The Ten Thousand Year Old Virgin (6)

William Hogarth - The Four Stages of Cruelty ("Cruelty in Perfection"), 1751

The Ten Thousand Year Old Virgin (5)

William Hogarth - The Four Stages of Cruelty ("The Second Stage of Cruelty"), 1751

The Ten Thousand Year Old Virgin (4)

William Hogarth - The Four Stages of Cruelty ("The First Stage of Cruelty"), 1751

The Ten Thousand Year Old Virgin (3)

William Hogarth - Beer Street, 1751

The Ten Thousand Year Old Virgin (2)

William Hogarth - Gin Lane, 1751

The Ten Thousand Year Old Virgin (1)

William Hogarth - Marriage A-la-Mode: The Tête-à-Tête, 1735


'We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.'

Salvador Dalí

The Gee Gees

Gilbert & George cutout dolls, 2000

Gilbert & George (South Park-style spoof by Helen Bucknail)

Gilbert & George ("The Little Artists")

Gilbert & George - Son of a God, 2005

Tim Marlow with Gilbert & George, 2007

'Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.'

Oscar Wilde

N.B. Gilbert & George will be awarded the Lorenzo il Magnifico Prize at the Florence Biennale in December.

Groom Of Darkness

Rembrandt - Philosopher in Meditation, 1632


'Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.'

Arthur Schopenhauer

Bride Of Darkness

Bill Viola - Ocean Without a Shore, 2007


'When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure.'

Ingmar Bergman in The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography.

Radical Cheek

Paul Signac - Portrait of Félix Fénéon, 1890


'The anarchist painter is not the one who will create anarchist pictures, but the one who will fight with all his individuality against official conventions.'

Paul Signac

The Man Not In The Mirror

Duane Michals - Portrait of Joseph Cornell, 1970


'Joseph Cornell never reveled in his growing status as a seminal figure, however. His last years were his most isolated. He would watch neighborhood children from his window, leaving boxes out on the porch for them to play with. In 1972, Cornell died at his Utopia Parkway home. He was cremated. His ashes buried in a small wooden box.'

Paul Solman (PBS Online News Hour, December 3o, 1997)

Through A Glass, Kaleidoscopically

Cindy Sherman - Untitled #424, 2004


'Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.'

Jonathan Swift

Art As War By Other Means

Francesco Clemente - Map of What Is Effortless, 1978


'So it's really not East or West, it's really part of the human experience that you are given certain conditioning and a certain character and that you have to live with that, and make the best you can of it. That is why we love the Hindu tradition, because of all these paradoxes we are confronted with - on the one hand this image of immobility and original knowledge and original uncontaminated being that we carry within ourselves, and on the other hand the deepest human desire: the desire for a narrative. And interesting narratives imply conflict. A narrative without conflict is boring - this is why I get very diffident about presentations of yoga or contemplative practices as "conflict free". When I hear about peace I get mad, because there is no such thing as peace, there is always war. It's either war with the other, or war within. If you are wise, it's war within.'

Francesco Clemente

Rigid Relics: Part Seven

Mano Poderosa (Hand with Religious Figures Atop Each Finger) - Mexico, 19thC

Rigid Relics: Part Six

Our Lady of Cocharcas under the Baldachin - Peru, Cuzco School, 1765

Rigid Relics: Part Five

Calvary Scene - Ecuadoran, 18thC

Rigid Relics: Part Four

The Baptism of Christ - Pulpit of Veit Stoss (Cracow), c. 1480-1490

Rigid Relics: Part Three

Nativity Group with Angel - Guatemalan, 18thC

Rigid Relics: Part Two

Gift-Bearing Figures (from a Nativity Group), Guatemalan, 18thC

Rigid Relics: Part One

Nativity Scene - Ecuadoran, 18thC