Bombay Beach

Have you heard of Bombay Beach?


Well, I saw it the other day and it was quite an experience. I found it ... well, puzzling. Somehow really disconcerting, because of all the conflicting feelings it expresses.
The blur of reality and non-reality and the instability of the boundary between them keeps nagging you all the time.
And you’re shocked at how horrible everything is and at the same time shocked that they seem to be coping somehow. And you keep wondering: Why do the lives of these fucked up people look and sound so beautiful, so poetic? Why do they have choreographies and soundtracks? You suddenly find yourself somehow envying the romanticism of their utter hopelessness. And at the same time it makes you feel sick inside because all the good things are probably fictitious addendums or results of the fictionalising.

When something makes you feel so weird, it’s probably good art. But I don’t even know if I liked it.

I am so over the early 19th century!

I’m really reluctant to write the historical context part of my dissertation because I just DO NOT WANT to repeat all those platitudes about changes happening around 1800 and lost securities and sudden self-consciousness and what not being the reason FOR EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED. That sort of thing makes the most tiresome reading ever. Also everybody knows about it plus it can’t be really true, which is a weird combination of facts.
Ugh.
18 days left of this madness, and I better be finished in time.

Dark kids die less unexpectedly.

Initialisation Ritual.

This is where I occasionally work.
These are boxes full of photos of pictures.

What I do is I split the continuous information of pictures up into searchable, verbal information. Digitalisation.

(Quick, before you miss a turn.)
Input Input.

Digitalisation means fingering.



Today: Manuscript Illuminations.
Kiss.

Random stuff I write in the back of my notebook while researching.

You don’t really like discussing things, do you?



I wanted to write: “One thing I've learned is that I prefer working with words to working with images.”

But then I started to think about it some more, and I’m not really sure that that’s what it is.
One thing I can definitely say is that the way art history is done at my university, it is not something I want to pursue for much longer. In that comparison I’ll take the study of literature any time.

But it probably doesn’t simply boil down to words > pictures. Oh no. Cos that would be far too easy and where would we end up if I could ever decide anything?

All of you people knowing what they want – how do you do it?

Back From Firenze.

I have returned from Florence with a travel bag stuffed with new impressions and so much to blog about. I have no photos yet because most of them are on film, and Max has taken the digital camera away (;() so I cannot get right to work.

But, meanwhile, let me share two photo-booth-photos of postcards that show details in Michelangelo’s Night and Day sculptures from the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici.


Details are the best.

By the way, the unfinished face of “Day” (not pictured) is one of the scariest and most fascinating things I have ever experienced in art. It is absolutely arresting to me.

Sibylle Bergemann

If I was in Berlin, or had a chance to go any time soon, I’d love to see the Sibylle Bergemann exhibition ”Polaroids” at the C/O.

“I am interested in the margin of the world, not the center. For me, it is the non-interchangable that is crucial. When something in the faces or landscapes is not quite right.”
Sibylle Bergemann

(How perfect is that last photo of a girl on a swing in the Mauerpark? I am absolutely in love with it.)