BALSE NEWSLETTER 040

 



a falcon, perched 

on the freeway lights

405 Los Angeles  



here, here, and

this morning, here



So near, hear?

stream of cars

determined silence.

 

Why not hunt in the prairie? I ask

Why not over the hill,

In the storied cove?



concrete, macchina



here I hunt, Charlie replies

here I nest.



pigeons, 

zip.



distracted I look up, look back

stand 

close

listen to the air, water, fire.

I enter, into the sky


Two weeks, at Balse.


Sentience, consciousness as gravity. Thinking clearly and creatively about consciousness.

Amotik - Byaasi [AMTK015]

PB33

 
 

Which direction is your curiosity going?…knowing what to focus on. curation, to create your library.

Call It Love
Aristotle's guide to the good life | Nicomachean Ethics , action with aim.

to read in French one day.

ART IN THE PARK (Under Construction) - lieee

2024.11.19 - 12.1

Ginza Sony Park

5-3-1, Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo (Google Maps)

 
 

till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 
 
 

Words of Wisdom

 

Science and technology laid claim to the image as a mechanism for visual registration, with the result that it was scientists at this juncture in history who oversaw the birth of new imaging techniques. Where Jan van Eyck (if Vasari is to be believed) had experimented with alchemy and distillation' to improve the binding and drying of oil paint, the key inventions in the nineteenth century were mechanical and chemical applications developed in the laboratory. Visual images were still the indispensable key to intellectual development they had been in the mind of Leonardo, but now it was no longer necessarily the artist who would shape those images. The academic artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been swayed by the ancient idea of ut pictura poesis, becoming caught up in the notion that visual art is fundamentally linguistic and narrative in character and hence, like language, can and must be encoded in clear grammar. Painting (and to a lesser extent sculpture), which still held out the promise in the Renaissance of becoming a vital link in the epistemological chain, was now reduced to the same status as literature - not even poetry - with the emphasis on the narrative component. History painting, in other words.

It ought not to be a surprise, therefore, that it was poets and novelists such as Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) and Émile Zola (1840-1902) who became fervent champions of the visual arts from the mid-nineteenth century, as we saw in a previous chapter. They stressed the role of imagination and emotion in the artistic interpretation of the world - something that was too important for mechanical photography, which was still in its infancy at the time. In a famous passage from 'Le moment artistique' (L'Événement, 1866), Zola argued, in what would become an important dictum for the twentieth century, that what art can add to reality is humanity.


A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART

PHOTOGRAPHY: THE ULTIMATE MARRIAGE OF ART AND SCIENCE

Chapter 3 ART(S) AND SCIENCE 253 




The marriage of art and ideology became a recurring phenomenon in the course of the twentieth century. Few of the many successive and overlapping 'isms' were entirely free of political, ideological or philosophical underpinnings. The democratisation of art and visual language enabled artists to develop revolutionary or reactionary reflexes, become politically or religiously engaged or, at the very least, pick a side in national and international conflicts. There are countless examples of politically engaged works of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They seldom attained the status of Manet's Execution of Emperor Maximilian or Picasso's Guernica, but the reciprocal influence between art and politics and/or religion remains a constant factor to this day. Ai Wei and Banksy are the most recent examples of artists who systematically address political issues, but countless others have gone before them in recent decades.

If we view the political and religious component of art from a long historical perspective- as we have sought to do in this chapter - it is notable that today's artists rarely allow themselvesto be used by the political powers-that-be. On the contrary, they almost systematically embody public opposition, the gnawing conscience of the nation, especially in the Western democracies. More than that, the work of artists who dance to the tune of autocratic regimes is simply not perceived as art in democratic countries. This creates fascinating paradoxes, such as the majestic, classicising statues of exotic dictators that are reviled as kitsch in Europe, even though similar statues from antiquity were seen as authoritative there until well into the twentieth century. Sculpted tributes, like the statues dedicated to the guardians of the demos in Athens twenty-five centuries ago, are still carved from blocks of marble, only now the busts are those of presidents and prime ministers. You will not find them in surveys of important artworks, except perhaps as negative examples. This conundrum illustrates how we citizens of the twenty-first century struggle with our own visual past and how certain genres and types of art have been contaminated by twenty-five centuries of political history. Above all, however, it shows how art has been transformed from a weapon of the powerful into one that is now also wielded by the people.

Chapter 4 ART, POWER, AND FAITH

A NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART - Pg 346-348




At the time, given that I had no idea then of the influence that family would have on my life, this mention should have passed me idly by. But it gave me a sharp stab of pain, the pain felt by a self that had long since mostly ceased to exist but which could still mourn the absence of Gilberte. For a conversation about the family of the "chief undersecretary at the Postmaster General's," which Gilberte and her father had once had in my presence, had gone completely from my mind. Memories of love are, in fact, no exception to the general laws of remembering, which are themselves subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit weakens all things; but the things that are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten, and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again. Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away from our mind's eye, in that abeyance of memory which may last forever. It is only because we have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were, envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not ourselves anymore, but someone else, who once loved something that we no longer care about. The broad daylight of habitual memory gradually fades our images of the past, wears them away until nothing is left of them and the past becomes irrecoverable. Or, rather, it would be irrecoverable, were it not that a few words (such as "chief undersecretary at the Postmaster General's") had been carefully put away and forgotten, much as a copy of a book is deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale against the day when it may become unobtainable.

Page 222, Book 2 of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, Translation by James Grieve



Main Studies

 
 
 

APPENDIX:

 



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Met brings Strauss back / 影のない女＠メット

Met brings Strauss back / 影のない女＠メット

December 1, 2024

Met brings Strauss back to New York

Metropolitan Opera 11.29.2024

RICHARD STRAUSS

Die Frau ohne Schatten #1

CONDUCTOR

Yannick Nézet-Séguin @nezetseguin

NURSE

Nina Stemme

SPIRIT MESSENGER

Ryan Speedo Green @speedogreen

EMPEROR

Russell Thomas @travlingtenor

EMPRESS

Elza van den Heever @elzasoprano

DYER'S WIFE

Lise Lindstrom @liselindstromsoprano

BARAK, THE DYER

Michael Volle @michaelvolleofficial

@metopera @metorchestra @maroon.ak

トン・コープマン＠NYP

12.11.2024

New York Philharmonic 12.11.2024

Handel’s Messiah

Ton Koopman, Conductor

Maya Kherani, Soprano

Maarten Engeltjes, Countertenor

Kieran White, Tenor

Klaus Mertens, Bass-Baritone

Musica Sacra

Asmik Grigorian, Soprano
Lukas Geniušas, Piano
At Carnegie Hall 12.12.2024
Program
TCHAIKOVSKY "Amid the din of the ball," Op. 38, No. 3
TCHAIKOVSKY "Again, as Before, Alone," Op. 73, No. 6
TCHAIKOVSKY "None but the Lonely Heart," Op. 6, No. 6
TCHAIKOVSKY "A tear trembles"
TCHAIKOVSKY Romance in F Minor, Op. 5
TCHAIKOVSKY Scherzo humoristique, Op. 19, No. 2
TCHAIKOVSKY "I bless you, forests," Op. 47, No. 5
TCHAIKOVSKY "Do not Ask," Op. 57, No. 3
RACHMANINOFF "In the silence of the secret night," Op. 4, No. 3
RACHMANINOFF "Oh, Do Not Sing to Me, Fair Maiden"
RACHMANINOFF "Child, thou art as beautiful as a flower," Op. 8, No. 2
RACHMANINOFF "The Dream," Op. 8, No. 5
RACHMANINOFF "Spring Waters," Op. 14, No. 11
RACHMANINOFF "Oh, do not grieve!" Op. 14, No. 8
RACHMANINOFF "I wait for thee," Op. 14, No. 1
RACHMANINOFF Prelude in G-sharp Minor, Op. 32, No. 12
RACHMANINOFF Prelude in D-flat Major, Op. 32, No. 13
RACHMANINOFF "Twilight," Op. 21, No. 3
RACHMANINOFF "How fair this spot," Op. 21, No. 7
RACHMANINOFF "Let Us Rest," Op. 26, No. 3
RACHMANINOFF "Dissonance," Op. 34, No. 13



 

COMING UP


Arthur Jafa - nativemanson

Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles

September 14–December 14, 2024

THE UNBOXING PROJECT

an iterative curatorial project by Hyunjoo Byeon and Minjin Chae

November 2 - December 21, 2024

Various Small Fires (VSF), Los Angeles

Umar Rashid

The Kingdom of the Two Californias. La Época del Totalitarismo Part 2.

November 2–December 21, 2024

BLUM, Los Angeles

Sabine Moritz

Frost

November 8–December 21, 2024
GAGOSIAN, Beverly Hills

Walead Beshty

Profit & Loss

November 7 – December 21, 2024

REGEN PROJECTS, Los Angeles

Liang Fu / Chantal Khoury / Daniel Pitín / Nadia Waheed

November 9 – December 21, 2024

NICODIM, Los Angeles

Allison Schulnik: Dumb Phone

Isabella Cuglievan: A ripple and a nest

Devin Troy Strother: Scenes for Josephine

November 16 - December 21, 2024

The Pit Los Angeles

Thom Mayne
Shaping Accident

18 Sep 2024 - 4 Jan 2025

LA LOUVER, Los Angeles

Julia Yerger

When Lottery
November 09 - January 04

Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form

15 November 2024 – 11 January 2025

LISSON GALLERY, Los Angeles

Gustav Metzger

And Then Came the Environment

13 September 2024 – 12 January 2025

Hause & Wirth, Downtown Los Angeles

Post Human

September 12, 2024–January 18, 2025

Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles

Sara Berman

Lapdogs and Fools

November 23, 2024 — January 18, 2025

VIELMETTER, Los Angeles

Bernard Frize

Shadows, Spirits and Clouds

Christian Boltanski

Animitas (Chili)

16 November 2024 - 18 January 2025

Merian Goodman Gallery, Los Aneles

FORM AND FEELING

Curated by Ashton Cooper

NOVEMBER 2, 2024 - JANUARY 18, 2025

NIGHT GALLERY, Los Angeles

CYNTHIA DAIGNAULT

The Lemon

October 26, 2024 - January 18, 2025

NIGHT GALLERY, Los Angeles

Loie Hollowell

Overview Effect

Nov 9, 2024 – Jan 18, 2025
PACE, Los Angeles

William Eggleston: The Last Dyes

Inquire

November 16, 2024—February 1, 2025

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

Views of Planet City - Visions of the Future

Sep 13, 2024 - Feb 16, 2025

SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture)

Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice
HAMMER, LA

Sep 14, 2024 – Jan 5, 2025

Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption

September 14, 2025 - May 31, 2025

UCLA Art|Sci Center presented at CAP UCLA

PST ART: Art & Science Collide

GETTY CENTER, LA

A landmark regional event that explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present

Olafur Eliasson: OPEN

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, LA

Martin Creed: Work No. 3868 Half the air in a given space
OCMA

July 3, 2024 – February 16, 2025

Simone Leigh

May 26, 2024 – January 20, 2025

LACMA

Iván ARGOTE Impermanent

November 16, 2024 -January 25, 2025
PERROTIN, Los Angeles

Firelei Báez

The Fact That It Amazes Me Does Not Mean I Relinquish It
13 September 2024 – 5 January 2025
Hauser & Wirth, DTLA

Gustav Metzger

And Then Came the Environment
13 September 2024 – 5 January 2025
Hauser & Wirth, Downtown Los Angeles

Frieze Los Angeles

20 – 23 February 2025
Santa Monica Airport

Raqib Shaw: Ballads of East and West

Nov. 16, 2024–March 3, 2025
Huntington Library, Pasadena, California

Alta / a Human Atlas of a City of Angels

January 13, 2025- Apr 27, 2025

Library Foundation of Los Angeles and Los Angeles Public Library

630 West 5th Street, Los Angeles

Olafur Eliasson: OPEN

On view Sept 15, 2024 – July 6, 2025
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

Plugged In: Art and Electric Light

Norton Simon, SEPTEMBER 20, 2024 – FEBRUARY 17, 2025

 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 039

 

light and shadow,

light to shadow.

light, Hammer museum, UCLA.

