bara

airmail

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:09:00 +0000

Girl of the future, I'm sending you a crown airmail...

If you are waiting for an email about your public transit tickets and your cameras, please wait a little more--it's coming. I've been working on this, haven't had time for much else. But I haven't forgotten. If you're still interested but haven't gotten in touch, please email ohbara at gmail dot com. The project will entail you receiving something in the post, taking a high-quality digital photograph (I'll specify what), then sending me back the photo (via email) and a public-transit ticket of any kind from the place it was taken.

Recently: Benoit P.'s photos. Kyoto Chirimen Museum. Magritte's house is a museum, too. A short video (not new, but still funny) about art school.

And more good mail. (Thanks, Gracia & Louise! Poems soon.)

Wolfgang Iser on Art

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:06:00 +0000

(Bernard Moninot, Dessin sur soie n° 2 [sans titre], acrylic, graphite, and silver thread on canvas.

Dole Municipal Museum of Fine Arts, Dole, France, April 2007)

Right from the start this contradiction [between the supposed transcendence of art and the revelation thereby that art did indeed have a function and was therefore dependent on worldly reality] was aggravated by the need to provide a concrete idea of what autonomous Art meant. The mere impulse of abstracting Art from the given world was not enough to convey an image of its autonomy. After all, Art was claiming to be the realm of freedom in which lay man's only chance to ennoble himself; but if man was to be led to true humanity by way of Art, then this Art that was to underlie his education could scarcely remain an abstract idea. How, though, can one concretize something that only lives through the transcendence of its direct opposite?

The answer was: by collecting all the great artistic achievements of the past. Hence the emergence of that typically nineteenth century institution, the museum. Originally, collections had grown from the personal tastes of individuals; but now the multiplicity of tastes had to be unified into a single concept of taste which could take on normative authority. And so works of art were taken out of their sacred or profane settings and placed in the museum. It is this 'abstraction,' this uprooting of the work from its context, that underlies whatever we have now come to call a work of art. As a representative of a normative taste, it must exercise its effectiveness entirely through itself, and not through any purposes of functions. It is scarcely surprising that when Duchamp displayed a bottle rack in a museum, everyone was shocked. For the museum was the final triumph of autonomous Art, in that it took works of art out of their historical settings and endowed art of all periods with contemporaneity, so that from their various appearances there could be extrapolated a single, universally valid norm of Art.

Once again, however, there is no escaping the problem that the museum was in fact meant to dispose of. The museum is 'a late stage of all the successful representations in the history of art, which are preserved by a present that simultaneously distances itself from them, in order to enjoy its own uniqueness' [quoting Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos,p 382]. This enjoyment, however, brings to light precisely the factor that the unified collection of works sought to cover up--namely, the historical relativity of taste, as evinced by the individual works and also by the historical functions, sacred or profane, that they had to fulfill in their original settings. Thus, the contemporaneity with which the museum endows the works actually causes stress to be laid on their historical differences, the concealment of which was supposed to underpin the claim of Art to be autonomous.

From Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, Johns Hopkins UP 1989, pp 204-205.

paris, a very small tour.

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:03:00 +0000

From Butte Montmartre. One of my favorite places because you can sit and watch all the people getting to the top, completely tired from all the steps, and then see them turn around and see Paris like this. I like to walk back down behind the basilica and then (if it is daytime and they are open) go into the many fabric shops. That's where I got the printed cotton with flying geese on it (with my mom when she came to see me).

A small Jewish grocery in the Marais, selling glazed fruits in these bins. The walls are lined with every possible kind of alcohol you could imagine, all different bottles reflecting all different kinds of light. This is where I found a bottle of Izarra for my dad. Right down the street from many little shops, including Petit Pan and many shops selling Japanese goods.

The herbs and plants in my friend's kitchen. Her window looks out on the court but it is the 5th floor, so there is lots of light.

The view from her window. I loved the neighbors' geraniums and the zinc-colored pipes and drains. Even though I remember how miserable living in those old buildings could be, I recognise their beauty (and hope I did, then, too). And the grey sky, against which the buildings of Paris are particularly beautiful, although they are stunning against the bright blue, too.

See? They're just made for that. The colors are so elegant and understated, and then all of a sudden they're right in front of you and you realise how well-planned they are, how they are just made to go together. The shades and shadows the different angles make. That gold dome!

Speaking of exclamation marks, here's one in the Jardin des Plantes, a botanical garden founded in the 17th century. Those trees are so Parisian as to be a cliché, aren't they? But they exist. I sat in this garden many times drawing.

Drawing these bean-poles, specifically. And watching the people. And listening to them talk.

