Against all odds
Beyond fear lies freedom
Believe in yourself
Be true to yourself
There's a brave new world that's raging inside of me
Chase you dreams
Courage strength mom dad
Don't dream it be it
My first act of treason was picking up a pen my first act of love was finding myself again
Freedom
Freedom is not free
Get busy living or get busy dying
People living deeply have no fear of death
Death before dishonour
I will not surrender
I am not afraid to walk this world alone
If you don't live for something you'll die for nothing
Individuality
I never give up
Integrity
I shall stand fast
It's better to be hated for what you are, than loved for what you're not
I will not conform to this world
I'll make it to the moon if I have to crawl
I found within me an invincible summer
Life is a lesson you learn when you're through
Live life
Monsters are real and ghosts are real too. They live inside us and sometimes they win
My cup truly overflows
My life is my art, my art is my life
Never give up
Never let your fear decide your fate
Never surrender
No net enslaves me
No retreat no surrender
Not with strength but with hope
Only the strong survive
Only you can define yourself
Out of the darkness cometh light
The pain you feel today, will be the strength you feel tomorrow
I'm richer then all y' all I've got a bank full of pride
Remember who you are
Stand alone
Stay true
Stay the coarse
To thine own self be true
Trust the voice within
The creation of reality is in the hands of the weaver
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong
23/57
The sun turns black, earth sinks in the sea,
The hot stars down from heaven are whirled ;
Fierce grows the steam and the life-feeding flame,
Till fire leaps high about heaven itself.
23/58
Now Garm howls loud before Gnipahellir,
The fetters will burst, and the wolf run free ;
Much do I know, and more can see
Of the fate of the gods, the mighty in fight.
23/59
Now do I see the earth anew
Rise all green from the waves again;
The cataracts fall, and the eagle flies.
And fish he catches beneath the cliffs.
The poetic Edda, Translated from the Icelandic with an introduction and notes by Henry Adams Bellows
For thirty-five years now I've been compacting waste-paper, and if I had it all to do over I'd do just what I've done for the past thirty-five years. Even so, three or four times a year my job turns from plus to minus: the cellar suddenly goes bad, the nags and niggles and whines of my boss pound in my ears and head and make the room into an inferno; the wastepaper, piled to the ceiling, wet and moldy, ferments in a way that makes manure seem sweet, a swamp decomposing in the depths of my cellar, with bubbles rising to the surface like will-o'-the-wisps from a stump rotting in the mire. And I have to come up for air, get away from the press, but I never go out, I can't stand fresh air anymore, it makes me cough and choke and sputter like a Havana cigar. So while my boss is screaming and wringing his hands and raining threats down on me, I slip away and set off in search of other basements, other cellars.
Most of all I enjoy central-heating control rooms, where men with higher education, chained to their jobs like dogs to their kennels, write the history of their times as a sort of sociological survey and where I learned how the fourth estate was depopulated and the proletariat went from base to superstructure and how the university-trained elite now carries on its work. My best friends are two former member of our Academy of Sciences who have been set to work in the sewers, so they've decided to write a book about them, about their crissings and crossings under Prague, and they are the ones who taught me that the excrement entering the sewage plant at Podbaba on Sundays differs substantially from the excrement entering it on Mondays, and that each day is so clearly differentiated from the rest that the rate of flux may be plotted on a graph, and according to the ebb and flow of prophylactics one may determine the relative frequency with which varying sections of Prague indulge in sexual intercourse.
Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal, 1976, translation Michael Henry Heim
He would lie in wait for monks grown weary with working in the oppressive heat, seizing a moment of weakness to force an entrance into their hearts. And once installed there, what havoc he wrought! For suddenly it would seem to the poor victim that the day was intolerably long and life desolatingly empty. He would go to the door of his cell and look up at the sun and ask himself if a new Joshua had arrested it midway up the heavens. Then he would go back into the shade and wonder what good he was doing in that cell or if there was any object in existence. Then he would look at the sun again and find it indubitably stationary, and the hour of the communal repast of the evening as remote as ever. And he would go back to his meditations, to sink, sink through disgust and lassitude into the black depths of despair and hopeless unbelief. When that happened the demon smiled and took his departure, conscious that he had done a good morning’s work.
Hermann Hesse, Peter Camenzind, translated by W. j. Strachan
As this personal love of nature began to grow in me and I listened to her voice as to a friend and travelling companion who speaks in a foreign language, my melancholy, though not cured, was ennobled and cleansed. My ear and eye became more acute, I learned to grasp subtleties and fine distinctions, and longed to hear the pulsation of life in all its manifestations more clearly and at close quarters - perhaps even to understand and enjoy the gift of expressing it in poetic form so that others also could get closer to it and seek out the springs of all refreshment, purification and childish innocence with deeper understanding. For the time being it remained a wish, a dream. I did not know whether it could ever be fulfilled, and I did what was nearest by loving everything visible and by no longer treating anything around me with scorn of indifference. p.84
[...]
I wanted to teach the people to be conscious of the pulse of the earth and take part in the life of the universe; not to forget in the bustle of their petty lives that we are not self-created gods but children belonging to the earth and the cosmic whole. I wanted to remind them that, like the songs of the poets and our dreams, the rivers, oceans, drifting clouds and raging storms are symbols and bearers of our hopes which spread their wings between heaven and earth; whose ultimate goal is the confident certainty of the right of citizenship and immortality of all living creatures.
[...]
But I was also eager to teach men to look for springs of joy and rivers of life in a brotherly love of nature. I wanted to preach the art of seeing, walking and enjoying life, of finding happiness in the present; to make it possible for mountains, seas and green islands to convey their message through their mighty and captivating tongues; to open up the view to the infinitely various manifestations of life as they blossomed day by day and overflowed beyond our towns and houses. I wanted to make people feel a sense of shame that we should know more about foreign wars, fashions, gossip, literature and art than about Spring unfolding its vital force outside our towns and the river that flows beneath out bridges and forests, and the lovely meadows traversed by our railways.
Collage with Bulgari advertisement Octo, Eternal Values (2014) and a bookmark from the National Gallery, London (An Allegory to the Vanities of Human Life, detail, circa 1736 Jan van Huysum)
Ivan Gutierrez, a 37-year-old artist who lives in the nearby village, stood before the pyramid and blew a low, sonorous blast on a conch horn. "It has already arrived, we are already in it" he said of the new era. "We are in a frequency of love, we are in a new vibration."
In this way existence closes the circle, but it couldn’t do this without including the night
from which it proceeds only in order to enter it again. Since it moved from the unknown to the
known, it is necessary that it inverse itself at the summit and go back to the unknown.
...
Action introduces the known (manufactured); then understanding, which is linked to it, relates the
non-manufactured, unknown elements, one after the other, to the known. But desire, poetry and
laughter increasingly cause life to slip in the opposite direction, moving from the known to the
unknown. Existence in the end causes the blind spot of understanding and right away becomes
completely absorbed in it. It could not be otherwise, unless a possibility for rest were to present
itself at a certain point. But nothing of the kind takes place: what alone remains is circular
agitation – which does not exhaust itself in ecstasy and begins again from it.
...
The upper part of my body – above the solar plexus – had disappeared, or at least no longer gave
rise to sensations which could be isolated. Only my legs – which kept me standing upright,
connected what I had become to the floor – kept a link to what I had been: the rest was an enflamed
gushing forth, overpowering, even free of its own convulsion. A character of dance and of
decomposing agility (as if made of a thousand idle futilities and of life’s thousand moments of
uncontrollable laughter) situated the flame ‘outside of me’. And as everything mingles in dance,
so there was nothing which didn’t go there to become consumed.
As cosmic man or the personification of the intelligence in the tree of life, the Green Man is
the point at which the truth is manifested in creation, whether as life, light, song, words or
other figurative forms of art. He is the medium through which divine inspiration guides the works
of time in the fullness of space. He is the point of entry of eternity into time. Space is the
medium of sound, and therefore the music of praise.
W. Anderson, Green Man: The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth.
...
Such circles designate, like the spirals, the paths of entry between worlds, and the pacing or
dancing of such designs in imitation of the journeys of the Gods, offers a perfect explanation of
these structures.
The Avebury henge was not a sculpture in the sense of being a finite, completed object.
Instead, it was brought to completion at the right time by human participation.
M. Dames The Avebury Cycle
...
In the extraordinary madness which periodically invaded Europe from the fourteenth to the
seventeenth century, people danced until they dropped.
At Liege in 1374, after certain possessed folk had come dancing half naked into the town
with garlands on their heads, dancing in the name of St John, we are told that many persons
seemingly sound in mind and body were suddenly possessed by devils and joined the dancers.
These objects were something like old fashioned projection screens, and something like gondolas; not of the Venetian type, rather the wheeled display stands used in retail (even though the wheels were rather too large to be seen on the shop floor - they were more reminiscent of something that could belong in a workshop - somehow 'masculine').
One was much taller than the other, on high legs. A square frame, glossy and blue, contained an LCD screen. The smaller one was painted in red gloss, and also held an LCD screen. The larger was somewhat mesmerizing as blue letters in italic capitals glided across the screen, spelling out 'TOTAL.' As I watched, I realised that the word seemed to glitch, to come apart - severed by a horizontal line through the middle; sometimes partially slipping from vision. TOTAL: this word as an entity, as a thing, as a visual object: I felt some pathos for it. It had fallen short, it was fading, it was uncertain. Words fail me...
