To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramović developed one of her most challenging (and best-known) performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her. Abramović placed on a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign informed them) in any way that they chose. Some of these were objects that could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, olive oil, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed the audience members to manipulate her body and actions.

Initially, members of the audience reacted with caution and modesty, but as time passed (and the artist remained passive) people began to act more aggressively. As Abramović described it later: “What I learned was that... if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you.” ... “I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”

Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0, 1974

Cornelis van Haarlem, Fall of the Titans, 1588

The Kiss of Death

Rosetta

Click through for large version

John Kenn Mortensen

"I thought of that old joke: This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, 'Doc, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken.' And the doctor says, 'Well why don't you turn him in?' and the guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.' Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships. They're totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs."

Woody Allen, Annie Hall, 1977

"Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."

Laocoön

Laocoön and His Sons

Giorgio De Chirico, The Archaeologists, 1940

Died this day.

“A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”

Arthur Rimbaud, Letter of the Seer, 15 May 1871

Hugo Simberg, The Garden of Death, 1896

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Seven Deadly Sins or the Seven Vices - Lechery, mid 16th Century

Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy review – ‘an exciting rollercoaster ride of beauty, horror and history’

Inside Anselm Kiefer's astonishing 200-acre art studio

Anselm Kiefer, The Rhine (Melancholia), 1982-2013

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Truth Rising from her Well, 1896

Aldous -> George

Born this day

Luis Ricardo Falero, Witches going to their Sabbath, 1878

Vasily Vereshchagin, The Apotheosis of War, 1871

IN CAMOGLI by Dan Fante

It looks like the same ocean 
but this is Italy - not L.A. 

Sitting at sunset in a two-hundred-dollar-a day hotel 
by the sea 

All expenses paid - no limit on the drinks 

Reading my shit in rooms full of Fante fanatics 
where - sadly - everybody now speaks perfect coca-cola and wears Levis
and 
looks like Tom Cruise without the big teeth 

On this trip I've been a fine success at impersonating a writer 
my poetry - remarkably - even sounds like me 
before I lost my muse 
and became a hopeless moron-hasbeen-talentless-retard 
fuck 
with a freight train roaring through my mind 
chasing a ridiculous lost idea of literary perfection 

But I warn you 
I'm like a dented 1985 Ford 
with a busted radiator, 
a cracked windshield, 
and 3 bald tires 
speeding down the autobahn 

Don't try to diss me or pass me or call my bluff 
'cause - see 
when I'm cornered 
I can write like a gin-pissing-raw-meat-dual-carburator-V8-son-of-a-bitch 

even in Italy

Hovsep Pushman, Narcissa

Ivan Aivazovsky, The Billow, 1889