I was so sad, last year, to hear that Christian Boltanski had died.
Like a couple of other artists his work seems to have punctuated my life in surprising ways. Agnes Varda is the same: I have found myself walking in a park in Paris from a film of hers, and remembered the film as the park without the strange runner who kept circling us that afternoon. If it hadn’t been for the film how would I remember the park without the runner? The film: an exclamation mark for the park. Boltanski shows are where I have ended up more than once by accident while at a loose end in Paris.
Whatever punctuates our lives, it’s worth noticing. Someone was telling me about the way their cat relates to space. It made me think how space affects us. Attachment. Attachment theory is so incomplete it makes me anxious and avoidant. Attachment doesn’t happen out of space, or time. Where on earth do people think attachment happens?
So here’s a picture I find beautiful of children moving across space, brought to you from a Boltanski show that ended on the same day as my birthday in 1980.
Reading through accounts of parliamentary exchanges over the last two years, and how these have been reported in the press (a grim task) I was struck by how often the word ‘offensive’ has been used to qualify words, phrases, statements, policies, the outcomes of meetings and other awful phenomena, the legacy of this British government.
The word offensive reads as an alternative to another word. In explaining, or criticising, on the face of things pointing out the problem, as if we need to be told, it shifts away from another word. Racist, for example.
We need to begin with the first word. Any conscious move away from it … is a move away from it.
If I say that statement x is offensive I haver already stopped saying that it is racist.
Racist. From there, how about a spontaneous connection? What Freud might have called a free association. These are illuminating and intensifying. Like poetry, such words take us somewhere.
Not all narcissism is pathological. Sometimes it is a good thing to be around (uplifting, motivating, generous, exciting) and other times it’s a nightmare (possessive, coercive, secretive, blind to the need of others). This article puts it rather well:
