The NYPD has declared a portion of Flatbush a “Frozen Zone”, meaning media are not allowed in and people can be subjected to arrest for not following police orders. It basically means the area is under temporary martial law. The last times the NYPD declared a Frozen Zone was on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and during the beginning of OWS.
Please call 311 to demand that everyone in connection to tonight’s Kimani vigil/march be released from the 71st precinct in Brooklyn. There’s one Malcolm X Grassroots Movement member arrested & two Justice Committee (JC) members arrested. A ton of community members who were at the vigil/march were also arrested. If you have friends/family in NYC please tell them to call 311. If you live in NYC please call 311. Let’s get them free! Please share!NYPD decided not to release community members and Cop Watchers arrested at the vigil for Kimani “Kiki” Gray. Please call 7182502001 to demand NO charges be brought against all arrested
“Winter”
Creator: Jean-Antoine Houdon (French, 1741-1828)
Date: 1787
Medium: Bronze
Location: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Severo Sarduy on the suicide of Mark Rothko
“[Rothko] wanted to get the right red; this was his life’s obsession. The red of his spilled blood—as well as that other, unnamed blood, alcohol— was to culminate a search that no painting could fulfill.”
An extraordinary painter in poet mode.
Writes Dumas:
I paint because I am a woman.
(It’s a logical necessity.)
If painting is female and insanity is a female malady, then all women painters are mad and all male painters are women.
I paint because I am an artificial blonde woman.
(Brunettes have no excuse.)
If all good painting is about colour then bad painting is about having the wrong colour. But bad things can be good excuses. As Sharon Stone said: ‘Being blonde is a great excuse. When you’re having a bad day you can say, I can’t help it, I’m just feeling blonde today.’
I paint because I am a country girl.
(Clever, talented big-city girls don’t paint.)
I grew up on a wine farm in southern Africa. When I was a child I drew bikini girls for male guests on the back of their cigarette packs. Now I am a mother and I live in another place that reminds me a lot of a farm – Amsterdam. (It’s a good place for painters.) Come to think about it, I’m still busy with those types of images and imagination.
I paint because I am a religious woman.
(I believe in eternity.)
Painting doesn’t freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns. Those who were first might be last. Painting is a very slow art. It doesn’t travel with the speed of light.
That’s why dead painters shine so bright.
It’s ok to be the second sex.
It’s ok to be second best.
Painting is not a progressive activity.
I paint because I am an old-fashioned woman.
(I believe in witchcraft.)
I don’t have Freudian hang-ups. A brush does not remind me of a phallic symbol.
If anything, the domestic aspect of a painter’s studio (being ‘locked up’ in a room) reminds me a bit of a housewife with her broom. If you’re a witch you still know how to use it. Otherwise it’s obvious that you’ll prefer the vacuum cleaner.
I paint because I am a dirty woman.
(Painting is messy business.)
It cannot ever be a pure conceptual medium, The more ‘conceptual’ or cleaner the art, the more the head can be separated from the body, and the more labour can be done by others. Painting is the only manual labour I do.
I paint because I like to be bought and sold.
Painting is about the human touch. It is about the skin of a surface. A painting is not a postcard. The content of a painting cannot be separated from the feel of its surface. Therefore, in spite of everything, Cezanne is more than vegetation and Picasso more than an anus and Matisse is not a pimp.
©Painting at the Edge of The World, Walker Art Center, 2001
I often write about ekphrasis— most simply, one work of art describing another, as in a poem about a painting. (Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn is a famous example). I am interested, more broadly, in the way (aesthetic, poetic, artistic) philosophies appear almost verbatim in strikingly different artists or thinkers, and in how philosophies of art, and artworks themselves, mutually inform and transform each other.
Today, reading Glissant writing on Lam, I came across this, as Glissant considers the technical history of European painting: “la perspective est un progrès à la fois technique et spirituel” (“perspective is both a technical and a spiritual progression”). It reminded me of something I hadn’t considered in a long time, but which I internalized so profoundly that it resurfaced effortlessly: Balanchine’s assertion that “dance is not a physical, but a moral undertaking.”
I love the way everyone struggles, elides, alludes to the same questions…
Lovely discovery today— a translation of Bonnefoy by Richard Pevear (before the great and deserved fame of Pevear & Volokhonsky, whose Anna Karenina is astoundingly good).
A faithful, challenging, daring translation. It is so interesting to see him work not from Russian, not in prose…
(From Poems: 1959-1975, Yves Bonnefoy, Richard Pevear, Trans. New York: Random House, 1985)
Gustave Moreau, Pièta, 1854
I adore Moreau— often because I appreciate the fairly icy, gilded, stylized decadence of his later work. Always one to over-ornament, never one to over-emote. It’s so lovely when one of your oldest favorites surprises you. Haunting, restrained grief.
(Image Source: wikipaintings.org)
Barnaby Furnas, Untitled (Flood), 2007, Urethane, dye and dispersed pigment on linen
Nice and bloody, with an ethereal quality and unsuspected depth (see bottom left).
The translucent, watery pale blue so depthless it makes itself invisible: only by a willed act of looking do we perceive it as blue not simply as there.
