#excess – @nickkahler on Tumblr

Critically analyze [the enemy] to know the estimations for gain and loss. Stimulate them to know the patterns of their movement and stopping. Determine their disposition of force (hsing) to know the tenable and fatal terrain. Probe them to know where they have an excess, where an insufficiency. Thus the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless. If it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it or the wise make plans against it.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c. 450 BCE

nickkahler

Flexibility is not the exhaustive anticipation of all possible changes. Most changes are unpredictable. ... Flexibility is the creation of margin - excess capacity that enables different and even opposite interpretations and uses. ... New architecture, lacking this kind of excess, is doomed to a permanent state of alteration if it is to adjust to even minor ideological or practical changes.

Rem Koolhaas, “Revision: Study for the Renovation of a Panopticon Prison, Arnhem, Netherlands,” in SMLXL, 1979-81

nickkahler

What makes painting 'impossible'? What makes 'great' painting impossible? Perhaps it is a sense of belatedness, a conviction that an earlier generation or artist has left only a few scraps to be cleaned up. Or maybe, at a particular moment, in a particular life and history, nothing could seem more presumptuous or inappropriate—maybe even obscene—than to set out to create a masterpiece. Impossibility can also be the result of the artist making excessive demands on the work, demands to which current practice has no reply.

Raphael Rubinstein, Provisional Painting, 2009

#raphael rubinstein #provisional #painting #art #quote #impossible #great #sense #generation #scrap #history #life #excess #demand #practice #reply #moment #clean #scrape

nickkahler

Excess infrastructural land is a highly visible, vacant stage.

Heather Alhadeff, "On Public Art," 2014

#infrastructure #excess #land #visible #art #public art #heather alhadeff #stage #performance

nickkahler

[The present avant-garde sculpture] can be described by two distinct but intimately related ideas: assemblage and unmonumentality. The former is a strategy to achieve the latter, and both are symptomatic of a larger, more ineffable phenomenon in contemporary visual culture that is the result of the excess of choice.

Laura Hoptman, "Going to Pieces in the 21st Century" from Unmonumental, 2007

#avant-garde #laura hoptman #quote #unmonumental #assemblage #monument #sculpture #strategy #phenomenon #culture #choice #excess #contemporary #art

nickkahler reblogged

ummhello

We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We no longer know how we can possibly use up all these accumulated things; we no longer even know what they are for.

Jean Baudrillard, Looking Back on the End of the World, 1986

#growth #jean baudrillard #quote #world #excess #knowledge #epistemology #philosophy #thing #consumerism #object #consumption