“Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others …”, he said

“The surrealists believed that objects in the world possess a certain but unspecifiable intensity that had been dulled by everyday use and utility. They meant to reanimate this dormant intensity, to bring their minds once again into close contact with the matter that made up their world. André Breton’s maxim “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table” is an expression of the belief that simply placing objects in an unexpected context reinvigorates their mysterious qualities.

This “crisis” the surrealists identified was being simultaneously diagnosed by others. Martin Heidegger held that the essence of modernity was found in a certain technological orientation he called “enframing.” This tendency encourages us to see the objects in our world only in terms of how they can serve us or be used by us. The task he identified was to find ways to resituate ourselves vis-à-vis these “objects,” so that we may see them as “things” pulled into relief against the ground of their functionality. Heidegger believed that art had the great potential to reveal the “thingness” of objects.

The surrealists understood that photography and cinema could carry out this reanimating process automatically; the process of framing objects in a lens was often enough to create the charge they sought. Describing the effect, Walter Benjamin drew a comparison between the photographic apparatus and Freud’s psychoanalytic methods. Just as Freud’s theories “isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed in the broad stream of perception,” the photographic apparatus focuses on “hidden details of familiar objects,” revealing “entirely new structural formations of the subject.”

Jonathan Lethem in The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism, published in Harper’s magazine. Worth reading!!

“Their art turns in on itself, becoming nothing more than coded language”, he said

“I went to Venice, and I came back worried. (…) many times over — too many times for comfort — I saw the same thing, a highly recognizable generic ­institutional style whose manifestations are by now extremely familiar. Neo-Structuralist film with overlapping geometric colors, photographs about photographs, projectors screening loops of grainy black-and-white archival footage, abstraction that’s supposed to be referencing other abstraction — it was all there, all straight out of the seventies, all dead in the ­water. It’s work stuck in a cul-de-sac of aesthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements. There’s always conformity in art — fashions come in and out — but such obsessive devotion to a previous generation’s ideals and ideas is very wrong. It suggests these artists are too much in thrall to their elders, excessively satisfied with an insider’s game of art, not really making their own work. That they are becoming a Lost Generation.”

Jerry Saltz in a recent article in NYMag about the Venice Biennale. Worth reading!! here

“just because ‘they’ said”, she said

“For to do things or not to do them just because ‘they’ said one must or must not, or because ‘they’ would be pleased if one did or angry if one did not, even if ‘they’ seemed to be inside oneself, this was surely an evasion. It was an evasion of the responsibility of being a separate person who could not, without dishonesty, see permanently eye to eye with anyone else. Of course, such conformity was necessary at times, or social living would be impossible, but it was no solid rock on which to base one’s living, for it seemed a bartering of one’s birthright of the unique viewpoint. I had often enough found myself behaving according to these inner commands and then had been shocked to notice that they were not standards which I myself agreed with at all; I had taken them over wholesale, oblivious of the fact that they were often in direct conflict with my own feelings about what was valuable in life.”

Marion Milner , in On Not Being Able To Paint. 1950. London: Heinemann

“we are, in a sense, always already dead”, she said

“While our mortality is inexorable – we are, in a sense, always already dead – we are also always already other to ourselves, and so our death is, in a sense, forever forestalled; (…) We may, for all intents and purposes, be already dead or, perhaps more accurately, caught in the endless feedback loop of eternal return that Derrida so eloquently describes.

The photographic self-portrait is particularly revealing in terms of these profound questions. Due to its status as representation, it opens the photographed subject-as well as the viewing subject to otherness and so to an ongoing “life” in later worlds of interpretation. The photographic self-portrait is like history or the memory that forms it: it never stands still but, rather, takes its meaning from an infinite stream of future engagements wherein new desires and fascinations produce new contours for the subject depicted. .”

