Machinic Assemblages of Desire
Rebecca Horn “Berlin Exercises in Nine Pieces” (1974)
Ink drawing by Salvador Dalí over a photo of a model wearing an astronomical necklace of Galalith stars from Schiaparelli’s Spring-Summer 1929 collection.
(via e-schiaparelli)
Merleau-Ponty on Mallarmé and Poetic Language
Merleau-Ponty - Sensible Objects
“Les Statues meurent aussi” Chris Marker & Alain Resnais (1950-53)
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome - Keneth Anger - 1954.
A Slavonic Mass by Leos Janácek plays as historical figures, biblical characters, and mythical creatures gather in the pleasure dome. Aphrodite, Lilith, Isis, Kali, Astarte, Nero, Pan, and the Great Beast and the Scarlet Woman are part of a visual feast of images superimposed, hallucinations, and the spirit of decadence of the “Yellow ’90s.” Mythological images from Aleister Crowley, cabalistic symbols, artifice, and magic combine to render the pleasure dome both as prison and as celebration.
The movie features the author Anaïs Nin as ‘Astarte’, Marjorie Cameron as ‘The Scarlet Woman’, and the filmmaker Curtis Harrington, as well as Kenneth Anger himself.
Inside the Pleasure Dome, Kenneth Anger’s personal Movie Museum house in Hollywood.
“How could one express in words these emotions of the body? Express that emptiness there? It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind. To want and not to have sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have - to want and want - how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again.”
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (via serialstranger)
