The Wind #6

Shomali Plain, north of Kabul - Simon Norfolk, Afghanistan: chronotopia, 2002

At sea #9

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In London next week: a screening of The Forgotten Space, followed the next day by a panel discussion with Allan Sekula, Noël Burch and Benjamin Buchloh. Ongoing: The Robinson Institute. Also: interviews on art and politics with Nicole Brenez & Thomas Beard; Modernity Revisited; that troublesome Godard period I & II; a letter from Danièle Huillet; Antoine on Raya M; and some pop music.

Realism(s) #18, or: near the chapel, the draught is unbearable

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The massive house of culture encloses minds which are constantly trying to re-decorate it. The cinema is a room in the house, an essential part of the structure. The room has connecting doors and a few windows. The doors, however, are papered with cobwebs and the windows opaque with grime. Beings, supposedly rational, probably human, people the space between the walls, though the lack of light makes precise observation difficult. The room's inhabitants gesticulate continually, mutter printable pieties, stumble up and down. Even though their English is excellent, they seem to have forgotten that the rest of the house surrounds them. They think that the limits of their room are the limits of existence, and they firmly believe what they do within the small space is enough. Like the sheets which have not changed for decades, the ideas which burden the ever malignant air have outlived their inspiration. The people are trapped in their gestures, in their words, in their newspapers. Like the characters in The Exterminating Angel, they dream of freedom (from and to what they cannot remember), kill the occasional stray lamb, even commit suicide every now and again, but since they cannot understand why they are captives in an unbarred room, they continue as before. Seldom but sometimes one of them lights a match, an attempt to see around the cage, but the gusts which ricochet within the running walls, constantly unrepaired by the absent landlord, immediately extinguish the flame and any hope of illumination. This they accept as inevitable, and the act, which emphasises and isolates a single hand, becomes a self-sufficient ritual. The hand, its shape, its crevices, is discussed, debated, defended and derided, often even interviewed. For the lack of anything else it becomes the focus of the room. Its owner loses himself in contemplation, forgetting the others in the room and the room itself. The house is long forgotten.

But under the house in the unpartitioned, dingy cellar where the beams which support the structure stand unconcealed, and where everyone has matches. . . .

--Simon Hartog's polemic inspired by Lindsay Anderson's if... (that "romantic phantasy born of political impotence") in the third issue of Cinim, Spring 1969, generously uploaded here. Image: Buñuel's El ángel exterminador, 1962. Title refers to Kafka's Amerika and Straub-Huillet's film Klassenverhältnisse, in which Karl's candle is repeatedly extinguished by the draught circulating in Mr. Pollunder's house: "here there were so many empty rooms, whose sole purpose was to make a hollow sound when you knocked on their doors."

This needle of the world #2

Clarification - Paul Klee, 1932, oil on canvas

Realism(s) #17, or: blanc merité

OPALKA 1965 / 1 - ∞ [detail] - Roman Opalka, 1965-2011, acrylic on canvas

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In 1965, Roman Opalka started counting from one to infinity, recording every number on a series of 196 x 135 cm canvases. Since 1972, each new grey canvas was gradually whitened by approx. 1% each time, and by 2008 the paintings consisted entirely of white upon white. Opalka painted into this void for three years before completing the work at the only possible point: his death, on August 6th, 2011. An obituary in the bourgeois press, perhaps impressed by the almost mechanical rationality of this exercise, noted: 'Some critics saw his project as a sort of suicide, and he did not altogether dispute that.'

ASLSP #2

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As the AV festival continues, so does the 744-hour Radio Boredcast — listening infrequently, I've heard more than a few unexpected sounds amidst the diverse noise. Some highlights from the slow cinema weekend: the Saturday/Sunday triple-bill of The Turin Horse, Two Years at Sea and Century of Birthing; the Pig Iron shot from Benning's Milwaukee/Duisberg (best seen in tandem with a trip to the SSI blast furnace at South Gare); Susan Stenger's Full Circle; Torsten Lauschmann and this. Also, Lumière's Acontecimientos 2011 has been published — some addenda to my list: Julia Holter's FACT mix; Grouper's Violet Replacement European dates; and, re: inflexion points, Paul Mason's LSE lecture, Notes on the Inorganic part I & II, and Our Operaismo [pdf].

No comment #7

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Whitley Bay, walking between the boarded up sea-front buildings. Something has finished here, we agree. Something is over. But at least they haven't begun the regeneration yet. They're going to turn it into a cultural quarter. Imagine that! A cultural quarter, where there was once the funfair and golden sands.

It was the same in the city. W. was unimpressed by the regeneration of the quayside, with its so-called public art. Public art is invariably a form of marketing for property development, he says. It's inevitably the forerunner of gentrification.

W. is an enemy of art. We ought to fine artists rather than subsidise them, he says. They ought to be subject to systematic purges. He's never doubted we need some kind of Cultural Revolution.

The real art of the city is industrial, of course, W. says. Spiller's Wharf. The High Bridge. The four storeys of the flax mill in the Ouseburn Valley...

W. likes to imagine the people of the city, the old working class, coming to reclaim the quayside. What need did anchor-smiths and salt-panners have for a cultural quarter? Why can't the descendants of the keelmen, of the rope-makers and wagon-drivers, come and retake the new ghettoes for the rich? In his imagination, W. says, a great army of Geordies storm along the river, smashing the public art and tearing down the new buildings.

--Lars Iyer, Dogma, 2012, p.73-4. Image: the John Heartfield exhibition at Side Gallery, Newcastle. Sadly, the very impressive Spiller's Mill was demolished a few months ago: by the time I got there, nothing was left.

ASLSP

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Worth noting: this year's AV festival, titled As Slow As Possible (after John Cage's Organ²/ASLSP, opens across the North East tomorrow. It's a thoughtful, extensive programme, featuring a bunch of films that are screening here in the UK for the first and possibly last time: James Benning's Nightfall and Milwaukee / Duisburg, Lav Diaz's Melancholia, Century of Birthing, and Raya Martin's Independencia. Otherwise, too much media to list, but also of note: Sivaroj Kongsakul's Eternity, The Time is Out of Joint, new and old work by Tarr and Kelemen, a few walks, and welcome opportunities to see some more familiar works projected to scale, e.g. La libertad, Honor de cavalleria, Juventude em marcha and Double Tide.