Short Walks

BLTX2: Friday, 2 March 2012

Vincenz — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:49:49 +0000

Link to maps here and here.

Hal launch: Friday, 27 January 2012

Vincenz — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:59:08 +0000

excerpt from _Hopscotch_ by Julio Cortazar, trans. Gregory Rabassa

Vincenz — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 13:58:22 +0000

And what does it mean to live in a different way? Maybe to live absurdly in order to do away with the absurd, to dive into one’s self with such force that the leap will end up in the arms of someone else.

excerpt from _Hopscotch_ by Julio Cortazar, trans. Gregory Rabassa

Vincenz — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 02:48:33 +0000

Maybe there is another world inside this one, but we will not find it cutting out its silhouette from the fabulous tumult of days and lives, we will not find it in either atrophy or hypertrophy. That world does not exist, one has to create it like the phoenix. That world exists in this one, but the way water exists in oxygen and hydrogen, or how pages 78, 457, 3, 271, 688, 75, and 456 of the dictionary of the Spanish Academy have all that is needed for the writing of a hendecasyllable by Garcilaso. Let us say that the world is a figure, it has to be read. By read let us understand generated. Who cares about a dictionary as dictionary? If from delicate alchemies, osmoses, and mixtures of simples there finally does arise a Beatrice on the riverbank, why not have a marvelous

hint of what could be born of her in turn? What a useless task is man’s, his own barber, doing the same thing over again, buying the same newspaper, applying the same principles to the same happenings. Maybe there is a millenary kingdom, but if we ever reach it, if we are it, it probably will not be called that any more. Until we take away time from its whip of history, until we prick the blister made of so many untils, we shall go on seeing beauty as an end, peace as a desideratum, always from this side of the door where it really is not always so bad, where many people find satisfactory lives, pleasant perfumes, good salaries, fine literature, stereophonic sound, and why then worry one’s self about whether the world most likely is finite, whether history is coming to its optimum, whether the human race is emerging from the Middle Ages and entering the era of cybernetics.

excerpt from _Hopscotch_ by Julio Cortazar, trans. Gregory Rabassa

Vincenz — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 23:59:30 +0000

[W]e invent our conflagration, we burn outwardly from within, maybe that is the choice, maybe words envelop it the way a napkin does a loaf of bread and maybe the fragrance is inside, the flour puffing up, the yes without the no, or the no without the yes[.]

excerpt from “The Renaissance” by Ezra Pound

Vincenz — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 04:02:41 +0000

A sound poetic training is nothing more than the science of being discontented.

time to be frank

Vincenz — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 20:25:22 +0000

I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

excerpt from _Aesthetic Theory_ by Theodor Adorno

Vincenz — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 09:48:29 +0000

The liberation of form, which geniunely new art desires, holds enciphered within it above all the liberation of society, for form—the social nexus of everything particular—represents the social relation in the artwork; this is why liberated form is anathema to the status quo.

fissure and form

Vincenz — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 22:32:03 +0000

For TA, in Aesthetic Theory, an artwork should not be content with a “vague and abstract universality.” Rather, an artwork is “predicated on fissuredness”—cracks and contradictions specific to its milieu—and is contingent on “opening itself to its content.” In TA’s view, these fissures “become [the] subject” of the artwork, and the artwork assumes the shape of the fissure: the artwork “molds” itself to the fissure and refuses to “obscure,” naturalise and domesticate the gaps and contradictions. By taking the form of the fissure, the artwork “makes it its own concern.” This does not mean, however, that the artwork relinquishes all control of determining its shape to the fissure itself. For TA, the artwork must still be subject to the “law of form.” To extend what TA is saying: the artist, in constructing the work, endeavours to come to terms between two distinct but interrelated concerns: (1) the aesthetic conventions implied by the law of form and (2) the milieu’s fissures, be they social, cultural, political, historical. On a related point: for TA, “artistic objectivity” and “social emancipation” are aligned when “on the basis of its own impulse,” the artwork “liberates itself from social convention and controls.” In his view, therefore, by being cognizant of, and resistant to, the laws of form, as well as by endeavouring to make form and fissure indistinguishable, the artist—through the medium of the artwork—may be able to interrogate social convention and be a possible agent of emancipation. But this agency is possible only when the artist “constantly admit[s] into the production of his work an element of negativity toward his own immediacy.” TA offers a way of considering the often fraught relationship between art and society. To articulate TA’s points in gists and piths: first, he proposes that the artwork be cognizant of— and be grounded on and shaped by—the cracked nature of the present moment. Second, even if the artwork is informed by the fissures of the moment, it nevertheless still has to be aware of the laws of form. Third, it is through the alignment of the social and the aesthetic that the artwork may be emancipatory: it is the social aspect of artistic form that offers the possibility not simply of aesthetic, but of social, freedom. For TA, “what is socially decisive in artworks is the content that becomes eloquent through the work’s formal structures.” In other words, it is not just the material per se that is “socially decisive”; rather, it is through form—which, for TA, is always already indistinguishable from the fissures of the milieu—that the artwork can be decisive, relevant, revolutionary, and new.

empty you

Vincenz — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 19:58:32 +0000

“The true method of making things present,” says WB in “Convolute H: The Collector,” “is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space).” A consideration of history, he illustrates further, follows that method: the method entails “receiving things into our space,” an approach that cautions against “displacing our being into theirs.” In other words, WB distinguishes between: (a) imposing ourselves onto the space of the thing we are considering; and (b) letting the thing approach our space and occupying it. WB’s remarks pertain to a consideration of history; perhaps it can also be relevant to thinking about the future. When a future prospect falls through, for instance, we are disappointed: we imagine ourselves in some future (preferably happy), we displace our wishes onto the space of that possible future, and when our imagined possibilities do not happen, we are crushed. The force of disappointment that crushes us is equal to the force of will we had exerted trying to make something happen. For WB, it seems, one way to make past things present is to adopt a stance of openness: a receptivity especially to the unpredictable, the contingent, the difficult. By contrast, we mustn’t rush blindly into the space of things; according to WB, in trying to come to terms with history, we should acknowledge that elements from the past arrive into our lives with the crystalline logic of chance: “they step into our life.” Which means, returning now to the idea of the future: we don’t know when and how it comes to us, what is asked of us is to be open to its arrival; we empty ourselves so that when it’s here, we can recognise it, we can take it in, the future can be present in us.