1/11/14

india_ink_sketches

developing_the_brief

studio_practice_1

"As the geographer Pierce Lewis put it in 1979, "If we want to understand ourselves, we would do well to take a searching look at landscapes." The human landscape is an appropriate source of self-knowledge, according to Lewis, because it is our unwitting autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears."

Understanding Ordinary Landscapes

studio_practise_1

"The sign starts a regular activity, an inference; it is thus that the stone as a sign through its meaning, its suitability for stone-skimming, refers to a future action that can be carried out precisely because the code indicates that here we can use the rules established via previous experience. The single
instance acquires a general, rule-directed nature, and thereby a collective nature. That is the second basic function of semiotic competence: it ensures that phenomena can be repeated, remembered and stored in habits, so that we can use the signs to make inferences about the nature of the world."

Signs in Use
An introduction to Semiotics
(Introduction:pg.2)

"Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our need in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign" 
(op. cit., p.226.)                 
Paul Valery, quote from,
The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (p.219)

"...in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King..."

http://www.naciente.com/essay15.html

"...the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to "experiment," but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence."

Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch

"...the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the precedent of the old masters. The same themes are mechanically varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is produced..."

Clement Greenberg, Avant-garde and Kitsch (1939)

And now for something awfully similar...

…and now for something completely different…

The above phrase is a reference to the spin-off film ‘And Now for Something Completely Different’ written by Monty Python. The film is made from a compilation of sketches featured in the first and second series of the television show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The phrase is taken from its use as a catchphrase in the TV series and is applied as a transition between sketches in the film.

"A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step towards the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stonger than his rock."

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus