Art
The work is what it means
The object of art
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
- Sonorisms I
- More than just a machine that runs along
- Nobody was doing anything
- NYLA
- Aggressively Zen
Isometry
What the masters had chosen
The tea master, Kobori-Enshiu, himself a daimyo, has left to us these memorable words: "Approach a great painting as thou wouldst approach a great prince." In order to understand a masterpiece, you must lay yourself low before it and await with bated breath its least utterance. An eminent Sung critic once made a charming confession. Said he: "In my young days I praised the master whose pictures I liked, but as my judgment matured I praised myself for liking what the masters had chosen to have me like."
In a state of reverberation
Irwin's terms of sudden, physical realization – bam! – call to mind the suddenly enlightening Zen slap or rap on the forehead. It also calls to mind [Philip Guston]'s own remark..."Look at any inspired painting...it's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation." Reverberation is another way of suggesting a kind of sudden, energetic, physical experience.
The idea grows as they work
As they work, the experience of the material under the artist's fingers subtly interacts with the idea in their mind to give the finished work some quality that was rarely fully anticipated. A few artists seem to have such a feeling for their materials that the prevision needs little modification; most say that the idea grows as they work experimentally.
Follow the brush
One of the oldest and most deeply ingrained of Japanese attitudes to literary style holds that obvious structure is contrivance, that too orderly an exposition falsifies the ruminations of the heart, that the truest representation of the searching mind is just to 'follow the brush.'
The differences in intentionality
[Marc] Treib summarized Irwin's views on conditional art as follows: "One does not start with a personal vocabulary or manner to be adapter to each situation. Thus, given the differences in intentionality between art and design, the artist and the designer will 'plow different furrows seemingly in the same field.'" This is an important point since it gets at the difference that Irwin sees between art and design, the first of which is predicated, as he says, on the opportunity to deal with each situation freely and without constraints, and the latter, which is restricted in many ways from the outset by functional, stylistic, and economic concerns.
Art as art
If modern painting is "art as art," this means, to paraphrase Reinhardt, that is represents nothing and exists only in and for itself. If this has created an "art language, with an art communication," this is because this kind of art has implied all along a form of intimate contact with its viewer, in which the viewing of "art as art" becomes "sensation as sensation" or "perception as perception." This distinguishes "modern painting" from representational painting, which exhibits duality, that is, it uses imagery to refer to "past experiences and feeling," and to "color and reconstruct in the mind" associations that are meaningful, but that take the viewer far away from the specifics of the encounter with the painting before them.
The core assertion
Sitting there in the Whitney's coffee shop, Irwin pointed through the glass wall up at the play of shadows on a building facade across the street. "That the light strikes a certain wall at a particular time of day in a particular way and it's beautiful," he commented, "that, as far as I'm concerned, now fits all my criteria for art."
At the terminus of Irwin's trajectory, when all the nonessentials had been stripped away, came the core assertion that aesthetic perception itself was the pure subject of art. Art existed not in objects but in a way of seeing.
Your only language is vision
To see with fresh, uninstructed eyes and an open mind requires a deliberate, self-aware act by the observer. Abstract artworks represent themselves and should be first viewed for themselves. When looking at outdoor abstract pieces, concentrate initially on the unique optical experience produced by the artworks. See as the artist saw when making the piece.
A focus on optical experience does not deny stories, it postpones them. Viewing an artwork may evoke interesting narratives – or just tedious artchat recalling similar art or artists, concocting playful tales, realizing how scrap metal was repurposed into art, making judgments about the artist's intentions or character, or contemplating an artwork's provenance, price, politics. Let the artwork stand on its own. Walk around fast and slow, be still, look and see from
up down sideways close afar above below
, enjoy the multiplicity ofsilhouettes shadows dapples clouds airspaces sun earth glowing
. Your only language is vision.Concrete poetry
Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance.
We might as well make them beautiful
The Macintosh team came to share Jobs's passion for making a great product, not just a profitable one. "Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too," said Hertzfeld. "The goal was never to beat the competition, or even to make a lot of money. It was the do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater." He once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany's example of creating great art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, "We said to ourselves, 'Hey, if we're going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.'"
Live your ten years
Artists are only creative for 10 years...we engineers are no different. Live your 10 years to the full.
