White and black

“Negatives—positives . . . the hallucinatory play of black and white . . . I deduced therefrom, philosophically speaking, that white and black signs, and the inevitable antinomy of the ideas of the past, like ‘day and night’, ‘angel and devil’, ‘good and evil’, are in reality complementaries, a fertile androgynous idea . . . White and black, yes and no, it is the binary language of cybernetics, making possible the building of a plastic bank in electronic brains. White and black, it is the indestructibility of art-thought and hence the perenniality of the work in its original form.”

—Victor Vasarely, 1965; quoted in Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s by John Houston, 2007.

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