BALSE NEWSLETTER 027

 
 
 




Two weeks, at Balse.


Dada-, totototooo-

dada-, tototo- dada-, to totttootooo

Shostakovich w Hilary Hahn

Not the usual way, almost by accident, amazingly ambiguous, like life. Camus

I took a step, one step forward. And this time, without sitting up, the Arab drew his knife, and held it out towards me in the sun, it was like a long flashing sward lunging towards my forehead. My whole being went tense, and I tightened my grip on the gun, The trigger gave, and it was there when it all started. I realized that I’d destroyed the balance of the day. The perfect silence of this beach, where I’d been happy. There I fired four more times into the lifeless body, and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness. - The Stranger, Albert Camus

Klimt at Neue Gallery


The cosmic joke and irony is that humans are not very musical at all….And we know this because we evolved along the ape line. And apes compared to birds are not musical. How can I say that? Birds have vocal learning. They can creatively learn new songs, Apes can’t do that. They are confined to the chords they are born with. Insects can pulse together in rhythm, and apes don’t have that. So it’s very odd that humans evolved from apes, who are not musical, but humans evolved music again from ground-up from scratch. - Michael Spitzer, PhD, Professor Music, Liverpool Univ.

The large head suspended in the air - Odilon Redon research

A BURIAL AT SEA - Liverpool, UK
Avalanche
Голоса

DJ Mixes
Partiboi69 b2b LOVEFOXY - House set Live From The Stingzone


Peter Doigy at d’Orsay

Revisit, study of Mishima.

Yukio Mishima - The Philosophy of Sun and Steel

And a wonderful film of Chris Marker.

Ten Lives of a Cat: A film about Chris Marker (2023)


till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 

 
 

Words of Wisdom

 

  • AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE - Wangechi Mutu

  • [[akademie-X]], [[favorite quotes]],[[Wangechi Mutu]]

    • page 228, Lesson 24: Living Art

      • The sharpening of visual intelligence is crucial for artists. I would recommend drawing - and by this, I don't mean drawing in a pedantic, high-school, instructional manner; I mean using your hand and your mind to pull out information from the subconscious onto a surface and into the real world. It is one of the best ways to shorten the distance between your brain and your fingertips and to allow you to gauge what is going on from within yourself. When you speed up that process, by drawing with as basic a material as pencil or charcoal, or ink and brush, your senses of intuition, honesty and integrity are sharpened. I would also push every artist to enhance their sense of context and their role as artist by visiting museums or the theatre, going to poetry readings, hanging out at DJ slams, listening to live bands - to participate in and enter cultural spaces in one way or another. Figuring out what's happening in other genres and media in your particular moment in time is important to you as a visual artist because even if you don't feel it's relevant to you, making cross-references makes you aware of your own position and place, your aliveness at that particular moment in time.

      • Everyone should understand as much about the past as they can possibly get in their heads. As the voices of their culture and their communities, artists in particular should know as much as possible about what has happened prior to their own existence. It's a way to stand out as the voice of the present, to pay homage to what has happened, and avoid repeating and recycling the mistakes that have already been made. It's also a way to remain in touch with your own humanity, and with the humanity of others whom you don't know.

[[akademie-X]],[[Tim Rollins]]

  • page 268 lesson 28: Art is Not Just Experience

    • We believe good art is work that doesn't ask permission to exist, to be is enough. Good art is anything made sincerely yours. This art can be affirmative, shamelessly beautiful or ugly, a contribution of dissent, audacious and critical, yet deeply celebratory by the very fact of its existence. We think good art is always a gift, an affirmation of a mysterious gratitude. It's not instrumental but feels inevitable. Art is a faith proposition built upon a base of wonder.


Main Studies

 
 

 
 

APPENDIX:



 




ClassicAsobi recommends

This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.







 

 

COMING UP


JASON RHOADES

DRIVE

27 FEBRUARY 2024 – 14 JANUARY 2025

HAUSER & WIRTH DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES

Ella Kruglyanskaya: See Saw

April 5–June 8, 2024, Jeffrey Deitch LA

Elgar and Vaughan Williams

SUN, APR 7

YOU ARE GOING!

