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

Untitled (So They Call Upon The Author To Explain)

Fig. 1. Rudolf Schwarzkogler - Action, 1965

We Call Upon The Author

What we once thought we had, we didn’t
And what we have now will never be that way again
So we call upon the author to explain

Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets
We’ve shunned them from the greasy-grind
The poor little things they look so sad and old
As they mount us from behind
I ask them to desist and to refrain!
Then we call upon the author to explain

Well, rosary clutched in his hand
He died with tubes up his nose
And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals
Chanted his name in code
We shook our fists at the punishing rain
And we called upon the author to explain

He said, everything is messed up round here
Everything is banal and jejune
There’s a planetary conspiracy against the likes of you and me
In this idiot constituency of the moon
Well, he knew exactly who to blame!
And we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix!
Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix

Well, I go guruing down the street
And young people gather round my feet
And they ask me things - but I don’t know where to start
They ignite the powder-trail straight to my father’s heart
And, yeah, once again
I call upon the author to explain

Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing
That mediocres my every thought?
I feel like a vacuum cleaner - a complete sucker!
It’s fucked up and he is a fucker
But what an enormous and encyclopedic brain!
I call upon the author to explain

Rampant discrimination
Mass poverty, third world debt
Infectious disease, global inequality
And deepening socio-economic divisions
Well, it does in your brain
We call upon the author to explain

Now hang on
My friend Doug is tapping on the window!
Hey Doug, how you been? (hey Doug)
Well, he brings me a book on holocaust poetry - complete with pictures
And then he tells me to get ready for the rain
And we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix!
Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix

Bukowski was a jerk!
Berryman was best!
He wrote like wet paper maché
But he went the Heming-way
Weirdly on wings and with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain

Down in my bolthole I see they’ve published
Another volume of unreconstructed rubbish
“The waves, the waves were soldiers moving”
Well, thank you - thank you!
Thank you and again
I call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix!
Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix

Nick Cave

A Pictorial Peccadillo From The Cannibal's Cookbook

Fig. 1. James Ensor - The Banquet of the Starved, 1915


'We need ... to grasp both sides of the paradox of the image: that is it alive - but also dead; powerful - but also weak; meaningful - but also meaningless.'

W. J. T. Mitchell

One More Verse From The Ballad Of Jack The Dripper

Fig. 1. Jackson Pollock - Lavender Mist, No. 1, 1950


'Once the secondary elaboration of style has covered the wild form-play of art, never again can the human eye see its full effects, neither this generation, nor future generations.'

Anton Ehrenzweig