Hillsborough, New Hampshire
“The meaning of the gesture of painting is the painting to be painted. This was not discussed very much in this essay because the intention was to pursue the gesture itself. Of course, the painting to be painted is assumed in the gesture, the painted painting is the stiffened, frozen gesture. If there were a general theory of gestures, a semiological discipline responsible for deciphering gestures, art criticism would not be empirical or ‘intuitive’ and would not try to explain aesthetic phenomena away by assigning causes as it does today. Rather, it would be an exact analysis of gestures that have solidified into paintings. In the absence of any such ‘choreographology,’ the better strategy may be to observe the gesture as it occurs before us and in us: as an instance of freedom. It means to try to look at the world with fresh eyes, without the prejudicial spectacles of objectification and abstraction that come with our tradition. Then the world would ‘appear’ again, illuminated with the splendor of concrete phenomena.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures