Molesworth/Barthes - Whitney Ratliff

Painting is not dead! 

Helen Molesworth, a chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, talks about some of her exhibitions and the conflicting issues she had with chronological sequencing. She says by placing photos in slideshows in chronological order or in groups by the decade, seemed boring and that that language isn't as influential alone but the images are more influential outside of that language, and that the language around the decade was so strong, it was so out of favor. If she reconfigured it outside of that language, she felt like the work itself emerged in a different way. By historizing the work in the moment made the work itself feel tainted.

The impact of criticism has on an art form is perceived by the culture, based on what is popular or in demand. "Criticism doesn't function in a highly speculative market, criticism functions in a depressed market where consensus building is more of the aim of the goal." Critics is a harder and rarer career to make. "The language of criticism and the impulse of criticism got pulled up in non-institutionally affiliated culturial projects. (I think that is what she said) A lot of the gravitas that were traditionally appointed to a critic was given to the curator." Critics and curators have essentially become one and the same but each holds its own fundamental goal to present the work and respect it as it is as well as what it is not.


Barthes
"Of course this epithet, to which we turn and return out of weakness or fascination (parlor game: discuss a piece of music without using a single adjective), has an economic function: the predicate is always the rampart by which the subject's image-repetoire protects itself against the loss that threatens it: the man who furnishes himself or is furnished with an adjective is sometimes wounded, sometimes pleased, but always constituted, music has an image-repretoire whose function is to reassure, to constitute subject, who hears it (would this be because music is dangerous--an old Platonic notion? Leading to ecstasy, to loss, as many examples from ethnography and popular culture would to show?)"

- Barthes, Grain of the Voice, pg 267-8

"The romantic "heart," an expression in which we no longer perceive anything but an edulcorated metaphor, is a powerful organ, extreme point of the interior body where, simultaneously and as though contradictorily, desire and tenderness, the claims of love and the summons of pleasure, violently merge: something raises my body, swells it, stretches it, bears it to the verge of explosion, and immediately, mysteriously, depress it, weakens it."

- Barthes, The Romantic Song, pg 289

"It is because Schumann's music goes much father than the ear, it goes into the body, into the muscles by the beats of its rhythm, and somehow into the viscera by the voluptuous pleasure of its melos: as if on each occasion the piece was written only for one person, the one who plays it; the truth Schumannian pianist -- c'est moi."

-Barthes, Loving Schumann, pg 295

These were just a view quotes I thought captured a good essence of each written piece by Barthes. Barthes does a great job analyzing the art of music and how it is presented poetically to the ear of its listeners. He describes current uses of work, such as the piano as a "nouvelle cuisine uncooked", most likely referring to current performances as being not as powerful or mesmerizing in good fashion as it once was when the piano was presented for a few listeners and more private performances of higher status. Music to the ear, is an intimate relationship between the listener who envelopes oneself into the work with great passion. It stimulates the ear into a state of euphoria in an emergence of pleasure and love. However, the voice as he describes in The Romantic Song, portrays two different sides that can be best summarized as being good and evil. A light and dark voice, one that displays an amorous, unisexual role within society towards love and passion or a demonic, diabolic evocation that divides, separates, dissociates, and dismembers the body.  Both affect the lost, the abandoned subject that the romantic song sings.