At the turn of the century a group of colorful French artists banded together in order to get the jump on the bourgeois notion of progress. This bohemian brand of progress gradually developed into what is sometimes called the avant-garde. Both these notions of duration are no longer absolute modes of "time" for artists. The avant-garde, like progress, is based on an ideological consciousness of time. Time as ideology has produced many uncertain "art histories" with the help of mass-media. Art histories may be measured in time by books (years), by magazines (months), by newspapers (weeks and days), by radio and TV (days and hours). And at the gallery proper – instants! Time is brought to a condition that breaks down into "abstract-objects". The isolated time of the avant-garde has produced its own unavailable history or entropy.

Robert Smithson, 'Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space' in The Writings of Robert Smithson, (New York University Press, 1979) p. 35

Most notions of time (Progress, Evolution, Avantgarde) are put in terms of biology. Analogies are drawn between organic biology and technology; the nervous system is extended into electronics, and the muscular system is extended into mechanics. The workings of biology and technology belong not in the domain of art, but to the "useful" time of organic (active) duration, which is unconscious and mortal. Art mirrors the "actuality" [...]. What is actual is apart from the continuous "actions" between birth and death. [...] Whenever "action" does persist, it is unavailable or useless. In art, action is always becoming inertia, but this inertia has no ground to settle on except the mind, which is as empty as actual time.

Robert Smithson, 'Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space' in The Writings of Robert Smithson, (New York University Press, 1979) p. 32

I think that the apparent coherence which the term "woman" assumes in contemporary ideology, apart from its "mass" or "shock" effect for activist purposes, essentially has the negative effect of effacing the differences among the diverse functions or structures which operate beneath this word. Indeed, the time has perhaps come to emphasize the multiplicity of female expressions and preoccupations so that from the intersection of these differences there might arise, more precisely, less commercially, and more truthfully, the real fundamental difference between the two sexes: a difference that feminism has had the enormous merit of rendering painful, that is, productive of surprises and of symbolic life in a civilization which, outside the stock exchange and wars, is bored to death.

Julia Kristeva, 'Women's Time' in Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1 (The University of Chicago Press, 1981) p.18

Sara Granér, 'Jul Utan Gränser' in GP, Nr 349, Årgång 152 (Göteborgs-Posten, 2010) p. 67

With their parallell lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.

[...]

Animals came from over the horizon. They belonged there and here. Likewise they were mortal and immortal. An animal's blood flowed like human blood, but its species was undying and each lion was Lion, each ox was Ox. This - maybe the first existential dualism - was reflected in the treatment of animals. They were subjected and worshiped, bred and sacrificed.

Today the vestiges of this dualism remain among those who live intimately with, and depend upon, animals. A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but.

[...]

The marginalization of animals is today being followed by the marginalization and disposal of the only class who, throughout history, has remained familiar with animals and maintained the wisdom which accompanies that familiarity: the middle and small peasant. The basis of this wisdom is an acceptance of the dualism at the very origin of the relation between man and animal. The rejection of this dualism is probably an important factor in opening the way to modern totalitarianism.

[...]

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention.

Therein lies the ultimate consequence of their marginalization. That look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished. Looking at each animal, the unaccompanied zoo visitor is alone. As for the crowds, they belong to a species which has at last been isolated.

This historic loss, to which zoos are a monument, is now irredeemable for the culture of capitalism.

John Berger, 'Why Look at Animals?' in Mark Dion (Phaidon Press Limited, 1997) pp. 100, 102, 107

For if all knowledge of the natural world is conditioned by institutions of knowledge with their own particular and parochial ways of producing truth, then the real - Nature - is not so much that which appears in representation, as that which remains always outside it. If the primary habitat of human beings is the order of symbols and communication (the library), then nature can never be captured in any single representational system we may produce. The real exists as an excess lying beyond the scope of representation, as a reserve which the production of truth draws upon, but cannot exhaust or contain.

