Tag: transience

Kiki Smith, Heute, 2008

“Ms. Smith, whose younger sister Beatrice died with AIDS in 1988, has long been fixated on the fragility of the human body. In her 2008 sculpture “Heute (Now),” left, on view in Ms. Smith’s Brooklyn Museum show, a coffin in unfinished knotty pine holds meticulous lamp-worked glass dandelions, produced by the glass artist David Willis, sprouting from its interior. (It also represents another thread that has run through her work for decades: an interest in unusual juxtapositions of materials.) Although the date of the work corresponds to the 20th anniversary of her sister’s death, Ms. Smith said she was not conscious of this when she made it; rather, the piece speaks to her fascination with natural-world cycles of death and renewal.”

—NY Times 

Mona Hatoum. (British of Palestinian origin, born in Beirut, Lebanon, 1952). + and -. 1994-2004. Sand , steel, aluminum, and electric motor, 10 5/8″ (27 cm) high x 13′ 1 ½” (400.1 cm) diameter. Fractional and promised gift of Jerry Speyer and purchase. © 2007 Mona Hatoum

“This work is a large-scale re-creation of the kinetic sculpture Self-Erasing Drawing Hatoum made in 1979. Replacing conventional artists’ tools (pencil and paper, paint and canvas) with a motorized, toothed metal arm and a circular bed of sand, Hatoum mechanizes the practices of mark-making and erasure. At a rate of five rotations per minute, the sculpture’s hypnotic and continual grooving and smoothing of sand evokes polarities of building and destroying, existence and disappearance, displacement and migration.“

–MoMA

mortalpractice:

Everything Important

happens behind my back.
Water lilies open, then close.
Nations are born. Friends up and leave
their sturdy bodies. The stonechat takes flight.
A son learns to whistle. A daughter finds
the greatest common factor, then falls
in love. One morning the leaves
are off the elm and halfway down the block.
And in the spring, however faithfully I check
for the first bloom along the secret alley
of camellias, I will be looking away,
will see them only once they’re a jostling palaver
of pink and white, so impossible a brightness
I will forget to be disappointed.

— Catherine Abbey Hodges, Instead of Sadness

Domestic

If, when studying road atlases
while taking, as you call it, your
morning dump, you shout down to
me names like Miami City, Franconia,
Cancún, as places for you to take
me to from here, can I help it if

all I can think is things that are
stupid, like he loves me he loves me
not? I don’t think so. No more
than, some mornings, waking to your
hands around me, and remembering
these are the fingers, the hands I’ve

over and over given myself to, I can
stop myself from wondering does that
mean they’re the same I’ll grow
old with. Yesterday, in the café I
keep meaning to show you, I thought
this is how I’ll die maybe, alone,

somewhere too far away from wherever
you are then, my heart racing from
espresso and too many cigarettes,
my head down on the table’s cool
marble, and the ceiling fan turning
slowly above me, like fortune, the

part of fortune that’s half-wished-
for only—it did not seem the worst
way. I thought this is another of
those things I’m always forgetting
to tell you, or don’t choose to
tell you, or I tell you but only

in the same way, each morning, I
keep myself from saying too loud I
love you until the moment you flush
the toilet, then I say it, when the
rumble of water running down through
the house could mean anything: flood,

your feet descending the stairs any
moment; any moment the whole world,
all I want of the world, coming down.

– Carl Phillips 

Is it possible to be a revolutionary and love flowers? by Camille Henrot

The exhibition of Paris based artist Camille Henrot is like a premonition of fresh spring with profound intrinsic meaning inside. Her practice of ikebana is linked to the idea of ‘art as autotransformation’. Camille Henrot perpetuates, in her own way, the Japanese art of the bouquet, where the arrangement of flowers is supposed to reflect the state of mind of the person who creates it. Just as values are embodied in natural things, supposedly innocuous flowers take on the aura of powerful and destructive weapons in the hands of the artist.

“My initial attraction to ikebana has to do with how it corresponds to the idea of an object meant to appease a troubled soul. Unlike ‘western’ art, which seeks to ward off the anguish of death through the creation of imperishable works, ikebana sets out (to console us through the intervention of elements. Through this project, I also had an ambition to attack in some small way the mental hierarchy specific to western culture that always has a tendency to idealise the arts of discourse and to undervalue the everyday arts such as flower arranging. Here, one is reminded of one of the major themes of Zen anti-rationalism, neatly summed up in the following adage: “Those who know do not speak and those who speak do not know.”" 

Source: cargocollective.com