“To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience”
Bachelard, p.86
Images
May 11th, 2012The analogy between housework and the daily musical practice
May 9th, 2012“But how can housework be made into a creative activity? The minute we apply a glimmer of consciousness to a mechanical gesture, or practice phenomenology while polishing a piece of furniture, we sense new impressions come into being beneath this familiar domestic duty. For consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions. It even dominates memory. How wonderful it is to really become once more the inventor of a mechanical action! And so, when a poet rubs a piece of furniture – even vicariously – when he puts a little fragrant wax on his table with the woolen cloth that lends warmth to everything it touches, he creates a new object; he increases the object’s human dignity; he registers this object officially as a member of the human household.”
(Bachelard, 1964, p. 67)
Paraphrasing Bachelard
May 1st, 2012When a dreamer can reconstruct the world from an object [sound object] that he transforms magically through his care of it, we become convinced that everything in the life of a poet [composer] is germinal.
(Bachelard, 1964, p. 70)
Verticality <-> Horizontality
April 25th, 2012“But the height of city buildings is a purely exterior one. Elevators do away with the heroism of stair climbing so that there is no longer any virtue in living up near the sky. Home has become mere horizontality.”
Gaston Bachelard The poetics of space p. 27
Gubaidulina
April 16th, 2012“To my mind the ideal relationship to tradition and to new compositional techniques is the one in which the artist has mastered both the old and the new, though in a way which makes it seem that he is taking note of neither the one nor the other. There are composers who construct their Works very consciously; I am one of those who ‘cultivate’ them. And for this reason everything I have assimilated forms as it were the roots of a tree, and the work its branches and leaves. One can indeed describe them as being new, but they are leaves nonetheless, and seen in this way they are always traditional and old. Dmitri Shostakovich and Anton Webern have had the greatest influence on my work. Although my music bears no apparent traces of it, these two composers taught me the most important lesson of all: to be myself.” (Sofia Gubaidulina)
Knowing, non-knowig
April 15th, 2012“ […] Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge. This is the price that must be paid for an oeuvre to be, at all times, a sort of pure beginning, which makes its creation an exercise in freedom.”
“If, for instance, I want to paint horses taking the water hurdle at the Auteuil race-course, I expect my painting to give me as much that is unexpected, although of another kind, as the actual race I witnessed gave me. Not for a second can be any question of reproducing exactly a spectacle that is already in the past. But I have to re-live it entirely, in the manner that is new and, this time, from the standpoint of painting. By doing this, I create for myself the possibility of a fresh impact […] An artist does not create the way he lives, he lives the way he creates.”
Jean Lescure, Lapicque, Galanis, Paris p. 78 and 123.
The poetics of space – Gaston Bachelard (1964)
April 14th, 2012
“We can admire more or less, but a sincere impulse, a little impulse toward admiration, is always necessary if we are to receive the phenomenological benefit of a poetic image. The slightest critical consideration arrests this impulse by putting the mind in second position, destroying the primitivity of the imagination. In this admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplative attitudes, the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost. At least the reader participates in the joy of creation that, for Bergson, is the sign of creation”
Spaces speak, are you listening?
March 31st, 2012Spaces speak, are you listening? Barry Blesser – Linda Ruth Salter
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10947
Le Corbusier – “L’Espace Indicible” (1945)
March 30th, 2012An excerpt from Le Corbusier’s “L’Espace Indicible” from 1945
“[…] Action of the work (architecture, painting or sculpture) on around: waves, shouts or cries (the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens), spouting lines such as radiation, operated as an explosive: the site near or far is shaken, affected, dominated or caressed. Reaction of the medium: the walls of the room, its dimensions, the square with the weight of its various fronts, bodies or slopes of the landscape and even the bare horizon of the plains or mountains with their tensions, the whole atmosphere influenced in this place is a work of art, indicating a willingness of man, imposing its depths or its projections, its hard or fuzzy densities, its violence or its sweetness […].”