I mix it with two in my thought
It is the artist who, more than other men, is able to create something out of nothing. A whole artistic work is immeasurably more than the sum of its parts.
“I mix it with two in my thought”; this is the statement of the fact of universal experience that the work of art has real existence apart from its translation into material form.
The job of art is to chase ugliness away
Bono later explained that not all corporate sponsorships were deals with the devil.
The 'devil' here is a bunch of creative minds, more creative than a lot of people in rock bands. The lead singer is Steve Jobs. These men have helped design the most beautiful art object in music culture since the electric guitar. That's the iPod. The job of art is to chase ugliness away.
Art is the one medium in which one cannot lie successfully
When we build, say, a business area in which all (or practically all) are engaged in earning their livings, or a residential area in which everyone is deep in the demands of domesticity, or a shopping area dedicated to the exchange of cash and commodities—in short, where the pattern of human activity contains only one element, it is impossible for the architecture to achieve a convincing variety—convincing of the known facts of human variation. The designer may vary color, texture and form until his drawing instruments buckle under the strain, proving once more that art is the one medium in which one cannot lie successfully.
A Painted Karatsu as Food for Thought
Recently there is a tendency to pursue distortion in art, but in the case of this jar, natural deformation has raised distortion to the level of spontaneous beauty.
The deeper unconscious intentions
Some time ago, a friend insisted that people should not listen to practicing architects or read what they write. According to him, the lack of logic in our discourse, the incongruity of our words, and the overzealousness in readings brought about by the biographical revision of our work were of little value.
In his book The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa approaches it from the opposite direction, but ultimately gives the same advice:
The verbal statements of artists and architects should not usually be taken at their face value, as they often merely represent a conscious surface rationalization, or defense, that may well be in sharp contradiction to the deeper unconscious intentions giving the work its very life force.
No ordinary objects
Abandoned by the world, no longer of use, but still carefully repaired and preserved, these were no ordinary objects. The reasons for their maintenance remain a mystery. At this point, they could only be described as "art". No—not so much "art" as something that exceeds art...
Hyperart.
We want you to work with an artist
Normally after the design was built, you would find places for the art to be located and then you would go out and select the artist that you wanted. That is historically, the traditional way to go.
But this time, someone else was calling the shots. A planning official, basically, who comes along and says, “We want you guys to work with an artist.” And the architects are like, “Sure of course.” But then the official goes—“No, you don’t quite understand. We want you to use an artist as a co-equal member of the design team.” That is, the artists are going to have just as much control as the architects. It was really unheard of.
A great painting has to be better than it has to be
This sounds like a paradox, but a great painting has to be better than it has to be. For example, when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de Benci in the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head. In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. Many painters might have thought, this is just something to put in the background to frame her head. No one will look that closely at it.
Not Leonardo. How hard he worked on part of a painting didn't depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless.
Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible. When people walk by the portrait of Ginevra de Benci, their attention is often immediately arrested by it, even before they look at the label and notice that it says Leonardo da Vinci. All those unseen details combine to produce something that's just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.
Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too.
A city cannot be a work of art
There is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art.
Truchet Tiles
Truchet tiles are square tiles decorated with patterns that are not rotationally symmetric. When placed in a square tiling of the plane, they can form varied patterns, and the orientation of each tile can be used to visualize information associated with the tile's position within the tiling.
The basic course
The Basic Course was a general introduction to composition, color, materials, and three-dimensional form that familiarized students with techniques, concepts, and formal relationships considered fundamental to all visual expression, whether it be sculpture, metal work, painting, or lettering. The Basic Course developed an abstract and abstracting visual language that would provide a theoretical and practical basis for any artistic endeavor.
The senses of form and tone
Man painted and danced long before he learned to write and construct. The senses of form and tone are his primordial heritage.
It cannot be taught in words
How to be a great painter cannot be taught in words; one learns by trying many different approaches that seem to surround the subject. Art teachers usually let the advanced student paint, and then make suggestions on how they would have done it, or what might also be tried, more or less as the points arise in the student’s head—which is where the learning is supposed to occur!
The quality of the day
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
Erased de Kooning Drawing
Once, Robert Rauschenberg erased most of a drawing by Willem de Kooning, and then named it Erased de Kooning Drawing.
