Tag Archives: Franz Xaver Messerschmidt

absolutely sweet marie

Michael Haneke wins the Palme D’ Or again. Austria. The perplexing, contradictory and often ambiguous battle ground between the liberal enlightenment, the tradition of Vltaire and Diderot and its almost strange complicity in producing a counter-Enlightenment in the person of … Continue reading

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vienna: codes unknown

Slavoj Zizek once said the fundamental principle of Freudian psychoanalysis, that of the “discord between the logic of the psychic apparatus and the demands of reality”; Stanley Milgram once termed the area formed between Budapest, Prague and Vienna, the Golden … Continue reading

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sunset of a new dawn

The Enlightenment. Its the basis of our secular society and ints values underpin much of the consumer economy. Its values have dominated the public sphere since the dawn of the industrial age. This liberal, rational, humanitarian way of thought has … Continue reading

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foiled hopes

The Enlighenment. The Age of the Enlightenment. The name of an age, the eighteenth century all across Europe and the colonies in the New World and the name of a movement that pervaded and came to dominate that age: a … Continue reading

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mad men

There was really no resemblance to social man. Artistically, a soul at war with the body in such visceral representations had heretofore gone unrepresented. The depiction of unreason in all its unfathomable, compelling, yet repulsive splendor. It was the beginning … Continue reading

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REAL MAD, SOMEWHAT BAD & A LOT OF KITSCH

Henry Fuseli’s ghostly and frightening subject-matter was a visual continuum of the Gothic novel, which developed an aesthetics of terror and horror, was occupied with dreams and the unconscious, and often looked back to the feudal world. Fuseli once said, … Continue reading

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US AND THEM: THE MADCAP LAUGHS

Henry Fuseli’s painting “The Mandrake” , now lost, struck the aging Horace Walpole as “shockingly mad, madder than ever, quite mad!” But Fuseli would hardly have regarded that as an insult. Much of the time he was trading on madness … Continue reading

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