Praeterita

It sounds simple enough. Every day during 2011, artist Kirsty Hall who lives in Bristol, UK, goes for a walk with a glass jar in her hand. Inside the glass jar is a small piece of art that she has created – a tiny ink drawing on Japanese paper, a braid of wire and beads, decaying roses from her garden, handwritten text on a long yarn of paper.  Art and images copyright Kirsty Hall, 2011 She looks for a nook or a cranny in which she can place the jar—a spot where it won’t be too visible, but where it will eventually catch the eye of a passerby. When someone picks up one of the jars, they see a note inviting them to register their find on the project website. After that, they are free to keep the jar, or to ‘release the jar back into the wild,’ as Kirsty calls it. From such simple ideas come very complex things. As I write, the 365 Jars project is now coming up to 99 jars left on garden walls and park benches around the Bristol and Clifton area. The project website meticulously ...

This is a test for a feature that Google has recently added to Blogger (the software behind this blog). Previously when you wanted to include a video, you either had to upload it into the blog post, or cut and paste a link or some HTML from YouTube. Now you can search YouTube, display the video thumbnails, play one to see whether you want it, then click 'Select' and the video clip is posted directly in. So I searched on 'Cezanne', and came up with this clip of the great abstract artist Brice Marden talking about the daddy of all twentieth century art.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Last night (April 8th), there was a temporary exhibition at Columbia College's Center for Book & Paper Arts of work from classes that combine text and image. I am proud to say that 6 out of the 9 people selected came from the Journal & Sketchbook class that I am co-teaching with Patty. The show, called 'Ratio', was organised by the Student Board of the Fiction Writing Department, under their President Greg Baldino (at left, below): On the night, four of our students were able to be present, to talk about their visual piece and to read from the accompanying text. They were Lynn Shapiro, who contributed an extremely ornate accordion book; Egan Click, who submitted an automatic drawing and a long journal entry with a similar extended rhythm to it; Kayla Nirschel, who read from the text that she had written in a spiral around an altered photo; and Wyl Villacres, who was inspired by our class to do a project that involved him writing his text on the half-naked bodie...

Meditation Number 64 starts with a personal memory of Joseph Beuys, the great German artist of the second half of the twentieth century.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

"The task of art today is to bring chaos into order."---Theodor Adorno.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Film is much on my mind at the moment. I'm currently halfway through a semester of co-teaching a class called Story in Fiction and Film International, which concentrates on the process of creating story as it emerges in fiction (such as Murukami, Allende, Kincaid, and other non-white or non-American writers) and films from around the world. Then there's the recent interview I posted with Bruce Sheridan , chair of the Film and Video department at Columbia College Chicago. (By the way, for those who don't know this, the F & V program is the largest in the USA for interdisciplinary learning in film, and certainly one of the top two or three programs in the country by any standard you want to compare it to). The teaching, and thinking about what Bruce said about language in relation to film, made me wonder why it is that the best films that I've seen recently have been documentaries, or non-fiction narratives in one form or another. "The Rape of Europa", a...

"Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth."---Theodor Adorno.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader