The fucking Fall

I've been listening to the latest Fall album, Your future our clutter, quite a lot lately.

It really is quite good. And they are the best band in the world.

Reminder

The Robert Heald Gallery has the opening of its inaugural exhibition tonight at 6pm. The exhibition is by Patrick Lundberg, who was last seen in Wellington at the Adam Art Gallery's Wall works show, which I was also in.

I'm looking forward to catching up with Patrick again. We got on well.

And a new gallery in Wellington is a very good thing. There's definitely a need for it.

Ridiculous bollocks

So what the diastolic look accomplishes when it summons the shape and inflates it is the hypercathexis of the superficial series of the photograph; and what the systolic look accomplishes when it revokes the shape and 'kills' it is the decathexis of the referential series.

Where, where do I begin?

No, I don't need to. It can stand all by itself in its monumental stupidity.

Something in Auckland to go to

School

The PGDip course consists of a studio paper and a theory paper.

For the theory paper, we have to propose and then write an essay. Interestingly, the weighting for the proposal and the final essay are the same. The essay proposal was due just before the Easter holidays, which have just finished.

I had a few different topics floating around in my head, and was unsure which one I wanted to do the most. Then we were told that, as none of us have art history backgrounds, we shouldn't try to write an art historical essay. Right, I thought, that decides it.

So I've proposed to write an essay on Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ, which is the best painting in the world:

I'm also going to tie it in with Francis Picabia's Amorphic paintings. These are not very well known, but I find them fascinating:

Duchamp reckoned Picabia invented the word 'abstraction', and there's a good argument he invented abstract painting (fuck Kandinsky). Most people, having come up with this (and an elaborate theory behind it), would spend the rest of their career elaborating on it. But not Picabia. Just a couple of years later, he renounced it as 'humbug'.

The essay will be called Immortality machines, and the element that I'm going to argue Piero's Baptism and Picabia's Amorphism have in common is that both were using painting as a machine to transform the personal, individual, and fleeting into the universal, eternal, and unchanging – the mortal into the immortal.

I'm highly dubious whether I can pull this off, as it'll involve developing several original arguments, but I really hope I do.

Exciting!

Something in Wellington to go to

The Robert Heald Gallery is opening on Thursday evening next week. If you're not sure where to go, there's a handy map on the website.

Time for another Céline quote

The rich don't have to kill to eat. They 'employ' people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy. They have beautiful women, the poor have ugly ones. Clothing aside, they're the product of centuries. Easy to look at, well fed, well washed. After all these years, life can boast no greater accomplishment.

It's no use trying, we slide, we skid, we fall back into the alcohol that preserves the living and the dead, we get nowhere. It's been proved. After all these centuries of watching our domestic animals coming into the world, labouring and dying before our eyes without anything more unusual ever happening to them either than taking up the same insipid fiasco where so many other animals had left off, we should have caught on. Endless waves of useless beings keep rising from deep down in the ages to die in front of our noses, and yet here we stay, hoping for something ... We're not even capable of thinking death through.

Good old Céline. It's been said of him that he hated everyone except his cat, his wife, and his dead mother.

That sounds about right.

A few pages later, we have this doozy:

When you stop to examine the way in which words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation. That corolla of bloated flesh, the mouth, which screws itself up to whistle, which sucks in breath, contorts itself, discharges all manner of viscous sounds across a foetid barrier of decaying teeth – how revolting! Yet that is what we are adjured to sublimate into an ideal. It's not easy. Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. Being in love is nothing, it's sticking together that's difficult. Faeces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or to grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than shit; our frenzy to persist in our present state – that's the unconscionable torture.

Unquestionably we worship nothing more divine than our smell. All our misery comes from wanting at all costs to go on being Tom, Dick, or Harry, year in year out. This body of ours, this disguise put on by common jumping molecules, is in constant revolt against the abominable farce of having to endure. Our molecules, the dears, want to get lost in the universe as fast as they can! It makes them miserable to be nothing but 'us', the jerks of infinity. We'd burst if we had the courage, day after day we come very close to it. The atomic torture we love so is locked up inside of us with our pride.

Motherfucking cunts

Heh heh heh.

You think you can follow what's going on?

Losers.

Ha ha.

An idle thought

When looking at Milan Mrkusich paintings at the City Gallery and then Hamish's recently, I thought how nice it would be if it were eventually discovered he'd also been secretly doing something fun all along, like kitten paintings.

Quote of the day

The worst part is wondering how you'll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows.

And maybe it's treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.

Oi Steve

Check out the flash lighter I was given for my birthday:

Apparently it was made in 1906 and went through World War I.

Amusement

I've borrowed a computer game off Rose's son. It's called Assassin's creed II, and is set in Renaissance Italy.

I haven't got very far through it yet, but then I'm not paying much attention to the plot. It's fun just wandering around the place and climbing over famous buildings.

The plot's not without its own amusement though. It involves a fair bit of cheesy butchering of history. I've met Leonardo da Vinci – apparently at some stage you fly in his flying machine – and tried to foil the Pazzi conspiracy.

It's gloriously silly.

Speaking of cheesy silliness, we're off to watch The clash of the Titans in 3D now.