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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3051 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 14, 2025

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So I am reading Paul Klee's notebooks, texts which hugely shaped the modernist Bauhaus approach to design and architecture during their attempts to bring all the arts under one umbrella. These texts are held to be as important for modern art as da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance.

Here is how the notebooks begin:

"Chaos as an antithesis is not complete and utter chaos, but a locally determined concept relating to the concept of the cosmos. Utter chaos can never be put on a scale, but will remain forever unweighable and unmeaurable. It can be Nothing or a dormant Something, death or birth, according to the dominance of will or lack of will, of willing or not willing. The pictorial symbol for this non-concept is the point that is really not a point, the mathematical point. The nowhere-existent something or the somewhere-existent nothing is a non-conceptual concept of freedom from opposition. If we express it in terms of the perceptible (as though drawing up a balance sheet of chaos), we arrive at the concept grey, at the fateful point between coming-into-being and passing-away: the grey point. The point is grey because it is neither white nor black or because it is white and black at the same time. It is grey because it is neither up nor down or because it is both up and down. It is grey because it is a non-dimensional point, a point between the dimensions."

"The cosmogenetic moment is at hand. The establishment of a point in chaos, which, concentrated in principle, can only be grey, lends this point a concentric character of the primordial. The order thus created radiates from it in all directions. When central importance is given to a point: this is the cosmogenetic moment. To this occurrence corresponds the idea of every sort of beginning (e.g. procreation) or better still, the concept of the egg."

This absolute tripe goes on for two whole volumes spanning 2,500 pages, and was turned into lectures for Bauhauslers.

..did you lose a bet, or why are you subjecting yourself to this sort of writing?

The answer is that my partner studied design, and given how much he's talked about Bauhaus in the past I'm trying to see if his positive view of them is warranted.

I am quickly discovering that the emperor has no clothes.

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