Ludwig Wittgenstein
Describe the aroma of coffee – why can’t it be done? Do we lack the words? And for what are words lacking? – But how do we get the idea that such a description must after all be possible? Have you ever felt the lack of such a description? Have you ever tried to describe the aroma and not succeeded?
Philosophische Untersuchungen

John McLaughlin
My purpose is to achieve the totally abstract. I want to communicate only to the extent that the painting will serve to induce or intensify the viewer’s natural desire for contemplation without benefit of a guiding principle. I must therefore free the viewer from the demands or special qualities imposed by the particular by omitting the image (object). This I manage by the use of neutral forms.
If I were to paint a “thing” or “conclusive idea” I would in effect by asking the spectator to believe with me that I had discovered or recognized a truth. This to me would be unreasonable. On the other hand I do not hesitate to present an anonymous structure designed to provoke in him a desire to consider and without restriction his relationship to nature.
The uncompromised form by virtue of its power to withhold neither reveals nor conceals.
Pasadena, 1963

Samuel Beckett
To restore silence is the role of objects.
Molloy, 1951

Francis Bacon
Could you try and define the difference between an illustrational and a nonillustrational form?
Well, I think the difference is that an illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact. Now why this should be, we don’t know. This may have to do with how facts themselves are ambiguous, how appearances are ambiguous, and therefore this way of recording form is nearer to the fact by the ambiguity of recording.
1975

Friedrich Nietzsche
We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.
Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn 1873

Martin Stokhof
The only true map of the world is the world itself.
The Company of Objects, 2008

Jozef Szeiler
But the quality, surely, is that through silence or rest, an equivalence takes place. Theatre as an art form, Which works with a stage, is based upon text and action; and the moment the text is taken away a silence is created, at least in the sense that there is no text; actions can still be performed, but a shift takes place: the overall environment becomes more interesting. Through silence one is always confronted with oneself, with the movement, the look, with that which one hears, as well as with the way in which one hears. When you take away the level of unity – which is always present in theatre – a radical shift in perception occurs. People leaving, rustling, coughing, blowing their noses... everything takes on a different quality, a different value. In a context such as this one could work with a text in a completely different way, concentrating on the compositional perspective rather than working from the basis of dramatic criteria.
interview in Vienna, 1993

Susan Sontag
What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.
[...] To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.
[...] Ingmar Bergman may have meant the tank rumbling down the empty night street in The Silence as a phallic symbol. But if he did, it was a foolish thought. (“Never trust the teller, trust the tale,” said Lawrence.) Taken as a brute object, as an immediate sensory equivalent for the mysterious abrupt armored happenings going on inside the hotel, that sequence with the tank is the most striking moment in the film. Those who reach for a Freudian interpretation of the tank are only expressing their lack of response to what is there on the screen.
It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else. Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.
Against Interpretation 1964

Mark Rothko
A painting is not about an experience. It is an experience.
in LIFE magazine (16 November 1959)

Aron Gurwitsch
What is imposed on us to do is not determined by us a someone standing outside the situation simply looking on at it; what occurs and is imposed are rather prescribed by the situation and its own structure; and we do more and greater justice to it the more we let ourselves be guided by it, i.e., the less reserved we are in immersing ourselves in it and subordinating ourselves to it. We find ourselves in a situation and are interwoven with it, encompassed by it, indeed just “absorbed” into it.
Human Encounters in the Social World, 1979

Robert Bresson
Make sure that you have exhausted everything that you can communicate by motionlessness and silence.
Notes sur le Cinématographe, 1975

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of well kept wrong turnings. And hence we see one person after another walking down the same paths & we know in advance the point at which they will branch off, at which they will walk straight on without noticing the turning, etc., etc.
The origin & the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can the more complicated forms grow.
Language – I want to say – is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’ (Faust)
Vermischte Bemerkungen

