2026-8-5T2119~I may have discovered the method. The drawing layer is white and middle gray. It needs layers of those alone. The drawing and the ground should press on each other palpably. When it does the color can come, first in a palette of oxides. The oxides should invite the others as the oxides want them. The painting will make itself. I need only apply presence and touch and breath. The revelation appears in raking light.

Nothing is born, nothing dies.
Nothing to hold on to, nothing to release.
Samsara is nirvana.
There is nothing to attain.

—Vasubandhu, from the Thirty Verses (5th century)

“As actually existing substances, paintings are individuals—that is to say, beings that cannot be divided into parts without ceasing to be the particular beings they are. When a painter is not pleased with the over-all effect of one of his works, he may cut out of it one or two of the parts he prefers and throw away the rest. If he does so, each part becomes a new individual. As for the primitive painting—that is, the primitive individual—it ceases at once to exist. To say that paintings are individuals is therefore to say that, considered as the very being it is, each of them enjoys the privilege of indivisibility.”—Étienne Gilson, Painting and Reality, 1955

“Even with this, however, we still have not come to the essential thing about smoking a pipe and about ritual life in general. It only comes into view when we reflect that we are dealing with an essentially aesthetic phenomenon. The assertion that pipe smoking and ritual gestures in general are aesthetic phenomena is risky primarily because it puts the question of art in an unfamiliar light. It’s not that we’re unfamiliar with emphasizing the ritual aspects of so-called artistic creation. In a certain sense, the romantic conception of art and any l’art pour l’art treats artistic activity as a kind of rite. What is unfamiliar about the assertion is not the claim that art is a kind of rite but just the opposite, the implication that ritual is a kind of art. This does not imply that there is a ritual form of being that expresses itself in specific gestures and in an artistically active life, among other things, as was the case in the romantic era or in l’art pour l’art. It rather implies that there is an aesthetic form of being, the artistic life, and that this life expresses itself in various gestures, including ritual ones. It is not art that is a kind of rite but a rite that is an art form. It is not that there is, for example, a Jewish art that expresses itself in literature or music but also in ritual, and a Jewish philosophy and ethics in addition, but just the opposite, the whole of Judaism, understood as a ritual form of life, is an art form among other ritual forms of life, and Jewish philosophy and ethics are aspects of this art form that threaten to obscure the essential thing, namely, the aesthetic dimension of Judaism. The assertion is unfamiliar and risky because art is usually understood to be a category of being within which such phenomena as rites, music, painting, and poetry come about. This is not the usual claim that the artistic life is a life-form along with the political life, the scientific life, or the religious life, or even that the artistic life is aligned under the religious one (Kierkegaard). It is rather the unfamiliar claim that religious life, inasmuch as one understands it to be a ritual life, is one kind of artistic life-form. This unfamiliar claim does not mean a sanctifying of the artistic life, but conversely, the desanctifying of ritual, for it was reached through the observation of profane pipe smoking.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

“That is what brings pleasure: to bear witness to oneself, freely and without purpose, within explicitly chosen parameters; to recognize oneself by one’s style, and then to immerse all other gestures (e.g., that of writing and that of conversing with a friend) in this style. From this standpoint, perhaps, we can appreciate the familiar saying about style making the man. In other words, pipe smoking is a gesture that permits us to act out, that is, to find ourselves in the world through our own style. This kind of pleasure can only be defined as ‘aesthetic,’ and so we can now say what was meant by the word art when we were discussing ritual gesture as a phenomenon of the artistic life. The word art means the gesture through which existence “acts itself out,” freely and purposelessly bearing witness to itself, within appropriate parameters. The “artistic life,” then, is the life-form that depends on the style in which gestures are performed. So the ‘artistic life’ is not about changing the world, or about being in the world with others, but about finding itself in the world.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

