Louis Stettner - Manhattan from the Promenade, Brooklyn, New York, 1954
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
Emile M. Cioran
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
I Don't Care What You Think - I'm Hanging On To It
Barbara Kruger - Untitled (You are a very special person), date unknown
Doubt tempers belief with sanity.
Barbara Kruger
Friday, February 19, 2010
I Was A Teenage Messiah And I'll Cry If I Want To
John Heartfield - Das Kreuz was noch nicht schwer genug, 1933
Se questo è un uomo
Voi che vivete sicuri
Nelle vostre tiepide case,
Voi che tovate tornando a sera
Il cibo caldo e visi amici:
Considerate se questo è un uomo
Che lavora nel fango
Che non conosce pace
Che lotta per mezzo pane
Che muore per un sì o per un no.
Considerate se questa è una donna,
Senza capelli e senza nome
Senza più forza di ricordare
Vuoti gli occhi e freddo il grembo
Come una rana d'inverno.
Meditate che questo è stato:
Vi comando queste parole.
Scolpitele nel vostro cuore
Stando in casa andando per via,
Coricandovi alzandovi;
Ripetetelele ai vostri figli.
O vi si sfaccia la casa,
La malattia vi impedisca,
I vostri nati torcano il viso da voi.
Primo Levi
Thursday, February 18, 2010
More Cities Of The Night And Their Webs Of Glitter
Jon Cattapan - Grey Nocturne (The Pool), 1996
What kind of viewpoint is proposed by the cityscape/datascape paintings? The street has been left behind; the scale is broader and more encompassing. Consistently, the point of view is high - the city is a sweeping vista glimpsed through the window of a plane. The viewer is a traveller, a tiny part of the global traffic of experiences, products and ideas.
It is a point of view that compresses space and stretches form. ... [Overlapping] skyscrapers are stacked across the canvas like a field of crystalline stalagmites. The vertical format of the works, along with a high horizon and diagonal perspectival projection, extends the forms up the canvas. This visual effect emphasises the supra-human scale of the city, as does the evacuation of the human figure from most of the paintings. But viewpoint and perspective also establish a particular urban focus: this is downtown, the corporate and administrative heart of the metropolis, housed in skyscrapers. This is an urbanism emblematic of the postmodern society's supplanting of modernism's 'smokestack' economy - a 'post-industrial' society, a 'consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society'.
It is a point of view that compresses space and stretches form. ... [Overlapping] skyscrapers are stacked across the canvas like a field of crystalline stalagmites. The vertical format of the works, along with a high horizon and diagonal perspectival projection, extends the forms up the canvas. This visual effect emphasises the supra-human scale of the city, as does the evacuation of the human figure from most of the paintings. But viewpoint and perspective also establish a particular urban focus: this is downtown, the corporate and administrative heart of the metropolis, housed in skyscrapers. This is an urbanism emblematic of the postmodern society's supplanting of modernism's 'smokestack' economy - a 'post-industrial' society, a 'consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society'.
Chris McCauliffe (from Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories)
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
At Last, The World Has Started Speaking Back To Us
Jenny Holzer - Truisms ("Survival"), 1983-5
The task of philosophical presentation is to come with speech to help speech, so that, in speech, speech itself does not remain presupposed but instead comes to speech.
The task of philosophical presentation is to come with speech to help speech, so that, in speech, speech itself does not remain presupposed but instead comes to speech.
Giorgio Agamben (from The Thing Itself)
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Strange Alignments Of The Visible And The Invisible
Candida Höfer - Masonic Temple Philadelphia I, 2007
The emotion of hoping expands out of itself, makes people wider instead of narrower; insatiable, it wants to know what makes people purposeful on the inside and what might be allied with them on the outside.
The emotion of hoping expands out of itself, makes people wider instead of narrower; insatiable, it wants to know what makes people purposeful on the inside and what might be allied with them on the outside.
Ernst Bloch (The Principle of Hope, 1959)
Monday, February 15, 2010
Those For Whom Every Everywhere Is An Elsewhere
David Salle - Old Bottles, 1995
I think a true intellectual is never at home. To me, being an intellectual means seeing things in a complicated way. One lives on the boundary, one is aware of many claims, many alternatives, and that precludes being at home. I accept being uncomfortable. I also don't know how else to be.
I think a true intellectual is never at home. To me, being an intellectual means seeing things in a complicated way. One lives on the boundary, one is aware of many claims, many alternatives, and that precludes being at home. I accept being uncomfortable. I also don't know how else to be.
Susan Sontag (in conversation with Adelaida López), 1987
