Musings on silence

What do Agnes Martin, David Lynch and Mike Parr have in common? 

Lynch on silence

'They say that in the transcendence, in the unified field, there is infinite silence alongside infinite dynamism. These two opposites co-exist. I have a recording studio and when you close the door and the machines are off, it’s so well soundproofed that you experience absolute silence. That is an unbelievable experience; it’s very blissful. Silence is so powerful and it’s missing in the world. It’s a really noisy world. So, silence is this basis on which all these sounds and other things come together. There’s something about that in music, too. It’s really quiet and the timing of when something emerges and how it emerges, how loud it gets at a certain point. It’s very interesting to think of silence.'

Creating calm

http://www.trendtablet.com/64189-creating-calm-in-a-chaotic-world/new romanticism and the sublime: http://www.trendtablet.com/15211-romanticism/

Readings

Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life.

A killjoy is a person who deliberately spoils the enjoyment of others

On a writing retreat in Shropshire, Wales, one of my colleagues, a feminist writer with the biggest red hair I have ever seen, wore "feminist killjoy" in neat cursive script on a gold chain around her neck. She said, when asked, that she needed to own it. "Why not?' she said, 'it's what people are thinking anyway.' She saw it as a kind of acceptance, acknowledgment, self- preservation, proving that she was already wise to them—dismantling before anyone else had the chance. 

We cooked together in the kitchen and made 'Toad in the Hole,' which she said she couldn't help but feel was appropriate.

To summarise: A KillJoy Survival Kit:
Books, things as reminders, time-in, time out, give permission, hangout with other killjoys, remember humour, emotions as a resource, bodies that speak to us.

And create manifestos: A manifesto not only causes a disturbance, it aims to cause this disturbance.

Image and Silence. Giorgio Agamben, Leland de la Durantaye diacritics, Volume 40, Number 2, Summer 2012, pp. 94-98

What is the power of silence and how do we understand it? A silence in the Roman times secret doctrine from the initiated or the impossibility of saying something (an undergoing, to undergo). I'm reminded of meditation and the silences impossible to describe. 

A business coach once gave me the best piece of advice that I still use whenever I remember... Silence. "Countless needless concessions are made in the conversational vacuum simply because one party cannot bear the discomfort of a pause."  People tend to fill the spaces when there is silence. This I think would have made Heidegger happy, as he posited....'silence is more powerful than any human potentiality.'

Absence then, become the more extreme form of presence. 

'On the tip of the tongue' reference to silence, to me this is my memory meltdown as opposed to a form of silence. A forgetfulness, surely?

Susan Sontag. Aesthetics of Silence, 1967.

Grosz, Elizabeth. “The Time of Violence; Deconstruction and Value.

Hooks, Bell Ain't I a Woman : Black Women and Feminism.

It was Adrienne Rich who said, “The impulse to create begins — often terribly and fearfully — in a tunnel of silence,”  

Sontag believed that art is "the mind’s need or capacity for self-estrangement." Art becomes out new meditation, our new religion. The craving of silence is craving for silence becomes superior to everyone else.

Will disconnecting become the new luxury? JOMO not FOMO.

Can art like Abramovic's become almost god-like cultish? Is there a difference between Braco the Gazer and Abramovic?

“Art is violent.  To be decisive is violent.”  – Anne Bogart, A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre

"Feminism as a political movement has been undermined by our inability to integrate feminist theory into all social spaces." How voices go missing or are forgotten in the bigger dominant paradigms.  The white supremacy in feminism, said to Hooks, that the work was angry and did have a positive bent... they might want to hear from other, but do they listen?