Finally I got my hands on Nijinsky's diary. Last night long after I put down the book I was not able to silence my own thoughts provoked by his writing. It had a lot to do with questioning pondering my own "sanity" but this is not the forum for such questions and musing.
This however is the right forum to share what I love and at times make absurd connection I personally find to not be so absurd.
In the light of today's economic climate I found this particular thought of Nijinsky fantastic, brilliant and true-
...I know what is needed to astonish an audience, and therefore I am sure to succeed. Do you want to bet that I will have millions? I want to have millions in order to make the Stock Exchange crash. I want to ruin the Stock Exchange. I hate the Stock Exchange. The Stock Exchange is a brothel. I am not a brothel. I am life, and life is love for people. The Stock Exchange is death. The Stock Exchange robs poor people, who bring all the money they have in order to increase it, in the hope of achieving their goals in life. I love the poor and will therefore gamble on the Stock Exchange in order to beat the stockbrokers. Stockbrokers are all men who gamble on the Stock Exchange with vast sums. Vast sums are death, and therefore sums are not God.
"Each day I believe less and less in the social question, and in the political question, and in the moral question, and in all the other questions that people have invented in order that they shall not have to face resolutely the only real question that exists- the human question. So long as we are not facing this question, all that we are now doing is simply making noise so that we shall not hear it."
Miguel de Unamuno
"As to the drama which informs these works, it has nothing to do with the individual versus society, nothing to do with the 'conquest of bread,' nor has it even ultimately to do with the conflict between good and evil. It has to do with freedom. For not a line could have been written by the men I have in mind if man had ever known freedom or even what is meant by it. Here truth and freedom are synonymous. In these works the drama begins only when man voluntarily opens his eyes. This act, the sole one which may be said to have heroic significance, displaces all the sound and fury of historical substance. Outward bound, man is at last able to look inward with grace and certitude. No longer looking at life from the world plane, man ceases to be the victim of chances or circumstance: he "elects" to follow his vision, to become one with the imagination. From this moment on he begins to travel; all previous voyages were but circumnavigation."
Henry Miller
Saturday, January 24, 2009
A small collection of contemporary painters I like-
There's "Marley and Me" then there's "Wendy and Lucy." Guess which one does better at the box office? Oh America if I wasn't so excited about this coming Tuesday, I'd have a word or two with you.
Something about the Butoh style of dancing makes it so familiar and homey, for me. It's absolutely beautiful. Would love to see a performance one day.
Butoh is the collective name for a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement inspired by the Ankoku-Butoh movement. It typically involves playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, extreme or absurd environments, and is traditionally "performed" in white-body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion, with or without an audience. But there is no set style, and it may be purely conceptual with no movement at all. Its origins have been attributed to Japanese dance legends Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno.
What my work space looks like right now. Using two walls. All the paper has a drawing on it, lightly "sketched," to be darkened in later and some will get a little bit of color in parts.
I'm currently working on 3 different mini-series (the Crown Princess and the chamber maid/Henry, June... and Anais/Eli and Oskar)that all fall under one bigger series "When We Are Children". Feeling very good about these.
Michelle Jane Lee’s art is minimalist in form yet muscular in content. There is a complexity, density; to put it simply, there is a lot of heart in her often times sparse drawings and paintings.
She is about going back to the moment of childhood possibility before our imaginations become impoverished and our options seemingly circumscribed. Her work reminds us that things could be different, if only we are brave enough to embrace the free fall, letting go of all of our prosthetics that keep us from realizing our freedom.
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