heart cave in
so much beauty in the world
“I need to remember … Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.” — Ricky Fitts (American Beauty, plastic bag scene)
NOTES:
objectifying, fetishizing, aesthetizing, anesthetizing, romanticizing, othering, ignoring, apotheosizing, burlesquing, proselytizingpresentingImage 1 and final bookend image (14): Garbage Truck in Blue and Red taken 3 am, with found lighting from a strobing ambulance attending a close-by calamity
Image 2, this post’s haiku:
white specks of snow fall
black bag shiny wrinkled worn
man wears to keep warm
some bottles throughout art history: Roderick O’Conner (Still Life With Bottles), Cezanne (Still Life With Peppermint Bottle), Warhol (Green Coca-Cola Bottles), Ai Wei Wei’s Untitled 1993 (Song dynasty sculpture inside a whiskey bottle), and er, Jeff Koons’ Dom Perignon bottles (“some of the most affordable Koons works on the market”)
Image 4, title: Still Life, With Bottles
Image 5 sequence title: Hunting Don Julio (The smooth flow of flavor from lips to tongue to gullet)
coal miners wear headlamps to speed the work and for safety, as does the man in Image 6, (photographed around 4 am)
Image 7: with his wheeled bin he walks the blocks
8: “high roller” is the text on the handle of the shopping cart. image 9, below, text on the box is “fragile”. text on the sticker the man is holding (at the dumpster, Image 11) says “you can do it”.
9: the nightclub at the back of the alley stashed their empty bottles in a former apartment below us (the building was being vacated for condo demolition); they weren’t officially paying rent for the space, so it didn’t have locks. The man in this picture discovered the Spanish-galleon’s-worth of treasure one morning, and spent hours hauling it away. The next day an angry worker from the club asked me if I’d taken anything from the building. I said “Sort of”.
10: man, everyday, sunset. Title: Harvest
11: personal moments made public (also re earlier post): I looked at him from above as he rummaged through the dumpster for food —he found a granola bar, lips to tongue to gullet — and looked through our detritus: the hand puppet, children’s drawings, and other personal items & memories which belonged to our family (we were “being vacated” for the condo construction so had to “deaccession” many possessions… all which later that day were found strewn across the alley. “Have you taken anything from the building?” “Yes. But not everything, not at all”).
12: Title - After A Sudden Gust of Wind (After Jeff Wall ((After Hokusai))
13: a few other feces art specimens: Piero Manzoni’s shit in a tin, Chris Ofili’s elephant dung paintings, Paul McCarthy’s giant inflatable turds, and, adjacent, (abutting!), Maurizio Cattelan’s solid gold toilet (“not one of the most affordable Cattelan works on the market”).
Garbage. Bottles. Shit. Eviction. Gold.
15: Bonus photo below (a twofer: combines this post’s theme with the previous one (perspective shifts)
As always: all photos taken from “The Window” unstaged, one location, 24/7/365) and by K.I.A.
BONUS PHOTO:
PREVIOUS POSTS:
ᴉuʌǝɹsᴉou <-> inversion
How beauteous mankind is
The Window (as network):
Random Window Set: Silhouettes
K.I.A. website: www.nu4ya.com (decentralized paintings, ephemeral sculptures, weatherworks, velocity poems and “some of the most affordable K.I.A. works on the market”)