Lazarus
David Bowie - Lazarus
--David Bowie Answers the Famous Proust Questionnaire
“Q: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? A: Living in fear.”
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"The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return"
11/01/2016
BOWIE FOREVER
Lazarus
David Bowie - Lazarus
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"The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return"
09/01/2016
About lasting love, time and eternity, by Alain Badiou
“Love is a tenacious adventure… Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.”
Philosopher Alain Badiou on How We Fall and Stay in Love
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Thanks again to Brainpickings:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/26/alain-badiou-in-praise-of-love/
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“An honorable human relationship … in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love,’” Adrienne Rich memorably wrote, “is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” That transcendent turbulence of mutual truth-refinement is a centerpiece of the altogether fantastic In Praise of Love (public library) by French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. January 17, 1937) — an impassioned and immensely insightful defense of both love as a human faculty and love as a worthwhile philosophical pursuit.
“Air de Capri” by Gerda Wegener, 1923
A century after Tolstoy wrote to Gandhi that “love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills,” Badiou argues that love is the most potent antidote to the self-interest that dominates the modern world and our greatest hope for bridging the gaping divide between self and other:
"Provided it isn’t conceived only as an exchange of mutual favours, or isn’t calculated way in advance as a profitable investment, love really is a unique trust placed in chance. It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference".
But unlike Tolstoy and Gandhi, who advocated for cultivating an expansive platonic love of one another, and unlike Martin Luther King, Jr., who pointed to the Ancient Greek notion of agape as the kind of love that would cut off the chain of hate between human beings, Badiou advocates for the truth-enlarging value of the most intimate kind of love — the eros of romance:
"Love… is a quest for truth… truth in relation to something quite precise: what kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be".
He considers the evolution of love, from its beginning reminiscent of cosmic inflation to its gradual and ongoing entwining of separate truth-particles into an expansive shared universe of truth:
Badiou cautions against our culture’s tendency to fetishize the encounter itself at the expense of the collaborative ongoingness that follows, which is the true substance of love:"We shouldn’t underestimate the power love possesses to slice diagonally through the most powerful oppositions and radical separations. The encounter between two differences is an event, is contingent and disconcerting… On the basis of this event, love can start and flourish. It is the first, absolutely essential point. This surprise unleashes a process that is basically an experience of getting to know the world. Love isn’t simply about two people meeting and their inward-looking relationship: it is a construction, a life that is being made, no longer from the perspective of One but from the perspective of Two".
"Love cannot be reduced to the first encounter, because it is a construction. The enigma in thinking about love is the duration of time necessary for it to flourish. In fact, it isn’t the ecstasy of those beginnings that is remarkable. The latter are clearly ecstatic, but love is above all a construction that lasts. We could say that love is a tenacious adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but equally so is the need for tenacity. To give up at the first hurdle, the first serious disagreement, the first quarrel, is only to distort love. Real love is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world".
This necessary temporal dimension is what moves the experience of love from the plane of chance to the plane of choice — or, rather, of being chosen; chosen, in Mary Oliver’s words, “by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable and beautiful and possibly even unsuitable.”
Badiou writes:
"To make a declaration of love is to move on from the event-encounter to embark on a construction of truth. The chance nature of the encounter morphs into the assumption of a beginning. And often what starts there lasts so long, is so charged with novelty and experience of the world that in retrospect it doesn’t seem at all random and contingent, as it appeared initially, but almost a necessity. That is how chance is curbed: the absolute contingency of the encounter with someone I didn’t know finally takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny, and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright".[…]"The locking in of chance is an anticipation of eternity… The problem then resides in inscribing this eternity within time. Because, basically, that is what love is: a declaration of eternity to be fulfilled or unfurled as best it can be within time: eternity descending into time".[…]"Happiness in love is the proof that time can accommodate eternity. And you can also find proof … in the pleasure given by works of art and the almost supernatural joy you experience when you at last grasp in depth the meaning of a scientific theory".
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Complement the enormously enlivening In Praise of Love with psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the paradoxical psychology of why we fall in love, Stendhal on the seven stages of romance, and Mary Oliver on love’s necessary wildness.
07/01/2016
MY INTERVIEW WITH GREAT SYRIAN ARTIST, TAMMAM AZZAM
[INTERVIEW] TAMMAM AZZAM FROM SYRIA
Syrian artist Tammam Azzam creates a ‘hybrid form’ of painting, as his the Ayyam Gallery presents him, through the application of various media, arriving at “interactions between surface and form that borrow and multiply as compositions evolve”. Born in Damascus, in Syria, in 1980, Tammam received his formal training from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Damascus, with a concentration in oil painting. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions, all around Europe and the Middle East.
