35: Black (hole) Friday

thank you Rory,
yes, that's definitely not what I was imagining...
i'm looking forward to reading it.

https://www.ritualsintime.space/page2 a little ways down is the passage on abbas
and it kind of recurs a few more times throughout the rest of the project

happy to read anything you feel like sharing, particularly your abbas chapter
and yes would be nice to see you again before I go

speaking of setting sail and anglo-saxons...
i found myself in the british museum this evening looking at the sutton hoo
a mysterious ship burial that slightly predates Cynethryth
though quite curious, the timing of these events for me
that she disappeared at sea and this boat found buried without a body
and how these two events get revealed to me on the same day

to complicate matters, I had gone to the wallace collection earlier
to see Poussins dance to the music of time
and was a bit irritated to find a man parked in front of it
making sketches in his journal

i calmed myself though, because we were the two people who decided
that friday evening at the wallace in front of Poussin was the place to be
i have to keep reminding myself how special each shared moment is
and especially in such intentional instances

this is where it gets really fascinating...
he just returned from tokyo where he was exhibiting some paintings
and i said I wanted to go to tokyo to do some research
and he recommended a french japanese residency
which i said was perfect because that was the intersection of my research ideas

we became fast friends and had a terrific conversation
moving through the gallery and new elizabeth line

and when I looked up his work I found this painting and the accompanying text:

Riddled with references and enigmas, Christian Hidaka’s work is a uniquely graceful journey through the history of painting, revealing an interpretation of it that is cerebral and sensual in equal measure.

The artist investigates the language of figuration and the representation of the picture plane. His work attempts a synthesis of two reference points: on the one side Renaissance painting, influenced by Euclidian geometry and the structure of the frame; on the other the limitless development of space and absence of a vanishing point, which we find in ancient Chinese calligraphic landscapes or in digital space.

and...

In extending a version of Trobairitz into the space of Le Grand Café, Christian Hidaka alters a key element of the original canvas: the main character of the composition, the Trobairitz, has gone missing. This gives the exhibition title, Desert Stage, its full meaning. The space appears to be waiting, standing by between two acts without its principal protagonist. Thanks to this absence, the visitor is completely free to become an actor in the composition, to invent herself or himself as the prospector in a pictorial fiction, and to circumambulate the cloisters with the theatrical backdrops.

and now I'll share an excerpt from the writing I'm working on:

The third research direction was largely shaped by a pair of texts from Byung-Chul Han called Good Entertainment: Deconstructing the Western Passion Narrative, and Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese that cosmologically situated western art in its saturating Christianity and invited readers to look outside this grim cosmovision towards other paradigms for art making and receiving. For his research, he wanted to look at the relationship between Ukiyo-e, instagram and Occitan poetry, as popular arts that dealt with subordinated class relations, commentary, and the world of floating images. Part of this inquiry concerned itself with a 21st century street photographer called Daniel Arnauld, and a 12th century troubadour called Arnault Daniel, and asked questions like, is the Met Gala a contemporary form of courtly love? and, what do the quotidian images and words of instagrams’ cloud have to do with the popular imagery and comments in Ukiyo-e’s floating world? 

Does this not give you chills all over? I'm adding Christian to the conversation. Christian, I learned today that Rory just published a book about an 8th century Anglo-Saxon queen who disappeared at sea, while I found myself in front of the remains of a buried 8th century Anglo-Saxon boat missing a royal body.

And we met in front of Poussin's dance to the music of time and learned we share an interest in 12th century troubadours, eastern art and the digital turn. And to make it that much more complex and fascinating, you did an exhibition about the disappearance of your troubadour protagonist! who likely appeared in one of the options for the autofictional account of a PhD proposal I'm considering.

As I mentioned earlier, when I was at delfina for lunch today, the host was talking about his relationship with an autonomous Zapotec village that Fred Moten recommended to me to visit—and i did. I wouldn't have thought much about it unless all of these other connections hadn't happened today. That experience actually inspired an essay called performative indigeneity and the shaman industrial complex, but we can set that aside.

I feel like some quantum cosmic black hole opened up on today, and all these troubadours, Zapotecs, Anglo-Saxon royalty, Euclidean grids and pictures from the floating world rushed in. Though I wonder if its not always the case and we're just too distracted to notice…

Anthony Powell chose Poussin's dance as the title for his roman-fleuve. Christian, as we were discussing earlier, I thought of this Luciano Fabro work if i were to use just one image to open up ritualsintime.space

and had written recently:

He loved museums though, with all their flaws and went as often as he could. In the national gallery he was at work on a series of photo details of painted and sculpted animals. He went to the Wallace Collection to see Poussin’s a dance to the music of time, which Anthony Powell chose for the title of his roman-fleuve. The scope of this memory work and art historiography appealed to him. Benjamin's fragments, Proust’s time, and so on. If he were to choose an artwork to illustrate the forgotten[sic] dance to the music of time, for these ritualsintime.space, it could perhaps be Luciano Fabro’s In Front, Behind, Right, Left, (Sky), Tautology. From 1968. He saw it recently on view in a show between Jeu de Paume and Le Bal on Arte Povera. Of this work he said “There is no such thing as absolute space, only space in relationship, personal space, insofar as it relates to a person. The movement of this person in space, even this space, the space of sky, is more important than all the movement of the sky. After making the sky, I prefer to use a photograph of the sky with the person in front of it, which stands for the sky." A modern valance towards the subject and the weighting of representation.

