quinta-feira, 25 de dezembro de 2008
Natividade
Paysage d'hiver, Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929), 1908.
Paysage d'hiver, Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929), 1908.
De acordo com o meu querer vim revelar a glória aos meus parentes e aos meus companheiros espirituais.
Estavam, de facto, preparados, os que estavam no mundo pela vontade da nossa irmã Sabedoria, a que é uma impetuosa por causa da sua candidez, a que nem foi enviada, nem pediu nada do Todo, nem da grandeza da assembleia, nem do Pleroma, quando saíu primeiramente para preparar moradas e lugares do Filho da Luz e dos companheiros de tarefa. Tomou os elementos de baixo para a construção dos habitáculos corporais para eles. Mas existindo eles numa glória vazia liquidaram a sua destruição nos habitáculos em que estavam. Uma vez que estavam preparados pela Sabedoria, estão preparados para receber a palavra que salva, da Mónada inefável e da grandeza da assembleia de todos os que esperam e dos que estão em mim. Visitei um habitáculo corporal. Desalojei o que residia anteriormente e eu entrei nele.
in Segundo Tratado do Grande Seth, Origem e encarnação do Salvador, Códice VII de Nag Hammadi.
Estavam, de facto, preparados, os que estavam no mundo pela vontade da nossa irmã Sabedoria, a que é uma impetuosa por causa da sua candidez, a que nem foi enviada, nem pediu nada do Todo, nem da grandeza da assembleia, nem do Pleroma, quando saíu primeiramente para preparar moradas e lugares do Filho da Luz e dos companheiros de tarefa. Tomou os elementos de baixo para a construção dos habitáculos corporais para eles. Mas existindo eles numa glória vazia liquidaram a sua destruição nos habitáculos em que estavam. Uma vez que estavam preparados pela Sabedoria, estão preparados para receber a palavra que salva, da Mónada inefável e da grandeza da assembleia de todos os que esperam e dos que estão em mim. Visitei um habitáculo corporal. Desalojei o que residia anteriormente e eu entrei nele.
in Segundo Tratado do Grande Seth, Origem e encarnação do Salvador, Códice VII de Nag Hammadi.
terça-feira, 23 de dezembro de 2008
Inconstitucional?
A Portaria nº 1488/2008 do ministro das Finanças, que hoje entra em vigor, prevê um auxílio financeiro extraordinário exclusivamente aos beneficiários dos Serviços Sociais da Administração Pública, incluindo os seus cônjuges, ascendentes, descendentes e equiparados. Os outros cidadãos ficam de fora. Será que isto não colide com o artigo 13º da Constituição que diz que o Estado não pode privilegiar nenhum cidadão em detrimento dos demais?
A Portaria nº 1488/2008 do ministro das Finanças, que hoje entra em vigor, prevê um auxílio financeiro extraordinário exclusivamente aos beneficiários dos Serviços Sociais da Administração Pública, incluindo os seus cônjuges, ascendentes, descendentes e equiparados. Os outros cidadãos ficam de fora. Será que isto não colide com o artigo 13º da Constituição que diz que o Estado não pode privilegiar nenhum cidadão em detrimento dos demais?
Sabedoria e sensatez
“Nada deve ser mais importante nem mais desejável (…) do que preservar a boa disposição dos professores (…). É nisso que reside o maior segredo do bom funcionamento das escolas (…).”
“Com amargura de espírito, os professores não poderão prestar um bom serviço, nem responder convenientemente às [suas] obrigações.”Recomenda-se a todos os professores um dia de repouso semanal: “A solicitude por parte dos superiores anima muito os súbditos e reconforta-os no trabalho.”
“Quando um professor desempenha o seu ministério com zelo e diligência, não seja esse o pretexto para o sobrecarregar ainda mais e o manter por mais tempo naquele encargo. De outro modo os professores começarão a desempenhar os seus deveres com mais indiferença e negligência, para que não lhes suceda o mesmo.”Incentivar e valorizar a sua produção literária: porque “a honra eleva as artes.”