Forced to flee the war in his own country, since 2011, Tammam Azzam has been living and working in Dubai. Left out of his art studio, he moved into a form of digital art. He became known for digitally superimposing Western masterpieces onto photographs of Syrian bombed buildings. He also attracted the attention of Bristolian street artist Banksy and was invited in his very special exhibition namedDismaland, last summer, settled for six weeks in Weston-Super-Mare, in West England. Art is evidently for Tammam a form of resistance.
Interview with Melissa Chemam.
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You were in Damascus when the revolution started in your country, which finally evolved into a civil war and the emergence of this violent islamist insurgency that gave birth to the organisation self-proclaimed the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. How did you leave Syria and what kind of link do you managed to keep from abroad with your family in the country?
After seven months into the Syrian revolution, my wife and I felt it had become impossible to continue living there. Most artists were struggling and I have a young daughter that I could not put to school. The gallery that I work with moved to Dubai and they asked me to come with them. I decided to move, after consulting my wife. I haven’t been back in Syria since, but my parents are still there, in Sweida, where my family is from, in the south of Syria, which is a little more secure than the rest of the country. It’s not a good situation – they have no electricity or no water but there is no war there like in Damascus or Homs. I consider Dubai not as a final destination but only as a step in our life as we cannot go back home for now. Every side is an enemy.
How did you start your art in Syria and was it always politically motivated?
We grew up against Bashar Al Assad’s regime; it’s the worst anybody can imagine. I studied art at the University of Damascus and graduated from the oil painting section in 2001. I had a studio in Damascus and did my three first solo exhibitions there. I was also a graphic designer for many cultural centres in the capital, like the French Cultural Institute and the Goethe Institute. I have become familiar with graphic programming, especially since 2002, but the first time I used it as an art media was in Dubai. I had left my studio behind me and I felt like so much was missing. In another city I had to start another story. At first, there were so many difficulties just to find a home for my family and a school for Selma, my daughter, and I needed to find work. I concerted my work in graphic design and settled a mini studio at home. That’s how I started working with digital media.
You then came to fame with your piece reproducing ‘The Kiss’ from Gustav Klimt, when and how did you get that inspiration?
In 2013, after reproducing artworks from the Syrian museum, I started reproducing a painting from Francisco de Goya, ‘The 3rd of May’, created in 1808 to immortalize the killing of hundreds of innocent Spanish citizens. I reproduced it digitally, into a picture of a Syrian destroyed street. Then I reproduced ‘The Mona Lisa’ and pieces from Munch, Van Gogh, Andy Warhol, etc. The background being the Syrian war, the contrast with the piece by Klimt is even more striking. The scene comes from a picture of Douma, a small city near Damascus, one of the cities where the revolution started, and which has been destroyed completely since.
How did you find the motivation to keep on producing art and believe in resistance?
It was difficult and it is still more and more difficult. I think about art all the time but we went through terrible events in Syria, firstly, and now it is also a disaster in so many other places in the world. People call me a Syrian artist, but I prefer to be considered as an artist. I don’t consider myself as a political artist. I’m an artist who came out of this political background. I’m not producing posters against a dictator or a regime, but artworks about people, which is the main purpose for me. There are the stories in my mind, and where to get stories, except from your memory and your place? But I think that in no way art can stop armies or violence. How can I resist? How can I save a child’s life? As artists, we can just try and continue. This is the way we can express ourselves. But we cannot fight. As a person, how to change things? Politics always prevent us. For instance, if I need a visa to enter a European country, there are so many papers I need to gather, I feel powerless. How could we fight this world system? And when attacks occurred in Paris, it was considered more important worldwide that when it occurred in Damascus or Baghdad or Beirut. It’s always been like that and it’s very hard to change.
Do you believe art still has a power of conviction even in the current context?
I agree that we can probably convince the youth about the importance of democracy and freedom. But if the world had managed to stop the unfair regimes these past five years, Syria could have become a democracy or at least a form of good regime. But now, Syria has become a land of terrorists, with hundreds of terrorist groups that have spread all over the world. And the whole world is scary now. People in Syria now just want to stop all the fighting and keep on living. I believe artists and writers have a role to play to reach out to the youth, politicise them and call for peace. But in Syria nothing has changed in five years. It’s only worsening. And Europe is refusing to help refugees in a shocking way. I believe that both ISIS and the regime, and even the police in Greece or in Western Europe shooting at refugees are the dangers. It’s not about nationalities or religions. We would need to bring about a big change mentally. I’m therefore too confused to give a clear message. The only message I can give is by continuing my art, as I can, with the little I have. We should continue trying.