I am in no way certain what this is connected to either, but I suspect it is connected to more than I once believed it to be connected to.
Fine arts and decorative arts
The fine arts are conscious and essentially individual in tradition.
The quantitative and economic aspects of the decorative arts, on the other hand, make them intrinsically repetitive. Because of this, their aesthetic qualities have a very intimate relationship to the technology of materials, and their design is thereby basically affected.
In addition to the qualitative need for repetitive detail in design, the decorative arts have a quantitative requirement, namely the imperative of covering large areas or making large numbers of individual objects.
I would want to be in that darkness
If there were a part of life dark enough to keep out of it a light from art, I would want to be in that darkness, fumbling around if necessary, but alive.
And I rather think that contemporary music would be there in the dark too, bumping into things, knocking others over and in general adding to the disorder that characterizes life (if it is opposed to art) rather than adding to the order and stabilized truth beauty and power that characterize a masterpiece (if it is opposed to life).
And is it? It is.
Holding together a civilization
It is only in the present age that it has been asserted that 'architecture is not an art' or 'should not be an art': and that strenuous efforts are made to made a distinction between design and art. And nowadays we build cities of such a quality that no one likes living in them, everyone who can do so gets a motor car to escape from them. Because of the multitude of motor cars, escape is now denied us, the country is destroyed, and the cities become still less tolerable to live in.
All that is the consequence of contempt for art. Art is not a matter of giving people a little pleasure in their time off. It is in the long run a matter of holding together a civilization.
The imprint of a man
Art is the imprint of a man: a creature whose nature is idiosyncrasy sparring with conformity.
Déjà vu
The artists expression may make us aware for the first time of something we had too little regarded or had not been fully conscious of, presenting us with something which is quite new to us and yet at the same time disturbingly familiar – déjà vu.
Fear of death
He thought that fear of death was perhaps the root of all art.
Mimesis
Realism played small part in the realities of life as experienced by the traditional Japanese artist. The expectations of the artist's cultivated sensibilities did not demand mimesis. Rather, indication, suggestion, simplicity took the place of any fidelity to outward appearance.
A perfect circle
Once, being asked to submit a sample of his work, what Giotto submitted was a circle.
Well, the point being that it was a perfect circle.
And that Giotto had painted it freehand.Iconography
It is understandable that those students who must work from reproductions of works of art are usually more interested in iconography than in the more subtle questions of technique and quality, but it is regrettable that technical ignorance should so frequently prevent art historians from considering the whole experience of the artist.
Simple moments of clarity
I have seen autistic children drawing at a terrific speed and I've always thought that my drawings should not be less rapid, because that speed gives them insignificance. In this speed lies their abandonment and it may cause them to be overlooked as mere doodles. However, I understand that they are like that pristine light that appears when they tell you that you have a tumour. In an instant, everything becomes clear and well-defined. All contours are cruelly illuminated as if it was worth taking a final look at the world. At such times, although the lines in the drawings clump into a skein of events that are indecipherable to ordinary mortals, they can be described in detail by the victim one by one. These are moments when weeds regain their nature as plants.
Only now can I understand these drawings as simple moments of clarity.
Apparency
Half a century ago, Stern discussed this attribute of an artistic object and called it apparency. While art is not limited to this single end, he felt that one of its two basic functions was "to create images which by clarity and harmony of form fulfill the need for vividly comprehensible appearance." In his mind, this was an essential first step toward the expression of inner meaning.
More than just a machine that runs along
"As far as I'm concerned, a folk art is when you take a utilitarian object, something you use every day, and you give it overlays of your own personality, what it is you feel and so forth. You enhance it with your life. And a folk art in the current period of time would more appropriately be in the area of something like a motorcycle. I mean, a motorcycle can be a lot more than just a machine that runs along; it can be a whole description of a personality and an aesthetic."