Shadow, I don’t remember where anymore.

spiace, ho dimenticato.

Few weeks, at Balse.


Let’s just take a deep breath,
let’s just ask the Baobab Tree for the next 30 minutes.
you’re welcome.

oh so dumb Europe dumb Europe dumb Europe

language, language, tyranny of words, theory of general semantics. worlds are symbols, not reality, they are high level abstractions.


There’s no coming back. All the things we had…. They’re just memories.

rust, trust, wait for dusk. wait for us.

feel my touch. what if i wait for you…

what do you want from me.


Falling together…

This Time, now clouds.

so obvious, speak louder than me.
There is no heaven, headphones on.

fuck it,
anti-fragile


Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice


to family and friends
wondering, what would Georgia O’Keefe say?



Devote Your ENTIRE Life - to be in exile, PP (Prague Photographer)

FKA twigs - Eusexua
cccccbgktcituuuijlgeltljntnlljlkllvtnegjfecr/cccccbgktcitdklgkfkcidrkd


DJ sets:

N/A - none…niente.

till next time. 4 sure

Charles A. Balse

 
 
 

Words of Wisdom

 

He claims that this method of working, which is his alone, is the only correct one, the only one leading to a serious result. He mercilessly condemns all preference for simplification which does not pass through submission to nature by means of a meditative and progressive analysis. If a painter is easily satisfied, it is because, according to Paul Cézanne, his vision is mediocre, his temperament practically worthless.

Leonardo da Vinci put forth a similar idea in his treatise on painting when he said, "The painter who has no doubts will profit little from his studies. When a work of art surpasses the judgment of the creator, he who works advances little; but when his judgment rules his works, those works become more and more perfect if inconsistency does not interfere." The artist will arrive at self-knowledge and the perfection of his art not through patience, therefore, but through love that gives insight and the desire to analyze in greater depth and to improve. He must extract from Nature an image which will be, properly speaking, his own; and only through analysis, if he has the strength to press it to the end, will he make himself known ultimately, unambiguously, abstractly.

page 37 -

Documents of Twentieth-Century Art

Conversations with Cézanne

Michael Scott Doran, Julie Lawrence Cochran (Translator), Richard Shiff (Introduction)


One should never say "model"; one should say "modulate." Shadow is a color like light, but it is less brilliant. Light and shadow are nothing more than a rapport between two tones.

Everything in nature is modeled after the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder. If the artist learns to paint according to these simple figures, he will then be able to do all he desires.

Drawing and color are not distinct from one another; gradually as one paints, one draws. The more harmonious the colors are, the more precise the drawing will be. Form is at its fullest when color is at its richest. The secret of drawing and modeling lies in the contrasts and affinities of colors.  The "effect" makes the painting, it unifies and concentrates it; and to produce this, a dominant patch is necessary. The artist must be a laborer in his art and discover early on his means of realization. He becomes a painter through the very qualities of painting itself. By exploring its coarse materiality. The painter must become classical again through nature, or, in other words, through sensation. It all comes down to this: to have sensations and to read nature.

page 39 -

Documents of Twentieth-Century Art

Conversations with Cézanne

Michael Scott Doran, Julie Lawrence Cochran (Translator), Richard Shiff (Introduction)


Here is the way Cézanne's palette was prepared when I met him in Aix:

Yellows

Brilliant yellow

Viridian (Veronese green)

Naples yellow

Greens

Emerald green

Yellows

Chrome yellow

Green earth

Yellow ochre

Raw sienna

Vermillion

Blues

Indian red (red earth)

Cobalt blue

Ultramarine blue

Prussian blue

Peach black

Burnt sienna

Reds

Madder lake

Carmine lake

Burnt crimson lake

EMILE BERNARD


page 79 -

Documents of Twentieth-Century Art

Conversations with Cézanne

Michael Scott Doran, Julie Lawrence Cochran (Translator), Richard Shiff (Introduction)


Main Studies

 
 
 

APPENDIX:

 



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Patricia Iglesias Peco

Las plantas de ese jardín conservaban en la sombra sus colores

October 26 - November 30

Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles

Arthur Jafa - nativemanson

Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles

September 14–December 14, 2024

THE UNBOXING PROJECT

an iterative curatorial project by Hyunjoo Byeon and Minjin Chae

November 2 - December 21, 2024

Various Small Fires (VSF), Los Angeles

Umar Rashid

The Kingdom of the Two Californias. La Época del Totalitarismo Part 2.

November 2–December 21, 2024

BLUM, Los Angeles

Sabine Moritz

Frost

November 8–December 21, 2024
GAGOSIAN, Beverly Hills

Walead Beshty

Profit & Loss

November 7 – December 21, 2024

REGEN PROJECTS, Los Angeles

Liang Fu / Chantal Khoury / Daniel Pitín / Nadia Waheed

November 9 – December 21, 2024

NICODIM, Los Angeles

Allison Schulnik: Dumb Phone

Isabella Cuglievan: A ripple and a nest

Devin Troy Strother: Scenes for Josephine

November 16 - December 21, 2024

The Pit Los Angeles

Thom Mayne
Shaping Accident

18 Sep 2024 - 4 Jan 2025

LA LOUVER, Los Angeles

Julia Yerger

When Lottery
November 09 - January 04

Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form

15 November 2024 – 11 January 2025

LISSON GALLERY, Los Angeles

Gustav Metzger

And Then Came the Environment

13 September 2024 – 12 January 2025

Hause & Wirth, Downtown Los Angeles

Post Human

September 12, 2024–January 18, 2025

Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles

Sara Berman

Lapdogs and Fools

November 23, 2024 — January 18, 2025

VIELMETTER, Los Angeles

Bernard Frize

Shadows, Spirits and Clouds

Christian Boltanski

Animitas (Chili)

16 November 2024 - 18 January 2025

Merian Goodman Gallery, Los Aneles

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Curated by Ashton Cooper

NOVEMBER 2, 2024 - JANUARY 18, 2025

NIGHT GALLERY, Los Angeles

CYNTHIA DAIGNAULT

The Lemon

October 26, 2024 - January 18, 2025

NIGHT GALLERY, Los Angeles

Loie Hollowell

Overview Effect

Nov 9, 2024 – Jan 18, 2025
PACE, Los Angeles

William Eggleston: The Last Dyes

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November 16, 2024—February 1, 2025

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

Views of Planet City - Visions of the Future

Sep 13, 2024 - Feb 16, 2025

SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture)

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Sep 14, 2024 – Jan 5, 2025

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September 14, 2025 - May 31, 2025

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OCMA

July 3, 2024 – February 16, 2025

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May 26, 2024 – January 20, 2025

LACMA

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13 September 2024 – 5 January 2025
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13 September 2024 – 5 January 2025
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Alta / a Human Atlas of a City of Angels

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Plugged In: Art and Electric Light

Norton Simon, SEPTEMBER 20, 2024 – FEBRUARY 17, 2025

 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 038

 

Nikko, Japan

Aoyama, Tokyo

Shibuya, Tokyo











Two weeks, at Balse.

no, several weeks.


Let’s filter this



Revisiting Pesoa - , who ‘despised utility and purpose’

the realms of uselessness. Observant.

self is fragmented.

we die many times.

life is a dream, billions of years to come.

so limited by knowledge.

club Asia, Shibuya, Tokyo


The Baccarat BK theme song that is

Jamie XX, all the way.
brilliant.
the perfect, in the moment.
Jamie xx - Waited All Night (ft. Romy & Oliver Sim) - emotions
Jamie xx - The Feeling I Get From You - tonight, here we are.
Jamie xx - Breather - extreme coolness, so BKK contemporary


Breathe, be grateful for this present moment, right here, right now.

I swear, they were playing this that night.







Siem Reap, Cambodia

The Most Influential Japanese Photographer EVER // Eikoh Hosoe Mishima Moriyama

also the theme of new life

What I would call sora for my dj/music categorization, 5 stars - the sky, in Japanese - Ben Böhmer - Best Life (feat. JONAH) (Official Visualiser)





Shinjuku, Tokyo

Shinjuku, Tokyo

some where near Nikko, Japan

 

Gaien mae, Tokyo

Gaien Mae, Tokyo

Shibuya, Tokyo

 
 

Words of Wisdom

 

Cornelius Agrippa in The Occult Philosophy, one of the most influential theurgic texts of the Renaissance, states the Neoplatonist ethos succinctly when he writes that the "world is an elemental, celestial and intellectual triad where every lower thing is ruled by something higher and receives that mighty influence whereby-through angels, heavens, stars, elements. animals, plants, metals and stones —the archetypal and supreme Craftsman transfers his omnipotent powers into us, having made and created all of them to serve us."

Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology

Ed Simon - pg 118



Bangkok, Thailand



Krishnamurti's major theological contention could be summarized by his statement "Truth is a pathless land," the belief that the angelic, or the divine, or the transcendent, or the absolute must forever be inaccessible to logical language, that no route can bring the initiate to that kingdom, and so the only means of approaching it is poetic rather than rational. At a 1929 address in the Netherlands, Krishnamurti proclaimed, "Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized ... A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect to be imposed on others... Truth cannot be brought down, rather the individual must make the effort to ascend to it." Just as quantum mechanics posits that all sorts of truths about the universe —say, the exact location or velocity of an individual particle —must remain ambiguous and are only decided upon by the arbitrary intercession of the observer, Krishnamurti describes something similar about the divine. Despite his training in Theosophy, such beliefs are perfectly consistent with many interpretations of Eastern religions, but they're also congruent with the idealist mystical belief that the universe only exists if it's being observed, and that God and his retinue are always doing the observing. Both Krishnamurti and Bohm were radical monists, believing in one substance, but rather than matter that substance was mind. The conclusions of quantum mechanics-demonstrated by mathematics and proven by experimentation-were disturbing to physicists who had been trained in the static model of Newtonian science; that some results seem to require consciousness appeared anathema to them. Yet the numbers were what the numbers were, the observations and experiments revealed what they had. On some level, there was a wisdom to assuming that the counterintuitive logic of quantum theory implied that consciousness permeated existence, as that would be the only way to make any sense of such strange results. As Bohm would audaciously declare in an essay published in 1987 in the collection Quantum Implications: Essays in Honor of David Bohm, "Even the electron is informed with a certain level of mind."

Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology

Ed Simon

Page 340





Bangkok, Thailand




Conversations with Cezanne

October 11, 2024

When Lecomte evaluated Cézanne so intelligently in 1899, "abstraction" had not yet settled into its twentieth-century, formalist definition. Nor had images called "abstract" abandoned representational reference, as they would begin to do not long after Cézanne's passing. The meaning of

"abstraction," circa 1900, was fluid and confused, an amalgam of contested notions. Regardless of anything Cézanne said, it was his technique that caused many of his witnesses to link the autonomy of his form and the purity of its beauty to a process of abstraction. This turn in interpretation entailed a certain irony: "form" and "beauty" were conceptual entities suited to endless verbal philosophizing, precisely what Cézanne disliked in Bernard among others. To reconcile abstraction, itself an "abstract" notion with the very physical nature of Cézanne's painting, most of those familiar with him claimed that his abstraction developed from the senses, not the intellect—more intuitive harmony than science of color, more spontaneous rhythm than planned geometry. This variant of "abstraction" broke from the term's nineteenth-century connotation of intellectual excess (we still say that certain arguments are "too abstract," or that a mentally distracted person has an "abstract" look). Lecomte's perception that Cézanne's style satisfied antithetical demands coming from impressionist naturalism and symbolist idealism was ingenious and should have been adequate to the situation; but other commentators began to acknowledge somewhat different alignments, cognizant of competing notions of "abstraction." For Denis, the conflict between Monet's impressionism and Gauguin's symbolism amounted to a dispute between sensualist lovers of nature and rationalist devotees of abstract form. Reacting to attitudes that troubled him in others, Denis complicated matters by switching sides in the ongoing debate. First he praised, then he denigrated abstraction, lamenting Cézanne's inadvertent role in furthering it.

     Why all this happened is crucial to the historical fortune of Cézanne's art. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Denis (like many others) observed that artists of his own age were being dehumanized by the leveling effects of modern urban life-mechanization, commodification, standardization, social regulation—all leading to impoverishment of both intellectual and spiritual experience. He argued that the remedy could be found in an "abstract ideal, the expression of inner [mental] life or a simple decoration for the pleasure of the eyes.", Under the circumstances, the representational arts would strive to mask out dull environmental realities, "evolving toward abstraction." However much this kind of "abstraction" might appeal to the intellect and imagination (subjective "inner life"), it would retain a distinct material component, located in a purified form and a straightforward procedure (the objective "beauty" of "a simple decoration"). Cézanne was exemplary because his marks appeared independent of any strict mimetic function and were also very physical, therefore representing a material (not conceptual) abstraction of the painting process. This was an aestheticized, humanized materialism, intense in both sensation and spirit; it seemed fit to counter the anesthetizing materialism of modern bourgeois existence.




page 30 -

Documents of Twentieth-Century Art

Conversations with Cézanne

Michael Scott Doran, Julie Lawrence Cochran (Translator), Richard Shiff (Introduction)






Bangkok, Thailand

Bangkok, Thailand










Aoyama, Tokyo, Japan

Main Studies

 
 

Bangkok, Thailand

Bangkok, Thailand

 
 

APPENDIX:

Bangkok, Thailand

 



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At Pioneer Works, Earl Howard and ICE, The opening venue since 2016

Inspired Inspiration : ブルックリンの閃き合い

 

Bangkok, Thailand

 

Siem Reap, Cambodia

Bangkok, Thailand

 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 036

 


 
 

The observer. Looking out, over the world. As she closes her eyes, we seize existence. As she reopens, a new existence.

 

Machine that sow together time.

 

Two weeks, at Balse.

Much focus on music. Digging into, catching up with German pop.





 
 
 
 

Words of Wisdom

 

Again and again, I return to this question of who among us can see the angels, and why they are so often invisible to the preponderance of people in the contemporary world. In past epochs, visionaries and prophets, mystics and poets were privy to the shimmering resplendence of the celestial choir flitting about in the cosmos. I, who have never seen an angel, and can scarcely believe that such a creature is possible, am envious of William Blake with his espying them in the trees at nightfall, every golden wing quivering in the sunset, every halo glowing in the dusk. As with so much of that which ails us—our nihilism and our prejudices, our alienations and our oppressions-I've long favored that myth of disenchantment, that faith that at one point the ladder to heaven was a bit sturdier and one need not have been as remarkable a soul as Blake to hear the flapping of the angels' wings. "There is a widespread sense of loss here," writes the philosopher Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, "if not always of God, then at least of meaning." I'm not sure that an overabundance of meaning was ever the birthright of humanity, but like all creation myths, this parable about disenchantment does what it needs to do in aiding me to make sense of the world. Because an angel is not something to be etherized and anatomized, dissected and categorized; an angel refers to nothing so vulgar as a body that can be examined with scalpel and calipers, but is closer to a fleeting feeling, a figure of speech, a turn of phrase, a sense that there is something greater and truer and more beautiful than you, and that despite it all you are loved and are capable of loving in return. For you see, an angel is merely love that is given a proper name, grace that is imagined with a face. A blessed wisdom that is so close we can sometimes hear it call to us in our names, the reminder of a wholly foreign and holy Other beautiful and irrational goodness. -ED SIMON Elysium page 15




At issue with Aquinas's systemization isn't that passages such as the one quoted above don't make sense, but rather that they make too much sense. Serpentine though the reasoning may be, Aquinas's logic is unassailable and, based on the axioms he assumes, conceives of an angelology as rigorous as Euclidian geometry. What's unclear is whether any of it corresponds to an actual reality. With the rise of Scholasticism toward the end of the Middle Ages, what we see in evidence isn't an overabundance of faith but rather a crisis of it. What's clear in reading Aquinas-especially once it's remembered that he abandoned his own philosophy after a mystical experience that was supposedly infinite in its beauty-is that the Summa Theologica is a project of trying to convince yourself of something. Neoplatonists had the benefit of admitting that their systems were forever deferred, always falling short of whatever ultimate things flit unseen beyond the veil of human senses. When it comes to approaching angels, science is deficient in a manner that poetry simply isn't. A powerful tool, poetry — as long as it isn't mistaken for the referent-one that dominated until the High Middle Ages, only to return with the Renaissance humanists, occultists, and Neoplatonists. The Areopagite was among the most subtle of thinkers in this regard, in avoiding intellectual idolatry that confuses the painting of a winged being with intangible celestial forces themselves—a feature of the aforementioned apophatic tradition of which he is an exemplar, a wisdom that understands that the spoken god is never the real God. This is the "being beyond being" as he calls it in Divine Names, something that "is cause of all; / but itself: nothing." What Dionysius's angelology offered was a system of symbol, metaphor, simile, and cipher in which to express the experience of the inexpressible, to hear that which is silent, to see that which is invisible. A language to speak of those without tongues, a hand to write among those lacking limbs, a mind to envision for the thought that is greater than all experience. For Dionysius, angels were both agents of inspiration and a metaphor for meaning; returning celestial beings to their most crucial function, his was a theory of the message. - ED SIMON Elysium page 64

AVOWAL Midori Arai

Tokyo International Gallery

Saturday, June 1, 2024 – Saturday, June 29, 2024

CÉZANNE SPEAKS…


(I publish [...] these notes collected by Cézanne's son without adding one line of my own, not wanting to alter in any way the thoughts, reflec-tions, and opinions of the artist ...)


I Critics' opinions about art are formulated more on literary principles than on aesthetic ones.

Il The artist must avoid literature in art.

Ill Art is the manifestation of an exquisite sensitivity.

Iv Sensitivity defines the individual. At its highest level, it identifies an artist.

v Great sensitivity is the most powerful characteristic of any beautiful artistic creation.

vi The most seductive element in art is the artist's own personality. 

vIl The artist gives form to his sensibility, to his own, innate individuality.

vIll The nobility of an artist's creation reveals his soul.

Ix The artist materializes and individualizes.

x The artist knows the joy of being able to communicate to others his excitement about nature, that masterpiece whose mysteries he believes he has deciphered.

xI Genius is the ability to renew one's emotion by daily contact with nature.

xII For the artist seeing is creating; creating is composing.

XIII Because the artist does not note down his emotions as the bird sings his song: he composes.

xIv The universality of the immediate impact of a work of art does not indicate its importance.


xv Art is a religion. Its goal is the elevation of thought. xVI He who does not hunger for the absolute (perfection) is content with placid mediocrity.

XVIl An intellect's excellence can be judged by the originality of its creations.

XVIII A mind that can organize powerfully is the most precious collaborator with sensibility in the realization of a work of art.

XIX Art is the adaptation of things to our needs and tastes. xx The technique of any art consists of a language and a logic.s xx1 Style is perfect when it is commensurate with the character and grandeur of the subject it interprets.

xXII Style does not result from the slavish imitation of the old masters; it develops from the artist's personal manner of feeling and expression.

XXIII The manner in which a work of art is rendered allows us to judge the distinction of the artist's mind and insight.

xxIv The quest for novelty and originality is an artificial need which can never disguise banality and the absence of artistic tempera-ment.

xxv Line and modeling do not exist. Drawing is the relationship of contrasts or, simply, the rapport of two tones, white and black. xxvi Light and shadow result from the rapport between colors.

These two most important phenomena differ not by their general intensity but by their individual resonance.

xxVII The form and contour of objects are created by oppositions and contrasts which result from their particular hues.

XXVIII Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and color cannot be separated, since all things in nature are colored.

xxIx As we paint, we gradually draw. Accuracy of tone gives an object both its light and shading. The better the color harmonies, the clearer the drawing becomes.

xxx Contrasts and relations of tones are the secret of drawing and shading?

xxxI Nature exists in three dimensions. There is a distance-a plane- between the painter and his model; it is atmosphere. All bodies seen in space are convex.®

XXXlI Atmosphere forms an enduring foundation. Oppositions of colors divide all the phenomena of light into separate elements upon the screen that is atmosphere. This atmosphere, then, envelops the painting, contributing to its synthesis and general harmony.

xxxIII We can say, therefore, that to paint is to create contrasts. xxxIv There is neither light painting nor dark painting, but simply relationships of tones. If they are placed well, by themselves they will establish harmony. The more numerous and varied they are, the greater is their effect and the more pleasing they will be to the eye?

xxxv Like all the arts, painting has its own techniques, but beauty of tone and harmonious combinations of sensations depend entirely on the artist's discernment.

xxxvi The artist cannot perceive all these relationships directly;

he must feel them.

xxXVII To sense correctly and represent that sensation fully is the foundation of style.

xXXVIII Painting is the art of combining sensations, in other words, of establishing harmony between colors, contours, and planes.

xxxx This method comes from contact with nature and develops through experience. It consists of searching for the expression of what one feels and of organizing sensations within a personal aesthetic.

xL Schools of art, a priori, do not exist. 10

XLl To paint from nature is to set free the essence of the model.

Painting does not mean slavishly copying an object. The artist must perceive and capture harmonyl from among many relationships. He must transpose them in a scale of his own invention while he develops them according to a new and original logic.

XLII To paint a picture is to compose.


