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.

Ernst Bloch (The Principle of Hope, 1959)

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.

Susan Sontag (in conversation with Adelaida López), 1987

The Other Four Letter Word And Its Multiple Miseries

Robert Indiana - LOVE, 1964

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.

Anaïs Nin

The Line Between The Love And Creation Of Beauty*

Jean-Antoine Watteau - Embarkation for Cythera, 1717

To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god.

Jorge Luis Borges

* The love of beauty is Taste. The creation of beauty is Art. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Things That Appear Only As They Are Disappearing

Caspar David Friedrich - Woman Before the Rising Sun (Woman Before the Setting Sun), 1818-20

Physically, too, she had altered. Her blue, almond-shaped eyes, grown longer, had not kept their form; they were indeed of the same colour, but seemed to have passed into a liquid state. So much so that, when she shut them it was as though a pair of curtains had been drawn to shut out a view of the sea. It was no doubt this one of her features that I remembered most vividly each night after we had parted.

Marcel Proust (from The Captive)

We Are Made To Mourn, Sang The Scottish Poet ...

Alexander McQueen (16th March 1969 - 11th February 2010)

If I'm design'd yon lordling's slave,
By Nature's law design'd,
Why was an independent wish
E'er planted in my mind?
If not, why am I subject to
His cruelty, or scorn?
Or why has man the will and pow'r
To make his fellow mourn?

Robert Burns - from Man Was Made to Mourn: A Dirge

Ron Mueck: Canny ... Uncanny ... Boy, Can He!, Pt 12

Ron Mueck - Youth, 2009