Wittgenstein writes the following: In philosophy no hypotheses are formed, no inferences drawn, no assertions made. One does not say: 'this is the way it has to be', but how things are shown. The overcoming of misunderstandings happens by means of description. 'In philosophy we do not draw conclusions. "But it must be like this!" is not a philosophical proposition. Philosophy only states what everyone admits (...). Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. 'For it cannot give it any foundation either. 'It leaves everything as it is (...). 'Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. --Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us. 'One might also give the name "philosophy" to what is possible *before* all new discoveries and inventions' (PI 599, 124, 126). It is difficult to find the proper beginning or rather not to want to go once again behind this beginning when one has found it (see OC 471). The difficulty is to accept something as a solution which first looks like a preliminary step towards it. The difficulty is: to stop (see Z 312, 314...). Copied from Brand, Gerd. The Central Texts of Wittgenstein. Robert E. Innis, trans. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1979. p. 173. Print.

About Statement by Karla Ochoa Verdecia

When you think on Cuban contemporary art a priori it is difficult to diagram a common topic line. Discourse proposals are as wide as the existing spaces for their spreading; it is a feature of post modernity the proliferation of trends, of artists, curators, art dealers, purchasers. Art in our country is living, stronger than ever, the experience of cohesion between painting, sculpture, installations, conceptualism, drawing, performances, photography, video-art, video performances, new means, etc. Likewise, there are authors that has chosen the social criticism, the erotic, the afro Cuban visualization, the genre discourse, the landscape, the hedonism, the consumerism or the heinous. But what happens when the artist’s interests go above the social problems, when his questioning becomes a reflection about art as such and about the theoretical, critique and investigative paraphernalia? What happens when the highly conventionalized means of communication are not enough for the individual expression? It is how Yornel Martínez proposes his thesis, from the purest conceptualism, about post modern art and its theoretical course during the last 50 years. Statement, title of the exhibition opened last February 16 in the alternative space El Apartamento, refers to the culture, the critique, the post critique, among other learnings that comprise the curricular base of an artist. Likewise, he establishes direct connections between personal creation and the theories that have supported the beginning and consolidation of hermeneutic movements, trends and methodologies. His production comes from the whole involvement of the walls in the exhibition space ,with texts that go from the introduction and definition of essentially post modern concepts, to the dissimilar bibliographic references and quotations of philosophers, professors, artists, writers and theoreticians as renowned as polemic. That is the case of John Cage, Jacques Derrida, George Bataille, Harold Bloom, Rimbaud and Lezama Lima. The proposal is found as luck of mélange where the links are given by the artist, who is in charge of coherently connects each one of the obvious discourses. In Yornel Martínez’s words: “my intention is to create a poetic untranslated influence in terms of language”. Therefore, the objective of giving new semas to typical conceptions in the history of art is explicit, with the aim of asking oneself about the value of those terms, interpretative techniques and classifications which in a way, have created the foundations for future conjectures about the artistic creation . On the other hand he sets groups, movements and trends like Dadá, Fluxus, the povera art, minimal and conceptual within the ideo-aesthetical possibilities of the twenty century, due to the aperture of the visual art and new expressive mechanisms. At the same time puts them as debtors Marchel Duchamp and the object trouvé, the one who made the target– book possible, the visual poetry and the “letrismo” that in this occasion is evident in his rhetorical. Yornel Martinez makes an interpersonal game with the receptor in which the premise of art for art´s sake and the inherent gesture supporting the theorical conceptual. Is in the very last, where in most of the time a total understanding of the works is achieved; and where positive or negative values are given to both, the author and to the work. It is not fortuitous, then, that one of the walls at the gallery has been selected for the bibliographic references that there are about him in magazines, blogs and catalogues. Thanks to the numerous publications, and to the signature of outstanding intellectuals in the field of national plastic art, it is possible to the author to establish his critique, his basis, his statement.
copied from http://artoncuba.com/blog/about-statement/

