.... One might almost be persuaded that there is nowhere any place for these things. Who will venture to receive them? And are they not themselves the confession of their own tragedy, these radiant things which, in their loneliness, have drawn the heavens about them? And which now stand there beyond the power of any building to control? They stand in space. What have they to do with us?                  

Rilke, Rainer Maria.  Rodin and Other Prose Pieces. Trans. G. Craig Houston. Quartet Books Limited, 1986.

untitled     cast: plaster, ink,    16 x16 x 5/8 inches 2015

Blanchot lays out his question about language as image :

or consider. ...  Blanchot lays out his question about language as image :

So we must express what we are seeking differently : in literature, doesn't language itself become altogether an image? We do not mean a language containing images or one that cast reality in figures, but one which is its own image, an image of language (and not a figurative language), or yet again, an  imaginary language, one which no one speaks; a language that is, which issues from its own absence, the way the image emerges on the absence of the thing; a language addressing itself to the shadow of events as well, not to their reality, and this because of the fact that the words which express them are, not signs, but images, images of words, and words where things turn into images.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Is the art pretty? No, says Mummy. Pretty is not important. Beefhaus

... or consider,   Quite another is the impression as an affection resulting from the shock of an event that can be said to be striking, marking. This impression is essentially undergone, experienced. It is tacitly presupposed in the very metaphor of the typos (imprint) at the moment the seal is pressed into the wax, inasmuch as it is the soul that receives the imprint. ...beginning of the dialogue, Socrates proposes: "And is it not memory and perception that lead to judgement or the attempt to come to a definite judgement as the case may be?" Protarchus acquiesces. Then comes the example of someone who wants to "distinguish" what appears to him from afar to be a man. What happens when it is to himself that he addresses his questions? Socrates proposes: "That our soul in such a situation is comparable to a book." How so? asks Protarchus. The explanation follows: "If memory and perceptions concur with other impressions at a particular occasions, then they seem to inscribe [graphein] words in our soul, as it were. ...imprint to that of drawing, of inscription (graphe)--- it belongs to the notion of inscription that it contain a reference to the other; the other-than-affection as such. Absence, as the other of presence!                                                            

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, The University of Chicago Press, pp.8,17.