unpredictable. It blurred the boundaries between improvisation and composition, often ignoring standard form, and was famous for its rapid shifts in mood and tempo.

Mingus (1922-1979) would have turned ninety last year, and in celebration, Mosaic has released The Jazz Workshop Concerts: 1964-1965, a new box set with rare and previously unreleased performances by some of Mingus’s greatest ensembles. These concerts, recorded near the apex of Mingus’s career, are visceral and often unvarnished. At times, the music here can be forbidding—several tracks run beyond thirty minutes—and though it may not be as uniformly polished as some of his studio albums, at its best this set captures an element of shock and surprise that Mingus’s studio recordings sometimes don’t.

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Imran Qureshi

Imran Qureshi-You who are my love and my life’s enemy too

From Art Mag:

Like beads strung on invisible threads, rain falls in precise lines from golden-hued clouds which part to reveal a patch of deep blue sky: Moderate Enlightenment, Imran Qureshi’s series of miniature paintings made between 2006 and 2009, presents an infinitely detailed, wondrous world. Everything in it seems delicate to the point of fragility—the blades of grass poking out of the earth, the ornamental branches and vines of the bushes and trees that intertwine to create frames and patterns. The young men and women in this microcosm also seem tender and introverted, dreamily blowing soap bubbles and flower petals into the air, opening their umbrellas, or taking walks, immersed in their solitude. Their style of clothing indicates that they are of the Muslim faith. The watercolor scenes seem so light and carefree that they have to be contained in gold leaf and ornamentation in order not to fly away. A lost paradise, one might say; a look at the spiritual unity of man and nature, a traditional, comprehensible world in which everything is intact and in its place.
 
But this nostalgic sentiment is far too simple, as becomes clear at second glance. Qureshi counters the initial impression of the sublime and near-antiquity with the insignia of a global leisure culture: his protagonists carry messenger bags, wear cargo shorts and camouflage T-shirts. The practical military look is a clear fashion statement. In combination with religion and spirituality, however, it quickly brings fanaticism to mind. Taking these “modern” signs into consideration when looking at Qureshi’s paintings, they are no longer as formally clear. Abstraction lies hidden beneath the ornament. The gold, which quickly evokes associations to religion, could also be the gold that western artists like Yves Klein, James Lee Byars, and Andy Warhol brought back into vogue in the second half of the 20th century.
    
Global reality has also crept into these idyllic scenes. The title Moderate Enlightenment is also a term former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf coined in 2003 at a summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to describe the path the Islamic world must take to finally escape the dead-end of fundamentalism and anti-Western sentiment. In its complexity, however, Qureshi’s series puts both to the test: the rigidity of religious fundamentalism and the rigidity of western “enlightened” clichés of Islamic culture.

Now, Deutsche Bank has selected Imran Qureshi, one of the most important figures on the contemporary Pakistani art scene, as its 2013 "Artist of the Year." Based on a recommendation of the Deutsche Bank Global Art Advisory Council, which includes internationally renowned curators Okwui Enwezor, Hou Hanru, Udo Kittelmann, and Victoria Noorthoorn, the bank honors an auspicious artist who addresses social issues in an individual way and has created a substantial oeuvre that concentrates on the two focal points of the Deutsche Bank Collection: works on paper and photography. The selection was announced in Berlin, where Qureshi’s works will be shown in a major solo presentation at the “Deutsche Bank KunstHalle” in the spring of 2013.

Circle 3420

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 - Year of the Snake

Chant Avedissian

Chant Avedissian, Al Watan Al Arabia “The Arab Nation”, pigments and gum arabic on corrugated cardboard, 250 x 300cm, 2008

From Nafas Art Magazine:

Avedissian integrates 20th century Egyptian iconography with pharaonic symbols, Islamic geometric and abstract patterns and the flowery baroque motifs of Ottoman decor. In his large stencils, images of historical characters, names, landscapes, objects and symbols intertwine and overlap. Painted with local pigments and bordered by hand-coloured textiles, they are celebrations of his nostalgic memories.

Treating subjects that have died is not an innocent choice. Most of his characters are figures from Avedissian's childhood. His work commemorates all that has been ignored by the Egyptian state for decades; be it a monument under environmental threat (Luxor, Aswan, the Valley of the Kings), famous streets, everyday objects, beloved animals, or famous people. With humour and a light touch, he reminds us of better times and a cultural heritage that should not be forgotten, one that belongs to Egypt and the entire Arab world.

Avedissian's approach is influenced by the Gandhi-like concepts of the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, with whom he worked for ten years. His fondness for popular art, Sufi poetry, Chinese and japanese Zen concepts and aesthetics, have resulted in his own version of a "Wabi-Sabi" lifestyle, one that he recreates wherever he goes in his peripatetic search.

Glenn Homann

The Other You in the Other Room

Arthur Peña

attempt 52
2013
canvas, staples, drywall, pine, scorched pine, hydrocal