For Mahoro Murasawa and Kevin Swierkosz-Lenart I Like everything else, music is (to use a Guattarian concept) an “optional matter”; that is to say, there are many ways to organize any sound material. Take, for instance, the chromatic scale, which represents a way of classifying and gathering together a finite number of sounds, namely, twelve…
Category: Visual Arts
Picturing Thought’s Self-Reflection
Thought’s minimal gesture amounts to establishing distinctions against the background of a night in which, otherwise, all cows would be black (and not even discernible from their own shadows): a primordial chaos or, what amounts to the same, the undifferentiated unity of all things in which nothing is yet outlined. (Example of basic distinctions: everything…
Moreau contra Impressionists
In a letter addressed in 1897 to Leopold Goldschmidt – who, having acquired a painting of his, Jupiter and Semele, asks its author for some comments on it – Gustave Moreau writes: “It would be deplorable if this admirable art, which can succeed in expressing so many things, so many noble, ingenious and profound and…
Beyond the Semiotic Prism
There is, on the one hand, the earth’s flesh, i.e. the multiplicity of movements, images, sounds, and sensations that compose it, by which all earthly beings enter in communication with one another emitting and receiving signs; that is to say, a dynamic multiplicity which is, furthermore, permanently accompanied by thought – a thought that is…
The Enigma of the Sensible
Commenting on Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes: What is important is not that Julien Sorel [i.e. the protagonist], after he has learned that he has been betrayed by Madame de Rénal, travels to Verrière and tries to kill her. It is that silence, that dreamlike journey, that thoughtless certainty, and that…
Two Types of Outside: Vermeer & Velázquez
Allow us to begin by quoting two Wittgensteinian propositions and an excerpt from Roy Wagner’s comments on them in his The Logic of Invention (2019). Wittgenstein: “A picture cannot […] depict its pictorial form: it displays it” (Tractatus, 2.172). “A picture cannot […] place itself outside its representational form” (ibid., 2.174) Wagner: “A picture does…
Seeing Is an Act of Insight
Balthus’s “pictures—like dreams—are journeys unto themselves,” writes Lance Esplung in The Art of Looking. “Balthus does not capture on canvas a scene already lived. He cultivates life within the breathing skin of the canvas, allowing his forms to play out their lives, independently and unpredictably, in relationship to and through the viewer’s experience. . ….
Cosmogenesis and the Capturing of the Invisible
As Paul Klee writes, a good painting puts into effect a process of cosmogenesis. Everything starts with “chaos,” or with a “grey point.” Chaos is the origin of all visible things, and all colours are contained in it. Colours form the world of any painting. Chaos, then, is the unlimited flow of invisible possibilities –…
Giacometti’s Women
They are made of earth and rock. These women. The mountain’s skin. The waves of the ocean have sculpted them. They traced salty waters guiding their ships. Open. Bodies. They stand in fire becoming spirits. Burning matches. The space they share is a ghostly power… and sacrifice.
Fra Angelico’s Wings qua Event
The theme is a commonplace: a virgin receives the visit of an angel who tells her she will bear a divine child. The narrative entirely conventional: the angel visits her in her room, outside of which a more-or-less Edenic garden is also offered to our view, eventually with Adam and Eve being expelled from it…