According to Greek mythology, according to Wikipedia, Medusa was a ‘monster’; she is generally described as a winged human female with venomous snakes in place of hair. Gazers upon her ‘hideous’ face would turn to stone. However, it is less known that Medusa was a master carver, engraving her existence in bone forever. Anything else said about her is a rumour and a violent appropriation. In fact, it must be difficult not to sprout a head of snakes in a society that constantly hisses at you.
— Tayi Tibble, from “Poūkahangatus: An Essay About Indigenous Hair Dos and Don’ts,” Poūkahangatus
We will sometimes fail to produce what we should, or to write or speak articulately enough, to be “right,” to be thoughtful or expansive enough, to consider the whole range of historical circumstance, to be responsible at our work’s distribution—but our failure is part of the collective project. We brave our errors in thought for the possibility that to see that their demonstration will allow others to get toward rightness. We brave the humility to learn from fair criticism, and also learn that usefully distanced shrug at the inevitable appearance of the jealous or maligning kind. We brave clumsy writing or speaking, that even in a crude form, a necessary idea will emerge as material for others to refine. When we are silent, we learn it makes room for others to speak.
It’s not just our errors we become brave about, but our projects’—and our own—incompleteness.
For the first presentation of this electromechanical peepshow I have used a modern play, which was still, however, written for the stage. It is the futurist opera “Victory over the Sun” by A. Kruchenykh who originated sound-poetry and is the leading writer of the most modern Russian poetic works. The opera was presented for the first time in 1913, in Petersburg. The music is by Matyushin (Quarter tones). Malevich painted the scenery (the curtain = black square).
We are constructing a stage on a square, which is open and accessible on all sides; that is the machinery of the show. This stage offers the “bodies in play” all the possibilities of movement. Therefore its individual parts must be capable of being shifted, revolved, extended, and so on. It must be possible to change over from one elevation to another quickly. Everything is rib-construction, so that the bodies circulating in the play will not be masked.
But I never fail to reply that we must bless the difficult authors of our day. […] Given a little more time, we shall no longer be able to understand them.
— Paul Valéry, Homage to Marcel Proust
We are inwardly made of something that is making itself, and does so at the expense of the possible. We are, by virtue of consciousness alone, completely inexhaustible — we who cannot pause inside ourselves without at once being assailed by so many thoughts, seeing one take the place of another, or one developing inside the other, opening up a vista of parentheses… . The mind cannot prevent itself from continually creating and devouring its creatures.
