short takes
Writing in the current issue of the New Left Review, Mike Davis offers a two-part meditation on the environmental crisis. The first part, “Pessimism of the Intellect,” uses the recent announcement that we have left behind the Holocene epoch and entered an Anthropocene period, made by Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, as the hook for a survey of current climate-crisis literature. The second part, “Optimism of the Imagination,” notes “innumerable examples” that “all point to a single unifying principle: namely, that the cornerstone of the low-carbon city, far more than any green design or technology, is the priority given to public affluence over private wealth.” Glancing back at Kropotkin, Ebeneezer Howard’s Garden Cities movement, and the radical plans for public space offered by Constructivist and Bauhaus designers, Davis suggests that the conversations about a “socialist city” of a hundred years ago “provide invaluable starting points for thinking about the current crisis.” To read the full article, which was originally delivered one year ago as a talk at the UCLA Center for Social Theory and Comparative History, click here.
The January 2010 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly contains reviews of recent books by two scholars based at NYU. Both books, Thomas M. Truxes’s Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York and Bryan Waterman’s Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature, also happen to focus on mid-to-late-eighteenth-century New York. And, last but not least, both authors happen to be speaking this semester as part of NYU’s Atlantic World Workshop. Truxes appears next Tuesday, February 2; Waterman will deliver a paper on March 23. For more, see Waterman’s blog, co-authored with Cyrus R.K. Patell and called, appropriately enough, Patell and Waterman’s History of New York; listen to Truxes’s March 2009 conversation with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate; and see my brief post on turn-of-the-eighteenth-century New York bookseller Hocquet Caritat.
I’ve just finished reading the new issue of The Baffler, and I can report that every article rewards an attentive read. The writing is crisp and the thinking is sharp throughout the magazine. Somewhat surprisingly, the tone of simmering resentment at the follies of our political and economic mandarins is invigorating, even at a moment of “bailout fatigue.” That tone characterizes the bulk of the issue’s essays, from Michael Lind’s thesis positing a contemporary U.S. oligarchy to Moe Tkacik’s analysis of book-length narratives about the economic crisis. Throw in smart essays on Detroit, Thomas Kinkade, Michael Bloomberg, Nelson Algren, and a two-part opening salvo (1, 2) about how we experience the internet, and the issue is more than worth its $12 cover price. Click here to subscribe, or here to download PDFs of several back issues.
“The skill at unmasking error, or simple intellectual one-upmanship, is not completely without value, but we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers or, to use a currently fashionable word on campuses, people who like to ‘trouble’ ideas.” So says Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, whose reviews in Bookforum I have always enjoyed. (See here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Roth continues: “Our students may become too good at showing how things don’t make sense. [...] If we humanities professors saw ourselves more often as explorers of the normative than as critics of normativity, we would have a better chance to reconnect our intellectual work to broader currents in public culture.” To read the rest of the essay, which is published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, click here. For those interested in reading even more, he also maintains a blog and writes for the Huffington Post.
Many people have commented upon Tony Judt’s eloquent and acutely observant description of the “progressive imprisonment without parole” that is life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, from which he suffers. The first of a series of short essays, on the subject of getting through the night, is in the January 14 issue of the NYRB. Judt has also been profiled recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I’ve just come across Roger Ebert’s perceptive and unsentimental description of being unable to eat or drink, published on his blog. Both are very much worth reading; each demonstrates a deeply admirable force of will and humbles those of us, myself included, who are blessed with relative good health.
My friends Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle, two-thirds of the editorial team behind e-flux journal, have printed excerpts from October’s recent questionnaire about the “lightness of being” that seemingly characterizes contemporary art. “I have arranged the extracts with an eye to connections that exist between them,” Hal Foster, who devised the questions, writes. “My purpose here is simply to suggest the state of the debate on ‘the contemporary’ in my part of the world today.” The last time October sent out such a questionnaire, asking in what ways “artists, academics, and cultural institutions” responded to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the answers were both insightful and revealing. Responses to the new survey by Grant Kester, Miwon Kwon, Richard Meyer, Pamela Lee, Tim Griffin, Rachel Haidu, and others can be found here. (Link to e-flux journal originally via Greg Allen.)
I’m jealous of my friend Michael Ned Holte, a talented art critic and film enthusiast, for he has seen James Benning’s Ruhr (2009), the filmmaker’s newest work and first foray into high-definition video. Thankfully, he has also written about it, for Artforum.com, and in the process has offered a thoughtful meditation on some of the differences between digital and celluloid images. It’s “not simply the difference between the ‘purity’ or indexicality of photographic grain versus cold, clinical pixels: Ruhr suggests that, for Benning, the true promise of HD is in its capacity to capture images at durations that push the limits of the viewer’s attention toward an almost-inhuman scale of time—albeit in a physical way that an all-too-human viewer, seated in the theater, will surely register.” Ruhr receives its US premiere at REDCAT in Los Angeles on January 11. To read the rest of Holte’s piece, click here.
