59. “One “retracts””

Each one (retracts) within the time of the utterance of his fellow.

– The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin

Reality no longer sustains the values necessary to the creation of Snow White…, or the witch or the dwarfs; it lacks the floor under the imagination, the ingredients of possible aspiration, the hunger for simulated fate, to create “stories” of any kind. There is therefore no happy ending to this Snow White, no denouement except one that mocks the original’s, no satisfaction to be obtained from a clear, completed arc of fictional experience. Fiction, Barthelme is saying, has lost its power to transform and convince and substitute, just as reality has lost, perhaps only temporarily (but that is not the concern of the imagination), its need and capacity to sustain fictions of this kind…. [The] book makes its way by dealing steadily with the problems of language. One “retracts” what the written world has been composed of not by ignoring it, by writing new language, but by discrediting it as the answer to one’s own contemporary needs.

– Richard Gilman: ‘Donald Barthelme’ reprinted Random House in ‘The Confusion of Realms’ in 1969 

60. “representationalism”

There is no doubt whatever that all our cognition begins with experience; for how else should the cognitive faculty be awakened in exercise if not through objects that stimulate our senses and in part themselves produce representations, in part bring the activity of our understanding into motion to compare these, to connect or separate them, and thus to work up the raw material of sensible impressions into a cognition of objects that is called experience? As far as time is concerned, then, no cognition in us precedes experience, and with experience every cognition begins.

– Immanuel Kant: ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’

See also, Robert M. Coates: ‘The Art Galleries: Creeping Representationalism‘, The New Yorker 36, no. 8, 9 April 1960.

61. “Motion of non-events”

B. The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.

D. Why is he obliged to paint?

B. I don’t know.

D. Why is he helpless to paint?

B. Because there is nothing to paint and nothing to paint with.

D. “And the result, you say, is art of a new order?” A friend of mine recounts the story of his college art history professor who introduced the work of Piet Mondrian by projecting a slide of the Dutch countryside near the Hague, where topography approaches zero. The implication, of course, is that Mondrian’s extreme rectolinephilia was a function of his environment – his paintings, in spite of their putative abstraction, are inevitably informed by History. I am by nature skeptical of this stripe of historical determinism. In fact, until I learned recently that Jackson Pollock grew up next door to a spaghetti factory, I tended to agree with Dr. Freud, who argued that what comes out is more than likely to be the opposite of what goes in. That is to say, I would not be surprised to learn little Piet spent his formative years in the Himalayas.

– Samuel Beckett: ‘Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’, Calder and Boyars, 1965

See also, Vivian Mercier: ‘The Mathematical Limit’, The Nation, Vol. 188, 14 February 1959.

“Reinhardt made the slideshow all his own. He referred to his lectures as “non-happenings” – they were often send-ups of both the avant-garde “happenings” also taking place in New York at the time, and the traditional university art history lecture, affectionately known as “darkness at noon.” Reinhardt staged his presentations to thwart expectation and even exhaust his audience. (He once showed over 2,000 slides in one sitting at the Artists’ Club, in a talk that began at 10 pm.) “He’d sit with the tray in his lap, feeding the slides into the projector, improvising as he went along,” Dale McConathy described. “His commentary ranged between art history and a devilish parody of the travelogue.” Reinhardt’s seemingly infinite catalogue mirrored his interest in two influential postwar theories of art classification: André Malraux’s conception of a museum without walls, and George Kubler’s framing of objects and history in The Shape of Time.”

– Prudence Peiffer: ‘Ad Reinhardt: Slides’, The Brooklyn Rail, 16 January 2014

62. “Status in imagination”

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘Biographia Literaria’, 1817

63. “Deprived of their tyranny”

If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

– John Stuart Mill: ‘On Liberty’ (‘Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion’), 1859

64. “fashionable facts”

As of her great proto-type, it may be said of her that “in this young lady there was nothing real” (or si peu giie rien) except vanity. She could take the colour chamseleon fashion of all the fashionable facts and fancies; she could simulate the fashionable sentiment; she could be artistic, passionate, and so forth by turns.

– George Saintsbury: ‘The Later Nineteenth Century’, 1907

66. “Do nothing but repeat its dead form”

Does Islamic non-figurative art triumphantly proclaim the “Infinite Oneness of God” or does it triumphantly proclaim again, with all other art, only the same “endless sameness of art”?

