Mark Rothko

/.../On the journey down from Naples the party had fallen in with a couple of Italian youths who offered to act as guides.
At Paestum, where the odd-assorted little band picnicked at noon in the Temple of Hera, the young men expressed their
curiosity as to the identity and occupations of the Americans. Fischer's daughter, who was acting as interpreter, turned
to Rothko and said: "I have told them that you are an artist, and they ask whether you came here to paint the temples,"
to which Rothko replied: "Tell them that I have been painting Greek temples all my life without knowing it."

John Banville on Rothko here

Tools and Grammar

/.../Utgångspunkten är en tysk journalfilm från 1926, som handlar om en klosterskola för blinda barn i Stuttgart.
I en scen besöker barnen en kyrkogård, som de sedan får återskapa i klostrets sandlåda. - Klosterskolan syftade
till att stärka de blinda barnens självkänsla genom att stärka deras andra sinnen. På den tiden fanns inte blindskrift
och de enda stället de kunde läsa, var på gravstenar där bokstäverna är urkarvade/.../

ur DN:påstan om Felix Gmelins utställning Tools and Grammar

the origins of time

"the days and nights had the same colour, as if everything happened just before daybreak..."
(Giacometti on The Palace..., Minotaure, No. 3-4, 1933)

The Palace at 4 A.M. enigmatically and explicitly is about time. But, one could hardly say that this "time-structure" reveals
any suggestions of organic vitality. Its balance is fragile and precarious, and drained of all notions of energy, yet it has a
primordial grandeur. It takes one's mind to the very origins of time - to the fundamental memory.


All above from Robert Smithson's Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space, November 1966 (in collected writings)

The Palace at 4 A.M.

The Palace at 4 A.M., Alberto Giacometti 1933


Study for The Palace at 4 A.M., Alberto Giacometti 1932

Dunkel hieroglyf

Hans gåtfulla symbollandskap låter sig inte diskursivt avläsas utan blott intuitivt fattas, det är landskapet som "dunkel hieroglyf" /...

Hans-Olof Boström om Caspar David Friedrich
Dagens Nyheter 18 januari 2002

Elbe

Elbe, Johan Hedbäck, 2010

The Orangerie Staircase

Versailles, the Orangerie Staircase, Eugène Atget, 1901

Marionett och ängel

Han kan allt efter smak och fallenhet betraktas som ett kosmiskt medium, som en förbryllande korsning av marionett och ängel,
som en inverterad panteist eller "panmorfiker" eller som en den medvetna omedvetenhetens motsägelsefulla labyrint /...

Erik Lindegren om Rainer Maria Rilke 1963
ur inledning till Malte Laurids Brigge

Empty stages

From Robert Fludd's Ars Memoriae, 1619


Sketch for the Globe Theatre based on Fludd. From Frances A. Yates' The Art of Memory.

Secondary theatre

from Robert Fludd's Ars Memoriae, 1619