Index Cards

“I take H [hashish] in order to be free. But in order to take H I must already be free.”

So much of what we see in galleries is responding to the imperative to overproduce, overenlarge, overconsume, and for artists with ascending and funded careers this trajectory can seem all but unavoidable. As Roberta Smith points out, the primary meaning of these works is often: “I made this because I can.”

Here Malcolm puts her own artful spin on Benjamin’s famous allusion to the camera’s ability “with its devices of slow motion and enlargement” to reveal hidden and unseen truths: “It is through photography that we first discover the existence of [the] optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”

The stars above, the plants below.

I am willing to do this as best I can but I will take no responsibility about doing it wrong.”

“We are all so overwhelmed by culture that it is a relief to see something which is done directly, without any intention of being good or bad, done only because one wants to do it.”

“to know whom to write for is to know how to write.”

I begin to wonder if it’s not just the modernist paradigm kicking in, that a metadiscourse is always more satisfying: painting about painting, photographs about photography, and writing about writing.

“visible wretchedness is counterbalanced by a hidden glory.”