THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

It was a land of storms.  They would approach silently at first, announced by the brief passage of a wind that slithered through the grass or by a series of sudden flashes on the horizon; then thunder and lightning would be unleashed, and we would be bombarded for a long while from every direction, as if in a fortress under siege.  Just once, at night, I saw lightning strike near me outside: you could not even see where it had struck; the whole landscape was equally illuminated for one startling instant.  Nothing in art has ever given me this impression of an irrevocable brilliance, except for the prose that Lautréamont employed in the programmatic exposition that he called Poėsies.  But nothing else: neither Mallarmé’s blank page, nor Malevich’s white square on a white background, nor even Goya’s last pictures whose black takes over everything, as Saturn devours his children.

Debord/Panegyric