Morocco under French Protectorate from 1912-1956: The Treaty of Fes, which officially established the Protectorate on 30 March 1912
Journey of a postcard, hanging in a cabin somewhere in Sweden over many years.... and left an imprint, sparked curiosity, has been carried to Trondheim.... . (Mats Hannes Platon)
What happened? What happened in Morocco in 1912? Imagine Art-History as a detective novel? An object of investigation and counter-investigation?
In the French Protectorate of Morocco (1912-–56), Moroccan craft guilds were industrialised and controlled by the administration but were physically separated into walled medinas and culturally segregated, seen as inferior to the European paradigms of art – the likes of Eugene Delacroix, Henri Matisse and Paul Klee, who all visited Morocco in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Morocco’s modern visual art scene evolved in tandem with this postcolonial period of flux, grappling with the nation’s new political identity while making sense of the recent legacy of the French-influenced arts education. At the same time, Morocco’s prominent cities continued to be cosmopolitan, international meeting points that attracted artists from all over the world – and who inevitably formed relationships with local artists. At this charged moment in time, the Casablanca Art School emerged as a site for experimentation, political discussion and exuberant exchange – initiating a major shift in the development of Moroccan Modernism away from the European hierarchical view of the country’s art.
Charlotte Jansen: The Human Stories of the Casablance Art School
A question of colour and the combination of colours >> look for Chroma—Book of Colours by Derek Jarman
Painting and the question of concepts: The Deleuze Seminars
What does Bacon mean when, throughout the interviews, he speaks of "orders of sensation," "levels of feeling," "areas of sensation," or "shifting sequences"? At first, one might think that each order, level, or area corresponds to a specific sensation: each sensation would thus be a term in a sequence or a series. For example, the series of Rembrandt's self-portraits involves us in different areas of feeling. And it is true that painting, and especially Bacon's painting, proceeds through series: series of crucifixions, series of Popes, series of self- portraits, series of the mouth, of the mouth that screams, the mouth that smiles . . . .
Moreover, there can be series of simultaneity, as in the triptychs, which make at least three levels or orders coexist. And the series can be closed, when it has a contrasting composition, but it can be open, when it is continued or continuable beyond the three. All this is true. But it would not be true were there not something else as well, something that is already at work in each painting, each Figure, each sensation. It is each painting, each Figure, that is itself a shifting sequence or series (and not simply a term in a series); it is each sensation that exists at diverse levels, in different orders, or in different domains. This means that there are not sensations of different orders, but different orders of one and the same sensation. It is the nature of sensation to envelop a constitutive difference of level, a plurality of constituting domains. Every sensation, and every Figure, is already an "accumulated" or "coagulated" sensation, as in a limestone figure. Hence the irreducibly synthetic character of sensation.
What then, we must ask, is the source of this synthetic character, through which each material sensation has several levels, several orders or domains? What are these levels, and what makes up their sensing or sensed unity?
Gilles Deleuze: Francis Bacon—The Logic of Sensation, Translated from the French by Daniel W. Smith, Continuum, London & New York, 2003. First published in France 1981.
I am interested in the stiching, the repetetive, Japanese Craft ... and here is my Jacket, a never ending stichy artwork !
I admire Agnes Martin (and many more)
(Tor-Ada Solberg)
As for her paintings, she had to eliminate everything and ended up with only horizontals and verticals. She doesn’t like diagonals: they are in space. She doesn’t want space. She used to paint the mountains, lightning and fire. She tried to make these paintings strong, then realised that what she liked was the plain, the horizontal line, without anything; the beach with no objects, just the ocean and millions of waves. Doing the rectangles, she saw that everything was nothing and thought of Isaiah: “Surely the people is grass.” Then she got prideful because that show was successful. She destroyed two shows after that. When she began working again, drawing lines, she discovered that what she liked best was the horizontal line, that it was the freest: no form, nothing. After that, that was all she did. Only some weren’t good, the scale was all wrong. She stopped looking at people, at the landscape. She went after the perfection in our minds.
Lizzie Borden, Agnes & Perfection, Essay in Another Gaze, March 2022.
The Sheer Teeming Multiplicity
The life and work of
Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
By Paul Strathern
I am interested in non-centrered narratives and storytelling. I brought The Crying Book, which I recommend to read, and appreciate the paintings of Lars Elling a lot.
(Hanna Undlien)
Serubiri Moses: In your latest book, The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity (2023), you discuss a 1961 painting by Chinese artists Wu Biduan and Jin Shangyi titled Chairman Mao Standing with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. I’m quite interested in your reading of Mao Zedong in such paintings. For example, you point to the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet split when you write that, through Wu and Jin’s artwork, “Mao inhabits the center of a new world of nonwhite bodies.”
This brings up many questions, starting with one about the realms in which that very world remains unseen. Why, in your view, hasn’t there been a sustained reading of Mao Zedong’s iconography within the United States, or even in Latin America? Do you think that a study such as yours, which looks predominantly at this 1960s period, is somewhat belated given that you also note the “shadow-like” Asian presence in American art writ large?
