"whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate." from the concept of dread
bonus points who anyone who actually knows who this is without using the internet to find it...
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
frederica mathewes-green
"it is possible for cultures to change for the better, once given a dose of truth. like a body, a culture has innate impulse to health. though this can be subverted in a million ways it can be nurtured as well. this should give us hope."
Saturday, February 11, 2012
fernando pessoa
“…since in life we all have to be exploited, I wonder if it would be less worthwhile to be exploited by vanity, glory, spite, envy, or by impossibilities. These are those that God himself exploits, the prophets and saints in the emptiness of the world…”
-Passage 58
Pessoa has been a source of intrigue since my visit to Lisboa in the Spring. I keep bringing up this trip as it was genuinely my truest escape from reality that I have fresh in memory, Slovakia being a near rival. Lisboa has an essence, one that Pessoa captures in the essence of his temporal misgivings, that I loved and is a location that I would ultimately hope to reside after "settling down" someday. The cobblestone streets and little shops capture the antiquated stains of a still impoverished European city, one that you still feel safe in, as if you were always meant to stay. It smells of the ocean; and the people gleam with joy. However, it is Pessoa's words that circle in shouts of banality, emptiness, and, ultimately, despair. All of this knowing he was still rather happy passing down the Rua dos Douradores. It runs off the page, I find myself beaming with the heartfelt empathy that I knew he saw in others and his quotidian notions of coffee shop visiting and subtle wine indlugence. What is it that God exploits? A good question, dear sir. One that must be fulfilled through our dreams, the purest of curses and the most fragile of impossibilities.
“Even in the poorest of eras…There are few like me, addicted to dreaming, who are also lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of dreaming about themselves that way”
-Passage 30
Both quotes taken from The Book of Disquiet, an unedited journal written under his various heteronyms from 1888-1935.
-Passage 58
Pessoa has been a source of intrigue since my visit to Lisboa in the Spring. I keep bringing up this trip as it was genuinely my truest escape from reality that I have fresh in memory, Slovakia being a near rival. Lisboa has an essence, one that Pessoa captures in the essence of his temporal misgivings, that I loved and is a location that I would ultimately hope to reside after "settling down" someday. The cobblestone streets and little shops capture the antiquated stains of a still impoverished European city, one that you still feel safe in, as if you were always meant to stay. It smells of the ocean; and the people gleam with joy. However, it is Pessoa's words that circle in shouts of banality, emptiness, and, ultimately, despair. All of this knowing he was still rather happy passing down the Rua dos Douradores. It runs off the page, I find myself beaming with the heartfelt empathy that I knew he saw in others and his quotidian notions of coffee shop visiting and subtle wine indlugence. What is it that God exploits? A good question, dear sir. One that must be fulfilled through our dreams, the purest of curses and the most fragile of impossibilities.
“Even in the poorest of eras…There are few like me, addicted to dreaming, who are also lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of dreaming about themselves that way”
-Passage 30
Both quotes taken from The Book of Disquiet, an unedited journal written under his various heteronyms from 1888-1935.
Friday, February 10, 2012
dennis oppenheim
dennis oppenheim
reading position for a second degree burn (1970)
third piece from roma's contemporary art exhibit. this is me every time i go to the beach, especially last summer in lisboa. i used sunscreen but was still so read that people stopped at intersections when they had the right-away. they assumed i was a stop sign, of course.
gina pane
gina pane
azione sentimentale (1973)
another piece from roma in 2009. miss pane's work may seem grotesque to some, but is very intense. it is what the spanish refer to as "morboso," something wrong yet has an essence that keeps pulling it back to attention.
hema upadhyay
hema padhyay
where the bees suck, there suck i (2008)
a great piece i saw in the museo d'arte contemporanea roma in august 2009.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Salazar on the Poor
“Begging is not a sign of poverty but a vice,” said Antonio de Oliviera Salazar, the former Prime Minister of Portugal, who suggests that a society should “punish the false beggars and place the rest, those left over, in asylums." This is what Foucault deemed "power-knowledge," the production of social knowledge through discourse with the intent to create a power hierarchy. Salazar sought to force his conservative mentality onto the populace, claiming that the poor were the malignant and should be forced into mental institutions. If one reads Foucault's Madness and Civilization, they could find where the roots of "mental insanity" lie and learn the power institutions had in shaping those standards of our contemporary reality. Though this is certainly a complicated ordeal nowadays, convoluted amid the various social discourse we have from politicians, civilians and the field of medicine; I found this short blurb meaningful enough that it may provoke one to delve deeper into understanding power, class and mental health. The initial inspiration derives in the Chiado Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon where I visited last Spring.
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