Scottee’s fabulous night of alternative performance, teleported to a tent, Saturday afternoon, in a field, in the rain. Who would have thought?! It worked brilliantly. Performances from Scottee himself, Annabel Sings, Nando Messias, Masumi Tipsy Saito, Theo Adams, The Tenor Ladies… loved it. Pix here.
Back home at The Ghetto…
NYT article here. We like. Check the slideshow, and look out for more exhibitions.
I claim for the image the humility and powers of a madeleine. Chris Marker’s seminal hypermedia work Immemory has been re-released in a format compatible with OS X. This is very good news for Marker fans: Immemory is an important work, which has languished for the past few years in the ‘dead media’ pool: the original version, from the 1990s, required MacOS ‘Classic’ to run. There doesn’t seem to be a discount for those of us who purchased the original version, but Immemory — unlike most ‘multimedia CDROMs’ of the time, is actually [appropriately, from recollection] worth paying for twice. …
And yes, yugen… To achieve the end of yugen, art had sometimes been stripped of its color and glitter lest these externals distract; a bowl of highly polished silver reflects more than it suggests, but one of oxidized silver has the mysterious beauty of stillness, as Seami realized when he used for stillness the simile of snow piling in a silver bowl. Or one may prize such a bowl for the tarnished quality itself, for its oldness, for its imperfection, and this is the point where we feel sabi. […] The love for the fallen flower, for the moon obscured …
A fragmentary translation of Zeami [世阿弥 元清]’s The Nine Stages of the Noh in Order served as both inspiration and creative headfuck for me during my time in Tokyo. As an outsider to the performance tradition in which it’s founded, The Nine Stages is opaque, yet provocative: the image of the Flower of Stillness — snow piling in a silver bowl — abides with me, and in my work. The Nine Stages of the Noh in Order Higher stages Flower of the miraculous – transcends power of speech and working of mind due to the yugen of a master actor. …
How few crowd shots I have. Those there are, are mostly compositions of faces, foreshortened by a long lens, flattened into a single plane. And not an absence of crowds, only, in my pictures — absence of the space for crowds, absence of space itself. What the world is: bodies & light.
At Anne-Fay’s, in swine flu quarantine limbo. So no shots of Nando’s performance at EYHO last night, which saddens me. Instead, been catching up on mailing-list reading and thinking about images, in halt compensation for inability to go out and make them. More on that later, but first a note to self, bookmarking a short thread on the Empyre list’s discursions around Relational Aesthetics this month. Reminded me I’ve never read Barthe’s Camera Lucida, so have a 2nd-hand copy on its way from Amazon… of which, I would be very interested to read James Elkin’s “Camera Dolorosa” in History of …