Category: Vizarts

“Everything we have come to call the arts seems to be in almost every 3-year-old. When these capacities are absent in a young child, we worry about them. There seems to be an understanding that the thing we call the arts has a critical function for kids, though we may have a hard time saying just what it is, especially if we call it ‘art’—but ‘it’ existed before the word for it existed, not just generally but for each of us. We were doing all of these things before we knew what it was we were doing, it seemed to be something coming from the inside.” – Lynda Barry, Making Comics

“The discourse of art, like any other professional discourse, imposes limitations on the possibilities of the gaze, speech or actions conducted by the spectator. The discourse of art directs us to continue to see the work of art as the source and goal of discourse, and enables the specialist spectator to exercise professional knowledge and to enjoy the fruits of its authority. . . . A civil intention enables the spectator to exceed the limits of professional discourse and to regard the image, not as source and end in itself, but first and foremost as a platform that bears the traces of others, and thus as a junction that articulates between such traces and the spectator who sees them.” – Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography

“The photograph is never a sealed product that expresses the intentions of a single player. The photograph does not make a truth claim nor does it refute other truth claims. Truth is not to be found in the photograph. The photograph merely divulges the traces of truth or of its refutation.” – Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography

“To historicize visual culture adequately is also to undermine the narrative that presents the history of art as the pertinent field of knowledge for the generation of visual culture in relation to which visual culture stands as a kind of appendix or late variant, possessed nevertheless of loyalty to shared principles. The hegemonic narrative, which accepts the imperialist pretenses of the history of art, presents art as the central channel for visual practice and sees photography as a sub-medium within this. In this account, photography has, since its inception, knocked ceaselessly on the door of art in order to gain admittance into its domain. Within the narrative it offers, the history of photography is indivisible from supposedly key moments when the photograph was admitted into museums of art. Such a narrative erases the infinite richness of photography and the many uses to which it was put outside of the context of art or the museum. It overlooks the fact that most users of photography display no desire to belong to the field of art, nor do they seek the recognition of its resident experts.” – Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography

“The coming together of the photographer with the persons photographed always extends beyond the concrete encounter between them. The photograph serves to increase the chances that the encounter will, in fact, endure, migrating to other spaces and circumstances which, at the very least, evade the photographer’s ability, or that of the persons photographed, to know them in advance.” – Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography

“The photographer engages in a significant series of choices with respect to the event of photography, and these influence the manner in which its final product—the photograph—will appear. Such choices begin with the sheer decision to aim the camera in the direction of a certain event or certain individual, and range through decisions relating to the selection of colors employed or the angle of the shot that will determine the tone of the frame. But even when a photograph is staged in all of its particulars, so that these decisions are highly controlled and highly rigid, the photographer still employs a camera and people are still present in the situation alongside her: they, in fact, stand before her. The co-presence of individuals at the time that the photograph is taken is admittedly usually managed in accordance with the ritual of photography, but it is never totally subordinated to the latter. The space that extends between them, and subsequently the space that extends between them and the spectators of their photograph, is a political space where huma beings look at one another, speak and act in a manner that is not solely subordinate to disciplinary constraints, nor to ones of governance.” – Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography

“It’s very hard indeed if not impossible to intend or design something uncanny. The uncanny results, it isn’t something you have much control over.” – Ian Penman, “Wham Bang, Teatime” (emphasis in original)

“The texture of any great work of art is complex and ambiguous.” – Northrop Frye, “The Archetypes of Literature”

“To judge a contemporary work of art correctly demands that calm, unprejudiced mood which, while susceptible to every impression, carefully guards against preconceived opinion or feelings. It requires a mind completely open to the particular work under consideration.” – Carl Maria von Weber, (Composers on Music, ed. Sam Morgenstern)

“For practical living, man needs to be free in his thought and responsible in his actions. But in dealing with art, responsibility of thought, which makes for slowness of judgment, and freedom of action, which makes for flexibility of taste, constitute the mechanics of vigor.” – Virgil Thomson, Taste in Music

“Thus it happened that Adolf Schiele, then twenty-four, encountered Franz Soukup’s twelve-year-old daughter. According to family legend, it was love at first sight, at least for Adolf, who vowed to make Marie his wife. Whether, as has been said, the Soukups opposed the marriage is debatable; the connection with the prosperous Schiele family was certainly not one to be disdained. However, Marie was scarcely more than a child when in 1879, at the age of seventeen, she married Adolf. Strictly educated in a Viennese convent, she knew nothing of the world and supposedly still played with dolls. On her wedding night, it is said, she fled the nuptial chamber in horror. Adolf Schiele was no such innocent: at about the time of his wedding, he had contracted syphilis. He refused to seek treatment and remained essentially asymptomatic until 1902, when the disease surfaced in its final, mortal stage. For Marie Schiele, the first years of marriage were blackened by the illness. Annually, more or less around the date of her wedding anniversary, she gave birth, and each year, for three years in succession, the infants were stillborn. Finally, on May 28, 1883, she bore a seemingly normal girl, christened Elvira. (All of the Schiele children would be raised in the Catholic faith, their mother’s religion.) In 1886, a second daughter, Melanie, was born. Egon, who came into the world on June 12, 1890, was the first and only son to survive. ‘[H]e is a dear strong child,’ Marie noted in her diary. ‘God preserve him for us. may he grow and flourish!’” – Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: Life and Work (footnotes omitted)

“We don’t need art to express ourselves. If you are sad, then cry. If you are angry, destroy something. If you don’t like something, say no to it. But if you want to make art, then do it because you want to make art and not for any other reason.” – Slovenian Damien Hirst (interviewed by Jesse Darling in “Being Damien Hirst”)