“Em meses alternados, pelo menos, o reitor deverá chamar os professores (…) e perguntar-lhes-á, com benevolência, se lhes falta alguma coisa, se algo os impede de avançar nos estudos e outras coisas do género. Isto se aplique não só com todos os professores em geral, nas reuniões habituais, mas também com cada um em particular, a fim de que o reitor possa dar-lhes mais livremente sinais da sua benevolência, e eles próprios possam confessar as suas necessidades, com maior liberdade e confiança. Todas estas coisas concorrem grandemente para o amor e a união dos mestres com o seu superior. Além disso, o superior tem assim possibilidade de fazer com maior proveito algum reparo aos professores, se disso houver necessidade.”
in Ratio Studiorum da Companhia de Jesus (1599).
“Nada deve ser mais importante nem mais desejável (…) do que preservar a boa disposição dos professores (…). É nisso que reside o maior segredo do bom funcionamento das escolas (…).”
“Com amargura de espírito, os professores não poderão prestar um bom serviço, nem responder convenientemente às [suas] obrigações.”Recomenda-se a todos os professores um dia de repouso semanal: “A solicitude por parte dos superiores anima muito os súbditos e reconforta-os no trabalho.”
“Quando um professor desempenha o seu ministério com zelo e diligência, não seja esse o pretexto para o sobrecarregar ainda mais e o manter por mais tempo naquele encargo. De outro modo os professores começarão a desempenhar os seus deveres com mais indiferença e negligência, para que não lhes suceda o mesmo.”Incentivar e valorizar a sua produção literária: porque “a honra eleva as artes.”
“Em meses alternados, pelo menos, o reitor deverá chamar os professores (…) e perguntar-lhes-á, com benevolência, se lhes falta alguma coisa, se algo os impede de avançar nos estudos e outras coisas do género. Isto se aplique não só com todos os professores em geral, nas reuniões habituais, mas também com cada um em particular, a fim de que o reitor possa dar-lhes mais livremente sinais da sua benevolência, e eles próprios possam confessar as suas necessidades, com maior liberdade e confiança. Todas estas coisas concorrem grandemente para o amor e a união dos mestres com o seu superior. Além disso, o superior tem assim possibilidade de fazer com maior proveito algum reparo aos professores, se disso houver necessidade.”
in Ratio Studiorum da Companhia de Jesus (1599).
sexta-feira, 19 de dezembro de 2008
Coisas da crise
O irrealizável projecto de Sergei Eisenstein de filmar O Capital de Marx foi agora concretizado pelo realizador alemão Alexander Kluge. Está disponível exclusivamente em DVD, este filme com 10 horas de duração.
O irrealizável projecto de Sergei Eisenstein de filmar O Capital de Marx foi agora concretizado pelo realizador alemão Alexander Kluge. Está disponível exclusivamente em DVD, este filme com 10 horas de duração.
domingo, 14 de dezembro de 2008
Interviews (4)
David Sylvester - Actually, your scale is very consistent. Almost everything you paint is pretty well to the same scale. Your smaller paintings are of heads and, when you paint a large painting, it's of a full-length figure: the head in the large painting is the same size as the head in the small one. There are very few cases of a whole figure done in a small painting.
Francis Bacon - Well, that's my drawback, that's my rigidness.
DS - And the scale is near that of life. So that, when you do a figure, the picture is large, which displeases the collectors.
FB - Yes, but my pictures are not very large compared to so many modern paintings nowadays.
DS - But they seemed to be so ten years ago when everybody was asking you to paint small pictures.
FB - Not any longer. They look rather small pictures now.
DS - You paint a lot in series, of course.
FB - I do. Partly because I see every image all the time in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences. So that one can take it from more or less what is called ordinary figuration to a very, very far point.
DS - When you're doing a series, do you paint them one after the other or do you work on them concurrently?
FB - I do them one after the other. One suggests the other.
DS - And does a series remain a series for you after you've finished working on it? That's to say, would you like the pictures to be kept together, or is it all the same to you if they get separated?
FB - Ideally, I'd like to paint rooms of pictures with different subject-matter but treated serially. I see rooms full of paintings; they just fall in like slides. I can daydream all day long and see rooms full of paintings. But whether I ever make them really like what drops into my mind, I don't know, because, of course, they fade away. Of course, what in a curious way one's always hoping to do is to paint the one picture which will annihilate all the other ones, to concentrate everything into one painting. But actually in the series one picture reflects on the other continuously and sometimes they're better in series than they are separately because, unfortunately, I've never yet been able to make the one image that sums up all the others. So one image against the other seems to be able to say the thing more.
David Sylvester in Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1975.
Francis Bacon - Well, that's my drawback, that's my rigidness.
