two

The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk, 2008:

Collectors -
1. The Proud Ones, those pleased to show their collections to the world (they predominate in the West).
2. The Bashful Ones, who hide away all they have accumulated (an unmodern disposition).

'Cuadrado', León Ferrari, Heliography print on paper, 100 x 100 cm,
1982

Olympics in Moscow, USSR (click on image for video),
1980

The time spent looking at something that poses itself as a challenge to the eye is directly proportional to the depth of the connection one builds with a subject.

The connection is physical, as well as temporal - resulting in the foundation of intimacy.

Click on images to expand

I am large, I contain multitudes
~
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1855

The Map of Tendre (Carte de Tendre or Carte du Tendre) was a French map of an imaginary land called Tendre produced by several hands (including Catherine de Rambouillet). It appeared as an engraving (attributed to François Chauveau) in the first part of Madeleine de Scudéry's 1654-61 novel Clélie.

Birmingham Spaghetti Junction

The title of Maryam Tafakory’s video Nazarbazi (2022) translates (from Farsi) as ‘the play of glances’

Jen Calleja, Vehicle, 2023

Birgit Jurgenssen, Standbein, 1977

Zachary Epcar, The Canyon, 2020

Mega-carnivore dinosaur footprint from a Kayentapus ambrokholohali found in Lethoso

Lucy Skaer, Sticks and Stones, mixed media, 2013-15

victorian chair caster

Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, 1994

Helena Almeida, Untitled, 2020

Towards the end of his life Caillois came to the conclusion that the rational and the imaginary do not necessarily have to be at odds with each other...he described and analyzed “the natural fantastic” as a series of phenomena in nature which testify to an underlying imaginary that is part of the real.

Marion Endt-Jones, The treasures of memory and knowledge”: Ilana Halperin’s Minerals of New York, 2019

‘Here, taking us beyond mimesis to the edge of “mimicry,” a body map is lived and even explored as a site as, in turn, a city is tailored to a body—one’s own and that of loved ones. Her city fits (and “fashions”) a body of love. It is an intimate geography, a body-city on a tender map. As in Scudéry’s map, where exterior landscape reads as interior, emotions are architecturally rendered and spatialized along a course.’

If one does not read space, one cannot interact with it.
Where there is no interaction, there is isolation -
the inside without the outside - which is a paradox because the inside requires an outside in order to define itself.

Mimicry is a form of interaction that escapes language, it connects to the environment by renouncing the active intention to do so.
Rather than drawing a connection between separate entities, its efficacy lies in the erasure of borders, in a gentle submission to the everything and nothing: a blending into motion, a kneading.

By being in a state of continuous, resilient motion, the mimicking creature is oblivious of issues of orientation,
Free of this concern and necessity, it has no need to map out the environment - as the navigation of space, precedes and outruns its understanding. The mapping occurs and immediately expires
Purposeless meandering in fact (errare), leads to a more intimate knowledge of space and its assets, allowing one mimicking creature to abandon the idea self ownership, and to regard everything as a whole, where each one takes what is present, available and needed, with the same generosity that they are willing to return to the world.

To map is to perform a preventive gesture in light of the threat of isolation and misunderstanding,
But the mimo being relates to the environment empathetically - by drawing space without a pretence to describe its true configuration,
but rather unconsciously generating, time and time again a new, authentic interaction with it: result of a union of subject + time + motion +surface.

The Mimo creature recognises that there is no distinction between the inside and the outside of itself.

If so, then, how does one translate experience? and does communication even truly exist if the self is one with its surrounding? who's interacting with who?

footnotes that support

footnotes that explicate

footnotes that align

footnotes that disagree, argue, that turn up the heat

the meaning of poetry is internal dialogue

on women and visibility

hidden mother photography

A map may draw the inside as it were an outside, thus shifting over time. Such map is no use for orientation, it's no guide or tool, but rather the expired picture of an endless process.

firthermore, it cannot look like a map or anything like a structure,
It cannot be drawn, as (e-)motion, outruns the written mark -
It may be a sound or a smell, something that pregnates but cannot be retained -

The Art of my dreams is not an object - it is an apprehensive gesture, a habit, a gymnastic*
Acrobatic intuition
Renouncing convention, forgetting the names of things, and losing self-awareness altogether, is what makes art the only viable channel for authentic communication - it is a contradiction.

