Anodyne
Sunday, April 08, 2007
 

Philip Larkin contemplates the foundations of the new University Library, c. 1970


Peter Doig, Blotter, 1993

April mist: dark greens, olive-greys, pink sprays of blossom. Rain falling, gently, on the sidewalk, on the things clumped by the bus stop: a fat clump of yellow phlegm; a shredded cigarette's loose sprinkling of tobacco; a sixpack's plastic rings. Air charged with the scent of sea-salt, with earth and pollen. A torn page from the back of the Georgia Straight abandoned in the gutter. Bold black capitals -- PROSTATE MASSAGE -- scarcely visible through the oily water.

"Interest in the sachlich, the neutral, the thinglike, implies an aceptance of the failure of rhythm in the world, and the impropriety of one of representation's grand projects, the negating of this failure in an 'aesthetic dimension,' to use Herbert Marcuse's phrase. When a thing is broken and thrown on the refuse heap, it falls off the highroads of history. The bold, fresh lines of movement no longer refer to it, its contours slump, its volumes are crumpled, its surface withers, its defeat as part of the livingness of life and being is manifest, and it becomes an object of aversion, cadaverous and abject. It is at this moment that it truly comes into being as an object. The sachlich marks the category of things in their alienated state; that which is sachlich is that which has been expelled from a certain universe of form and rhythm and which has, possibly imperceptibly, begun its migration to another one." (Jeff Wall, "Roy Arden: An Artist and His Models")
- posted by cjb @ 9:03 AM


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