A flat theatre

Varro, De Lingua Latina

A person can make (facere) something and not enact (agere) it, as a poet makes a play, but does not act it (agree in the sense of playing a part); on the other hand the actor acts the play, but does not make it. So the play is made (fit) by the poet, but not acted (agitur) by him; it is acted by the actor, but not made by him. Whereas the imperator (the magistrate in whom supreme power is invested) of whom expression res gerere is used (to carry something out, in the sense of taking it upon oneself, assuming total responsibility for it), neither makes nor acts, but takes charge, in other words carries the burden of it (sustinet)

Oh what a beautiful arch! What an elegant piece of architecture!

A society that has lost its gestures seeks to re-appropriate what it has lost while simultaneously recording that loss

Gilles de la Tourette

With the leg as support, the right foot is raised from the ground in a rolling motion from the heel to the tips of the toes, which are the last part to be lifted away: the whole leg is brought forward, and the foot touches down at the heel. At this moment, the left foot, which has completed its roll and now rests only on the tips of the toes, in turn leaves the ground; the left leg is carried forward, moves closely alongside the right leg and goes past it, and the left foot touches the ground at the heel just as the right is finishing its roll forward.

Francis Alys - A story of deception

desert eats jungle
jungle eats sea
sea eats desert
desert eats man
man eats jungle
jungle eats desert

from a piece of paper at Francis Alys' show at the Tate. The gallery attendant wouldn't let me photograph a A4 piece of paper but allowed me to copy what it said on my mobile.

A story of deception :

magic / absurdity / poetic / political / loop / unfinished / never-ending / infinite / never-changing / ever-changing

Simple gestures that generate different readings.

A fascination with human labour. People carrying carts/boxes/shop-bikes/plants.

Le temps du sommeil :

Series of small oil-paintings. Echoes of the performances, gestures.

The paintings in the series Le Temps du sommeil were begun in 1996 and often worked at night. They feature visionary dreamlike scenes involving tiny suited men and women acting out strange rituals reminiscent of children's games and gymnastic experiments. Many of these images anticipate and recall the forms he has employed in his actions, but the paintings connect to his actions in other ways too since their surfaces are worked and re-worked. Like the actions, they are perpetually unfinished, and their interpretations unfold over time without resolution.

from the booklet

Pier Paolo Pasolini - The Filmmaker - Documentary

Pier Paolo Pasolini - The Filmmaker - Documentary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gZzIlsNvDA

Links

Slavoj Žižek on toilets and ideology

Naked Cleaning

Christoph Morlinghaus

Objects

Relational Aesthetics

Ben Lewis - Art Safari

http://www.ubu.com/film/relational.html

Notes from "The Future of the image" by Jacques Ranciere part II

I.The Future of the Image

The Alterity of Images

These images refer to nothing else. This does not mean, as is frequently said, that they are intransitive. It means that alterity enters into the very composition of the images, but also that such alterity attaches to something other than the material properties of the cinematic medium.

-

...operations : relations between a whole and parts; between a visibility and a power of signification and affect associated with it; between expectations and what happens to meet them.

-

Let us look at the beginning of the film (Au hasard Balthazar)[...]the screen is still dark, with the crystalline notes of a Schubert sonata. It continues, while the credits flash by against a background conjuring up a rocky wall, a wall of dry-stone or boiled cardboard, when braying has replaced the sonata. [...] a little donkey's head sucking at its mother's teat in close-up. a very white hand then descents along the dark neck of the little donkey, while the camera ascends in the opposite direction to show the little girl whose hand this is, her brother and her father. A dialogue accompanies this action ('We must have it' - 'Give it to us' - 'Children, that's impossible'), without us ever seeing the mouth that utters those words. The children address their father with their back to us; their bodies obscure his face while he answers them. A dissolve then introduces a shot that shows us the opposite of these words : from behind, in a wide-angled shot, the father and the children come back down leading the donkey. Another dissolve carries us over into the donkey's baptism - another close-up that allows us to see nothing but the head of the animal, the arm of the boy who pours the water, and the chest of the little girls who holds a cande.

-

In these credits and three shots we have a whole regime of 'imageness' - that is, a regime of relations between elements and between functions.

-

Bresson's 'images' are not a donkey, two children and an adult. [...] They are operations that couple and uncouple the visible and its signification of speech and its effect, which create and frustrate expectations.

-

By separating the hands from the facial expression, it reduces the action to its essence [...] By compressing the action into a sequence of perceptions and movements, and short-circuiting any explanation of the reasons, Bresson's cinema does not realize a peculiar essence of the cinema. It forms part of the novelistic tradition begun by Flaubert : an ambivalence in which the same procedures create and retract meaning, ensure and undo the link between perceptions, actions and affects.

-

The image is never simple reality. Cinematic images are primarily operations, relations between the sayable and the visible, ways of playing with the before and the after, cause and effect.

-

It is simply that when we speak of Bresson's images we are not referring to the relationship between what has happened elsewhere and what is happening before our eyes, but to operations that make up the artistic nature of that we are seeing.

-

'Image' therefore refers to two different things : likeness of an original / alteration of resemblance (art)

-

The images of art are operations that produce a discrepancy, a dissemblance. Words describe what the eye might see or express what it will never see; they deliberately clarify or obscure an idea.

-

But the commonest regime of the image is one that presents a relationship between the sayable and the visible, a relationship which plays on both the analogy and the dissemblance between them.