Visuel : © Ayyam Gallery
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Links
TLC: http://toutelaculture.com/actu/politique-culturelle/interview-tammam-azzam-from-syria/
Ayyam Gallery: http://www.ayyamgallery.com/
Soon:
DUBAI (11, ALSERKAL AVENUE)
Tammam Azzam
The Road
18 January - 3 March 2016
Calais: From Banksy's Steve Jobs to London Calling
An unknown person has added the words 'London Calling' in giant lettering over the top of the image - using the figure of Steve Jobs as the 'I':
Read more here :
Migrants deface Banksy artwork inside Calais jungle as SOLAR PANELS installed at camp
MIGRANTS have defaced a Bansky mural inside the Calais "jungle" camp, which has been fitted with solar panels.
04/01/2016
The Issue of Migration and the Art World
Interesting article.
Published in The Wall Street Journal last week. Link:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-europe-and-america-migrants-take-on-the-art-world-1451509444$
In Europe and America, Migrants Reach the Art World
Where to see the artists’ works
In Kader Attia’s installation “The Dead Sea,” a wave seems to have left behind a sinister cargo: jeans, sweaters and T-shirts, all in shades of blue and eerily empty, as if “the sea had rejected them,” the artist says. For many visitors, the work recalls the recent picture of a drowned Syrian boy and other images of refugees.
Though born in France, Mr. Attia, who also spent much of his childhood in Algeria, identifies with the Algerian teenagers he has photographed resting on huge concrete blocks and staring out at the Mediterranean. The installation and the photos above it form part of the exhibition “Streamlines: Oceans, Global Trade and Migration” at the Deichtorhallen, on view until March 13 in Hamburg, Germany.
The 45-year-old artist, now based in Berlin, is one of numerous contemporary artists delving into the highly charged issue of migration. “It’s one of the themes that are going to define the latter half of this century,” says London-based John Akomfrah, whose art often focuses on the subject. His 2015 video installation, “Vertigo Sea,” layers ethereal underwater scenes with shots of African migrants making ocean crossings. The three-screen piece, which made its debut at the Venice Biennale in May, will be at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol, England from Jan. 16.
John Akomfrah's 'Vertigo Sea' (2015) which is a three-channel video installation with sound that runs 48 minutes. PHOTO: SMOKING DOGS FILMS/LISSON GALLER
Frequently referencing the African diaspora, Mr. Akomfrah’s videos grow in part out of his own history. As a child, he moved with his mother from Ghana to the U.K. A solo show of his work at London’s Lisson Gallery, opening Jan. 22, will explore the subject in a two-part video installation with the working title “Auto-da-fé.” A pervasive subject in the news of the past year—Germany alone accepted an estimated one million refugees—migration has long fascinated artists. Jacob Lawrence’s 1941 “Migration Series”chronicled the mass movement of African-Americans from the rural South to the North in a series of 60 paintings, while Dorothea Lange’s 1936 photo “Migrant Mother” remains an emblematic rendering of displacement during the Great Depression. Contemporary migration “will have a profound impact on what culture will be,” says Leah Dickerman,who curated an exhibition on Lawrence’s “Migration Series” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2015.
In November, at Norway’s Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Oslo-based artist Vanessa Bairdreceived one of the country’s biggest art awards, the Lorck Schive Prize, for her large-scale mural, “I Don’t Want to Be Anywhere, but Here I Am.” Disturbing and surreal, the pastel work illustrates a dark fairy-tale like world with an ocean that, if you look closely, contains gruesome portraits of drowning refugees. The images are set against mundane daily activities, like reading a book or drinking tea. Ms. Baird says that she was inspired by a visit to the migrant community on the outskirts of Calais, France. The piece will be on display through Feb. 28.
Michele Mathison's 'Chapungu, Shiri yedenga (bird of heaven)' PHOTO: MICHELE MATHISON/TYBURN GALLERY
In Miami, at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Carola Bravo’s “Blurred Borders” project takes a personal route. The Venezuelan-born artist, who now lives in Florida, drew on her own experience migrating to the U.S. from Caracas four years ago. A video installation layers images of birds in flight, yellow butterflies and classic American artwork like Lawrence’s “Migration Series.” “The only way to belong to a new place is to mix—to mix what you bring with you, the best of you, and what your new country is offering you,” she says. “I decided my work had to do the same.”
