Piet Mondrian - Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-1943)
"In art the search for a content which is collectively understandable is false; the content will always be individual."
Piet Mondrian
"Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered."
Albert Camus
"The foundation of one's thought is the thought of another; thought is like a brick cemented in a wall. It is the simulacrum of thought if, in his looking back at himself, the being who thinks he sees a free brick and not the price of semblance this freedom cost him: he doesn't see the waste ground and the heaps of detritus to which a sensitive vanity consigns him with his brick.
The work of the mason, who assembles, is the work that matters. Thus the adjoining bricks, in a book, should not be less visible than the new brick, which is the book. What is offered the reader, in fact, cannot be an element, but must be an ensemble in which it is inserted: it is the whole human assemblage and edifice, which must be, not just a pike of scraps, but rather a self-consciousness.
In this sense, the unlimited assemblage is the impossible. It takes courage and stubbornness not to go slack. Everything invites one to drop the substance for shadow, to forsake the open and impersonal movement of thought for the isolated opinion. Of course the isolated opinion is also the shortest means of revealing what the assemblage really is - the impossible. But it has this deep meaning only if it is not conscious of the fact.
This powerlessness defines the apex of possibility, or at least, awareness of the impossibility opens consciousness to all that it is possible for it to think. In this gathering place, where violence is rife, at the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who realises cohesion realises that there is no longer any room for him."
From Theory of Religion by Georges Bataille
