one hundred and twenty-eight

An excellent way to spend eight and a half minutes:



 Andy Goldsworthy is an amazing, intriguing man, and it's great to be able to watch him work.

This is an evening for watching art programmes with my sister, and wishing there was more like the above on television now.

Another of tonight's highlights was a clip of Anthony Caro gleefully exclaiming of his Early One Morning 'And then, I painted it green!' - before the interview cuts to his wife saying 'Tony really has no understanding of colour. He's a form man. He usually lets me make the decisions about colour'.

(As you can see, Early One Morning ended up red.)

one hundred and twenty-six

If I were to ever get a tattoo (sometimes I am tempted, but am so fickle that anything involving permanence freaks me out) I would want it to look something like this lovely little fox, a marginal drawing in Gerald of Wale's 'History and Topography of Ireland'.

(ps the British Library's online gallery of illuminated manuscripts in wonderful)

one hundred and five

ninety

I very much like this song by Jesca Hoop (with Guy Garvey! he has one of my favourite voices in the world and writes lovely lyrics, plus he hosts a very good and eclectic show on bbc radio 6. So, all in all, a brilliant man).

 I think this picture sums up some of my recent moods very well.

seventy-seven

Music Visualizations, Synchoric Orchestra dancing Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, first performed in 1919 at Shawn's Grand Ave.

I spent a good couple of hours searching The Commons on Flickr. If you haven't yet, I suggest you go and take a look: it's a collection of the world's public photography archive, and contains pictures from galleries, museums and libraries around the world.

Ruth St. Denis in 'Rhada'. (This is not from The Commons, but the New York Public Library's stream).

As I seem to be on a dancey theme: I have just watched the most stunning pas de deux, and will have to watch it at least four more times before I get over this feeling of heartsqueezedness, breathlessness. It's Marianela Nunez and Edward Watson, in Wayne McGregor's Infra:

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A.J. Russell image of the celebration following the driving of the "Last Spike" at Promontory Summit, U.T., May 10, 1869

'In the course of the nineteenth century, time ceased to be a phenomenon that linked humans to the cosmos and became one administered by technicians to link industrial activities to each other. It changed the way people imagined their world... Midway through that century, Henry David Thoreau was living at Walden Pond, outside the community but near the railroad line. Standard time had not yet regulated America, but the railroad already dominated the experience of time. Thoreau commented, 'I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear... They go and come with such regularity and precision, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one well-conducted institution regulates a whole country.' The railroad had eclipsed the sun.'

Rebecca Solnit, Motion Studies: Time, Space & Eadward Muybridge

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I love Yelena Bryksenkova's sketchbooks.

yes, yes I do.

sixty-eight

The Royal Observatory is currently showcasing the winners of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2010.

A Perfect Circle by Dhruv Arvind Paranjpye

Paranjpye's photograph shows an annular eclipse, which occurs when the moon is too far from the earth to completely cover the sun (as happens in a total eclipse).

This is such an amazing image. I love how the wispy, formless clouds - lit like they were painted by Turner - obscure the bright, hard circle of the sun.

Like many of the other astronomical photographs, I find this simultaneously compelling and unsettling. I can hardly believe that that pale ring is our sun - and then, that something so bizarre as the sun actually exists. I like being encouraged to see something to which I had grown (too) accustomed - the sun, space, stars and planets - as novel and weird and amazing again.

It is easy for the world to become a habit.

I am also reminded of a particular Rodchenko painting, Composition no. 61:

Rodchenko was inspired by images from old science books, and this one certainly has the feel of the moon and the sun, of eclipses.

fifty-eight

Last Wednesday I took a day off work to go and look at art. Nearly everyone in the office was away on a summer break, and I was feeling jealous. I took my holiday in June, and it feels very distant.

I went to see Pyschopomps, by the taxidermist Polly Morgan. A pyschopomp is a 'guide of souls' - the deities, spirits or angels responsible for leading souls to the afterlife. They appear in numerous cultures: Charon, Horus, Woden, the Grim Reaper; pyschopomps all. Nowadays, there is Oscar the cat, who lives in a nursing home and curls up with those about to die. His predictions have been so accurate that staff will now alert a patient's family when Oscar appears on a bed. What else could he be, but a pyschopomp?

Anyone who has visited a natural history museum will be aware of taxidermy, which recreates an image of life using the skin of a dead animal. Those museum exhibitions, with animals frozen still as if in photographs, posed on backgrounds meant to resemble their natural habitat, are oppositional to Morgan's work: she does not aim to create a fiction of natural life, as if to pretend the animal had not been deconstructed and treated and tanned and manipulated by human hands.

I love this piece. Looking at it gave me an intense feeling of motion sickness. It was not a mass of wings, but one bird circling and swooping; it felt like the bird itself was always moving just out of line of my vision, and all that was left was a flurry of wing. I'm very drawn to static objects that nonetheless seem full of potential and movement; it is so impressive, to be able to make something so energetic despite its physical stillness.

This feeling, of movement without movement itself, was also present in this piece.

The little finches are akin to Eadward Muybridge's work: both he and Morgan capture a series of single moments of movement, and compose them in a way that suggests motion.

I read a review that spoke of escape and transcendence with regard to the second piece: the birds are outside their cage, lifting it beyond this world to another. But they didn't seem free to me. They are not inside the cage, but its metal still reaches up and holds them. They wear it. It put me in mind of how we incorporate animals into our service: we place real birds in cages to lift our spirits with song; we create bird deities to lift our spirits from life to the land of the dead.