Documents of Twentieth-Century Art

Conversations with Cézanne

Michael Scott Doran, Julie Lawrence Cochran (Translator), Richard Shiff (Introduction)







Main Studies

 
 
 
 

APPENDIX:


MARA & VELA - Fliegen davon (Official Video)
Schüttelfrost - fyne (Official Video)
Liebesbriefe - fyne (Official Video)
Magdalena Bay - Image (Official Video)
Jordana - Push Me Away (feat. Magdalena Bay) (Official Video)
FCUKERS - "Bon Bon" - 2024/3/13 13th Floor, TX
“Basura” Soltera visualesdekari
Why You Can’t Trust Good People - The Philosophy of 1984 and George Orwell
Continuously Evolve as a Photographer: Stephen Shore
Lucinee | HÖR - August 5 / 2024
PALLAR - MÄR | 03.24
Somniac One - HATE Podcast 397
Cirkle - HATE Podcast 395
KUČKA - Drowning (from the album ‘Wrestling’)
KUČKA – ‘Not There’ (live for Like A Version)
KUČKA - Wasting Time (til the end of the world)
KUČKA - Eternity (from the album ‘Wrestling’)
KUČKA - Contemplation (from the album ‘Wrestling’)
KUČKA — No Good For Me (from the album ‘Wrestling’)
Pretty Girl - All Good (Official Music Video)
Pretty Girl - Inside (Official Music Video)
KUČKA - Heavyweight (Official Video)
KUČKA - Heaven (Live Version)KUČKA - Flux 98
KUČKA - Real (from the album ‘Wrestling’)
SPIN Sessions Presents: KUČKA (Live)
Flume feat. KUČKA & Quiet Bison - ESCAPE (Official Music Video)
S1RENA - Atlantis (Official Video)
Schüttelfrost - fyne (in 360°)
S1RENA - Weit Entfernt (OFFICIAL VIDEO)
S1RENA x mickyi - Zone Out (OFFICIAL VIDEO)
ELIF - ABER WO BIST DU (Official Video)
ELIF - BEIFAHRERSITZ (Official Video)
Domiziana - Amore (prod. by Miksu/Macloud & Sizzy & Sira | Offizielles Musikvideo)
Tove Lo & SG Lewis - Busy Girl (Official Music Video)
Pretty Girl - Sun Phase
1,000,000 Film Photos. 234,000 Undeveloped Upon Death. What Happened to Them? Garry
Winogrand
Inside Open Ground: A very interesting new Club with an incredible sound system (Subtitles)
Hiroko Yamamura | Boiler Room: Chicago
ELIF - ABER WO BIST DU (NACHT SESSION)
ELIF - NUR MIR (Official Video)



 



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BALSE NEWSLETTER 035

 
 

Two weeks, at Balse.

A superb, must see documentary film by Wim Wenders - Anselm (2023) - Official Trailer, on the German contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer. Stunning. Great for learning the artist and his works.


Danh Vo Interview: Art Should Estrange - experiencing his work at the Venezia Biennale Arte 2015 Danish Pavilion may have been the first true and deep encounter with contemporary art. Continuing the research on the artist.

Other contemporary art research Berlinde De Bruyckere (Interview). And found this nice video of the actual Pierre Huyghe <Liminal> exhibition at the Punta Della Dogana.

What do I know - Montaigne - the art of living. ESSAIS, to experiment, to try.

Logic is not for me, she says. Logic is not hospitable to a creative mind. interesting. Love it.

Some Nietzsche - Nietzsche and The Human Animal: The Domesticated and The Strong

  • "In order to be able to create, we must give ourselves greater freedom than has been given us before; at the same time, liberation from morality and relief through festivals (premonitions of the future! celebrate the future; not the past! compose the myth of the future! live in hope!) Blissful moments! And then cover up the curtain again and turn our thoughts to fixed, close goals." (Nietzsche)

  • "Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all." (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)


Suffering and bliss - you DO need suffering in your life | Arthur Brooks. More, Carl Jung - The Psychology of The Hero - Carl Jung's Archetype, and a bit new-agey but nevertheless, some research done Eckhart Tolle on Transforming Desire into Fulfillment

Visiting documentaries on Martin Margiela fashion designer. And other fashion related studies.


Research on art critique. ADSR Art Critique method - a method of understanding works of art and design. No, I did not go to art school, and I am interested in the method.

Meet the Collectors | Troy Carter - a fresh perspective. Interviewing art collectors.


 
 
 

Words of Wisdom

 

Yet one thing is clear: Leonardo da Vinci did not view the visual arts - especially painting - as a science: as far as he was concerned they were the science. He recognized the impossibility of communicating scientific ideas without recourse to visual art as the knowledge in question had to be illustrated in order to be understood correctly. Anatomy, for example, cannot rely on written descriptions alone, it must be recorded and disseminated visually as well. All this led Leonardo to the conclusion that knowledge and understanding - the foundations of science - could not exist without painting. Through him, there was a growing awareness that art in general and painting in particular could contribute to the further development of knowledge in the broadest sense. In this way, he definitively paved the way for artists towards the sciences - artes as they were known at the time, while conversely demonstrating that imagination and creativity

- ingenium or ingenuity - are essential to the achievement of new insights.

NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART - Chapter 2 Art as Idea page 149



Both that which appeared to Ezekiel in the desert imploring him to be not afraid and the little figurine are terrifying, but beautiful as well, for what they embody and represent are that sacred and forever-distant world of meaning that for a few brief moments sometimes intercedes in prosaic exis-tence. Cohen's observations about the prevalence of the word "angel" in the radical poetry of the Beats (and in his own work) speak to something that creative artists have always known-that this something always shimmers a bit when engulfed in the process. Creative acts-painting and dancing, music and writing-are so often where that enchanted conduit to the transcendent remains obvious. It should be pointed out that so often the miracle of angels is a literary one; the being that commands Ezekiel to eat a scroll rolled in honey, making those words part of his flesh; Gabriel appearing to the Prophet Muhammad with the perfection of the Qur'an; Moroni with Joseph Smith and those golden tablets of Palmyra. Angels are writers. And dancers. And musicians. And painters. And sculptors. They endure because they are such a perfect encapsulation of the mysteriousness that still defines creation, that can't be entirely explained away by neurology or sociology. They are like what Federico García Lorca called the duende. - ELYSIUM, Ed Simon, page 11



"It would be tempting to reach for a universal definition that could apply across all these cultural settings," writes Valery Rees in From Gabriel to Lucifer: A Cultural History of Angels. Supernatural beings or cultural archetypes, transcendent creatures or poetic symbols? Or somehow all of these things?Rees writes that if "we wish to consider the idea of angel as a psychological archetype we must first decide whether we are considering a simple messenger, a protector, a concept of goodness, a motivating idea, or a soul free from bodily form. For angels fulfill all these roles." Their variability is certainly part of what makes angels so evocative still, but Rees's identification goodness as being one of their most important attributes can neither be skirted over nor sandwiched between other roles of such beings. "Goodness," after all, is one of the most operative connotations of the very word. "You're an angel," "Be an angel," "She was an angel." For all that is mysterious about the heavenly choir — their behavior and appearance, their function and their agency-nothing is stranger than their goodness It remains the great scandal of the angelic, arguably the great scandal of ethics. In our bloody and wicked century, inheritor of the monstrous twentieth century, nothing can seem more foreign, more irrational, than goodness. To be good is to not act in self-interest; it's to reject the instrumentalization of other people, it's to recognize someone else beyond the veil of culturally and economically enforced solipsism. Goodness remains radical, it remains strange and yet it's very much real. In making angels symbolic of goodness, there is a union of metaphysics and ethics, so often kept philosophically distant, though they are intrinsically connected. To say that angels are symbols of transcendence and of ecstasy must not be purchased with an ignorance of goodness, for such mystical reveries are only masturbation unless they also acknowledge the idea of goodness, the idea of the sanctification and sacredness of other consciousnesses. - ELYSIUM, Ed Simon, page 11

Brancusi: Carving the Essence

March 30 [Sat] - July 7 [Sun], 2024

Artizon Museum, Tokyo

Main Studies

 
 
 

APPENDIX:

Ruhrtriennale 2024: Berlinde De Bruyckere (Interview) - comtemporary art

Meet the Collectors | Troy Carter - art collection

Once You Stop Caring, the Results Come - The Philosophy of Michel de Montaigne - philosophy

Why I'm done being logical. - inspiration

John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 4 (1972) - documentary

007 CULTUR FM (2024 Live Afrobeats Mix by Tayo Iku) - music

parismatiq vol.7 | aprtment life x nomad travel club (alternative r&b, amapiano, afro sounds) - music

somewhere in Between (full album) - music

Eckhart Tolle on Transforming Desire into Fulfillment - psychology

Tokyo Underground - Short Film (R35 GT-R, BMW E30, FD RX-7, Honda NSX and more) - music

The Psychology of The Hero - Carl Jung's Archetype - psychology

Anselm (2023) - Official Trailer - documentary/film

The Dior Cabine chronicles: A scarf for every attitude - fashion

Valentino Rendez-Vous | Starring Zendaya - fashion

Alexander McQueen | Fall Winter 2023/2024 | Full Show - fashion

Charli XCX | Boiler Room & Charli XCX Presents: PARTYGIRL - music

ayrtn - FEEL THA BASS - music

Sorry, but you DO need suffering in your life | Arthur Brooks - philosphy

Danh Vo Interview: Art Should Estrange - art

Nietzsche and The Human Animal: The Domesticated and The Strong - philosophy

TDJ | SCR Guestmix | SCR - music

Pierre Huyghe, « Liminal », Punta della Dogana, Venice, March 2024 - art

Uma Scheffer | Boiler Room: Buenos Aires - DJ set

How Art Critique *SHOULD Work. MONSTER EPISODE! - A New Method - In Depth | Elliott Earls - creativity

The Artist Is Absent: A Short Film on Martin Margiela - fashion/documentary

 



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Rei Nakanishi - 「表層の季節」

GINZA TSUTAYA BOOKS

May 18 - June 5th, 2024

 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 034

 








Two weeks, at Balse.




So, he tells me to explain,

as it will help us.

Eventually, I said, sure,

let’s do it.

it is about selecting.

Problems of marketing - anti-marketing starter pack
I have not yet watched the Manufacturing Consent, now on my list. He introduced me to Corporate Music - How to Compose with no Soul, which is a great watch as well. Episode 4, Publicity And Advertising, Ways Of Seeing (BBC Four, Presented by John Berger). “when everybody’s social class is more or less determined by birth, a personal envy is a less familiar notion. And without social envy, glamour cannot exist. Envy becomes a common emotion when a society is moved towards democracy and stopped halfway, where status is open to anyone, but only enjoyed by a few.” Brilliant doc.


A video recording of the Pierre Huyghe's Exhibition at Punta Della Dogana, Venice. Glad, 10 favorite contemporary artists of today. Pierre is in our top three favorite contemporary artists list that we are working on right now. Berlinde De Bruyckere also in top three.

Marseille Skate video. stylish skateboard video.

LA Photographer, Adali Schell, an impressive young photographer here.

The Comet / Poppea
An opera presented by MOCA and The Industry

Composed by George Lewis
Libretto by Douglas Kearney
Concept & Direction by Yuval Sharon






This was a very well made review of Perfect Days, by Wim Wenders. If you haven't seen it, you may not want to see it. Or, well, just watch it. It is pretty inspiring. 無心 'mushin' -
Little appreciations in a day. 鏡 ‘kagami’ or mirror. reflection. 木漏れ日’komorebi’


You do want to hear this - Alva Noto - HYbr:ID Sync Inter. ALVA NOTO, a favorite of ours since the 90’s. But it wasn’t until this year that I havegone back, thanks to KOMPAKT and Qubouz.








Herzog’s remarks on Pschyco Analysis was refreshing. I was very fascinated with Freud and Jung but this was a fresh breeze into my brain to balance the influence.


