What Has Ever Been So Horrible It Can't Be Imaged?

Fig. 1. Vija Celmins - To Fix The Image In Memory XII, 1977-82


'To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more and more. Images transfix and images anaesthetise. An event becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen a photograph. But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real.'

Susan Sontag

Promised Lands Will Always Break Their Promises

Fig. 1. Martin Kippenberger - The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika”, 1994


'To the degree that a work of art breaks through the realm of art and becomes uptopian perception, it is creation - meaning that it is subject to moral categories in relation not just to human beings in the act of conception, but to man's existence in the sphere of perception. The moral nature of creation gives the work the stamp of the expressionless.'

Walter Benjamin

A Fascist Would Rather Be The Bulb Than The Light

Fig. 1. Olafur Eliasson - Inverted Berlin Sphere, 2005


'Education is dangerous - every educated person is a future enemy.'

Hermann Goering

Tell Me When You Think You Know Where I'm Going

Fig. 1. Jaroslav Krupka - Path near Police nad Metují, c. 1930


'If I'm free, it's because I'm always running.'

Jimi Hendrix

A Song Is Anything That Can Walk By Itself, He Said*

Fig. 1. Bob Dylan - Scotland, possibly Princess Street, 20 May 1966 Edinburgh (p. Barry Feinstein)


'A person is a success if they get up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.'

Bob Dylan

* 'A song is anything that can walk by itself.' (Bob Dylan)

There, Where The Dead Are Still Dancing And Singing

Fig. 1. Pompeian fresco (detail), c. 1st Century AD

The Dead Are Not Dead

Hearing things more than beings,
listening to the voice of fire,
the voice of water.
Hearing in wind the weeping bushes,
sighs of our forefathers.

The dead are never gone:
they are in the shadows.
The dead are not in earth:
they're in the rustling tree,
the groaning wood,
water that runs,
water that sleeps;
they're in the hut, in the crowd,
the dead are not dead.

The dead are never gone,
they're in the breast of a woman,
they're in the crying of a child,
in the flaming torch.
The dead are not in the earth:
they're in the dying fire,
the weeping grasses,
whimpering rocks,
they're in the forest, they're in the house,
the dead are not dead.

Birago Ishmael Diop (Senegalese, 1906-1989)

Where Banality Is Measured In Degrees Of Glamour

Fig. 1. Lucy Skaer - Die Belagerung, 2008


'One of the greatest satisfactions of the philosopher is to expose the fallacy in what has hitherto been accepted as a conclusive argument; and I suppose this can be as selfless as any satisfaction in making a contribution to general welfare. Equally satisfying, and equally altruistic, is to expose the fallacy in the fallacy - to demonstrate that it is not a fallacy after all, or not the sort of fallacy it was claimed to be. By this turn of the wheel, what was worth saving in the original argument gets rehabilitated, though it will never look quite the same.'

Monroe C. Beardsley