Afro Asia and the Ethics of Friendship — Joan Kee in conversation with Serubiri Moses
“I’ve been reading William H. Frey’s 1985 book, Crying: The Mystery of Tears, a scientific exploration of how and why we cry. Frey led, for several years, experiments on the chemical composition of tears, as well as investigations into crying behavior among adults in the United States. He is a proponent of the idea that crying is an excretory process, that it helps rid the body of stress-related chemicals, and that this may be the reason we feel better after a good cry. (We do not, not always, but you know that already.) When Frey first published his work, the media response was enormous, as viral as it could be in the pre-Internet era. Walter Cronkite interviewed him. Charles Schulz referred to his work in a Peanuts cartoon. Curious about that art in particular, I email Frey to ask if he might share it with me, and he soon calls back.
***
In his book, Frey speculates that “higher levels [of the hormone prolactin] may account in part for the fact that women shed tears more often and more readily than men.” I can’t help noticing that in his conceptual framework men are the default figure, to which women are compared. And he (and every other crying researcher I’ve read) treats sex as binary and absolute, sex and gender as interchangeable. I go digging and find that differences in prolactin levels emerge in puberty; people categorized by researchers as female experience an increase, those categorized as male a decline. What would happen if Frey were to flip his model, ask why males suffer from a prolactin deficit, and a corresponding inability to cry? Or better still, what if researchers were to treat sex and gender as the varied sets they are? What would the science of tears look like then?”
(Heather Christle, The Crying Book, page 54)
Joan Kee
Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method
"Starting in the mid-1960s, a group of Korean artists began to push paint, soak canvas, drag pencils, rip paper, and otherwise manipulate the materials of painting in ways that prompted critics to describe their actions as “methods” rather than artworks. A crucial artistic movement of twentieth-century Korea, Tansaekhwa (monochromatic painting) also became one of its most famous and successful."
"Most essential and distinctive is her attention to ‘method’. Kee argues method as the key concept in the art of tansaekhwa and as a key element in her own analysis. This book, as she affirms in Introduction, relies ‘heavily on close formal reading’ of artworks (p 28), which she carries out in a meticulous manner, which helps the reader to appreciate each painting’s unique details and each artist’s unique method, by this means the paintings’ hidden contents and contexts are unraveled and explored. Kee utilises formal analysis – which in fact is the fundamental methodology in the discipline of Art History – at the core of her examination powerfully and deliberately, proving that this ‘return to the basic’ is itself a game changer in the current scholarship of art history, a field where the role of theory and interpretation is privileged over that of observation and description and where writings on non-Western art are dominated by an ethnographic approach."
book review in Third Text by SooJin Lee
Someone then said, "this reminds me of North Korean paintings....." --- what do we have in mind when we speak of North Korean Art?
“To break into tears seems the right verb, as if one leans on a membrane until it gives way, until the boundary between the body and its tears dissolves, until the citizen self falls into the nation of cry. Or perhaps it is that one’s self becomes tears, breaks into small, hot droplets.”
(Heather Christle, The Crying Book, page 52)
Right now, I am interested in porn—post-porn, feminist porn, other kinds of porn and did a lot of research. Like in RE:SEARCH, I found Annie Sprinkle, the post-porn modernist. But Music is equally important for this, and especially the rap artist Cardi B...
(Moa West)
What happens after the pornographic moment? What is the post. . . in porn? What is post to the term that is porn? Why watch porn? Why not? Or why not look for “other” porn? Why not produce post-porn? How do we theorize sex performance? How do we produce new body- and sex-technologies? How do we celebrate critical pleasures? How do we analyze and criticize without censorship? Why affirm the fetish? Why sexualize alienation? How do we intensify the relation between theory and practice? Why is power sexy? Why is the body a victim of capitalist commodification? Why don't we perform and show sex differently, instead of idealizing a way back to nature? A symposium on the biopolitics of pornography.
The concept called "post-porn" was invented by erotic photographer Wink van Kempen and made popular by sexwork-activist and performance artist Annie M. Sprinkle. It claimed a new status of sexual representation: Through identifying with critical joy and agency while deconstructing its hetero/normative and naturalising conditions, Sprinkle made us think of sex as a category open for use and appropriation of queer_feminist counter-pleasures beyond the victimising framework of censorship and taboo.
What Happened to Sex in Scandinavia
An exhibition, curated by
Marta Kuzma in Oslo 2007.
In terms of highlighting artists, I am most fond of public toilets art -- or other walls used in public spaces to scribble messages or drawings
(Pil Ulheim)
Dirty Diaries was created in 2009 to explore what porn could be from the perspective of the female gaze and queer identity. The films were made with a mobile phone camera and a small amount of funding from the Swedish Film Institute. The project caused a lot of controversy in Sweden, but also a worldwide recognition for its artistic quality and its groundbreaking nature.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 - 1988)