From time to time, I like to watch these gliders fly in the sky. Such a cool feeling.

But this might be the most important clip in the last two weeks - XENOMORPH by Heaven Sent Honey. GIGER.

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.”―Rainer Maria Rilke,Duino Elegies

WHO, if I cried out, might hear me – among the ranked Angels? Even if One suddenly clasped me to his heart I would die of the force of his being. For Beauty is only the infant of scarcely endurable Terror, and we are amazed when it casually spares us. Every Angel is terrible. - Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, First Elegy

 
 
 

Words of Wisdom

 

Mimemata 

NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART - Chapter 2 Art as Idea page 122 


Thinking about art has been dominated by the concept of 'mimesis' since antiquity. Freely translated, the ancient Greek term refers to the 'imitation' of nature which human beings sought to recreate in their art until well into the nineteenth century. The degree to which the creator succeeds in this goal has always been one of the most important benchmarks for the quality of the work of art. Successful mimesis resulted in what the Greeks - who did not have a word for visual artworks - called mimemata (singular mimema: the result of imitation). The concept is of the utmost importance to any understanding of Western art history. Mimesis was the focus of Western visual culture from the antique era until the paradigm shift of Impressionism and its offshoots began to undermine the principle from the latter part of the nineteenth century. No artist before then had dared to produce art that did not consider nature its ultimate model. To this day, many people still judge a work's merit in terms of its mimetic qualities. Consequently, the principle of imitation was at the forefront of the artist's possibilities and limitations for centuries. The techniques of oil painting and linear perspective, for instance, did not just develop out of nowhere but were vital steps in the ancient quest for perfection in the emulation of reality that has typified Western art. Even more than that, the notion that art is essentially an imitation of nature actually fed through over time into the visual culture of non-Western religions and cultures. The ancient Greek concept played an active part, for instance, in the visualisation of Buddhism, whose founder was represented symbolically during the religion's first centuries (up to the fourth century BCE). It was only after Alexander the Great's conquests in the Indus Valley that the Buddha began to be depicted as the idealised human figure we know today [2.6]. Mimesis might thus appear simple and self-evident at first sight, yet it is far from being so. Simulating what we see is not a straightforward process. The term itself is not unambiguous either and has undergone various shifts in meaning since ancient times. Over the centuries, mimesis became an umbrella concept taking in ideas such as imitation, representation, similitudo, simulacrum and prototypum. If we delve more deeply into the phenomenon, which is precisely what occurred in antique Greek culture, emulation proves to be highly complex. Artists can, for instance, imitate nature in an idealised way by seeking to perfect it, but they can also strive for a 'photographic' realism [2.7, 2.8] or give free rein to their creativity and imagine things that cannot be imitated, as they do not actually exist. The centaurs on the famous Parthenon frieze [2.9 ] appear lifelike, but these hybrid mythological beings - half human, half horse - are obviously a product of human imagination.


NEW HISTORY OF WESTERN ART - Chapter 2 Art as Idea
Ekphrasis page 128


One final concept from Greek antiquity that deserves some explanation here, even though it is not directly related to art theory, is ekphrasis (Exparis or descriptio in Latin) meaning an artful description. Ekphrasis was a standard part of the progymnasmata, the exercises given to students of rhetoric. Would-be orators had to describe a sculpture or painting as vividly and accurately as possible, so that the visual narrative they created would allow their audience to form a clear idea of the work. Theorists of rhetoric were quick to appreciate this ability to 'speak to the imagination'. Ekphrasis had a substantial impact on art in the Renaissance as it enabled the artists of the time to work in the opposite direction. Knowledge of antique art was limited in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, not only outside Italy but within the birthplace of Renaissance art itself. Barely any trace had survived of paintings from antiquity; all that remained of Zeuxis and Apelles' masterpieces were the beautiful descriptions of Horace and Pliny, and so their texts, along with those of other authors, began to be used in an attempt to reconstruct antique art. The translation from image to word was thus reversed, as words were turned back into images. The so-called Calumny of Apelles - a description of an allegorical composition by the most famous Greek sculptor - is an example as striking as it is well known. The painting was described by Lucian and was drawn and painted by numerous Renaissance masters, including Botticelli, Mantegna, Raphael and Bruegel.


Henri Cartier-Bresson

People of Moscow

Page 66


I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and even less a journalist. What I am looking for, above all else, is to be attentive to life….


The camera is not the right instrument to provide the whys and wherefores of things; it is, rather, designed to evoke, and in the best cases—in its own intuitive way—it asks questions and gives answers at the same time. I have thus used it in an active flânerie, in search of "objective chance."




Main Studies

 
 
 
 

APPENDIX:

 


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This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.













 
 
 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 033

 





Two weeks, at Balse.


In the desert. The harsh Joshua Tree, Palm Springs, LV, then the soothing breeze that is the Pacific Ocean. Julio. Second half of this year. Refocusing on the rest of the year.

‘if we resist or ignore an archetype, it will possess us’ - Jung

death and rebirth. life is death, death is life.

access to great wisdom. day after day, friendship that arrived from Tokyo.



origins of ideas, ‘as you walk around the woods. derivative to original, somewhere along this axis. Verisimilitude, it is the idea behind works of art that make the work interesting.’ ‘quieting the mind and the body, empty the mind.’ emptying the mind is an impossibility. Modified Transcendental Meditation Method. The closer that we look at any subject the more you see. Ideas will inexorably manifest itself….background cognitive process.’



more archetypal journey - choosing a path of change.

are you living a lie? the acid test. Initiation into life. Individuation and courage. The glorious freedom that awaits. lie vs truth. Need to make the transition alone. Are they ready to accept the call to rebirth. To live again. The Fountain.



Ask new and different question. Asking questions is a way of thinking. The reality is, we don’t have the answers. We lose sight of opportunities that are right in front of us.

What makes us uniquely human is our creativity. Curiosity. Be clumsy students of something, anything.



JACQUEMUS Capri.

Gautier, Odilon Redon, Gustav Moreau the Apparition with Salome - late 19th and early 20th century Paris. Symbolist movement.

Learning From Past Lives

Love Acid Arab

Döne Döne Acid Arab

Gouloulou Acid Arab





The art of mourning - Taryn Simon
’this absolutely felt like it needed to be sonic…and something beyond language, beyond image…beyond definition that is inarticulable.’






DJ set

Richie Hawtin - Womb, Tokyo 20.04.2024



literature - Brave New World


till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 
 
 

Words of Wisdom

 

A disservice, a slander, a libel-for angelology as properly constituted has nothing to do with Touched by an Angel or Hummel figurines. Angelology, rather, is the discipline that probes the ecstasies of transcendence, the ineffable nature of meaning that permeates reality, in a space with which words themselves can't fully grapple. Just because angelology reduces us to the wooliest of superlatives -"infinite," "eternal," "ecstasy," "transcendence" —doesn't mean that they don't refer to that something, nor is it a reason to abandon angels themselves to the saccharine and the mawkish.  The poet and folk musician Leonard Cohen, a consummately nonmawkish and antisaccharine artist, a lover but not a sentimentalist, was asked in a 1984 interview by the journalist Robert Sward of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about his affection for the word "angel." Detailing his attraction to the way the term was used by those great poets of beatitude Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso, Cohen admits that "I never knew what they meant, except that it was a designation for a human being and that it affirmed the light in an individual." This is a telling answer about the angelic, our attractions to them whether in Paradise Lost or It's a Wonderful Life, the manner in which such beings reflect the divinity in humanity and the humanity in divinity. They are otherworldly but near; alien but familiar; pure alterity and yet totally personal. Angels are the waystation between us and the unapproachable God. Cohen explains how the Beat poets were anything but maudlin in their attraction to the image of the angel; such a being to them wasn't evidence of cheap faith, but rather of the connections between the suffering soul and something in the great beyond, a light in the perennial darkness. "An angel is only a messenger, only a channel," Cohen says, and yet we're angels to each other, for the "fact that somebody can bring you the light, and you feel it, you feel healed or situated. And it's a migratory gift," suggesting that angels themselves are as much verb as noun. - ELYSIUM, a visual history of angelology, by Ed Simon, Introduction - page 8

FG: I think a good work is a work that doesn't know its audience. Upon its creation, it doesn't yet know what its audience is, because otherwise it's just communication. Communication is about the transfer of information between two pre-constituted subjects. But the question mark is what I'm obsessed with — and I think Pierre is also. You don't know the identity of the audience or the viewer. And I think that's crucial, not to presuppose.  Otherwise, you do bad work.

AS: I agree with you. The work should not be addressed intentionally to an audience as such. It should be indifferent. To push the idea further, it can also exist independent of the presence of the viewer, which is something essential in Pierre's work. He often says, "I'm not exhibiting some thing to someone. I'm exhibiting someone to something.” 

FG: It's very difficult to presuppose what the human really is. The only definition of the human I can come up with is that it's something always in the process of transformation of de-identifying itself to become itself.

AS: The human is an escape route.

Ursula magazine -  artists Fabien Giraud and Raphael Siboni in conversation with Anne Stenne about possible futures and the influence of Pierre Huyghe, page 73





Willem de Kooning e l'Italia

Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice

Main Studies

 
 
 
 

APPENDIX:

 

Self and Beyond, a group exhibition

Ota FineArts Tokyo

5/11 - 6/15/2024






ClassicAsobi recommends

This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.











 
 
 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 032

 

Link to original post

 
 





Two weeks, at Balse.


Theme - Ghost & angeles - Angelology, the research topic of the time for the new photo book to come.

More Berlinde studies of her and sculpture. Horses. Creating new language. Branch and trees, symbol of life. New life. Pillow that is hope. Then Roni Horn, rediscovering water. Dialog with surrounding. Using a face as a place. eye contact and ambiguity. almost like a landscape. Visual traces. Photographic, yet possessing architectural and psychological component. Figurative and symbolic. Moving through language to arrive at visual. You use metaphor to make yourself at home in the world. You use metaphor to extinguish the unknown, but I don’t want to be extinguished."


Study - Rick Owen

'PROPHET OF THE APOCALYPSE' RICK OWENS

personal universe.

Understanding Rick Owens

architectural

TECHNO

Vinicius Honorio - Stay In The Rhythm [BP076]

and some nice solid DJ sets for a weekend afternoon

ANIMA Invites - Hekato | HÖR - June 14 / 2024

ROÜGE | HÖR - Jan 7 / 2023

GWÄN | HÖR - June 13 / 2024

and house

Antraum aka (Anton & Traumer) - Hyaku [OMAKASE003]



Stories. NOWNESS
Inside Tokyo’s host clubs and the interplay between self-realization and self-destruction


Preparing for the California desert road trip assignment to Joshua Tree, Palm Springs, and Vegas.

till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 
 
 

Words of Inspiration

 

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression. I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds-the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate. But this takes care only of the content of the picture. For me, content cannot be separated from form. By form, I mean a rigorous organization of the interplay of surfaces, lines, and values. It is in this organization alone that our conceptions and emotions become concrete and communicable. In photography, visual organization can stem only from a developed instinct. - 1952

Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye - Writings on photography and photographers, page 42

Those who go searching for angels inevitably convince themselves that they've found them; it's the uneasy visions among the unprepared that announce themselves. In my case, I happened to be sitting on my faux leather couch, dusted in crumbs and stains, in my former apartment that overlooked the Lehigh Valley and the crumbling, rusting steel mill some miles downriver, either reading a novel or watching television, I can't remember. Suddenly, with absolutely no indication this would happen, I was utterly, totally, completely, and fully convinced of the following: the unity of all creation, the benevolence of that reality, the thrumming of a blessed energy beneath the universe— and most of all, I felt a genuine and infinite tenderness toward all of my fellow suffering creatures, an empathy that for a second made pure adrenaline course through my heart, that left my mouth dry and my head dizzy. I felt, for a second, as if I was in the glorious presence of a kind and knowing and wonderful something.

