Quotes

Adam Fuss

“We are so conditioned to the syntax of the camera. We don’t realize we’re running on half the visual alphabet” (in Higgins 2013, 88).

Alan Watts

“In reality there is nothing in the universe which is completely perfect or completely still; it is only in the minds of men that such concepts exist” (in Juniper 2003, 7).

Charlie Sheeler

“Isn’t it remarkable how photography has advanced without improving?” (in Carroll 2018, 120).

Doug and Mike Starn

“Photography isn’t just an image, any more than a painting is just paint. The print is an object, and this object becomes the embodiment of a concept” (in Higgins 2013, 87).

Hans Arp

“What arrogance is concealed in perfection? Why struggle for purity and position when they can never be attained? The law of chance, which embraces all other laws and is as unfathomable as the depths from which all life arises, can only be comprehended by a complete surrender to the unconscious” (in Gold 1978, 05:39).

Igor Stravinsky

"The study of the creative process is an extremely delicate one. In truth, it is impossible to observe the inner workings of this process from the outside" (Stravinsky 1947, 49).

“[M]y freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit" (Stravinsky 1947, 65).

John Baldessari

“It’s a myth that photography represents the truth … If anybody believes a photograph is telling the truth, they’re in the dark ages” (Baldessari 2018, 0:07).

John Berger

“In itself the photograph cannot lie, but, by the same token, it cannot tell the truth; or rather, the truth it does tell, the truth it can by itself defend, is a limited one” (in Berger and Mohr 1995, 97).

“The more imaginative the work, the more profoundly it allows us to share the artist's experience of the visible” (Berger 1972, 10).

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

“The enemy of photography is the convention, the fixed rules of ‘how to do.’ The salvation of photography comes from the experiment” (in Seiferle 2012)

Man Ray

"It isn’t a question of understanding, it’s a matter of acceptance" (in Kuenzli 2015, 23).

"I [do] not even understand my own things myself or why I [do] them. But I [do] not care: the idea [is] to do it. It isn’t a question of understanding, it’s a matter of acceptance" (in Kuenzli 2015, 23).

Mariah Robertson

“[We’re in] an age of extinction: films, chemistries and equipment are being discontinued […] It’s like standing on the polar ice cap watching it melt around you” (in Higgins 2013, 107).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

To think is thus to test out, to operate, to transform" (Merleau-Ponty 1996, 122).

Phil Jackson

“You’re only a success at the moment you perform a successful act” (The Guardian 2009).

Robert Rauschenberg

"Screwing things up is a virtue" (in Higgins 2013, 188).

“You don’t choose to be an artist, and I don’t think you learn to be one either” (in Granlund 1997, 00:36).

Sigmar Polke

"What interests me is unforeseeable uncertainty" (in Thistlewood 1996).

Wassily Kandinsky

“Painting is like a thundering collision of different worlds that are destined in and through conflict to create that new world called the work … Every work of art comes into being in the same way as the cosmos by means of catastrophes, which ultimately create out of the cacophony of the various instruments that symphony we call the music of the spheres … The very word composition called forth in me an inner vibration. Subsequently, I made it my aim in life to paint a ‘composition’” (in Dabrowski 1995, 10).

Bibliography

Baldessari, John. 2014. "John Baldessari on fighting the 'photography' label". San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. September 28, 2018. YouTube video, 02:08. https://youtu.be/UCnzsLhER7g.

Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books.

Berger, John and Jean Mohr. 1995. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books.

Carroll, Henry. 2018. Photographers on Photography: How the Masters See, Think & Shoot. London: Laurence King Publishing.

Dabrowski, Magdalena. 1995. “Kandinsky Compositions: The Music of the Spheres.” MoMA 19: 10–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4381285.

Fuss, Adam. 2018. “Camera-Less Photography: Adam Fuss”. Victoria Albert Museum. YouTube video. October 10, 2018, 03:40. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHNvVm0Rp_4.

Gold, Mick. 1978. “Dada and Surrealism: Europe After the Rain documentary (1978)”. Manufacturing Intellect. January 25, 2018. YouTube video, 01:21:19. https://youtu.be/sdBaS8fgwNs.

Higgins, Jackie. 2013. Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus. London: Thames & Hudson.

Juniper, Andrew. 2003. Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence. North Clarendon: Tuttle Publishing. ProQuest Ebook Central. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=900365.

Kuenzli, Rudolf. 2006. Dada. New York: Phaidon Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1993) 1996. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Edited and translated by Michael B. Smith. 2nd ed. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Seiferle, Rebecca. 2012. "László Moholy-Nagy Artist Overview and Analysis". theartstory.org. https://www.theartstory.org/artist/moholy-nagy-laszlo/.

Stravinsky, Igor. 1947. “The Composition of Music.” In The Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, translated by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl, 45–65. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

The Guardian. 2009. “Phil Jackson Warns NBA Champions LA Lakers against Complacency.” The Guardian. October 27, 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2009/oct/27/phil-jackson-la-lakers-nba.

Thistlewood, David. 1996. Sigmar Polke: Back to Postmodernity. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press And Tate Gallery Liverpool.