READING （EAST/WEST） 閱讀 （東西)
Orientation and Significance 導向與意義
Posted December 23, 2021
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Good and evil are the same.
— Heraclitus (active about 500 BCE)
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Heraclitus living in the old acoustic world before Greek literacy said, “You can’t step in the same river twice.” And today in the electric world we say, “You can’t step in the same river ” period.
— Marshall McLuhan (1973)
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One of the passions which now absorb me is an insatiable curiosity; having recognized that evil has triumphed and that I cannot prevent it, I am determined to study its development as objectively as possible.
— Mikhail Bakunin … letter to Élisée Reclus (1875)
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My personal freedom, confined by the liberty of all, extends to infinity.
— Mikhail Bakukin (1871)
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Searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that being my own.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins (1883)
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Walk during a few moments very consciously in a certain direction; simultaneously an infinite number of living creatures in the universe are moving in an infinite number of directions.
– Stanley Brouwn (1969)
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Stan Brakhage, Chinese Series [detail], 2003. 2 minutes, 18 seconds; 35 mm film, black and white and colour.
Curatorial Record:
Chinese Series was the final film made by avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933-2003)—the last testament of a prolific 50 years in which he completed over 350 works of lyrical first-person cinema. Studying hypnagogic vision and what he termed “moving visual thinking,” Brakhage’s studies in light and motion often respond to cultural considerations as well as personal visual experience. In Chinese Series the abstract shapes that he hand-scratched with his fingernails into the softened emulsion of the film reflect his decades-long study of Chinese art and poetry, and are powerfully suggestive not only of Chinese calligraphic characters, but of mysterious hinted-at landscapes, shafts of light, or foliage.
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Wyndham Lewis
(1927)
The unfolding of the fan is the spatial image. The closing of it is the time image. They are respectively, extension and intensity.
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All realization, of a high intensity, must be analogical: we cannot twist entirely round upon ourselves: we cannot experience reality “front on,” we must make use of the external to experience what is ultimate—having no “outside” or “inside”.
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Michael Snow, Authorization, 1969. Photograph—instant silver prints (Polaroid 47) and adhesive tape on mirror (in metal frame). 56.6 x 44.4 x 1.4 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Curatorial record:
This work was presented by the artist as part of his solo exhibition at the 35th Venice Biennale—1970.
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Marshall McLuhan (1960):
Media are the parameters of all enterprises, whether private or collective. They impose, they are the assumptions. Mostly, therefore, they are subliminal just because they are constitutive and pervasive. But to a number-sodden age, it may be more effective to say “Media are the parameters” rather than that “the medium is the message.”
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