It will be apparent to anyone who has ever made such a gesture that we recognize ourselves in them, and only in them: only in piano playing, only in painting, only in dancing does the player, the painter, the dancer recognize who he is. It is a founding principle of Zen Buddhism that self-recognition can be a religious experience, if the recognition is of the “whole” self: its rituals (tea drinking, flower arranging, board games) are therefore sacred rites. Certainly the greatest discovery of Jewish prophesy is that religious experience is an experience of the absurd, the groundless, that “God” is manifest as that which is inexplicable, indefensible, “good for nothing else”: hence its battle against magic and its insistence on the absurd rite, with no aims that make any sense. But all these noble insights, those of the artist, the Zen monk, and the prophets, can be gained in a modest and profane way by watching such everyday gestures as pipe smoking with sufficient patience. For then it becomes clear how each of us is a virtual artist, and a virtual Zen monk, and a virtual prophet. For each of us performs purely aesthetic, absurd gestures of the same type as smoking a pipe. What also becomes clear, of course, is what sets most of us apart from real artists, Zen monks, and prophets, namely, the complete renunciation of reason (in the sense of explicability and purpose) and the unconditional surrender in the gesture and to the gesture essential to the real artist, the real Zen monk, the real prophet.

—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

One of the possible definitions of freedom (and not necessarily the worst) describes it as having the same parameters as dialogue. In keeping with such a definition, freedom in a given country could be measured by the coverage and efficiency of the telephone network, and the relatively paleotechnical character of the telephone in all countries would permit us to conclude that no country is overly concerned about the freedom of its citizens.

—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

So there are two possible diagnoses: either the telephone network will serve as a model of a network that keeps branching out, for example, for reversible video networks and computer terminals, and in this case, we are moving toward a telematic society of self-recognition and the acknowledgment of others; or the second alternative is a centrally controlled and programmed mass society. Although current signs point toward the second alternative, it is too repugnant to face squarely. In such an apparently harmless tool as the telephone, both possibilities are visible. Which one will become reality depends in part on us.

—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

At present, the gesture of searching is providing increasingly compelling evidence that subject and object are always interwoven. A subject is always the subject of some sort of object, and an object is always the object of some sort of subject; there is neither subject without object nor object without subject. This is not the perception of a subject encountering an object. It is an actual relationship from which subjective and objective poles can be abstracted. Subject and object are abstract extrapolations of a concrete relation. The “transcendental mind” and “objectively given world” are ideological concepts extrapolated from actual reality—reality we are and in which we are.

—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

The researcher who approaches society as if it were an ant colony, the technocrat who manipulates the economy as if it were a chess game, is a criminal. He maintains that, through objective perception, he rises above ideologies. He is in fact a victim of the ideology of objectivity.

—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

Of course we have no doubt that the tangible world can be manipulated further through technology. But we believe that this world has its limits. There is no doubt that more and more ingenious technical frivolities can be contrived. The human body can be objectified and then controlled. The economy can be manipulated. The human mind can be programmed and so manipulated. Perhaps human beings can be fabricated. But there are two concerns. The first is whether this progressive objectification is not accelerating the loss of concrete reality. The second is whether this progressive objectification is interesting.

—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

For the ancients, “theory” was a contemplative examination of eternal forms. For the bourgeois, it was a group of coherent hypotheses. In the present, theory is becoming a strategy for being-alive-in-the-world. The contemporary researcher, the contemporary theoretician, measures the nearness of the environment, but neither to observe its form nor to hypothetically explain it. It is rather to transform the approaching possibilities into freedom.

—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

As an “interface” theory, [a general theory of gestures] would break through the structures of the sciences as they have been elaborated and are currently institutionalized in universities and elsewhere. In this sense, it would have an antiacademic character. But it would also have an anti-ideological character, because although it would be interested in people and events, it would proceed with a minimum of assumptions. These aspects of the theory, namely, its interdisciplinary, antiacademic, and anti-ideological qualities, will presumably characterize a whole range of future theories.

—Vilém Flusser, Gestures

…the concept of “gesture” may be defined as a movement that expresses a freedom. The gesture, as the movement it is, is in fact determined, as are all other movements, and in this sense completely explainable. But what makes it unique is that, untouched by any of this, it expresses a subjectivity [Innerlichkeit, “inwardness”] that we are forced to call “freedom.” Accordingly, the competence of a general theory of gestures would be the study and ordering of acts of expressions of freedom. …gesture is a movement through which a freedom is expressed, a freedom to hide from or reveal to others the one who gesticulates. Through this redefinition, the receiver of the gesture is drawn into the competence of a general theory of gestures, and the theory becomes a meta-theory of the theory of communication.

—Vilém Flusser, Gestures