"Art uses things to make its presence felt. But art is not itself a thing."
"Survival had nothing to do with measuring the rise and fall of economic
indicators, but the cunning of living in-between these inhuman quantifications,
and finding novel ways to be unmoved and unmoored by their movements, in any
direction. Progress was not chasing profit, but standing firm where you happened
to have found yourself, against the forces that bull or bear either way."
"The predatory nature of the social forces that work on us from above, and the
individual’s instinct that survival through self-interest is the only course available to
meet the demands of the day, are two aspects of the same thing that I have been trying
to describe in both concrete and abstract ways."
"But a work is more than an attraction. Art´s power has as much to do with how it keeps the world at arm´s length. By repelling the advances of those who want nothing more than to make art embraceable, relational, and understandable, art gains a semblance of autonomy, and acquires the power to evoke in the person experiencing the work – however fleetingly – those moments in one´s life when actual freedom was tasted and felt. And by insisting upon the unresolved conflicts of reality return as immanent considerations of form, art severs the chain of thinking that binds its import to an aesthetic tradition that pictures the image of wholeness and cohesiveness as the expression of holiness and reconciliation. When art refracts its inner elements into an order of irreconcilabilities, art´s essential polarity changes from something that strives to attract, to one that can´t help but repulse. This aura of repulsion enables art to levitate above its own grounding."
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