Belting’s arguments suffer particular damage in English translation because they hinge so directly on the word almost always rendered as “gaze.” In academic English for the past three decades or so, “gaze” has conjured up a whole series of associations that originate with Jacques Lacan and his ideas about the way that sight shapes thought (or “scopic regimes,” which sounds only slightly less outré in French than it does in English). To our collective misfortune, “gaze” and “the gaze” entered the Anglophone vocabulary through a translator’s effort to find the right English word to match Lacan’s “regard.” But “gaze” is not that word. Lacan’s regard meant an incisive look that has nothing whatsoever to do with gazing. “Gaze,” like “berserk,” is one of the marvelous Scandinavian contributions to the English vocabulary for mental derangement. It means an unfocused, mindless kind of looking, the kind of stupefied contemplation that brings to mind operative lovers doting on miniature portraits of the beloved, the rapt stare that Narcissus showered upon his own reflection, and stargazers turned upward obsessively to the heavens in the minds of their unappreciative contemporaries. A gaze is, indeed, the exact opposite of a pointed and precise regard, or an equally pointed and precise German Blick. Translators of Chinese and japanese have usually used the word “view” for this kind of intelligent looking—a much more appropriate description of the activity at hand, as our own English usage proves: we say “point of view” and “viewer,” rather than “point of gaze” and “gazer,” because gazing never focuses on a point, and we don’t go “gazing” at art, or “gazing for” someone, we go “looking.” Tellingly, Belting drops the misleading term for his own discussion of Al-Hazen’s optics and speaks of “seeing” and “glancing.”

By now, however, one translator’s unhappy choice in rending Lacan has become the byword for two generations of English-speaking scholars who would classify themselves as “critical” and “theoretical” while accepting, uncritically and with utter lack of theoretical sophistication, a grossly misleading term for one of their fundamental concepts.

For the rest of Rowland’s review, see the December 29 issue of The New Republic.

Police shoot water cannons as Jammu Kashmir state government employees shout anti government slogans during a protest outside the civil secretariat in Srinagar, India, May, 5, 2008. (Dar Yasin/AP)

The use of bright colors has entered the news in two unexpected ways this week. On Friday, Time’s Lightbox blog reported on the use of pink dye in the water cannons the government uses to fight political protesters in Uganda. The report included a stunning-looking—if dispiriting to think about—slide show demonstrating how the dyes, in a rainbow of colors, have been used elsewhere in recent decades. Today’s New York Times includes a story about the riotous colors—a “scourge” of tastelessness, according to some—used in the rebuilding of Baghdad. A slideshow accompanies the report.

Each of the report’s seven sections encompasses a type of adult-education effort, with individual examples; the fifth focuses on “Corporation Educational Programs.” Peffer discusses courses conducted by the American Institute of Banking, the Standard Oil Company, and Westinghouse Electric, the latter of which enrolled roughly 5,000 of its employees in East Pittsburgh. The offerings of these companies are relatively straightforward, in that they mostly focus upon teaching employees skills they can use to get ahead in their careers at the company. Such initiatives conform to what historian Lizabeth Cohen has called “welfare capitalist” policies, which sought, in the wake of labor unrest and shop-floor organizing during the 1910s, to redirect incipient working-class solidarity into an attachment to the company.

Albert C. Barnes

“One unique venture should be noticed,” Peffer continues, “not because it has a general application to this field but because it is an interesting example of what may be done under special conditions. The Barnes Foundation of Philadelphia is the educational outgrowth of the A.C. Barnes Company, manufacturing chemists., but it is primarily the product of a unique personality…” So begins his introduction to an aspect of Albert C. Barnes’s educational efforts of which I was previously unaware. There is, of course, the famous art gallery Barnes set up in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, home (for a little while longer, at least) to his spectacular, idiosyncratic—and idiosyncratically presented—collection of artworks, many of them modernist masterpieces. But even while he was amassing this amazing ensemble of paintings, sculptures, and other objects, Barnes was working (with John Dewey and others) to provide educational opportunities for the workers who manufactured Argyrol, the antimicrobial drug that made him immensely wealthy. Here is part of Peffer’s description of what went on, which I offer without further comment beyond a recommendation that you bear in mind when it was published.

His fortune was made in a few years and, as he says, having no interest in wealth or commercial success per se, he took advantage of his position to give free play to his ideas. His business absorbs little of his own time and not all the time of his employees. Philosophy, psychology and art share the attention and the time both of himself and his employees.

The plant is a study group or club as much as an industry. There are about twenty employees. The men are all Negroes; no white man has ever held a job there. The women, about equal in number, are all white. There is not much work to do; in summer there is non at all, as the materials used in the preparations manufactured by the company cannot be handled in hot weather. Finding, then, that all the work that needed to be done could be finished in five or six hours a day, while the customary workday was eight hours, Dr. Barnes asked himself what to do with the remaining hours. The answer came naturally out of his own inclinations: study. So they began to study.

From one to two o’clock every afternoon was set aside as a sort of discussion hour. Those who wanted to come could, those who did not could do something else. There were two classes, usually on alternate days, although the program was most elastic. One class was for the women, who were more advanced, and the other for the Negro men, some of whom could barely read, having been picked in nearly every case at random as unskilled laborers. There was no formal curriculum. There were not even formal “subjects.”

