Das aufgeräumte Zimmer, die Dinge an ihrem Platz oder so scheint es: Dabei haben die Dinge keinen Platz, kommen nur wie zufällig nebeneinander zu Liegen und schaffen ihre eigene Ruhe um sich herum, die ihnen den Anschein gibt, als wäre dies hier ihr angestammter Platz.
The ecological value of the term Nature is dangerously overrated, because Nature isn’t just a term – it’s something that happened to human-built space, demarcating human systems from Earth systems. Nature as such is a twelve-thousand-years old human product, geological as well as discursive. Its wavy elegance was eventually revealed as inherently contingent and violent, as when in a seizure one’s brain waves become smooth. Wash-rinse-repeat the agrilogistics and suddenly we reach a tipping point.
The Anthropocene doesn’t destroy Nature. The Anthropocene is Nature in its toxic nightmare form. Nature is the latent form of the Anthropocene waiting to emerge as a catastrophe.
–Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology
Frankfurt, November 2023
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author- God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.
a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.
— Roland Bartes, Death of the Author
Any object, intensly regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods.
— James Joyce, Ulysses, p. 545
— Curtis Saville, Wittgenstein’s Door
He could not persuade himself that, if he wrote round about his subject with facility or treated it from any standpoint of impression, good would come of it. On the other hand he was persuaded that no-one served the generation into which he had been born so well as he who offered it, whether in his art or in his life, the gift of certitude.
-James Joyce, Stephen Hero
In the last days of her life, my wife’s mother spent most of her time sleeping on the couch. In the few hours she was awake, she was watching Biathlon on TV: Something that comes very close to a visual non-stimulus.
During Covid I started watching old movies: The rule was not their age, but that I had already seen them. Their predictability were part of what interested me there. I did not want to be surprised, not visually and certainly not by a story.
That you are content with just a low-level stimulus, barely registering above white noise or just the plain nothing-at-all of sleep.
You don’t need much of anything any more.
Korea, July 2022
Nothing is stable, all is shifting, changing. There is no such thing as a picture, it is an impossibility and a mirage to believe so.
— Phillip Guston
Untitled (Eva, 1967)
I am not doing anything at all
I am content with negating what I am doing
There is no center to what I am doing
I don’t stick to things
Nothing interests me long enough to actually do anything about it
There is no way in hell i am going to finish this
I cannot will myself into this
Oh do you really think that this is what you are doing?
You are complacent
You do not push yourself
But when pushing: Pushing where to?
In the studio
circular gesture
dividing the plane
a lot of the things I talk about are not about what I photograph, but how I use what I see for something else
Try to pinpoint this “something else”
are you too abstract?
Are you not abstract enough?
Are you just tired? Close your eyes for a moment. Like two or three years.
You have old eyes. And this is not a good thing.
