A moving prism

Old Man with his Head in his Hands (At Eternity's Gate), Vincent van Gogh » Zola says, ‘Moi artiste, je veux vivre tout haut – veux vivre’ [I, as an artist, want to live as vigorously as possible -- (I) want to live], without mental reservation – naive as a child, no, not as a child, as an artist – with good will, however life presents itself, I shall find something in it, I will try my best on it. Now look at all those studied little mannerisms, all that convention, ho w exceedingly conceited it really is, how absurd, a man thinking he knows everything and that things go according to his idea, as if there were not in all things of life a ‘je ne sais quoi’ of great goodness, and also an element of evil, which we feel to be infinitely above us, infinitely greater, infinitely mightier than we are. How fundamentally wrong is the man who doesn’t feel himself small, who doesn’t realize he is but an atom. Is it a loss to drop some notions, impressed on us in childhood, that maintain...

Painting:  Beksinski » Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity  […] Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it. — : that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life recites a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness, which presents itself only to him while appearing anonymous to the outside, nameless, existing merely as necessity, as reality, as being — . — From a letter on Cezanne by Rainer Maria Rilke to his wife (a painter), June 24, 1907 

Duane Michals, Untitled 1968 » Finally, I am getting older, any change becomes more and more difficult. But in all this I foresee a great misfortune for myself, one without end and without hope; I should be dragging through the years up the ladder of my job, growing ever sadder and more alone as long as I could endure it at all. But you wanted that sort of life for yourself, didn’t you? — Franz Kafka, from Diaries 1914-1923. Translated by: Martin Greenberg  

Louis de Brocquy, Head and horizon (1960) » When we say “in us,” when we speak so easily and so painfully of inside and outside, we are naming space, we are speaking of a visibility of the body, a geometry of gazes, an orientation of perspectives. We are speaking of images. What is only in us seems to be reducible to images, which might be memories or monuments, but which are reducible in any case to a memory that consists of visible scen es that are no longer anything but images, since the other of whom they are the images appears only as the one who has disappeared or passed away, as the one who, having passed away, leaves “in us” only images. He is no more, he whom we see in images or in recollection, he of whom we speak, whom we cite, to whom we attempt to give back words, to let speak—he is no more, he is no longer here, no longer there. And nothing can begin to dissipate the terrifying and chilling light of this certainty. As if respect for this certainty were still a debt, the l...

Masahisa Fukase, Ravens » Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things. — L’amitié, Maurice Blanchot, 232-3, in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus , 341-2

Herbert List, Under the sun, 1937 The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall. It is like a prayer to what is empty. And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers: “I am not empty, I am open.” — from Vermeer, Tomas Tranströmer, trans Robert Bly

Lisa Oppenheim, “Lunagram 9,” 1851/2010, silver toned photogram, exposed to moonlight » Soon (or simultaneously) the question is no longer ‘Why don’t you love me?’ but ‘Why do you only love me a little?’ How do you manage to love a little? What does that mean, loving ‘a little’? I live under the regime of too much or not enough; greedy for coincidence as I am, everything which is not total seems parsimonious; what I want is to occupy a site from which quantities are no longer perceived, and from which all accounts are banished. – A Lover’s Discourse , Roland Barthes