Archives for November 2015

"Art styles do not follow one another step-by-step or even as an ongoing argument. They disappear and reappear. They twist and turn. They rub up against other styles. They migrate and transmigrate. They pop up in very strange places. As in parapsychology, causality is replaced by synchronicity." John Perrault "In Gutai art the human spirit and the material reach out their hands to each other, even though they are otherwise opposed to each other. The material is not absorbed by the spirit. The spirit does not force the material into submission." Gutai Manifesto (1956) "In everything, it takes great effort to think up something new. And even if something is good it takes time for … [Read more...]

"The female, the lumpen-proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure—all that has been outcast and vagabond in our consideration of the figure of Man—must return to be admitted in the creation of what we are.” Robert Duncan "No interpretive skill in the world can in fact eliminate ideal objects from our speech and thought." Edmund Husserl "The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense 'collection' of commodities; the individual commodity appears as its elementary 'form.' Our investigation therefore begins with the 'analysis' of the commodity." Karl Marx, Chapter One … [Read more...]

"Architecture… the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction." Walter Benjamin "One of the greatest problems of our own times is dealing with the uncontrollable acceleration of time, a process that began with 19th-century industrializations; it keeps continually disposing of things in expectation of the future, of the next thing. All avant-garde movements were in fact based on the continual destruction of preceding works in order to go on to something new. Implicit in this is the murder of the future." Manfredo Tafuri Interview with Richard Ingersoll "It's no accident that puritanism, and the puritanical outlook, runs absolutely parallel to the … [Read more...]

" If everything “looks” fake, then what is real? A fake film that makes no effort at naturalism disturbs the separation between spectator and screen. It is a total dreaming state in which the barriers between the dreamer and the dreamed, the projected and the real, are articulated in a jarring mash of lines and bichromate forms: everything is either shadow or light. The city provides the “stage” for this collapsing of the dreamer into the dream." Owen Vince On Cabinet of Dr. Caligari "Renoir has a lot of talent, but he’s not one of us." Daryl Zanuck "My films were not for mass consumption...I could imagine nothing worse than producing something for an alienated mass culture, which I … [Read more...]