People From France

"Natural Movement is the universal workout the world has forgotten."

"I meet men all the time who can bench 400 pounds but can't climb up through a window to pull someone from a burning building. I know guys who can run marathons but can't sprint to anyone's rescue unless they put their shoes on first. Lots of swimmers do laps every day but can't dive deep enough to save a friend, or know how to carry him over rocks and out of the surf."

"Everybody says, 'I'm in shape, or I'm out of shape,' " he tells his students..."Everybody's in shape. You've been shaped," he says, curving his back to model the slumpy posture of the average office worker. "That's your shape."

"No jump is good if the landing is bad."

"The last two centuries were familiar with the myth of progress. Our own century has adopted the myth of modernity. The one myth has replaced the other. ... Men ceased to believe in progress; but only to pin their faith to more tangible realities, whose sole original significance had been that they were the instruments of progress. ...This exaltation of the present ... is a corollary of that very faith in progress which people claim to have discarded. The present is superior to the past, by definition, only in a mythology of progress. Thus one reatins the corollary while rejecting the principle. There is only one way of retaining a position of whose instability one is conscious. One must simply refrain from thinking—and surrender oneself to the vortex of the corollary."

"The vulgarity of the myth of modernity is plainly revealed by the preeminence in its mythology of the factors of quantity; to be modern is always to beat the record in some respect. Distinction, therefore, is opposed to modernity as quality is to quantity."

"The first of men did no more than take the fruit of the tree, and that, we are told, was sin. Modern humanity "tortures the tree in order the sooner to obtain its fruit.""

"To have lived a full life is to have learned to love, that is, to give greatly. It is to have learned how to make the gesture that some scholars have called oblative, opposing this term to captative; as though contrasting the gesture of offering with the gesture of seizing."

"En politique, a dit Anatole France, il n'y a pas de traîtres; il n'y a que des perdants."

"... selon le mot de Talleyrand, la trahison est une question de dates ..."

"Sometimes I think someone upstairs saved me from being ordinary."

"It has been easy to settle in."

"I honesty thought it was over."

"At court, far from regarding ambition as a sin, people regard it as a virtue, or if it passes for a vice, then it is regarded as the vice of great souls, and the vices of great souls are preferred to the virtues of the simple and the small."

"The image started showing up on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram within hours of the attacks in Paris: a simple, slightly off-kilter rendering of the Eiffel Tower framed by a circle so as to look like a peace sign. Most people who shared the image, which has since become the dominant visual symbol of grief over the attacks, probably didn’t know where it originated, or who was responsible for coming up with it.… the creator of the drawing was a French illustrator named Jean Jullien, who posted it to his Twitter page around midnight Paris-time with the caption “Peace for Paris,” and watched it swiftly take flight. Jullien, whose work tends to be marked by a light touch and a breezy, sometimes high concept sense of humor, has made a habit of reacting to the news in graphic form before, drawing pictures to mark the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the legalization of gay marriage in Ireland, and the massacre at Charlie Hebdo in Paris last January."

"In the wake of Friday night’s Paris attacks, which left over 120 people dead in six incidents around the city, one poignant sketch began circulating social media to honor the victims. The symbol, including Paris’ iconic Eiffel Tower in the form of a peace sign, shows solidarity with the French capital and has been shared widely along with the hashtags #PrayforParis and #jesuisparis"

"Just in case our enemies needed another reason to despise us, today the inactivist group Somnolent Tilty-Headed Wankers for Peace launched an exciting new graphic: the same old clapped-out hippie peace symbol but incorporating the Eiffel Tower (right)! Isn't that a cool, stylish way of showing how saddy-saddy-sadcakes you are about all those corpses in the streets of Paris? It's already gone viral! And that's all that matters, isn't it? Our enemies use social media to distribute snuff videos as a means of recruitment. We use it to confirm to them how passive and enervated we are: What was it the last time blood ran in the streets of Paris? Oh, yeah, a pencil - for all those dead cartoonists. But, given that blood in the streets of Paris looks like becoming a regular event, it helps to have something of general application. What about, ooh, a tricolor with a blue tear at the end? No, better yet: a peace symbol with a croissant in the middle. No, wait... What's that? All you are saying is give peace a chance? But what, in fact, are the chances of peace for Paris and France? What are the odds? Oh, sorry. All they were saying is give peace a chance. And, having said it, they've gone back to sleep until the next atrocity requires another stupid hashtag or useless avatar. Parisians should be revolted by this third-rate gimmick, and revile those who created and promoted it."