Norman Bryson, 'Mark Dion and the Birds of Antwerp' in Mark Dion, (Phaidon Press Limited, 1997) pp. 96-97

I have forced myself to contradict myself [...] in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp - The Art of Making Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1999) p. 296

What would I do with money? I have enough for my needs... If I had more money I would have to spend time taking care of it and that is not the way I want to live.

Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Duchamp - The Art of Making Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1999) p. 157

The mediator between head and hands must be the heart

Fritz Lang / Thea von Harbou, Metropolis (1926)

"Houses and furniture and clothes, they are all terms of an old base world, a detestable society of man. And if you have a Tudor house and old, beautiful furniture, it is only the past perpetuated on top of you, horrible. And if you have a perfect modern house done for you by Poiret, it is something else perpetuated on top of you. It is all horrible. It is all possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalization. You have to be like Rodin, Michael Angelo, and leave a piece of raw rock unfinished to your figure. You must leave your surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that you are never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside."

D.H. Lawrence, Women In Love, (Penguin Books, 1976) p. 402

Originally published in 1921

"At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship. So it is with you. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn't. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does not meet and mingle, and never can"

D.H. Lawrence, Women In Love, (Penguin Books, 1976) pp. 161-162

Originally published in 1921

"When we have knowledge, don't we lose everything but our knowledge?" she asked pathetically. "If I know about the flower, don't I lose the flower and have only the knowledge? Aren't we exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren't we forfeiting life for this dead quality of knowledge? And what does it mean to me after all? What does all this knowing mean to me? It means nothing."
"You are merely making words," he said; "knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. you don't want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary – and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism. What is it but the worst and last form of intellectualism, this love of yours for passion and the animal instincts? Passion and the instincts – you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness. It all takes place in your head, under that skull of yours. Only you won't be conscious of what actually is: you want the lie that will match the rest of your furniture."

D.H. Lawrence, Women In Love, (Penguin Books, 1976) p. 45

Originally published in 1921

För övrigt avskyr jag samhället, ty det vilar ej på fritt fördrag, det är en vävnad av lögn - och jag flyr det med nöje!

August Strindberg, Röda Rummet (Norstedts Pocket, 2007) p. 17
Originally published in 1879

Nu kan jag analysera den mycket omatalade konstnärsdriften, eftersom jag själv varit ute för den. Den vilar ytterst på en bred bas av frihetsbegär, frihet från nyttigt arbete; därför har också en tysk filosof definierat det sköna = det onyttiga; ty om ett konstverk vill vara nyttigt, röjer en avsikt eller tendens är det fult; vidare vilar driften på högmod; människan vill i konsten leka Gud, icke som om hon skulle kunna göra något nytt (det kan hon inte!), utan göra om, förbättra, arrangera. Hon börjar icke med att beundra förebilderna d.v.s. naturen, utan hon börjar med kritik. Man ser allt så bristfälligt och vill göra det bättre. Detta högmod som driver och denna frihet från syndafallets förbannelse, arbetet, gör att artisten känner sig stå över andra människor, vilket han på visst sätt gör, men han får också behov att ständigt påminnas härom, ty eljes kommer han lätt underfund med sig själv - det vill säga han finner intigheten i sin verksamhet och det oberättigade i sin flykt från det nyttiga. Detta ständiga behov av erkännande av sitt onyttiga arbete gör honom fåfäng, orolig, och ofta djupt olycklig - blir han sig själv klar, upphör ofta hans produktionsförmåga och han går under, ty att återvända i oket när han en gång smakat friheten, det kan endast den religiöse.

August Strindberg, Röda Rummet (Norstedts Pocket, 2007) pp. 275-276
Originally published in 1879

Dans quelques années, quand je t'aurai oublié et que d'autres histoires comme celle-là, par la force encore de l'habitude, arriveront encore, je me souviendrai de toi comme de l'oubli de l'amour même. Je penserai à cette histoire comme à l'horreur de l'oubli ; je le sais déjà.

Marguerite Duras/Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 1959