#01 / Iñaki Bonillas

THE WORLD ACCORDING I単aki Bonillas

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Bibliografía Portada: Parménides, Zenón, Meliso (Escuela de Elea). Fragmentos (traducción de José Antonio Míguez), Aguilar, Buenos Aires, 1962.

Epígrafe: Walter Benjamin. Illuminations (1969, traducción de Harry Zohn), Schocken Books, Nueva York, 1988.

Fragmento 1: Jean de La Bruyère. Los caracteres o las costumbres de este siglo (1688, traducción de Consuelo Berges), Aguilar, Madrid, 1959.

Fragmento 2: Gaston Bachelard. La llama de una vela (1961, traducción de Hugo Gola), Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Puebla, 1986.

Fragmento 3: Georges Perec. Especies de espacios (1959–1982, traducción de Jesús Camarero), Montesinos, Barcelona, 2004.

Fragmento 4: Daniil Kharms. Today I Wrote Nothing (2007, traducción de Matvei Yankelevich), The Overlook Press, Woodstock y Nueva York, 2007.

Fragmento 5: Roberto Juarroz. Undécima poesía vertical (1958–1993), Pre-Textos, Valencia, 2002.

Fragmento 6: Friedrich Nietzsche. La gaya ciencia (1883, traducción de Pedro González Blanco y Luciano de Mantua), El Barquero, Barcelona, 2003.

Fragmento 7: Daniil Kharms. Op. cit.

Fragmento 8: Babrio. Fábulas de Esopo. Vida de Esopo. Fábulas de Babrio (traducción de Javier López Facal), Gredos, Madrid, 1978.

Fragmento 9: Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Selected Poems (traducción de Michael Hamburger), Penguin Books, Reino Unido, 1968.

Fragmento 10: Daniil Kharms. Op. cit.

Fragmento 11: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Aforismos (1800–1905, traducción de Juan del Solar), Edhasa, Barcelona, 2008.

Fragmento 12: Fernando Pessoa. Libro del desasosiego (1913–1935, traducción de Perfecto E. Cuadrado), El Acantilado, Barcelona, 2005.

Fragmento 13: Joseph Roth. El busto del emperador y jefe de estación Fallmerayer (1935, traducción de Alberto Vital y Marlene Rall), Ediciones Heliópolis, ciudad de México, 1995.

Fragmento 14: Parménides. Op. cit.

Fragmento 15: Roberto Juarroz. Decimocuarta poesía vertical / Fragmentos verticales (1994), Emecé, Buenos Aires, 1997.

Fragmento 16: e.e. cummings. 95 Poems (1958), Liveright, Nueva York, 2002.

Fragmento 17: Friedrich Nietzsche. Así habló Zaratustra (1883, traducción de Andrés Sánchez Pascual), Alianza, Madrid, 1972.

Fragmento 18: Roberto Bolaño. Putas asesinas, Anagrama, Barcelona, 2001.

Fragmento 19: Laurence Sterne. Tristram Shandy (1759), Everyman’s Library, Reino Unido, 1972.

Fragmento 20: San Agustín. Las confesiones (traducción de Olegario García de la Fuente), Akal, Madrid, 2003.

Fragmento 21: Roberto Juarroz. Poesía Vertical 1983/1993, Emecé, Buenos Aires, 1997.

Fragmento 22: Pascal. Pensamientos (1670, traducción de X. Zubiri), Espasa-Calpe, Buenos Aires, 1950.

Fragmento 23: Fernando Pessoa. Op. cit.

Fragmento 24: Jack Kerouac. Libro de jaikus (edición bilingüe, traducción de Marcos Canteli), Bartleby, Madrid, 2008.

Fragmento 25: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Op. cit.

Fragmento 26: Franz Kafka. Aforismos de Zürau (1917–1918), traducción de Claudia Cabrera), Sexto Piso, ciudad de México, 2005.

Fragmento 27: Karl Kraus. Escritos (traducción de José Luis Arántegui), Visor, Madrid, 1990.

Fragmento 28: Fernando Pessoa. Op. cit.

Fragmento 29: Fernando Pessoa. Odas de Ricardo Reis (1924, traducción de Ángel Campos Pámpano), Pre-Textos, Valencia, 2002.

Fragmento 30: Fernando Pessoa. Poesías completas de Alberto Caeiro (1946, traducción de Ángel Campos Pámpano), Pre-Textos, Valencia, 2005.

Fragmento 31: W. H. Auden. Un poema no escrito (1954, edición bilingüe, traducción de Javier Marías), Pre-Textos, Valencia, 1996.

Fragmento 32: Joseph Joubert. Pensamientos (1840, traducción de Carlos Pujol), Edhasa, Barcelona, 1995.

