“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
“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
“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
“…and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
― Vincent van Gogh
Vortex
Richard Serra
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
My attitude is, I make the sculpture in the studio on my own terms on my own time, and I want to see it go out of the studio and have its own existence whether it’s noticed or not.
—-Tony Cragg
Tony Cragg’s “Line of Thought”
Dallas, Texas
Ever since I saw his exhibition at the Nasher a few years ago, I have been a fan of Tony Cragg. It was a tough time for me and visiting his sculpture meant something to me – it gave me an ethereal comfort. I think I found it reassuring that independently beauty still existed in the world.
Then I shot his work in the sculpture garden of the Dallas Museum of Art. Earlier this year, I found another work I liked in a museum in Houston.
At any rate, it is one thing to see sculpture in a museum or gallery – in a carefully-prepared setting – it is something entirely different to see sculpture in the wild… especially unexpectedly.
We were riding through Uptown Dallas at night on the monthly Critical Mass Ride, when I spotted a large sculpture out in front of a fancy office building – and it was undoubtedly a Tony Cragg. It was really cool to see, even if I had to keep on pedaling on.
Later, it didn’t take much internet searching to determine that the sculpture was Tony Cragg’s “Line of Thought” out in front of the Rosewood Court Complex. It has been there for a number of years, but I had never noticed it. Of course, that isn’t really my hood….
The weekend of the Uptown Ciclovía, where a street through uptown was closed to automobiles I made a point of finding the Rosewood Court (the Ciclovia route went right by it) and stopped to look and take a photo.
It was cool finding Cragg in the wild.
Tony Cragg’s “Line of Thought”
Dallas, Texas
“Phyllida’s hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
Dragon Park,
Dallas, Texas
“Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don’t come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they’re having a piss.”
― Banksy, Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall
Deep Ellum, Texas
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Design District
Dallas, Texas
“To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.”
― Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
Houston Museum Of Fine Arts
“A responsible Warrior is not someone who takes the weight of the world on his shoulders, but someone who has learned to deal with the challenges of the moment.”
― Paulo Coelho, Warrior of the Light
Design District
Dallas, Texas
“The Warrior knows that no man is an island.
He cannot fight alone; whatever his plan, he depends on other people. He needs to discuss his strategy, to ask for help, and, in moments of relaxation, to have someone with whom he can sit by the fire, someone he can regale with tales of battle.”“Then the Warrior realizes that these repeated experiences have but one aim: to teach him what he does not want to learn.”
― Paulo Coelho, Warrior of the Light
Bill Chance 