absurdity and contradiction - the objective / subjective cosmos (4 July 2016)

Paola Pivi, Have you seen me before? (2008)



Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.

- Thomas Nagel, philosopher

Joseph Beuys, I like Amercia, and America likes me, 1974 - installation - three days in a small room with a coyote and 50 copies of the Wall Street Journal


... the mind-body problem is not just a local problem, having to do with the relation between mind, brain, and behavior in living animal organisms, but that it invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.

- Thomas Nagel

John Baldessari, Studio, 1988



This dull river has a deep religion of its own; so, let us trust, has the dullest human soul, though, perhaps, unconsciously.

- Nathaniel Hawthorne

John Baldessari, Raised Eyebrows/ Furrowed Foreheads: (Black and White eyebrows), 2008



Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.

- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters


The point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstasy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.

- Thomas Nagel