"I do graphics commercially for a living, but when I get affected by things, when something happens in the world, I usually communicate online with my drawings."

"I just wanted something symbolic, something that everybody could understand easily, and everybody could share regardless of where they’re from and whether they’re a keen observer of illustration usually. I just wanted something universal. … a few people from different places follow my work, and I enjoy communicating to them, usually for happier reasons. What I do in general is try to communicate with people — and I’m aware that the more you want to communicate to a larger audience, the more universal and simple you have to be. It’s an image for everyone. It’s not my image — it’s not a piece of work that I’m proud of or anything — I didn’t create it to get credit or benefit from it. I just wanted to express myself, and from experience I know that through social media people like expressing themselves, or need to express themselves. It is somehow quite organic, the way these things go — you can’t really plan on it. I would just say that if people have used it so much, and if they felt like it was useful for them to share, then the image worked and I’m happy, so to speak, even though happiness is not really a thought that springs to my mind in such horrible times."

"This is what I do, I draw, I reacted graphically, just drawing something spontaneously with pen and paper and then sharing it as a raw reaction. With so much violence and tragedy — we just want a bit of peace."

"Peace for Paris"

"Sins which would terrify us if they were peculiar to ourselves alone cease to frighten us when they are shared. The sinner sleeps soundly when he finds himself surrounded by a multitude, as though God were obliged to spare him."

"Jesus ... never laughed. Nothing has ever equaled the seriousness of his life; it is clear that pleasure, recreation, anything that could divert the mind, had no part in it. The life of Jesus was utterly taut, wholly caught up in God and in the woes of men, and he gave to nature only what he could not have refused it without destroying it."

"Not only do we have no real right to the things of the world, because belonging always essentially to God they can never belong to creatures; but we are also limited by the laws of God in the use of those possessions; for it must not be imagined that God gives them to us so that we may dispose of them as we wish. He is too just to have made such an unequal distribution. These goods being the means destined by his Providence for the subsistence of men, he gives to some more than they need only so that they may distribute it to others. A rich man, in so far as he is rich, is thus no more than steward of God's good things."

"The soul which stops at creatures delays the course of the voyage by which it moves toward God; and by desiring to enjoy them, it proportionately deprives itself of the enjoyment of God."

"The world was rightly horrified by America’s recent blunder in bombing the Médecins sans Frontières’ hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. But how many Syrian Kunduzes will result from Russian airstrikes if the Kremlin continues to favor bombs over guided missiles?"

"Yes. We have, in France, a real tradition of what Jean Paul Sartre, in the foreword of a book of his friend Roger Stéphane, called l’aventurier. Lawrence of Arabia, Byron, Andre Malraux. And for me, l’aventurier was a very honourable destiny. To write and to act … To live your life far from yourself, far from you bases ... To change yourself deeply … All these were real targets for me. Life is worth being lived if one takes the risk and the chance of being different than himself. To break the ropes which tie you to your place. To break the rules of your natural group. To convert yourself into something else. To change your soul.And not to do what you were formatted, shaped to do. I was shaped to be a professor, I was shaped to be just a writer. And then, Bangladesh happened."

"Moreover, you know … mass murder, slaughter, is often an abstract thing. But when you happen to see it directly, to be a witness of it, it’s something quite different, you cannot just play games. It changes you deeply. And you are compelled to do something. The last weeks of 71, November to mid December, were among the most moving, disturbing and terrible I have experienced in my whole life. I saw things I should not have seen. I saw things a man should not see. But I saw them."

