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

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'.

Chris McCauliffe (from Jon Cattapan: Possible Histories)

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.

Giorgio Agamben (from The Thing Itself)

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)