In this sense, as it refuses to say anything in particular while actually everything at once, it can never expire.
It oscillates in indecision, and it is absolutely committed to being irresolute.

it clings on to the object "eye", but it doesn't "see" itself: it is "vision".

* intuition: forgetting one’s name

an unbound infiltration of information that is not cognated, but it is cognition

The Kleptomaniac incorporates space (in-corpo: taking in, merging)
To appropriate, blend and disappear -
To claim and expand

Acting in silent revolution/ submitting to a compulsion

Anti-social --> against conventional acceptability
Anti-ownership --> the kleptomaniac takes, and often disposes, returns or gives away, the stolen objects)

Kleptomania doesn’t claim (anything),
Kleptomania is the act of claiming

Kleptomania sets matter free of restrains ownership, it eliminates the border between subject and object
It inadvertently generates cohesion.

Kleptomania: a compulsion (and therefore an uncontrollable urge) which is problematised by the societal system which defines it.
It is subversive because it breaks rules, but it does so without the intention to do so with a political motive,
it is simply a response to an environment which rejects and relentlessly belittles the kleptomaniac
Shame is what leads the kleptomaniac to act in the dark, on the margins, and through the cracks of a structure.
A lack of structure = lack of measure = insatiability = compulsion

And this shame is what shifts the recognition of this behaviour from being instinctive* (naturally grounded, just)
to compulsive* (toxic and affected)

Both mimicry and kleptomania refer to behaviours which place a subject in an inadvertently invisible and subversive relation to its environment

The unawareness of the performing agent is what makes these behaviours politically meanigful, and creative -
they are instinctive responses to input

kleptomania, however can also be read as symptom of a visceral, unconscious desire to re-claim territory in a rigid and unapologising system which has bullied the kleptomaniac,
Making them simultaneously a victim and an activist of this narrative

The glitch:
Replication, repetition, imitation,
applied indefinitely over time by all life forms, generates complexity
the accumulation of discrepancies - errors* - is at the core of evolution
For each replica of another, constitutes an individual element in a bigger scheme,
where the only possible definition is given by contrast
(the glitch, the generative error)

02.06 I pull myself out of myself to a place where I believe many have landed before - those who are driven by a desire to wander off the edges of circumstance. I believe circumstances conditiones our vision. we can never see things as they are, truly. So I'd rather rely on intuition, which differs from knowledge - and in fact it is its opposite, its nemesis, its brilliant sibling. In order to operate intuitively one must trust themselves enough to let go of any prescribed form of protection or prevention from error (from errare, meaning wandering). One must unlearn. Brancolando nel buio. Forget, ignore what they know about the outside world, to focus uniquely on the inner primordial drive to explore it. One must forget because they believe in no separation between the inside and the outside, one knows they are one and that is all there is to know

As a materialist discipline, touch is one of art history’s most valued senses. Over time, art historians have devised multiple ways to touch objects with their eyes, ears, noses, words — rather than hands — because skin-to-object contact can shorten the lifetime of certain objects they seek to preserve. In physics, when two or more objects touch they transfer charge. The objects ‘influence’ each other, sometimes ‘significantly’. Working backwards, therefore, the art historian who is significantly influenced by their object of study has also experienced the sensation of touch. In art history this transfer of charge, or moment of touch, is the élan vital of research. It is a haptic encounter, because it concerns how we experience touch both on the inside and outside of our bodies, as both sense and emotion. It is the feeling that makes us want to continue the (re)search. It was described by Roland Barthes as ‘le petit mort’… and draws itself towards André Breton’s notion of ‘objective chance’.

André Breton understood ‘objective chance’ as the “projection of subjective desire onto objective facts so as to manipulate them towards its fulfillment”. In the spirit of ‘objective chance’, the role of the art historian is to draw their own desire lines through the history of human creative endeavour to engender touch between bodies of the past and the present future. The charge that is transferred can ignite political action, empathy, apathy, disgust. It is extremely powerful — an aesthetic rather than anaesthetic of social, vis-a-vis bodily, change.

Show your mark what they want to see; what guides the graphic point, the quill, the pencil or scalpel, guides you.

Passionate Encounters but Never Sex

Erotic Encounters but Never Sex

‘Objective chance’ can also be employed as a tool to trace oppositional histories of art. It is speculative and playful, open to affinities and oblique attractions. It is based on things that feel right, rather than things that are right. As author Brian Dillon writes, “Affinity insults the academy”.