MERCE CUNNINGHAM (1919-2009) was a leader of the American avant-garde throughout his seventy-year career and is considered one of the most important choreographers of our time. Through much of his life, he was also one of the greatest American dancers. With an artistic career distinguished by constant innovation, Cunningham expanded the frontiers not only of dance, but also of contemporary visual and performing arts. His collaborations with artistic innovators from every creative discipline have yielded an unparalleled body of American dance, music, and visual art. Of all his collaborations, Cunningham’s work with John Cage, his life partner from the 1940s until Cage’s death in 1992, had the greatest influence on his practice. Together, Cunningham and Cage proposed a number of radical innovations. The most famous and controversial of these concerned the relationship between dance and music, which they concluded may occur in the same time and space, but could be created independently of one another. The two also made extensive use of chance procedures, abandoning not only musical forms, but narrative and other conventional elements of dance composition—such as cause and effect, and climax and anticlimax. For Cunningham the subject of his dances was always dance itself. Born in Centralia, Washington on April 16, 1919, Cunningham began his professional modern dance career at 20 with a six-year tenure as a soloist in the Martha Graham Dance Company. In 1944 he presented his first solo show and in 1953 formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as a forum to explore his groundbreaking ideas. Over the course of his career, Cunningham choreographed more than 150 dances and over 800 “Events.” Dancers who trained with Cunningham and have gone on to form their own companies include Paul Taylor, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Karole Armitage, Foofwa d’Immobilité, and Jonah Bokaer. Cunningham’s lifelong passion for exploration and innovation made him a leader in applying new technologies to the arts. He began investigating dance on film in the 1970s, and choreographed using the computer program DanceForms during the latter part of his career. He explored motion capture technology to create décor for BIPED (1999), and his interest in new media led to the creation of Mondays with Merce. This webcast series provides a never-before-seen look at the Company and Cunningham’s teaching technique with video of advanced technique class, Company rehearsal, archival footage, and interviews with current and former Company members, choreographers, and collaborators. An active choreographer and mentor to the arts world until his death at the age of 90, Cunningham earned some of the highest honors bestowed in the arts. Among his many awards are the National Medal of Arts (1990) and the MacArthur Fellowship (1985). He also received the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award in 2009, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in 2005, the British Laurence Olivier Award in 1985, and was named Officier of the Legion d’Honneur in France in 2004. Cunningham’s life and artistic vision have been the subject of four books and three major exhibitions, and his works have been presented by groups including the Ballet of the Paris Opéra, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, White Oak Dance Project, and London’s Rambert Dance Company. Cunningham passed away in his New York City home on July 26, 2009. Always forward-thinking, Cunningham developed the precedent-setting Legacy Plan prior to his death, to guide his Company and ensure the preservation of his artistic legacy. Copied from http://www.mercecunningham.org/merce-cunningham/

