postcard montage

Dogs cutting a spacetime cord to send modernity spiraling into the void in the form of a postcard montage of Saturn Devouring His Children.

— Dogs doing things (@dogsdoingthings) January 11, 2012

 

on which they pin pieces of paper

“Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and all are more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room’s inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums.”

John Berger, et al. Ways of Seeing (1972).

a new optics

“More quickly than Moscow itself, one learns to see Berlin through Moscow…What is true of the image of the city and its people applies also to the intellectual situation: a new optics is the most undoubted gain from a stay in Russia.”

–Walter Benjamin, “Moscow.” Trans. Edmund Jephcott

“…the outsiders will dispense with pageantry not from any puritanical dislike of beauty. On the contrary, it will be one of their aims to increase private beauty; the beauty of spring, summer, autumn; the beauty of flowers, silks, clothes; the beauty which brims not only every field and wood but every barrow in Oxford Street; the scattered beauty which needs only to be combined by artists in order to become visible to all.”

–Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

“History Signs On”

from Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse (trans. Michael Dash 1989):

The former opening montage that signed on the television news broadcast of ORTF-Martinique (1970) could be seen as both an abridged history and an analysis of structures. It presented us with, in the amazing shorthand possible in montage, the Arc de Triomphe attached in all kinds of ways (boat, train, and airplane) to a field of pineapples, to a cane cutter (who wiped the sweat from his brow and raised his head, no doubt to see the said airplanes go by), to a young Martinican woman, apparently “in the shadow of these pineapples in flower,” finally to a rocky coast.

An abridged history, because here expressed in images is the true Martinican journey, even if one can imagine that between the pineapples and rocks objectivity ought to have suggested the image of one of those heroes on horseback, whip in hand, who created our country.