Voltaire's Monkey

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Addendum X

James Abbot McNeill Whistler (1804–1881) - Arrangement in Grey and Black (Portrait of the Artist's Mother), 1871

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

James Abbot McNeill Whistler

Saturday, May 03, 2008

The Thinking Person's Icarus

Caspar David Friedrich (1774 - 1840) - Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist, 1818

The higher we soar, the smaller we seem to those who cannot fly.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Replay III

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840): At The Crossroads of Art and Philosophy

A Walk at Dusk, c. 1830-35

We have art in order not to die of truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.

Gilles Deleuze

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Addendum IX

If Books Could Kill

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) in Basel, c. 1875

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.

Ambrose Bierce

Palimpsest IV

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1845) - Book With Wings, 1992-1994

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

Coda III

The Creep of Reason Produces Cynics

René Magritte (1898-1967) - Golconde, 1953

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say, "I want to see the manager."

William Burroughs

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

William Faulkner

The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.

G. C. Lichtenberg

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

Michel de Montaigne

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society - a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself . . . The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

Ayn Rand

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

Mark Twain

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Orson Welles

Friday, May 02, 2008

Replay II

The Antidote to Love is You

Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) - Untitled #305, 1994

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

Sigmund Freud

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Gilding The Turd

Wim Delvoye (b. 1965): Post Po-Mo Punk

Caterpillar Scale Model, 2002

Cement Mixer, 2007

Cement Truck, 1999

Concrete Mixer, 1992

Kiss 3, 2000

Kiss 2, 2001

Garbage, 2000

Waited Till 9, 2000

Tatooed Pigs, 2006

Cloaca (Kunsthalle Vienna), 2001

Cloaca (The Power Plant, Toronto), 2004

Birdhouse #1, 1998

Marble Floor #111, 1999

Gas Canisters, 1998

Coke Canisters, 2002

Chapel, 2006

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

In my day artists wanted to be outcasts, pariahs. Now they are all integrated into society.

I thought to discourage aesthetics . . . I threw the bottlerack and the urinal in their faces and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided.

I've decided that art is a habit-forming drug. That's all it is, for the artist, for the collector, for anybody connected with it.

It's true, of course, humor is very important in my life, as you know. That's the only reason for living, in fact.

I was interested in ideas, not in visual products. I wanted to put painting again in the service of the mind.

The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.

The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian. It is an ordination.

The creative act is not formed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

It is the spectators who make the pictures.

I force myself to contradict myself, so as to avoid conforming to my own taste.

Art is an outlet toward regions which are not ruled by time and space.

The word 'art' interests me very much. If it comes from Sanskrit, as I've heard, it signifies 'making'.

Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.

Unless a picture shocks, it is nothing.

Marcel Duchamp

Yes, This Shit Is Art

Sometimes Pretty, Often Vacant

Is This Shit Art? (Art Safari, BBC) - Ben Lewis

Replay I

Piero Manzoni (1933-1963): Taking the Odour Out of Ordure

Merda d'artista (Artist's Shit), 1961

Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist who died at the age of 29 in 1963. But before he went he got some excrement - his own - and put it in a tin can. 'Excellent!' he said, in Italian, 'I think I'll call it Merda d'artista!'

Manzoni's canned shit is well known now, or the idea of it is. It's an idea as powerful in the popular imagination as the idea of blank canvases. In fact the actual cans are not all that well known. There are many of them. Each one contains an amount of the artist's own shit. On the label it says 30 grams but of course no one can really tell. The labels are quite detailed and well designed, with the name of the work in three languages, plus the date, the artist's signature and the name of the collector who owns the individual can - all this is part of the look. PIERO MANZONI is printed on the label in light grey letters on a grey ground, with the name repeating so it makes a mantra of the artist's name, as well as a grey and yellow pattern.

When they were first sold they cost their weight in gold. Now they're worth much more. If one came on the market today it would cost about 30,000 pounds. So while a pile of them was shown in a vitrine in London's Serpentine Gallery recently, it was a pile of shit but it was nearly a million pound's worth. . .

Money, shit, art: the holy trinity. Manzoni took jokes to a higher plane than Duchamp, in that he elevated them to the spiritual plane which was somewhere Duchamp never really wanted to go. Manzoni transubstantiated the things of the earth into mystery things. His signature was his magic medium. With it he could turn balloons filled with his breath into saintly relics or make women into artworks. He signed them and issued them with a certificate so that they knew what class of living art work they were - temporary, permanent, intermittent and so on. Each state was symbolised by stamp of a different colour on the certificate - for example, a state of permanent art was symbolised by a red stamp. The women had no special duties as works of art but they did become prisoners of Manzoni, prisoners of his idea.

He wanted to make the world into a prisoner too, with a metal cube inscribed with the words 'Base of the world', which he exhibited upside down on the floor, making the earth into a sculpture, one that floated in infinite space.

From This Is Modern Art by Matthew Collings

Addendum VIII

Plastic Poo

Paul McCarthy (b. 1945) - Shit Pile, 2007

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Sex Is Not The Enemy

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) - Olympia (detail), 1863

The painting of the nude in the 1860s . . . as the critics of the critics of the 1860s never tired of saying, is . . . curiously hybrid, marked by modernity in an incoherent way. If it is chaste, and it sometimes is, it is rigid and inanimate with its own decorum; and if it engages with sexuality, it does so in ways which verge on violence or burlesque.

Something is wrong here: a genre is disintegrating . . . The nude is not a matter of sexual health but of artistic conventions, and it is these that were foundering in the 1860s. If there was a specifically bourgeois unhappiness, it centred on how to represent sexuality, not how to organise or suppress it . . .

One might expect these problems - especially the way they seemed to invite a reading in terms of some general cultural doom - to produce lot of bad criticism. One might especially predict at the end of a genre, a squad of Cassandras inflexible for truth and purity; and, sure enough, they existed. In the face of Cabanel's Venus and Baudry's Perle, Maxime du Camp put paid to the salon nude in general. "Art", he wrote in 1863, "should have no more sex than mathematics." The mark of the nude in art was chastity and abstraction: "The naked body is the abstract being, and thus it must preoccupy and tempt the artist above all; but to clothe the nude in immodesty, to give the facial features all those expressions which are not spoken of, that is to dishonour the nude and do something disreputable." The nude "ceases to be honest when it is treated so as to intentionally exaggerate certain forms at the expense of others", when its poses are "provoking", its attitudes "violent", and its whole language contorted and unnatural.

The vocabulary is torturous - trying to speak of sex and yet not speak of it - but the message is clear. Desire is no part of the nude: the nude is human form in general, abstracted from life, contact, attraction, even gender.

From Olympia's Choice by T. J. Clark

Verso XII

Tanja Ostojic - Origine du monde, 2002

While using her own body within different cultural and social contexts as a retort to various power-games Ostojic inevitably entered the realm of "gender troubles". Her reflection on gender issues is focused on the economic and political phenomena that accompany the phantasm of European Community that is shared by many Eastern European countries. In her project "Looking for a Husband with a EU Passport" she reveals and ironizes the truth about the traffic with women, prostitution, pragmatic marriages and all other "side effects" of transition. In such conditions the economy of gendering is inevitably the economy of power over the body. The self-irony of this project is contained in the intentional aesthetics of artist's usage of her own image for the Internet add: her skinny shaved body without any traces of sensuality and seducing gaze or gesture conveys completely opposite visual message. From this conflict of the textual invitation with the visual repulsion was born the gap of ambiguity between attraction and abjection.

Suzana Milevska