Category Archives: images
duchamp/roussel, stars
Raymond Roussel, author of L’Étoile au front.
Marcel Duchamp’s tonsure de 1919.
effingham
“Max smiled. He said, ‘I shall take refuge in the Phaedrus. You remember at the end Socrates tells Phaedrus that words can’t be removed from place to place and retain their meaning. Truth is communicated from a particular speaker to a particular listener.’
‘I stand rebuked! I recall that passage. But it is a reference to mystery religions, isn’t it?’
‘Not necessarily. It can apply to any occasion of learning the truth.’
‘Do you think Hannah – desires the true good?’
Max said after a long silence during which Effingham found himself nodding with sleep, ‘I’m not sure. And I don’t think you can tell me. It may all be to meet some need of my own. I’ve meant all my life to go on a spiritual pilgrimage. And here I am at the end – and I haven’t even set out.’ He spoke with a sudden fierceness, cutting and lighting a cigar with quick precision and moving the ash-tray farther down the table with a loud clack. He added, ‘Perhaps Hannah is my experiment! I’ve always had a great theoretical knowledge of morals, but practically speaking I’ve never done a hand’s turn. That’s why my reference to the Phaedrus was damned dishonest. I don’t know the truth either. I just know about it.’ ”
(Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn (1963), pp. 100–101.)
(Frank Stella, Effingham I (1967), in the Van Abbemuseum.)
porter/ashbery/schuyler
Fairfield Porter, John Ashbery and James Schuyler Writing “Nest of Ninnies”, 1967. Oil on canvas; 36″ x 26″. On show at the Betty Cunningham Gallery’s Fairfield Porter: Painting and Works on Paper which closes today.
(Review at the Brooklyn Rail.)
marsden hartley/fountain
I wish I could find a better image online of Marsden Hartley’s 1913 painting The Warriors:
It’s the background in Alfred Steiglitz’s photograph of Duchamp’s Fountain in The Blind Man:
It’s odd that the backdrop to such a well-known photo seems to have so little existence online.
(There’s a slightly larger version in this essay by Marjorie Perloff, but that’s in black and white. She does note how similar the urinal looks to Hartley’s painting.)
(Related: Ron Silliman goes to see the Dada show in D.C. and is somewhat disappointed. He does catch what’s wrong with the show there.)
picabia’s spanish women
From the show at Michael Werner, where there are a series of women with crazy eyes that Picabia worked on for a while:
Francis Picabia, Espanole a la rose, 1916
(Francis Picabia, Espanole, c. 1926–27.)
variously noted
And another, Le troisieme jour, from 1929 in the Palazzo Cavour in Torino:
a fine poster
(Seen at the George Maciunas show at Maya Stendhal. This reproduction really doesn’t do it justice: the actual poster is crisp as can be and Beuys looks really fantastic in that hat.)
(Bonus: Joseph Beuys, “Sonne Stat Reagen” (MP3, 3:03, 2.8Mb), originally released in 1982, on Fluxus Anthology. Poppy in the nicest way.)
(Bonus bonus: To Rococo Rot & I-Sound, “Fishermen Dressed Like Joseph Beuys” (MP3, 3:38, 5.4Mb), from 2001, not quite as nice as the song by Beuys himself (it’s an instrumental), but with one of the best song titles ever.)
at the vitalic show
going to providence
