"Every photograph which exists to perpetuate something becomes its grave and tombstone." Richard Hennessy "Integrity is not only a moral condition, but a pictorial task." Michael Fried "Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried." Walter Benjamin A discussion of abstraction in art is usually something one has with in-laws, or weird Uncles during the Holidays. It is usually a simple argument about how abstract art isn't really art, and how anyone could do it, and how modern art in general is junk. Rarely are there serious discussions about abstraction … [Read more...]

"When a couple of local people asked us where we were staying that evening we replied that we would just pull our car next to a park and catch some sleep. Horrified, our new friends told us bluntly that “The Los Angeles Police (LAPD) will pull you out of your car, kick the shit out of you and then arrest you.” This grim assessment of the LAPD was corroborated in the wake of the 1992 LA riots by a local fifth-grade teacher who told historian Mike Davis that: “In the area where I work, the LAPD is a sadistic occupying army.” Paul Ortiz, The Anatomy of a Rebellion (Solidarity) "...the social contract establishes corporate virtue as an asylum for individual sin, making a moral society out … [Read more...]

"A logic of displacement (or obsolescence) is conjoined with a broadening and diversifying of the processes and flows to which an individual becomes effectively linked. Any apparent technological novelty is also a qualitative dilation of one's accommodation to and dependence on 24/7 routines; it is also part of an expansion in the number of points at which an individual is made into an application of new control systems and enterprises." Jonathan Crary "Very early in my advertising career, it became clear to me that I was being paid to stop you from doing or thinking whatever else you might want to do or think, and instead get you to focus on the piece of information that was of interest … [Read more...]

"Imperialism is nothing other than the totality of the economic, political, and military means mobilized to produce the submission of the peripheries, today as yesterday." Samir Amin "It was a street-show that had an ideology of conformity at its heart; to consumerism, commodified emotion and a shared experience of pre-chewed sentimentalised joylessness disguised with a perfect-toothed smile. Individually, the images are what they are. Photographers have to make a living. Collectively, this spittling drizzle of photographic normality and drab betrayed the fear, dishonesty and essential conservatism that lies at the heart of so much photography, art direction and buying; every one of … [Read more...]

"Sixteen states saw their guard rolls double over the past decade {1990 to 2000} while most of them reduced overall public employment...state and county correctional adminstrations, taken together, have elevated themselves to the rank of third largest employer in the land, just behind Manpower Inc, and Wal Mart, and just ahead of General Motors...the U.S. carceral system now employs four times as many people as McDonalds and seven times more than IBM." Loic Waquant Punishing the Poor "It is no simple matter to determine the precise extent to which mass incarceration is exacerbating the deep socio-economic and related cultural and political traumas that already plague inner-city … [Read more...]

"In the late ’60s, Guy Debord—who was a situationalist—he looked again at the work of Edward Bernays, and saw that now what we called the media was starting to be joined by governments and by financial banking systems. And he called it the “integrated spectacle.” So we’re all living in this completely false reality that doesn’t really exist. The thing that’s so funny is that we’ve become the mouthpiece of this consumersism." Penny Arcade "The sage, holding onto the left half of the tally does not demand payment from others; the person with potency {de} takes charge of the tally; the person without potency looks to collecting on it." Lao Tzu "On the other side there are doubts … [Read more...]

"These sacrifice zones of the corporate state are expanding. The recent shooting of an unarmed young black man in Ferguson revealed the insidious disease of white supremacy and how easily U.S. cities can turn into a military occupied police state. With unprecedented persecution of whistle-blowers, the Obama administration continues to threaten press freedom and engage in extrajudicial killing through drone attacks for anyone who is on the receiving end of U.S. imperial foreign policy. The world is quickly becoming one big open-air prison." Nozomi Hayase “Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” … [Read more...]

"Just like the operations of the consciousness, these scriptural graves are defective: there is a fissure in the construction, a leak in the system. In an almost totemic way, historiography is infected by what it touches as the past always seems to overhaul the present. And thus the real not only reveals itself in discourse, it also makes a disturbing appearance when writing is confronted with its own limits or, in other words, when the factory of history suddenly has to face its industrial waste." Alex Demeulenaere "Strategies are undermined by unpredictability. Tactics make an ally of unpredictability." Stan Goff "Narration created humanity." Pierre Janet There is … [Read more...]