Category: Uncategorized

Duane Michals – Take One and See Mt. Fujiyama (1976)

It’s a bit difficult to read the text giving the low-res nature of this assemblage. And since it’s a bit of a challenge to find all the individual photos (presented legibly) in one place, I went ahead and transcribed everything:

  1. It was a hot day. The book was dull. He was bored.
  2. Someone slipped an envelope under the door.
  3. There was something peculiar written on it. (Take one and see Mt. Fujiyama)
  4. Inside were some green pills. Without any hesitation he gulped down a pill.
  5. He felt like a balloon with it’s air being let out. Instantly he became six inches tall.
  6. The door squeaked behind him, as the largest woman he had ever seen entered the room.
  7. She grew larger as she approached his chair and began to tower over him.
  8. She did not to see him. He was excited by her size.
  9. His excitement turned to terror, when he realized that she was going to sit on his chair and on him.
  10. As her colossal ass descended upon him, he tried to run but was paralyzed. His tiny legs refused to move.
  11. He stood frozen with excitement, as the big behind settled down, closer and closer.
  12. She sat on him.
  13. Miraculously, in the darkness, he began to see the snow covered peaks of Mt. Fujiyama.
  14. [No text]
  15. [No text]

I had never seen this until this morning–it’s superbly Lynchian (even if David Lynch would’ve been in the process of struggling to get Eraserhead made at the time Michals unleased this on the world.)

The interesting thing in putting this together is that there appears to be variances in the captioning based on editions? Also, there’s at least two versions of the 6th frame (v1, v2).

I actually think that v2 is probably better because the way it reads above, the frame 6 functions like an insert shot whereas and with v2 there’s a sense that the whole thing is covered in a single master shot.

Maciek Jasik – Aneta at Dusk (2014)

This is clearly an image where one of those spark shower shooting fireworks has been placed just out of from on the river bank, ignited and then with the camera set to burst, the fuse is lit.

You’d think my first thought would be that this is not unlike the more lo-fi work Ryan McGinley has been doing with fireworks for decades (at least I believe it’s now decades at this point).

Truthfully, if you deleted McGinley’s work with fireworks from his larger output as an artist, I would likely reclassify his work as a personal favorite.

But what Jasik has done is taken an idea so haphazard and slapdash in it’s application that it’s difficult to see how anyone saw merit there and turned it into something so thoroughly ephemeral, I only know how to speak of it in terms of haunting-ness.

It’s not just that he leaves a half-baked notion in the oven long enough for it to be done, it’s that he adds something evocative to the proceedings–presumably through careful editing.

This image–in particular–reminds me of that Björk* quote:

There are certain emotions in your body that not even your best friend can sympathize with, but you will find the right film or the right book, and it will understand you.

I’d say add a photograph to that list because this conveys a wistful yet grounded feel that I frequently wish I had a word to call it by its name.

A part of that association is that although I look at it and know the sparks are a result of some sort of fire work, it reminds me of the effect from the original Star Trek they uses for teleportation. It was basically a two part effect. The camera was anchored on a tripod, they lined everyone up in the transporter on their marks and then they walked off while the camera was still running and they faded out the characters while optically printing footage from a slow motion camera that was inverted and then filmed aluminum powder falling against a black background. So the feeling of displacement is not just in my head–it’s a sort of visual rhyme I’m picking up on.

(*Björk‘s latest album Utopia is effing superb, by-the-by… it may not be the sort of thing I usually feast upon but it is one of the best works of Art from 2017.)

Carl Sagan – Diagram of all Space and Time (1985)

There are two medicines for all ills: time and silence

— Alexander Dumas

The long silences need to be loved,
— Franz Wright, Home Remedy from God’s Silence: Poems (via violentwavesofemotion)

“My body was an ache, a silence.
  It could not affirm how long it had waited for you.”
– Stephen Dunn, The Waiting from New and Selected Poems

Source: chaosophia218

Saint George Hare – Victory of Faith (1889)

I missed the hungry lions lurking behind bars in the heavily shadowed upper left corner when I first saw this–as such my thought was Victory of Faith is a weird title for a painting that is ostensibly about lesbians, isn’t it?

As I’m looking into it now, I’m realizing my mistake and that it’s both a mistake and an insight into the work.

My instinct–that this is a work of erotica–is almost certainly true. Hare’s other work was rife with similar sorts of tableaux. However, the lions I missed initially are rather important.

This scene is ostensibly a depiction of a high society misstress and her maid who are discovered to have converted to Xtianity and sentenced to death by lions in the coliseum. They have been stripped and locked in the anteroom of the coliseum where the lions that are to eat them look on as they slumber.

