A Few Good Poets

Not that there aren't plenty. But a few good ones can be found on this Favorite Poem Project site.
(As you will notice, the page is an absolute of absolutes of nec plus ultras of political correctness. Does that make the poems - and their readers - any more problematic?)

To all the bloggers, I dedicate the first verse of Block City, by Robert Louis Stevenson:

What are you able to build with your blocks?
Castles and palaces, temples and docks.
Rain may keep raining, and others go roam,
But I can be happy and building at home.

Mind you, Stevenson was a great traveler, author of Treasure Island and many other adventure novels, inspired by his own voyages.

An advertising gem

I always wonder if these really clever, subtle ads ever work, or if they are created to get the creators some publicity. If they do work, how come there aren't more of those?
(via)

Technorati: publicity, advertising, art, contemporary art, vvoi

One last explosion

Part of the final sequence of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (music by Pink Floyd). Here is an enthusiastic reading of the film, and here is a description of how it was actually received (quite lengthy text, with an accent on the soundtrack which shows Antonioni's way of dealing with other artists).

Public art

Leon Reid IV in São Paulo.

Idea: the beauty of art in public is that art cannot be public. Art is necessarily private, intimate, as any experience (yes, also the so-called "group experience"). So art that is out there, when it's good, makes contact also because it creates a special, intimate zone where the public regains its human dimensions.
And yes, to answer your question, I am tempted to think this applies to any public art, of any size and in any context.

(Leon Reid IV via)

Technorati: art installation, street art, visual art, installation, art, contemporary art, vvoi

Experiencing Bergman

I was full of doubts. I had never been to the cinema to see a Bergman. Tried watching Persona on TV, and I don't recall where and when exactly I was severely disappointed by the Seventh Seal.
Saraband was to be my first real Bergman experience. The film was publicized as extremely slow and extremely beautiful and true - "yet another Bergman classic". I am allergic to film classics. I went to see it on the same principle as I read Hegel and Heidegger - to make sure I know why I don't like it.
I went with a couple of my friends, we were having a great time all day.
The film has a horrible poster of an elderly couple embracing. He has an old sweater, looks filthy, they are both as serious as any Nordic film couple should be. I figured this was one of Bergman's last films.
The experience was stunning. It certainly isn't a classic - thank God. It has a total simplicity about it which only apparently puts it in the bourgeois linage of Strindbergs and other Ibsens. Actually, it's much more delicate, sensitive, it does not play out any scandal (which I am very tired of), only shows how relations between people evolve.
There isn't much more, really. Yet it is the proportions, the subtle movements of the plot, that won me over. I found myself with a sort of enthusiastic empathy for the characters that I didn't know I could have. Yes, it's the artistic containment. But it is also the not-overdoing-it. The getting to what makes up a person.
What impressed me most was that I didn't find any of the annoying symbolism of Persona. There is no need for metaphysics if you look carefully enough into what is in front of you.
Saraband was Bergman's last film.

I have heard an anecdote about Bergman's severe approach to moviemaking: during one of the shootings, his cinematographer's mother fell very ill and was said to be dying. The cinematographer wanted to go. Bergman looked at his long-time, faithful collaborator and said: "If you leave now, you son of a bitch, you can never come back!".
I don't know which film they were supposed to be shooting. But it simply couldn't have been Saraband.

Technorati: movies, Ingmar Bergman, Bergman, art, contemporary art, vvoi

Doing the right thing for art

Fragments of Richard Jackson's installations.

Parantheses from Barthes' Camera Lucida (1&2)

1.
(1852)
(this is how life is made up of small solitudes)
2.
(one needs to classify, to group, if one wants to constitute a corpus)
(Professional/Amateur)
(Landscapes/Objects/Portraits/Nudes)
(Realism/Pictoralism)
(if it exists)
(a certain photo and not the Photo)
(spoken out)
(from what it represents)
(which happens in the case of any other image, charged since the beginning and by principle with the mode in which the object is simulated)
(professionals can)
(out of commodity it is necessary to accept this universal which, at the moment, only sends us towards the tireless repetition of contingency)
(I believe the sharks, according to Michelet)
(I didn't know yet that out of this stuborness of the referent in being always present would appear the essence of what I was looking for)
(there is no photography without something or someone)
(to take pictures of)
(the voice of science)


all the parantheses from chapters 1 & 2 of Camera Lucidaby Roland Barthes (my translation)

Technorati: digital art, art, contemporary art, vvoi