2:00PM

PROGRAM & ARTIST LISTING

Arvo PÄRT — Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten

ELGAR — Cello Concerto

Intermission

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS — Symphony No. 8

CATHERINE GOODMAN
NEW WORKS

Hauser & Wirth DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES, 27 FEBRUARY – 5 MAY 2024

JASON RHOADES
DRIVE

Hauser & Wirth DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES, 27 FEBRUARY 2024 – 14 JANUARY 2025

Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony

SUN, APR 14

YOU ARE GOING!

2:00PM

PROGRAM & ARTIST LISTING

Jonathan Bailey HOLLAND Assemble

RAVEL Tzigane

RAVEL Mother Goose Suite

Intermission

SAINT-SAËNS — Symphony No. 3, "Organ"

Anna LapwoodOrgan Recital

SUN, APR 21

7:30PM


Dudamel Leads Beethoven and Strauss

SUN, MAY 5

YOU ARE GOING!

2:00PM

PROGRAM & ARTIST LISTING

Andreia PINTO CORREIA Cortejo (world premiere, LA Phil commission with generous support from the Esa-Pekka Salonen Commissions Fund)

BEETHOVEN — Piano Concerto No. 4

Intermission

STRAUSS Don Quixote

Dvořák and Ortiz with Dudamel

SUN, MAY 12

YOU ARE GOING!

2:00PM

PROGRAM & ARTIST LISTING

John WILLIAMS Olympic Fanfare and Theme

Gabriela ORTIZ Altar de cuerda

Intermission

DVOŘÁK — Symphony No. 9, “From the New World”

VENEZIA, 20.04 - 24.11 2024

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN

LACMA Apr 7–Oct 6, 2024

I Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker

Norton Simon, APRIL 19, 2024 – AUGUST 5, 2024

Plugged In: Art and Electric Light

Norton Simon, SEPTEMBER 20, 2024 – FEBRUARY 17, 2025

Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight

Huntington Library, Nov. 11, 2023–Nov. 30, 2025


 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 026

 
 
 




Two weeks, at Balse.


It starts with a sound of bells, with its planetary vision, So Weit Wie Noch Nie - as far as never before. 2007, Ave B & 13th, Kompakt.


Close (2024 Remaster) Robert Lippok

Mahler?


After a long break, I am back into seeking fashion, but at a much elevated consciousness. Whatever that means.


Why do we stop drawing? why some people stop drawing? Some of us, most of us, start drawing before we start speaking. And so on. At some point drawing is no longer important. but, others find it harder to let go of drawing. If that is your wish.


haven’t seen it, and haven’t the time, but severance, looks really interesting.

DJ Mixes

Berlin

Hudson Mohawke b2b Nikki Nair | Boiler Room Festival Berlin: SYSTEM

¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U DJ Set | Keep Hush Live: Tokyo

Yung Sherman | Boiler Room: Stockholm

Mechatok | Boiler Room: Stockholm





Alan Watts - what it would be like if we had the power to dream anything that we wished to dream. Absolutely anything at all…. if you were granted this power what would you do? ….pleasure itself demand contrast…certainty and familiarity. potentiality. ever ongoing. nuanced manner. possibility. difference, transcendental form, namely, differences and separation. imaginative narrative. releasing control, otherness of dream. luminosity. pure possibility. form.



Auguste Renoir - imagine, to lift your dress, so open, one of the most, the story of ourself. evokes. war breaks out. astonishment, on French soil. must enlist. only from afar, deposed, republic, amidst of the war. only comes to an end. winter, not until the war. killed in his very first battle. 1871. city full of weapons. refused to. Montmartre. ends in communes defeat. devastation. then impressionists. pont neuf. you do not think that the city went through such duress. workman carrying vegetables. The working class, soldiers, the middle class. The mixture of Paris. A Sunday off.

the new republique, meets everyone with the same empathy.




poetry, so long as I believed the right things.




till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 

Gallery COMMON

9 Feb–10 Mar 2024

 
 

Words of Wisdom

  • AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

    LESSON 23

    TUTOR: Carrie Moyer

    Page 220

    Sharpen your visual intelligence by looking at art in person - Close looking is a means of gathering information in order to analyse a work of art within the parameters set by its maker. Through careful examination the object reveals its materials, size, scale; the processes and methods of its facture; the identity of the maker; its relationship to the history of the medium and genre as well as to the world at large. using this form of connoisseurship to decide if art is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ would defeat the purpose. It’s more like being a scientist and learning how to analyse and identify what you’re looking at.

  • AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

    LESSON 26

    TUTOR: Raqs Media Collective

    Page 248

    The Third Lesson: Time for Wine

    The third lesson is about time. Sometimes, to learn this lesson, we have to prepare a feast - a feast with no food, but with a lot of wine and many notes. One of the forms this has taken is a symposium on time, which was first produced in the Wide Open School at the Hayward Gallery, London, in the summer of 2012. The form is simple and remains durable.

    Fifteen or so participants sit in a large table, each with a plate and a wine glass in front of them. A set of carefully chosen notes on time printed on index cards appear on the plates, in the form of ‘courses’. Each ‘guest’ reads the ‘portion’ on his/her plate and everyone drinks, and after a round of readings (a course) the ‘table’ has a conversation. The idea is to let thinking, conversation and the requisite amount of wine do its job to add up to a stimulating consideration of time. Time itself is physically present. The cumulative, incremental effect of wine, factored through time, tranforms the experience into being enveloped inside a dilating fold. ‘Students’ cease to be students, and process elaborate theories. The reticent blossom into the loquacious, and the shy become bold. Once, at the end of the feast, people burst into song, and tears. Invariably, there has been laughter. The length of time this takes is a minimum of three hours, about the duration of a well-paced meal. As the courses gather momentum, an intensification of ideas and images, of associations and possibilities, takes hold, and we begin to get a grip on the qualia of time itself. We understand the relationship between, the presence of art. and the intensification of experience: of a different sense of time.

 


Main Studies

 
 

 
 

APPENDIX:



 



ClassicAsobi recommends

This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.





 

William Brickel, Was It Ever Fair

March 16, 2024

Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles

January 20 through March 2, 2024

 

 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 025

 
 
 



Two weeks, at Balse.

let us go deeper.

the key paradigm shift is neediness to openness.

here we, to have a nice light dose of acid techno

super catchy TDJ love

It is starting to connect. that is, as Duchamp says, choosing is the artist’s role. As this dj set is, machines enable ease to operate, as she focuses on the selection process. what it is to choose? is the question, and is our job, to seek. input of choice, output of choice. the refinement of choice. choosing to choose. in the now.

enough \

////past////present/////future/////here where sequence circles current flow - soul, existence, season. sound. time for freedom - KiNK & RACHEL ROW

Interest in now, the contemporary. Sure, contemporary music, contemporary art. Yet, everything is contemporary. you are contemporary. How you feel, is de facto, contemporary. In this moment. all. Past, future. also in instrumental.

back to some zappississimo Kompakt beskar

more serious deep thought wave WELLENTAL

much deeper acid Unter Wasse

eventually this that we arrive at, this time transissimo Papa Nugs sora

KIM GORDON
KIM GORDON

a few fun mixes to check for this evening

Isabelle Beaucamp | HÖR - February 15 / 2024

ÜBERKIKZ | HÖR - January 29 / 2024

salome

then thunder dome, candy? no gimmick, hard core.

3000

slowing down humans NIGHT TAPES. so beautifully soulful melodies of mine.

pulled again to the far away TDJ come back home.

could we say that we have lost the dream?

oh so human.

we have reached.

and here we strive, or

back to

NIGHT TAPES

NIGHT TAPES

just

Abigail Rose- Run Girl

Coma Caroline Polachek

lovedance - Tendo

what is? I ask.

select

Istanbul, I love walking. That can be part of my story.

