The Starry Heavens
It seemed to me that I was looking at the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in finite space. Here space itself truly spoke, dreamed, and gave birth to temporal forms. Expectancy, doubt, concentration, all were visible things. With my own eye I could see silences that had assumed bodily shapes. Inappreciable instants became clearly visible: the fraction of a second during which an idea flashes into being and dies away; atoms of time that serve as the germs of infinite consequences lasting through psychological centuries—at last these appeared as beings, each surrounded with a palpable emptiness.…there in the same void with them, like some new form of matter arranged in systems or masses or trailing lines, coexisted the Word!
Paul Valéry. Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de Dés”.
The Treachery of Images
1.To employ a calligram where are found, simultaneously present and visible, image, text, resemblance, affirmation and their common ground.
2.Then suddenly to open up, so that the calligram immediately decomposes and disappears, leaving as a trace only its own absence.
3.To allow discourse to collapse of its own weight and to acquire the visible shape of letters. Letters which, insofar as they are drawn, enter into an uncertain, indefinite relation, confused with the drawing itself – but minus any area to serve as a common ground.
4.To allow similitudes, on the other to multiply of themselves, to be born from their own vapour and to rise endlessly into an ether where they refer to nothing more than themselves.
5.To verify clearly, at the end of the operation, that the precipitate has changed colour, that it has gone from black to white, that the “This is a pipe” silently hidden in the mimetic representation has become the “This is not a pipe” of circulating similitudes.
Michel Foucault. Peindre n’est pas Affirmer. 1968
La Madeleine
The worldly signs are empty; they take the place of action and thought; and they try to stand for their meaning. The signs of love are deceptive; their meaning inheres in the contradiction of what they reveal and try to conceal. The sensuous signs are truthful, but in them subsists the opposition of survival and nothingness, and their meaning is still material; it resides elsewhere. However, to the degree that we achieve art, the relation of sign and meaning becomes closer. Art is the splendid final unity of an immaterial sign and a spiritual meaning.
Gilles Deleuze. Proust and Signs.
Louis Henderson. Une Carte Postale à Marcel. 2010
Speech and Noise
Everything speaks, everything has meaning, to the degree that every speech production is assignable to the legitimate expression of a place: the earth that shapes men, the sea on which their exchanges take place, the everyday objects in which their relations can be read, the stone that retains their imprint.
Jacques Rancière. The Names of History
Louis Henderson. Horse/Cloud Transparency. 2010
CAPITAL
Its design has been based not solely on abstract aesthetic principles, or on the economics of commercial construction, or on the techniques of mass production, but on the social constitution of the community itself, with its diversity of human interests and human needs. Thus the architects and planners have avoided not only the clichés of ´high rise´ building but the dreary prisonlike order that results from forgetting the very purpose of housing and the necessities of neighbourhood living.
The architecture critic, Lewis Mumford, speaking about the Lansbury Estate, 1953.
A Girl With a Dog at Chrisp Street Market, London, May 2010.
Lansbury Dispensing Chemist, London, May 2010.
Archaeology of Mythology 
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