Fragmento 33: Fernando Pessoa. Poesías completas de Alberto Caeiro. Op. cit.

Fragmento 34: Giacomo Leopardi. Pensamientos (1817–1837, traducción de César Palma), Pre-Textos, Valencia, 1998.

Fragmento 35: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Op. cit.

Fragmento 36: W. H. Auden. Op. cit.

Fragmento 37: Ibídem.

Fragmento 38: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Op. cit.

Fragmento 39: Enrique Vila-Matas. Bartleby y compañía (2000), Anagrama, Barcelona, 2002.

Fragmento 40: William Blake. Songs of Innocence & Experience (1789), Tate, Londres, 2008.

Fragmento 41: Fernando Pessoa. Poesías completas de Alberto Caeiro. Op. cit.

Fragmento 42: Jack Kerouac. Op. cit.

Fragmento 43: Duc de La Rochefoucauld. Maxims (1664–1927, traducción de Leonard Tancock), Penguin Books, Reino Unido, 1981.

Fragmento 44: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Op. cit.

Fragmento 45: Friedrich Nietzsche. Op. cit.

Fragmento 46: Roberto Juarroz. Decimocuarta poesía vertical / Fragmentos verticales. Op. cit.

Fragmento 47: Arthur Schopenhauer. El arte de ser feliz (2001, traducción de Angela Ackermann Pilári), Herder, Barcelona, 2007.

Fragmento 48: Joseph Joubert. Op. cit.

Final: Daniil Kharms. Op. cit.

Colofón: Príncipe de Ligne. Extravíos o mis ideas al vuelo (1797–1811, traducción de Ignacio Díaz de la Serna), Sexto Piso, ciudad de México, 2004.

editorial

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO 1/2009 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO seeks to challenge an artist to work in an unfamiliar way: using any source other than his/her own work, s/he develops an idea, a concept, a subject or a vision which can only be realized on paper. On 64 blank pages, s/he creates a special project by collecting images, texts, graphs, and/or by inviting artists, friends, family-members to generate content and to contribute to it.

Our interest in artists developing this project is based on the conviction that they constitute a main creative source inventing forms for content.

With THE WORLD ACCORDING TO we offer an empty space in which the artist can step back from his/her daily practice to find different ways of examining the world that surrounds them and to finally develop new content and unexpected forms.

IÑAKI BONILLAS (Mexico City, 1981. Lives and works in Mexico DF).

With a regard for the aesthetics and the conceptual practices of the 1960s and 1970s, his work is an investigation about photography, the photographic medium and the possibilities of the construction of the image.

In 2003 Bonillas introduced the vast photo archives of his grandfather, J.R. Plaza, into his work. He links elements together that are a priori incompatible: on the one hand a personal, biographical narrative that consists of private anecdotes and emotions, and on the other a quasi-scientific element of compilation, classifying and archiving. Bonillas´ works have been exhibited in institutions such as Matadero (Madrid, 2007), Mies van der Rohe Pavilion (Barcelona, 2005), the Venice Biennale (2003) and most recently at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel (2009).

Editors Ellen Blumenstein Katharina Fichtner Frank Kalero Maribel Lopez Design JealousGUY © 2009 for the reproduced works the artist(s) © 2009 argobooks and the authors Published by argobooks Choriner Straße 57 10435 Berlin Deutschland Germany Tel. +49 30 78706994 www.argobooks.de ISBN: 978-3-941560-19-2 Printed in Germany

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO IÑAKI BONILLAS

Fragment 5: no English translation

ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Fragment 6: Cover: Fragments Parmenides, The Fragments of Parmenides: A Critical Text with Introduction, and Translation, the Ancient Testimonia and a Commentary, Uitgeverij Van Gorcum, 1986

Wordly Wisdom.

Stay not on level plain, Climb not the mount too high, But half-way up remain-The world you’ll best descry!

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Dover Publications, 2006

Fragment 1:

Fragment 8:

Everything has been said, and we have come too late, now that men have been living and thinking for seven thousand years and more. Concerning human behaviour, the best and finest things have already been culled; we can merely glean after the ancients and the ablest of the moderns.

The Camel and the Arab

Jean de La Bruyère, The Characters, Kessinger Publishing, 2007 Fragment 2: Solitude increases if, on the table lit by the lamp, the solitude of the blank page is displayed. The blank page! A great desert to cross, never before crossed. This blank page that remains blank during each vigil, is it not the great sign of a solitude that endlessy begins again? And what a solitude dogs the solitary man when it is the solitude of a worker who not only wants to learn, who not only wants to think, but who wants to write! Then the blank page is nothingness, a painful nothingness, the nothingness of writing.

Yes, if only one could write! After that, perhaps one could think. Primum scribere deinde philosohari, according to a witticism of Nietzsche. But one is much too alone to write. The blank page is too blank, too empty at first for one to begin truly existing by writing. The blank page imposes silence.

It contradicts the familiarity of the lamp. From this point on the “engraving” has two polarities: the polarity of the lamp and of the blank page. The solitary worker is torn between these two. A hostile silence thus reigns in my “engraving.” Did Mallarmé not live in a divided “engraving” when he recalled …The deserted light of the lamp On the empty paper which its whiteness protects.

Gaston Bachelard, The Flame of a Candle, Dallas Inst Humanities & Culture, 1988

AN ARAB CAMEL-DRIVER, after completing the loading of his Camel, asked him which he would like best, to go up hill or down. The poor beast replied, not without a touch of reason: „Why do you ask me? Is it that the level way through the desert is closed?“ Aesop, The Complete Fables, Penguin Classics, 1998 Fragment 11: no English translation Fragment 12: In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Penguin Classics, 2003 Fragment 13: After that Fallmerayer left; and we never heard anything of him again.

Joseph Roth, Hotel Savoy; Fallmerayer the Stationmaster; The Bust of the Emperor, Chatto & Windus, 1986 Fragment 14:

Fragment 3:

Shining by night with borrowed light, wandering round the earth

Practical exercises

Parmenides, The Fragments of Parmenides: A Critical Text with Introduction, and Translation, the Ancient Testimonia and a Commentary, Uitgeverij Van Gorcum, 1986

Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps.

Apply yourself. Take your time.

Note down the place: the terrace of a café near the junction of the Rue de Bac and the Boulevard Saint-Germain the time : seven o’clock in the evening the date : 15 may 1973 the weather : set fair Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on.

Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you?

Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see.

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin Classics, 1997

Fragment 15: no English translation Fragment 17: Tortuously do all good things come nigh to their goal. Like cats they curve their backs, they purr inwardly with their approaching happiness,—all good things laugh.

His step betrayeth whether a person already walketh on HIS OWN path: just see me walk! He, however, who cometh nigh to his goal, danceth.

And verily, a statue have I not become, not yet do I stand there stiff,

stupid and stony, like a pillar; I love fast racing.

And though there be on earth fens and dense afflictions, he who hath light feet runneth even across the mud, and danceth, as upon well-swept ice.

Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget your legs!

Lift up also your legs, ye good dancers, and better still, if ye stand upon your heads!

Fragment 24: There’s nothing there because I don’t care Jack Kerouac. Libro de Jaikus (bilingual edition), Bartleby, 2008

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Algora Publishing, 2003

Fragment 25: no English translation

Fragment 18: no English translation

Fragment 26:

Fragment 20: All these things I retain in my memory, and how I learnt them I retain. I retain also many things which I have heard most falsely objected against them, which though they be false, yet is it not false that I have remembered them; and I remember, too, that I have distinguished between those truths and these falsehoods uttered against them; and I now see that it is one thing to distinguish these things, another to remember that I often distinguished them, when I often reflected upon them. I both remember, then, that I have often understood these things, and what I now distinguish and comprehend I store away in my memory, that hereafter I may remember that I understood it now.

Therefore also I remember that I have remembered; so that if afterwards I shall call to mind that I have been able to remember these things, it will be through the power of memory that I shall call it to mind.

Phillip Schaff, The Confessions and Letters of St. Agustin, with a Sketch of his Life and his Work, Grand Rapids, T&T Clark, 1886 Fragment 21: no English translation Fragment 22: Let no one say that I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the subject is new. When we play tennis we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better.

I had as soon it said that I used words employed before. And in the same way if the same thoughts in a different arrangement do not form a different discourse, no more do the same words in their different arrangement form different thoughts!

Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, Cosimo, Inc., 2007 Fragment 23: Absurdity Let’s act like sphinxes, however falsely, until we reach the point of no longer knowing who we are. For we are, in fact, false sphinxes, with no idea of what we are in reality. The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine.

Let’s develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them. Let’s cut a path in life and then go immediately against that path. Let’s adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren’t and don’t wish to be, and don’t even wish to be taken for being.

Let’s buy books so as not to read them; let’s go to concerts without caring to hear the music or to see who’s there; let’s take long walks because we’re sick of walking; and let’s spend whole days in the country, just because it bore us.

Fernando Pessoa, Op. cit.

There is a goal, but no way; what we call a way is hesitation.

Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Exact Change,1991 Fragment 27: Nocturnal Hour Nocturnal hour that passes away as I, considering, weighing and grading, note that this night is already fading.

