For us art is very straightforward and narrowly defined: If you make art based on politics, then for us it’s not art. If you make art based on feminism, then for us it’s not art. If you make art based on enviromental protection, then for us it’s not fucking art. Translate it just like this. Translate the word ‘fucking’ too.
–birdhead, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pGx4PLL4iw&t=263s
Heidelberg, April 2016
Heidelberg, October 2021
[…] eine negativen Theologie des Bildes […], die davon ausgeht, dass ein Bild im stärksten und wahrsten Sinne des Wortes nicht intentional erreicht werden kann, sondern nur in einem komplexen, vielschichtigen und immer wieder negativen (Beseitigung, Verwischung, Vermalung, Zerstörung von Sichtbarkeiten und Ordnungen im Gemälde) Prozess des Malens – vielleicht – glücken kann.
— über Gerhard Richter
The basic insight of this analysis is found in Heidegger’s remark that, for the most part, the things of the world are not represented by our minds at any given moment. Mostly we fail to notice that the ground beneath our feet is stable, that our heartbeats continue without interruption, that atmospheric oxygen enables the continuation of our lives, and that the absence of political uproar in the streets makes possible our calm contemplation of phenomenological ontology. Usually, the life of things is notaccessible to us, but hidden, concealed, or withdrawn.
And here we encounter the seldom-noted ambiguity of Heidegger’s concept of the “ontological difference”: the difference, so important for his philosophy, between being and beings. On the one hand, the ontological difference means the difference between present and absent, veiled and unveiled, concealed and unconcealed, tool and broken tool, and so forth.
— Graham Harman, The Revenge of the Surface: Heidegger, McLuhan, Greenberg
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow:
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand–
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep–while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
Ouch, that hurt. But I probably needed that:
On January 7, 1971, Diane Arbus conducted interviews with prospective students of a photography master class she would teach that winter – the last winter of her life – and wrote about the interviewees thus:
…one after another would parade into this empty room like as if I was a burlesque producer or a pimp… their pictures mostly bored me and I had a slight feeling like I didn’t know what was with ‘em, they were after all so wildly different from Good Pictures, except there was that mysterious thing… I didn’t want to look at them, as if it might be catching and I would end up learning from the students how to take just such boring pix as those.
— Diane Arbus, quoted from Janet Malcolm’s “Forty-One False Starts“