“the eye thinks even more than it listens” (Deleuze) I now remember that, before I began reading Deleuze, I had struggled with an aesthetics of process. I put together a 100-page manuscript with notes, quotations, sketches of structures. I wanted to move away from the idea that art consists of objects perceived in a particular way, because this produces two main strands of thought: 1.) What constitutes an object that we call art, and 2.) why is the perception of…
I love complexity, but sometimes also radical simplification—to gain a little clarity. For example, the history of ideas in the visual arts. In Europe, after the great migrations, art history can be sketched in broad strokes as a history of ideas: In medieval art, stories were told visually – mainly the stories of the Bible. Most people could not read, after all, certainly not Latin or Greek. The wood-panel painting of the altars is therefore a kind of comic, and…
In Plato’s allegory of the cave, people sit before a wall on which the shadows of the real objects of the world can be seen. Since they have seen only shadows throughout their lives, they think these are reality. The philosopher’s task is to explain to people that they should turn around to see how the apparatus of light, which serves as a projection mechanism, produces an illusion. Once people had recognized this, they would free themselves from the chains…
When I first came ‘home’ again from India, I looked at my library and saw that almost nothing in it interested me anymore. What had happened? What is in this library and what is not? My library is that of a philosopher and art historian who taught in Europe and the USA. It contains many books concerned with discourses of modernity and postmodernity—theoretically, historically, analytically, comparatively… Often it is about the subject of representation. What is depicted how, for what…
