“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, July 9, 2011

When a shape is just about to take form of just about to disappear


Ajay Kurian's intriguing exhibition of transient forms in Callicoon, NY, starts next week. He says:

when something gets so close to not being, that's when it becomes radically powerful and evocative. When a shape is just about to take form or when it is just about to disappear, it becomes beautiful. Just as when a bubble pops. Just as when dormant sand takes shape, just as when words appear from mottled and ruddy dirt. Nevertheless, tragedy still haunts both Bowles’ narrative and the exhibition, and beauty can only suffice so much. As long as we approach reality as such - asymptotically - we may be unwittingly bound to the tragic.

This is remarkably similar to the argument I'm making in what I'm writing right now, on causality.


No comments: