Blog Details: le projet d'amour

I am so incredibly busy these days with lots of decisions to make, writing deadlines to meet, people to talk to. And of course, I'm doing what I always do when I'm really busy and need to make some important decisions: I decorate my writing space. Since I couldn't find the type of prints I wanted to hang on my wall, I decided to make them myself. I like them so much, I thought I'd share them, so I've opened a little shop aptly titled, the sea, and other tales.

It's just a teeny shop at the moment, but I hope you like it. Hope you're all having a lovely week so far.

A story is told according to which Saint-Pol-Roux, in times gone by, used to have a notice posted on the door of his manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to sleep, which read: THE POET IS WORKING.

A great deal more could be said, but in passing I merely wanted to touch upon a subject which in itself would require a very long and much more detailed discussion; I shall come back to it. At this juncture, my intention was merely to mark a point by noting the hate of the marvelous which rages in certain men, this absurdity beneath which they try to bury it. Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.

-ANDRÉ BRETON, Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924.

If I were stranded on an island and could only take one film with me, it would be this one. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 film, The Red Shoes, is widely regarded as one of the most innovative films ever made. The plot is very simple: a young ballerina is torn between the love for a man and the passion for her profession. But at the heart of this simple plot is an intricately complex weaving of artistic and philosophical manifestos. This is one of those films that actually successfully blends surrealist imagery with a lucid narrative. And it is so much more than that too.

As I was re-watching this film today, it occurred to me how The Red Shoes exemplifies ANDRÉ BRETON's words in the Manifesto of Surrealism. The underlying artistic philosophy of this film is precisely: stop, and watch, the poet is at work. Hush. This is both the danger and uniqueness of the film. Nothing is reined in, which is what makes the imagery so fascinating. The marvelous isn't simply beautiful, it is reality. At the moment, I'm drawn to films that do not wish to define reality for their viewers, but that simply present multiple versions of it through the mediating force of fantasy.

p.s. in the spirit of the film, I haven't reined in my selection of images. I simply can't choose, the entire film is so mesmerising.

Entering the artistic space of Fred Eerdekens places the spectator in a semantic landscape in which what one had thought of as stable meanings are continually twisted and turned. What better way to figurize this than by letting the spectators themselves ‘twist and turn’ in trying to make sense of the objects. In spiralling around the objects, they in fact become direct figures of the play of logic that rules the objects. After the linguistic turn, and in the wake of post-structuralist thought, the topography of our mental landscapes has become increasingly intricate. The work of Fred Eerdekens attests to this fact and it provides a conceptual map of this, in many places still unknown territory.

-Hanjo Berressem, “Differentials and diffractors. Objects by Fred Eerdekens”

I've recently discovered the art of the Belgian artist Fred Eerdekens and felt that jolt of electricity I get when I see in image-form concepts that I can only express in words. I think that what I like most about his art is that it is inherently unstable, it changes from different directions and altering perspectives. Since I am consumed by notions of fleeting, permeability and the fragility of our ever-changing consciousness in my own work at the moment, I think my personal discovery of these artistic pieces is quite timely.

To see more of his work, click here.

The heart is the organ of desire (the heart swells, weakens, etc. like the sexual organs), as it is held, enchanted, within the domain of the Image-repertoire. What will the world, what will the other do with my desire? That is the anxiety in which are gathered all the heart's movements, all the heart's 'problems.'

-Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, p. 52.

The art of Lyndie Dourthe is described as a 'workshop' of 'tiny oddities', and the minute I stumbled upon her website, I was charmed by the bizarrely beautiful work. The heart artwork reminded me of Barthes's own representation of the heart in A Lover's Discourse.

Wouldn't it be fascinating to map out the anatomy of desire through oddities and the body? Her artwork mingles flowers, death and bodily organs, suggesting a link between all three. In my mind, the link is desire, almost like we need physical proof of its existence through tokens, curiosities and the body's vulnerability and permeability. To see more of Lyndie's work, visit her blog.

I have two more lovely things to share. One of my (very, very) short stories has won a short fiction competition and will be available in print early next year. You can read it online here. I really enjoyed the difficult task of condensing ideas into one hundred words. It's often harder than having the luxury of a longer word count to play with.

The second piece of news is that I will soon be joining the writing team for The Australian Ballet's blog, Behind Ballet. I hope you'll visit me there every once in a while.

Jacob and Lucy were looking at photographs together; she was explaining what she called art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction. They examined print after print, and Lucy spoke of practised seeing, methodical execution, and all the positive and negative relations that combine to conjure a beloved face. Her images came in many colours - browns, purples, sepias, olive - achieved by altering the developing silver with toning solutions of other metals - gold, iron, copper, selenium. Lucy was proud of her art: she saw before her an immanent opulence, recorded as her own metaphysics. These images would endure. These would gloriously outlive her.

-Gail Jones, Sixty Lights, p. 239.

I've been thinking about photographs and memory. This is not a particularly new or original thought, but nevertheless, a preoccupying one. what interests me, is the way that we become attached to certain photographs that are not of beloved faces, but of people we have never met. why do we like certain images, and why do such images retain a presence in personal and cultural memories?

one of my favourite photographs is the one above of Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins. I don't know why this photo has stuck in my memory. I think it might have something to do with the slight details of their bodies: the small veins of her arched fingers near her hips, the way that one of his fingers moves in an opposite direction with such precision. It seemed to suggest something the moment I first saw it, and now I have forgotten what this suggestion was, but the photograph has remained in my memory.

So perhaps this is why we love certain photographs: because they suggest the secret life of our imperfect and fragile memory, and they outlive it. Photographs of beloved faces fit too neatly with memories, it's the more random memories formed by strangers that I'm finding particularly absorbing at the moment.

So in the spirit of my absorption, I'm curious to find out what other photographs people find appealing, or secretly like. Please do share, do you have a favourite photo?