As has been fairly well-established sex was a fixation within Victorian culture, even if no one really addressed it directly. There was apparently a tradition of coding erotica into work that seemed explicitly Xtian at first glance. The choice of martyrs as subjects would’ve been practically–many saints were tortured and otherwise humiliated/punished, thus them being clothed would been a vestige of protection. (See also: Saint Eulalia)

Additionally, apparently Xtian commentators saw the lack of clothing as proof of their freedom from sin.

Interestingly, I can’t help thinking of this image in terms of the trope of Daniel in the Lions’ Den–where Daniel is depicted as standing upright and prayerful through the night. It reminds me of the tired police procedural trope–which is factually dubiou–where the guilty are so relieved at having finally been found out that they sleep like babies; whereas the innocent are so consumed by their righteous fury at being falsely accused, that they cannot sleep.

Daniel was innocent and stood vigilant through the night; these women are guilty (of being Xtians) and therefore slumber.

The ways in which this is both Xtian allegory and work of Victorian erotic all at once are intriguing. Unfortunately, there’s also apparently racial connotations–namely: the painting can be read to contain only one woman, i.e. the dark skinned woman who in her martyrdom is purified and becomes white.

I think it’s a dubious claim and given that their are two lions, I just don’t see it. However, there was apparently a moral panic in the ‘woke’ Victorian world where slavery was considered to be morally repugnant but instead of working to right centuries of wrong headed thinking, injustice and inequality–a new focus centered on ‘white slavery’ (which apparently was entirely preoccupied with sex work, it seems–something I did not know until just now).

With this painting, Hare was apparently making very thinly veiled erotica designed to fool Xtians but to also give voice to his own interest in a sort of slave spectacle peddled by the likes of Boucicault.

The Victory of Faith is also the title of one of Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films so again, I suspect there’s more unpleasantness to this painting than I’m even able to scratch the surface on.

Source: elmayordelosdiez

#1600

This blog has artistic pretenses aplenty; however, when it comes right down to it, it is a Tumblr sex blog–the degree of privilege (having the time and resources enough to keep this project going) is not something that is lost on me; as such: I take a break every 50 posts to contextualize the proceedings here within the scope of what’s happening in the larger world.

I can’t possibly hope to cover everything that’s happened in the 1.5 months since our last post. That’s a simple statement of fact but it’s also well worth identifying as an anti-resistance tactic–it’s physically not possible to keep up with everything but leftist guilt is a powerful sentiment to co-opt and I feel that this is one way in which the current US government is truly succeeding.

Sadly, there have been other successes. Shorn troll doll with a permanently smug, shitstained grin–Ajit Pai, led the FCC in revoking Net Neutrality protections and the House and Senate voted to pass a sweeping tax code that creates a $1 trillion+ deficit and offers graduated tax cuts that will mean (in practice) that the more you make the less you pay in taxes.

These two ‘victories’ for the GOP are both unpopular from a bipartisan standpoint. Both are guided by a strict conservative orthodoxy which maintains that the world functions in a fashion that is not anything like the way the world actually works.

Conservatives believe that regulation stifles innovation. They trust that corporations know best and that we should trust them to do what they do best. Climate change should be enough to categorically disprove this. Ah, yes–but there’s the rub. (Also, I believe that conservatives are aware that while strong title II protections likely also serve their interests, they do realize that capital being what it is they trust the unregulated system to be attuned to profiteering and as such feel that non-regulation likely serves their interests more than anyone elses–I mean even with regulation Russia was able to effectively manipulate opinion via social media.)

Short term, there isn’t likely to be a great deal of fallout over the Net Neutrality repeal. It’ll be litigated ad nauseum–it may or may not shake out in favor of those who favor regulation or those who oppose it. At this point there is no way to tell.

However, the tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy will have immediate ramifications. If you recall those anti-austerity riots in Italy and Greece several years back, that is the future these craven shits are steering us towards. It doesn’t matter if you view the end game as the creation of a neo-plantation system or whether you see this as a long game on ridding the state of minorities, LGBTQ+ folk, atheists and Muslims–I personally believe that when those idiots who voted for this president start having to watch their children starve, they are going to accuse (righteously) those they voted for of abandoning them. And which point it will be easy for leaders to embrace their favorite distraction technique–screaming fake news before deploying the time honored tradition of blaming the other for social turmoil.

It’s gotten so bad that the US ambassador to The Netherlands, was asked about disturbing afactual, Islamophobic comments he is on video spewing. He responded that it was fake news and when pressed about his lie he referred to it as fake news again as his comments were clearly taken out of context. (They were not.)

What worries me is with it looking more and more likely that at the very least the Predator-in-Chief’s campaign colluded with non-American groups and governments in an effort to manipulate the 2016 election. The thought I keep having is that even at this point when collusion is proven (and that’s an assumption but it seems fairly clear where this is headed)–will anything be done about it? Or, will the rallying cry be more fake news and then other outrages will mount and we’ll lose track of it?