"I assert that Pakistan is the biggest rogue of all the rogue states of today. I assert that what is taking form there, between Islamabad and Karachi, is a black hole compared to which Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad was an obsolete weapons dump."

"I am the bastard child of an unholy union between fascism and Stalinism. I am the contemporary of a strange twilight when the clouds above are dissolving amid the clash of arms and the cries of the tortured. The only revolution I know, the one which may grant notoriety to this century, is the Nazi plague and red fascism. Hitler did not die in Berlin. Conqueror of his conquerors, he won the war in the stormy night into which he plunged Europe. Stalin did not die in Moscow nor at the Twentieth Congress. He is here among us, a stowaway in the history that he still haunts and bends to his mad will. You say the world is doing well? It's certain in any case that it keeps on going, since it isn't changing. But never before has the will to death become so nakedly and cynically unleashed. For the first time the gods have left us, no doubt weary of wandering on the plain of ashes where we have made our home. And I am writing in an age of Barbarism which is already, silently, remaking the world of men."

"The French playboy philosopher, who toppled Gaddafi, ponders the big questions. And fervently supports Israel."

"One old man says at the fountain, that his right hand, armed with the knife, will be burnt off before his face; that, into wounds which will be made in his arms, his breast, and his legs, there will be poured boiling oil, melted lead, hot resin, wax, and sulphur; finally, that he will be torn limb from limb by four strong horses. That old man says, all this was actually done to a prisoner who made an attempt on the life of the late King, Louis Fifteen. But how do I know if he lies? I am not a scholar. 'Listen once again then, Jacques!' said the man with the restless hand and the craving air. 'The name of that prisoner was Damiens, and it was all done in open day, in the open streets of this city of Paris; and nothing was more noticed in the vast concourse that saw it done, than the crowd of ladies of quality and fashion, who were full eager attention to the last – to the last, Jacques, prolonged until nightfall, when he had lost two legs and an arm, and still breathed!'"

"When the four limbs had been pulled away, the confessors came to speak to him; but his executioner told them that he was dead, though the truth was that I saw the man move, his lower jaw moving from side to side as if he were talking. One of the executioners even said shortly afterwards that when they had lifted the trunk to throw it on the stake, he was still alive. The four limbs were untied from the ropes and thrown on the stake set up in the enclosure in line with the scaffold, then the trunk and the rest were covered with logs and faggots, and fire was put to the straw mixed with this wood."

"O death, why art thou so long in coming?"

"We had the courage to watch the dreadful sight for four hours ... Damiens was a fanatic, who, with the idea of doing a good work and obtaining a heavenly reward, had tried to assassinate Louis XV; and though the attempt was a failure, and he only gave the king a slight wound, he was torn to pieces as if his crime had been consummated. ... I was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears as I heard his piercing shrieks, half of his body having been torn from him, but the Lambertini and Mme XXX did not budge an inch. Was it because their hearts were hardened? They told me, and I pretended to believe them, that their horror at the wretch's wickedness prevented them feeling that compassion which his unheard-of torments should have excited."

"The day will be hard."

"As was the case with other artists, Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics," published in 1948, was to have great significance for the work of Nicolas Schöffer. On reading it he made his first acquaintance with the science in the making, and he was later to incorporate cybernetic concepts in several of his most interesting works. Schoffer's application of cybernetics — which Wiener defined as "control and communication in the animal and the machine"-postulated that the behaviour of a mobile sculpture would be influenced by the behaviour of the spectator and by the environment in accordance with a fixed pattern and this would in turn influence the spectator."

"Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992) formulated his idea of a kinetic art that was not only active and reactive, like the work of his contemporaries, but also autonomous and proactive, in Paris in the 1950s. He developed sculptural concepts he called Spatiodynamism (1948)."

"Hungarian-born artist Nicolas Schöffer created his first cybernetic sculptures CYSP 0 and CYSP I (the titles of which combined the first two letters of “cybernetic” and “spatio-dynamique”) in 1956."

