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Monday, November 24, 2014

Laziness

Why cannot art exist any more in the West? The answer is simple. Artists in the West are not lazy. Artists from the East are lazy; whether they will stay lazy now when they are no longer Eastern artists remains to be seen. Laziness is the absence of movement and thought, dumb time – total amnesia. It is also indifference, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence. It is sheer stupidity, a time of pain, futile concentration. Those virtues of laziness are important factors in art. Knowing about laziness is not enough, it must be practiced and perfected.
Artists in the West are not lazy and therefore not artists but rather producers of something … Their involvement with matters of no importance, such as production, promotion, gallery system, museum system, competition system (who is first), their preoccupation with objects, all that drives them away from laziness, from art.

Mladen Stilinović – excerpt from The Praise of Laziness, 1993


Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Essay Films

'Sans Soleil was the first time I'd seen someone make a work out of the struggle to make the work...it suddenly crystalized all my anxieties...I realized you could make the image out of the struggle, for me this is the essayistic mode'
Kodwo Eschun
27:00

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The Red and the Black

This split is sometimes called the "red" and "black" divide, red referring to the Marxists and black referring to the anarchists. Otto von Bismarck remarked, upon hearing of the split at the First International, "Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!"