László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895–1946)
Konstruktion
ca. 1920–1922

Concrete music (Piano)
Glenda Leon
2019

…time doesn’t always develop according to a line and thus things that are very close can exist in culture, but the line makes them appear very distant from one another. Or, on the other hand, that there are things that seem very close that, in fact, are very distant from one another. In order to explain these two perceptions we must, in fact, clarify the theory of time. The classical theory is that of the line, continuous or interrupted, while mine would be more chaotic. Time flows in an extraordinarily complex, unexpected, complicated way ... Time is paradoxical; it folds or twists; it is as various as the dance of flames in a brazier-here interrupted, there vertical, mobile, and unexpected. The French language in its wisdom uses the same word for weather and time, le temps. At a profound level they are the same thing. Meteorological weather, predictable and unpredictable, will no doubt some day be explainable by complicated notions of fluctuations, strange attractors…. Someday we will perhaps understand that historical time is even more complicated.

Michel Serres, Conversations with Bruno Latour

Claude Lalanne
“Iolas” Flatware Service, designed circa 1966, executed 1986.

I’m not delusional enough to claim that a novel is going to explode the value systems, politics, economics, and forms of knowledge that have produced the extinction era, nor that literature will not go extinct if humans do. But on good days I do think that fiction—which might not come in the form of a novel at all—works: as in, it performs a type of labor in service of change, for better or for worse. Its effects are not linear, one-to-one, or necessarily calculable, and should not be measured as such. No cause-and-effect equation can account for them. Fictions are myriad small explosions with far-reaching fragments.

Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape

Jirō Takamatsu (Japanese, 1936–1998)
Shadow No. 199
1968, 55 x 46 cm

Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia O'Keeffe, Hands and Grapes
1921

When I get confused about love, or other things in the world, thinking about Spinozian definitions often helps me because of their clarity. Spinoza defines love as the increase of our joy, that is, the increase of our power to act and think, with the recognition of an external cause. You can see why Spinoza says self-love is a nonsense term, since it involves no external cause. Love is thus necessarily collective and expansive in the sense that it increases our power and hence our joy. Here’s one way of thinking about the transformative character of love: we always lose ourselves in love, but we lose ourselves in love in the way that has a duration, and is not simply rupture. To use a limited metaphor, if you think about love as muscles, they require a kind of training and increase with use. Love as a social muscle has to involve a kind of askesis, a kind of training in order to increase its power, but this has to be done in cooperation with many.

Michael Hardt, ”No One is Sovereign in Love: A Conversation Between Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt – Heather Davis & Paige Sarlin”

Carl Auböck
Vase No. 3793
1950