The Sixth Sense

"The sixth sense is a delicate little Aeolian harp that nature has set at the entrance to our breathing...which followed and surpassed the others. It quivers at the merest movement of metaphor; it permits human thought to sing.
I begin to think the vowel a is the vowel of immensity. It is a sound area that starts with a sigh and extends beyond all limits.
Like some soft substance, it receives the balsamic powers of infinite calm. With it, we take infinity into our lungs, and thorough it, we breathe cosmically, far from human anguish."

Gaston Bachelard

The Poetics of Space

Pussy Riot

colourful Russian female noise-group

Pussy Riot 

perform in unexpected places in Moscow
to protest for political change

listen

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin,

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish him, we pray thee!

Congregations genuflect,

Black robes brag gilt epaulettes,

Freedom's phantom's gone to heaven,

Gay Pride's chained and in detention.

KGB's chief saint descends

To guide the punks to prison vans.

Don't upset His Saintship, ladies,

Stick to making love and babies.

Crap, crap, this godliness crap!

Crap, crap, this holiness crap!

(Chorus)

Virgin Mary, Mother of God.

Be a feminist, we pray thee,

Be a feminist, we pray thee.

Bless our festering bastard-boss.

Let black cars parade the Cross.

The Missionary's in class for cash.

Meet him there, and pay his stash.

Patriarch Gundy believes in Putin.

Better believe in God, you vermin!

Fight for rights, forget the rite –

Join our protest, Holy Virgin.

(Chorus)

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin,

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, we pray thee, banish him!

Survival Kit

arts and animals

give human strength and hope

 to survive

Syrian refugee camps in Turkey and Libanon

Daydreaming

„The chief benefit of the house: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being.

Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relieved as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.

The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the daydream….It maintains man through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world.”

Gaston Bachelard

The Poetics of Space

Immensity

„Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being. The presence of an obvious immensity can point the way to intimate depth. When the dreamer really experiences the world immense, he sees himself liberated from his cares and thoughts, even from his dreams. He is no longer shut up in his weight, the prisoner of his own being."

Gaston Bachelard
The Poetics of Space

„As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space, I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being: and I smiled, because it had never occured to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! 

My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality! How terrible the world seems to those who do not know themselves! 

When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night’s own solitude in a universe without end!”

O. V. de Milosz

L'amoureuse initiation

Mask Exorcism of Lajos Vajda

apocalyptic monster-gnomes

cubist human and vegetable forms

constructivist hieroglyphics of distress:

iconic heads 

in the shadow of threatening death

with swirling colour patches

Lajos Vajda

Mask Exorcism of Eva Hesse

eccentric abstraction,

stuffed expressionism,

anti illlusion:

paintings full of life and death, 

comedy and tragedy

haunting doubts and nightmares

Eva Hesse

Mask Exorcism of Margit Anna

magic puppets 

expressing tragedy,

fear, solitude;
symbolizing man in the storm of history:

colourful naive paintings
surreal abstraction 
grotesque expressionism

Margit Anna

Margate

Margate

Turner Contemporary

Turner Snowstorm

Botond Masks

Schlaf

sleeping masks, bondaged heads:

stability and instability

calm and tension

distortion in a state of peace:

collages of steel, canvas, plastic and paper

Botond

Real and True

painting and trees

Budapest

Kazinczy utca

Bourgeois Masks

life size, fabric covered heads
hiding emotions: 
pain, doubt, hunger and desire;
cubist masks:
 embroidered, decorated patchwork 
of domestic materials
sewn together 
- joining and reparation -
to heal traumas

Louise Bourgeois

Freud Museum London

Bourgeois Totems

 mysterious, amputated fabric female torsos 

- only womb, genitals and breasts -  

laying on their backs

ready for love

holding babies, family and weapons

frightening miraculous ancient voodoo dolls

sewn together from old worn cloth

as bandage on deep wounds

Louise Bourgeois

Freud Museum London

The Turin Horse is Us

   Nietzsche cried when he witnessed a carriage driver whip his horse. 

However he cried not only for the animal, but for all of us,

living only for surviving, under rules made not by us.

God is dead - said Nietzsche - and we killed him.

And living a life without God, morality and love

 is a life that leads to the end of the world,

and there is nothing on the other side

in this majestic, elegant and emblematic work of art:

Bela Tarr's mesmerizing new film, 

The Turin Horse

Face-Off with a Lion

A Mattias Klum experience

Rusalka Again

"Man is an abomination of nature: he has turned his back to Mother Earth" 
and now lives in an artificial world. He longs to get in touch with the spirits of the forest, the ocean and the blue sky again, but the return to nature is possible only by death.
ROH
Salzburg

Masai Warrior's Cricket

 Getty images

Members of the nomadic tribe from the Laikipa region of Kenya play cricket. They use their matches to campaign against HIV, alcohol-and substance abuse, and also against female mutilation.

Shrine

in a temporary housing in Fukushima
 after the March 11 2011 earthquake and tsunami
when radiation poured into the atmosphere and environment

Photo Phyllis B. Dooney

Fragile

On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star, like tears  from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are, how fragile we are

Fragile

Pop-Op Art Fashion

Am I a typewriter?                          Am I a radio?

       A clock?                                    A rosegarden?

An armoured medieval knight?

Maria Katrantzou

Sweet Dreams

let him sleep forever
Song Dong
Barbican

Waste Not

Chinese conceptualist artist Song Dong displayed her mother's collection of over 10000 objects in Barbican, London hoarded during five decades of social and political turmoil in Peking.
The collection of thousands of old, rubbish stuff helps to understand five decades of Chinese history  with a constant struggle for survival, but also explores the role everyday objects play in our memories.

isn't this familiar?

waste not