Those who remember with some fondness Today in Letters, the blog I published briefly in 2007, will appreciate Letters of Note, edited by Shaun Usher. The author describes it as a “blog-based archive of fascinating correspondence, complete with scans and transcripts of the original missives.” Since I began following the site a few weeks ago, it has presented letters from Billy the Kid, Margaret Thatcher, American Revolutionary War General William Howe, and many others. The scans make each entry; it’s fascinating to ponder the material details of each letter, from paper choice (or letterhead design) to handwriting.
From an interview with Wolves in the Throne Room drummer and organic farmer Aaron Weaver: “I think that black metal fundamentally is an attempt to reawaken an ancient spirit. It’s an attempt to touch some sort of transcendent primal knowledge…. I think that black metal is an artistic movement that is critiquing modernity on a fundamental level saying that the modern world view is missing something. It’s missing acknowledgment of a spiritual reality. That estrangement from spiritual knowledge is the source of very deep sadness and alienation.” I’ve been listening to WiTTR’s 2007 album Two Hunters on repeat for the last few days. It’s a pretty exceptional record; read the Pitchfork review here. The band describes itself as combining “an eco-spiritual awareness with the misanthropic Norwegian eruptions of the 1990s.” If only we all could do that.
On Design Observer, Steven Heller looks back at the late-’60s leftist muckracking magazine Ramparts, discussing both its content and its (curiously staid but influential) design. “Marking the end of post-war puritan American values, a younger generation that had been raised on the sour milk of McCarthyism reinvigorated periodical publishing. Ramparts on the West Coast was the clarion of new aesthetics, politics and social mores.” The magazine is also subject of a new book, A Bomb In Every Issue by Peter Richardson, which Dwight Garner reviewed for the New York Times in early October.
The first significant reviews of Gordon Wood’s entry in Oxford’s multi-volume History of the United States are trickling in. Jay Winik, in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, calls Empire of Liberty “the culmination of a lifetime of brilliant thinking and writing” and “as elegant a synopsis of the period as any I know,” noting in particular the way Wood traces the emergence of the middling classes as active, engaged citizens. Jill Lepore, writing in the Washington Post, is respectful but less excited, noting Wood’s “particular knack for writing books with the magisterial sweep” of the volumes in this series while acknowledging that his focus on intellectual and political history leaves out “daily ugliness and economic strife.” For more, see the new article about and interview with Wood in the Post’s “Writing Life” series.
Prompted by an article in The Guardian and an op-ed in the New York Times, Ben Davis considers why people hate “conceptual” art: “What people actually mean by ‘conceptual art’ here is art that is not valued on the basis of its real, intrinsic merits, but because of the ideas around it. ‘Conceptual’ is conflated with an ‘anything goes’ mentality, the sense that esthetic values have been compromised by shallow commercial permissiveness.” To read the rest, click here. (Link via Mira Schor.)
Last night, T.J. Stiles’s new biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The First Tycoon, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction from an award committee chaired by Yale historian David Blight. By coincidence I just happened to read a thoughtful, generous (but by no means naive) review-essay about the book written by Steve Fraser. It’s in the current issue of The Nation, and can be found online here. “Whatever their Weltanschauung, many of these studies [a genre Fraser dubs "the misunderstood robber baron" biographies] are first-rate histories, and The First Tycoon … is no exception. Vanderbilt’s rise from small-time ferry boat operator on Staten Island to the dominant figure in the nation’s maritime (steamboat) and land (railroad) transportation system is a fascinating story, and Stiles tells it well. His writing is lively and colorful. He is a meticulous and exhaustive researcher with an instinct for the telling anecdote.” Fraser’s byline notes he is at work on a book about “America’s two Gilded Ages,” which most likely expands on his essay “The Two Gilded Ages” in the summer issue of Raritan. I recommend both of Fraser’s pieces. [Update, 11/24: Stiles has responded to Fraser's review here, and commented thoughtfully on the process of responding here.]
The last time I wrote about Sharon Core’s photographs I reviewed an exhibition of prints from her series “Early American,” which is based on the still life compositions of the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century painter Raphaelle Peale. New photographs from that series are now on view, of all places, in the Gallery at Hermès on Madison Avenue and 62nd Street. To see images of the new works and read an interview with Core, see this post on The Moment, the NYT’s style blog. She says: “As for the process, it’s really a means to an end—to create an illusive representation of another time. The photographs are completely traditional, involving no digital media whatsoever, so I am staging the ‘reality’ of an early-19th-century painting in terms of lighting, subject matter and scale. This requires a lot of planning in advance of the moment of exposure.” The exhibition remains on view until December 11.
I am a fan of Marilynne Robinson’s writing, so I was happy to learn yesterday that her next book will arrive in 2010. It is an essay collection titled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self, and it will be released by Yale University Press. It seems likely that it is a version of the four lectures Robinson delivered last spring at Yale under the same title, which can be viewed online at this page. (News via The Second Pass.)
