Yves Bonnefoy (to Paula Rego): ‘Paula, you put speech to the test of night. The frail voice which sought the clearest and simplest truth in the relationship between people, you bury it, as a mountain crumbles, under the multiplying voices that you hear crashing around inside you, as they protest violently, crazily, angrily, in the abyss of the unconscious. Your dark revelations have become the entire sky, the entire earth. What will remain of the hope of this child who has arrived from nowhere, clutching in his clenched fist what he needs to pay for his passage?
Everything, in my opinion.’
Anthony Howell: ‘Both fetishism and the carnivalesque have a bearing on the nature of curios. Familiar objects that are invested with more than their due share of interest may have become fetishised and as fetishes they may well feature in cabinets of curiosity. The carnivalesque, that fascination with the world turned upside down may also contribute to the curious – silver plate photographs of Popes and bishops staring into the heavens through the powerful lenses of telescopes in the Vatican observatory induce a vertiginous sense of the topsy–turvy.’
Alan Wall: ‘It is hard to imagine a Russian iconographer saying that in art one must kill the father. There the tradition, and its continuity, is of the essence. It is only when form is under dynamic interrogation, when art is turning itself inside out, when the new is in radical conflict with the old, that spiritual parricide appears to be in order. Modernism negotiates a crisis of form. The old realism had become, according to Brancusi, ‘a confusion of familiarities’, and the word familiarity is linked morphologically to the word family. So if you want to attack that effectively you will need to go for the head, which is to say the paterfamilias. So shall we modify Picasso’s statement and say, in modern – and certainly modernist – art one must kill the father, because the father still commands that kingdom which represents our ‘confusion of familiarities’? His is the old formality that must be broken up by those excluded from the Salon, the Young Turks of innovation and dissent stirring out there on the street.’
Anthony Howell: ‘The cave paintings have a swift, improvisatory feel. Often they are superimposed, one on another. Very small tribes may have spoken different languages, but you needed a fair number of hunters for a mammoth hunt. What this tribe called a mammoth, another called a borogove. But if the hunters from several tribes came together in a cave, you could all agree on a drawing. What are we hunting? We are hunting that!’
Nigel Wheale: ‘Almost everyone involved in organising the five exhibitions of Guernica during these critical months, and many of those who visited them, must have been aware that Franco’s Nationalists were at that moment remorselessly destroying all hope of a Republican victory; on 2 November an armed Nationalist merchantman had even sunk a Republican steamer carrying food seven miles off the Norfolk coast near Cromer. While Guernica was on its progress through England, Republican lines were collapsing, the front destroyed; Catalonia was overrun during January, half a million fleeing north from Barcelona in the last days of the month.’
Walter Pater: ‘We come at last in the marbles of Aegina to a monument, which bears upon it the full expression of this humanism,—to a work, in which the presence of man, realised with complete mastery of hand, and with clear apprehension of how he actually is and moves and looks, is touched with the freshest sense of that new-found, inward value; the energy of worthy passions purifying, the light of his reason shining through, bodily forms and motions, solemnised, attractive, pathetic. We have reached an extant work, real and visible, of an importance out of all proportion to anything actually remaining of earlier art…’
Walter Pater: ‘This whole first period of Greek art might, indeed, be called the period of graven images, and all its workmen sons of Daedalus; for Daedalus is the mythical, or all but mythical, representative of all those arts which are combined in the making of lovelier idols than had heretofore been seen. ‘
Walter Pater: The highest Greek sculpture is presented to us in a sort of threefold isolation; isolation, first of all, from the concomitant arts—the frieze of the Parthenon without the metal bridles on the horses, for which the holes in the marble remain; isolation, secondly, from the architectural group of which, with most careful estimate of distance and point of observation, that frieze, for instance, was designed to be a part; isolation, thirdly, from the clear Greek skies, the poetical Greek life, in our modern galleries.
Keith Johnson: The “Privat Lampe des Künstlers II” floor lamp is an attempt to allow the opportunity to decorate a private residence with a rather strange yet wonderful Franz West metal object. This lamp, fabricated of unwieldly-looking iron chain, is absolutely austere in its appearance. Its sole embellishment: a disquieting raw light bulb.
Anthony O’Hear: I suppose, in most sculpture there will be several final causes, several purposes for which the work is done; but as human work, it will have always have some final causality, and in having it, a sculptural object will be distinguished from a purely natural stone, however similar the two might be in appearance. A whole host of other questions, about form and meaning, will then come into play in determining our response to the sculptural object.
Keith Johnson: As is often the case in great works of art, “Modus Operandi” dormeuse reveals an unplanned yet “controlled” accident – a side-view of the head-rest shows that in the course of pulling the fabric into a French-twist bolster, the woven Freudian words appear to be spinning “uncontrollably” inwards towards the center – a veritable “vortex of the mind” of whomever might be laying there.
Keith Johnson: Lawrence Weiner, a central figure in the formation of 1960’s Conceptual art, is renowned for creating site-specific artwork that encompasses the usage of typographic texts. In this case, a rather normal-looking, Shaker-like desk and bench have been modified with copper-inlaid words and decorations in order to imply a greater sense of gravitas than a desk would normally offer by itself.
Keith Johnson: In this metaphoric object by the American conceptual word artist Lawrence Weiner, the act of creation cannot be performed except by artists who realize creation often starts with failure.
Charles Jencks: In architecture, the movement has returned after the Neo-Modernism of the 1990s, in every way but by name. The world is now saturated by the confused labels of Modernism and Post-Modernism, but the streams of concerns to which these labels used to refer are continuing. That is apparent in architecture with the digital ornament (a leading movement), the iconic building (with its many marvellous and woeful examples), and the hybrid “time buildings” (that mix past, present and future architectural codes).
Curiouser and curiouser.
Anthony Howell: ‘Both fetishism and the carnivalesque have a bearing on the nature of curios. Familiar objects that are invested with more than their due share of interest may have become fetishised and as fetishes they may well feature in cabinets of curiosity. The carnivalesque, that fascination with the world turned upside down may also contribute to the curious – silver plate photographs of Popes and bishops staring into the heavens through the powerful lenses of telescopes in the Vatican observatory induce a vertiginous sense of the topsy–turvy.’