Status Updates From The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic...

“Matisse, set within a human’s time and vision, looked at the still open whole of his work ib progress and brought his brush toward the line which called for it in order that the painting might finall be that which it was in the process of becoming. By a simple gesture he resolved the problem which in retrospect seemed to imply an infinite number of data.”

“There is thus an opaqueness of language. Nowhere does it stop and leave a place for pure meaning; it is always limited only by more language, and meaning appears within it only set in a context of words. Like a charade, language is understood only through the interaction of signs, each of which, taken separately, is equivocal or banal, and makes sense only by being combined with others.”

“The untiring way in which the train of words crosses abd recrosses itself, and the emergence one unimpeachable day of a certain phonemic scale according to which discourse is visibly composed, finally seats the child over to the side of those who speak.”

“A painting is not substitutable for a thousand words, nor may a thousand words replace a painting. In the end what we must say is that language is neither primary nor secondary to painting, both are different modes of signification for the expression of meaning.”

“One day, once and for all, something was set in motion which, even during sleep, can no longer cease to see or not to see, to feel or not to feel, to suffer or be happy, to think or rest from thinking, in a word to ‘have it out with the world.’ My first perception... is an ever present event, an unforgettable tradition.”

“An artist’s style is as inaccessible to himself or herself as our own face and everyday gestures. Marleau-Pontt says that it ‘is just as recognizable for others and just as little visible to him as his silhouette.’”

“Deprived of any context other than official museum approval, presented not in progress but in retrospective, they vie with one another as hostile, rival abstractions in an unjustified, agressive modernity.”

“Museums have existed for barely two hundred years and only in cultures influenced by modern Europe, yet for most of us, our awareness of what painting is depends nearly exclusively upon this institution.”

“We shall see that the idea of complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive—that it is, if you wish, silence.”

“Influenced by Neitzche and Gide, Malraux finds in modern painting a return to the worship of the sublime and exotic that characterized primitive religion. Consequent upon the death of God, Malraux was determined to ward off the death of culture and to establish the artist as a replacement for the divine...”

“By a masterpiece Malraux meant ‘the most significant work by the inventor of a style,’ an artist’s ‘most personal work, the one from which he has stripped all that is not his very own, and in which his style reaches its climax.’”

“That is why he questioned the picture emerging beneath his hand, why he hung on the glances other people directed toward his canvas. That is why he never finished working. We never get away from our life. We never see ideas or freedom face to face.”

“There is no difference between saying that our life is completely constructed and that it is completely given.”

If Cézanne’s life seeks to use to carry the seeds of his work within it, it is because we get to know his work first and see the circumstances of his life through it , charging them with a meaning borrowed from that work.”

“The painter can do no more than construct an image; he must wait for this to come to life for other people. When it does, the work of art will have United these separate lives; it will no longer exist in only one of them like a stubborn dream or persistent delirium, nor will it exist only in space as a colored piece of canvas. It will dwell undivided in several minds, with a claim on every possible mind...”

“... the artist launches his work just as a man once launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything more than a shout...”

“A hand is not simply part of the body, but the expression and continuation of a thought which must be captured and conveyed... That is the real struggle!”