"Aesthetic hygiene is necessary for collective societies, for any social group residing together on a large scale. How? By programming environments that obey rigorous aesthetic criteria. Each time the inhabitant walks around in the city, he must bathe in a climate that creates in him a specific feeling of well-being, invoked by the massive presence of aesthetic products in the environment,"

"In the late 1950s, experiments such as the cybernetic sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer or the programmatic music compositions of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis transposed systems theory from the sciences to the arts. By the 1960s, artists as diverse as , Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, Sonia Sheridan, and were breaking with accepted aesthetics to embrace open systems that emphasized organism over mechanism, dynamic processes of interaction among elements, and the observer’s role as an inextricable part of the system. Jack Burnham’s 1968 Artforum essay “Systems Aesthetics” and his 1970 “Software” exhibition marked the high point of systems-based art until its resurgence in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century."

"A homeostat constantly seeks to establish a balance which is perpetually disrupted, and performs a statistical exploration of all the possible combinations of inputs."

"Every place radically imbues (formally, architecturally, sociologically, politically) with its meaning the object (work creation) shown there. Art in general refuses to be implied a priori and so pretends to ignore or reject the draconian role imposed by the museum (the gallery), a role both cultural and architectural. To reveal this limit (this role), the object presented and its place of display must dialectically imply one another"

"When we say architecture, we include the social, political and économie context. Architecture of any sort is in fact the inévitable background, support and frame of any work."

"I agree with Rosenberg’s text that says anything is art as soon as it is put in a museum. And that is why artists are such appalling things, since they are responsible for this state of affairs in art."

"More and more, the subject of an exhibition tends not be the display of artworks, but the exhibition of the exhibition as a work of art. Here, the Documenta team, headed by , exhibits (artworks) and exposes itself (to critiques)."

"Vertically striped sheets of paper, the bands of which are 8.7 cms wide, alternate white and colored, are stuck over internal and external surfaces: walls, fences, display windows, etc.; and/or cloth/canvas support, vertical stripes, white and colored bands each 8.7 cms, the two ends covered with dull white paint. I record that this is my work for the last four years, without any evolution or way out. This is the past: it does not imply either that it will be the same for another ten or fifteen years or that it will change tomorrow. The perspective we are beginning to have, thanks to these past four years, allows a few considerations of the direct and indirect implications for the very conception of art. This apparent break (no research, or any formal evolution for four years) offers a platform that we shall situate at zero level, when the observations both internal (conceptual transformation as regards the action/praxis of a similar form) and external (work/production presented by others) are numerous and rendered all the easier as they are not invested in the various surrounding movements, but are rather derived from their absence."

"Every act is political and, whether one is conscious of it or not, the presentation of one's work is no exception. Any production, any work of art is social, has a political significance. We are obliged to pass over the sociological aspect of the proposition before us due to lack of space and consideration of priority among the questions to be analysed."

"The work of art... in seemingly by-passing all difficulties, attains full freedom, thus in fact nourishing the prevailing ideology. It functions as a security valve for the system, an image of freedom in the midst of general alienation and finally as a bourgeois concept supposedly beyond all criticism, natural, above and beyond all ideology."

"Duchamp realized that there was something false in art, but his limitation was that, rather than demystifying, he amplified it. By taking a manufactured object and placing it out of context, he quite simply symbolized art. His actions tended to “represent” and not “present” the object. Duchamp, like all artists, could not “present” anything at all without “re-presenting” it. And if he symbolized art in this way, it was because as soon as he exhibited a bottle rack, a shovel, or a urinal, he was really stating that anything was art as soon as you pointed at it. By extension, and this is very important, that means that a cow in a field becomes art in a painting, a tree by Courbet becomes art, and a woman by Rubens becomes art; now this cow, this tree, and this woman exist in another way. Duchamp dismantled this process supposedly to take away its sanctity, but he went about it in such a way that by being against art, he was in art. Let’s clarify an important point right away: Duchamp is not anti-art. He belongs to art. The art of extolling the consumer society."