Two Point(s) North
Claire Daigle
Countless journeys have begun with the plotting of Polaris, the North Star, actually a double star, by which to navigate. The experience of the Walker & Walker exhibition at the Sheppard Gallery is no exception. As if wishing away the confinement of four walls, the piece, Northern Star, involves a pinpoint piercing of the gallery lit up from behind by an LED bulb at the precise spot where, night after night, Polaris appears in the sky. There’s nothing necessarily spiritual or natural about this vision, however: it stands as an example of second nature, a doubling, at which Joe and Pat Walker excel particularly.
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Claire Daigle
Countless journeys have begun with the plotting of Polaris, the North Star, actually a double star, by which to navigate. The experience of the Walker & Walker exhibition at the Sheppard Gallery is no exception. As if wishing away the confinement of four walls, the piece, Northern Star, involves a pinpoint piercing of the gallery lit up from behind by an LED bulb at the precise spot where, night after night, Polaris appears in the sky. There’s nothing necessarily spiritual or natural about this vision, however: it stands as an example of second nature, a doubling, at which Joe and Pat Walker excel particularly.
Read on
Walkers above the sea of clouds
Simon Morley
Wer aber sind sie, sag mir, die Fahrenden, diese ein wenig Flüchtigern noch als wir selbst’/‘But tell me, who are they, these wanderers, even more transient than we ourselves.’ Rainer Maria Rilke, The Fifth Duino Elegy
The other day I dropped into Kehoes, and who should I see propping up the bar but Caspar David Friedrich, the celebrated German painter. There was an almost empty glass of Guinness in front of him and he was looking rather melancholy, so I offered to buy him another.
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Simon Morley
Wer aber sind sie, sag mir, die Fahrenden, diese ein wenig Flüchtigern noch als wir selbst’/‘But tell me, who are they, these wanderers, even more transient than we ourselves.’ Rainer Maria Rilke, The Fifth Duino Elegy
The other day I dropped into Kehoes, and who should I see propping up the bar but Caspar David Friedrich, the celebrated German painter. There was an almost empty glass of Guinness in front of him and he was looking rather melancholy, so I offered to buy him another.
Read on
The End of Light
Francis McKee
There is a scene in The Man Who Fell to Earth in which the main character, the alien Thomas Jerome Newton, is travelling across America in a limousine. At one point he glances out the window and sees 19th plains pioneers staring back at his vehicle passing through the landscape. This is perhaps the most striking moment of the film, certainly more remarkable and more memorable than the scenes in which Newton recalls life on his own planet. Those scenes are simply fantasy but the incident in the limousine reveals something essential about the medium of film in which Newton’s story unfolds.
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Francis McKee
There is a scene in The Man Who Fell to Earth in which the main character, the alien Thomas Jerome Newton, is travelling across America in a limousine. At one point he glances out the window and sees 19th plains pioneers staring back at his vehicle passing through the landscape. This is perhaps the most striking moment of the film, certainly more remarkable and more memorable than the scenes in which Newton recalls life on his own planet. Those scenes are simply fantasy but the incident in the limousine reveals something essential about the medium of film in which Newton’s story unfolds.
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Allegories of Reverie
David Beech
Within Romanticism, the unprecedented subjectivities of the Romantic sensibility were always already there, naturally present and (only) culturally repressed. However, it seems that the pictures and poems were necessary for this presence to appear. The techniques of negation that are central to Romantic art underwrite this un-innovated innovation of an always already individual subjectivity suppressed by the codes of mastery – it is as if the subtraction of all antecedent conventions leaves something that has been there all along. The Romantic subject is thus the mise en scène of reason and culture, the background which envelops everything to take centre stage.
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David Beech
Within Romanticism, the unprecedented subjectivities of the Romantic sensibility were always already there, naturally present and (only) culturally repressed. However, it seems that the pictures and poems were necessary for this presence to appear. The techniques of negation that are central to Romantic art underwrite this un-innovated innovation of an always already individual subjectivity suppressed by the codes of mastery – it is as if the subtraction of all antecedent conventions leaves something that has been there all along. The Romantic subject is thus the mise en scène of reason and culture, the background which envelops everything to take centre stage.
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Unfilmed Mountain
Fergus Daly
"There's a temptation to show a mountain [...] then one fine day you realize that it's better to see as little as possible" Jean-Marie Straub
"Lord, we don't need another mountain, There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb, There are oceans and rivers enough to cross, Enough to last till the end of time." Bacharach & David
In The Logic of Sense Deleuze wrote that thought has a geography: "It appears that thought itself presupposes axes and orientations according to which it develops, that it has a geography before having a history, and that it traces dimensions before constructing systems."
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Fergus Daly
"There's a temptation to show a mountain [...] then one fine day you realize that it's better to see as little as possible" Jean-Marie Straub
"Lord, we don't need another mountain, There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb, There are oceans and rivers enough to cross, Enough to last till the end of time." Bacharach & David
In The Logic of Sense Deleuze wrote that thought has a geography: "It appears that thought itself presupposes axes and orientations according to which it develops, that it has a geography before having a history, and that it traces dimensions before constructing systems."
Read on
Re:Reflecting Romanticism
William Fox
When the film Nightfall by the Walker & Walker arrives via Fed Ex from Ireland, accompanying the DVD is the requisite voucher assuring the United States government that the enclosed material is neither obscene nor immoral, and that nothing in it advocates insurrection against the country or threatens violence against any of its citizens. Under the synopsis of contents, Joe Walker has written: “A man makes a journey across a lake to the site of an echo.” I pause as I open the package, wondering what a customs official would make of such a description.
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William Fox
When the film Nightfall by the Walker & Walker arrives via Fed Ex from Ireland, accompanying the DVD is the requisite voucher assuring the United States government that the enclosed material is neither obscene nor immoral, and that nothing in it advocates insurrection against the country or threatens violence against any of its citizens. Under the synopsis of contents, Joe Walker has written: “A man makes a journey across a lake to the site of an echo.” I pause as I open the package, wondering what a customs official would make of such a description.
Read on