Every man needs aesthetic ghosts in order to live. I have pursued them, sought them, hunted them down. I have experienced many forms of anxiety, many forms of hell. I have known fear and terrible solitude, the false friendship of tranquilizers and drugs, the prison of depression and mental homes. I emerged from all that one day, dazzled but sober. … I did not choose this fatal lineage, yet it is what allowed me to rise up in the heaven of artistic creation, frequent what Rimbaud called “the makers of fire,” find myself, and understand that the most important encounter in life is the encounter with one’s self.From the farewell speech of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, translated and presented as the opening monologue of the recent biopic L’amour fou.
Based on what I know of Saint Laurent from only having watched this film, a comparison to Arthur Rimbaud would be apt, perhaps drawn out over a far longer stretch of life: instead of abandoning his craft at 21 and fleeing to north Africa to become a merchant, YSL simply bought a house there, kept cranking out his culture-shifting art for the next few decades, survived the alcohol and drugs that came along with the celebrity, and slowly amassed a treasure trove of art and sculpture that sold recently for close to $500M. And yet he struggled with depression and unhappiness for all but “two moments a year”, his entire life. The NY Times review of L’amour Fou has down the sense of nihilism you get from the film’s protagonists’ lives:
To be surrounded by the most concentrated beauty the world has to offer and yet be chronically depressed is to confront the sad reality that material bounty may bring fleeting pleasure but nothing resembling peace of mind. To realize that you may have the world while still feeling as if you have nothing is to experience a closer encounter with the void than most of us are likely to have.
Other recent fashion documentaries worth watching, even if you’re like me and not really well-versed (or especially interested) in fashion:
Tag: art
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Yves Saint Laurent and Arthur Rimbaud
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Gold by Evan Roth
[Video no longer available]
Gold, an acrylic + light sculpture by Evan Roth of the Graffiti Research Lab, capturing the marker movement of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s handwriting. The way the projected light spirals through the acrylic is beautiful!
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Salman Rushdie on Ai Weiwi
The lives of artists are more fragile than their creations. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus to a little hell-hole on the Black Sea called Tomis, but his poetry has outlasted the Roman Empire. Osip Mandelstam died in a Stalinist work camp, but his poetry has outlived the Soviet Union. Federico García Lorca was killed by the thugs of Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but his poetry has survived that tyrannical regime.
We can perhaps bet on art to win over tyrants. It is the world’s artists, particularly those courageous enough to stand up against authoritarianism, for whom we need to be concerned, and for whose safety we must fight.
From Salman Rushdie’s op-ed “Dangerous Arts” in today’s New York Times, on Ai Weiwei’s arrest and detention by Chinese authorities, a matter of human rights urgency. -
Arthouse Fissures
With the Austin Museum of Art shuttering their downtown location, the city’s crackdown on home/studio spaces on the east side, the House voting to gut the funding for the Texas Commission for the Arts, and the recent news that Art Lies is ceasing publication, what could make this a bleaker month for central Texas art?
Arthouse, the 100-year-old Austin-based organization I’ve been proud to support since the days when it was still called the Texas Fine Arts Association, is beginning to show signs of fracture, despite their beautiful new façade. You can get the bigger story over at Austin360 if you’ve missed it in the news, but to summarize: exhibited art has been mishandled and censored, their admired and successful curator was fired abruptly (possibly after having written a letter of concern to the director about the above-mentioned mishandling), and some of their prominent board members and staff members have resigned in protest. There’s also a growing collective voice of concern by the artists who were to be contributing work to the upcoming 5×7 fundraising show (myself included). So far, apart from short responses directly to inquiring reporters, I don’t believe that Arthouse has issued a statement on the matter, which isn’t especially good PR in my humble opinion.
Eric Zimmerman has a nice summary of the concerns on his cablegram blog:
No one would argue against a new building, or at very least a renovation. But when you dump truckloads of cash into a designer building and neglect to budget for a curator, the person who puts the actual art in the Arthouse, there seems to be some serious priority issues. I said it before, a building is nice and all, but what you show in that building is where the rubber meets the road. I’d love to see art organizations forgo the starchitect buldings and put money into paying artists, curators, and their staff instead.
For the curatorial angle (or perhaps, the “lack of curator”), you might be interested in Wendy Vogel’s take over on …might be good.
Here’s to hoping that Arthouse can steer itself back on track as the leading space for contemporary art in Austin.
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Little Nemo Turns 100
The principal factor in my success has been an absolute desire to draw constantly. I never decided to be an artist. Simply, I could not stop myself from drawing. I drew for my own pleasure. I never wanted to know whether or not someone liked my drawings. I drew on walls, the school blackboard, old bits of paper, the walls of barns. Today I’m still as fond of drawing as when I was a kid — and that’s a long time ago… The incomparable Winsor McCay, quoted in a Los Angeles Times blog post that points out that this is the 100th anniversary of McCay’s short film Little Nemo. If you’ve never seen his animated shorts — they’re among the first examples of the medium, and yet still technically brilliant — you should hit up the YouTube and get started with Nemo…
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Videogames Are Liquid Architecture
If architecture is frozen music, then a videogame is liquid architecture. Journalist and critic Steven Poole, author of Trigger Happy, quoted in an counter-point article by Michael Mirasol posted on Roger Ebert’s blog, Why video games are indeed Art.
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Its the Dialogue of the Pieces
It’s the dialogue of the pieces, not the pieces themselves, that creates aesthetic success. From number 51 in 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick. I heard this quote this past week as part of the “Music of Interaction Design” panel at SxSWi presented by Cennydd Bowles and James Box. Here’s a short PBS NewsHour writeup about the panel with a video interview of the two designers.
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The Very Heart of Noise
I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise… George Gershwin on Rhapsody in Blue’s inspiration, the rhythm of the city train.
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Genius Childhood Recaptured at Will
But genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.
Charles Baudelaire, from The Painter of Modern Life. I often see this quoted by itself, so here’s some context:
But genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed. To this deep and joyful curiosity must be attributed that stare, animal-like in its ecstasy, which all children have when confronted with something new, whatever it may be, face or landscape, light, gilding, colours, watered silk, enchantment of beauty, enhanced by the arts of dress. A friend of mine was telling me one day how, as a small boy, he used to be present when his father was dressing, and how he had always been filled with astonishment, mixed with delight, as he looked at the arm muscle, the colour tones of the skin tinged with rose and yellow, and the bluish network of the veins. The picture of the external world was already beginning to fill him with respect, and to take possession of his brain. Already the shape of things obsessed and possessed him. A precocious fate was showing the tip of its nose. His damnation was settled.