Life becomes fascinated

"Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder"

Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 1891

Arno Auer - Newspaper cut-ups - 2011

Ilya Bolotowsky - Untitled - 1950

Nikolai Suetin - Dynamics in Suprematism - 1921

Evolutionary Process

“I live on Earth at present and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process - an integral function of the Universe.”

Buckminster Fuller, I seem to be a Verb, 1970 

Ernst Haeckel - Rhizopoda Radiata - Kunstformen der Natur - 1904

Karl Blossfeldt - Abutilon, Saxifraga Aizoon, ? - Urformen der Kunst - 1929

Rudolph Steiner - Seven planetary seals - c.a. 1907

via Ritman Library

"All life is but a poem, a movement. I am but a word, a verb, a depth, in the most savage sense, the most mystique, the most alive."

Blaise Cendrars, Der Sturm, 1913
quoted in Michel Décaudin, La crise des valeurs symbolistes: vingt ans de poésie française, 1895-1914, 1991

The Divine Parallelepipeds

"Then, as this morning on the dock, again I saw, as if for the first time in my life, the impeccably straight streets, the glistening glass of the pavement, the divine parallelepipeds of the transparent dwellings, the square harmony of the grayish blue rows of Numbers. And it seemed to me that not past generations, but I myself, had won a victory over the old god and the old life."

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1921

quoted in James C. Scott, Seeing like a State, 1998

Walter Gropius - Bauhaus master houses - Dessau - 1925/1926

Cornelius van Eesteren and Theo van Doesburg - Axonometrics east/north of Maison Particulière - 1923

Iakov Chernikov - Aristography - 1914/1927