The name of infidel - Simon Ungers

“Go into the Exchange in London, that place more venerable than many a court, and you will see representatives of all the nations assembled there for the profit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian deal with one another as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the name of infidel for those who go bankrupt.” 

Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, 1734

Simon Ungers - Cathedral from the series Seven Sacred Spaces - 2003

Simon Ungers - Cathedral from the series Seven Sacred Spaces - 2003

Simon Ungers - Cathedral from the series Seven Sacred Spaces - 2003

I lost interest in nature

"After seeing electricity, I lost interest in nature"
Vladimir Mayakovsky 

quoted in Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams : Utopian Vision 

and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, 1988

Alexander Rodcheckno - Vladimir Mayakovsky at the Beach - circa 1928

via Nasty, Brutalist and Short

The Chains of my Mortality

"I had been deafened by the clanking of the chains of my mortality"

Saint Augustine, The Confessions, 397-398

Jacob Epstein - Rockdrill - 1913

Gustav Klutsis - Multilingual propaganda machine - 1925


Richard Vergez - Boost - 2007

Qualitative Modernity

“Modernity is a qualitative category, not a chronological one” 
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1951

Karl Moser - Saint Anthony Church - Basel - 1927 

Picture by Carl Nalls

Renwick Battery Gunhouse Loophole
picture by Peter Nencini 2011 ?

Josef Albers - To Monte Alban - Graphic Tectonic serie - 1942

“No epoch has existed that did not feel itself, in the most eccentric sense, to be ‘modern’ and consider itself to be standing immediately before an abyss. The despairing, wide-awake consciousness, standing immersed in decisive crisis, is chronic in humanity. Every period appears to itself as unavoidably new. Every period appear to itself as unavoidably new. This ‘modernity’, however, is precisely that which is diverse just like the diverse aspects of and the same kaleidoscope.”
Walter Benjamin, The Arcade Project, 1940