The play of refracted light
“The Projection Screen. Here is to be found the interpretation of [Kasimir] Malevich’s last picture [White on White, 1918]—the plain white surface, which constituted an ideal plane for kinetic light and shadow effects which, originating in the surroundings, would fall upon it. In this way, Malevich’s picture represented a miniature cinema screen. . . .
The play of refracted light. In the continuation of this work we must undoubtedly come to the manipulation of moving, refracted light (color); we must “paint” with flowing, oscillating prismatic light. . . .”
—Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, from The New Vision, 1947.
the theory of neoplasticism
“Using only the primary plastic elements: the straight line, the right angle, the rectangle, and the colors yellow, red, blue (primary colors), white, gray, and black (neutral colors), the De Stijl painters formed the structural syntax which was automatically translated into the theory of neoplasticism.”
—Daniele Baroni, from The Furniture of Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, 1977.
the principle of primary colors
“[T]he De Stijl artists—including Rietveld in his early furniture—held rigidly to the principle of primary colors—red, blue and yellow—together with the use of noncolors like gray, white, and black, and rejected the contamination of complementary and secondary colors.”
—Daniele Baroni, from The Furniture of Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, 1977.
the ‘flim flam’
“[W]hen I had got hold of a bank roll, I gave up the rough graft of picking pockets and started in what was called at that time “sure thing graft” such as the “flim flam,” or more properly speaking, short changing with a ten or twenty dollar bill. I worked this graft for about six months and was very successful.
In the meantime, I became acquainted with the men in the the green goods business. . . .”
—George Appo, from his unpublished autobiography; quoted by Timothy J Gilfoyle in A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York, 2006.
The green goods game
“The green goods game worked like this: Operators sent out letters or “circulars” throughout the United States claiming that they possessed stolen or discarded currency engraving plates from the U.S. Treasury. The circular offered genuine-looking counterfeit money, or “green goods,” to prospective buyers at cut-rate prices. For one hundred dollars one could purchase twelve hundred dollars in counterfeit notes; six hundred dollars bought ten thousand dollars of the same. For purchasing the maximum, the individual was promised “states rights,” or a monopoly on the green goods in his region. . . .
The most successful green goods operations required considerable finance, thoughtful planning, elaborate hierarchies, and police or political protection. Leading financial backers, or “capitalists,” supplied bankrolls of three thousand to twenty thousand dollars to display before potential victims, a huge sum of money in an age when unskilled workers earned less than one thousand dollars annually. . . .
The best defense . . . was that the green goods game was legal. Since such swindlers displayed genuine currency during their transactions, they were not guilty of fraud, counterfeiting, or any other statutory crime. . . . A cunning green goods operator used only legal tender . . . ‘which he pretends to be counterfeit.’”
—Timothy J Gilfoyle, from A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York, 2006.
black monoliths ten feet tall
“As I came of age, earth was visited yet again in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. . . . These aliens were neither monsters of organic mutation nor totalitarian robots, neither vegetable nor mechanical nor near-human in crustacean make-up and/or what passed for futuristic couture at the time. Instead the nonhuman arrived in utterly nonhuman form: black monoliths ten feet tall.”
—Edward Strickland, from Minimalism: Origins, 2000; quoted by Charlie Gere in Art, Time and Technology, 2006.
a series of discrete, universal signs
“By the beginning of the nineteenth century it was possible to grind paint mechanically, rather than by hand, as had been the practice hitherto. . . . One result of this was that the nature of paint changed considerably. . . . [M]achine production tended to lead to overgrinding, which meant that the subtle differences between pigments that hand grinding brought out were lost. . . .
Mechanical grinding of paints led to another important development, that of paint in tubes. . . . [T]he mechanized production of paint and its storing in sealable tubes—as opposed to its production by hand—standardized colour, both literally, in that additives such as wax and oil tended to efface the differences between pigments, and conceptually in that it turned colours into a series of discrete, universal signs, “cadmium red”, “magenta” and so on. . . .”
—Charlie Gere, from Art, Time and Technology, 2006.
apostrophes, stripes, commas, bars
“Van Gogh is a painter because he re-collected nature as if he had re-perspired it and made it sweat, made it spurt forth in luminous beams onto his canvas, in monumental clusters of colors, the secular crushing of elements, the fearful elementary pressure of apostrophes, stripes, commas, bars, and we can no longer believe, after him, that the natural aspects of nature are not made up of these things. . . .
with color seized as if just pressed out of the tube,
with the imprint of each hair of his brush in the color,
with the texture of the painted paint, distinct in its own sunlight, with the I, the comma, the period of the point of the brush itself screwed right onto the hearty color that spurts forth in the forks of fire which the painter tames and remixes everywhere.”
—Antonin Artaud, from Van Gogh, le suicid’ de soci’t’, 1963; quoted by Charlie Gere in Art, Time and Technology, 2006.
Man’s skull
“Man’s skull . . . is equal to the universe, for in it is contained all that it sees in it. Likewise the sun and the whole starry sky of comets and the sun pass in it and shine and move as in nature; similarly, comets appear in it and disappear, inasmuch as they do in nature; all projects for perfection exist within it. Epoch after epoch, culture after culture appear and disappear in its infinite space.”
—Kasimir Malevich; quoted by Charlie Gere in Art, Time and Technology, 2006.
Advance boldly, great and small workers of the human race
“If transportation of mankind to another sun is possible, then why our fears about the light-giving span of life of our presently bright sun? Let it grow dim and become extinct! During hundreds of millions of years of its glory and brilliance man will be able to build up supplies of energy and emigrate with them to another seat of life. . . .
In all likelihood, the better part of humanity will never perish but will move from sun to sun as each dies out in succession. Many decillion years hence we may be living near a sun which today has not yet even flared up but exists only in the embryo, in the form of nebulous matter designed for eternity and for high purposes. . . .
Thus, there is no end to life, to reason and to perfection of mankind. Its progress is eternal. And if that is so, one cannot doubt the attainment of immortality.
Advance boldly, great and small workers of the human race, and you may be assured that not a single bit of your labours will vanish without a trace but will bring to you great fruit in infinity.”
—Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovski, Investigation of World Spaces by Reactive Vehicles, 1911-12; quoted by Charlie Gere in Art, Time and Technology, 2006.