Netherlands (Amsterdam, Utrecht) plus Peter Greenaway & art (avant-garde, space, 4th dimension)

photograph taken by A/Z inside Utrecht Central Museum (available at Fine Art America, together with other photographs of the Netherlands and art);

from Peter Greenaway's Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012);
Peter Greenaway on Creative Activity, Eros, Thanatos (& your gramma) [I took this video out of Youtube, because I wanted to change it];

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"Susanne Leenhoff, grande et massive comme un Rembrandt, tendre comme un Vermeer, joyeuse comme un Frans Hals..."
Sophie Chauveau (Manet Le secret)
"Les cauchemars de la peinture flamande nous frappent par la juxtaposition à côté du monde vrai de ce qui n'est plus qu'une caricature de ce monde; ils offrent des larves qu'on airait pu rêver."
A. Artaud (Théâtre oriental et théâtre occidental)
"... les images de certaines peintures de Grünewald ou de Hieronymus Bosch, disent assez ce que peut être un spectacle où, comme dans le cerveau d'un saint quelconque, les choses de la nature extérieure apparaîtront comme des tentations."
A. Artaud (Le théâtre et la cruauté)

"Esse integrante do grupo chefiado pelo Beatinho para se entregar às forças federais, singularizava-se pelos traços que dele Euclides nos deu, mais no livro que aqui, diversos dos do sertanejo em geral, isto é, bem nutrido, olhos azuis, com muito de flamengo, lembrando ascendência holandesa."

Olímpio de Souza Andrade (em Euclides da Cunha, Caderneta de Campo)

"Una pesadilla —dice Ulpiano—. Han colgado en los árboles a esos que mataron aquí. Los urubús los picotean. Pone los pelos de punta."

"Eran los colgajos de los árboles lo que el Enano miraba hechizado..."

Mario Vargas Llosa, La guerra del fin del mundo

"On peut dire sans doute de la critique protestante des oeuvres saintes qu'elle abandonna le monde aux oeuvres profanes, que l'exigence de la pureté divine ne sut qu'exiler le divin, et achever d'en séparer l'homme. On peut dire enfin qu'à partir de là, la chose a dominé l'homme, dans la mesure où il vécut pour l'entreprise et de moins en moins dans le temps présent. Mais la domination de la chose n'est jamais entière, et n'est au sens profond qu'une comédie: elle n'abuse jamais qu'à moitié tandis que, dans l'obscurité propice, une vérité nouvelle tourne à l'orage."

Georges Bataille (La Part maudite)

"Quando, naqueles idos de 60, fazia-se muita música criativa no Brasil, quem documentou, incentivou e ofereceu condições ideais para que toda aquela avalancha renovadora tivesse um rendimento máximo, foram as multinacionais, mais precisamente a Philips, através de um marroquino, judeu, de nome italiano, formação francesa, naturalizado brasileiro e presidente de uma multinacional holandesa, o André Midani."

Júlio Medaglia (Música Impopular)

"For just as the beating is not only punishment for guilt but also a source of pleasure, every other element is similarly ruled by this wild ambivalence, this simultaneous holding of two wholly contrary positions... the peculiar temporality of the matrix... the meanings of all the stages remain suspended within it, in the form of a 'but also'..." (Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious).

"... Malevich may have reversed the process of dealing with higher dimensional figures by means of their sections of one less dimension. Instead, he may have thought of his colored forms as symbols for three-dimensional bodies moving in a new direction and thus creating both four-dimensional solids and four-dimensional space..." (Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension).

"A third way in which hyperspace philosophy may have influenced Malevich... relates to their new, gravity-free space... there is no longer a horizon to establish an up-down orientation... Ouspensky describes infinity as... 'the abyss, the bottomless pit into which the mind falls, after having risen to heights to which it is not native'... a November 1917 letter [from Malevich] to Matyushin states 'I saw myself in space hidden among the points and colored strips, there, in the middle of them, I depart in the abyss..." (Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension).

"... quarks and leptons acquire mass in a very similar fashion to the weak gauge bosons... [they] interact with the Higgs field distributed throughout space and are therefore also hindered by the universe's weak charge... [they] acquire mass by bouncing off the Higgs charge distributed everywhere throughout spacetime..." (Lisa Randall, Warped Passages).

"Human life is oppressed by internal causes (both physical and moral) as well as by external factors. It is necessary to fight against both. All that can help us to understand the evils of oppression is useful  to present and future. Therefore it is essential to demonstrate that plastic art can help to clarify this evil... Art is the aesthetic establishment of complete life (unity and equilibrium) free from all oppression..." (Mondrian, as quoted in Charles Harrison's 'Abstraction').

"Man, as the appearance of utmost internality, of spirit, does not posses any point in front, at the side or the back, no fixed point at all towards which he could define a dimension. This explains why in expressing the spiritual, in making spirit an artifact, he will be forced to a moto-stereometric form of expression. This moto-stereometric form of expression represents the appearance of a 4-n dimensional world in a world of three dimensions" (Theo van Doesburg, as quoted in Linda Henderson's The Fourth Dimension).

"Dada completely negates the generally acknowledged duality of matter and mind, woman and man, and in so doing creates the 'point of indifference', a point beyond man's understanding of time and space. For this reason Dada is able to mobilize the optical and dimensional static viewpoint which kept us imprisoned in our (three-dimensional) illusions" (Theo van Doesburg, as quoted in Linda Henderson's The Fourth Dimension).

"The sensation that demands you sit, lie, stand is first of all a plastic sensation that elicits commensurate plastic forms, therefore, the chair, bed, and table are not utilitarian phenomena but only plastic ones, otherwise the artist cannot sense them" (Kazimir Malevich, The World as Objectlessness, Hatje Cantz, 2014).

"When the Dutch invaded the country in 1630, they decided to make their main settlement on a narrow island, and very soon felt themselves restricted by a lack of space. The place was Santo Antônio do Recife, a small Portuguese settlement of approximately 10 hectares whose population would reach nearly six thousand during Johan Mauritss tenure as administrator c. 1640. It had an important harbour for the shipment of sugar and other goods to Europe, even though it was surrounded by a swampy delta and separated from the open sea by a long line of reefs. These were very familiar building conditions for the Dutch... When Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen came to Brazil on 23 January 1637, accompanied by 2700 soldiers, this situation was fated to change. Perhaps one of the main concerns of the humanist count, who was educated at the court of Kassel and was a friend of Constantijn Huygens, was teh search for the virtus, which was to be attained through education and self control. A man of such noble birth and upbringing was expected to embody the best of human nature in all its perfection and he considered himself obliged to expand his conquests all over the world in order to install a victorious civilisation..." (Maria Angélica da Silva, Melissa Mota Alcides, Collecting and Framing the Wilderness: The Garden of Johan Maurits (1604-79) in North-East Brazil, Garden History, Vol. 30, No. 2, Winter/2002);

See also:

- Kitsch, Neo-Kitsch, Anti-Kitsch;

- Poetry & the Avant-Garde tradition; 

- Iberê Camargo: self-taught painter; 

- pick a soul (ass you wish); 

- en profane: Orsay & Centre Pompidou;

- l'oeuvre &/ou le vrai oeil;

- Musée de Cluny;

- Warszawa;

- Lublin; 

- Call me Helium; 

- list of painters and other visual artists;

- Série, presque à genoux with thread;

- Spooky Blue;

- A Ipupiara e além: pela volta de um humanismo monstruoso na academia;

- Frans Post's Brazil: Fractures in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Colonial Landscape Paintings (by Lisa Oliver);