When I think how did we get here? I don’t know how we got here….. so my thing is to go back to we’ve got an institution, what is an institution? How do we recognise an institution? How does an institution bestow respect admiration and affection and how does that institutions can bestow some of those things, some of the time?
Tuesday 28 February 2012
the next phase
Monday 2 May 2011
Gilding Lilies
1.
A thin lick of gilt that frames the act,
One golden moment stolen from the sun,
The solid gold baby in the wretched cot
The glow of passing summer, snapped, snapped, snapped.
2.
I am the king of gold, my Midas touch
Lethal as the Gorgon’s stare. I am classical
And hallowed, straight as a die rapt
In perfections and somewhat beyond gone
Out of the world well on the way to truth
Dressed as cliché, each word poured fresh
Minted, mounted, mantled, minuted, mined.
3.
Two reproductions of paintings by Raphael Soyer
Stood in for melancholy. My parents’ shorthand
Comprised the banalities of my own banality..
Our need of art came down to Raphael Soyer.
But why the melancholy? Why the need for it
In reproductions? Was it aspiration?
Cause enough, God knows! And yet the image
Was oddly fitting, creating our need for it.
We were modernists of nostalgia. The whole house
Swam and rang with the fetish of missing things,
Their nodding ceremonies, their hand-me-down
Lost gold look gilding the whole house.
Later I knew that Soyer wouldn’t cut it
Not half as much as melancholy did,
That gilding was a matter of melancholy,
A link to further links and as with any link
The only thing to do with it is cut it.
4.
Sometimes the frame will swallow up the act.
Sometimes the memory outshines the sun.
Sometimes the cot of gold contains a child.
Sometimes a snap is the only thing you’ve got.
Tuesday 22 February 2011
Reviewing the work
(15) Curtains / blinds
1.
It was when time was finally receding
we found perspective, or rather it found us,
diminished and helpless on the far horizon.
Perspective was the thing we’d keep our eyes on,
since shrinkage was, for us, a form of bleeding,
and everything was closing in around us.
So everything closed in, and we were shrunk
within the very terms we thought we’d mapped,
our maps being vague approximations,
too imprecise for neater calculations.
Either our systems or our eyes were junk.
However free we were we still felt trapped.
However free we were we still were locked
in houses too small to live in, cars too wide
to miss a pot hole or a traffic cone.
The mind won’t fit the skull, it just gets blown,
and yet keeps spreading and will not be blocked.
It wants to fly because it’s stuck inside.
These words want out. They want a natural light
if only so they might feel less uncertain.
Perspective starts here where they say their names
so any drawing underwrites their claims.
Their vanishing point is what is lost to night
whose drawing is the drawing of a curtain.
2.
Little by little she let down the blinds.
The light in the room obeyed her as she moved.
It was a work of delicate gradations.
She could control gradations in this way,
leading the light as if it were a horse
she might have ridden right back to the stables.
Horses of light were champing at the bit.
They stamped the darkness, breathed a thin grey fume.
Light trembled with excitement that was fear.
The blinds kept moving, light was growing thinner.
It was like dusk, or dawn, some half-way station
between two busy major terminals.
And in that darkening there was a moment
when breath failed and the pain slipped into numbness,
and night, or just the blinds, brought darkness on.
George Szirtes
We've reached a point in the project where we're taking stock of the material generated so far. Posted here and in the following posts are works and thoughts from the end of last year as well as some produced more recently.
Friday 31 December 2010
new year, new work
Happy New Year to all our blog followers.
Thursday 21 October 2010
Wysing Arts Centre
It has been a busy time.