Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground

by

Blind Willie Johnson – Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground

Blind Willie Johnson was born in 1897 in Marlin, Texas
a small railroad town in the heart of cotton country

He was not born blind

His mother died when he was an infant
his father remarried

When Willie was five
he told his father he wanted to be a preacher
and he made himself a cigar box guitar

When he was seven
his father caught his stepmother
with another man and beat her
to avenge the beating
she threw lye in Willie’s eyes

He spent the remainder of his life
in absolute darkness

His father would leave him
on street corners to sing for money
the myth of Blind Willie Johnson has it
he was arrested for nearly starting a riot
at a New Orleans courthouse with a his rendition of
If I Had My Way I’d Tear The Building Down
a song about Samson and Delilah

He had only five recording sessions
between 1927 and 1930

In 1945 his house burned to the ground
with no money and nowhere to go
Johnson slept in the burned ruins
on a bed of damp newspapers
he contracted pneumonia
was denied admittance to the local hospital
and died

His song Dark was the Night is on the Voyager spacecraft
as it explores the outer edges of our solar system
on its way to interstellar space

Antonin Artaud Les malades et les médecins

by


The disease is a condition.
Health is only one other, more ugly.
I mean more cowardly and petty.
No patient who has grown.
Not healthy that will ever betrayed,
not wanting to be sick,
such as doctors I suffered.
I was sick all my life and I only ask to continue.
Because the states of deprivation of life
I have always learned a lot more about
the plethora of my power as credenzas petty bourgeois:
THE HEALTHY ENOUGH.
Because my being is beautiful but awful.
And it is beautiful because it is awful.
Ugly, Affre built awful.
Cure a disease is a crime.
This is bruise the head of a kid much less stingy than life.
The ugly con-rings.
The beautiful rots.
But ill, is not doped with opium, cocaine or morphine.
And you must love the charterer fevers,
jaundice and perfidy much more than any euphoria.
Then the fever, high fever my head –
because I am in a state of high fever
for the last fifty years that I’m alive –
give me my opium –
this being –
that,
I’m hot-headed,
opium head to toe.
Because cocaine is a bone,
heroin, over-bone man,
tra la sara i ca ca ca i fena tra la fa ca sara
and opium is this cave,
this cave mummification blood,
scrapings of the sperm in the cellar of an old excrémation this kid,
this disintegration of an old hole,
this excrémentation a kid,
little kid buried anus,
whose name is: poop, pee, con-science of disease.
And opium father fi fi
So that goes from father to son –
he must return you to the powder,
when you have suffered much without bed.
So I think that this is mine eternal sick,
heal all doctors –
born doctors deficiency disease –
not doctors ignorant of my statements
awful sick to me to impose their insulin,
a world of health slumped.

Antonin Artaud




Walker Evans

by

“A good art exhibition is a lesson in seeing to those who need or want one, and a session of visual pleasure and excitement to those who don’t need anything — I mean the rich in spirit. Grunts, sighs, shouts, laughter, and imprecations ought to be heard in a museum room. Precisely the place where these are usually suppressed. So, some of the values of pictures may be suppressed too, or plain lost, in formal exhibition.

I’d like to address the eyes of those who know how to take their values straight through and beyond the inhibitions accompanying public decorum. I suggest that true religious feeling is sometimes to be had even at church, and perhaps art can be seen and felt on a museum wall; with luck.

Those of us who are living by our eyes — painters, designers, photographers, girl watchers — are both amused and appalled by the following half-truth: “what we see, we are.” And by its corollary: our collective work is, in part, shameless, joyous, autobiography-cum-confession wrapped in the embarrassment of the unspeakable. For those who can read the language, that is. And we never know just who is in the audience. When the seeing-eye man does turn up to survey our work, and does perceive our metaphors, we are just caught in the act that’s all. Should we apologize?”

Walker Evans – Boston Sunday Globe, August, 1st, 1971, p. A-61.

Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman: A Brief Manifesto

by
American abstract artists, The Irascibles, including William Baziotes, James C. Brooks, Jimmy Ernst, Adolph Gottlieb, Hedda Sterne, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, Bradley Walter Tomlin, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Theodoros Stamos, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko. (Photo by Nina Leen//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
American abstract artists, The Irascibles, including William Baziotes, James C. Brooks, Jimmy Ernst, Adolph Gottlieb, Hedda Sterne, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, Bradley Walter Tomlin, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Theodoros Stamos, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko. (Photo by Nina Leen//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.

  2. This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

  3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.

  4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.

  5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. (Rothko said “this is the essence of academicism.)

  6. There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.

  7. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

June 13, 1943 edition of the New York Times, brief manifesto: Mark Rothko, with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman.

Dream: Roger Blin

by

As I’m thinking about the Great Recession
and it’s impact on art


the image of Roger Blin
comes to mind.

He had decided to produce
the work of Samuel Beckett.

he had to make a choice between two unpublished scripts,
Eleutheria or Waiting for Godot.

I have a sense that
if Blin had not picked Godot,
primarily because its smaller/single set
fit his limited budget,
this significant moment
in the history of the contemporary theater
would have been very different.





I admit:
the choice to do a cheaper project
is not always a pleasing aesthetic option,
but there is some significance
that if Blin had been operating in a subsidized institution,
the direction performance practices and theory have taken
might have been much more ordinary.

While it wasn’t the sole stimulus,
Beckett’s bare stages
contributed richly to the visual simplification of theater images
in the 1960s and 1970s
an aesthetic that privileged
the image of human figures in space.

Is there originality in any work of art?

by

While contemporary performance may borrow
either aesthetic strategies
or apparent ideological gestures from the past,
this borrowing
makes no claims to invest the material
or the aesthetic strategy
with a historical “thought.”

The process in which a block of material
or a analogous strategy
incorporates a prior unit or technique
in a form of quotation
that makes no reference to what is prior
other than its status as
something borrowed, appropriated, taken up
in the moment of performance.

Is there originality in any work of art?

Have I thought myself
into the corner of defining art itself
as a manipulation of existing languages,
tropes, gestures
that may vary in craft
but always re-presents or reproduces
what is prior.

Productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, O’Neill
are only simulations,
in no way a production of originality;
while contemporary performance
frees itself from that pretense.

Of course
this is bull shit
as that freedom from pretense
is itself a claim for authenticity.