Turned out Banksy’s ‘event’ was just around the corner from here in Dalston. A few pictures before my camera died. It was a good weekend for art: also Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet at the White Cube, and the exhibition of Henry Wellcome’s extraordinary collection of things at the British Museum. And a mango lassi at the Rasa festival in Hannover Square.
More un-London, monsoon-like rain. I am an enemy of symbols. Symbol is too narrow a concept for me in the sense that symbols exist in order to be deciphered. An artistic image on the other hand is not to be deciphered, it is an equivalent of the world around us. Rain in Solaris is not a symbol, it is only rain which at certain moment has particular significance to the hero. But it does not symbolise anything. It only expresses. This rain is an artistic image. Symbol for me is something too complicated. Andrei Tarkovski, Interview Ein Feind der Symbolik …
OLEDs and epaper with the contrast and resolution of the real thing, foldable and flypost-able like the real thing. Wait til you see what I have in my pocket. And cinema is worrried about HDTV! Let pixel-perfect flowers of the new new media bloom. From Headmap: The next generation of devices is going to give us new animals, less easilly defined with preconceived ideas An out-of-content excerpt which fills me with a dreadful excitement. Which reminds me. Banksy does live animals later this month.
Tim points out that there’s a new Criterion DVD of Stan Brakhage available. Good year for experimental film (so far). The ones I really really want to find are a couple of short things I saw at the London Film Makers’ Co-operative screenings in Camden about 10 years ago. I can’t remember the titles, but I think they were by John Tappendam, about whom I know nothing. One was black and white, high contrast, the other colour. Both were formalist things probably made by filming the shadows cast by hanging mobiles or similar. Very fine.
The bfi has released its Norman McLaren 2 DVD ‘Collector’s Edition’ set. Mine turned up today. Beautiful. Fantastic transfer, and good selection of films. Lines Horizontal (1961), Mosaic (1965) and Synchromy (1971) are extraordinary visual toccatas. Expensive, but worth it. Buy a video projector, tape down the curtains, and turn up the volume.
There’s a big Tillmans retrospective on at the moment at Tate Britain; we’re going to make a day of it tomorrow and, if the weather’s nice, catch the new Tate river bus up to Tate Modern afterwards. I’m listening to Dub Tractor’s More or Less Mono. Sparkly music for an otherwise glum day.
Marcell Iványi’s lovely short film, Wind. Good articles in p.o.v magazine from a few years ago. Can’t find a copy anywhere (I saw it at a festival) [edit: 2013: here’s a copy on YouTube], although there were at one point rumours online that its included on a Hungarian VHS of Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Strange world.
(Quoted in the July 2003 World of Interiors (p.119)): Don’t look at it — just glance! Sometimes in a mere glance one can see more than in the close scrutiny of a thousand details.