This is Mélodies Graphiques, also in the Marais, very near the Ile-St-Louis. I bought a tiny card (about 1.5" by 2") that had had a pattern burnt out of it: flowers and leaves in an arbor. He collects the beautiful mail his customers send him. I promised to send something, but haven't. Maybe this year.

And this is Austerlitz Station (Gare d'Austerlitz), to which I had a fond connection because of W.G. Sebald's book Austerlitz, which you can read about here. And here. And here. And here. The Métro trains going in are bright turquoise, which is brilliant against the gray stone and glass, and echoes the faded turquoise paint on the façade (you can see a hint of it in the mullions of the window in the lower left corner of the photograph).

return to the archive

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:33:00 +0000

Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote about Derrida. Well, let's change that. I'm re-reading The Postcard for the chapter I'm writing right now and it makes me remember exactly why I love Derrida. He is so materially romantic. The archive? Yes, it's the part of memory work that contains the trace of the past, and it's an important theoretical trope. But it's also a material love story for Derrida, who caresses his distant beloved via his careful treatment of the things around himself. He notices everything. The book is full of trains, photomatons, houses of cards, pots of growing myrtle, books, letters, postcards, photographs, traces of the beloved and the disappearance. And throughout it there is the insistence on the burning of the archive--let's destroy it as we go, let's start over, Derrida (or 'Derrida', because as readers we're not meant to be sure of who we are reading, I don't think) says. Let's build this record of all the things that I love and you love and then if we need to let's leave it all behind, poems and libraries and Purim cakes and telephones and hands and cut-paper flowers.

printing (again)

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:40:00 +0000

Playing with pieces of old prints in order to get ready for the class I'm teaching at LPW next weekend, I made this, which is pleasing on lots of levels.

H.B.

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:58:00 +0000

A public service announcement: how wonderful it is to have someone in your life who supports you and makes space for you and wants to find out about what you love, and resists you when resistance is necessary, and talks with you honestly, and takes you places when you're blue, and drives a long way to see you, and meets you at stations, and brings you flowers, and gives mean-nice presents, and talks easily with all your friends, and introduces you to his family, and makes you feel welcome, and takes care of you when you have a 101° fever, and puts up with your incessant punning, and teaches you stuff you didn't know you needed to know, and drives through blizzards when your plane is rerouted, and gets you to like cats, and speaks other languages with you, and is just generally kind and smart and fun and funny, and lets you be happy, and helps you be happy!

"...but he did have pictures of this apartment. He got the job."

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:40:00 +0000

It's the last sentence of this article* that I think speaks most to me--about how our 'training' as thinkers, makers, and academics has to be flexible, and not only nominally so. It's time for a re-valuing of diverse and deep knowledges, and of unorthodox expressions thereof! Why not--why can't a maker be a geographer, or a pattern designer, or an amateur (in the best sense of that word) astronomer? Especially with the amount of information that is available to us now via the internet (not to mention via the more traditional sources--public libraries, museums, universities, etc.), there is so much possibility for deepening and broadening our understandings.

It wasn't so long ago that an apprenticeship--proving one's capabilities, learning by doing--was an acceptable way to learn things. Why not now? Come on, all you auto-didacts: there's a whole lot of everything out there waiting to be known and thought about and wondered at and questioned. And that can change the system as we know it--where at the moment more and more it seems that education is 'just' a means to an end; where things like 'impact' (what does that even mean?!) mean more than passion and wonder; where learning is commodified and curiosity loses ground.

Education in the most open sense of the word--open access to and curiosity about the world, or as much of it as possible--should be for everyone. And it begins in thinking that things are possible, that one can learn about what is interesting.

So what would you do? What do you want to know? Where are you going to begin?

---

* N.B.: I do find the kind of blithe endorsement of collecting for the sake of the aesthetic of collections kind of bizarre, though. What's the point of having Wellies you don't wear? Okay, they're beautiful objects, designed objects...but they're also functional. Design for design's sake? I think W. Benjamin would have something to say to that.

♥

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 10:24:00 +0000

and that's all!

Peaks

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:29:00 +0000

One thing I love about the small scale of the UK is that these landscapes are just a couple of hours from me by bus. I'd like to go back to the Peaks alone and stay somewhere for a week. Seems like a place that could be really good for writing.

changed priorities ahead

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:00:00 +0000

In about two weeks, the ftp service I use through Blogger is going to end, and I'm not sure what will happen to this space, or to the posts I've made here for the last three years, at that point. I'm looking at my options right now, but the ones I've found aren't ideal.

I'd like to keep control of how my space looks, and I don't want there to be ads. I'd like to keep my archives accessible. I'm looking at Movable Type, but I'm not sure I have the energy and time that switch would take.

