“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,…
Read More“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…
Read More“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…
Read More“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…
Read More“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…
Read More“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…
Read More“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.…
Read More“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…
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N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 