John Steppling

"a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning." William Carlos Williams (Landscape with the Fall of Icarus) "The growing relevance of technology in artworks must not become a motive for subordinating them to that type of reason that produced technology and finds its continuation in it." Theodor Adorno (Aesthetic Theory) "the opposite of play is not serious occupation but — reality.” Sigmund Freud (The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming, 1908) I wanted to look at the growing irrationality of the West today by or through the lens of American cinema. And to a degree through the critical analysis of several different films. The first film in question is The Shining … [Read more...]

"The wing of the Angel of Death brushes against me, and the systole of my soul inundates the depths of my spirit with the blood of divinity ... our elaborate human lineage is no more than a doomed procession of phantoms trooping from nothingness to nothingness .... If we are all to die altogether-what is the point of everything! Wherefore? It is the Wherefore, the Wherefore of the sphinx, that corrodes the marrow of our soul and that is the begetter of the anguish which stirs our love of hope .... And so we sing dirges to death, the never-ending respite, simply from fear of it, and call it a liberation. " Miguel de Unamuno (The Tragic Sense of Life) "It is quite impossible for a … [Read more...]

"When two do the same thing, they do not do the same thing.” Ernst Bloch (Heritage of Our Time) "President Nixon: You think, you think we want to, want to go this route now? And the – let it hang out, so to speak? Dean: Well, it's, it isn't really that – Haldeman: It's a limited hang out. Dean: It's a limited hang out. Ehrlichman: It's a modified limited hang out." Whitehouse Tapes (March 22, 1973) "As to the question whether it is the illness that generates the crime or whether the crime, by its very nature, was always accompanied by something like an illness, [Raskolnikov] still felt unable to resolve the issue". Fyodor Dostoyevski (Crime and Punishment) After a week in … [Read more...]

"Although the term, mark, is commonly applied to a person who is given short-lived expectations by operators who have intentionally misrepresented the facts, a less restricted definition is desirable in analyzing the larger social scene. An expectation may finally prove false, even though it has been possible to sustain it for a long time and even though the operators acted in good faith. So, too, the disappointment of reasonable expectations, as well as misguided ones, creates a need for consolation. Persons who participate in what is recognized as a confidence game are found in only a few social settings, but persons who have to be cooled out are found in many. Cooling the mark out is one … [Read more...]

"Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on higher and higher levels, the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness of man." Georg Lukacs (History and Class Consciousness) "The whole point is to show that human beings have lost their instincts, especially their sexual instinct and, more specifically still, their instinct to reproduce." Jean Laplanche (New Foundations of Psychoanalysis) “Sex is always political.” Gayle Rubin (Thinking Sex) “While it is indisputably true that sexuality is always being politicized, the ways in which having sex politicizes are … [Read more...]

"Can there be culture without melancholia? " Homi K. Bhabha (A Question of Survival) "The notion of “bad conscience” developed at the same time as the art of the portrait and accompanied the rise of both individualism and the sense of responsibility. A connection surely exists among guilt, anxiety, and creativity." Jean Delumeau (Sin and Fear) “Everything happens as if there were an original defect in man.” Henri Gouhier (The Tyranny of the Future) "...paintings in the age of the internet need to be clever far more than they need to be good." John Seed (The Disrupted Realism of the New King Charles Portrait, Hyperallergic 2024) Increasingly I feel the that the 21st century … [Read more...]

“If freedom is the condition of life, it cannot be employed to abolish life and so to destroy and abolish itself … suicide is in no circumstances permissible…. Moral philosophers must, therefore, first and foremost show that suicide is abominable.” Immanuel Kant (Suicide) "Nessus, [a Centaur], carries the Poets across the river of boiling blood and leaves them in the Second Round of the Seventh Circle, The Wood of the Suicides. Here are punished those who destroyed their own lives and those who destroyed their substance. The souls of the Suicides are encased in thorny trees whose leaves are eaten by the odious Harpies, the overseers of the damned. " Dante (Canto 13, Inferno {Ciardi … [Read more...]