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.
all the sounds of the environment at once
“In 1969 . . . [part of] a special edition of Marshall McLuhan’s Dew-Line Newsletter . . . [was] a pack of cards, the “Distant Early Warning Deck.”. . . Each card has a quotation from a different thinker or artist. The five of diamonds is dedicated to [John] Cage, and bears the following: ‘[S]ilence is all the sounds of the environment at once.’”
—Charlie Gere, from Art, Time and Technology, 2006.
haunted Sixties culture
“[A] dream of technical control and of instant information conveyed at unthought-of velocities haunted Sixties culture. The wired, electonic outlines of a cybernetic society became apparent to the visual imagination.”
—David Mellor, from The Sixties: Art Scene in London, 1993.
The arc-light
“The arc-light shining into his window seemed for this hour like the moon, only brighter and more beautiful than the moon.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, from The Beautiful and Damned, 1922.
Madame Jouvenon
“Madame Jouvenon was . . . seated in La Sevillana eating a merinque. She was a bright-eyed little woman whose hair, having gone prematurely white, she had unwisely allowed to be dyed a bright silvery blue. To complete the monochromatic color scheme she had let Mlle. Sylvie dye her brows and lashes a much darker and more intense shade of blue. The final effect was not without impact.”
—Paul Bowles, from Let it Come Down, 1952.
furry beams of light
“When he looked at the sun, his eyes closed almost tight, he saw webs of crystalline fire crawling across the narrow space between the slitted lids, and his eyelashes made the furry beams of light stretch out, recede, stretch out.”
—Paul Bowles, from Let it Come Down, 1952.