IN THE FACE OF RELENTLESS BARBARISM IN THIS SUPPOSEDLY VERY MODERN AGE, ART BECOMES A STAND, A POLITICAL TOOL, AN IDEOLOGICAL LINE TO MAINTAIN MAN’S SANITY, OR EVEN TO SAVE HUMANITY FROM AN EVENTUAL RETROGRESSION AND ANNIHILATION. NON-CONDESCENDINGLY SPEAK FOR MYSELF, MY FAITH IN ART REMAINS THE SAME. I AM VERY STUBBORN WITH MY AESTHETIC BECAUSE I BELIEVE THAT THE ARTIST CAN STILL CONTRIBUTE TO GREATER CULTURE.

— Lav Diaz

Max Ernst, Paysage Noir, 1923

It seems to me that what you are saying is that Art can be reduced (everything can be reduced) to an idea or a content or a form (any kind of “something”) that can be accurately and appropriately described (and inscribed in a disciplinary fashion) through academic language (without suffering any real, noticeable, substantial loss).

I would claim you lose pleasure first of all, and then, I ask, why even bother?

I don’t believe in this supposed structural integrity of western rationalism.

What if the world we see is a mental breakdown that we all share? We cannot step out of it. How do we talk about it?

A sense of humor is fundamental.

As we move forward (FORMward) things become vague, blurred. Things fall off. We forget. Maybe we aren’t moving, only the past crumbles and that seems like moving?

A.N. Houx

Interview (april, 1979)

Planche de “Petra Chérie”

Micheluzzi

Cy Twombly
Leda and the Swan, part III, 1980

JL, 15/08/14
Felicidades Jorge!

Whenever tyro novelists ask me for career advice I always say the same thing to them: think hard about whether you wish to spend anything up to 20 or 30 years of your adult life in solitary confinement; if you don't like the sound of that silence, abandon the idea right away. But nowadays many people who sign up for creative-writing programmes have only the dimmest understanding of what's actually involved in the writing life; the programme offers them comity and sympathetic readers for their fledgling efforts – it acts, it essence, as a therapy group for the creatively misunderstood. What these people are aware of – although again, usually only hazily – is that some writers have indeed had it all; if by this is meant that they are able to create as they see fit, and make a living from what they produce. In a society where almost everyone is subject to the appropriation of their time, and a vast majority of that time is spent undertaking work that has little human or spiritual value, the ideal form of the writing life appears gilded with a sort of wonderment. The savage irony is that even as these aspirants sign up for the promise of such a golden career, so the possibility of their actually pursuing it steadily diminishes; a still more savage irony is that the very form their instruction takes militates against the culture of the texts they desire to produce. WB Yeats attributed to his father the remark that "Poetry is the social act of the solitary man"; with the creative-writing programmes and the Facebook links embedded in digitised texts encouraging readers to "share" their insights, writing and reading have become the solitary acts of social beings. And we all know how social beings tend to regard solitary acts – as perversities, if not outright perversions.

WILL SELF

Bill Sienkiewicz