Gonzalo Fonseca, 1970s

If horror is banalized it is not because we see too many images of it. We do not see too many suffering bodies on the screen. But we do see too many nameless bodies, too many bodies incapable of returning the gaze that we direct at them, too many bodies that are an object of speech without themselves having a chance to speak. The system of information does not operate through an excess of images, but by selecting the speaking and reasoning beings who are capable of ‘deciphering’ the flow of information about anonymous multitudes. The politics specific to its images consists in teaching us that not just anyone is capable of seeing and speaking.

— Jacques Rancière - The Emancipated Spectator (2009 Verso Edition)

Nadia Khodasevich-Léger, Composition, 1969

Just about all societies that get called “indigenous,” “tribal,” or “hunter-gatherer” (terms that in these contexts tend to mean “not integrated into industrial capitalism”) manage (or used to manage) their natural environments so as to provide for themselves. We, in the midst of capitalism, might crave something we like to call the wild, but indigenous forms of knowledge as well as the historical and anthropological evidence show clearly that we and our genetic forebears have controlled our environments in order to provide for ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years. For the greater part of that time our main tool was fire. Bill Gammage has shown, for instance, that the national parks of modern Australia — those areas that civilization reserves for wilderness — are very different from the pre-colonial landscape. Australia’s indigenous people did not live in the “wild,” but in an environment that they had deliberately shaped to provide for themselves. It was a continent-wide land management system.

— Ben Etherington, The New Primitives

Man Ray, The Fifty faces of Juliet, 1941-1954.

When our imaginations meet a mind decidely not like ours, our own nature is suddenly called into question. Consciousness cannot be taken for granted when there are, plainly, varieties of awareness. The result is an intoxicating uncertainty. And that is a relief, is it not, to acknowledge that we do not after all know what a self is? A corrective to human arrogance, to the numbing certainty that puts the soul to sleep. It’s the unsayability of what being is that drives the poet to speak, and to make versions of the world, understanding their inevitable incompletion, the impossibility of circumscribing the unreadable thing living is.

— Mark Doty from The Art of Denoscription: World into Word