DS - And the scale is near that of life. So that, when you do a figure, the picture is large, which displeases the collectors.
FB - Yes, but my pictures are not very large compared to so many modern paintings nowadays.
DS - But they seemed to be so ten years ago when everybody was asking you to paint small pictures.
FB - Not any longer. They look rather small pictures now.
DS - You paint a lot in series, of course.
FB - I do. Partly because I see every image all the time in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences. So that one can take it from more or less what is called ordinary figuration to a very, very far point.
DS - When you're doing a series, do you paint them one after the other or do you work on them concurrently?
FB - I do them one after the other. One suggests the other.
DS - And does a series remain a series for you after you've finished working on it? That's to say, would you like the pictures to be kept together, or is it all the same to you if they get separated?
FB - Ideally, I'd like to paint rooms of pictures with different subject-matter but treated serially. I see rooms full of paintings; they just fall in like slides. I can daydream all day long and see rooms full of paintings. But whether I ever make them really like what drops into my mind, I don't know, because, of course, they fade away. Of course, what in a curious way one's always hoping to do is to paint the one picture which will annihilate all the other ones, to concentrate everything into one painting. But actually in the series one picture reflects on the other continuously and sometimes they're better in series than they are separately because, unfortunately, I've never yet been able to make the one image that sums up all the others. So one image against the other seems to be able to say the thing more.
David Sylvester in Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1975.
sexta-feira, 5 de dezembro de 2008
quinta-feira, 4 de dezembro de 2008
Werner Herzog
A partir de 10 de Dezembro — e até 2 de Março de 2009 — o Centro Pompidou mostra a grande retrospectiva da obra de Werner Herzog com a projecção de 55 filmes. Nascido em 1942, Werner Herzog começa a filmar no início dos anos 60 e é a partir das suas primeiras curtas-metragens que Herzog afirma a essência do seu trabalho recusando a dicotomia entre ficção e documentário, procurando através das imagens a imaterialidade da vida. Gilles Deleuze considera-o «le plus métaphysicien des auteurs de cinéma».
«J'ai tourné beaucoup de documentaires ces dernières années, faute de financement pour mes fictions. Mais dans mon oeuvre, la frontière entre les deux n'est pas évidente. Mes documentaires sont délibérément stylisés et inventifs, car je hais le cinéma-vérité, tous ces films qui prétendent enregistrer la réalité avec des manières de comptable. La vérité que je recherche au cinéma est d'ordre poétique, extatique.»
Werner Herzog
«J'ai tourné beaucoup de documentaires ces dernières années, faute de financement pour mes fictions. Mais dans mon oeuvre, la frontière entre les deux n'est pas évidente. Mes documentaires sont délibérément stylisés et inventifs, car je hais le cinéma-vérité, tous ces films qui prétendent enregistrer la réalité avec des manières de comptable. La vérité que je recherche au cinéma est d'ordre poétique, extatique.»
Werner Herzog
terça-feira, 2 de dezembro de 2008
Interviews (3)
David Sylvester - When you get a photograph taken with a high-speed camera that produces an entirely unexpected effect which is highly ambiguous and exciting, because the image is the thing and it isn't, or because it's surprising that this shape is the thing: now, is that illustration?
Francis Bacon - I think it is. I think it is a diverted illustration. I think the difference from direct recording through the camera is that as an artist you have to, in a sense, set a trap by which you hope to trap this living fact alive. How well can you set the trap? Where and at what moment will it click? And there's another thing, that has to do with texture. I think the texture of a painting seems to be more immediate than the texture of a photograph, because the texture of a photograph seems to go through an illustrational process onto the nervous system, whereas the texture of a painting seems to come immediately onto the nervous system. It's terribly like, for instance... Supposing you were to think of great ancient Egyptian things made of bubble gum, supposing you were to think of the Sphinx made of bubble gum, would it have had the same effect upon the sensibility over the centuries if you could pick it up gently and lift it?
DS - You're giving this as an example of the effect of a great work's depending on the mysterious way in which the image combines with the material that it's made of?
FB - I think it has to do with endurance. I think that you could have a marvellous image made of something which will disappear in a few hours, but I think that the potency of the image is created partly by the possibility of its enduring. And, of course, images accumulate sensation around themselves the longer they endure.
DS - The thing that's difficult to understand is how it is that marks of the brush and the movement of paint on canvas can speak so directly to us.
