Not Many Things Come With A 500-Year Guarantee

Fig. 1. A photograph of Michelangelo’s Pietà by Aurelio Amendola from the book Michelangelo: La Dotta Mano (2008)

'Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.'

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simon

Four Blind Ears: Or, The Art Of Listening To Pictures

Fig. 1. Alessandra Sanguinetti - Time Flies (2005)


'What the picture tells me is "itself" - I should like to say. That is, its telling me something consists in its own structure, in its forms and colours.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Don't Always Apologise For Talking About Painting*

Fig 1. Theo van Doesburg - Composition VIII (The Cow), c. 1918


'To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.'

Paul Valery

* 'We must always apologize for talking painting.' (Paul Valery)

I Had A Dream, And In My Dream History Came True

Fig. 1. François Morellet - Néons avec programmation aléatoire poétique-géométrique, 1967


'In its traditional form, history proper was concerned to define relations (of simple causality, of circular determination, of antagonism, of expression) between facts or dated events: the series being known, it was simply a question of defining the position of each element in relation to the other elements in the series. [But] the problem now is to constitute series: to define the elements proper to each series, to formulate its laws, thus constituting the series of series, of "tables." ... Thus, in the place of the continuous chronology of reason, which was invariably traced back to some inaccessible origin, there have appeared scales that are sometimes very brief, distinct from one another, irreducible to a single law, scales that bear a type of history peculiar to each one, and which cannot be reduced to the general model of a consciousness that acquires, progresses, and remembers.'

Michel Foucault

In Truth, Other People Are A Problem Worth Having

Fig. 1. Helen Levitt - New York, ca. 1940


'For there is but one problem - the problem of human relations. We forget that there is no hope or joy except in human relations.'

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Death Came To Them Daily In The Form Of Ideology

Fig. 1. Sungsoo Koo - Tour Bus (from the series Magical Reality, 2005-2006), 2005


'Works of art are often sites where the issues or questions a community or culture finds urgent, fundamental, or troublesome are elaborated and negotiated. In part, this is a matter of what Nelson Goodman calls the "cognitive efficacy" of visual representations: through representing or symbolising selected elements of "the world," experience is made susceptible to ordering and rearrangement; the world can be more completely grasped, ordered, illuminated. Visual representation is, consequently, a vehicle for the increase of knowledge, both scientific and nonscientific. But knowledge is ideological: what passes for knowledge at any given moment is radically conditioned by a complex of regnant interests, values, utilities. What may seem at first a pure discovery, an objective truth emergent in visual representation - linear perspective is a good example - is later revealed as a culturally specific, ideologically* engaged, contingent construction.'

Michael Leja

* 'Ideology designates a rich "system of representations," worked up in specific material practices, which help form individuals into social subjects who "freely" internalise an appropriate "picture" of their social world and their place in it. Ideology offers the social subject not a set of narrowly "political" ideas but the fundamental framework of assumptions that defines the parameters of the real and the self; it constitutes what Althusser calls the social subject's "'lived' relation to the real."' (James Kavanagh)

The Sunday Six: Keep Moving - Nothing To See Here

Fig. 1. Al Held - Torquad II, 1985

Fig. 2. Blake Edwards - Untitled, 1987

Fig. 3. Peter Halley - The Acid Test, 1991-92

Fig. 4. Karen Kunc - The Wanting Pool, 2007

Fig. 5. Peter Zimmermann - Shess, 2007

Fig. 6. Parastou Forouhar - Red is my Name, Green is my Name, 2008


'What you see is what you see.'

Frank Stella