Summer break

Nils and I have pressed eject until late August, early September. Until then, hee haw.

A recommended summer read and flic

The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius. (From Antiquity people!)

Au hasard Balthazar, the 1966 French film directed by Robert Bresson.

(Still from Shaun Gladwell's video Storm Sequence, happily on view in the back room at Sikkema Jenkins, sadly only through today).

Image Volley

MS:
I like what you said about - as I understood it - playing a bit more, using the time we have.

NFA:
That sounds good. Any ideas on how to proceed?

MS:
Maybe a post of just images? I send one to you and you send one to me in reaction?

Ahead and Down

to meander, to stumble, to look ahead and down at once, to be burdened, to be wily, to respond, to anticipate, to retrace, to resist, to submit, to draw, to inscribe, to pre-date, to carry, to bear, to forbear, to transport, to move, to choose, to be agent, to ruminate, to be an ass, to bray, to smell bad, to bare one’s teeth, to eat roses, to be fearless of heights, to be sure-footed, to drink at a stream, to fall in a stream.

Setback, breakthroughs, doldrums

MS: What we’re doing is a bit different than other curatorial experiments, don’t you think?

NFA: I think we're holding our concept more loosely, perhaps allowing for different questions, or rather more time for questioning. Part of what we're doing I think is to look for a different tone or attitude, and we're doing that with a pretty clear feeling of what that approach is but articulating it slowly over time.

MS: Right. This is usually the kind of thing that makes me incredibly anxious. But it really makes for a stronger foundation and better work, in my humble opinion.

NFA: Time is something that I'm constantly feeling I don't have enough of, that I’m rushing to do things and still not getting them all done, and I think that that’s a kind of trance that this process will help break down. Why not let some things unfold in a leisurely way? Before we started this I had kind of forgotten this question.

MS: Ah, for me, time's a bit different.

NFA: How is it for you?

MS: For me, it's that I'm late. In life, in general. The metaphor I have is the boat has already left without me.

NFA: It was the wrong boat.

MS: That's what they say. Also, I worry about things not coming together.Like May 2010, and we have no artists lined up.

NFA: Maybe that’s one of the advantages of art. If it fails it doesn't mean a thing. And on the other hand, the possibility is there to make something marvelous, more marvelous than almost anything else.

MS: How could failure not mean a thing?

NFA: You’re right. I disagree with what I just said about failure. If it doesn’t mean a thing it’s probably not a failure.

MS: I need to hear a bit more about that.

NFA: I mean you can only fail if you were hoping to succeed, and that's something you can feel and it means something.

MS: Who wouldn't hope to succeed? What's an alternative? Just experimenting for experimentation's sake?

NFA: I guess a process that spans successive failures, successes, setbacks, breakthroughs, doldrums, etc., and hopefully leads to, or becomes, or is, something marvelous. That's what I hope a different attitude about time will help us get to.

MS: That would represent a true liberation for me – that is, not to weigh in in a black-and-white fashion every step of the way. In other words, going with the flow and acknowledging it as just flow.