Strangers, secrets and desire: the surreal world of Sophie Calle Sean O'Hagan Saturday 4 March 2017 07.00 EST Sophie Calle is France’s most famous – and the world’s most quintessentially French – conceptual artist. She once said that she became an artist because she wanted to seduce her father, who was an avid art collector. In the pursuit of her art, she has become a stripper, a stalker and a thief, famously finding a stranger’s address book on the street and, instead of returning it, contacting everyone in it and asking them for a description of the owner. Calle, 63, has been using photography as well as text, video, film and performance in her work since the late 1970s. In 2003, Paris’s Pompidou Centre staged a retrospective of her work and the Whitechapel Gallery, London, followed suit in 2010. In 2007, she represented France at the Venice Biennale. Somewhat belatedly, then, she has made it on to the shortlist of the 2017 Deutsche Börse photography prize for what is, in her terms, a rather traditional publication. Sophie Calle: My All is a retrospective photo-book comprising postcard-style photographs documenting all 54 of her artworks thus far. What Do You See? (2013). Facebook Twitter Pinterest What Do You See? (2013), one of Calle’s Deutsche Börse prize‑nominated photographs. Photograph: Sophie Calle Confusingly, she has created an exhibition of new work for the show entitled My Mother, My Father, My Cat, which deals with the recent deaths of all three in a characteristically playful and self-revealing way. Accusatory extracts from her mother’s diary are displayed opposite a portrait of her cat, Souris, laid out in a small coffin. She is also planing to release a concept album about the cat, which will include a piece by Laurie Anderson and another by the French singer Camille. From the beginning, Calle’s work has merged elements of fiction, fantasy, performance and documentary in its ongoing investigation of the increasingly blurred boundaries between the private and the public, the voyeuristic and the theatrical. Sometimes she utilises elements of chance; other times, she imposes often bizarre rules on her everyday life in order to document the results. The Sleepers (1979). Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Sleepers (1979), in which Calle’s bed was occupied by 29 people. Photograph: Sophie Calle In 1979’s Sleepers, she invited 29 people to occupy her bed for eight hours as she observed them sleeping, waking and eating breakfast served by her. That same year, she created what was, perhaps, her first signature piece, Suite Vénitienne, which began when she met a stranger at a party and decided to somehow follow him to Venice. What followed was part theatrical performance and part noir detective thriller. Having found him, she somehow convinced the woman in the room opposite to let her use it to clandestinely photograph his daily comings-and-goings while disguised as a maid. Like much of what was to follow, Suite Vénitienne depends for its power on the evocation of desire and obsession as well as the artist’s willingness to make work that relies on intrusion and surveillance. But Calle’s approach is more mischievously complex than that. The postmodernist French thinker, Jean Baudrillard, in an essay for the resulting book, pointed out the wilful contradiction at the heart of the undertaking. “Nothing was to happen, not one event that might establish any contact or relationship between them.” Her seeming obsessions are played out, first and foremost, in the creation of her art. In Voir la Mer (2011), Calle captured the reactions of elderly residents of Istanbul after they had seen the sea for the first time. Facebook Twitter Pinterest In Voir la Mer (2011), Calle captured the reactions of elderly residents of Istanbul after they had seen the sea for the first time. Photograph: Sophie Calle In 1980, however, for her project, The Bronx, she placed herself at the centre of her art in a different and more vulnerable way by walking around the economically deprived streets of New York’s South Bronx and asking strangers to take her to what they considered a special place. The result is an uneasy portrait of a beleaguered neighbourhood and its people through her encounters in a single day. It is the closest she has yet come to documentary portraiture, though, in 2010, she made an installation piece, To the Sea, in which she recorded on film the reactions of elderly residents of Istanbul who had never seen the sea. Take Care of Yourself (2004-2007). Facebook Twitter Pinterest Take Care of Yourself (2004-2007), in which Calle sent a break-up text from a former lover to 107 women. Photograph: Sophie Calle This merging of chance and order, randomness and ritual in her work caught the attention of Paul Auster, and he recreated her in his 1992 novel, Leviathan, as Maria, an artist whose “activity didn’t stem from a desire to make art so much as from a need to indulge her obsessions”. In 1994, they collaborated on a project during which she spent days smiling at every stranger she met and set about personalising a public phone box with a new coat of paint flowers, snacks and note pads. Calle’s work is at its most powerful when it transgresses social codes. For Take Care of Yourself, which she showed at the 2007 Venice Biennale, she sent a curt break-up text she had received from a lover to 107 women requesting their reactions. She received advice in the form of songs, drawings and even a copy of the letter with three bullet holes though it. This is art not so much as self-therapy, but as a way of holding up a mirror to human behaviour as it is tested and sometimes unmoored by desire and obsession – and indeed any rupture in the fabric of the public rituals we construct to mask our deeper selves. As our lives become more public on social media and the border between the private and the public ever more politically contested, Calle seems increasingly like an artist whose provocations are more like premonitions. The Deutsche Börse photography foundation prize 2017, featuring Sophie Calle’s new work, is at the Photographers’ Gallery, London W1F, until 11 June. thephotographersgallery.org.uk. Copied from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/mar/04/strangers-secrets-and-desire-the-surreal-world-of-sophie-calle?CMP=twt_gu

Cremation Portraits CREMATION ART An exciting new way to combine the power of personalized art and provide the comfort of keeping a small amount of ashes close. The image, transferred onto museum quality canvas, is stretched and wrapped around a wood frame. A UV coating completes the process. We have a wide selection of frames to choose from. The beautiful canvas-transfer print emulates the color richness, texture and fine detail of an original painting right down to the detail of brush strokes. We can also make adjustments and fix your damaged photos. Once you have approved the design, the cremation ashes of your loved one are tastefully incorporated into a one-of-a-kind piece of artwork. A final layer of glaze is applied over the ashes to permanently hold them in place. The cremation ashes are fully visible and touchable while adding a third dimension of beauty and meaning to the cremation art work. The result is a fine piece of memorial art that will give comfort and peace that will be admired for generations to come. There are three basic styles of cremation art to choose from. Using a photograph you supply, we can create a custom piece of heirloom art. It can be a portrait, a family photo, a picture of a special place, such as the location of the scattering or home site. There are no limits, so be creative. You can even combine our scenes with your photo if you would like. Text can also be added to further personalize each piece. A poem, a favorite saying, names and date are just some of the ideas people have used. We also have a selection of spiritual and comforting scenes of art that you may choose from. You may also select to have a hand drawn pencil sketch for your cremation ashes art. The penciled sketch can be a portrait or scene. You will be in close contact with the artist throughout the design process. Many of the families served by Cremation Solutions choose to scatter the ashes of their loved ones with a scattering urn while retaining some of the ashes for cremation art, cremation jewelry and small keepsake urns. Because the artwork is digitally created we can keep cremation art and portraits affordable. You also will have a chance to view the design before it goes to print, so you will know just what you are getting. We can make changes and deminish blemishes to your photo at your request. We know how important this artwork is to your family. Unlike Cremation Urns only a small amount of ashes is needed and we carefully handle the ashes with the utmost respect and dignity. We have a strict system in place to track the cremation ashes, so you can be assured that only the cremation ashes of your loved one are used and any ashes that are not used will be returned with your art. Once you place your order we will immediately ship you a kit to mail the ashes to us. Each order is tracked using both the name of the deceased and your order number. Shipping the ashes and the cremation art is included in the cost of your selection. Starting at Only $127 including shipping! Copied from www.cremationsolutions.com