FB - Well, if you think of the great Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en-Provence, for instance, and if you analyze it, you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational. I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks. And you can't will this non-rationality of a mark. That is the reason that accident always has to enter into this activity, because the moment you know what to do, you're making just another form of illustration. But what can happen sometimes, as it happened in this Rembrandt self-portrait, is that there is a coagulation of non-representational marks which have led to making up this very great image. Well, of course, only part of this is accidental. Behind all that is Rembrandt's profound sensibility, which was able to hold onto one irrational mark rather than onto another. And abstract expressionism has all been done in Rembrandt's marks. But in Rembrandt it has been done with the added thing that it was an attempt to record a fact and to me therefore must be much more exciting and much more profound. One of the reasons why I dont't like abstract painting, or why it doesn't interest me, is that I think painting is a duality, and that abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interested in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes. We know that most people, especially artists, have large areas of undisciplined emotion, and I think that abstract artists believe that in these marks that they're making are catching all these sorts of emotions. But I think that, caught in that way, they are too weak to convey anything. I think that great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless I think that they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way. Why, after great artists, do people ever try to do anything again? Only because, from generation to generation, through what the great artists have done, the instincts change. And, as the instincts change, so there comes a renewal of the feeling of how can I remake this thing once again more clearly, more exactly, more violently. You see, I believe that art is recording; I think it's reporting. And I think that in abstract art, as there's no report, there's nothing other than the aesthetic of the painter and his few sensations. There's never any tension in it.
David Sylvester in Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1975.
Francis Bacon - I think it is. I think it is a diverted illustration. I think the difference from direct recording through the camera is that as an artist you have to, in a sense, set a trap by which you hope to trap this living fact alive. How well can you set the trap? Where and at what moment will it click? And there's another thing, that has to do with texture. I think the texture of a painting seems to be more immediate than the texture of a photograph, because the texture of a photograph seems to go through an illustrational process onto the nervous system, whereas the texture of a painting seems to come immediately onto the nervous system. It's terribly like, for instance... Supposing you were to think of great ancient Egyptian things made of bubble gum, supposing you were to think of the Sphinx made of bubble gum, would it have had the same effect upon the sensibility over the centuries if you could pick it up gently and lift it?
DS - You're giving this as an example of the effect of a great work's depending on the mysterious way in which the image combines with the material that it's made of?
FB - I think it has to do with endurance. I think that you could have a marvellous image made of something which will disappear in a few hours, but I think that the potency of the image is created partly by the possibility of its enduring. And, of course, images accumulate sensation around themselves the longer they endure.
DS - The thing that's difficult to understand is how it is that marks of the brush and the movement of paint on canvas can speak so directly to us.
FB - Well, if you think of the great Rembrandt self-portrait in Aix-en-Provence, for instance, and if you analyze it, you will see that there are hardly any sockets to the eyes, that it is almost completely anti-illustrational. I think that the mystery of fact is conveyed by an image being made out of non-rational marks. And you can't will this non-rationality of a mark. That is the reason that accident always has to enter into this activity, because the moment you know what to do, you're making just another form of illustration. But what can happen sometimes, as it happened in this Rembrandt self-portrait, is that there is a coagulation of non-representational marks which have led to making up this very great image. Well, of course, only part of this is accidental. Behind all that is Rembrandt's profound sensibility, which was able to hold onto one irrational mark rather than onto another. And abstract expressionism has all been done in Rembrandt's marks. But in Rembrandt it has been done with the added thing that it was an attempt to record a fact and to me therefore must be much more exciting and much more profound. One of the reasons why I dont't like abstract painting, or why it doesn't interest me, is that I think painting is a duality, and that abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interested in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes. We know that most people, especially artists, have large areas of undisciplined emotion, and I think that abstract artists believe that in these marks that they're making are catching all these sorts of emotions. But I think that, caught in that way, they are too weak to convey anything. I think that great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless I think that they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way. Why, after great artists, do people ever try to do anything again? Only because, from generation to generation, through what the great artists have done, the instincts change. And, as the instincts change, so there comes a renewal of the feeling of how can I remake this thing once again more clearly, more exactly, more violently. You see, I believe that art is recording; I think it's reporting. And I think that in abstract art, as there's no report, there's nothing other than the aesthetic of the painter and his few sensations. There's never any tension in it.
David Sylvester in Interviews with Francis Bacon, 1975.