The human reality of perception
"The great misinterpretation of twentieth-century art is the claim advanced that many people, especially critics, that cubism of necessity led to abstraction. But on the contrary, cubism was about the real world. It was an attempt to reclaim a territory for figuration, for depiction. Faced with the claim that photography had made figurative painting obsolete, the cubists performed an exquisite critique of photography; they showed that there were certain aspects of looking—basically the human reality of perception—that photography couldn't convey, and that you still needed the painter's hand and eye to convey them." — David Hockney
It can also be art
It is worth remembering a website does not have to be a product; it can also be art. The web is also a creative and cultural space that need not confine itself to the conventions defined by commercial product design and marketing.
The language of art
Everything points to the conclusion that the phrase 'the language of art' is more than a loose metaphor, that even to describe the visible world in images we need a developed system of schemata.
Anatomical Drawings of Staircase Spaces
A Book by Tomoyuki TanakaWittgenstein's Mistress
A Novel by David Markson- I think very well of him indeed
- A perfect circle
- The Eiffel Tower
- Ceci n'est pas une pipe
- Erased de Kooning Drawing
Words and Images
An Essay by René MagritteSilence
A Book by John CageThe Story of Art
A Book by E. H. GombrichThe Sense of Order
A Book by E. H. GombrichHyperart: Thomasson
A Book by Genpei Akasegawa & Matt FargoArt and Illusion
A Book by E. H. GombrichI've designed it that way
A Quote by Townes Van ZandtI don't envision a very long life for myself.
Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?
I've designed it that way.AI-art isn’t art
An Essay by Erik HoelAI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful.
…Just as how something being either an original Da Vinci or a forgery does matter, even if side-by-side you couldn’t tell them apart, so too with two paintings, one made by a human and the other by an AI. Even if no one could tell them apart, one lacks all intentionality. It is a forgery, not of a specific work of art, but of the meaning behind art.
Avant-Garde and Kitsch
An Essay by Clement GreenbergCapitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable of producing becomes almost invariably a threat to its own existence.
The problem with ornament
An ArticleContemporary architects are, however, increasingly engaging with ornamentation. The zenith was Grayson Perry and Charles Holland of FAT’s fairytale House for Essex (p64), but it does not serve as an indicator because the involvement of an artist has allowed an enhanced engagement with ornament until it surpasses mere decoration and becomes embodied in the architecture in a way that architects do not allow themselves to do. Think of FAT’s old work: the ornament is all contained within a surface - a facade - which allowed them to separate out the (Modernist) architecture from the (kitsch) superficiality of the elevation. Like Venturi before them, their ornament allowed them to have their ornamentally iced cake - and eat the Minimal Modernist sponge underneath.
The Finish Fetish Artists
An EssayFor others, perhaps especially those artists who worked with light and transparency and were involved in the birth of the Light and Space Movement, an immaculate surface is a prerequisite. Helen Pashgian explained this very clearly:
“On any of these works, if there is a scratch... that’s all you see. The point of it is not the finish at all – the point is being able to interact with the piece, whether it is inside or outside, to see into it, to see through it, to relate to it in those ways. But that’s why we need to deal with the finish, so we can deal with the piece on a much deeper level”.
The importance of a pristine surface calls for a very low tolerance to damage by the artists. The feeling is shared by Larry Bell:
“I don’t want you to see stains on the glass. I don’t want you to see fingerprints on the glass... I don’t want you to see anything except the light that’s reflected, absorbed, or transmitted”
Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface
A Book by Robin Clark- Phenomenal: An Introduction
- Phenomenal: Exhibited Works
- Stealth Architecture: The Rooms of Light and Space
evermore, and other beautiful things
An Article by Linus the SephistIf all evidence of civilization on Earth was destroyed, and humans had to re-build society from the ground up, what would be different? Feynman reckons that pivotal scientific moments, like the discovery of the atom, will still happen in the same way. Perhaps mathematics will be similarly rediscovered.
Someone told me once in response to this question, no artwork would ever be recreated. The art we create – music, stories, dance, film – isn’t a fundamental element of the universe, or even of humanity. It’s unique to each artist. If you choose to create art, you leave something in the world that has never had a chance to exist before, and will never again have a chance to exist. There will never be another Beatles or Studio Ghibli or Picasso. Art, in its infinite variations of originality, is cosmically unique in a way the sciences will never be. Art immortalizes human experiences that would otherwise vanish in time.
minimator.app
An ApplicationMinimator is a minimalist graphical editor.
