"That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful." ~Edgar Allan Poe / "Understood in its metaphysical sense, Beauty is one of the manifestations of the Absolute Being. Emanating from the harmonious rays of the Divine plan, it crosses the intellectual plane to shine once again across the natural plane, where it darkens into matter." ~Jean Delville
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
~G. Bachelard
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
~Umberto Eco
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
~Thomas Mann
Stay, little ounce, here in/ Fleece and leaf with me, in the evermore/ Where swans trembled in the lake around our bed of hay and morning/ Came each morning like a felt cloak billowing/ Across the most pale day. It was the color of a steeple disappearing/ In an old Venetian sky. (...)
Would they take/ You now from me, like Leonardo's sleeve disappearing in/ The air. And when I woke I could not wake/ You, little sphinx, I could not keep you here with me./ Anywhere, I could not bear to let you go. Stay here/ In our clouded bed of wind and timothy with me./ Lie here with me in snow.
~For a Snow Leopard in October, Lucie Brock-Broido
Thursday 1 October 2009
Laurie’s Ballet
Porcelain dolls, miniature houses, ballet slippers, sharply-lit stage against mysterious darkness, an abyss into one’s mind (or of one’s mind?), glistening snowflakes and iridescent rose petals, swooning whirls of tutus, Alice’s beautiful skirts and her Wonderland, a dream within a dream, an invitation to a dance—eerie yet bizarrely irresistible, that dulcet and melodious danger.
Laurie Simmons was born on Long Island, New York, in 1949. She received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia (1971). Simmons stages photographs and films with paper dolls, finger puppets, ventriloquist dummies, and costumed dancers as “living objects,” animating a dollhouse world suffused with nostalgia and colored by an adult’s memories, longings, and regrets. Simmons’s work blends psychological, political and conceptual approaches to art making, transforming photography’s propensity to objectify people, especially women, into a sustained critique of the medium. Mining childhood memories and media constructions of gender roles, her photographs are charged with an eerie, dreamlike quality. On first glance her works often appear whimsical, but there is a disquieting aspect to Simmons’s child’s play as her characters struggle over identity in an environment in which the value placed on consumption, designer objects, and domestic space is inflated to absurd proportions. Simmons’s first film, “The Music of Regret” (2006), extends her photographic practice to performance, incorporating musicians, professional puppeteers, Alvin Ailey dancers, Hollywood cinematographer Ed Lachman, and actress Meryl Streep. She has received many awards, including the Roy Lichtenstein Residency in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome (2005); and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1984). She has had major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Baltimore Museum of Art (1997); San Jose Museum of Art, California (1990); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1987); and has participated in two Whitney Biennials (1985, 1991). Simmons lives and works in New York.
Slow Dance from Laurie Simmons Studio on Vimeo. Slow Dance. 2007. USA. 35mm film (transferred to HD CAM). 4:28 min. Directed by Laurie Simmons Cinematography by Ed Lachman ASC Music by Michael Rohatyn Lyrics by Laurie Simmons
P.s. I have not written a “proper” blog entry for a while (that is, one with a fair amount of blabbering on my part), but when I encounter works by artists such as Laurie Simmons, words seem unnecessary. There is however another article which is incubating in my head at the moment, and will hopefully be my next post.
2 comments:
I love Laurie Simmons and her world! Thank you for this post :)
Glad you like it too Michiko! I thought her world was too lovely and fascinating not to share...
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