John Steppling

"In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerised Germans; it was her Triumph of the Will that reputedly cast Hitler’s spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior. She replied that the “messages” in her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on a “submissive void” in the German population. “Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked. “Everyone,” she replied, “and of course the intelligentsia.” John Pilger "If place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with … [Read more...]

"Psyche is extended,(but) knows nothing about it." Sigmund Freud "Walking is in fact determined by semantic tropisms; it is attracted and repelled by nominations whose meaning is not clear, whereas the city, for its part, is transformed for many people into a 'desert' in which the meaningless, indeed the terrifying, no longer takes the form of shadows but becomes, as in Genet's plays, an implacable light that produces this urban text without obscurities, which is created by a technocratic power everywhere and which puts the city dweller under control...under the control of what? No one knows." Michel de Certeau "We know that under the image revealed there is another which is truer … [Read more...]

"Concrete structures with walls designed to be rendered white make bad ruins..." Nikolaus Pevsner Architectural Review, 1959 "It was the first post-humanist Biennale,” said Aaron Betsky, curator of the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale, and went on: “If you follow the definition of modernism it is the production of completely rationalised states. Rem shows the elevator, the staircases, everything that moves you around. It creates completely reproducible and optimised space that is the same all over the world. What are eliminated, as Rem said, are not only the architects but also people. If that is where we are, and if that is what we have to build on, it is for me rather frightening but … [Read more...]

"'Yugen' as a concept refers to mystery and depth. 'Yu' means dimness, shadow filled, and 'gen' means darkness. It comes from a Chinese term 'you xuan' which meant something too deep either to comprehend or even to see." Donald Richie A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick "The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the … [Read more...]

The photo above, from the great Maneul Alvarez Bravo, is one I've been looking at a lot this week. I can't find where it was taken except that, obviously, it was Mexico. It reminds me a bit of Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico. And of that famous snapshot of Zapata and the U.S. Council. This is a world increasingly remote from our own. I think that is part of the sadness embedded in the above image. "Satire? Call it instead a projection of existing givens—trends clear to those not already brainwashed, from escalation of war-making activities, counterrevolutionary in spirit and purpose, to the eradication of privacy of the individual on a global basis, and in-between, the stabilization of a … [Read more...]

"True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams." Gaston Bachelard "If you are moved only by the color relationships, then you miss the point." Mark Rothko Almost everything in this culture that purports to be a sign of compassion or respect or care, is in every instance an expression of the exact opposite. Politically correct terms or labels, programs from the state claiming to assist the poor, reforms designed to protect consumers, etc. Humanitarian interventions, or the war on poverty. This trickles down, as both cause and effect, to the individual and his vocabulary. On an individual level people have begun to speak … [Read more...]

"Violence so permeates society that popular pleasures are organized around an 'aesthetics of vulgarity', with the state staging public rituals in which 'the masses join the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology', and when power, in its own violent quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence." Achille Mbembe (quoted by Randy Martin in Empire of Indifference) "Women are not drawn to indicators of evolutionary fitness. If they were, they'd be all over me.” Elliot Rodger "(fascism is) the sum total of all the irrational reactions of the natural human character." Wilhelm Reich "What needs to be … [Read more...]

"...the era of neoliberal revanchism was characterized by a discourse of revenge against minorities, the working class, feminists, enviromental activists, gays and lesbians, and recent immigrants: the political enemies of the bourgeois political elite and their supporters." Tom Slater (on Neil Smith) "...this triple exclusion, the prison and the criminal justice system more broadly contribute to the ongoing reconstruction of the ‘imagined community’ of Americans around the polar opposition between praiseworthy ‘working families’—implicitly white, suburban, and deserving—and the despicable ‘underclass’ of criminals, loafers, and leeches, a two-headed antisocial hydra personified by the … [Read more...]