rachel whiteread

Rachel Whiteread - Untitled (One hundred spaces)

- a thing is a hole in a thing it is not

be prepared

sorry Kant, but you'll have to wait, i'm entering a weekend dedicated to serious Benhabib reading! by the way - what are you're view on feminism mr. K?

kant'en

There can be no rule according to which anyone is forced to recognize anything as beautiful.

The judgement of taste is based on the feelings of pleasure but also claims universal validity – yet judgement of taste cannot be proven since they do not rest on concepts or rules.

To Kant pleasure can be communicable only if it is based on a state of mind that is universally communicable. Since this judgement isn’t connected to concept, it must connected to ‘cognition in general’ as opposed to a particular cognitive state of mind - .

The judgement takes the form of a conceptual judgement, since we speak of beauty as if it were a property of things and say ‘the thing is beautiful’.

Kant read through the glasses of D.W.Crawford

I’m not sure that this has led me any further in my search for knowledge:

- What does he mean by subjective universality?

- How can anything be communicable without being based on concepts?

contemporary aesthetics

There seems to be no way around it. Working with contemporary aesthetic theory one has to consider Kant – seriously…
I therefore plan to spend some of my spare time in this guys strange company. Hoping that he might inspire me in my ongoing reflection on the concept of art.

But now comes judgement, which in the order of our cognitive faculties forms a middle term between understanding and reason. Has it also got independent a priori principles? If so, are they constitutive, or are they merely regulative, thus indicating no special realm? And do they give a rule a priori to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, as the middle term between the faculties of cognition and desire, just as understanding prescribes laws apriori for the former and reason for the latter? This is the topic to which the present Critique is devoted.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 1790

Helle Helle

Men vi kunne lide de samme gode gamle rettene med sovs. Vi kunne også lide at ligge på sofaen, især mig. Dertil kom vores fælles glæde ved bagerbrød og ugeblader hver torsdag. Vores mor havde givet os smag for den slags, torsdag havde altid været ugens højdepunkt. Den tradition havde skabt en talemåde iblandt os:
- Ved du hva? Sagde den ene.
- Nej, og jeg vil selv læse det, sagde den anden.
Vi læste også Tove Ditlevsen og Knuth Becker og Pearl S. Buck. På skolen i Næstved var der en, der sagde til mig, at den slags ikke var riktig litteratur. Han hed Hans, og havde gået et år på universitetet. Jeg tillagde ikke hans udtalelser nogen særlig værdi. Hvis han var så stor en litterat, ville han vel ikke uddanne sig til ergoterapeut.

Rødby-Puttgarden (2005): 10

Ian McEwan

I’ve spent quite a few hours in company with bad books lately, and started reading Saturday with not too great expectations. Now, after having finished it in a couple of days, I am still amazed. McEwan’s medical knowledge on the human brain is certainly impressive, but what makes it all breathtaking to me is his way of combining politics, natural sciences and arts in his negotiation on the meaning of life. Saturday puts the private man on the public scene in a brilliant way; the intimacy of lovers and families is connected to war and peace on a grand scale. Love and war, echoing the magnificent novels of the nineteenth century, compressed to the happenings of a day in the life of Henry Perowne. And this ‘compression’ - a life in a day - leads us on to another great English author – to Virginia Woolf. It is also possible to see Saturday as a comment on her novel Mrs. Dalloway. We find similarities in the dinner party preparations, the city walking, insanity and war, in how both authors show us the singular life and the larger world as interconnected – both fragile and exposed to threats.

Henrik Ibsen

2006 marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Henrik Ibsen. And we should therefore ask: Why is Ibsen still important? Right now the best arguments seems to come from feminist theorists like Toril Moi. While waiting for her book: Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, and Philosophy, we can spend some time with the latest NIKK magasin which focuses on gender analyses of his plays.

self portrait tuesday

It sometimes seems like my life without me would be the most accurate depiction of me - . Today’s choice of self portrait is inspired by the words of Henri Cartier-Bresson: “We always want to work with our brains, but we must be available and let our sensitivity direct us when we are looking at a work of art, as if we’re surfing on a wave. We must be open, open, open to what it gives us”. I like his wave metaphor; it makes me think of one of my great heroes, Virginia Woolf. Anyway, here it is, not necessarily all of me, but maybe a possible depiction of the emotional me on a self-portrait Tuesday?

Doug Aitken: still from Electric Earth, 1999.

art, philosophy and knitting - ways of exploring the big questions -

Liv Reidun Brakstad

self portrait tuesday

i was barely there at the beginning, and i’m not absolutely sure what i(t) looked like… i have to rely on someone else’s depiction of it.

Brooklyn Follies

I have been reading Paul Auster’s books for many years, starting with his New York trilogy around 1988. I must admit I haven’t been as impressed by his latest works as I was by the trilogy. And I wonder; is it me changing as a reader, or is it him having lost something?
His last book, The Brooklyn Follies I don’t even seem to manage finishing. It has a lot of nice minor stories, but the major plot? The narrator is commenting on the narration, and by this constructing some kind of meta-fiction, but this is nothing like the things Auster used to do. I do absolutely not like to put a half read novel away, but I think I’ll have to do it now, unless someone can give me a really good reason to continue – a reason which quite disappointingly doesn’t seem to be found in the book itself.

Simone de Beauvoir in Chicago; 1954


I’m not too sure she would have backed up all the domestic needlework on this page, but I imagine she had a taste for good design - and no matter what - I do approve of her work, which I guess is what matters most, to me anyway…

My first encounter with John Banville’s literature was through his Booker Prize winning novel The Sea (2005). And I know for sure that I will have to read many more of his books in the years to come.

The way Banville uses language is amazing, and extremely challenging for one not having English as her first language. But the text, full of small sentences of poetry, makes the effort worthwhile & advisable.
In the story of the narrator, past and present are fused, like waves – coming and going in the mind of the narrator. Mourning the death of his wife in the town where he spent his childhood holidays, Max Morden goes in and out of different realities, and Banville is by this constant motion composing a complex life story.
But the story is just a part of this novel; even more stunning is the language it is written in, the way he as an author approaches wordless sensations. Like the indescribable feeling of one’s first kiss: “I had a sense of a general, large, soft settling, as of a sheet unfurling and falling on a bed, or a tent collapsing into the cushion of its own air” (161) the atmosphere seems almost painted on the pages…