[kunst und technik] architecture / media / modern life is a team of architects, artists and designers, based in Berlin. Founded in 1996. In 1996-2000 located in a former laboratory building in Monbijou Park on the Spree River in Berlin-Mitte; since 2000 in a project office in Berlin-Mitte. It works on, with, and between the intersections of art, architecture, visual communication, real and virtual spaces. Beside the development of its own projects a place for exhibitions and events on the topic of cutting-edge technology and culture, with an affiliated club (to the demolition of the laboratory building, spring 2000). Members: Jan Edler, Tim Edler, Jonathan Garnham, Rainer Hartl, Frank Hühnerkopf, Martin Janekovic, Andreas Klockmann, Juliane Kühn, Uwe Rieger, Helle Schröder. http://www.kut-berlin.de/ http://www.quobo.de/Quobo/seitenenglisch/archive/archiv90er/90kunstue.html Copied from www.monoskop.org/Kunst_und_technik

Rehearsal politics - Dialogue, Communication and Notes on the 8th Shanghai Biennale Gao Shiming "I wish my work to be something like a scalpel, a flask or an underground passage, and I would like them to be ashes as firecrackers." - Michelle Foucault For the nature of action, we are far from being fully and clearly thoughtful. - Martin Heidegger A conversation A: Do not you think we are getting stupid? B: Everybody is smart, just as an artist becomes foolish. C: Is the question of contemporary art not too "smart" to the artists? D: In fact, the artists are very anxious, but also very at a loss, simply said - the lack of sense of direction. B: Is the curator clear? D: curators are equally confused and confused. Not to mention the problem, or only ask questions, never give the answer. Is there any answer? D: We always feel dissatisfied and can not tell the reason. A: what can be, nothing boring. B: personal creativity seems to have dried up, can not find the source point, full of cosplay. D: everywhere is business, gallery advertising everywhere, the magazine is all auction information, critics and galleries together, curators and collectors conspiracy ... ... B: everywhere is "standardized contemporary art". C: Can contemporary art be standard? D: feeling the stones across the river. ABCD: tired of it. ABCD: very tired. E: We are inexplicably entering a state. But can not clearly describe this state. Where do we come from? We face all day is the strength of the art market, the history of art failure, the confusion of values, curator's strategy and discourse ... ... F: In fact, contemporary, is not only this loss and no sense of direction is appropriate. 80 years, 90 years, the artist goal is clear, there are things to do, it is because there are enemies, there are goals. And now, it seems that art is flattened, and no art enemies can fight. E: It is natural that one of the works of contemporary art is to continually make our self-reliant land into a quicksand, and it continually creates puzzles and confuses. C: Are you confused? B: mainly at a loss. A: everything seems to be pre-allowed. C: Are you allowed? A: The key is even if it is allowed to make no sense, we have no derailment of the impulse. B: what things are a bit mean, but it's no big deal. D: the artist's individual is not filled, but very empty. F: the individual can be a wilderness, can be ruins, can also have a disease, that is not healthy and empty. E: This is the moment of the artist's crisis, although the history of art since the modernist history itself is full of the history of the crisis, but now we are not the same situation, feeling was evacuated, exhausted. C: "how to do nothing?" B: Did we forget the original intention? A: Wait! Wait! What is coming soon? ABCDEF: very tired. ABCDEF: Trouble. Copied from http://www.s-i-m-a.org/sima/site/?p=2054, which Google labeled a "dangerous" site, then run through Google site translator to de-dangerize it.