Others see migration as a symbol of the larger human condition. “The migrant underlines this idea that we are always moving toward something else—that we are always incomplete,” says Niels Van Tomme, curator of a traveling exhibition entitled “Where Do We Migrate To?” now at the Värmlands Museum, in Karlstad, Sweden. The show, which ends Feb. 22, features work by some 20 contemporary artists who have placed migration at the center of their work.
In February London’s Tyburn Gallery will feature Michele Mathison’s sculptural work “Zimbabwe Birds” as a part of a solo show for the Johannesburg-based artist. The piece re-creates in cast-iron culturally significant stone carvings from the 13th and 14th centuries, later looted by British colonizers.
The work builds on the artist’s interest in displacement, a theme central to his 2014 work “Refuge,” in which he recreated 20 white tents, originally used as temporary housing for migrants, on an open field in Johannesburg. Over the course of the show, under pressure from wind and weather, the tents began to degrade.
“It’s part of the impermanence of the work, but also of the situation,” says Mr. Mathison.
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The installation 'La Mer Morte' (The Dead Sea) by French artist Kader Attia on display at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany, in December. PHOTO: MARKUS SCHOLZ/EPA
Remembering "Rock Against Racism"
New book by photographer Syd Shelton, documenting the movement "Rock Against Racism', sold by Autograph ABP:
http://www.autograph-abp-shop.co.uk/books/rock-against-racism
Syd Shelton
Rock Against Racism
Limited time offer, while supplies last! Order Rock Against Racism and get two vintage RAR badges with your book.
Christmas shipping has ended, all orders will be posted the first week of January 2016.
Autograph ABP announces the publication of a major new book of Syd Shelton’s photographs and graphic design produced for and about the British Rock Against Racism Movement of 1976-1981. The accompanying exhibition runs at Rivington Place, London EC2 from 2 October until 5 December 2015.
Rock Against Racism (RAR) confronted racist ideology in the streets, parks and town halls of Britain. RAR was formed by a collective of musicians and political activists to fight fascism and racism through music. Shelton’s photographs capture one of the most intriguing and contradictory political periods in British post war history, and for him this work was a socialist act, what he calls a ‘graphic argument’ on behalf of marginalised lives. Shelton photographed performers such as The Clash, Elvis Costello, Misty in Roots, Tom Robinson, Au Pairs and The Specials. He also captured the audiences at RAR gigs and carnivals across England, as well as what he calls ‘the contextual images’ of the lives and landscapes that often fuelled acts of racist violence.
The full colour publication features and essay by Paul Gilroy, Professor of American and English Literature at King’s College London, and an interview with Syd Shelton by Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London, and now a writer and psychoanalyst, and Visiting Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York.
The book is co-edited by Mark Sealy MBE Director of Autograph ABP andCarol Tulloch, Professor of Dress, Diaspora and Transnationalism at the University of the Arts London.
About Syd Shelton
Syd Shelton (b.1947) is a British photographer and graphic designer. He has worked in Europe, Australia and the United States. He co-edited and was art director of a series of photographic books: 24 Hours in Los Angeles (1984), the award winning Day in the Life of London (1984) and Ireland: A Week in the Life of a Nation (1986). His work was recently included in the exhibition Words, Sound and Power: Reggae Changed My Life at The British Music Experience: Britain’s Museum of Popular Music, O2 Arena, London (2012) and The Photographer’s Gallery exhibition The World in London.
Syd Shelton (b.1947) is a British photographer and graphic designer. He has worked in Europe, Australia and the United States. He co-edited and was art director of a series of photographic books: 24 Hours in Los Angeles (1984), the award winning Day in the Life of London (1984) and Ireland: A Week in the Life of a Nation (1986). His work was recently included in the exhibition Words, Sound and Power: Reggae Changed My Life at The British Music Experience: Britain’s Museum of Popular Music, O2 Arena, London (2012) and The Photographer’s Gallery exhibition The World in London.
About Autograph ABP
Established in 1988, Autograph ABP is a charity that works internationally in photography and film, cultural identity, race, representation and human rights.
Established in 1988, Autograph ABP is a charity that works internationally in photography and film, cultural identity, race, representation and human rights.
Rock Against Racism is supported using public funding by Arts Council England. The publication of this work is supported by a grant from The Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust.
- Published by Autograph ABP, October 2015
- 188 pages
- 240 x 220mm
- Case bound
- 143 illustrations
- ISBN 978-1-899282-18-0
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