Amelia Jones in The “Eternal Return”: Self-Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment; Signs, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 2002), pp. 947-978; The University of Chicago Press

“No man is an island, entire of itself”, he said

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated…As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness….No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

John Donne in Devotions upon emergent occasions and severall steps in my sicknes – Meditations XVII, 1624

“art has no intrinsic value”, he said

(…) That is, aesthetic value is a sensuous appearance of social values. The work of art has no intrinsic value in itself; it indicates or produces by suggestion something which is thought to be desirable, and so from this desired thing it borrows value. (…) Art then is a symbol. Like all symbols it is subject to being debunked. But this is not a judgment against specific works of art for being mendacious in hiding other interests, as Schopenhauer condemns pornography for arousing men’s wills instead of quieting them as art should; it is a judgment against the sincerity of all aesthetic interest. (…) If a thing which is desired can be achieved in a certain way, we value those things which make it possible. The value of the means is derivative from the value of the end, and when the value which is ultimate has been realized, the value which the other acts and objects have by virtue of contributing to its attainment is now lost. When the house is built, the tools are no longer needed. To be sure, they may have other values and they may serve other ends, but their specific value in this particular situation has been used up.” (…)

Lewis White Beck in Art Criticism and Semantic Discipline, published in Delaware Notes, Vol. 16, A. 3 (1943), pp. 31-53, by University of Delaware

“The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.”, he said

“…as in prose, ‘form’ in photography is reluctant to become ‘content’, and works best when it just barely succeeds in converting its subject into art – that is, when it calls the least attention to itself and lets the almost ‘practical’ meaning of the subject come through.
This is why there are so many pictures made with documentary intent among the masterpieces of photography. But they have become masterpieces by transcending the documentary and conveying something that affects one more than mere knowledge could. The purely descriptive or informative is almost as great a threat to the art in photography as the purely formal or abstract. The photograph as to tell a story if it is to work as art. And it is in choosing and accosting his story, or subject, that the artist-photographer makes the decisions crucial to his art. Everything else – the pictorial values and the plastic values, the composition and its accents – will more or less derive from these decisions.”

Clement Greenberg, in Four Photographers, 1964

“fiction tends towards the real”, he said

“The two go together (document and fiction). The document tends towards the imaginary, the fiction tends towards the real. You could say that if you aim at a form of truth through fiction, then the real will become enigmatic precisely because it is obvious. Documentary photography offers an interesting possibility of achieving a poetic form. For me that is more than an interesting possibility, it’s what I’m aiming at. If an image is powerful enough, if it resists us, if, by its obscure coherence, part of it escapes our understanding, then it means that something has been won from reality.”

Luc Delahaye, interviewed by Philippe Dagen, published in Art Press nº306

“in nature, you can’t make art”, she said

“The only thing we knew was that the best answer we could look for was in nature. So we went back to the desert and started traveling. The desert was a great place for us, because there was a minimum of information, an extremely violent environment, heat, and so on. You were confronted with yourself and your own life. Then we decided to go to the Aborigines to find answers in nature. We chose the Aborigines because the culture was absolutely nomadic, as we were. At that time, we lived in the car and just traveled around. We didn’t have any home. Also, Aborigines don’t just make ceremonies three times a year. Ceremony is their life. They have this amazing narrative culture, the dreamtime stories. When they make a ceremony, they spend a long time making the most beautiful objects. The moment the ceremony is finished, the objects are left there, destroyed. And then they start all over again. So there was no material culture. It was very close to how we thought about our life and performance as a way of living. Another interesting thing about Aborigines is that they never had yes or no in their language. They don’t exist because they don’t doubt. They are completely connected with nature, and there is no doubt in their minds. Suicide doesn’t exist in the Aboriginal world because it’s not needed. It was very interesting how much we learned, how much we were inspired by this culture. We didn’t produce any work there; in nature, you can’t make art. Nature is so perfect as it is that art becomes an obstacle. Art can only be done in destructive societies that have to be rebuilt. I see the artist as a bridge between nature and the city. We went to nature to get, and we went to our society to give. “

Marina Abramovic during an interview performed by Janet A. Kaplan, published in Art Journal, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 7-21, published by College Art Association