QUOTESMITH

What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato’s cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don’t know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?

Philosophy is not a doctrine it is an activity/Tatigkeit… The results of philosophy are not ‘philosophical sentences’ but the clarification of sentences. Philosophy should make thought that is otherwise cloudy and indistinct, clear, and should sharply differentiate it.

There is a gang of artists, theoreticians, and artist-theoreticians who have a very strong affinity (moreover, one that links them to a figure such as Artaud): they burn and burn up in the endeavour to push out as far as possible the limits of what language and machines, as the primary instances of structure and order for the last few centuries, are able to express and in doing so to actually reveal these limits.

Modernism had two great wishes. It wanted its audience to be led towards a recognition of the social reality of the sign (away from the comforts of narrative and illusionism, was the claim); but equally it dreamed of turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity which the to and fro of capitalism had all but destroyed. […] Modernism lacked the basis, social and epistemological, on which its two wishes might be reconciled. The counterfeit nature of its dream of freedom is written into the dream’s realization.

In a letter to Jane Drew, Maxwell Fry and Pierre Jeanneret (December 1951) Le Corbusier described their task as:

‘To give India the Architecture of Modern Times, Modern Techniques, Modern Mind, and adaptation to the surrounding conditions that are extreme over there. The climate is wonderful, heroic and at times overwhelming.’ (Oeuvres Completes. Vol VI p51).

Some of twenty-two years ago in a gathering, I was asked what my painting really means in terms of society, in terms of the world… And my answer then was that if my work were properly understood, it would be the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism. Because to the extent that my painting was not an arrangement of objects, not an arrangement of spaces, not an arrangement of graphic elements, was [instead] an open painting… to that extent I thought, and I still believe, that my work in terms of its social impact does denote the possibility of an open society.