But the architects in Beacon took it a step further and decided that a person should not be too comfortable when looking at art, that art should make a person uncomfortable; presumably, if art is doing its job it should do that, and so they decided to keep the museum too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, going with the flow of the seasons while oddly going against the flow of normal temperatures for those seasons.
Mary Ruefle, On Imagination
A man taught art at a university. When he came home after work his daughter asked him what he did that day. He said, “I taught people how to draw.” And she said, “People forget how to draw?”
Mary Ruefle, On Imagination.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes how the gods seemed to have thought that no punishment would be more dreadful than the repetition of useless labor. However, for the author, there is a moment in Sisyphus’s effort—after he has pushed the stone to the top of the hill—when he stops to look at it as it rolls back down. After this, Sisyphus descends the mountain only to climb it again, once more pushing the stone. This moment of pause, which for Camus has a cyclical nature akin to Sisyphus’s suffering, corresponds to a moment of awareness, an instant in which Sisyphus transcends his punishment and rises above his fate. In that brief moment, Sisyphus is stronger than the stone and stronger than the gods. It is for this reason that, according to Camus, we may imagine Sisyphus happy in his misfortune.
The Sisyphus I imagined tries to carry the stone in a thousand different ways, perhaps placing smaller stones along the path to allow for a brief pause halfway up the mountain. My Sisyphus builds terraces into the earth, allowing him to set down the stone so that it won’t roll back before reaching its destination. Sisyphus searches for alternative routes—some more direct than others—to make the most of the time certain things take. Sisyphus gets discouraged. Sisyphus gets bored. The Sisyphus I conceived discreetly plants shrubs in carefully chosen spots, hoping they will grow. Months later, he hurls the stone from the top of the mountain as if he were bowling. He laments having only one ball at his disposal, but congratulates himself on the idea. He narrowly misses the target, so he descends eagerly to the plain, ready to climb and throw the stone again. If we think about it, that’s work enough for eternity.
What Do Artists Do All Day? is the title of a BBC documentary series, in which each episode is dedicated to a different Sisyphus, from Norman Ackroyd to Cornelia Parker. Over the course of thirty minutes, we observe each one’s version of bowling. In these documentaries, just as with Sisyphus, the goal is not the efficiency of the gesture, but experimentation for its own sake—a logic of progression in which nothing appears complete or perfect. The same is true of Abstract, a performance by Cão Solteiro and Vasco Araújo, which celebrates more than ten years of collaboration through trial and error, through painful climbs up the mountain and glorious bowling moments toward the trees.
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NYT: What do you wear when you write?
Vivian Gornick, looking fabulous: You’re joking! What I wear? A T-shirt and sweatpants. I just get up in the morning, I pull them on and I sit down.
NYT: What do you like to wear when you write?
Ms. Crosley: Whoever says anything other than “bathrobe” is a filthy liar. I wear two bathrobes: One is a fully disgusting, old, formerly white robe. One is a vintage kimono when I feel like I want to be in a movie about a writer.
NYT: What do you like to wear when you write?
Hermione Hoby: I do actually like to wear an outfit rather than, like, sweatpants because I need to feel that there is something interesting happening in what I’m wearing. So I do like to get dressed to write.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/21/style/rachel-comey-nyrb.html
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Sometimes we use the words “dazzle” and “bedazzle” as if they were synonyms—but they’re not. Both terms refer to something visually dazzling, but there’s a subtle difference in usage. Bedazzle means to decorate or adorn something with shiny objects, while dazzle refers to the way we can impress or amaze someone through extraordinary performance. Someone who wants to bedazzle others with their clothing might choose specific garments and embellish them so they sparkle. Someone who aims to dazzle an audience might do so with a breathtaking presence or a powerful speech.
Thus, bedazzle is a verb that means to impress or dazzle someone with something visually striking. Dazzle can also refer to decorating or beautifying something, but it leans more toward blinding or overwhelming someone with bright light or with something astonishing or surprising. It can also describe the ability to impress an audience with a show of skill or talent. Most of the time, we do little more than fail in our attempts to dazzle and bedazzle—like Sisyphus, watching the stone fall from the top of the mountain.
For Fitzgerald, it was “better to wear a becoming dress three times straight than to alternate it with two frights”—a sensible rule, were it not for the occasional difficulty in distinguishing what makes us elegant from what frightens those around us. If we kept every outfit we ever wore, in the end we’d find an enormous pile of trial-and-error attempts.
In the beginning, there is black and white, and we go out in our everyday clothes—but slightly simplified. Then, we begin a series of experiments, more or less failed, and keep on experimenting. Silhouettes are sometimes strange, inappropriate—as tends to happen when we see something and imagine it looks good on us, only to quickly realize that the world of ideas is different from the bodies we’re given to wear every day. Deep down, we can’t match the standard because it’s abstract, unreal, idealized. In practice, nothing fits us. Over the course of a lifetime, we make about 380 costume attempts that move progressively toward the visual confusion of someone trying to camouflage themselves to avoid being seen.
But the more one camouflages, the more one ends up standing out—dazzle bedazzle—just like the ships in the First World War that were dressed in beautiful abstract patterns in an attempt to go unnoticed by the enemy’s eye. Image layered upon image leads to enormous visual confusion, heightening everyone’s discomfort. Not every attempt to bedazzle succeeds. Pause for more trial and error. Suddenly, on stage as in life, the scene becomes confusing. An invasion of devils brings to mind a journey through the history of theatre—from the figure of the fool, to Vice, to Harlequin—prompting reflection on the disruptive role of laughter and the cruelty often associated with it.
When a well-known figure from a dramatic play assassinates the reigning king, aided by his wife, to take the throne, he imagines his life will improve because a beautiful ornament—a crown—will rest upon his head. A first hint that this won’t be the case appears when the characters around him describe how he now looks like a dwarf in king’s robes. After the usurpation, the clothes hang too loosely on him—which always struck me as an excellent description of how, at times, we desire something only to discover that it’s too big for us to wear. This sense of misfit applies to many things in life—from leaving the house thinking we have the right height, the right hair, the right shoes, only to arrive at our destination and realize the occasion was the wrong one for such a display of loveliness. This mismatch between who we are and who we want to be, between what we wish others were and what they are, between the jobs we imagined and the ones we have, between who we are and what we wear, between the money we have and the money we’d like to have, helps explain our small misfortunes and the ways we try to overcome them by attempting to dazzle others. What remains is the luck—or misfortune—of knowing that tomorrow, the costume will be the same.
Maria Sequeira Mendes
caosolteiro.com 