BALSE NEWSLETTER 034

 








Two weeks, at Balse.




So, he tells me to explain,

as it will help us.

Eventually, I said, sure,

let’s do it.

it is about selecting.

Problems of marketing - anti-marketing starter pack
I have not yet watched the Manufacturing Consent, now on my list. He introduced me to Corporate Music - How to Compose with no Soul, which is a great watch as well. Episode 4, Publicity And Advertising, Ways Of Seeing (BBC Four, Presented by John Berger). “when everybody’s social class is more or less determined by birth, a personal envy is a less familiar notion. And without social envy, glamour cannot exist. Envy becomes a common emotion when a society is moved towards democracy and stopped halfway, where status is open to anyone, but only enjoyed by a few.” Brilliant doc.


A video recording of the Pierre Huyghe's Exhibition at Punta Della Dogana, Venice. Glad, 10 favorite contemporary artists of today. Pierre is in our top three favorite contemporary artists list that we are working on right now. Berlinde De Bruyckere also in top three.

Marseille Skate video. stylish skateboard video.

LA Photographer, Adali Schell, an impressive young photographer here.

The Comet / Poppea
An opera presented by MOCA and The Industry

Composed by George Lewis
Libretto by Douglas Kearney
Concept & Direction by Yuval Sharon






This was a very well made review of Perfect Days, by Wim Wenders. If you haven't seen it, you may not want to see it. Or, well, just watch it. It is pretty inspiring. 無心 'mushin' -
Little appreciations in a day. 鏡 ‘kagami’ or mirror. reflection. 木漏れ日’komorebi’


You do want to hear this - Alva Noto - HYbr:ID Sync Inter. ALVA NOTO, a favorite of ours since the 90’s. But it wasn’t until this year that I havegone back, thanks to KOMPAKT and Qubouz.








Herzog’s remarks on Pschyco Analysis was refreshing. I was very fascinated with Freud and Jung but this was a fresh breeze into my brain to balance the influence.


From time to time, I like to watch these gliders fly in the sky. Such a cool feeling.

But this might be the most important clip in the last two weeks - XENOMORPH by Heaven Sent Honey. GIGER.

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.”―Rainer Maria Rilke,Duino Elegies

WHO, if I cried out, might hear me – among the ranked Angels? Even if One suddenly clasped me to his heart I would die of the force of his being. For Beauty is only the infant of scarcely endurable Terror, and we are amazed when it casually spares us. Every Angel is terrible. - Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, First Elegy

Coco Young - Passage

NIGHT GALLERY

MAY 4 - JUNE 15, 2024

 

Venezia Biennale - Giardini - FRANCE
 
 

Words of Wisdom

 

Mimemata 

NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART - Chapter 2 Art as Idea page 122 


Thinking about art has been dominated by the concept of 'mimesis' since antiquity. Freely translated, the ancient Greek term refers to the 'imitation' of nature which human beings sought to recreate in their art until well into the nineteenth century. The degree to which the creator succeeds in this goal has always been one of the most important benchmarks for the quality of the work of art. Successful mimesis resulted in what the Greeks - who did not have a word for visual artworks - called mimemata (singular mimema: the result of imitation). The concept is of the utmost importance to any understanding of Western art history. Mimesis was the focus of Western visual culture from the antique era until the paradigm shift of Impressionism and its offshoots began to undermine the principle from the latter part of the nineteenth century. No artist before then had dared to produce art that did not consider nature its ultimate model. To this day, many people still judge a work's merit in terms of its mimetic qualities. Consequently, the principle of imitation was at the forefront of the artist's possibilities and limitations for centuries. The techniques of oil painting and linear perspective, for instance, did not just develop out of nowhere but were vital steps in the ancient quest for perfection in the emulation of reality that has typified Western art. Even more than that, the notion that art is essentially an imitation of nature actually fed through over time into the visual culture of non-Western religions and cultures. The ancient Greek concept played an active part, for instance, in the visualisation of Buddhism, whose founder was represented symbolically during the religion's first centuries (up to the fourth century BCE). It was only after Alexander the Great's conquests in the Indus Valley that the Buddha began to be depicted as the idealised human figure we know today [2.6]. Mimesis might thus appear simple and self-evident at first sight, yet it is far from being so. Simulating what we see is not a straightforward process. The term itself is not unambiguous either and has undergone various shifts in meaning since ancient times. Over the centuries, mimesis became an umbrella concept taking in ideas such as imitation, representation, similitudo, simulacrum and prototypum. If we delve more deeply into the phenomenon, which is precisely what occurred in antique Greek culture, emulation proves to be highly complex. Artists can, for instance, imitate nature in an idealised way by seeking to perfect it, but they can also strive for a 'photographic' realism [2.7, 2.8] or give free rein to their creativity and imagine things that cannot be imitated, as they do not actually exist. The centaurs on the famous Parthenon frieze [2.9 ] appear lifelike, but these hybrid mythological beings - half human, half horse - are obviously a product of human imagination.


NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART - Chapter 2 Art as Idea
Ekphrasis page 128


One final concept from Greek antiquity that deserves some explanation here, even though it is not directly related to art theory, is ekphrasis (Exparis or descriptio in Latin) meaning an artful description. Ekphrasis was a standard part of the progymnasmata, the exercises given to students of rhetoric. Would-be orators had to describe a sculpture or painting as vividly and accurately as possible, so that the visual narrative they created would allow their audience to form a clear idea of the work. Theorists of rhetoric were quick to appreciate this ability to 'speak to the imagination'. Ekphrasis had a substantial impact on art in the Renaissance as it enabled the artists of the time to work in the opposite direction. Knowledge of antique art was limited in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, not only outside Italy but within the birthplace of Renaissance art itself. Barely any trace had survived of paintings from antiquity; all that remained of Zeuxis and Apelles' masterpieces were the beautiful descriptions of Horace and Pliny, and so their texts, along with those of other authors, began to be used in an attempt to reconstruct antique art. The translation from image to word was thus reversed, as words were turned back into images. The so-called Calumny of Apelles - a description of an allegorical composition by the most famous Greek sculptor - is an example as striking as it is well known. The painting was described by Lucian and was drawn and painted by numerous Renaissance masters, including Botticelli, Mantegna, Raphael and Bruegel.


Reina Mikame - Following the Light

Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Tokyo

GHOST BRUSH - NOH Sangho

YUKIKOMIZUTANI

May 17 to June 15, 2024

Henri Cartier-Bresson

People of Moscow

Page 66


I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and even less a journalist. What I am looking for, above all else, is to be attentive to life….


The camera is not the right instrument to provide the whys and wherefores of things; it is, rather, designed to evoke, and in the best cases—in its own intuitive way—it asks questions and gives answers at the same time. I have thus used it in an active flânerie, in search of "objective chance."




WHAT WILL YOU GIVE? Veronica Fernandez Tidawhitney Lek

Main Studies

 
 

Stories from Africa : Group Show「Resonant Harmonies」

Theaster Gates: Afro-Mingei

 
 

APPENDIX:

 

Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight


ClassicAsobi recommends

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







 

Elaine Stocki

Night Gallery, LA, North Gallery chapel viewing room through June 15th, 2024
 

Clare Woods - I Blame Nature

NIGHT GALLERY, LA
 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 033

 





Two weeks, at Balse.


In the desert. The harsh Joshua Tree, Palm Springs, LV, then the soothing breeze that is the Pacific Ocean. Julio. Second half of this year. Refocusing on the rest of the year.

‘if we resist or ignore an archetype, it will possess us’ - Jung

death and rebirth. life is death, death is life.

access to great wisdom. day after day, friendship that arrived from Tokyo.



origins of ideas, ‘as you walk around the woods. derivative to original, somewhere along this axis. Verisimilitude, it is the idea behind works of art that make the work interesting.’ ‘quieting the mind and the body, empty the mind.’ emptying the mind is an impossibility. Modified Transcendental Meditation Method. The closer that we look at any subject the more you see. Ideas will inexorably manifest itself….background cognitive process.’



more archetypal journey - choosing a path of change.

are you living a lie? the acid test. Initiation into life. Individuation and courage. The glorious freedom that awaits. lie vs truth. Need to make the transition alone. Are they ready to accept the call to rebirth. To live again. The Fountain.



Ask new and different question. Asking questions is a way of thinking. The reality is, we don’t have the answers. We lose sight of opportunities that are right in front of us.

