Category Archives: Thought

Tagg on Documentary photography

February 15, 2013

“Documentary is not documentation. While documentary practice may have traded rhetorically with the quasi-scientifc techniques of nineteenth-century documentation, it no longer functioned as a jealously guarded technical discourse produced by experts for experts. While the authority of documentary may have… Continue reading →

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Kiefer on Art

February 8, 2013

“All of painting, but also Literature, and all that goes with it, is merely a process of going round and round something inexpressible, round a black hole or crater whose centre one cannot penetrate. And those things one seizes on… Continue reading →

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Mauron on Mallarmé

February 8, 2013

“All who remember the day when first they looked into the Poems or the Divagations will testify to that curious feeling of exclusion which put them, in the face of a text written with their words (and moreover, as they could somehow… Continue reading →

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Steiner on Art

February 1, 2013

“Whatever enriches the adult imagination, whatever complicates consciousness and thus corrodes the clichés of daily reflex, is a high moral act. Art is privileged, indeed obliged, to perform this act; it is the live current which splinters and regroups the… Continue reading →

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Foucault on Language

February 1, 2013

“At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its… Continue reading →

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One off: Jean-Siméon Chardin

February 1, 2013

  Portrait of Madame Chardin, 1775 by Jean-Siméon Chardin “Chardin’s genre paintings, like Vermeer’s before him, go much further than that. By a technical feat which virtually defies analysis — though one writer has remarked helpfully on Chardin’s characteristic choice… Continue reading →

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Beckett on Language

February 1, 2013

“It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at… Continue reading →

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Barthelme on not knowing

February 1, 2013

“What is magical about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation” — from “On Writing” in Not-Knowing by Donald Barthelme. Photograph by Eva Vermandel, from Splinter.

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Cavell on Photography

February 1, 2013

“To say that photographs lie implies that they might tell the truth; but the beauty of their nature is exactly to say nothing, neither to lie nor not to. Then what purpose may be served, or disguised, in attempting to… Continue reading →

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Sante on photography

December 29, 2012

“Sometimes, looking at these cards, you come upon a picture that makes you feel as if its maker had just discovered photography, had made it up by himself from scratch. The American real photo postcard is a laboratory for the… Continue reading →

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