ondaatje

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. 

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.” 
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

hansa posted

I would advise all those who seek to measure the arts by the norms of a scientific attitude to draw dialectical materialism out once again from their store, clear it up, mull it over, and set it out for use in their brains. Even a few of the wise and sagacious have clean forgotten that creation always is in a state of constant flux, something always germinating, something decaying. To capture phenomena out of that continuous flux, the artist has to have the roguishness of the naughty little boy, and the capacity of dreaming secretly. r ghatak

Toys

Excerpt from Artist and Artisan, KG. Subramaniam, Geeta Kapur

The toy has to have a materiality in optimum relation to its many fictions.(1) Which is to say, it should be manipulable actually, in the sense of bobbing, wheeling, levered parts or otherwise sufficiently absurd or incomplete to invite the amused extension of its parts by the child. For that very reason, the simpler the toy the better. Its life is anyway in good hands. The child after all needs after all only a paper windmill to set all the coloured flags of the universe awhirl.

The toy, a perfect play object, is also a seductive sign.; the possibilities of the signifier always exceed the limits of the signified, and you test your improvisatory capacities with it. For of course the toy has no function or meaning beyond what the imagination brings to it. After the wane of magic the only object that can be called magical is a toy; an object that is the sum of its parts demonstratively put together, and which is allso more infinitely more because the parts , the signifying elements, are always in permutation. At least for the child and also for the adult who will let each configuration escape a simple computation.

Modern artists have looked to the artefacts of the primitives to invent what one might call a nonsense totem, a cross between a toy, a secret object of desire; a compact little semiological unit for the purpose of encoding catastrophic messages.

1- Cf. Roland Barthes, 'Toys', Mythologies

the dark

It rained for days. Thin rain that soaked you in half an hour without the thrill of a real torrent. I went from home to home gossiping and seeing friends; helping with whatever had to be tended or gathered. My friend the priest was on a pilgrimage, so I left him long letters of the kind I would most like to receive.

I like the early dark. It's not night. It's still companionable.

No one feels afraid to walk by themselves without a lantern. The girls sing on their way back from the last milking and if I jump out on them they'll shout and chase me but there'll be no pounding hearts. I don't know why it is that one kind of dark can be so different from another. Real dark is thicker and quieter, it fills up the space between your jacket and your heart. It gets in your eyes. When I have to be out late at night, it's not knives and kicks I'm afraid of, though there are plenty of those behind walls and hedges. I'm afraid of the Dark. You, who walk so cheerfully,whistling your way, stand still for five minutes. Stand still in the Dark in a field or down a track. It's then you know you're there on sufferance. The Dark only lets you take one step at a time. Step and the Dark closes round your back. In front, there is no space for you until you take it. Darkness is absolute. Walking in the Dark is like swimming underwater except you can't come up for air.

Lie still at night and Dark is soft to the touch, it's made of moleskin and is such a sweet smotherer. In the country we rely on the moon, and when the moon is out no light can penetrate the window. The window is walled over and cast in a perfect black surface. Does it feel the same to be blind? I used to think so, but I've been told not. A blind pedlar who visited us regularly laughed at my stories of the Dark and said the Dark was his wife. We bought our pails from him and fed him in the kitchen. He never spilt his stew or missed his mouth the way I did. 'I can see,' he said, 'but I don't use my eyes.' He died last winter, my mother said.

It's early dark now and this is the last night of my leave. We won't do anything unusual. We don't want to think that I'm going again.

from The passion, Jeanette Winterson

collage/montage

its (collage's) heterogeneity, even if it is reduced by every operation of composition, imposes itself on the reading as stimulation to produce a signification which could be neither univocal nor stable. Each sited element breaks the continuity or the linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to the text of its origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality. The trick of collage consists of never entirely suppressing the alterity of these elements reunited in a temporary composition. Thus the art of collage proves to be one of the most effective strategies in putting into question all of the illusions of representation. ( collages 34-5)

Grammatology Derrida

Montage does not reproduce the real, but constructs and object ( its lexical field includes the terms "assemble, build, join, unite, add, combine, link, construct, organise" Montage 121 or rather mounts a process ( " the relation of form to content is no longer a relation of exteririty, the form resembling clothes which can dress no matter what its content, it is process, genesis, result of a work" in order to intervene in the world, not to reflect but to change reality.


from-
The object of post criticism
Gregory L Ulmer

The anti aesthetic

eco essay in asian age

to be the same is really boring or on identity

" If we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity unique to ourselves. But the relationships we have to have with our selves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be of relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. "- Michel foucault, Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity