Friday, January 10, 2014

THE VOICE OF HUMANITY (KISS ON MY LIST)







"I would put up a hundred brass tablets to one phrase of Constantin Brancusi’s:


ONE OF THOSE DAYS I WOULD NOT HAVE GIVEN UP FIFTEEN MINUTES OF MY TIME FOR ANYTHING UNDER HEAVEN.


There speaks the supreme sense of human values.  There speaks WORK unbartered.  That is the voice of humanity in its highest possible manifestation."


Ezra Pound , from Demarcations, British Union Quarterly , January – April, 1937






Pound’s words, elaborating Brancusi’s phrase, inspire and remind me of the first time I saw Brancusi’s art and felt a rush and uplift in words’ absolute absence.  Cheers to Brancusi, Man Ray, Pound, Alfred Stieglitz, 291, and 2014 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Hall & Oates, who were a local band when we were in college and whose song is a sweet reminder of life lived, i.e., the voice of humanity. 






Top:  Man Ray and Constantin Brancusi toasting before Endless Column in Edward Steichen's garden, Fall 1927, Voulangis, France

Middle:  Constantin Brancusi exhibition, "291," New York City, 1914,  published in Camera Work, No 48, 1916

Lower:  Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss, 1908



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