Now, normally I'm rather a shit. Which is why this uncharacteristically moving sense of togetherness with existence still remains so memorable to me. And I'm under no illusions as to the veracity of that experience, that divine "click" that suddenly moved in heart and spirit, soul and mind. No doubt there could be some recourse to material explanation, a kernel of dopamine that got loose in my synapses, some endorphins kicked up for a physiological reason. At that point I was a few months sober, and the reformed among us tribes of dipsomaniacs often speak of a so-called pink cloud, the heady rush of those first few months when you've dried out and you're no longer bathing your nervous system in liquid depressant, so the most basic of normal functions appear as if heaven to you. So maybe it was some random neuron flaring, just a bit of the cognitive flotsam that gets trudged up now and again, more often through chemical inter-vention, but occasionally through the sheer randomness of everything.

All of this could be true-and it strikes me as utterly irrelevant. Because whether that experience was just "in my head" misses the point of what perception is-everything is, of course, mediated through my head. The question is whether it corresponded to anything in the outside world, but when it comes to ecstasy and transcendence that very question strikes me as more of a categorization mistake than as anything that is particularly useful, Barbara Ehrenreich, the great muckraking journalist, writer, and thinker, had a not dissimilar experience when she was a thirteen-year-old girl in California, writing in Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything how she suddenly realized that "it seemed astounding to just be moving forward on my own strength, unim-peded, pulled toward the light." This was no Saul to Damascus moment for Ehrenreich, who was and remained an atheist her whole life, but it was an acknowledgment of an uncanny something. Reflecting on that moment, she writes, "You can and should use logic and reason all you want. But it would be a great mistake to ignore the stray bit of data that doesn't fit into your preconceived theories, that may even confound everything you thought you were sure of."

Because the situation is, whether angels are "real or not," people have long experienced them, and still do. I'm envious, because I would love to see an angel, though I think that I've experienced grace, and that's not necessarily a different thing. Often the word "theophany" is used to describe the divine encounter, the experience of something that is infinite and eternal, both immanent and transcendent, and far above our prosaic reality. The beauty of theophany is that such encounters happen in the real world, for where else would they occur? - Elysium, A Visual History of Angelology, Ed Simon, Introduction - Torward an Angelic Poetics, page 7

Main Studies

 
 
 

APPENDIX:

 






ClassicAsobi recommends

This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.






 
 
 
 
 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 028

 
 
 




Two weeks, at Balse.

Rain, in LA, I love.

Rain coat. I love raincoat.

Spring/summer

water itself, and the form has always been exciting, to me…in the buoyant state…the idea of movement, idea of gesture, or the idea of different materials and freezing form. - LOEWE

sound of rain, radio, forest, light, city, prayers? LEMAIRE. radio. signal. higurashi, maboroshi.

Story of irreplaceable loss, story that come through. World Press Photo

Richochet

IN MIX

X tin | HÖR - April 5 / 2024

Richie Culver | HÖR - April 5 / 2024

clean, philosophical, harmonic, repetitive wonderfulnesssisimo.

Meskendir Konduku

loosing track of that Why is so dangerous. Not knowing why we photograph…leads to lack of creativity, insecurity, it leads ultimately to procrastination. And procrastination is death of art, death of creativity.

defining Why.

The power of her photographs.

A medium.

Style is something challenging to find.

To try to share a view of the world…

god -2hollis

suspense - Jeff Mills

realize - vitesse x

lovely Marias

Preparing to go back to Venezia for the Bienalle Arte
BIENALLE

till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 
 
 

Words of Wisdom

 

DIALOGUES WITH MARCEL DUCHAMP by Pierre Cabanne

Chapter 4. I Like Breathing Better than Working

Page 69


CABANNE: You have also said that the artist is unaware of the real significance of his work and that the spectator should always participate in supplementing the creation by interpreting it.


DUCHAMP: Exactly. Because I consider, in effect, that if someone, any genius, were living in the heart of Africa and doing extraorinary paintings every day, without anyone's seeing them, he wouldn't exist. To put it another way, the artist exists only if he is known. Consequently, one can envisage the existence of a hundred thousand geniuses who are suicides, who kill themselves, who diappear, because they didn't know what to do to make themselves known, to push themselves, and to become famous.

    I believe very strongly in the "medium" aspect of the artist. The artist makes something, then one day, he is recognized by the intervention of the public, of the spectator; so later he goes on to posterity. You can't stop that, because, in brief, it's a product of two poles - there's the pole of the one who makes the work, and the pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the one who makes it.

   Naturally, no artist accepts this interpretation. But when you get right down to it, what is an artist? As much as the furniture maker, say Boulle, he's the man who owns a "Boulle." A work is also made of the admiration we bring to it.

  African wooden spoons were nothing at the time when they were made, they were simply funcational; later thye became beautiful things, "works of art".

  Don't you think the spectator's role is important?



[[akademie-X]], John Stezaker

Lesson 30: Art Education - A Contradiction in Terms, page 283


After years of involvement in art education, both as a student and as a teacher, I have arrived at the conviction that art education is a contradiction in terms. Picasso understood this when he said that he did not search but that he found. Art is finding and that is incalculable and unpredictable. There can be no preparation for it. No research is possible for it.


Education is ostensibly dedicated to knowledge. The best art comes out of not knowing - out of ignorance. Education professes to render the world either transparent or legible. Art seems always to be a confrontation with the opposite: the unknowable, the illegible.


.....I believe in the importance of seclusion and indolence in the creation of art. Art needs to find a space to hide. It thrives in dusty neglected atrophied spaces. In a sense, one could say it needs educational dysfunction: it needs neglect. How often have important developments in art come out of groups of students taking control of their own aesthetic agenda in the absence of a strong educational programme? Modern education, in attempting conscientiously to create a miniature version of the exhibiting world awaiting its prospective artists, inadvertently betrays the possibility of art, which as Maurice Blanchot insists, comes out of an 'exile from life'.


More practically, I would suggest following the example of Henry David Thoreau's economics of aesthetic reflection: find an undemanding job, occupying the minimum time commitment to support the maximum proportion of time dedicated to aesthetic indolence. Times have changed the balance of that economy since Thoreau's day. He only had to work one day a week for the farmer whose land he lived on in order to subsist in his exile from life. We live in a culture hostile to nonproductive activity, but it's precisely because of this that the resistance of aesthetic indolence is so vital.

Mariko Oya “La lumière” exhibition

Venue: agnès b. gallery boutique 5-7-25 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo
La Fleur Minami Aoyama 2F
Date: March 9, 2024 (Sat) - April 7, 2024 (Sun)





Main Studies

 
 
 
 

APPENDIX:

 





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This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.









 
 

COMING UP


Tavares Strachan

Magnificent Darkness

17 February - 13 April 2024 - Marian Goodman LOS ANGELES

SARAH AWAD

To Hold a Thing

MARCH 23 - APRIL 27, 2024 - Night Gallery, LA

Francesca Gabbiani

April 6 to May 11, 2024 - Baert Gallery, LA

Ella Kruglyanskaya: See SawElla Kruglyanskaya: See SawApril 5–June 8

Jeffrey Deitch LA

Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s

FEB 11 – MAY 12, 2024, HAMMER

Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight

Nov. 11, 2023–Nov. 30, 2025, The Huntington

Anna LapwoodOrgan Recital

SUN, APR 21

7:30PM


Dudamel Leads Beethoven and Strauss

SUN, MAY 5

2:00PM

PROGRAM & ARTIST LISTING

Andreia PINTO CORREIA — Cortejo (world premiere, LA Phil commission with generous support from the Esa-Pekka Salonen Commissions Fund)

BEETHOVEN — Piano Concerto No. 4

Intermission

STRAUSS — Don Quixote

 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 027

 
 
 




Two weeks, at Balse.


Dada-, totototooo-

dada-, tototo- dada-, to totttootooo

Shostakovich w Hilary Hahn

Not the usual way, almost by accident, amazingly ambiguous, like life. Camus

I took a step, one step forward. And this time, without sitting up, the Arab drew his knife, and held it out towards me in the sun, it was like a long flashing sward lunging towards my forehead. My whole being went tense, and I tightened my grip on the gun, The trigger gave, and it was there when it all started. I realized that I’d destroyed the balance of the day. The perfect silence of this beach, where I’d been happy. There I fired four more times into the lifeless body, and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness. - The Stranger, Albert Camus

Klimt at Neue Gallery


The cosmic joke and irony is that humans are not very musical at all….And we know this because we evolved along the ape line. And apes compared to birds are not musical. How can I say that? Birds have vocal learning. They can creatively learn new songs, Apes can’t do that. They are confined to the chords they are born with. Insects can pulse together in rhythm, and apes don’t have that. So it’s very odd that humans evolved from apes, who are not musical, but humans evolved music again from ground-up from scratch. - Michael Spitzer, PhD, Professor Music, Liverpool Univ.

The large head suspended in the air - Odilon Redon research

A BURIAL AT SEA - Liverpool, UK
Avalanche
Голоса

DJ Mixes
Partiboi69 b2b LOVEFOXY - House set Live From The Stingzone


Peter Doigy at d’Orsay

Revisit, study of Mishima.

Yukio Mishima - The Philosophy of Sun and Steel

And a wonderful film of Chris Marker.

Ten Lives of a Cat: A film about Chris Marker (2023)


till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 
 
 

Words of Wisdom

 

  • AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE - Wangechi Mutu

  • [[akademie-X]], [[favorite quotes]],[[Wangechi Mutu]]

    • page 228, Lesson 24: Living Art

      • The sharpening of visual intelligence is crucial for artists. I would recommend drawing - and by this, I don't mean drawing in a pedantic, high-school, instructional manner; I mean using your hand and your mind to pull out information from the subconscious onto a surface and into the real world. It is one of the best ways to shorten the distance between your brain and your fingertips and to allow you to gauge what is going on from within yourself. When you speed up that process, by drawing with as basic a material as pencil or charcoal, or ink and brush, your senses of intuition, honesty and integrity are sharpened. I would also push every artist to enhance their sense of context and their role as artist by visiting museums or the theatre, going to poetry readings, hanging out at DJ slams, listening to live bands - to participate in and enter cultural spaces in one way or another. Figuring out what's happening in other genres and media in your particular moment in time is important to you as a visual artist because even if you don't feel it's relevant to you, making cross-references makes you aware of your own position and place, your aliveness at that particular moment in time.

      • Everyone should understand as much about the past as they can possibly get in their heads. As the voices of their culture and their communities, artists in particular should know as much as possible about what has happened prior to their own existence. It's a way to stand out as the voice of the present, to pay homage to what has happened, and avoid repeating and recycling the mistakes that have already been made. It's also a way to remain in touch with your own humanity, and with the humanity of others whom you don't know.

[[akademie-X]],[[Tim Rollins]]

  • page 268 lesson 28: Art is Not Just Experience

    • We believe good art is work that doesn't ask permission to exist, to be is enough. Good art is anything made sincerely yours. This art can be affirmative, shamelessly beautiful or ugly, a contribution of dissent, audacious and critical, yet deeply celebratory by the very fact of its existence. We think good art is always a gift, an affirmation of a mysterious gratitude. It's not instrumental but feels inevitable. Art is a faith proposition built upon a base of wonder.

Main Studies

 
 
 
 

APPENDIX:

 




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This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.







 
 

COMING UP


JASON RHOADES

DRIVE

27 FEBRUARY 2024 – 14 JANUARY 2025

HAUSER & WIRTH DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES

Ella Kruglyanskaya: See Saw

April 5–June 8, 2024, Jeffrey Deitch LA

Elgar and Vaughan Williams

SUN, APR 7

YOU ARE GOING!

2:00PM

PROGRAM & ARTIST LISTING

Arvo PÄRT — Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten

ELGAR — Cello Concerto

Intermission

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS — Symphony No. 8

CATHERINE GOODMAN
NEW WORKS

Hauser & Wirth DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES, 27 FEBRUARY – 5 MAY 2024

JASON RHOADES
DRIVE

Hauser & Wirth DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES, 27 FEBRUARY 2024 – 14 JANUARY 2025

Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony

SUN, APR 14

YOU ARE GOING!

2:00PM

PROGRAM & ARTIST LISTING

Jonathan Bailey HOLLAND — Assemble

RAVEL — Tzigane

RAVEL — Mother Goose Suite

Intermission

SAINT-SAËNS — Symphony No. 3, "Organ"

Anna LapwoodOrgan Recital

SUN, APR 21

7:30PM


Dudamel Leads Beethoven and Strauss

SUN, MAY 5

YOU ARE GOING!

2:00PM

PROGRAM & ARTIST LISTING

Andreia PINTO CORREIA — Cortejo (world premiere, LA Phil commission with generous support from the Esa-Pekka Salonen Commissions Fund)

BEETHOVEN — Piano Concerto No. 4

Intermission

STRAUSS — Don Quixote

Dvořák and Ortiz with Dudamel

SUN, MAY 12

YOU ARE GOING!

2:00PM

PROGRAM & ARTIST LISTING

John WILLIAMS — Olympic Fanfare and Theme

Gabriela ORTIZ — Altar de cuerda

Intermission

DVOŘÁK — Symphony No. 9, “From the New World”

VENEZIA, 20.04 - 24.11 2024

BIENNALE ARTE 2024

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN

LACMA Apr 7–Oct 6, 2024

I Saw It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker

Norton Simon, APRIL 19, 2024 – AUGUST 5, 2024

Plugged In: Art and Electric Light

Norton Simon, SEPTEMBER 20, 2024 – FEBRUARY 17, 2025

Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight

Huntington Library, Nov. 11, 2023–Nov. 30, 2025

 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 026

 
 
 




Two weeks, at Balse.


It starts with a sound of bells, with its planetary vision, So Weit Wie Noch Nie - as far as never before. 2007, Ave B & 13th, Kompakt.


Close (2024 Remaster) Robert Lippok

Mahler?


After a long break, I am back into seeking fashion, but at a much elevated consciousness. Whatever that means.


Why do we stop drawing? why some people stop drawing? Some of us, most of us, start drawing before we start speaking. And so on. At some point drawing is no longer important. but, others find it harder to let go of drawing. If that is your wish.


haven’t seen it, and haven’t the time, but severance, looks really interesting.

DJ Mixes

Berlin

Hudson Mohawke b2b Nikki Nair | Boiler Room Festival Berlin: SYSTEM

¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U DJ Set | Keep Hush Live: Tokyo

Yung Sherman | Boiler Room: Stockholm

Mechatok | Boiler Room: Stockholm





Alan Watts - what it would be like if we had the power to dream anything that we wished to dream. Absolutely anything at all…. if you were granted this power what would you do? ….pleasure itself demand contrast…certainty and familiarity. potentiality. ever ongoing. nuanced manner. possibility. difference, transcendental form, namely, differences and separation. imaginative narrative. releasing control, otherness of dream. luminosity. pure possibility. form.



Auguste Renoir - imagine, to lift your dress, so open, one of the most, the story of ourself. evokes. war breaks out. astonishment, on French soil. must enlist. only from afar, deposed, republic, amidst of the war. only comes to an end. winter, not until the war. killed in his very first battle. 1871. city full of weapons. refused to. Montmartre. ends in communes defeat. devastation. then impressionists. pont neuf. you do not think that the city went through such duress. workman carrying vegetables. The working class, soldiers, the middle class. The mixture of Paris. A Sunday off.

the new republique, meets everyone with the same empathy.




poetry, so long as I believed the right things.




till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 

Gallery COMMON

9 Feb–10 Mar 2024

 
 

Words of Wisdom

  • AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

    LESSON 23

    TUTOR: Carrie Moyer

    Page 220

    Sharpen your visual intelligence by looking at art in person - Close looking is a means of gathering information in order to analyse a work of art within the parameters set by its maker. Through careful examination the object reveals its materials, size, scale; the processes and methods of its facture; the identity of the maker; its relationship to the history of the medium and genre as well as to the world at large. using this form of connoisseurship to decide if art is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ would defeat the purpose. It’s more like being a scientist and learning how to analyse and identify what you’re looking at.

  • AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

    LESSON 26

    TUTOR: Raqs Media Collective

    Page 248

    The Third Lesson: Time for Wine

    The third lesson is about time. Sometimes, to learn this lesson, we have to prepare a feast - a feast with no food, but with a lot of wine and many notes. One of the forms this has taken is a symposium on time, which was first produced in the Wide Open School at the Hayward Gallery, London, in the summer of 2012. The form is simple and remains durable.

    Fifteen or so participants sit in a large table, each with a plate and a wine glass in front of them. A set of carefully chosen notes on time printed on index cards appear on the plates, in the form of ‘courses’. Each ‘guest’ reads the ‘portion’ on his/her plate and everyone drinks, and after a round of readings (a course) the ‘table’ has a conversation. The idea is to let thinking, conversation and the requisite amount of wine do its job to add up to a stimulating consideration of time. Time itself is physically present. The cumulative, incremental effect of wine, factored through time, tranforms the experience into being enveloped inside a dilating fold. ‘Students’ cease to be students, and process elaborate theories. The reticent blossom into the loquacious, and the shy become bold. Once, at the end of the feast, people burst into song, and tears. Invariably, there has been laughter. The length of time this takes is a minimum of three hours, about the duration of a well-paced meal. As the courses gather momentum, an intensification of ideas and images, of associations and possibilities, takes hold, and we begin to get a grip on the qualia of time itself. We understand the relationship between, the presence of art. and the intensification of experience: of a different sense of time.

 

Main Studies

 
 
 
 

APPENDIX:

 



ClassicAsobi recommends

This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.





 

William Brickel, Was It Ever Fair

March 16, 2024

Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles

January 20 through March 2, 2024

 
 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 025

 
 
 



Two weeks, at Balse.

let us go deeper.

the key paradigm shift is neediness to openness.

here we, to have a nice light dose of acid techno

super catchy TDJ love

It is starting to connect. that is, as Duchamp says, choosing is the artist’s role. As this dj set is, machines enable ease to operate, as she focuses on the selection process. what it is to choose? is the question, and is our job, to seek. input of choice, output of choice. the refinement of choice. choosing to choose. in the now.

enough \

////past////present/////future/////here where sequence circles current flow - soul, existence, season. sound. time for freedom - KiNK & RACHEL ROW

Interest in now, the contemporary. Sure, contemporary music, contemporary art. Yet, everything is contemporary. you are contemporary. How you feel, is de facto, contemporary. In this moment. all. Past, future. also in instrumental.

back to some zappississimo Kompakt beskar

more serious deep thought wave WELLENTAL

much deeper acid Unter Wasse

eventually this that we arrive at, this time transissimo Papa Nugs sora

KIM GORDON
KIM GORDON

a few fun mixes to check for this evening

Isabelle Beaucamp | HÖR - February 15 / 2024

ÜBERKIKZ | HÖR - January 29 / 2024

salome

then thunder dome, candy? no gimmick, hard core.

3000

slowing down humans NIGHT TAPES. so beautifully soulful melodies of mine.

pulled again to the far away TDJ come back home.

could we say that we have lost the dream?

oh so human.

we have reached.

and here we strive, or

back to

NIGHT TAPES

NIGHT TAPES

just

Abigail Rose- Run Girl

Coma Caroline Polachek

lovedance - Tendo

what is? I ask.

select

Istanbul, I love walking. That can be part of my story.

Now we have a Tokyo staff photographer, reporting on the arts from the Far East.

till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 
 
 

Words of Wisdom

  • AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

    LESSON 19

    TUTOR: Thomas Lawson

    Page 179 - 182

    Making art is all about lining up ideas with the materials appropriate to expressing them, and good art begins when that match-up appears seamless and inevitable. Bad art happens when the ideas are uninteresting, banal, over-familiar, and the materials and handling are indifferent

    (Sherrie) Levine’s work is good art because it takes up a series of ideas and finds a fresh way to further the argument through the deployment of materials and methods well-matched to the task. The Hirst work, on the other hand, is bad art because it succumbs to glib thinking and decision-making as it seeks to capitalize on a marketing idea. The project may have begun with a reasonable chance of becoming good art, but, as the choices informing it became increasingly arbitrary and driven by an over-riding desire to sell, it went bad. And, by the way, Duchamp is probably accorded the ‘great artist’ label because his investigations and choices led to a radical rethinking of the entire project of art-making over the past century. Great art, then, is art that brings together extraordinary ideas and the materials and methodology to match.

  • There’s a narrow perspective on life that seeks to identify a purpose behind it, as if living weren’t good enough on its own. I remember in Sunday School being told that the chief end of man was to glorify God, and hearing elsewhere that I was expected to get a job, settle down, have a family. It seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that people who hunt for purpose in this way are looking to close down options and erect simplified codes of conduct that will have predictable outcomes. They want to limit choices within a range of what they consider acceptable, and try to punish anyone who thinks differently. Art exists as a rebuke to all that; it celebrates being. Making art is a communicative act, but the most stunningly liberating thing about it is that it has no purpose in the day to day. It may help make sense of things, but it prescribes nothing.

  • Making art is all about lining up ideas with the materials appropriate to expressing them, and good art begins when that match-up appears seamless and inevitable. Bad art happens when the ideas are uninteresting, banal, over-familiar, and the materials and handling are indifferent.

    (Sherrie) Levine’s work is good art because it takes up a series of ideas and finds a fresh way to further the argument through the deployment of materials and methods well-matched to the task. The Hirst work, on the other hand, is bad art because it succumbs to glib thinking and decision-making as it seeks to capitalize on a marketing idea. The project may have begun with a reasonable chance of becoming good art, but, as the choices informing it became increasingly arbitrary and driven by an overriding desire to sell, it went bad. And, by the way, Duchamp is probably accorded the ‘great artist’ label because his investigations and choices led to a radical rethinking of the entire project of art-making over the past century. Great art, then, is art that brings together extraordinary ideas and the materials and methodology to match.