Upon the screen of the smaller object, to the bottom right, almost slipping out, was the word SUPER in italic capitals. It was flashing - like brand names in lights at Piccadilly Circus, or how I would imagine it to be in Las Vegas. Yet once again there was a sense of pathos pertaining to the one who is desperate to be noticed, but just seen in the peripheral vision, at the edge, about to become obsolete.
Below the screens as I looked down, I noticed that the wires and connections at the back of the DVD player were left open, hanging out, and that surrounding the glossy blue frame was grey foam, cushioning the LCD screen and protecting it from damage. The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. Or this time perhaps we may infer that the Bachelor himself has been disrobed, robbed, even. The edifice that would give this work a sense of sheeny, hermetic closure as an object has been cast to one side. It appears to be suspended - in a state of display in its most commercial aspect (as a product/object/work of art), and also in the sense that it has been left bare: in a state that could be either not quite complete or abandoned in the process of dismantling.
Laurie Edson writes about 'The Large Glass,'
'The verbal clues provided in the title suggest that we are witnessing the ongoing process of the stripping and all that goes with it, a dynamic situation has been 'caught in the act', temporarily frozen in glass and delayed (delay, of course, promises completion at some later time).
Duchamp uses techniques that function to delay the spectator's response, and this very delay (and the subsequent heightening of the spectator's desire to comprehend, to solve, to figure out, read) produces desire in the sense which Barthes has used the term.'
It seems that in Marsh's work too, there is the undeniable sense of delay, and to use Edson's terminology, of being 'caught in the act.' In the seductive promise of a shiny, glossy exterior, and in the promise of the words 'super' & 'total' the viewer seeks at once to understand what is missing - to understand why this object is left as it is, apparently undone, to know exactly what it is, or what it is for. I (the spectator) am caught between a state of mesmerized fascination with the brightly lit words on the LCD screen, a sensuous appreciation of the physical potential of the clean, glossy structure, and a feeling of frustration in terms of knowing: I cannot name this thing before me; I cannot define it. And as such, both the physical object and meaning are left un-ended.
Installation for me is the staging of an arena; a temporal place, where there is the suggestion of narrative, but without the acting out or realisation of it. A tension or awkwardness is arrived at through the procedure. There can be an ambiguity of state; between definitives is where I find space for the work. I construct exhibition components like film or theatre scenery; with a facade of functionality. I am interested in light constructions, that can reflect the temporal and theatrical nature of an exhibition, mobility rather than permanence can be implied. A crude and provisional construction will be revealed in places; I am curious to make components that are ill fitting or dysfunctional. I want to create gaps that can be entries into the work. A gap is a hole, the place of desire; a sense of incompleteness in ourselves, we perpetually seek fulfilment, to be whole. Fantasy is continually renewed, we return again and again to the same place. For me this is also a metaphor for the creative process: the continual making and unmaking of work, the building of ideas and their subsequent deconstruction and the need build new again.
Nikolai Astrup, St. Hansbal.
Astrup sitt eige notat, udatert brev til borgermester Aslaksen , Arendal, etter 1905 / Kunst og kultur 1928, s. 227-230.
"Hun matte slik som jeg selv og mange andre barn her pa Vestlandet lide under den fanatiske religiositet som en tid herjet blant de eldre her. Alt var synd - like til det a renne pa kjelke. Og St. Hansnatten, nar balene brente rundt i fjellene og menneskene myldret som sorte punkter oppover fjellsidene og de rodkledde jenter med de hvite skjorteermerne ringet seg som lyse prikker og gnister om blussene, da var det synd for kristne folk a vaere med, da matte den lille jentungen og jeg sta pa avstand bak gjerdet og se og hore, hvordan de andre danset om balet og hujede av glede. Den siste rest av urreligion som ubevisst blusset opp.
Jeg fikk en forestilling om at dette med balet var noe syndig, noe stygt, som ble bedrevet i det gronne halvmorket – noe hedensk. Og dette ble enda mer forsterket ved sjalusien som grov i brystet nar de andre barna fikk vaere med, og jeg matte sta utenfor. Og slik sa jeg min lille lidelsesfell e – og den stygge, gule ilden, som ikke lyste i sommernatten, men som lokket og drog meg nettopp fordi den var omgitt med mystikk, ugudelighet, og ra hedenskap. Og til sist turte jeg meg inn blant de ugudelige. Men den lille piken stod igjen og sa pa med det bleke ansiktet og de store, sorte oynene som suget ilden i seg.
Slik er det jeg opprinnelig har bildet inne i meg."
