“In all activities, train with the slogans.” 

– Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche #9

In the manner of the mind training [Tib. lojong] slogans of Atisha — and in line with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s commentary, ‘Training the Mind and Cultivating Loving-Kindness’, Boston: Shambala, 1981, and Alan Ginsberg’s ‘Mind Writing Slogans’, Limberlost Press, 1994 — and the collection of Georges Braque’s aphorisms, reflections, and short poetic notes compiled by Pierre Reverdy and first published in 1952.

59 Notes toward Bewußte Gestaltung [conscious formation / conscious shaping].

1. Bewußte Form [conscious form] is the world knowing itself in shape.
2. Form is not a container — it’s a flash of relation.
3. Gestaltung [the production of form as a mode of knowledge] is thinking through the hands.
4. Every act of seeing is a making.
5. The world appears only through your formation of it.
6. Consciousness is not reflection — it’s Gestaltungskraft [Creative Power].
7. Bewußte Gestaltung [conscious formation / conscious shaping]: the will to see as forming.
8. Know by creating. (Erkennen ist Schaffen.) / Recognizing is creating.
9. The artist does not imitate; the artist generates.
10. Form ist Tat. Form is action.
11. Perception is fabrication; fabrication is perception.
12. Reality is never given — only composed.
13. Beware the unconscious fiction that calls itself truth.
14. The world is full of fictions pretending not to be made.
15. To fabricate consciously is to free the world.
16. Totalität [Totality] is the dance of difference that refuses closure.
17. The fragment belongs to the whole without being absorbed.
18. Hold the tension — don’t resolve it.
19. Bewußte Gestaltung [conscious formation / conscious shaping] = luminous balance between abandon and return.
20. The hand thinks what the eye cannot.
21. Each stroke, each word, is a miniature Totalität [Totality].
22. Conscious forming is relational ethics.
23. The real begins when fictions admit their own making.
24. Wirklichkeit [Reality] is the event of conscious relation.
25. There is no real without awareness of fabrication.
26. Every form hides its own myth.
27. Form is myth made visible.
28. Conscious form redeems myth through awareness.
29. Beware of unbewußte Fiktionalisierung [unconscious myth-making/fictionalisation].
30. Make your fictions transparent, not transcendental.
31. The eye is not an organ — it is a relation.
32. Du bist die Augen der Welt [You are the eyes of the world].
33. Seeing is co-creating.
34. To perceive is to participate.
35. Consciousness is the plastic medium of being.
36. Bewußte Form [Conscious form] = the real appearing as luminous relation.
37. Every artwork is an act of ethical seeing.
38. The ethical begins where perception awakens.
39. Conscious form is compassion in structure.
40. Bewußte Gestaltung [conscious formation / conscious shaping] knows itself as luminous fabrication.
41. There is no purity in art, only transparency.
42. When you see the fabrication, you free the form.
43. The mind is a sculptor of time.
44. The real is a verb.
45. Be the interval between form and formlessness.
46. Fragment — not failure, but fidelity to difference.
47. Totalität [Totality] breathes through fragments.
48. To create consciously is to enter tha.mal.gyi shes.pa: ordinary awareness, radiant form.
49. Conscious art = rang shar: free-rising appearance.
50. Each brushstroke: a small liberation from dogma.
51. Bewußte Gestaltung [conscious formation / conscious shaping] resists both ideology and spectacle.
52. See without grasping — form without fixing.
53. Conscious form is useless, therefore beneficial.
54. Glittering uselessness: freedom shining as perception.
55. The aesthetic is ethical when it transforms relation.
56. Don’t perfect the form; let it breathe.
57. Let awareness sculpt reality without owning it.
58. Form consciously, then abandon the form.
59. Bewußte Gestaltung [conscious formation / conscious shaping]: beneficial because it transforms relation, perception, and worlding.

References / Sources:

Adorno, Theodor W. 1970. Ästhetische Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Assmann, Aleida. 1999. “Kunst als Erkenntnis bei Carl Einstein.” In Erinnerung, Raum, Text: Essays zur Literaturwissenschaft, 223–240. Munich: Fink.

Benjamin, Walter. 1963. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Breton, André. 1924. Manifestes du surréalisme. Paris: Gallimard.

Davis, William. 2013. Schelling’s Moment of Abandon. Albany: SUNY Press.

Einstein, Albert. 1917. Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie. Braunschweig: Vieweg.

Einstein, Carl. 1915. Negerplastik. Leipzig: Verlag der weißen Bücher.

———. 1920. Von der Plastik Afrikas. Berlin: Propyläen Verlag.

———. 1926. Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Propyläen Verlag.

———. 1973. Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen. Edited by Sibylle Penkert. Reinbek: Rowohlt.

———. 1973. “Totalität I–V.” In Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 3, edited by Sibylle Penkert, 33–41. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum.

———. 1973–1974. Gesammelte Werke. Edited by Sibylle Penkert and Helmut Heissenbüttel. 4 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum.

Ginsberg, Allen. 1994. Mind Writing Slogans. Boise, ID: Limberlost Press.

Grohn, Ellen. 1999. “Bewußte Form und Totalität bei Carl Einstein.” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 44 (2): 183–201.

Guenther, Herbert V. 1975. The Dawn of Tantra. Berkeley: Shambhala.

———. 1984. Matrix of Mystery: Scientific and Human Aspects of Human Knowledge. Boulder: Shambhala.

Heissenbüttel, Helmut. 1973. “Einleitung.” In Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen, by Carl Einstein, 5–15. Reinbek: Rowohlt.

Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Krauss, Rosalind E. 1985. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kracauer, Siegfried. 1930. Die Angestellten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Longchenpa. 1998. The Precious Treasury of the Way of Abiding (Tshig don rin po che’i mdzod). Translated by Richard Barron. Junction City: Padma Publishing.

Marchand, Suzanne. 2010. “Carl Einstein and the Invention of Primitive Art.” Modern Intellectual History 7 (2): 245–271.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Le visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard.

Negri, Antonio. 2003. Time for Revolution. Translated by Matteo Mandarini. London: Continuum.

Penkert, Sibylle. 1970. Carl Einstein: Beiträge zu einer Monographie. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.

Reverdy, Pierre. 1952. Le jour et la nuit: Cahiers de Georges Braque 1917-52, Paris: Gallimard.

Rochlitz, Rainer. 1984. Carl Einstein et l’art du XXe siècle. Paris: Éditions du Cerf.

Schöttker, Detlev. 1994. “Mythos und Moderne bei Carl Einstein.” Arcadia 29 (2): 182–203.

Simondon, Gilbert. 1989. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Millon.

Archival & Digital Resources

Carl Einstein Research Site. Forschung / Bibliographie / Nachlassübersicht. https://www.carleinstein.com.

Heidelberg University Digital Library. Carl Einstein: Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de.

Springer Reference. “Einstein, Carl.” In Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit Online.

© David Patten, 2025