Jean-Luc Godard

 

Jean-Luc Godard est mort

3 December 1930 – 13 September 2022

Six Statements on the death of Jean-Luc Godard

1. Manipulate the pictorial tropes of film
2. Films have changed aesthetics
3. Everything is allowed in kino
4. No difference between life and cinema
5. Make what you’re saying interesting
6. The Truth at 24 frames a second

Happy New Year

 

A Toast
proposed by
Her Magnificence the Vice-Curator of the Collège de ’Pataphysique
& Benign Inquisitor of the London Institute
for the Celebrations of 1 Absolu 150.
Pronounced in absentia, by the Vice-Rogator, Milie von Bariter.
My friends, optimates and members of the Collège de ’Pataphysique,

I should like to propose a toast.
The New Year 150 marks
149 years since the birth of Alfred Jarry, a
just cause for celebration indeed…
Nevertheless, the optimates and members of
the Collège are distinguished not by their
admiration for Jarry, however great it may
be, but rather by all that the apostrophe signifies.
So let us drink instead to this symbolic
representation of the Science as embodied
in our belovéd Collège de ’Pataphysique:
Vive l’Apostrophe!

Cuyp Cows

 The Bloggist and his friend, Alfred Jarry, elicit the interest of a small herd of cows and name them Cuyp Cows in honour of Aelbert Cuyp, Dutch painter of cows. De geschiedenisboeken vertellen ons dat Meneer Cuyp werd geboren in Dordrecht op 20 Oktober 1620 en stierf aldaar op 15 November 1691.  It has been said that Cuyp’s eye “was tuned to the harmony of colour, like the ear of a musician to sound.” However, the Bloggist and his friend, Alfred Jarry, simply like cows.

Four from the Professors series

More images from the Professors series from the early 1990’s; but why is the series called Professors? In the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries there were people who claimed to know what “true” religion was and they were referred to as Professors of the Truth. Their seamless combination of religion and politics changed society, changed Europe. In the present day it is the ecologists and people concerned about the environment that question our life choices and the way we impact the planet. These photographs are of artworks I constructed out of natural materials – earth, stone and wood – naturally balanced. They are photographed because they are unstable and not suitable for exhibiting in a gallery, they might fall over. And that is the point of the pieces. They represent the environment and like the environment they are easily unbalanced by human carelessness with catastrophic results. In creating the Professors artworks I was influenced by Arte Povera, Mono-ha and Fluxus. 

 

Four untitled structures from the Professors series

 

Untitled, from the Professors series

 

I saw my image and I knew my own imprisonment.

A Sculpture, an Assemblage, a Performance Piece? Buil de Onplezierig admires the artwork, “The chair stands, shoreless and infinite in an anonymous space, waiting – waiting like the elephant Heiyantuduwa Raja to carry the Relic of the tooth of the Buddha? Public and critical reception to this Assemblage is mixed, divided between admiration for the mise en scène and incomprehension as to its significance. This composition contains nothing overtly surrealistic, yet the unnatural clarity of the detail replete with dream visions is hallucinatory in effect. Fearfully and wonderfully made, precious and unique, do we miss the truth and are we brave enough to ask the obvious question? Well, what is it? An outlay of skill and imagination, an object inhabited by an artist’s aura? Is it where language is not sufficient, something new made known, individualism, originality? Pieter Brueghel drew a whale and inside there were hundreds of smaller fish. We see a chair but inside there are hundreds of ideas, assumptions, decisions. Does the chair represent a dialectical tension between the personal and the public?”

Père Ubu

 

Slava Ukraini!

Slava Ukraini!

Two photographs made by the Bloggist in 1975/76

Photographs the Bloggist never thought would become relevant again.

Belittling the Russians by making fun of them

Bombing