Arrival supplants departure

With the advent of instantaneous communications (satellite, TV, fiber optics, telematics) arrival supplants departure: everything arrives without necessarily having to depart.

Paul Virilio, 'The Overexposed City' in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Columbia Books of Architecture, 1998) p. 544

A time that instantaneously exposes itself

Only a short time ago, the opening of the city's gates was determined by the alternating of day and night. Today, however, since we not only open the shutters but also the television, daylight itself has been changed. A false electronic day, whose only calendar is based on "commutations" of information bearing no relationship whatsoever to real time, is now added to the solar day of astronomy, electric light and the dubious "daylight" of candles. Chronological and historical time, which passes, is this succeeded by a time that instantaneously exposes itself. On the terminal's screen, a span of time becomes both the surface and the support of inscription: time literally or, rather, cinematically surfaces.

Paul Virilio, 'The Overexposed City' in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Columbia Books of Architecture, 1998) p. 544

Amnesia-ridden hills

Everything you now think of as a room—as space, as volume, as creation—will soon just be a suffocation of sand grains packed together in dense, amnesia-ridden hills, landscapes almost laughably quick to forget they once were architecture.

Geoff Manaugh, 'When Hills Hide Arches' on Bldg Blog, http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/when-hills-hide-arches.html (31/03/2014)

Purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure

You know, the truth is, I think I do know what really disturbs me about this work that you’ve described – and I don’t even know if I can express it, Andre – but somehow, if I’ve understood what you’ve been saying, it somehow seems that the whole point of the work that you did in those workshops, when you get right down to it and ask what it really was all about – the whole point, really, I think, was to enable the people in the workshops, including yourself, to somehow sort of strip away every scrap of purposefulness from certain selected moments. And the point of it was so that you would then be able to experience somehow just pure being… And I think I just simply object to that. I mean, I just don’t think I accept the idea that there should be moments in which you’re not trying to do anything. I think it’s our nature to do things. I think purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure. And to say that we ought to be able to live without it is like saying that a tree ought to be able to live without branches or roots; but actually, without branches or roots, it wouldn’t be a tree. I mean, it would just be a log.

Wallace Shawn, My Dinner With Andre (Saga Productions Inc., 1981)

We are at the goal constantly

I found through Oriental philosophy, my work with Suzuki, that what we are doing is living, and that we are not moving toward a goal, but are, so to speak, at the goal constantly and changing with it, and that art, if it is going to do anything useful, should open our eyes to this fact.

John Cage, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 72

Free of our activity

By silence, I mean the multiplicity of activity that constantly surrounds us. We call it ”silence” because it is free of our activity. It does not correspond to ideas of order or expressive feeling – they lead to order and expression, but when they do, it ”deafens” us to the sounds themselves.

John Cage, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 71

Direct contact with ephemerality

The nature of listening is the experience of hearing something and then realizing that you’re no longer hearing it and that you’re hearing something else. This is part and parcel of hearing. When you look at a painting, you don’t have the impression that the painting is disappearing. But as you listen to sounds, you have the impression that they’re gone, and that others have taken their place. And you’re brought right by paying attention to events in time. All you need to see is [that] you’re brought into direct contact with ephemerality.

John Cage, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 66

No such thing as empty space or empty time

There is no such thing as empty space or empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot… Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

John Cage, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 61

Art is not an escape from life

Formerly, one was accustomed to thinking of art as something better organized than life that could be used as an escape from life. The changes that have taken place in this century, however, are such that art is not an escape from life, but rather an introduction to it.

John Cage, Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 56

Commodity, the bias of the world

Commodity, the bias of the world,
The world, who of itself is peised well,
Made to run even upon even ground,
Till this advantage, this vile-drawing bias,
This sway of motion, this Commodity,
This bawd, this broker, this all-changing word,
Clapp'd on the outward eye of fickle France,
Hath drawn him from his own determin'd aid,
From a resolv'd and honourable war,
To a most base and vile-concluded peace.
And why rail I on this Commodity?
But for because he hath not woo'd me yet:
Not that I have the power to clutch my hand,
When his fair angels would salute my palm,
But for my hand, as unattempted yet,
Like a poor beggar, raileth on the rich.
Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail,
And say there is no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.
Since kings break faith upon commodity
Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee.

William Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John (The New Temple Shakespeare, 1935) pp. 28-29

Not my way of feeling

'What about the intensity, the excitement?'

'Oh, none of those aspects interested me. They're precisely the things about abstract expressionism which didn't interest me. I wanted to change my way of seeing, not my way of feeling. I'm perfectly happy about my feelings. I want to bring them, if anything, to some kind of tranquility. I don't want to disturb my feelings, and above all, I don't want somebody else to disturb my feelings. I don't spend my life being pushed around by a bunch of artists.'

Irving Sandler, 'To Open Our Eyes' in Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 50

Silence, exile and cunning

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile and cunning.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books, 1992) pp. 268-269

The true and the beautiful

The true and the beautiful are akin. truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible: beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. [...] The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books, 1992) p. 225

Static vs kinetic emotions

The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books, 1992) p. 222

Those nets

The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moment I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Books, 1992) p. 220