T.J. Clark
Our present means of image-production strike me as still utterly under the spell of the verbal – that’s the main part of the problem with them. They are an instrumentation of a certain kind of language use: their notions of image clarity, image flow, image depth, and image density are all determined by the parallel [unimpeded] movement of the logo, the brand name, the product slogan, the compressed pseudo-narrative of the TV commercial, the sound bite, the T-shirt confession, the chat show Q and A.
Billboards, web pages, and video games are just projections – perfections, perfected banalisations – of this world of half-verbal exchange. They are truly [as their intellectual groupies go on claiming] a “discourse” – read, a sealed echo chamber of lies.
Therefore it becomes more and more important to point to the real boundaries between seeing and speaking, or sentence and visual configuration. And imperative to keep alive a notion of a kind of visuality that truly establishes itself at the edge of the verbal - never wholly apart from it, that is, never out of discourse’s clutches, but able and willing to exploit the difference between a sign and a pose, say, or a syntactical structure and a physical [visual, material] interval.
I take a dim view of the present regime of the image not out of some nostalgic “logocentricity”, but because I see our image machines as flooding the world with words – with words [blurbs, jingles, catchphrases, ten thousand quick tickets to meaning] given just sufficient visual cladding.
The Sight of Death New Haven 2006

Ludwig Wittgenstein
The origin & the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can the more complicated forms grow.
Language – I want to say – is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’ (Faust)
Vermischte Bemerkungen 1937

Friedrich Nietzsche
Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases — which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal.
Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.
We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.
Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn (1873)

Mark Twain
Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889

Samuel Beckett
Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end.
The Unnamable, 1954

Jasper Johns
I think that most art which begins to make a statement fails to make a statement because the methods used are too schematic or too artificial. I think that one wants from painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be be what you can’t avoid saying, not what you set out to say.
London, 1974

Susan Sontag
One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling... which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment.
We have more or less the same bodies, but very different kinds of thoughts. I believe that we think much more with the instruments provided by our culture than we do with our bodies, and hence the much greater diversity of thought in the world. Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking.
The Rolling Stone Interview with Jonathan Cott 1978

Francisco Varela
The computationalist doctrine was dominant for many years, and it is still the common sense in the large public. From this point of view, the mind is necessarily in the head, and is largely representational machinery for control and action.
But the last 15 years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This new wave arose because the computationalist doctrine failed to account even for the most elementary coping with the world: walking, perceiving object in a natural setting, imagination.
Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. Form this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it is roots in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself.
Why the mind is not in the head. The Cosmos Letter, Expo’90 Foundation, Japan

M.R. Bennett & P.M.S. Hacker
When we say that someone changed his mind, that he has a dirty mind, and that he has turned his mind to such-and-such a question, we do not imply that there is one thing, a mind, which has changed, is dirty and has been turned. Indeed, the only thing we are speaking of is the person, and from case to case (and phrase to phrase) we are saying very different things of the person.
Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience 2003


Maurice Merlau-Ponty
For the player in action the football field is [...] pervaded with lines of force [...] and articulated in sectors (for example, the ‘openings’ between the adversaries) [...] the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the ‘goal’, for example, just as immediately as the vertical and the horizontal planes of his own body. It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of mileu and action.
The Structure of Behavior, 1942

Gilbert Ryle
The statement ‘the mind is its own place’, as theorists might construe it, is not true, for the mind is not even a metaphorical ‘place’. On the contrary, the chessboard, the platform, the scholar’s desk, the judge’s bench, the lorry-driver’s seat, the studio and the football field are among its places.
The Concept of Mind, 1949

William Stafford
The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying the things you do not have to say weakens your talk.
Hearing the things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing.
And the things you know before you hear them, these are you, and this is why you are in the world.
Crossing Unmarked Snow, 1998

Agnes Martin
My interest is in experience that is wordless and silent and in the fact that this experience can be expressed for me in art work which is also wordless and silent.
It is really wonderful to contemplate the experience and the works.
But with regard to the inner life of each of us it may be of great significance. If we can perceive ourselves in the work – not the work but ourselves when viewing the work - then the work is important. If we can know our response, see in ourselves what we have received from a work, that is the way to the understanding of truth and beauty.
We cannot understand the process of life – that is everything that happens to everyone. But we can know the truth by seeing ourselves, by seeing the response to the work in ourselves.
Those who depend on the intellect are the many. Those who depend on perception alone are the few.
New York, 1974

