Hieronymus Bosch, “Last Judgment (fragment)” (1506-08). Oil on wood, 60 x 114 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. (image via Web Gallery of Art)
An exquisite corpse of apposite quotes from the Hyperallergic Weekend Editors.
With Halloween around the corner and Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” taking up temporary residence at the Museum of Modern Art, the first Weekend Word is “terror”:
“[The surrealists] identified tragedy with terror. That is why they had to go to the ideas of the primitive world with all its overtones of terror. Surrealist art under all its realistic and ideal surfaces contains all the weird subject matter of the primitive world of terror.
But that time is over. The war the surrealists predicted [World War II] has robbed us of our hidden terror, as terror can exist only if the forces of tragedy are unknown. We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. We are no longer, then, in the face of mystery.”
—Barnett Newman
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
—Alfred Hitchcock
“This is the issue, to protect the public from unwanted performing.”
—Steve Paxton, on showing work in the MoMA atrium and avoiding inadvertent audience participation from unsuspecting museum goers
“I will be shot with a rifle at 7:45 P.M. I hope to have some good photos.”
—Chris Burden
“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, from the first “Duino Elegy”