After a lapse of about eighteen months, I’ve renewed my subscription to the London Review of Books just as the journal celebrates its thirtieth anniversary and launches a newly redesigned website. John Sutherland, a contributor for three decades, profiles the LRB and its editors for the Financial Times, recounting its “marsupial” early issues (enfolded within the NYRB), some controversies it has raised, and a number of the contributors who are identified with it. Click here to read the article.
The program for the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, which will be held in San Diego next January, is now online. There are scores, if not hundreds, of sessions and panel discussions. Based on a cursory look through the list, one trend is particularly clear: ocean and maritime history is enjoying a moment of serious attention, with panels on oceans and the environment, maritime labor, port cities, and the like. The meeting also features a fair number of events focused on marriage and sexuality in different historical periods. To browse or search the presentations, click here.
Two books on which I worked as editor and/or copyeditor have just been published. The first is Produce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat, an anthology of essays and one interview that concerns Anton Vidokle’s artistic practice. It is the eighteenth book in the Lukas & Sternberg series from Sternberg Press. I wrote a preface for the collection; among the contributors are Liam Gillick, Martha Rosler, Boris Groys, and Maria Lind. More information about the title can be found here. The second title is the catalogue accompanying Rosalind Nashashibi’s recent exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which opens November 13 at the Bergen Kunsthall in Bergen, Norway. The book contains an interview with Nashashibi and short texts by the artist, as well as essays by Dieter Roelstraete and Martin Herbert. For more information, click here. Shameless plug: I am available as a freelance editor and copyeditor for art publications. See my “about” page further information.
A few weeks ago I traveled to Bard College in order to see (and then write about) Rachel Harrison’s exhibition “Consider the Lobster.” My response, which is not a review but rather a brief meditation on the structure of the exhibition, will appear in a forthcoming issue of the European art magazine Kaleidoscope. I focus on Harrison’s reconstitution of earlier installations-cum-exhibitions, and the subsequent tensions concerning the autonomy of the artworks that comprise them, as well as on Harrison’s playful deployment of “walls.” For a closer look at the actual contents of the exhibition, please see Whitney Museum curator Elisabeth Sussman’s excellent review in the November issue of Artforum. The piece is available online here. Sussman writes: “Harrison’s brilliant and witty use of this particular object is typical of her strategy of exploiting the readymade to imbue her work with the attributes of modern life, whether bizarre or well ordered. Like the lobster, Harrison is a scavenger, rooting in the waste bin of our material lives.” Harrison’s exhibition remains on view until December 20.
My friend and former colleague David Velasco has interviewed Tacita Dean, one of my favorite working artists, about her new film Craneway Event, which premieres next week as part of PERFORMA 09. (If you haven’t looked yet at the PERFORMA calendar, you should—there are many outstanding events on the docket.) Dean has worked with Cunningham before, producing a series of six 16-mm films that I discussed when they were presented at Dia Beacon last year. Now she has filmed the rehearsals for a Cunningham “event” that took place in a former Ford factory in northern California; the still reproduced on the Artforum website looks amazing. Here is some of Dean’s description: “Merce told me I didn’t have to be faithful to the chronology of the dance, which was very liberating but, in the end, I was quite faithful. The Event had three stages on which the dancers dance simultaneously, so as a viewer you never have a composite view, which is the same in my film: no single perspective. The actual Event is always broken up.”
national health insurance, from FDR and Harry Truman to JFK and Lyndon Johnson. The chapter on Johnson draws on newly released archival material to present a “secret history of Medicare” that counters the popular narrative granting credit for the program to Senator Wilbur Mills. It turns out that LBJ, master manipulator of Congress that he was, was in on Mills’s “surprise” packaging of three separate bills—the ones that became Medicare Part A, Medicare Part B, and Medicaid—all along, graciously working behind the scenes to clear the path for the senator to dramatically reverse his longstanding anti–health insurance stance (and even following this narrative line in his autobiography).
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The gallery designs of the 19th century were shaped primarily by scientific theories: Goethe’s discussion of colour had museum directors calibrating their walls to match the dominant hues in their painting collections; later, in the 1890s, Wilhelm Wundt’s stimulation experiments prompted a scramble to eliminate ‘sameness’ in gallery architecture. Such scientific considerations were intertwined with social and political questions. Were spectators to be treated as a liberal body politic that could learn, in galleries, the art of citizenship? Or were they individuals seeking intimate, emotionally charged encounters with masterpieces?
At the outset of his book, Drescher describes slavery as a “perennial institution” and outlines the ways in which Christians and Muslims enslaved each other (but not their co-religionists); describes the organization of African society and its ability to facilitate of the export of slaves after initial Portuguese contact; and the shift from Mediterranean to transatlantic slaving. He suggests that a “freedom principle” arose in the consciousness of serfs and peasants in northwest Europe during the fifteenth century, leading to the gradual incorporation of contracts for labor and the recognition that a line divided those who possessed a modicum of freedom from the far greater number of people who did not.