I
How can I pray under the blue Christian sky
For help in love, the victory of dreams?
I confide and complain to the morning star,
The passionate star…
For you, Sappho, Aphrodite stood by
And when you called hurried in her swan chariot!
But now she is no more. Livid, exiled, white, morose
She smashed into the foam from which she once arose.

II
If once upon a time beside the sea
Unfriendly love should pierce me
With undesired temptation,
Time-wasting and suffering —
Oh then I’ll turn to you, mythic sea-foam,
And see in you a white body shimmering,
A chariot wheel, a lock of gold, a swan’s wing.


Sea-Foam, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, 1937

From [x]

Gertrude Käsebier
The Sketch (Beatrice Baxter Ruyl)
1902

Ossip Zadkine
Portrait de Henk et Nel Wiegersma
1930

Bridget Riley's drawings and sketches hanging in her studio
London, n.d.
Hang-Up Gallery, London

“Strategy works through a persistent (de)constructive critique of the theoretical. “Strategy” is an embattled concept-metaphor and unlike “theory,” its antecedents are not disinterested and universal. The critical moment does not come only at a certain stage when one sees one’s effort succeeding. It is not only in that moment of euphoria that we begin to decide that we had been strategic all along. The strategic use of an essence as a mobilizing slogan or masterword like woman or worker or the name of a nation is, ideally, self-conscious for all mobilized. This is the impossible risk of a lasting strategy.”

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘In A Word,’ interview with Ellen Roney

Abisag Tüllmann
Bridget Riley
White Chapel Gallery, London
1966