Wednesday, December 23

A christmas memory


The brain may take advice, but not the heart, and love having no geography, knows no boundaries: weight and sink it deep, no matter, it will rise and find the surface: and why not? Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature; only hyprocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell. —Truman Capote

Hear him reading here.

Monday, December 7

The flexible subject

I've been thinking again about the translation of the immaterial gesture as a means of identification, or sometimes as a shortcut of representing a whole of an identity (noting not much difference between the identifying gestures of representations of Catholic saints and the corporate logo as identifying the nature of a brand.) An example of this in the art world is the recent Francis Alÿs piece, Fabiola. Although referencing mechanical reproduction, each piece in the Fabiola project is made by hand (not the artist's, but a variant group of individuals of different skill levels.) "...Alÿs's collection produced copies of copies based on a 19th-century French/British, image/text hybrid, a fictionalization of an early Christian woman from Rome."