I really like how sites like Martha's new workbook and Delphine Doreau's sketchbook work, and I've been wanting a way to make my site more integrated and less linear.

Any ideas/recommendations/help?

On an aside that may be interesting only to me, I just realised (prompted by a comment from Nadia) that something like the past ten posts have had pictures of buildings in them.

interim

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:07:00 +0000

In the interim, I have taught a lot of classes where I got to talk about surrealism, feminism, poetry, the semi-colon (also known as the king of punctuation marks), why women in the 18th century used lead to powder their faces, how to construct a thesis statement, why René Magritte is the most excellent painter of them all (this may be subjective).

I have thought about my thesis and had a very successful meeting with my supervisor. I've called home and called Z. and written emails and letters. I've written poems. I've written part of a film script. I've written some thesis. I've gone to a couple of workshops. I've made travel plans (Paris in May!).

I've gone to Bakewell and Buxton by bus, and watched the stunning beauty of the Peak District roll by the window. I've had tea with the Birdwoman. I've been so even-keel. I've enjoyed watching the light change now that it is late winter. I caught it just as I like it--light from the west, dark in the east, bright blue above, red-orange bricks that typify this city--the other day.

playlist

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:32:00 +0000

Ideal playlist for singing (links to videos):

1. Quelqu'un m'a dit, by Carla Bruni.
2. Gatekeeper, by Feist.
3. Ta p'tite flamme, by Amélie-les-Crayons.
4. La noyée, by Serge Gainsbourg.
5. Casimir Pulaski Day, by Sufjan Stevens.
6. To Build a Home, by The Cinematic Orchestra.
7. Amen, by Jolie Holland.
8. Don't Watch Me Dancing, by Little Joy.
9. The Littlest Bird, by the Be Good Tanyas, but ideally with someone to sing the harmony.
10. Hallelujah, by Leonard Cohen, but maybe a bit closer to this K.D. Lang version.
11. Say a Little Prayer for You, by Aretha Franklin.
12. Winter, by Tori Amos.

bunnies * konijntjes * shop * winkel

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:51:00 +0000

Guess who'll be in the shop today?

Meet Kaatje, Loetkin, Maartje, Elleke, Geraard, and Lien.

They're all made of cashmere and backed with the same fabric as their legs, with hand-embroidered faces and their particular personalities. Each konijntje comes with a name tag (not shown).

Last day to buy in time for Valentine's Day is tomorrow, if you live in the US, Thursday in Europe, Monday of next week for the UK. I can't guarantee arrival before the holiday due to the vagaries of the Post here, but those are my guidelines.

color to end the month

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:19:00 +0000

After several weeks of grey it was finally bright this weekend. On Friday I taught in Leicester, then took a walk and went to the printshop. Beeston was also bright in the sun.

St. Verde.

Angela Liguori.

a people's history

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:19:00 +0000

I read Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States while I was living in France. It was so absorbing I had to consciously pace myself so I wouldn't finish it too quickly. By the end, I knew I wanted to study for a PhD, because I wanted to make work that would make other people feel like that book made me feel: alive. Hopeful. Powerful. I felt an immense love for the strikers who were brave enough, unarmed, to call out 'Cowards!' when the police charged them; the people who risked humiliation, violence, harm, and death to change the way our political system works. And I felt despairing that those things felt like history sometimes. I am not always good at sticking up for what I think is just but that book made me want to be better.

Howard Zinn died yesterday. You can see him speaking and others reading from the People's History here. It's about an hour, but it is worth it. So beautiful, stirring. Overwhelming. Thank you, Professor Zinn, for reminding me that just a few people acting together can change things.

on saturday

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:28:00 +0000

We went to Rugby (the town, not the sport, although that's where we get rugby). Fran thought I meant rugby when I meant Rugby so she was surprised about halfway there. Oh, that's why you wore those clothes! Ha. We went to the gallery where my work is and then walked around the town. I had been there before, this summer, to see the Museum of Everyday Life.

Earlier that morning, terrible but joyously noisy breakfast with entire Beeston contingent, charity-shop shopping (where I found a really beautiful blue midcentury ceramic pitcher for £3), and walking in the brief sunshine. I love mornings. And my life.

Best part of the day was telling some (12-year-old) kids who tried to harass us that we were from an (imaginary) republic where there were no cars, and confusing them when they tried to explain (or point cars out) by calling them 'cows'. And our names began with a letter that was unpronounceable in English. And that we'd walked to Rugby--but very quickly, on the motorway, so it only took 20 minutes. Also gleaned the valuable information from said lads that ASDA is indeed Rugby's best candy shop. Out of the mouths of babes, folks.

recommend.

