"Those who are enlightened never stop forging themselves. The realizations of such masters cannot be expressed well in words or by theories. The most perfect actions echo the patterns found in nature."

-Morihei Ueshiba

"In a spectacle like that of Balinese theater there is something that has nothing to do with entertainment, the notion of useless, artificial amusement, of an evening's pastime which is the characteristic of our theater. The Balinese productions take shape at the very heart of the matter, life, reality. There is in them something of the ceremonial quality of a religious rite, in the sense that they extirpate from the mind of the onlooker all idea of pretense, of cheap imitations of reality. This intricately detailed gesticulation has one goal, an immediate goal which it approaches by efficacious means, whose efficacy we are even meant to experience immediately. The thoughts it aims at, the spiritual states it seeks to create, the mystic solutions it proposes are aroused and attained without delay or circumlocution. All of which seems to be an exorcism to make our demons flow."

-Artaud

-Victor Ekpuk

almost March and it feels Aok

"All that essential and indescribable part of man that is called imagination dwells in realms of symbolism and still lives upon archaic myths and theologies. It depends upon modern man to 'reawaken' the inestimable treasures of images that he bears within him and to reawaken the images so as to contemplate them in their purity and assimilate their message"
-Mircea Eliade:

The Industrial Revolution began the process of division of labor between art and technology; the dissociation of the conception from the execution. Bauhaus/De Stijl/Vhutemas attempted to reconcile the two but only succeeded in the abstraction of social relations already at work in the political economy of the industrial and post-industrial age. In an era where the image and even the symbol reign supreme as means of social organisation (witness the use of mythology in recent advertising) all that remains for the artist is to take personal control over the creation of mythologies. The artist thereby replaces priest, magician and shaman in "the, midnight of time’s destitution" (Heidegger)
-Graeme Revell

"Art and the artist create each other simultaneously"
-Graeme Revell

"It's not how much you have that makes you rich, it is how little you need that makes you rich"
-Unknown

"Angels, they say, don't know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead"
-Rilke

That only which we have within, can we see without. If we meet no Gods, it is because we harbor none. If there is a grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children...to leave the world a better place...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;..... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all."

-Søren Kierkegaard

"The art world is these days very much about careers and business. It’s more like a banking phenomenon. There’s two ways that it tends to work, one is that someone, maybe just leaving college or whatever in their show, makes a piece of art and it receives very positive attention. It might be that they’re doing black stripes on a yellow background, or everything that they do is just yellow and black. Because that’s what people like, they think OK, that’s what works, that’s what gets the attention, and they do lots more paintings with black and yellow. Eventually they get known as the “black and yellow person.” It’s a formula, but then it’s repeated over and over with very slight variations until they die. And the other way is who they have sex with, which gallery owners they have sex with. Those are the two basic ways that the art world works. I have no interest in doing the same thing every day of my life, to me that’s the same thing as being dead. Why not just go work in a factory, if all you’re going to do is churn stuff out, you may as well go work in a sweatshop. So it’s a great tragedy that modern art has become a slave to familiarity, that people want an artist to keep doing the same thing, and that that’s seen as a positive quality. I mean what art grew from were various people’s attempts to paint or sculpt transcendental mystical divine states. It was religious and it was about epiphanies and about our place in the universe and our relationship with nature. Sometimes it was schematic too, like sand drawings or Navaho maps, and it as ritualized. It wasn’t even about making something that was permanent. It was a ritual that took place for the psychic or physical healing of the tribe. It was magic, and I grew up feeling very strongly that it was supposed to be magic, it was supposed to be about a conversation with nature and the universe. It was also a way to try and describe the indescribable. It’s about the states of consciousness and joy and revelation that can’t be photographed or manufactured. That to me is was art is for. A religious sacred calling, and it was as important as any religious or spiritual belief system. To me art is the religion. The fact that god’s first quality is creation, to me that’s everything. Creativity and the creation of something that didn’t exist before is something ineffable and incredible and unlikely, that you can share with other human beings. But that’s not what we see in the art world very often, in fact it’s usually laughed at. The art world today is so formularized and so much about cliques and pleasing those with money. It’s basically decoration."

-Genesis P-Orridge

2009
day one