Now we have a Tokyo staff photographer, reporting on the arts from the Far East.

till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 

 
 

Words of Wisdom

  • AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

    LESSON 19

    TUTOR: Thomas Lawson

    Page 179 - 182

    Making art is all about lining up ideas with the materials appropriate to expressing them, and good art begins when that match-up appears seamless and inevitable. Bad art happens when the ideas are uninteresting, banal, over-familiar, and the materials and handling are indifferent

    (Sherrie) Levine’s work is good art because it takes up a series of ideas and finds a fresh way to further the argument through the deployment of materials and methods well-matched to the task. The Hirst work, on the other hand, is bad art because it succumbs to glib thinking and decision-making as it seeks to capitalize on a marketing idea. The project may have begun with a reasonable chance of becoming good art, but, as the choices informing it became increasingly arbitrary and driven by an over-riding desire to sell, it went bad. And, by the way, Duchamp is probably accorded the ‘great artist’ label because his investigations and choices led to a radical rethinking of the entire project of art-making over the past century. Great art, then, is art that brings together extraordinary ideas and the materials and methodology to match.

  • There’s a narrow perspective on life that seeks to identify a purpose behind it, as if living weren’t good enough on its own. I remember in Sunday School being told that the chief end of man was to glorify God, and hearing elsewhere that I was expected to get a job, settle down, have a family. It seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that people who hunt for purpose in this way are looking to close down options and erect simplified codes of conduct that will have predictable outcomes. They want to limit choices within a range of what they consider acceptable, and try to punish anyone who thinks differently. Art exists as a rebuke to all that; it celebrates being. Making art is a communicative act, but the most stunningly liberating thing about it is that it has no purpose in the day to day. It may help make sense of things, but it prescribes nothing.

  • Making art is all about lining up ideas with the materials appropriate to expressing them, and good art begins when that match-up appears seamless and inevitable. Bad art happens when the ideas are uninteresting, banal, over-familiar, and the materials and handling are indifferent.

    (Sherrie) Levine’s work is good art because it takes up a series of ideas and finds a fresh way to further the argument through the deployment of materials and methods well-matched to the task. The Hirst work, on the other hand, is bad art because it succumbs to glib thinking and decision-making as it seeks to capitalize on a marketing idea. The project may have begun with a reasonable chance of becoming good art, but, as the choices informing it became increasingly arbitrary and driven by an overriding desire to sell, it went bad. And, by the way, Duchamp is probably accorded the ‘great artist’ label because his investigations and choices led to a radical rethinking of the entire project of art-making over the past century. Great art, then, is art that brings together extraordinary ideas and the materials and methodology to match.

  • Introduction by Robert Motherwell, page 10, Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Cabanne

    An artist must be unusually intelligent in order to grasp simultaneously many structured relations. In fact, intelligence can be considered as the capacity to grasp complex relations; in this sense, Leonardo’s intelligence, for instance, is almost beyond belief. Duchamp’s intelligence contributed many things, of course, but for me its greatest accomplishment was to take him beyond the merely “aesthetic” concerns that face every “modern” artist - whose role is neither religious nor communal, but instead secular and individual. This problem has been called “the despair of the aesthetic:” if all colors or nudes are equally pleasing to the eye, why does the artist choose one color or figure rather than another? If he does not make a purely “aesthetic” choice, he must look for further criteria on which to base his value judgments. Kierkegaard held that artistic criteria were first the real of the aesthetic, then the ethical, then the realm of the holy. Duchamp, as a nonbeliever, could not have accepted holiness as a criterion but, in setting up for himself complex technical problems or new ways of expressing erotic subject matter, for instance, he did find an ethic beyond the “aesthetic” for his ultimate choices. And his most successful works, paradoxically, take on that indirect beauty achieved only by those artists who have been concerned with more than the merely sensuous. In this way, Duchamp’s intelligence accomplished nearly everything possible within the reach of a modern artist, earning him the unlimited and fully justified respect of successive small groups of admirers throughout his life. But, as he often says in the following pages, it is posterity who will judge, and he, like Stendhal, had more faith in posterity than in his contemporaries. At the same time, one learns from his conversations of an extraordinary artistic adventure, filled with direction, discipline, and disdain for art as a trade and for the repetition of what has already been done. 

 


Main Studies

 
 

 
 

APPENDIX:



 


ClassicAsobi recommends

This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.