art

TERESA OF AVILA: BRIDE OF SONG

/ Mary Farrelly
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Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Saint Teresa in Ecstasy, 1647-52. Marble, life-size.

Writing, for Teresa, is to connect with the unknown. The search for a providential interlocutor, one which makes her speak that which she cannot explain; the wait for grace. Grace, an answer to questions we have not even asked ourselves. Such is the mystery of Saint Teresa, the reason we continue reading her with delight five hundred years after her birth. She turns religion into poetry.

Read the rest of Gustavo Martín Garzo’s article at El País

THEODOR W. ADORNO

/ Joseph Twist

Adorno commenting on Arnold Schönberg’s A Survivor of Warsaw (1947):

The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with rifle butts contains, however distantly, the possibility that pleasure can be squeezed from it.  The morality that forbids art to forget this for a second slides off into the abyss of its opposite.   The aesthetic stylistic principle, and even the chorus’s solemn prayer, make the unthinkable appear to have had some meaning; it becomes transfigured, something of its horror is removed.  By this alone an injustice is done the victims, yet no art that avoided the victims could stand up to the demands of justice.

Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Can One Live after Auschwitz: A Philosophical Reader, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Rodney Livingston and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 240-58 (p. 252).