The Depths

"Then don’t weep for the horrors of war 
Before the war we had only the surface 
Of the earth and the seas 
After it we’ll have the depths 
Subterranean and aerial space..." 
Guillaume Appolinaire, War, 1915

Diego Rivera - The Manufacture of Poisonous Gas Bombs 

Sketch - Detroit Industry Mural - 1932

via Daoud Martin

Alexander Rodchenko - Costume for The Bedbug, pt. 2 - 1929

Leon Bibel - Family with Gas Masks - 1936

via Third Organ

Heart of Stone

"His heart is like ice, he feels no pain

... For the creatures downtrodden by destiny...

The tears of those unfortunates thrown in the bustle

His heart of stone knows no warmth."

Nella in Alexander Bogdanov, Engineer Menni. A Martian Stranded on Earth, 1913

Lazar Khidekel - Black suprematism circular - ?

Alexander Rodchenko - Logo design for Dobrolet - 1923

Mária Balážová - Serpent Geometry 2 - 1994

Unconditional Necessity

"Just as the desire for empathy as the basis for aesthetic experience finds satisfaction in organic beauty, so the desire for abstraction finds its beauty in the life-renouncing inorganic, in the crystalline, in a word, in all abstract regularity and necessity…

Thus all transcendental art sets out with the aim of de-organicizing the organic, i.e. of translating the mutable and conditional into values of unconditional necessity. But such a necessity man is able to feel only in the great world beyond the living, in the world of the inorganic." 

Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 1907

Paul Strand - Abstraction - Twin Lakes, Connecticut - 1916

Aleksandr Rodchenko - Steps - 1930 

Alvin Langdon Coburn - Vortograph - 1917

Our Things in our Hands

“The light from the East is not only the liberation of worker, the light from the East is in the new relation to the person, to woman, to things. Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades.”
Alexander Rodchenko, 'Rodchenko v Parizhe. Iz pisem domoi', Novyi lef, 1927
via Christina Kiaer

Unknown Photographer - Walter Gropius - 1968

via Exit Architects

"Since the universal power of the whole of nature is nothing but the power of all individual things together, it follows each individual thing has the sovereign right to do everything that it can do, or the right of each thing extends so far as its determined power extends"
Baruch Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, 1670

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