Solely on its own terms

“It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at “abstract” or “non-objective” art-and poetry, too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape-not its picture-is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars, or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.”
Clement Greenberg, Avant-garde and Kitsch, 1939. Partisan review p. 36.

Luigi Russolo - L'uomo morente - 1941

Kasimir Malevich - The Shroud of Christ - 1908

Paul Gauguin - The Loss of Virginity - 1890

To wipe away the Entire Horizon

"But how did we do this ? How were we able to drink up the sea? 

Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?"

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125, 1882

Erik Bulatov - Horizon - 1971/72 (via artdaily)

Kazimir Malevich - Red Cavalery - 1928/32

Ferdinand Hodler - Lake Geneve with Jura - 1911

At the End of its Tether

"The writer finds very considerable reason for believing that within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by aeons, there has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life-and not simply human life but all self-conscious existance - has been going on since its beginning. If his thinking has been sound, then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded."

H.G. Wells, Mind at the End of its Tether, 1946

Paul Klee - Ad Marginem - 1930

Kasimir Malevich & El Lissitsky - Suprematist Composition - 1918

via Manuellement

Hanafuda Suzuki suite

The Sense of Wonder

"The suddenness, radical disorientation, the sensation to be withdrawn from the normal course of time, 

the intuitive certitude to have come in contact with a real ordinarily hidden, 
the overwhelming joy, the serenity, the sense of wonder." 

Michel Hulin, La Mystique Sauvage: Aux Antipodes de l'Esprit, translation mine. 

Gustav Klimt - Fish Blood - 1897-98

Jan Toorop - Fatalism - 1893

Kasimir Malevich - The Shroud of Christ - 1908

The Second Time as Farce

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, 
so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: 
the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852

Kasimir Malevich - Suprematism (?) - 1915

Blue Noses - Kitchen Suprematism - 2005

Frank O. Gehry - Winton Guest House - 1983 to 1986

Crossroads

"If all artists could see the crossroads of these celestial paths, 

if they could comprehend these monstrous runways and the weaving 

of our bodies with the clouds in the sky, then they would not paint chrysanthemums" 

Kazimir Malevitch, "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: 

The New Realism in Painting", 1915

Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art Chart, 1936

André Breton, Surrealist Intrusion into the Enchanter's Domain, 1960 (thanks to Tessel)

Neue Slovenische Kunst, NSK Organizational Diagram, 1986

« It is a sort of absolute rule that everywhere, in all places, at all times of civilization, in all beliefs, by all means and in all regards, the untrue supports the true ; the true gives the untrue as its ancestor, as its cause, as its author, as its origin and its end, without exception nor remedy, and the true engenders this untrue by which it itself demands to be engendered.»

Paul Valery, Petite lettre sur les mythes, 1928

Alexeevich Kudriashev

 Alexeevich Kudriashev, Construction of a Rectilinear Motion, 1925

 Alexeevich Kudriashev, Construction of a Rectilinear Motion, 1925 

 Alexeevich Kudriashev, Luminescence, 1926

via Kosmograd

The Circle of Things

"I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and stepped out of the circle of things."

Kasimir Malevitch 

...

Georges Vantongerloo, Composition, 1918

Robert van t’Hoff, Spatial-plasticism model, 1918  

Kazimir Malevitch, Architekton Gota,  1922

John Storrs, Study in architectural form, 1927

"The man in the coffin is one with the horizon, the ring of the Universe"
Gabriele D’Annunzio, Notturno, 1916 
quoted here