Outside a bird proclaims: it is day.

Nocturnal hour that passes away as I, considering, weighing and grading, note that this winter is already fading.

Outside a bird proclaims: it is spring.

Nocturnal hour that passes away as I, considering, weighing and grading, note that this life is already fading.

Outside a bird proclaims: it is death.

Karl Kraus, Selected Writings, Penguin Books, Limited, 2008 Fragment 28: A breath of music or of a dream of something that would make me almost feel something that would make me not think.

Fernando Pessoa, Op. cit.

Fragment 29: I prefer roses, my love, to the homeland And I love magnolias More than fame and virtue.

As long as this passing life doesn’t weary me, And I stay the same, I´ll let it keep passing.

What does it matter who wins or loses If nothing to me matters And the dawn still breaks, And each year with spring the leaves appear, And each year with autumn They fall from the trees?

What do the other things which humans Add on to life Increase in my soul?

Nothing, except its desire for indifference

And its languid trust In the fleeting moment.

Fernando Pessoa, Selected Poems, Ohio University Press, 1971 Fragment 30: If they want me to have some kind of mysticism, okay, I’ve got one.

I’m a mystic, but only with my body.

My soul is simple and it doesn’t think.

My mysticism is not wanting to know, It’s living and not thinking about it.

I don’t know what Nature is: I sing her.

I live on top of a knoll In a lonely whitewashed house, And that’s my definition.

Fernando Pessoa, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro, Shearman Books, 2007 Fragment 31: The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist. (It is relatively easy to guess when one should think as a physician.)

W. H. Auden, Un poema no escrito (bilingual edition), Pre-Textos, 1996 Fragment 32:

which the poet does indeed appear to be saying farewell to literature: “Autumn already! But why yearn for an eternal sun if we are committed to the discovery of divine light, far away from those who die at different seasons?”

A mature Rimbaud - “Autumn already!” - a mature Rimbaud at the age of nineteen bid farewell to what for him is the illusion of christianity, to the very stages his poetry has been through, to his illusionist principles, in short to his high ambition. And before him he glimpses a new path: “I tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new languages. I thought I had acquired supernatural powers. Now you see I must bury my inspiration and my memories! The beautiful glory of an artist and storyteller soaks away!”

He ends with a statement that has become famous, clearly a farewell of the first order: “one must be absolutely modern. No songs: hold on to a step that has been taken.”

All the same, even though Derain did not send it to me, I prefer a simpler farewell to literature, much more straight forward than Rimbauds Adieu. It is to be found in the draft of a season in hell and reads as follows: “I can now say that art is an idiocy.”

Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co, The Harvill Press, 2004 Fragment 41: The morning sprouts. No: the morning does not sprout.

The morning is an abstract thing, it simply is, not being a thing.

We start to see the sun, at this hour, here.

If the early sun lights the trees it is beautiful, It is so beautiful that we call the morning “We begin to see the sun” As when we call it the morning, That is why there is no benefit in giving erroneous names to things, We should never give them names.

never lift on high what is fragile, that is, do not expose it to a fall

Fernando Pessoa, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro, Shearman Books, 2007

Joseph Joubert, Some of the “Thoughts” of Joseph Joubert, W.V. Spencer, 1867

Fragment 42:

Fragment 33: I feel newborn at each moment For the complete newness of the world.

Wednesday blah blah blah— My mind hurts Jack Kerouac, Libro de Jaikus (bilingual edition), Bartleby, 2008

Fernando Pessoa, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro, Shearman Books, 2007

Fragment 44: no English translation

Fragment 34:

Fragment 45:

Young men very commonly believe that they make themselves likeable by pretending to be melancholy. And perhaps, when it is feigned, melancholy can for a short time be pleasing, specially to women. But true melancholy is shunned by the whole of humankind, and in the long run nothing pleases and nothing is successful in our dealings with people but cheerfulness. Because ultimately, contrary to what young men think, the world, quite rightly, does not like to weep, but to laugh.

The Immortals.

“To-day is meet for me, I come to-day,” Such is the speech of men foredoomed to stay.

“Thou art too soon, “ tehy cry, “thou art too late,” What care the Immortals what the rabble say?

Giacomo Leopardi, Thoughts, Hesperus, 2002

Fragment 46: no English translation

Fragment 35: no English translation

Fragment 47: no English translation

Fragment 38: no English translation

Fragment 48:

Fragmento 39: Adieu is a brief text by Rimbaud included in A Season in Hell, in

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Dover Publications, 2006

Dreams. Their lantern is magical.

Joseph Joubert, Some of the “Thoughts” of Joseph Joubert, W.V. Spencer, 1867