Life and Art

Lately I've got into drawing, something people have been suggesting, but something that never was evident to me. The thing I've come to find is, that was interests me most, like in any art btw, is the living potential a line can have, and especially so, if it does not serve to seperate two colour fields from each other. This way it becomes an unique utterance, irrevocabel and irrepeatable. In a time when it is hard to find living people because people are rather absorbed by merely surviving, a great luxury indeed.

Driving in my car listening to the radio

How single instances can stay in the memory to that extent that the situation is remembered in almost every aspect and how they sometimes coincide in an odd way.
First instance I'm driving in my car in the spring of 2000, when all of a sudden there is announced on the radio that Ian Dury has died; I still remember the street, the light and the traffic lights.
Next I'm also driving in my car looking for an unoccupied space on a parking lot, it's almost Christmas, when all of a sudden space and time get irrelevant because again on the radio I get informed that Joe Strummer has died.
The last, but the first one in the row was Salvador Dalí, which occured when I had only just my driving licence and I was taking friends home after school.
Every time my favourite radio station would announce these information as news bulletins, interrupting their programme for it...

Novelty and Art III

Strange to read in an apostille in a paper that the commentator wishes pop music to be "new", while moaning the fact that the charts are dominated by digitally remastered reissues of older albums/ bands. Also he criticised the fact (?) that people have turned from consumers into users. Then he links the consuming attitude to owning and sometimes destroying, but also on the positive side to getting inspired by, and the using one to getting bored easily. Maybe it is just me being not so much up-to-date with expressions, but I always believed consuming had a rather passive connotation and would also fit in with a mere user's attitude and why is it bad to listen to music that dates back to the 1960s or 1970s?!
Oddly there are points that I could so much agree with like that music, even pop music should be inspiring, yet I wonder why this should be limited to "new", maybe better contemporary, music, and why I do have the feeling that notions get twisted here?!
Still I do rather share, like way back in the 1990s when in a seminar on New British Art the subject of contemporaneousness was raised and I was to have the final word later on with a presentation of Derek Jarman's Garden(something that I felt was also transcendenting the contemporary, even by the most fragile means), Thierry De Cordier's view "Je n'ai absolument rien à voir avec le XXème siècle" or Barnett Newman's notion that he corresponds with artists from the past and that he was sure that they would somehow understand what he was doing.

 

 

The Calling - To Have or To Be?

"Not a whit, we defy augery: there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, it's not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come - the readiness is all. Since no man owes of aught he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be."

Petals on a wet, dark bough

Looking forward to the winter, when the boughs of the elder, the black chokeberry, juneberry and the oleaster are covered by tiny white spots thanks to the birds.
The fact that I planted an elder is probably owed to Derek Jarman.

To Be Or Not To Be

Once I've put all my courage together and resolved  to take a work of art to a seminar or rather some informal talk we had afterwards entitled "Um den Punkt gesprochen/ Talking around the point". "As it was supposed to be something small that can be carried around easily, the thing I came up with was "To be or not to be" and so I did deliver the entire soliloquy in English - my dearest lovely professor did not understand a word, but it enabled us to dsicuss more formal aspects like the flow and the melody -, but what it actually did to me was giving me the oportunity to discover my own definition of Art with a capital "A", which turned out to be something that each time you visit it would show you some new aspects, things you have not been able to notice before. Something as alive and complex as life itself or nature.
To me it's always quite nice to walk outside into the garden and simply watch and listen to eg the bees and bumble bees humming around in the lavender, what a gorgeous sight. And then I remember my mother commenting that if one has not got the time to look after one's garden, one should use concrete to cover the space, what a hostile view. I'd rather have a wild garden than concrete, but then my mother's view simply reflects the common attitude today, a shame. There have been so many gifts we received, a walnut tree or some holly, that have just started growing, most probably due to some birds...

"Nachdem der bunte Vogel der Phantasie ihn seit langem verlassen hatte, kam eines Tages das graue Huhn der Depression/ After the multicoloured bird of fantasy had left him for a long time, the grey hen of depression appeared."

The All Together

is a wonderful film and one I nearly missed because of a preposterously wrong, negative review on imdb - note to myself, as far as sense of humour or historic setting in a film is concerned, never ever let yourself be discouraged by the average imdb user, for your sense of humour and your view on the importance of correct historic setting in a film differ too much from their average taste! Back to The All Together, what I really loved about this film was that it makes fun of a lot of phenomena of modern life and culture, not least  of itself, right from the beginning ;D. Some of the issues targeted are the media, especially TV and TV presenters, gangsters, British and American relation and their mutual language, modern art, eg monochrome painting (I myself do monochrome paintings ;)), real estate, French movies, Jehova's witnesses etc, and it not just entertains but it revealingly challenges these matters - maybe it was just me but at one point I was reminded of the abominable Gunther von Hagens and his Körperwelten/ Body Worlds, something that has been bothering me a lot and that I learned to have a laugh at thanks to this movie. Last but not least I truly enjoyed the soundtrack...