James Harris
'The artist can never use more of ever-changing reality than one single moment of time and, if he is a painter, he can look at this moment only from one single aspect. But since their works exist not only to be seen but also to be contemplated, contemplated at length and repeatedly, it is clear that this single moment and single aspect must be the most fruitful of all that can be chosen. Only that one is fruitful however, that gives free rein to the imagination. The more we see... the more we must believe ourselves to be seeing. There is no moment however in the whole sequence of an emotion which enjoys this advantage less than its climax. Beyond it there is nothing and thus to show to the eye the extreme, means to clip the wings of the imagination.'
from 'Discourse on Music Painting and Poetry' Three Treatises [1744]

Merleau-Ponty
"By considering the body in movement, we can see better how it inhabits space (and moreover, time) because movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and time - it actively assumes them, taking them up in their basic significance usually obscured in the commonplace of established situations."

"Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them. The world is not an object such that I have in my possesssion the law of its making: it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit, only the inner man — or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself." from 'Phenomenology of Perception' [1945]

Gilles Deleuze
'The body is the Figure, or rather the material of the Figure. The Figure, being body, is not the face, and in fact has no face. The head does not lack spirit; rather it is spirit in bodily form, the vital breath of the body, an animal spirit, the animal spirit of man. Man becomes animal, but the animal at the same time becomes spirit, the spirit of man, the physical spirit of man presented in a mirror, like the Eumenides or Fate'.
From 'Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation' [1981]

St. Augustine
'What is it therefore that I measure? Where is that short syllable by which I measure? Where is that long one which I measure? both have sounded, have flown and gone, they are now no more: and yet I measure them... it is not these sounds which are no longer, which i measure, but something that is in my memeory that remains fastend there. It is in thee my mind that i measure the times. Please do not interrupt me now, that is do not interrupt thine own self with the tumult of thine own impressions. In thee I say it is that I measure the time. The impression, which transient things cause in thee and which remains even when they have gone, that is it which being still present I measure.'
from 'Confessions'


Gertrude Stein
The thing that is fundamental about plays is that the scene as depicted on the stage is more often than not one might say it is almost always in syncopated time in relation to the emotion of anybody in the audience.

Your sensation as one in the audience in relation to the play played before you your sensation I say your emotion concerning that play is always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking and to which you are listening. So your emotion as a member of the audience is never going on at the same time as the action of the play.

In the first place at the theatre there is the curtain and the curtain already makes one feel that one is not going to have the same tempo as the thing which is there behind the curtain. The emotion of you at one side of the curtain and what is on the other side of the curtain are not going to be going on together. Then also beside the curtain there is the audience and and the fact that they are or will be or will not be in the way when the curtain goes up that too makes for nervousness and nervousness is the certain proof that the emotion of the one seeing and the emotion of the thing seen do not progress together. Nervousness consists in needing to go faster or go slower so as to get together. It is that that makes anybody nervous.

Beside all this there is the thing to be realized and that is how you are being introduced to the characters who take part in an exciting action even when you yourself are one of the actors.

The things over which one stumbled and there it was a matter of both seeing and hearing clothes, voices, what the actors said, how they were dressed and how that related itself to how they were moving around. Then the bother of never being able to begin over again because before it had commenced it was over, and at no time had you been ready, either to commence or be over. Then I began to vaguely wonder whether I could hear and see at the same time and which helped or interfered with the other and which helped or interfered with the thing on the stage having been over before it had really commenced. Could I see and hear and feel at the same time and did I.

Everybody knows so many stories and what is the use of telling another story.

Anyway the play as I see it is exciting and it moves but it also stays and that is as I said in the beginning might be what a play should do.
from 'Plays' Lectures in America 1916

Home