  • Introduction by Robert Motherwell, page 10, Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Cabanne

    An artist must be unusually intelligent in order to grasp simultaneously many structured relations. In fact, intelligence can be considered as the capacity to grasp complex relations; in this sense, Leonardo’s intelligence, for instance, is almost beyond belief. Duchamp’s intelligence contributed many things, of course, but for me its greatest accomplishment was to take him beyond the merely “aesthetic” concerns that face every “modern” artist - whose role is neither religious nor communal, but instead secular and individual. This problem has been called “the despair of the aesthetic:” if all colors or nudes are equally pleasing to the eye, why does the artist choose one color or figure rather than another? If he does not make a purely “aesthetic” choice, he must look for further criteria on which to base his value judgments. Kierkegaard held that artistic criteria were first the real of the aesthetic, then the ethical, then the realm of the holy. Duchamp, as a nonbeliever, could not have accepted holiness as a criterion but, in setting up for himself complex technical problems or new ways of expressing erotic subject matter, for instance, he did find an ethic beyond the “aesthetic” for his ultimate choices. And his most successful works, paradoxically, take on that indirect beauty achieved only by those artists who have been concerned with more than the merely sensuous. In this way, Duchamp’s intelligence accomplished nearly everything possible within the reach of a modern artist, earning him the unlimited and fully justified respect of successive small groups of admirers throughout his life. But, as he often says in the following pages, it is posterity who will judge, and he, like Stendhal, had more faith in posterity than in his contemporaries. At the same time, one learns from his conversations of an extraordinary artistic adventure, filled with direction, discipline, and disdain for art as a trade and for the repetition of what has already been done. 

 

Main Studies

 
 
 
 

APPENDIX:

 


ClassicAsobi recommends

This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.



 
 
 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 024

 
 
 



Two weeks, at Balse.

Some Sartre docs, enter conciseness. 

A lot of times you will learn that Sartre is incoherent, Sartre has betrayed himself, ah, Sartre has been with the Communist, without the Communist. He misunderstood this misunderstood that. He made mistakes and this and that…. I don’t think that is very important. It’s an attitude. It’s ‘do not take anything for granted. Criticize it. Attack. Find your own way.’  uh…he would say something wonderful, he would say ‘I THINK AGAINST MYSELF’.   You have to think against everything which has been given to you by education. You have to criticize every single thing which is being given to you. 

Jean-Paul Sartre: The Road to Freedom (Human All Too Human) - BBC

Annie Cohen-Solal, Biographer

Sartre spent his life testing the limits of traditional thinking but at the heart of this philosophy is one deceptively simple question, ‘if human beings are truly free to do anything they want how are we to live our lives?’ Sartre never did find a convincing answer to this question, but he was never less than unflinchingly honest with the attempt. 

Continued the journey with the encounter with Vitesse X, nyc.

Vitesse X - Us Ephemeral

Vitesse X - Right Now 

Vitesse X - Activation

A drive to Century City, Wim Wenders,  PERFECT DAYS, first theater in 2024. 

Now to revisit Wenders’ past films. 


YOUR WORK AS GIFT. Contribution to the world. 

Then, there was, a Crayon

          Da$H - "HAD TO LIVE IT"

TOKYOPILL 

Old school? Pop, dance.  TDJ -  Enfin c'est ici que ☀️ Sous les rayons incandescents ☁️ D'un monde plastiquement parfait ☀️ Où les rêves ne sont pas que des rêves mais bien des réalités ☁️ Dans cet univers vêtu de charme se trouve 

TDJ - Lalala (Want Somebody)

TDJ - Open Air (feat. fknsyd)

Are these the same people? non so, random encounters. Or probably not random. 

SPF INFINI

Sainté - Compare

And entering the world of Daniil Trifonov - Coming up on the 25th, at Disney Hall, LA PHIL, Brahms Piano Concerto no. 2, conducted by Malikki . 

All connected. Design and culture. Diversity of culture. Subcultures. 

Eastern & Western Design: How Culture Rewires The Brain

Rabbits eat carrots. Cross-culture collaborations. Inventing the concept of nature, Greeks. St. Augustine. Language. 

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis - the very words you use can influence the world view

Complex nuanced issues. 



The absurd hero, the lens of humor. 

To be experienced. Not to be riddled. 

I am unknowing. 


Life can only be understood backwards, but it must lived forward - Søren Kierkegaard 



Torstoy, Kurosawa, Living.

Hedonistically, love, finding your own meaning. Worth. 

Sense of meaning.


Starting to get into Fashion philosophy  - Martin Margiela: In His Own Words

Deeper than clothes

till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 
 
 

Words of Wisdom

  • AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

    LESSON 19

    TUTOR: Thomas Lawson

    Page 178

  • Artists notice stuff - the way things come together or fall apart, the telling detail or overlooked ruin, the tell-tale gesture. To be an artist, you have to train yourself to pay attention to the world in which you live, constantly looking for clues, always aware of your surroundings. Make notes, try observational drawing or taking photographs, study how things are made. There is no one method here. The task is to find a way to notice the details that make sense to you, the details that will open your eyes to content.

  • This is why so many of us get pissed off with lazy thinking that equates making art to expressing feelings. Too often, this simply means the equivalent of throwing a tantrum and nobody cares to see that. If you are interested in expressing emotion, you have to examine that emotion, find its source, calibrate how best to represent it. The most successful expressionist art is always coldly calculating. 

  • A good artist pays attention to the world she finds herself in which includes the political and moral dimensions of that world. Making straight-up political work is difficult, and most attempts fail. They come across as simple-minded or strident; worse, they are usually so tied to a particular moment that they are irrelevant within a couple of months. But work that is grounded in a specific set of observations, developed through appropriately considered and handled techniques, will always speak to an understanding of relationships, and thus to society.

 
 

Main Studies

 
 
 
 

APPENDIX:





 


ClassicAsobi recommends

This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.



 
 
 

BALSE NEWSLETTER 023

 
 



Two weeks, at Balse.

precious, is time to yourself

if you can be true to yourself

that is

we all know this

so the question becomes

how

how do you

how can I

be

true to myself

and what is true?

this work

of art

that is

to think freely

think deeply

to study vastly.

enough.

The fashionable kind Kali Uchis - ¿Cómo Así?

More coucou - COUCOU CHLOE - POKERFACE

more snow strippers - SNOW STRIPPERS - UNDER YOUR SPELL #SURFGANG

NNHMN - Hungrige Liebe

researching - REI KAWAKUBO - COMME des GARCONS

The Intersection Of Fashion And Performance Art.

what is conceptual art, on bbc? - WHOS AFRAID OF CONCEPTUAL ART | BBC DOCUMENTARY | 2016 HD

the proper, KOMPAKT - Heiko Voss - Talking Man (Ada Mix) - Kompakt

the very proper - COMPUTER DATA-healing

magic man - NNHMN

the lovely- Isaac Delusion — Let her go ft. LUCASV

is it to live gut feeling?

in a way?

sound, a fascinating thing

place, to place day to day,

change, in the same old way

spend time, some life, tries to catch the shade….

recording memories,

till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 
 

Words of Wisdom

  • History of Modern Art, seventh edition, H.H. Arnason Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Chapter 1, page 4

    The emphasis on emulation as opposed to novelty begun to lose ground toward the end of the eighteenth century when a new weight was given to artistic invention. Increasingly, invention was linked with imagination, that is to say, with the artist’s unique vision, a vision unconstrained by academic practice and freed from the pictorial conventions that had been obeyed since the Renaissance. This new attitude underlies the aesthetic interests of Romanticism. Arising in the last years of the eighteenth century and exerting its influence well into the nineteenth, Romanticism exalted humanity's capacity for emotion. In music, literature, and the visual arts, Romanticism is typified by an insistence on subjectivity and novelty. Today, few would argue that art is the simply the consequence of creative genius. Romantic artists and theorists, however, understood art to be the expression of and individual’s will to create rather than a product of particular cultural as well as personal values. Genius, for the Romantics, was something possessed innately by the artist: It could not be learned or acquired. To express genius, then, the Romantic artist had to resist academic emulation and instead turn inward, toward making pure imagination visible. The British painter and printmaker William Blake (1757-1827) typifies this approach to creativity.

  • AKADEMIE X LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

    LESSON 18

    TUTOR: Chris Kraus

    Page 170

    Whereas modernism believed that the artist’s life held all the magic keys to reading works of art, neo-conceptualism has cooled this off and corporatized it. The artist’s own biography doesn’t matter much at all. What life? The blanker the better. The life experience of the artist, if channeled into the artwork, can only impede art’s neo-corporate, neo-Conceptual purpose. It is the biography of the institution that we want to read. 


    Reviewing dOCUMENTA (13) in New York Magazine, Jerry Saltz coins the term ‘Post Art’ to describe work that ‘doesn’t even see art as separate from living…things that aren’t artworks so much as they are about the drive to make things that, like ar, embed imagination in material and grasp that creativity is a cosmic force…A chemist or a general may be making Post Art every day at the office.”

 
 

Main Studies

 
 
 

APPENDIX:

 


ClassicAsobi recommends

This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.



 
 
 

Wagner, Das Rheingold, Dudamel, LA PHIL

BALSE NEWSLETTER 022

 

Marrakech, Morocco, photo essay

 
 



Two weeks, at Balse.

Igor Stravinsky permanently relocated to LA in 1940. The previous year, lost his daughter, wife, and mother. Stayed in LA for the next 23 years, died 6 April 1971 in NY, buried in Venezia. Stravinsky at LA Phil

Aaron Copland, Clarinet by the magical Boris Allakhverdyan - LA PHIL

Flying through time and space. Photos essay reporting from Nov 2023, Marrakech, Sahara, Morocco by Yohei Abe released.

ClassicAsobi continues his NY concert 2023/2024 season, checkout his postings on Tannhäuser, Franz Welser-Möst and Bartok.

Snow Strippers, the Detroit duo.

then there is coucou, another big recent favorite.

synchronicity, synchronicity, Jung research.

Now study Das Rheingold and gotta love Snow Strippers and ALIEN art centre.

thus spoke Zarathustra.

till next time.

Charles A. Balse

 
 
 

Words of Wisdom

from AKADEMIE X - LESSONS IN ART + LIFE

Tutor: Katharina Grosse
Lesson: The Artist as a Link Among other Links

  • how I see the world: I do not see borders - not between foreground or background, nor between the visible and the invisible. I do not perceive the world through its recognizable forms, but through its possible appearances. I see the world as it is - as illusion.

  • I realized that thinking is performative and therefore thoughts project space. I change the world by thinking about it in different ways and by giving space to these thoughts. Therefore I can actively create past, present and future and let them happen at the same time.

Tutor: Dan Graham

Lesson: Art Schools at Their Best and Worst

BEST

  1. Visiting artists: Lectures and studio visits

  2. Class trips.

  3. Availability of video, film and audio equipment with technicians

  4. Practical training in areas such as graphic design.

  5. Good libraries

WORST

  1. The emphasis, since the 1980s, on making art as a specialist professional ‘career’ rather than as a passionate experiment.

  2. The obsession with the artist as a future ‘art star’.

  3. The obsession with making an academic rationale for art, a good example being the overuse of the world ‘problematize’.

  4. Teaching only the contemporary art that is found in the art magazines in the library.

 
 
 
 
 
 

APPENDIX:

 

ClassicAsobi recommends

This section features content recommended from the NYC based ClassicAsobi and his team, specializing in classical music.