26 June 2013

at the beach

Paret på stranden/The Couple on the Beach, February 2013 from Roy Andersson on Vimeo.

Prince Street


I keep coming across various paintings as I unearth different files from several old computers. This one was done around 1994 in New York on Prince street where I lived. Funny enough I wish to get back to these kinds of 'stories'. I am never sure just what they mean which is why I find them so intriguing now (not that I had a clue what they meant 20 years ago either) but I am curious to explore something a little more figurative than what I have been up to past 12 years while living in the Drome.
More will be revealed.....


21 June 2013

roses


'Belle roses'
Cried the bicyclist 
Whizzing by.


20 June 2013

what is cinema?

What is neorealism? from kogonada on Vimeo.

blackbird


Once in a while
A blackbird calls out
To my daydreams. 



18 June 2013

nameless


Nameless, is the fear
Of death; falling 
Blossoms of June.


11 June 2013

knee


'Get off my knee'
I try to explain 
To the beetle.


04 June 2013

surprise!



I just arrived back in France from England, and while driving south I was listening to France Inter; a discussion between Francois Busnel and the writer Antoine Compagnon concerning Proust and Montaigne. Compagnon said that literature must principally evoke a sense of the 'surprise'. He added that a reader must never read the preface before jumping into the book. 

"One should not lose out on the pleasure of reading by too much pedagogy". 
("..il ne faut surtout pas, surtout pas supprimer ce plaisir par trop de pédagogie"...)

I bring all this up because recently in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanawaza, Japan (but it could be almost any Contemporary venue today) I moved through an exhibition while reading the fact-sheet which I was given to explain the works and the artists exhibiting. There are, these days, certain code phrases which let one know that one is in a Contemporary Museum space:
"...the artist engages our sensibilities.."
"...he has created a world that calls our attention to ..."
"A continuing investigation of life and death is the theme informing all facts of..."
"...we remain confused by...."
"These works which compel us to question our 
visual understanding of the world and everyday 
awareness, engender a mysterious world of a 
different dimension...."

I am often surprised to discover that I am 'supposed to feel this', and I am 'supposed think that', that I was supposed to 'question thisand 'be confronted' by that. I have barely the freedom to have my own experience in front of a work of art as I am assaulted by what the curators and artists have already programmed me to experience. No doubt they do not trust that we, (the public), can be trusted to 'get it' without being armed to the teeth with all sorts of information and philosophical questions. But isn't it all a bit maddening? I mean: where is the poetry, after all?

Thus, how refreshing it was to hear a writer proclaim that surprise, an element so duly overlooked, it would seem, is a crucial necessity for entry into the world of literature, for this writer, (and reader). In other words: what is the point of our imagination if we cannot be present for our own experience in front of a work of art, even at the great, and delicious risk of getting lost in it?

So the questions begs: If one agrees with this premise, then; why the disconnect between the 'Visual Arts' and 'literature', and, how come the Visual Arts have been hijacked by intellectuals and anthropologists