Notes from Jean-Marie sent to me on Aug. 4, 2016:
There are a wealth of resources for you to explore in terms of your proposal but most specifically thinking about such artists as Diana Thater who often uses biological components in her video works and installations (plant, animal, celestial life), Guido van der Werve whose slow-paced works are self-reflective within the landscape, the filmmaker, Peter Hutton’s exquisitely executed films (Three Landscapes, Study of a River, At Sea), and of course the films of Chantal Ackerman (La Chambré a beautiful taxonomy of space) would be in close alignment with your concepts surrounding stillness. Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography by Karen Beckman and Jean Ma, David Campany’s introduction to the Book Cinematic, entitled When to be fast when to be slow, Barthes, Image Music Text, and John Cage’s Silence may be useful texts to consider. Additionally, the eco works of site-specific sculptor, Jackie Brookner, and composer David Dunn may be fruitful.
Notes from Andrew sent on Aug. 6, 2016
The mobility of the body as it traverses the garden establishes baroque effects at the core of the
geometricized French garden. The baroque insinuates itself at the very centre of neoclassicism
as anamorphic distortion where the multiple, supplemental perspectives (frontal, oblique,
transversal, aerial, isometric) are synthesized by the deployment of the spectator’s body and
concomitant idiosyncrasies of perception…the ontological suppleness of space is revealed
through the unfolding of depth,…(Weiss 1998:47-8) – from Allen S Weiss Unnatural Horizons
The image, in its simplicity, has no need of scholarship. It is the property of a naive
consciousness; in its expression, it is youthful language.” (Bachelard 1994: xviii)
“This is where the phenomenological doublet of resonances and repercussions must be
sensitsed. The resonances are dispersed on the different planes of our life in the world, while the
repercussions invite us to give greater depth to our own existence. In the resonance we hear the
poem, in the repercussion we speak it, it is our own. (Bachelard 1994: xxii)
To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.
(Bachelard 1994: 88) – from the Poetics of Space
But perhaps thing versus idea does not seem to name an opposition precisely. Then we might
phrase it a little differently: image versus idea;…It cannot be dispossessed of a primordial
freshness, which ideas can never claim. An idea is derivative and tamed. The image is in the
natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and
none of ours. We think we can lay hold of the image and take it captive, but the docile captive is
not the real image but only the idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it.
(Ransom 1938: 115) – from John Crowe Ransom The World’s Body