This image gets to the late modern anxieties of an impossible individual constructed by markets, technologies and their legitimating cosmologies. In describing another voluminous project, a year of posts on a popular social media platform, he concluded it was a bildungsroman of depersonalization. This is what ecological thought offered him, a way out of this impasse. If one didn’t find a way out, these questions could accumulate baroquely until they suffocated you. And you start writing sentences like Depth is computed as an absence, a non visible differential between two positions. The illusionistic space of perspective. Data gleaned from penetrating waves. The compounding volumes of anisotropic data collected through instrumental logics assembles in dangerous effigy the vestiges of ethics and ecology alienated from meaning. So here was an image, a strong articulation of an impasse, a departure point towards the otherwise...

apologies for this strange mess,
but i don't know what else to do,
beside revel out loud

kindly,
perry

Notes 11/25

He liked that other peoples words could join the space he made to share. And invited them openly.

Biking around the neighborhood to get some yogurt from the coop he saw a group of small children on a class trip holding hands in high viz, walking peacefully, looking, smiling, laughing. He was calmly sure the tragedy of our world was built with our culture, our stories, and an otherwise is possible.

Some bikers wear spandex and bike as fast as they can over mountains. They also do this trick where they bike directly behind someone to go faster. It’s some kind of aerodynamic I don’t really understand.

I bike more to get some bread or go to the museum and stop along the way to sit in the sun. Sometimes I choose a really slow person moving through the tube and walk behind them so they shield me from all the people rushing around.

The loop of the painting. The seasons. Times wry smile, playing his lyre. He said photography got in the way of looking and been back to see the painting three times that week, drawing small sections at a time. That day he was doing time. We walked through the hooligans and holograms and business men and androgynous satyrs, the disorienting warm of their frenetic movements. We moved into the fiber optic new Elizabeth line. It felt designed to hurdle people as quickly as possible. Everything was high speed, smooth, frictionless, hard and cool to the touch. At the end of the night one chemical flush would be run through the entire system to prepare for the following day. If that distinction between between days and nights was not permanently abolished.

This new system attached itself like a parasite. They spoke about an old journal the painter found in the walls of his home during their renovation. He was taken with how simple the entries were. We met and we kissed. She left and I was sad. She came back.

They spoke about each person having a small brilliant Machiavellian pub roaring in their pockets and domestic spaces. And what might be gleaned? They spoke about Miyazaki’s island and 7000 year old trees. What expression does time have on his face he asked? It’s a knowing, half amused, almost smugness, but it’s too small to really know the rocks, the 7000 year old trees.

Western art as ritualized mourning for modernity’s social and ecological collapse. This is silly, teleological.

He liked going to art collections and complaining.

He realized the odyssey was basically his medium.

He was a bit terrified by what he called scalar chauvinism, that opened an ethical black hole inside his nascent vegetarianism.

In central London so many of the women have the same plastic surgery face. It’s so sad. Scared eyes behind butoh masks. He remembered the airport in Istanbul, everyone wrapped in bandages, it looked like the middle of a war.

Everyone doped on phones and sugar. The popular music was so powerful people were throwing themselves onto the tracks. Or fleeing to the metaverse. It was cold, but people walked around with little clothing on, bright colors, quivering with chemicals, hormones and the will to power.

I ended up at John Smith’s house a couple nights ago with Stanley at 2am eating Lincolnshire poacher and laughing about triangle of sadness. I sent a note the following morning saying thanks for a lovely evening and that I wondered how often we walked by each other on the way to e5. And then when I biked out of the house this morning to get some gilchester buns I saw John and Miranda walking from e5 and we had a funny chat about art and missed connections.

I went to the cheese monger and the first customer shouted, ‘I’m celiac! did you cut any bread on your board?!’ To which he replied, in a very thick French accent, ‘no worrees madame, we do not cross-contameenate.’ The next customer said, ‘200 grams of parmesan.’ To which he replied, ‘good morning, monsieur, how are you today?’ And then after greeting him and asking for some Lincoln-‘shire’ poacher, he replied ‘we’re in London, not Lord of the Rings’ and when he gave me the cheese asked to ‘give my regards to Frodo.’

I laughed too loudly, honestly.

Walking back I met eyes with grace, a rescue, and she greeted me warmly.

I continued on to the Jonas Mekas centenary, a program of shorts film diaries, some poetry readings of mostly Jonas’ work by Rimas and Stephen and his letter from nowhere. At first I appraised them like a nutritionist, prescribing a diet without meat, alcohol, sugar, caffeine. And then I quieted this part of my mind, because art should not really be evaluated on to how good it is for you. The short film diaries became overwhelming. I thought I recognized everything, though it was too fast to hold onto, and soon I began weeping. Deeply. And sweating. Sweating and weeping. Brimming and pouring. If I didn’t leave the theater I would have dissolved and evaporated. I composed myself in the bathroom. My eyes had turned bright red and my whole face was glowing as if I were on fire. Gareth helped ground me a little, offering kind words, small tasks I could help with.

The poetry put me back in my youth. Max fish and reckless nights. A passage about a dog licking dust from a boot and it being a connection to the sacred. Letters from nowhere made me so hungry I had to leave the theater. I usually get the same thing at the whitechapel restaurant, bitter chicories and bread with salty butter. I returned at the perfect moment. It’s as if some things wait until their perfect time. Like I had never seen a Mekas film until right now, this perfect moment. I offered that maybe it was his presence in the New York of my childhood that felt like something mainstream I had to distinguish myself from. But I really don’t know, simply that it arrived at my ocean door, just when it should have.

Jonas, after Brahms, offers we should let everything come, that we should simply prepare ourselves for it, and if we do anything for our art, it’s to help. Help with a silken touch. And kindness. This film moved me greatly. I began weeping again. Less this time. And the ending, or beginning, was perfect, with Jonas dancing to the music of time spinning in a magnificently joyful and heartbreaking loop.

There are times when you get glimpses of the

And times when it rushes you so clearly, singing, already everywhere.

As long as there are languages we don’t understand, the world will be safe...