What makes us uniquely human is our creativity. Curiosity. Be clumsy students of something, anything.



Kishio Suga “There Is Neither Such Thing as Being, Nor Such Thing as Not Being”

April 27 - June 8, 2024

TOMIO KOYAMA GALLERY ROPPONGI

JACQUEMUS Capri.

Gautier, Odilon Redon, Gustav Moreau the Apparition with Salome - late 19th and early 20th century Paris. Symbolist movement.

Learning From Past Lives

Love Acid Arab

Döne Döne Acid Arab

Gouloulou Acid Arab




The art of mourning - Taryn Simon
’this absolutely felt like it needed to be sonic…and something beyond language, beyond image…beyond definition that is inarticulable.’






DJ set

Richie Hawtin - Womb, Tokyo 20.04.2024



literature - Brave New World


till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 

Tony Cragg

Marian Goodman Gallery

1120 Seward Street Los Angeles | 27 April - 29 June 2024
 
 

Words of Wisdom

 

A disservice, a slander, a libel-for angelology as properly constituted has nothing to do with Touched by an Angel or Hummel figurines. Angelology, rather, is the discipline that probes the ecstasies of transcendence, the ineffable nature of meaning that permeates reality, in a space with which words themselves can't fully grapple. Just because angelology reduces us to the wooliest of superlatives -"infinite," "eternal," "ecstasy," "transcendence" —doesn't mean that they don't refer to that something, nor is it a reason to abandon angels themselves to the saccharine and the mawkish.  The poet and folk musician Leonard Cohen, a consummately nonmawkish and antisaccharine artist, a lover but not a sentimentalist, was asked in a 1984 interview by the journalist Robert Sward of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about his affection for the word "angel." Detailing his attraction to the way the term was used by those great poets of beatitude Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso, Cohen admits that "I never knew what they meant, except that it was a designation for a human being and that it affirmed the light in an individual." This is a telling answer about the angelic, our attractions to them whether in Paradise Lost or It's a Wonderful Life, the manner in which such beings reflect the divinity in humanity and the humanity in divinity. They are otherworldly but near; alien but familiar; pure alterity and yet totally personal. Angels are the waystation between us and the unapproachable God. Cohen explains how the Beat poets were anything but maudlin in their attraction to the image of the angel; such a being to them wasn't evidence of cheap faith, but rather of the connections between the suffering soul and something in the great beyond, a light in the perennial darkness. "An angel is only a messenger, only a channel," Cohen says, and yet we're angels to each other, for the "fact that somebody can bring you the light, and you feel it, you feel healed or situated. And it's a migratory gift," suggesting that angels themselves are as much verb as noun. - ELYSIUM, a visual history of angelology, by Ed Simon, Introduction - page 8

FG: I think a good work is a work that doesn't know its audience. Upon its creation, it doesn't yet know what its audience is, because otherwise it's just communication. Communication is about the transfer of information between two pre-constituted subjects. But the question mark is what I'm obsessed with — and I think Pierre is also. You don't know the identity of the audience or the viewer. And I think that's crucial, not to presuppose.  Otherwise, you do bad work.

AS: I agree with you. The work should not be addressed intentionally to an audience as such. It should be indifferent. To push the idea further, it can also exist independent of the presence of the viewer, which is something essential in Pierre's work. He often says, "I'm not exhibiting some thing to someone. I'm exhibiting someone to something.” 

FG: It's very difficult to presuppose what the human really is. The only definition of the human I can come up with is that it's something always in the process of transformation of de-identifying itself to become itself.

AS: The human is an escape route.

Ursula magazine -  artists Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni in conversation with Anne Stenne about possible futures and the influence of Pierre Huyghe, page 73





Willem de Kooning e l'Italia

Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice

Main Studies

 
 

Nina Canell / Reijiro Wada 42 Days

SCAI THE BATH HOUSE

Thu. 15 February - Sat. 25 May, 2024
 
 

APPENDIX:

 

Self and Beyond, a group exhibition

Ota FineArts Tokyo

5/11 - 6/15/2024






ClassicAsobi recommends

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






 
 

Morimura Yasumasa　Five Characters in a Transformer

ShugoArts

2024.4.19 Fri - 6.1 Sat