Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

–WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

 

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Dein Himmel

 

Mein Himmel, wie liebe ich Dich Annerl und Dein Kuß ist mir lieber als eine Landschaft.

— Franz Kafka, Beschreibung eines Kampfes

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Image As Debris

 

this is how we see the world

you don’t know where a picture begins and where a picture ends

“I wanted to pull out everything that was nameable in my work and have people look at fragments of both paint and images coming together—filtering together—and then falling apart.”

not representing something else

–sarah sze

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Waste of Time

“Why make things so difficult for the viewer?
“We are a consumer-society, and it seems to me that art has
become a passive ‘spectator sport’ to an extent unprecedented in history. I
have always tried to work against this tendency by producing ‘occasions for
interpretation’ rather than ‘objects for consumption’. I believe that the ability
to produce rather than consume meanings, and the ability to think otherwise
ways of thinking not encouraged by the imperative to commodity
production, ways condemned as ‘a waste of time’ – is fundamental to the
goal of a truly, rather than nominally, democratic society. I believe art is one
of the few remaining areas of social activity where the attitude of critical
engagement may still be encouraged
– all the more reason then for art to
engage with those issues which are critical.”

— Victor Burgin

 

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