vrijdag 10 mei 2024

Golden Times

 

L'age d'Or

well those golden have seen better times – as have we, but not to fret and stay the course... along with an archive-exhibition in Charleroi (may-sept) we will combine investigations, one in the framework of a series concerning the 'Borinage' former coal-mining area south-west of Mons, the cradle of the industrial revolution on the continent, and then the resurgence of the 'submersible' series... which has been dormant for quite some time...

 



There will be a publication made, but it is not yet clear if this might be in the guise of a catalogue, a travellogue or pure fiction, free associative bits floating simultaneously... possibly in a LJA format but more likely a RVR... and then the question arises whether to combine the different strands or to separate them:

...one for the series of interventions in the Borinage (being a fifty-fifty intervention at Le Grande Hornu and one at Maubeuge (though this is a bit borderline when it comes to considering what/where the Borinage is... and then one at the two houses where Vincent van Gogh stayed during his sojourn in the area as an evangelist... part of the archive exhibition mentioned...


in any case it's all about by-gones, and as such the RVR (rear view review) lends itself ideally, and who knows, this disappearing bookstore might be it(s last major publisher, seeing as how we are dealing in counterfit anyways...

dinsdag 19 december 2023

backing up again

 


Decembrist nicolaean

Considering the autocrat now housing in the Kremlin, it seems that time, its expansion and contraction, is as it was opted by that single stone, flexible...
Flexible, stretchable, rubberized or just plain formless, power distorting any sort of recognizable soul as Gogol might have noted... The revolt did not emmenate from the peasants however, but was an attempt at modernizing and reforming by the upper middling classes and young officers from good homes... Inspired no doubt by the American Revolution, with its notion of equality... 
But translated to the Russian Steppes, there was not much to go on, and it was a bit of a feeble revolt soon quashed by the Tsars army... Nicholas I ... Himself a bit of a reformer, but of a very superficial and diluted sort... The sort we don't even consider nowadays, being weened on hard-hitting breaking fake news and short-cut reasoning if at all... Reason seems to be the least of anyone's worries..
( the sleep of reason)
Producing monsters from one generation to the next, even the bolsheviks could not muster an even-handed redistribution... And in the end were no better than Nicholas II, who, given half the chance might have been a better bet for most of the populace... As it is, history repeats itself and even now, with a useless bloody war being supported by the main body of the population... Why is unclear... We see ourselves forced to admit that progress does not always take place...
So saint Nick has another letter this year yearning for betterment... Peace of earth and all that, piece of mind, Eye and Ear departments...

dinsdag 29 augustus 2023

refurb publications

 soon to be refurbished look-back publications (rear view review) soon to be gathered here...

(been delayed again... bear with us


here a quick look at a reading of spinach during the summer...

zondag 12 februari 2023

 

 



RhoK show


I had already mentioned the pleasant presentation surprise in the circuit of the showcase circuit in Liège, where I found some sumptuous works of Vered Ben-Kiki in a fitting (if it had not been for roadworks) setting – but now we were treated to two presentations in which one could get up close and personal to her work...

At the R.Ho.K. In Brussels in two of their buildings: Etterbeek and Woluwe. Upon entering the somewhat brutish 70's pavilion in Etterbeek one could only not that it fit – Vered Ben-Kiki's works fit the space well, being of large human dimensions, from detail to arms-length, in a space that has a strong presence of it's own but caters well to the multi-level view from different aspects: The notion that there is not only one reading of the work, or better said, avoiding a single interpretation and always leaning towards another... Encompassing various points of view without becoming muddled or obtuse, Vered manages to keep complacency at bay and remind us that it could be either this way or that, equally valid.

Born and raised in Haifa, where she studied philosophy to begin with, she opted for the art academy in Antwerp as a next step rather than one of the ivy-league universities in the States she was originally planning to use her scholarship for... Already influenced by the interaction of languages, in her care Hebrew, English and some Arabic, the immersion into another split culture such as Belgium, with its French and Flemish interactions (...being married to the French-speaking artist Serge De Taeye in a Flemish-speaking town) must have been an interesting challenge. One that perhaps led her to re-visit her first school exercise books in which the basics, vowels consonants, word fragments and short phrases and visual transcription – illustrative drawings – mingle to form a kaleidoscopic world which is then ordered into lists, groups, schemes, categories and sorts...


This ordering however, is essentially arbitrary... we use it for practical purposes, but are not sure if we can trust it: Vered Ben-Kiki questioned the didactic order from an early age – her critical slant led her to investigate why something could not be such, or thus, or perhaps even something else entirely... Simple concepts of, 'here', 'there', 'yesterday' 'now' are redistributed in an unstable landscape in which the search for the truth become philosophical: 'Now is already gone...' friend an fellow 50/50er Wout Vercammen liked to propose... But here one must also hark back to Vered's study of Wittgenstein, and his own multifarious views on 'ordinary language' in his 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophico' and then the later 'Über Gewißheit' in which a hand might be resting on a table or....


What at first glance is 'absurdist' (not to say surreal) playfulness clothed in a sort of comic-strip format or table of consonants, vocabulary lists, abstract formula's, rules and exceptions – imagery of simple day-tot-day objects that begin to waver by nature of their representation, their identification and/or their juxtaposition with others and the relations formed... Tough at first glance I can not perceive a direct link to any specific theorem (which I imagine was also to be avoided at all cost) I do suspect that a reading of (for instance) E. Gellner's 'Words and Things, an examination, and an attack on Liguisic Philosophy' would open up various new avenues in which to view this work.



The show is in two locations, quite different but at the same time fitting for this endeavor to show different aspects of Vered Ben-Kiki's work years after it had been rolled up an put away... She herself did not show any more for quite a while, having taken up other projects, one quite closely related, being children's books, in which her work reverberates, and music, where the graphics of her productions are also apparent... In both of R.Ho.K.'s spaces there is a selection of works from divers periods and styles – which make both sites interesting to visit, and personally I find taking a bit of time to consider the works is essential... at this point there are no extensive texts or references to aid the viewer, but that is also a good thing: to view the work unfettered by theory is to enjoy it in it's most pure and playful – no doubt there will be quite a bit said and discussed afterwards... and that is the point: to begin to (re-)consider her work after so many years of absence.



 

here Vered at the bookstand of Gruzemayer during HAB with one of her first books

zaterdag 26 november 2022

shorter days light night

 the days are growing (garden resting)

(but still darkened...)  noted:


Finnis Terrae

Though intriguing this sort of circuit has the problem of being outflanked by it's locations – we've been here before, which is not really a problem, but to then see it as something completely new does not work – and so one finds oneself asking if the work shown is strong enough to withstand the location, and in most instances, not.


 

So there we stand at the edge of the world – best go back at this point. It was not entirely without merit to come this far, and along the way found some bits and pieces to interest, but on the whole it were the elements we already knew that caught our eyes afresh, not really the interventions withing – one may laud the effort to get one to see the known again, and it is true that one would not have come because one has seen it before – were it not for these interventions, but that's about it: conduit towards understanding the world afresh: a good exercise and glad to have taken part, but more than that I have not to say.

 




 









shorter again, time for lights


from display in Plantin Moretus Museum / Finis Terrae

vrijdag 15 april 2022

Refurbish and reboot

 time to refurbish and reboot, 

winter installations still hanging on, but soon to be augmented...


some elements from the AK-37 (image) still in use... more soon




for instance this batik by Laetitia Yalon from the time...

vrijdag 31 december 2021