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The Ballroom of Romance:
a place (Glenfarne, Co. Leitrim, Ireland; see the above picture)
a piece of literature (short story by William Trevor)
a film (directed by Pat O’Connor).
The three ballrooms came into being in that order; the literature was inspired by the facade of the building as Trevor drove past one day on his way to Enniskillen, and the film was a rendition of the short story. Amazing that a structure known as the ‘Nissan Hut’ could inspire such diverse cultural productions.
More about The Ballroom of Romance here
The photograph above is by Gareth Kennedy, taken one day while passing on the bus to Enniskillen.
Artist duo McDermott and McGough currently have a retrospective exhibition on view at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (another one for the collaborative artist couples list).
From the press release:
An Experience of Amusing Chemistry: Photographs 1990 – 1890 comprises some 120 works created using a wide range of historic photographic techniques, including the use of palladium, gum, salt and cyanotype prints. David McDermott and Peter McGough met when they were both part of the famous East Village New York art scene of the 1980s, and have since become renowned for their seamless fusion of art and life.
In a revolt against the confines of chronological time, they have built their practice through appropriating imagery and objects from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They have also assiduously reconstructed their lives as Victorian gentlemen – complete with knee britches, top hats and tail coats – immersing themselves in the environment and era in which they feel most at home, and, incidentally, dating their works accordingly.
My instinctual response to this work was unfairly and unjustifiably dismissive. I don’t think it’s the act of performative nostalgia, of literally attempting to live in the past, that spurred this displeasure. I actually think it’s the specific era that the artists chose: Victorianism is so passé. Different ‘pasts’ (that is, historical eras) go in and out of fashion like anything else. I wonder if it is simply their choice of the Victorian era that caused my nose to curl up?
The press release also claims that ‘they also subvert the obvious by incorporating homoerotic and art historical references, allowing the subject to expand outside of its time-capsule-like boundaries and to exist in relation to current cultural and artistic ideals’.
Image above: Bubble of Soap Formed at the Extremity of a Strand of Straw, 1884, 1990, palladium print. Image held here
In Paul Murnaghan’s Memorious, (14 - 28 January 2006), advertising space was used as a platform to announce that the artist’s memory capacity was for sale. Once the advertisement had been read, the work was completed in that form. If the contacts that were included in the ad were utilized, the work entered a second phase, one in which the activator gained control. At this stage it is necessary for that person to make some decisions. Which memory shall be chosen, why this memory, what is its value?
Memory was the first monument, before drawing, photography or object. Like any ideology or belief, the substance of the monument corrupts over time. Memorious offered a functional placebo of commemorative effect. Of course the purchased certificate will not degrade in the same fashion. The dictated text or monument is wax sealed in a document of personal authenticity. The substance may be a complete fabrication, a dream, a wish or a memorial. Here, all is valid and true. It is intended that these manuscripts will resurface at some stage and that individuals will reengage with the content of the text.
from the artist’s website
*Funes the Memorious is a famous story by Jorges Luis Borges that imagines the risks of perfect memory: it concerns a man who possesses ‘total recall’ and is paralysed by it.
A new list - some of the most common, and most unusual searches that led people to this blog. (I imagine many have gone away disappointed).
back in the day porn
ballymun girl having sex
bar with former ddr statues
breaking up on facebook
diagram on how to pan for gold
glastonbury public sex
gold things
how is nostalgia diagnosed?
josip broz tito
nostalgic video productions porn
+public-art +Belfast
retro chocolate bars
roundabout+sculpture
Sex
Skinhead girls
Skinhead porn
skinny jeans translated into welsh
sourdough
sympathy in anthropology
Yesterday my laptop died.
I am ashamed to say that I reacted to this news in a similar fashion to how I responded to a recent phonecall notification of a family death: shock (surprising myself at how well I was dealing with ‘the situation’), followed by immersion in attempts at practical problem-solving, followed by belated panic and an overdue sense of hopelessness and disorientation.
Michael said something cool today. He said something remarkable and unprecedented has occurred to us as a species now – “We’ve reached a critical mass point where the amount of memory we have externalised in books and databases (to name but a few sources) now exceeds the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there’s more memory ‘out there’ than exists in ‘all of us’. We’ve peripheralised our essence.” *
I was haunted by the loss (of photos, music, work projects, documentation of artwork, pieces of writing, invoices, tax returns) that were embedded in this machine, not backed up. My outsourced memory was not backed up and I had no one to blame but myself. The worst part of the loss were the gaps in my inventory of the things I knew I had lost: the things I couldn’t even remember but had lost anyway. I imagined these things sitting zipped up tightly in yellow folders. These yellow folders had clearly defined edges but blurred-together names; they hovered somewhere close to the right side of my forehead but slightly above it, lost in a blind fringe.
I awoke with a headache the day my laptop died, and it has refused to recede. I’ve had a lot of reading to do and been overtaken with anxiety since I’ve been unable to take notes except in written, paper, form. My thinking has become linear and I realise I’m not entirely used to it. The pressure to internalise all of this material and remember everything now is making my headache worse.
After flatlining, the laptop actually responded to artificial resuscitation but I have been told that the medium-to-longterm prognosis is bad. So we are making the most of every day we have left together.
Today I went out and bought a monstrous backup hard drive. The muscles around my cheekbones and mouth relaxed for the first time since the emergency (I hadn’t realised they had been all pinched together). I experienced a warm, flowing sensation inside my body (not pee or other bodily fluid: something much more ethereal and life-affirming).
Your life is made up of experiences: your music, your memories, your information. As that collection grows, so does the need to save your life.**
I am disgusted with myself for buying into this.
* Microserfs, Douglas Coupland, 1995. ** Printed on the packaging of my new external hard drive.
Artist Vanessa Beecroft, best known for her performative installations of naked, or semi-naked women, is a pertinent artist to think about in relation to the aesthetics of the crowd.
At the heart of this is the very question of the aesthetic, or the look, of the crowd (as seen from outside it) versus any potential agency it might have, which seems strictly limited within Beecroft’s work. The women on display in Beecroft’s installations are typically tall, thin creatures, their ranks reminiscent of fetish photography, fashion, porn, fascism and science fiction in varying measures.
Now that Beecroft’s predeliction has shifted from spectatorship of the Aryan blonde body to the black female body (as found in Sudan, a body sited within a particular racial and geopolitical discourse), it seems she has finally moved a fetish too far.
Image held here
So there are two distinct things that are interesting here - the visual and what it represents.
(The trajectory runs from attention data > interest cloud > XXL attention profile).
This represents APML: attention profiling mark up language. (APML is a proposed standard that allows users to share their own personal attention profile and compress all forms of attention data into one portable file format that can be traded between ‘attention seekers and givers’).
The internet is coming up with some intriguing new forms of visual culture to respresent what’s been described and imagined as ‘the crowd’ or ‘the masses’. This runs from the conventional idea of the crowd as a stupid-to-dangerous social ‘blob’ and the dangers of ‘groupthink’, to optimistic ideas of collective intelligence such as James Suroweicki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. It comes back to the old debate of populism. That is, elitism.
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