school of things

“Reduced to their lowest common denominator, photographs are usually the concrete results of a photographer’s response to a stimulus - a photographer being defined as anyone who is prepared at a given moment to respond to a stimulus by using a camera. The immediate stimulus is usually the visual perception of something (the subject), but the full range of emotions, associations, and memories (including memories of other photographs) that the subject evokes are part of the stimulus complex and will all affect how the photographer actually perceives the subject - and hence whether and how he will choose to photograph it. Perhaps the most puzzling element of the stimulus complex is the desire to make a photograph in the first place. In recent years, theoreticians of photography have advanced a great many speculations about why people feel the need to make photographs: to endow the moment recorded with a sort of deep-frozen immortality, to fragment experience into manageable pieces, to - insulate oneself from new experiences (like travelers who never really look at anything-they just take photographs), to analyse episodes of life, to exercise a form of voyeuristic aggression, to transform experience into objects (photographs) that can be possessed and hoarded like money, to learn about the structure and meaning of the world, or simply to make aesthetically and intellectually provocative images.”

“When we view a photograph, what we perceive with our eyes in the present is the visible echo of something that no longer exists. Something similar occurs when we look at a star like the sun, tra albe e tramonti - between dawns and dusks), whose light always and necessarily reaches us after a delay; most often after it has already been burned out for millions of years. And so perhaps the photographic image does not reveal the succession but rather the relationship of coexistence between past and present. The photograph is simply the point of transition - or, as Luigi hoped, of equilibrium - between inside and outside, invisible and visible, between that which is excluded and that which is included in the framing of the shot, between personal memory and history between microscopic and macroscopic.”

“This is a book about how we see. How do we see the environment around us? How do we see its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures? How do we see where we are in the environment? How do we see whether we are moving and, if we are, where we are going? How do we see what things are good for?”

“The Letterist International invent a new kind of knowledge, a street ethnography, whose primary method is the dérive. What the dérive discovers is psychogeography: the lineaments of intersubjective space. In place of the chance encounters of the surrealists, they create a practice of play and strategy which invents a way of being, outside of commodified time and outside of the separate disciplines of knowledge including geography. Henceforth the city will not be a site for fieldwork but a playing field, in which to discover intimations of a space and time outside the division of labor. The goal is nothing less than to invent a new civilization which will make a mark on historical time with the grandeur of the Temple of the Sun.”

With his eyes closed, he was overcome by a strange inability to visualise anything. He tried to tell himself the names he knew for each thing in the room, but he couldn’t picture anything; not even the plane he had just seen landing, though he might have recognised in his mind, probably from earlier experience, the screeching of its brakes on the runway. He opened his eyes and looked for a while at the corner where the kitchen was: he concentrated on the tea kettle and the wilted flowers drooping in the sink. He had barely closed his eyes again when the flowers and the tea kettle were unimaginable. He resorted to thinking up sentences about the things instead of words for them, in the belief that a story made up of such sentences would help him visualise things. The tea kettle whistled.

AGAINST THE RUIN OF THE WORLD, THERE IS ONLY ONE DEFENCE - THE CREATIVE ACT.

“Ordinarily, in times of idleness, he would stroll into town. But when concentrating on his work, he usually went to the outskirts - out into the wilderness; thus far, he had adhered to this rule. But did he actually have any rules? Weren’t the few that he had tried to impose on himself constantly giving way to something else - a mood, an accident, a sudden inspiration - that seemed to indicate the better choice? True, his life had been oriented for almost twenty years toward his literary goal; but reliable ways and means were still unknown to him. Everything about him was still as temporary as it had been in the child, as later in the schoolboy, and still later in the novice writer.”

Michael Rosen ‘School rules: the 10 elements of successful arts education’

“So a border is a restriction, but it also creates a protected space for experimentation. Within that border, as long as it holds, something fragile can begin to grow; on the other hand a border like that is also in its very nature the sign of a tension between inside and outside, and in this sense it contains the possibility of its own dissolution, the possibility that the pressure differential that has built up between these two temporarily separated systems will be balanced out.

“I find it absurd to buy shoes that cost 400 euros.

“I remembered what I’d read those hours before in Lemaître’s breviary, and I said to myself that it made sense about applied science journals at the end of the nineteenth century being full of articles on the possibility of colour in photographs and the possibility of building a tunnel under the Channel; since you only needed to think a little to see that the two subjects concerned the same thing: how to see in the open air and how to see underground; how to see above and how to see below. Because looking is the great subject; looking is and always has been our primary concern.”

“According to Dewey the main problem of the identification of what is known with what is real is that it makes it appear as if all other dimensions of human life - such as the practical, aesthetic, ethical or the religious dimensions - can only be real if they can be reduced to and validated by what is revealed through our knowledge. By assuming that knowledge provides the ‘norm’ for what is real, other aspects of the ways in which human beings live their lives are relegated to the domain of the subjective: the domain of individual taste, points of view, feelings and individual perspectives. As Dewey put it, ‘When real objects are identified with knowledge-objects, all affectional and volitional objects are inevitably excluded from the “real” world, and are compelled to find refuge in the privacy of an experiencing subject or mind’. Dewey believed that the identification of what is known with what is real was one of the most fundamental mistakes of modern philosophy and referred to this mistake as the ‘intellectualist fallacy’. Yet for Dewey this was not only a philosophical problem. It rather was a problem that lay at the heart of modern culture, which was the reason Dewey referred to it as a crisis in modern culture. In a sense Dewey’s work can be read as a response to this crisis.”

Art Concepts