Sunday, February 8, 2015

exposed to the alternations



The history of the authentic regime of art could be thought similarly to the history of this mutilated and perfect statue,* perfect because it is mutilated, forced, by its missing head and limbs, to proliferate into a multiplicity of unknown bodies.

(Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2013), tr. Zakir Paul)


To induce immigrants to bring with them useful property, the Government offered a bonus of twenty acres for every three pounds worth of goods imported; and the colonists -- quite unconscious of the future that lay before them -- carried out great numbers of costly, though often unsuitable, articles, by means of which the desired grants were obtained. It was found difficult to convey this property to the town, and much of it was left to rot on the shore, where carriages, pianos, and articles of rich furniture lay half-buried in sand and exposed to the alternations of sun and rain.

(Alexander Sutherland and George Sutherland, History of Australia and New Zealand from 1606 to 1890 (1894))


* The Belvedere Torso



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