– Ad Reinhardt: ‘Art Vs. History’, Art News, January 1966

This new part of your ‘art-as-art dogma’ looks like the same old thing. Are you still saying the one thing you say needs to be said over and over again and that this thing is the only thing for an artist to say” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“There’s nothing else to say?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

– Ad Reinhardt: Autointerview, Art News, March 1965

The necessity of doing nothing

(The necessity of) not doing anything

“Striving” for nothing.

– Ad Reinhardt: ‘[Notes on the Black Paintings]’, Unpublished, undated notes

Where there is nothing but the one, nothing is seen

– Ad Reinhardt: ‘ONE’, Unpublished Notes, 1966-67

Endless repetition of infinite sameness / Not sameness but oneness?”

– Ad Reinhardt: ‘Art-As-Art’, Unpublished Notes, 1966-67

Because there is nothing to paint and nothing to paint with.

– Samuel Beckett: ‘Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit’, Calder and Boyars, 1965

[Oneness] [00]

(‘Art as Art’ pp. 105 to 107)

Shadow of the spiritual [01], the one, the good [02]

(Sign, image, universe of sense [03] only) purest, most equivocal

Movement beyond itself toward its idea [04]

Intensified, purified, exalted, awesome nearness of center [05]

Purgative, illuminative, unitive [06], most secret working [07]

Innermost essence, perfection inner concentration [08]

A principle of its own which however capable of historical evolution,

yet remains unchanged in essence [09]

No “lowest common denominator” but highest

Secondlessness [10], secondarinessless, non-duality, unmixed being [11]

Mystical ascent [12] ( – separation from error [13], evil

( –        “       from world of appearances [14], sense

(attractions [15]

( – “the divine dark” [16] – “luminous darkness” [17]

First, light, then cloud, finally dark [18]

Yearning for further vision [19] –> vision beyond vision [20]

Neither choice nor chance [21], chance not choice

No Part of the flux [22], fluxum & jetsum

“Let’s get the flux outa here”

Always seen as something new, strange, wonder [23].

Never exhaust desire to see more [24]

“One” over by it, “oneder,” “onederfull”

Awareness of hidden things [25], look toward what is hidden [26]

Avest for that which has no dimension, no time [27]

Nothing to take hold of, neither place, time, measure, nor anything else [28].

Beyond essence, inconceivability

Beyond light, limit, the unmixed, the unfettered

the unchangeable, the untrammeled 

Intangible, invisible, illimitable

Beyond “ seeing,” beyond foul and fair [29]

Of what transcends all affirmation.

What is beyond all negation [30] beyond becoming

Advance toward the formless, what is without contour, 

Encountering nothingness [31]

Contemplate supreme principle [32] of the one, hold to unity [33]

The one does not contain any difference, always present [34]

The one is not in some one place [35], pinpoint, pigeonhole

The one not aspire to us, we aspire to it [36], achievement

At home with voids, reality, and self sums, products of zero

“Not that”, it is “no thing”, “nil”, “nothing” [37]

“A non-rendering of non-experience” [38]

turning up as dark shadow, spreading stain, widening fissure
Nay-sayers, underminers [39]
Absurd [40], nausea [41], negativity, cold wind of nothing, blankness [42]
Nothing is the whole, or at least the central, tune [43]

Masters of voidness

Flaubert, Melville, Mallarme [44]

“Bottomless doubt” [45]

Sum of all enigmas, deliberately thwarts every system of inquiry and interpretation

Pervasive presence [46]

Interstices of void [47] provide perspective, depth, significant distance

“Unnamable” [48]

“Sense of an ending,” paradigm of apocalypse [49]

Structure mere successiveness into patterns [50]

make life endurable [51] against the drear perspectives of ongoing

time? [52]

Make sense of their span 

fictive concords with origins and ends <– [53]

Moves off the plane of theory [54]

Break through its own paradigms

Reinvent cherishable world within prison of temporality [55]

The only distinction to hold up in the long run is the one between good

and bad [56]

From painting to painting from time to time

Far-ranging mockery

Wealth of possibility whose individual possibilities tend to cancel one 

another out 

Unfreedom felt as freedom and the reverse

Radical mistrust of language, writing, fiction, imagination [57]

Resist at same time as it stays in connection

Not-again-to-be-taken-in

New formed on the dead ground [58]

One “retracts” what has been done not by ignoring it or doing it new

But by discrediting it as the answer [59]

Discrediting its claims, to be what art has to be

–> representationalism [60]

“Freaking out,” “blowing one’s mind”

Motion of non-events [61]

Status in imagination [62]

Deprived of their tyranny [63] as fashionable facts [64]

Easy score

Redeem it from exhausted uses and servitude to other powers [65]

Do nothing but repeat its dead form [66] <–