All drawings are made of lines in a grid based canvas. The lines are limited to vertical and horizontal lines, and quarter circles.
app.wombo.art
An ApplicationA small store
A Gallery by Kyeoung Me LeeLoveFrom,
A WebsiteLoveFrom,
is a creative
collective.The Gifted Listener: Composer Aaron Copland on Honing Your Talent for Listening to Music
An Article by Maria PopovaThe poetry of music, Copland intimates, is composed both by the musician, in the creation of music and its interpretation in performance, and by the listener, in the act of listening that is itself the work of reflective interpretation. This makes listening as much a creative act as composition and performance — not a passive receptivity to the object that is music, but an active practice that confers upon the object its meaning: an art to be mastered, a talent to be honed.
Monoskop
A WebsiteMonoskop is a wiki for the arts, media and humanities.
On 'The Master and His Emissary'
A Quote by Ian McGilchristPeople who make works of art, whatever they might be, have gone to great trouble to make something unique which is embodied in the form that it is, and not in any other form, and that it transmits things that remain implicit
...Works of art are not just disembodied, entirely abstract, conceptual things. They are embodied in the words they’re in or in paint or in stone or in musical notes or whatever it might be.
Enjoying the garden together
A Quote by Brian EnoAnd essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life.
What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.
Signing party
An ArticleSince the Macintosh team were artists, it was only appropriate that we sign our work. Steve came up with the awesome idea of having each team member's signature engraved on the hard tool that molded the plastic case, so our signatures would appear inside the case of every Mac that rolled off the production line. Most customers would never see them, since you needed a special tool to look inside, but we would take pride in knowing that our names were in there, even if no one else knew.
Almanacs and cyclical time
An Article by Austin KleonI am fascinated by the Farmer’s Almanac, and the “Planting by the Moon” guide in particular, which has advice such as: “Root crops that can be planted now will yield well.” “Good days for killing weeds.” “Good days for transplanting.” “Barren days. Do no planting.”
I think it’d be funny to make up an almanac for writers and artists, one that emphasized the never-ending, repetitive work of the craft.
1,000 True Fans
An Essay by Kevin KellyTo be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.
A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.
Tokenize This
An Artwork by Benjamin GrosserDifferent from the typical website whose URLs act as persistent indexes to a page and its contents, Tokenize This destroys each work right after its creation. While the unique digital object remains viewable by the original visitor for as long as they leave their browser tab open, any subsequent attempt to copy, share, or view that URL in another tab, browser, or system, leads to a “404 Not Found” error. In other words, Tokenize This generates countless digital artifacts that can only be viewed or accessed once.
Poioumenon
A DefinitionA specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation (sometimes the creation of the story itself).
After the Fair
An ArtworkAfter the Fair by David Maljkovic. Via hiddenarchitecture.
After the Fair puts in focus the Yugoslavian Pavilion at the International Vienna Fair and recalls absent images of the pavilion and the absence of an euphoric projection of a happier future which should be built after the recent historic trauma. The exhibition in its archtectonically determined space of the Georg Kargl BOX cannot reconstruct these 'events', however it can bring up questions as a kind of an inventory making.
Rafael Araujo's Golden Ratio
A GalleryBlue Morpho Double Helix & Icosahedron
Woodblock Prints
An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi SōetsuIt seems to me that many printmakers are suffering under a delusion. Looking at current trends, it appears that recent prints are simply copying fine art and painting. Some printmakers are working in the nanga style of painting. Others are attempting to reproduce the effects of oil. Some cleverly contrived prints are often difficult to distinguish from paintings done with a brush. The question arises: Why are these printmakers working in the medium of woodblock printing at all?
For prints to follow in the footsteps of painting has very little meaning. The art of the brush and palette should be left to the brush and palette.
The art of taking
A Quote"By making it possible for the photographer to observe his work and his subject simultaneously, and by removing most of the manipulative barriers between the photographer and the photograph, it is hoped that many of the satisfactions of working in the early arts can be brought to a new group of photographers. The process must be concealed from—non-existent for—the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in taking and not in making photographs. In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture, and our task is to make that possible."
— Edwin H. Land, co-founder of Polaroid
Painting With the Web
An Article by Matthias OttSo much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.
