Shirin Kouladjie   |   Days of My Life : 2001.06.28 250 x 250 pixels

mdst three twenty-two a commonplace "book" . click on image at left to return to mdst 322 homepage maintained by: kennedy co-authored by: last modified by: kennedy 04.02.03 16.19 checked out by: .

.

"Danto concluded that works of art that are 'antiaesthetic, palimpsestic, fragmented, chaotic, layered, hybridized" may be "a mirror of our times."

—Irving Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era

.

"The moment a collage was attached to that unruly Cubist surface there was an instantaneous switch. No longer able to pin a subject together in a space too shallow for it, the multiple vanishing points of the Analytic Cubist picture shower out into the room with the spectator. His point of view ricochets among them. The surface of the picture is made opaque by collage. Behind it is simply a wall, or a void. In front is an open space in which the viewer's sense of his own presence becomes an increasingly palpable shadow. Expelled from the Eden of illusionism, kept out by the literal surface of the picture, the spectator becomes enmeshed in the troubled vectors that provisionally define the modernist sensibility. The impure space in which he stands is radically changed. The esthetics of discontinuity manifest themselves in this altered space and time. The autonomy of parts, the revolt of objects, pockets of void become generative forces in all the arts. Abstraction and reality - not realism - conduct this rancorous argument throughout modernism. The picture plane, like an exclusive country club, keeps reality out and for a good reason. Snobbishness is, after all, a form of purity, prejudice a way of being consistent. Reality does not conform to the rules of etiquette, subscribe to exclusive values, or wear a tie; it has a vulgar set of relations and is frequently seen slumming among the senses with the other antithetical arts."

—Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube

.

"A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing. Education is this funny thing. You deal for several years with organized information, and then you go out into the world and you never see any of that ever again. There's no more organized information. I'm trying to establish within my seminars disorganized information, which students can start practicing their moves on."

—Peter Schjeldahl, "Why Artists Make the Worst Students," First published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1998.11.27.

.

"The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur."

—Alfred North Whitehead, qtd. in Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Random House, 1967): 7.

.

"Everything we do is music."

—John Cage, qtd. in Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Random House, 1967): 119.

.

"We have no art. We do everything as well as we can."

—Balinese Saying, qtd. in Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Random House, 1967): 137.

.

"Only the hand that erases can write the true thing."

—Meister Eckhardt, qtd. in Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Random House, 1967): 147.

.

"The meaning of a message is the change which it produces in the image."

—Kenneth Boulding, qtd. in Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964): 26.

.

"...Indeed, if multiplicity is the spirit of the digital age, it encompasses the trivium as well as the quadrivium– which later joined forces to form the seven liberal arts– and much more. We might say that, as a vehicle for education not only formal but more importantly via living, the web has obsolesced the seven liberal arts in favor of a curriculum with boundaries far less rigid, and populated by thousands of subjects, constantly under construction via the serendipity of Web links rather than departmental committees in universities.

"We might call this new anti-regime: the digital arts."

—Paul Levinson, Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millenium (New York: Routledge, 1999): 194.

.

"...If our traditional liberal arts were designed to make us fully productive citizens in a world moved by literacy, we might say that the digital arts– not only what is on the Web but the training and knowledge to know how to find and use it– are necessary to make us fully productive citizens in at least the first years of the new millenium.

"This new digital emphasis not only on knowing but on knowing how to know– which suggests that the most fundamental form of knowing is doing– is consistent with the educational philosophy of John Dewey, which, apropos his name, went so far as to equate knowing with doing. It is also consistent with McLuhan's call for "cool" teachers– facilitators, not lecturers, who elicit student participation– and theorists from Dewey to Montessori to Piaget who have promoted the virtues of the active learner....

"Online education thus becomes education about how to learn online, as much as it is education in any specified subject such as history or philosophy, in this reversal of passive, lecture-and-book based education that parallels the reversal of television into the Web."

—Paul Levinson, Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millenium (New York: Routledge, 1999): 196.

.

"Collage is a way of making art, but it is not a specific artform, nor is it a style."

—Harold Rosenberg, "Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers," Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (New York: Macmillan, 1975): 173.

.

"In itself, collage has no aesthetic or intellectual character..."

—Harold Rosenberg, "Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers," Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (New York: Macmillan, 1975): 173.

.

"The collage révolution brings to an end the age-old separation between the realm of art and the realm of things. With collage, art no longer copies nature or seeks equivalents to it; an expression of the advanced industrial age, it appropriates the external world on the basis that it is already partly changed into art."

—Harold Rosenberg, "Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers," Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (New York: Macmillan, 1975): 174.

.

"Collage is part of art history, but it also represents a decisve upheaval in that history."

—Harold Rosenberg, "Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers," Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (New York: Macmillan, 1975): 176.

.

"Collage manifests itself in modern art as a kind of adversary within the mode itself."

—Harold Rosenberg, "Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers," Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (New York: Macmillan, 1975): 176.

.

"There is an inherent element of mockery in collage..."

—Harold Rosenberg, "Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers," Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (New York: Macmillan, 1975): 176.

.

"...collage seems to say to the spectator, 'see how easy it is to make a work of art.'"

—Harold Rosenberg, "Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers," Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (New York: Macmillan, 1975): 178.

.

"Collage is the primary formula of the aesthetics of mystification in our time.... it reflects the absurdity of representing things and images in a universe of forces and energies."

—Harold Rosenberg, "Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers," Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (New York: Macmillan, 1975): 178.

.

"...there is a vein of farce in collage... [an] exposure of the duplicity of art..."

—Harold Rosenberg, "Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers," Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (New York: Macmillan, 1975): 180.

.

Return to MDST 322 Homepage