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freehand: recent Australian drawingHeide Museum of Modern Art
25 November 2010 - 6 March 2011
Yesterday we saw how an artist at the local Heidleberg School recorded the drawmatic rain burst over Heide MoMA some days ago :
Rain
The rain, in the courtyard where I watch it fall, comes down at very different speeds. In the centre, it is a fine discontinuous curtain (or mesh), falling implacably but relatively slowly, a drizzle, a never-ending languid precipitation, an intense dose of pure meteor. Not far from the right and left walls heavier drops fall more noisily, separately. Here they seem to be about the size of a grain of wheat, there of a pea, elsewhere nearly a marble. On the moulding, on the window ledges, the rain runs horizontally while on the undersides of these same obstacles it is suspended, plump as a humbug. It streams across the entire surface of a little zinc roof the peephole looks down on, in a thin moiré sheet due to the different currents set in motion by the imperceptible undulations and bumps in the roofing. From the adjoining gutter, where it runs with the restraint of a brook in a nearly level bed, it suddenly plunges in a perfectly vertical, coarsely braided stream to the ground, where it splatters and springs up again flashing like needles.
Each of its forms has a particular speed; each responds with a particular sound. The whole lives as intensely as a complicated mechanism, as precise as it is chancy, a clockwork whose spring is the weight of a given mass of precipitate vapour.
The chiming of the vertical streams on the ground, the gurgling of the gutters, the tiny gong beats multiply and resound all at once in a concert without monotony, not without delicacy.
When the spring is unwound, certain gears continue to function for a while, gradually slowing down, until the whole mechanism grinds to a halt. Then, if the sun comes out, everything is erased, the brilliant apparatus evaporates: it has rained.
from:
Francis Ponge: Unfinished Ode to Mud
poems translated by Beverly Bie Brahic
published by CB editions (2008)
click here for the original French
Here's how Marcel Broodthaers ///////
(In Germany, 2000, your correspondent had the great happy fortune to watch in mesmerized delight the projection of this Marcel Broodthaers' 1969 16mm film loop.)
La Pluie (Projet pour un texte)
Here's how bLOGOS/HA HAHe writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
He writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
He writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
He writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
He writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
He writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
He writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
He writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
He writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
He writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
He writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
He writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
He writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
He writes/ it rains/ the writing runs/
Fall of the Reign of Regard
after The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism
by Tommaso Siciliano (1585)
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA