Adorno/Han

Raymond Han, "Frieze" (2001)


“A newspaper obituary for a businessman once contained the words: ‘The breadth of his conscience vied with the kindness of his heart.’ The blunder committed by the bereaved in the elevated language reserved for such purposes, the inadvertent admission that the kindhearted deceased had lacked a conscience, expedites the funeral procession by the shortest route to the land of truth….The bourgeois…is tolerant. His love of people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.”
-Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, #3 (1951)

Adorno/Assael 3

Steve Assael, "At Mother" (c.2006) [Oil on Canvas, Steel]


"One realizes with horror that earlier, opposing one's parents because they represented the world, one was often secretly the mouthpiece, against a bad world, of one even worse. Unpolitical attempts to break out of the bourgeois family usually lead only to deeper entanglement in it, and it sometimes seems as if the fatal germ-cell of society, the family, were at the nurturing germ-cell of uncompromising pursuit of another. With the family there passes away, while the system lasts, not only the most effective agency of the bourgeoisie, but also the resistance which, though repressing the individual, also strengthened and perhaps even produced it. The end of the family paralyses the forces of opposition. The rising collectivist order is a mockery of a classless one: together with the bourgeois, it liquidates the Utopia that once drew sustenance from motherly love."
-Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia #2 (1951)

Adorno/Azarmand

Mina Azarmand, "Dark Quiet" (2006)


"Considerations which start from the subject remain false to the same extent that life has become appearance. For since the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in its present phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically condemned...The subject still feels sure of its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to subjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the form of subjectivity itself."
-Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Dedication (1951)