“The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself. But, inversely, the painter's gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange.”

— Michel Foucault

Las Menias
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970)

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Michel Foucault 128

French philosopher 1926–1984

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“We are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see him. And just as we are about to apprehend ourselves, transcribed by his hand as though in a mirror, we find that we can in fact apprehend nothing of that mirror but its lusterless back. The other side of a psyche.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Las Menias
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970)

“We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators.”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist

Nature and the Greeks (1954)
Context: We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it. Not only my own body, but those of my friends, also of my dog and cat and horse, and of all the other people and animals. And this is my only means of communicating with them.

“The painting will not be looked at passively, not embraced all at once by an observer's immediate gaze. But relived in its elaboration, remade by thought and if I dare say reacted... All the gestures made by the painter, he [the observer] feels them reproduced in him.”

Jean Dubuffet book Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Source: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 75

“We are in the process of seeing the fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe's prophecy in which the painter, impassioned by his mistress-model and also by his art, "did not want to see that the colors he spread on his canvas were taken from the cheeks of the woman seated beside him. And when several weeks had passed, and very little remained to be done, nothing but a stroke on the mouth and a glaze over the eye, the mistress’s spirit still flickered like the flame at the base of a lamp. Then he put on the final touch, put the glaze in place, and for a moment the painter stood in ecstasy before the work he had finished. But a moment later, he was struck with panic, and shouting with a piercing voice: ‘It is truly Life itself,’ he suddenly turned around to look at his mistress. She was dead."”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Nothing ever constrains us to face what is dying when we see it so alive in our images.
J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 208
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

“There was an incongruity between many of the models that we were taught and the policy positions that our teachers (and we) believed in. The models seemed more consonant with free market prescriptions, though they were presented more as benchmarks rather than full characterizations.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz (1943) American economist and professor, born 1943.

Autobiographical Essay (2001)

“New space neither needs nor demands pictures - it is not a picture transposed on a surface. This explains the painters' hostility towards us [a. o.: Malevich ]: we are destroying the wall as the resting place for their pictures.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

critical quote of Lissitzky c. 1923, in Proun Space - in An Architecture for World Revolution, El Lissitzky; translation Eric Dluhosch; Lund Humphries, London: 1970, p. 138
1915 - 1925

“Heisenberg now approached the problem from a new philosophical angle. He discarded all models, pictures and parables, and made a clear distinction between sure knowledge we gain from observation of nature and the conjectural knowledge we introduce when we use models, pictures and parables. Sure knowledge… can only be numerical, so that Heisenberg's results were inevitably mathematical in form, and could not disclose anything about the true nature of physical properties or entities.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

“In general, just as painters in working from models constantly gaze at their exemplar and thus strive to transfer the expression of the original to their own artistry, so too he who is anxious to make himself perfect in all the kinds of virtue must gaze upon the lives of the saints as upon statues, so to speak, that move and act, and must make their excellence his own by imitation.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

vol. 1, p. 17
Letters

“The problem is not the math itself, but the blind acceptance and even idolatry we have applied to the quantitative models. These predictive models leave citizens befuddled and unable to defend or criticize model-based decisions. We argue that we should accept the fact that we live in a qualitative world when it comes to natural processes. We must rely on qualitative models that predict only direction, trends, or magnitudes of natural phenomena, and accept the possibility of being imprecise or wrong to some degree. We should demand that when models are used, the assumptions and model simplifications are clearly stated. A better method in many cases will be adaptive management, where a flexible approach is used, where we admit there are uncertainties down the road and we watch and adapt as nature rolls on.”

Orrin H. Pilkey (1934) American ecologist

Interview with Orrin Pilkey & Linda Jarvis-Pilkey https://web.archive.org/web/20080105132439/http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/publicity/pilkeyinterview.html.
Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future (2007)

“We were outcasts, roughly expressionist painters not acceptable to most dealers and collectors.(A reference to the TEN group of painters).”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

1950s, Conversations With Artists, 1957

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Michel Foucault 128

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