testing…
Degrade first the arts if you’d mankind degrade,
Hire idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade.
William Blake, Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, title page (c. 1798–1809)
it’s reynolds’ lineage still piles up the cash & blake is still hard to find.
The human body is a battlefield we would do well to return.
Now there is nothingness, now death, now putrefaction, now ressurrection: to wait for i don’t know what apocalypse beyond that, what explosion of what beyond in order to get straightened out
with things
is a dirty joke.
Antonin Artaud, Electroshock
Before we can create we must destroy. Decay is built into the system, a system without decay is fantasy. spectacle is fantasy. looming not resonating.
If a man gives way to all his desires, or panders to them, there will be no inner struggle in him, no ‘friction,’ no fire. But if, for the sake of attaining a definite aim, he struggles with the desires that hinder him, he will then create a fire which will gradually transform his inner world into a single whole.
P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous (1949).
Almost all people are hypnotics. The proper authority saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and the people believed properly.
Charles Fort.
power relationships function psychologically, a person should feed on the drama – perform the role set, foucaults relationships of control.
the definition of voyeur, or perhaps the cultural definition of voyeurism, emphasises the observers dislocation from the event viewed but implies a sexual aspect in the tone of the gaze, stresses the vulnerability of the observed, that which is seen is the bare minutiae of life & that the normal state of affairs would insist that ‘it’ would (perhaps should) not be seen. seedy.
power plays, foucaults panoptican, blah.
observing the banal.
emotional drama that runs through – gives weight / narrative to – the mundane functions as a quick release / quick to come down psychic energy fix. (confirmation of compulsive behaviour) any discomfort in breaking cultural rules balanced by knowledge that cultural rules are there to be broken & that breaking them confers status to an essentially compulsive behaviour.
performance of day to day life.
‘all the world’s a stage’
a painter is in the landscape & as cezanne saw it; cannot be an observer. [he paints his sensations?]
as i was drawing in the national gallery, stood in front of a velásquez, a couple were muttering behind me. i heard them mention ‘voyeurism’. and they were pleased with themselves, excited by it
Not only morals are rotten, the very atmosphere
we live in is materially and physically rotten with actual poetry, with obscene appearences, wih venomous spirits, with infected organisms which you can see with the naked eye provided you have, like myself, lengthily, bitterly and systematically suffered from it.
And hallucinations or delirium are all out of the question here:
no, here
it is a question of this confirmed sophisticated elbow-pushing from an abominable world of souls in which every imperishable actor, every uncreated poet of the breath has always been made to feel the shameful parties making filth of his purest flights.
And no political or moral revolution will be possible so long as man continues to be magnetically held down-
even in his most elementary and simple organic and nervous reactions –
by the sordid influence
of all the questionable centers of the Initiates,
who, sitting tight in the warmth of the electric blankets of their duality-schism
laugh at revolution as well as wars,
certain that the anatomical order on which the existence as well as the duration of actual society is based
will no longer know how to be changed.
Theatre and Science, Antonin Autaud.
‘laugh at the revolution as well as wars’
I see the task of architecture as the defense of the authenticity of human experience.
Juhani Pallasmaa, Encounters
the isolation of the senses. sight is visual, touch is touch, taste is taste, hearing accounts only for hearing and smell – while associated with taste still only really functions as smell. i am pointing out the obvious but; each of these bleed into each other.
the totality of experience necessitates the conjuring of all. the sensual.
our experience is also subconscious – mass conscious – a psychic reading.
a building cannot be a selection of forms generated purely to be visually inspirational. we are affected by a multitude of its ‘impressions’ on us (‘the eyes of the skin’ juhani pallasmaa) – our experience of it. potentially as inhabitant.
the warmth of the material, the exploitation of darkness as well as light
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
Noam Chomsky;The Common Good, 1998.
much of the language around art is indistinguishable from the language of public relations (or mills & boon).
o 