Manuel Alvarado

A sign stands there saying, this is the village you are entering.

The sign names the place, speaks it as it were (an electronic voice could, these days, simulacrally speak it, as our 209 bus from Hammersmith to Barnes speaks its stops; but the orthographic sign 'speaks', I guess, in a voice that's in my head, thanks to my grasp of written language even in a language I do not know [this wouldn't work for me in Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic or Cyrillic]

British Library: The Shelf as Spectacle

Serried ranks of books: stacks.

British Library Bachelard / More Clare Rae

Powers of Google:

'The Rise and Fall is a new [2009] video work by Clare Rae, depicting the artist moving in a circle in mid air. The video is looped, the subject remains locked in an endless cycle floating through space. The Rise and Fall deals with ideas surrounding contemporary feminism and femininity, whilst investigating the relationships between gender, staging and performance.'

or:

'Good Girl and the Other

Clare Rae / Australia / 2007 / 2min / TBA

Synopsis:

Good Girl and the Other is a looped video work depicting the artist chasing her doppelganger

over and under a kitchen table. Set in a domestic interior, the repetitious movement and

soundtrack infer a psychological tension to create an emotive work that becomes fatiguing, as

any kind of resolution is avoided. This video is made by utilizing a stop motion technique,

which uses photographic stills, allowing for a precise overlapping of frames to create motion.

The resulting aesthetic and concept is unique and unconventional.

Biography:

Clare Rae graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in RMIT University in Melbourne.

She has done eighteen exhibitions in Australia and Singapore, and has won a Special

Commendation RMIT/ Siemens Fine Art Prize in 2007.'

This from: Inaugural Experimental Film Forum 2010, 22 May 2010, Saturday. I.e., a screening happening a week today! far away!

*

Google as ultimate Association Machine: 'this next to' / 'this leads to' that.

The weight of the two words: Search. Engine.

Bachelard, library days

An image by Clare Rae

“To withdraw into one’s corner is undoubtedly a meager expression. But despite its meagerness, it has numerous images, some, perhaps, of great antiquity, images that are psychologically primitive. At times, the simpler the image, the vaster the dreams.”

Gaston Bachelard

Ekphrasis, 1

And googling for 'images' using words or phrases brings up 'interesting connections'

Henri Matisse, Sala vermelha, 1908
Óleo s/ tela, 93x73,5cm
Museu do Ermitage, S. Petersburg, Rússia

(source: http://antologiadoesquecimento.blogspot.com/2005/10/ut-pictura-poesis-25-o-vermelho.html)

The yellow / orange frame separates red from green.

The trees against green match the apples against red, in point (!) of circularity.

The google here was ut picura poesis, which raises the ekphrasis question.

Gaston Bachelard is useful here, his late 'space' volume.

Parergon, 1

"Le parergon inscrit quelque chose qui vient en plus, extérieur au champ propre [...] mais dont l'extériorité transcendante ne vient jouer, jouxter, frôler, frotter, presser la limite elle-même et intervenir dans le dedans que dans la mesure où le dedans manque." - J. Derrida, La vérité en peinture, p. 65

The exploration of the frame is essential to any consideration of metonymy broadly considered, that is of contiguity as operating within the work of art.

(Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/82743420@N00/3567288112/)

Serried Ranks, 1

In viewing Annabel Elgar's wonderful current photography show at Wapping Project Bankside, the phrase 'serried ranks' kept coming into my mind to describe one of the 'resources' she puts into play.

I decided to try my Google luck at the phrase, especially since, strangely enough, in extensive quotations s.v. 'serried' and related trades in the OED the phrase itself fails to turn up. Here is the first result.

This is from John L. Stoddard's lectures on Japan, and is indeed labelled 'Serried Ranks'.

Here is a rather different 'serried ranks' image.

More on both of these later!

Doris Salcedo: The Meaning of 'Jagged'

Doris Salcedo: The Meaning of 'Jagged'

Time Out, May 6 - 12 2010, insert, 'Tate Modern is 10'. A time-line ribbon takes us through the Unilever Series of installations in the Tate's 'Turbine Hall' (sculpture as the absence of turbine?), and remarks of Doris Salcedo's work: 'From a hairlike crack to a deep rupture in the floor, this disturbing interruption, entitled 'Shibboleth', symbolised a dividing line between the haves and have-nots. Even now that the Colombian artist's piece has been filled in, a scar still remains' (6).

What determines that a line (in this case strikingly a line in three dimensions) should symbolise just this? Pre-eminently, the artist's statements.

And if I associate it (instead? also?) with Ezra Pound's 'Le Paradis n'est pas artificiel | but is jagged' (Canto 92)? Or if a parent photographs happy children playfully exploring the crack in the floor (as documented in the Tate's photographs of the installation)? (On the Pound, see

http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/, 'Ezra Pound: Farfalla in Tempesta', Tuesday 4 May 2010, not least for Clark's posting of beautiful photographs of the butterflies [farfalla] Pound identifies in that Canto.)

Joining and Disjoining: Samuel Butler

These are the essence of change.

One of the earliest notes I made, when I began to make notes at all, I found not long ago in an old book, since destroyed, which I had in New Zealand. It was to the effect that all things are either of the nature of a piece of string or a knife. That is, they are either for bringing and keeping things together, or for sending and keeping them apart. Nevertheless each kind contains a little of its opposite and some, as the railway train and the hedge, combine many examples of both. Thus the train, on the whole, is used for bringing things together, but it is also used for sending them apart, and its divisions into classes are alike for separating and keeping together. The hedge is also both for joining things (as a flock of sheep) and for disjoining (as for keeping the sheep from getting into corn). These are the more immediate ends. The ulterior ends, both of train and hedge, so far as we are concerned, and so far as anything can have an end, are the bringing or helping to bring meat or dairy produce into contact with man's inside, or wool on to his back, or that he may go in comfort somewhere to converse with people and join his soul on to theirs,or please himself by getting something to come within the range of his senses or imagination.

A piece of string is a thing that, in the main, makes for togetheriness; whereas a knife is, in the main, a thing that makes for splitty-uppiness; still, there is an odour of togetheriness hanging about a knife also, for it tends to bring potatoes into a man's stomach.

In high philosophy one should never look at a knife without considering it also as a piece of string, nor at a piece of string without considering it also as a knife.

Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler:Selections, ed. Henry Festing Jones (London: Jonathan Cape, 1921), 21

An essential 'quote' as to the dynamics of contiguity.

The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Even as the warped structures multiplied in his vision, crowding the lost distance, he possessed a sense of intimacy with each of them, a peculiar knowledge of the spaces within them and of the streets which coiled themselves around their mass.

--Thomas Ligotti, 'Vasterien', Songs of a Dead Dreamer (London: Robinson Publishing, 1989 [1986])