blue tiger
to borges, the tiger was a fascinating but ungraspable animal, pure sensuality, and no language. the blue tiger, as an image or device, is even worse, like a tiger that has been tigered- double obscurity and exponential obsession. colors only seen in dreams, uncountable stones, a belief which has as its fuel the desire for an impossible refutation of the belief. this best way to describe the blue tiger pictured above, however, is “appropriately false”– a strategically flawed reminder that a living tiger is an infinite amount of unknowable features, none of which are herein represented.
blue tiger- $3
[…] doing some research about tigers the other day and then talking about bestiaries with james mcshane and kate schapira. bestiaries are books, classically from the middle ages, of drawings of animals of the world, often used to illustrate biblical or societal beliefs. they were drawn often with the only guidelines being physical descriptions and/or previous bestiaries, a system in which artistic idiosyncrasies and poetic turns become rapidly telephone-gamed and retranslated, then reworked into strident examples of god’s word made flesh. some gems: […]
I don’t think there’s an “i” in “tchotchkes”
silly– noted and changed