Longfellow Bridge Trophy Room
An ArtworkB&W photo is from my camera, second photo of shelves from linked article.
Upon stumbling upon it, you might imagine a story of a college athlete who fell from society’s grace, but rumor has it, this unusual sight is actually an art installation that just “popped up” in May of 2014 and has been steadily expanding and attracting visitors who sometimes add their own trophies to the collection. Although the trophies are not bolted to the four metal shelves in any way, free to be taken, people just don’t.
The still life effect
A Fragment by Paul GrahamIf you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head. You'd think. But people don't. In fact, this is a constant problem when you're painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you're so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you're kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it's too late.
Chazen Museum of Art
A GalleryThe Chazen’s expansive two-building site holds the second-largest collection of art in Wisconsin, and is the largest collecting museum in the Big 10.
Art is memory's mise-en-scène
A Quotebutdoesitfloat
A BlogBut what do you want to say?
An Article by Ralph AmmerPablo Picasso famously said:
“The world doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?”
A sensible approach to something that can’t be explained is to express it.
Rather than giving you explanations or “saying something”, most artists are concerned with what I like to call “room for interpretation”. They create platforms that trigger thoughts, feelings, emotions, and ideas.
Instead of trying to explain the inexplicable artists express their view of it. They don’t want to tell you what to think, they invite you to respond.
Making sense
A Quote by Pablo PicassoThe world doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
The Pale King
We change them and are changed
"We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed."
— Frank Bidart, Borges and I
Displacement
...the man fitted to his job like a man to the exact pocket of space he displaces.
What's wrong?
Pay attention, boy. The next suitable person you're in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, "What's wrong?" You say it in a concerned way. He'll say, "What do you mean?" You say, "Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?" And he'll look stunned and say, "How did you know?" He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing.
Narrative codes
The idea, as both sides' counsel worked it out, is that you will regard features like shifting p.o.v.s, structural fragmentation, willed incongruities, & c. as simply the modern literary analogs of 'Once upon a time...' or 'Far, far away, there once dwelt...' or any of the other traditional devices that signaled the reader that what was under way was fiction and should be processed accordingly. For as everyone knows, whether consciously or not, there's always a kind of unspoken contract between a book's author and its reader; and the terms of this contract always depend on certain codes and gestures that the author deploys in order to signal the reader what kind of book it is, i.e., whether it's made up vs. true. And these codes are important, because the subliminal contract for nonfiction is very different from the one for fiction.
An enormous machine
The couple of years in question here saw one of the largest bureaucracies anywhere undergo a convulsion in which it tried to reconceive itself as a non- or even anti-bureaucracy, which at first might sound like nothing more than an amusing bit of bureaucratic folly. In fact, it was frightening; it was a little like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human.
Abstruse dullness
Consider, from the Service's perspective, the advantages of the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex. The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it's interesting.
To hide or dissemble
Fact: The birth agonies of the New IRS led to one of the great and terrible PR discoveries in modern democracy, which is that if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble.
Distraction
To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.
The Manual
I don't believe I have anything to say that isn't in the code or Manual.
In a stare
Being in a stare referred to staring fixedly and without expression at something for extensive periods of time. It can happen when you haven't had enough sleep, or too much sleep, or if you've overeaten, or are distracted, or merely daydreaming. It is not daydreaming, however, because it involved gazing at something. Staring at it. Usually straight ahead—a shelf on a bookcase, or the centerpiece on the dining room table, or your daughter or child. But in a stare, you are not really looking at this thing you are seeming to stare at, you are not even really noticing it—however, neither are you thinking of something else. You in truth are not doing anything, mentally, but you are doing it fixedly, with what appears to be intent concentration. It is as if one's concentration becomes stuck the way an auto's wheels can be stuck in the snow, turning rapidly without going forward, although it looks like intense concentration. And now I too do this.
We infantilize ourselves
Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say. It has something to do with liberal individualism, and something to do with capitalism, but I don't understand much of the theoretical aspect—what I see is what I live in. Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilize ourselves. We don't think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.
