Paul Klee
Flagged Pavilion
1927

Genres provide an affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold, whether that thing is in life or in art. The waning of genre frames different kinds of potential openings within and beyond the impasse of adjustment that constant crisis creates. [...] In the present from which I am writing about the present, conventions of reciprocity that ground how to live and imagine life are becoming undone in ways that force the gestures of ordinary improvisation within daily life into a greater explicitness affectively and aesthetically. Cinema and other recording forms not only archive what is being lost but track what happens in the time that we inhabit before new forms make it possible to relocate within conventions the fantasy of sovereign life unfolding from actions.

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism

Otto Wagner
Österreichische Postsparkasse
1904-12

"Graphical addition of single-valued scalar fields." Dynamic meteorology and hydrography, 1910.

Every juridical system is in some way a crystallization of a specific set of values, because ethics is part of the materiality of every juridical foundation, but Empire—and in particular the Roman tradition of imperial right—is peculiar in that it pushes the coincidence and universality of the ethical and the juridical to the extreme: in Empire there is peace, in Empire there is the guarantee of justice for all peoples. The concept of Empire is presented as a global concert under the direction of a single conductor, a unitary power that maintains the social peace and produces its ethical truths. And in order to achieve these ends, the single power is given the necessary force to conduct, when necessary, ‘‘just wars’’ at the borders against the barbarians and internally against the rebellious.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire

Kimberley points
Post-colonial spearheads made by Western Australian Aboriginal people from glass bottles and ceramic telegraph-wire insulators instead of traditional stone. There are four different designs for different uses including hunting, ceremonies, and trade.

National Museum of Australia

Orpheus, 1953.
Leonora Carrington