Kurtág Kafka Fragments

The moonlit night dazzled us. 

Birds shrieked in the trees. 

There was a rush of wind in the fields. 

We crawled through the dust, a pair of snakes.

There is a destination, but no path to it;

what we call a path is hesitation. 

None sing as purely as those in deepest hell; 

it is their singing we take for the singing of angels.  

The true path goes by way of a rope

that is suspended not high up,

but rather just above the ground.

It's purpose seems to be more 

to make one stumble

than walked upon.

Kurtág: Kafka Fragments

ROH

Photos Netia Jones

Saint John's Passion

"When the floodwaters of our sin have receded, 

then appears the rainbow as a sign of God's mercy."

Bach: Saint John's Passion
Barbican

Bloody Parsifal

"...oh, what unforgiven sin am I deemed guilty?"

In this bloody spiritual crisis powerful men full of blood fear they are losing touch with God, while blasphemous women are bloody sinners, seducers and sorcerers, excluded from the clan. 

Can renunciation and compassion save these people in this apocalyptic sea of blood ?

MET

Mutual Empathy

President Obama's Israel Speech

"Having demonstrated empathy for Israel, Obama then asked Israelis to feel empathy for Palestinians... urged both sides to "think anew" about the intractable conflict and break out of the "formulas and habits that have blocked progress for so long.""

speech

The Power of Old Clothes

Sterling Ruby: EXHM

(Exhumation)

"Fabric collages as allegories for the burdens that plague contemporary existence"

Hauser&Wirth

Basics

Robert Rauchenberg: Jammers

Stitched fetishes of love and loss, faded memories, fragments of souvenirs.

Gagosian

Bloody Reanimation

Sterling Ruby: EXHM

"Discarded, buried and collected materials reanimated via burning, boiling, melding, filling, stuffing and glazing as a redemption of past mishaps and failures."

Hauser&Wirth

Landscape and Character

Roy Lichtenstein: Chinese Landscapes

"Sublime simplicity with a detached "mechanical" approach... and bold, enigmatic gestural brushstrokes at the painting's horizon line... as a reflection of the artist's character."

Yale 

Tate

Marks of Ideas

"There are certain marks, like these, that I am fond of using because they have no basis in reality, only in ideas."

Roy Lichtenstein

"Lichtenstein is a Homo Imago, a new species of “image man” whose touchstones come from mass media, from printed images and not of life."

Hal Foster

Tate

A Sea of Mistery

Roy Lichtenstein: Dotted Seascapes

"No matter what you touch and you wish to know about, you end up in a sea of mystery. You see there's no beginning or end, you can go back as far as you want, forward as far as you want, but you never got to it, it's like the essence, it's that right, it remains. This is the greatest damn thing about the universe. That we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can't grasp it. And it's meant to be that way, do y'know. And there's where our reverence should come in. Before everything, the littlest thing as well as the greatest. The tiniest, the horseshit, as well as the angels, do y'know what I mean. It's all mystery. All impenetrable, as it were, right?"

Henry Miller

Tate

Hope Pope

Pope Francis

Pope Benedict

Dalai Lama

Skype Love

Bendi

New Pope

"Francis seems to be an opponent of austerity, most notably during his time as spiritual leader of Argentina when the country defaulted on its debt in 2002 … When the debt crisis hit in 2002, the church called in strong terms for a debt restructuring to take place which privileged social programs above debt repayment. They argued that the true problems in the Argentinian economy were, in their words, “social exclusion, a growing gap between rich and poor, insecurity, corruption, social and family violence, serious deficiencies in the educational system and in public health, the negative consequences of globalization and the tyranny of the markets.”

more

Ambiguity

Sherrie Levine: Avant-Garde ans Kitsch 2002

"We live our lives in the midst of ambiguities we will never resolve. When we die our heads will still be filled with a few stupid certitudes mixed in with some more or less good ideas, and we are never going to know which are which. There is no certainty."

Jonathan Rée

Alternate Realities

Giolight chandelier Johanna Grawunder 2008

„Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality – call it an alternate reality – to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.”

Haruki Murakami: South of the Border, West of the Sun

LACMA

Glances

 Marjane Satrapi

"The subjects' sideways glances invite us to decipher the mystery of their thoughts."

Pacific Ocean

Roly-Poly

Seated Female Figure

2500-1500 BC

Northern Afghanistan

LACMA

Sculpto-Painting 2

Provocative and Natural Form Organization

Knud Merrild

1933

LACMA

Sculpto-Painting

Woman with Hat

1916 

Coquette

1948

Alexander Archipenko

"faceted planes and negative space to create a new way of looking at the human figure, showing a number of views of the subject simultaneously"

LACMA