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:14:00 +0000

(An unrelated drawing of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis fulfils your recommended daily sketch allowance.)

Poetry readers, writers: I am in urgent need of your recommendations for single texts (NOT anthologies) to teach to intermediate/advanced adult students of poetry. I'm teaching a workshop this summer that will be a reading-as-writers (i.e., literature-based) workshop, and I'd just love to hear what other people would teach. I'm going to choose two books (maybe three); it's a two-week (6-day) course.

Right now my brainstorm list includes My Life by Lyn Hejinian; Glass, Irony and God, by Anne Carson; Residence on Earth by Neruda; Some Ether by Nick Flynn. I'd like books that are challenging formally or thematically but that students who aren't extremely familiar with recent writing could still enjoy (for that reason, the Hejinian is lower on my list). I'm thinking of structuring the course around the construction of the self.

Let the discussion begin. What text would you love to teach? What text inspired you (and/or still does)? What text do you wish you'd been taught? And why, why, why? All suggestions very welcome.

teaching

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:29:00 +0000

Tomorrow morning I start the first regular teaching I've had since I left France. This marks the end of the luxurious period of only-reading-only-writing-only-making of the PhD. Where are we going?

I am sure there will still be trains, also the ocean. Paris. Flowers in the spring. And poems, photobooths, the birdwoman, adventures, all the things I like. And things I don't know I like yet, like 18th-century British history, commuting, and grownup clothes. And and and. This is why I like teaching--my students remind me to think about how much there is to know and how exciting it is to start to know it.

and then there were...

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:29:00 +0000

Well, you know what happens when you leave rabbits in a room together. There are five 'vlaamse konijntjes' (Flemish bunnies) here now, and more on the way. Probably in the shop around the end of next week, in time for Valentine's Day.

grain

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:41:00 +0000

The grain guarantees the mediation and points me beyond the representation (the photograph) and to the Real (which, despite all postmodern tendencies, I find I do believe in, in my fashion). This is the moon at 5:15 p.m. today. Still a little light in the western sky; I can't believe how fast winter is going this year. I love this flickr group: The Archival Moon and Waiting.

Tomorrow I go back to the library, where I'm writing about textual ontology and reading books about art history. On Friday I start teaching again, as a lecturer in Leicester. Birds, rabbits, some Dutch, some French, some cakes, and probably lots of photographs in the interim. How are you?

MR HAT

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Has adventures. But he is not the only one. You can still email me (ohbara at gmail cot com) or leave a comment if you want to participate in the project I'll begin in March. You need to have access to a public transport network that gives you a ticket, a digital camera, and to be willing to send me a photo (I'll tell you of what) and the ticket.

Full details will come to participants in March (and when they do, your utter discretion is necessary). If you know of people who might like to play along--especially from Asia, Central America, South America, Africa, and Europe--please pass my contact details along.

For now, look at her and this and this.

the story of making things

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:22:00 +0000

Pictures of art I love and the story of why I like it (and so why I make art), for the Belgian for Christmas, You can see them here.

there is a light and it never goes out

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:10:00 +0000

I didn't listen to the Smiths in high school. Or university. Or graduate school, the first time. I discovered them in April, after two years in the UK and in the aftermath of a cataclysmic breakup. They are so absolutely English to me. The ennui, the feeling of being caught somewhere small. The 'do I dare disturb'-ness of it (yes, I know Eliot was American). The ironic posturing. The sincerity buried underneath it all. The bleakness. The beauty in the damp, dark, watery, days: there is a light and it never goes out. Listening to this song makes me nostalgic for an adolescence that doesn't belong to me.

no unified aesthetic here, I'm afraid

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:50:00 +0000

(I love having a camera that works. Thank you, Jonathan.)

I didn't realise Mieke Willems was two people, or that their shop is in Antwerp. Now I know. The second piece of information is more pertinent to me. Next time I'm in Belgium I'll go there and see the shop.

Drawing as both pushing away (pencil on paper) and pulling near, says WJT Mitchell. That's how I feel about very spare aesthetics (like MW above, or Fine Little Day, or, Martha, or Camilla Engman, or 88). I wish I could do it but somehow I always end up with a riot of pink, green, yellow, flowers everywhere, postcards balanced on pictures, a gingham tablecloth.

Sometimes I feel like I am not serious enough!

How could that possibly be.

Recent find--more of that spareness thing I want but can't: Dear Oly.

I love this.

noreply@blogger.com (Eireann) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:18:00 +0000

"But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

"Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

"That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

-David Foster Wallace, from this.