Backyard Fruit

Being here, by Mark Garry, thread pins, beads

(via farewell-kingdom)

"Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand."

Chuck Palahniuk, Diary (via shesanargonaut)

(via thenakedbrowneye)

"Et c’était comme quatre coups brefs que je frappais sur la porte du malheur."

L’étranger, Albert Camus

Between: The Politics of Culture in Friel’s (play) Translations

The following are a series of excerpts from Kevin Whelan’s essay on Brian Friel’s play Translations. Never have I read an academic paper that moved me as much as (if not more than) the work of art it is analyzing. The complete article can be found here:

http://oconnellhouse.nd.edu/assets/39536/kw_on_translations.pdf

A little overly-simplified contextual background: Friel’s play is set in Ireland during a period of colonial mapping and place re-naming. The bold text in the final excerpt is my own emphasis, not the author’s.

Colonialism is never just a political and economic condition but also a psychic one. Translations probes the psychodynamic effects of colonialism as they play out in the linguistic realm, where the private and the public spheres meet. Masquerading as a version of universalism, colonialism presented the acquisition of English as a liberation, the golden bridge that carried the native beyond localism into the world at large, rescuing him from provincialism by awarding full participation in British civic life. The toll required was the relinquishment of the native language, disavowal of native history, severance from native culture.

[…]

Translations is ultimately a language play not a history play, an emphasis that Friel himself constantly stressed: ‘The play has to do and only to do with language.’ He wished to understand what it means to become a people having to use a language ‘that isn’t our own’ and how Irish people today respond to ‘having to handle a language that is not native to them’. Consider Friel’s own mastery of the language as in a deceptively simple phrase like ‘English cannot express us’: this has at least three mutually enriching meanings in this context — to hurry us up, to squeeze us out, to describe us.

[…]

The native Irish tradition of dind seanchas (place lore) relied on a narrative rather than a technical mode of surveying the landscape. It produced a cultural landscape that coded a reciprocal, vernacular relationship between a community and its environment, not imposed from outside or above but developed cumulatively, spontaneously, organically. The material practices and associated symbolic forms that comprised this cultural landscape had a dual function. The first was secular, pragmatic, social; the second was symbolic, cultural, associational. The lived landscape provided a locus for human affection, imprinted as remembered forms, ways of being, ways of living, ways of seeing, ways of knowing. This version of landscape connected its outer contours with an inner vision: in place names the landscape and the imagination meet. Place names are an accumulated repertoire of historical knowing, a narrative sediment deposited by the continuous flow of history. The sense of place fuses a material environment, a historical experience and a lived reality, and is encapsulated in the Irish word dúchas.

More Egon Schiele. Sorry, too tired to get the titles up on these at the moment. I’ll be editing this post in the morning…. but I think I see the seeds of my next proper thesis.

This piece has never had much appeal to me, aesthetically. But Max Beckmann’s description of his 1933 triptych, Departure, is so tragically beautiful: 

“On the right wing you can see yourself trying to find your way in the darkness, lighting the hall and staircase with a miserable lamp dragging along tied to you as part of yourself, the corpse of your memories, of your wrongs, of your failures, the murder everyone commits at some time of his life - you can never free yourself of your past, you have to carry the corpse while Life plays the drum.”

Beckmann was a German artist who claimed to have suffered a “great injury to his soul” while fighting in the first World War. Some of his work was included in Hitler’s Degenerate Art show in 1937, after which he sought refuge in the United States. 

Forever in love with Austrian Expressionist Egon Scheile’s intimate and complex human relations.

Seated Couple (1915), The Truth Unveiled (1913), Embrace (1917)

Source: artinthepicture.com

LOVE. THESE.

Fox Jump and Fox Run (Made with russian pages, a sharpie, and prisma color markers. Covered with clear acrylic) by Jade Phillips

(Source: fer1972)

Edgar Degas, Dancer Adjusting Her Shoulder Strap (1895-6)

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

“While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”   - Dorothea Lange

“Un serpent boa qui digerait un elephant.”

Le Petit Prince Nursery School Designed by AR+TE Architects in Saint-Nom la Breteche, France, inspired by drawings and writings by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

So lovely when culture, craft, form & function, illustration & literature all get together and spawn. I want to hug this building. Je t’aime… 

Found on this blog: http://patrichotomy.wordpress.com/

“Mon dessin ne représentait pas un chapeau. Il représentait un serpent boa qui digérait un éléphant […] Les grandes personnes ne comprennent jamais rien toutes seules, et c’est fatigant, pour les enfants, de toujours leur donner des explications.”

(Source: edna-million-in-a-drop-dead-suit, via picturesofbirds)

"Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes."

The Mind’s Eye, by Oliver Sacks

revelrysociety:

[…] fantastic collection of photographs taken by Stanley Kubrick for Look Magazine housed on the Museum of the City of New York website. You can view them all right now: visit MCNY.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Well, I’ve always been interested in approaching a big city in a train, and I can’t exactly describe the sensations, but they’re entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics.”  - Edward Hopper