There is a role and function for beauty in our time.
—-Tadao Ando
(click to enlarge)
Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth
Tadao Ando, Architect
Beauty in Our Time
Category Archives: Photography
Not the Shadow of the Past
“Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
High Water,
Dallas, Texas
Slicing Out This Moment and Freezing It
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
― Susan Sontag
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth,
Fort Worth, Texas
I Want My Fifteen Minutes
“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”
― Andy Warhol
Self Portrait
Andy Warhol
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Fort Worth, Texas
All Secrets of the River
But out of all secrets of the river, he today only saw one, this one touched his soul. He saw: this water ran and ran, incessantly it ran, and was nevertheless always there, was always an at all times the same and yet new in every moment! Great be he who would grasp this, understand this! He understood and grasped it not, only felt some idea of it stirring, a distant memory, divine voices.
—-Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
I took this photograph a couple months ago, after the first flood. The Trinity river has gone back down now – I haven’t been down there since it dropped. I need to go, to see what happened to everything that was under so much water for so long.
Continental Bridge Park with Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in the background.
Dallas, Texas
He Will Kill Himself With Climbing
“And what, O Queen, are those things that are dear to a man? Are they not bubbles? Is not ambition but an endless ladder by which no height is ever climbed till the last unreachable rung is mounted? For height leads on to height, and there is not resting-place among them, and rung doth grow upon rung, and there is no limit to the number.”
― H. Rider Haggard, She
Ladder for Booker T. Washington
Martin Puryear
Modern Art Musuem of Fort Woth
“Tell him to seek the stars and he will kill himself with climbing.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966
Ladder for Booker T. Washington
Martin Puryear
Modern Art Musuem of Fort Woth
I Do Not Love the Bright Sword For Its Sharpness
“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
The Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art
Fort Worth, Texas
Book With Wings
“If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
― Ray Bradbury
(click to enlarge)
Book With Wings
Anselm Kiefer
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Inside the Vortex
“The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.”
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe
inside of:
Vortex
Richard Serra
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Anyone With the Sensitivity of an Armadillo, or Even You
“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist–a master–and that is what Auguste Rodin was–can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body.”
—-Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Bill Chance 