Monday 11 October 2010

weißer Papierfläche

Muybridge, The First Fall, 1867























Muybridge/ Pi-Wi-Ack (Shower of Stars), Vernal Falls, 400 Feet, Valley of Yosemite
1872 photograph | albumen print

The identity of the background of a drawing is quite different from that of the white surface (weißer Papierfläche) on which it is inscribed. We might even deny it that identity by thinking of it as surge of white waves (though these might not even be distinguishable to the naked eye.) (eventuell mit bloßem Auge nicht unterscheidbarer) (604/83).

Framing Pictures, Transcending Marks: Walter Benjamin’s ‘On Paintings, Signs
and Marks’

Andrew Benjamin

Maryon Wilson Park / between



































'… the constant motion in the leaves rendering his landscapes confused and unmeaning… [T]he same objection necessarily applies to all moving objects, which can never be properly delineated without the aid of memory'. Only after it had fallen to the ground was a leaf available for impression, when it rejoined the world of inert things.

Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion p44 commenting on Daguerre's experiments.


Monday 4 October 2010

Faraway

If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object, create a new Garabagne, so as to compromise no real country by my fantasy [though it is then that fantasy itself I compromise by the signs of literature]. I can also- though in no way claiming to represent or analyse reality itself [these being the major gestures of Western discourse] - isolate somewhere in the world [ faraway ] a certain number of features [a term employed in linguistics], and out of these features deliberately form a system.

Barthes / Empire of Signs

introspection
a distant being … geographical distance is a metaphor of the past … travelling is a techinique of anamnesis.
the exoticon - the unfamiliar subject … an experience of remoteness was necessary to reveal this idea to itself…

Warburg and the image in motion / 66