Doubling
Obetrolling didn't make me self-conscious. But it did make me much more self-aware. If I was in a room, and had taken an Obetrol or two with a glass of water and they'd taken effect, I was now not only in the room, but I was aware that I was in the room. In fact, I remember I would often think, or say to myself, quietly but very clearly, 'I am in this room.' It's difficult to explain this. At the time, I called it 'doubling', but I'm still not entirely sure what I meant by this, nor why it seemed so profound and cool to not only be in a room but be totally aware that I was in the room.
Strings and clots
The walls' texture was mostly smooth, but if you really focused your attention there were also a lot of the little embedded strings and clots which painters tend to leave when they're paid by the job and not the hour and thus have no motivation to hurry. If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on.
More by accident
In an intentional bout of concentrated major thinking, where you sit down with the conscious intention of confronting major questions like 'Am I currently happy?' or 'What, ultimately, do I really care about and believe in?' or— particularly if some kind of authority figure has just squeezed your shoes—'Am I essentially a worthwhile, contributing type of person or a drifting, indifferent, nihilistic person?', then the questions often end up not answered but more like beaten to death, so attacked from every angle and each angle's different objections and complications that they end up even more abstract and ultimately meaningless than when you started. Nothing is achieved this way, at least that I've ever heard of. Certainly, from all evidence, St. Paul, or Martin Luther, or the authors of The Federalist Papers, or even President Reagan never changed the direction of their lives this way—it happened more by accident.
Wisdom
This remains largely theory, but my best guess as to his never dispensing wisdom like other dads is that my father understood that advice—even wise advice—actually does nothing for the advisee, changes nothing inside, and can actually cause confusion when the advisee is made to feel the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of his own situation and path.
No-nonsense
Admittedly, though, however alert and aware I felt, I was probably more aware of the effects the lecture seemed to be having on me than of the lecture itself, much of which was over my head, and yet was almost impossible to look away from or not feel stirred by. This was partly due to the substitute's presentation, which was rapid, organized, undramatic, and dry in the way of people who know that what they are saying is too valuable in its own right to cheapen with concern about delivery or 'connecting' with the students. In other words, the presentation had a kind of zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it. I felt that I suddenly, for the first time, understood the meaning of my father's term 'no-nonsense', and why it was a term of approval.
The pie has been made
"In today's world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentleman, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made—the contest is now in the slicing."
Midwest sunset
For those who've never experienced a sunrise in the rural Midwest, it's roughly as soft and romantic as someone's abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room. This is because the land is so flat that there is nothing to impede or gradualize the sun's appearance. It's just all of a sudden there.
Test anxiety
It was part of a larger discussion about younger examiners and television and the theory that America had some vested economic interest in keeping people over-stimulated and unused to silence and single-point concentration. Shackleford's observation was that the real object of the crippling anxiety in 'test anxiety' might well be a fear of the tests' associated stillness, quiet, and lack of time for distraction. Without distraction, or even the possibility of distraction, certain types of people feel dread—and it's this dread, not so much the test itself, that people feel anxious about.
To fill in the gaps
It would be easy to impose on the office a whole welter of detail, explanation, and background that was actually gleaned only later and not part of my arrival and dazed scurrying about with the Iranian Crisis at all. Which is a quirk of temporal memory—one tends to fill in gaps with data acquired only later, sort of the same way the brain automatically works to fill in the visual gap caused by the optical cord's exit through the back of the retina.
Every love story is a ghost story
What hell is
He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers connected to nothing he'd ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind's own devices.
No place it hadn't already been
He imagined that the clock's second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn't already been a million times before, and imagining the second hand was so awful it made his breath catch in his throat and he looked quickly around to see if any of the examiners around him had heard it or were looking at him.
The word invents itself
Posits certain neologisms as arising from their own cultural necessity—his words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you're getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself.
Unborable
The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air.
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men.
It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
Institutional structure
'That was all he said it seemed like I needed, just to talk to somebody with no bullshit, which was what the Zeller Center doctors didn't realize, or like they couldn't realize it because then the whole structure would come down, that here the doctors had spent four million years in medical school and residency and the insurance companies were paying all this money for diagnosis and OT and therapy protocols, it was all an institutional structure, and once things became institutionalized then it all became this artificial, like, organism and started trying to survive and serve its own needs just like a person, only it wasn't a person, it was the opposite of a person, because there was nothing inside it except the will to survive and grow as an institution.'