Miss Mary Mullen, one of the office executives, had a flair for psychology. She took the classes, more or less under Dr. Barnes’ supervision. They read William James, with difficult passages simplified and explained for them by Miss Mullen. They read John Dewey in the same way. They read and analyzed and discussed and re-read. Whatever they took up had to be interested in terms of their own lives, their immediate situations at their work and in their personal relationships. They analyzed the effectiveness of their work in the light of what they read. They analyzed their attitudes, bringing personal and family problems to the group. They analyzed each other’s personalities as reflected in their common association. They took up a Negro magazine, found an article of general application, translated it in terms of their own experience, tested their new beliefs by later experience. Dr. Barnes took the whole staff to a play presenting a difficult social or personal problem. The next day he brought to the discussion hour a written analysis of the action and motivation of the play. The others debated his analysis and presented alternative interpretations and solutions. In the same way they approached race problems, economic problems, personal problems. After a few years one of the Negroes who when he was first employed was just literate was leading a group in discussion of one of John Dewey’s latest works. Another had a seminar in the complete works of H.G. Wells. In one year it was found necessary to abandon the classes because of the opening of the Foundation’s art gallery. In the spring one of the men proposed that they organize and conduct a class by themselves the coming year.

The Reliance Building (Photo: Geoff Hoffman/Flickr)

This month I have been reading books on the history of Chicago. I’ve enjoyed several that are deemed classics in their fields—namely William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis and Carl Smith’s Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief. But rather than sing their praises yet again, I want to mention a new book, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury’s Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City (University of Chicago Press, 2009). It’s a slim, engaging study that places a handful of the city’s first skyscrapers, including The Monadnock, the Masonic Temple, and the Reliance Building, in the context of the raucous decade during which they were erected. While Merwood-Salisbury does include some formal description, a far greater proportion of her book is given over to analysis of “architecture and anarchy,” strikes by building trades union members, and the skyscrapers’ relationship to civic reform efforts, such as sanitation. Even the technical innovations that allowed the skyscrapers to reach above ten stories in the first place, such as steel-frame construction, are examined from the standpoint of their impact upon the labor that goes in to their building. This push-and-pull between aesthetics and politics played out in the pages of The Inland Architect, the house journal of the city’s architecture professionals, and the newspaper and periodical press, which Merwood-Salisbury mines to strong effect.

Rorotoko, a website that publishes original first-person statements by authors that describe their books, featured Chicago 1890 at the beginning of the month. Here are a few of Merwood-Salisbury’s own words:

→ The book is firstly a reinterpretation of some well-known architectural masterpieces by Chicago architects Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root, notably the Monadnock (1885-92) and the Reliance Building (1889-95). I examine these buildings not only as important artifacts in architectural history, but also as sites for a contentious debate about the future of the industrial city.

Chicago’s defining events, including the violent building trade strikes of the 1880s, the Haymarket bombing of 1886, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, and Burnham and Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago— feature large in the book as the context in which the skyscraper, at the turn of the twentieth century, was imagined, built, and finally repudiated. This approach to architectural history provides a new way to look at the work of important American architects, understanding their designs as specific responses to modern urban phenomena.

To read more from this interview, click here. To see a video recording of a lecture on this subject that Merwood-Salisbury delivered at the Skyscraper Museum last year, click here.

I’m neither a health care expert nor a scholar of Johnson, so I can’t assess how fresh this “secret history” really is. Yet the book, published by the University of California Press, is obviously aimed at a broad audience, ostensibly offering ballast to anyone debating health care in 2009 and 2010. The final chapter goes so far as to offer “eight rules for the Heart of Power,” among them “passion,” “speed,” “hush the economists,” “go public,” and “manage Congress.” Curiously, though, it seems that Sam Tanenhaus, editor of both the New York Times Book Review and the Times’s Week in Review section, is among the only editors to have responded to the book. I guess the vicissitudes of book publicity will always escape me: I would imagine that powerhouse academic authors plus reputable academic press plus hot-button topic would equal widespread review attention. But despite the fact that The Heart of Power was featured on the cover of the NYTBR, where it was reviewed by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and was the prompt for an article in the Week in Review, there’s not much else out there. (I canvassed the web and Lexis-Nexis.) Here’s an interview with Morone on Open Source, a radio program based at Brown. These pieces came out in September, so perhaps others are on their way. For what it’s worth, Reich’s assessment of the book, and his description of Obama’s action on the authors’ lessons, seems to me insightful and fair. Here are his thoughts on the latter topic:

The book was written before President Obama began his push for universal health care, but he seems to have anticipated many of its lessons. He’s moved as quickly on the issue as this terrible economy has let him, and he has outlined his goals but left most details to Congress. Nor has he been too rattled by naysaying economists (although the cost estimates of the Congressional Budget Office set him back). The question remains whether, in the months ahead, he can knock Congressional heads together to clinch a meaningful deal, and overcome those who inevitably feed public fears about a “government takeover” of health care and of budget-busting future expenditures. “The Heart of Power” suggests that the odds are not in his favor.

My reading last year was a whiplash affair; I caromed between books on contemporary art and books on American history. Among my favourites were Jackson Lears’ Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (Harper), which expands upon the insights of his first book, No Place of Grace (1981). Whereas that earlier volume cast a series of late-19th-century anti-modern prophets as unwittingly complicit in the arrival of therapeutic consumer culture, in his new book Lears views the period as a cauldron of proactive revitalization. This search for new spiritual and physical beginnings led, he persuasively suggests, to unintended consequences – not least to martial ambition and America’s arrival on the world stage as an imperialist power.

Later in the summer, I enjoyed my friend Suzanne Hudson’s study Robert Ryman (MIT Press), subtitled ‘Used Paint’. The book not only shrewdly frames Ryman’s practice as a pragmatic ‘open inquiry’ made up of constituent parts (primer, paint, support, edge, wall) but also includes a brief and fascinating discussion of Victor D’Amico, an unknown-to-me pioneering art educator who worked at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from the 1930s to the ’60s. Another book from MIT will no doubt prove of enduring value: Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson’s Institutional Critique, an anthology of artists’ writings that follows their collection of artists’ writings on Conceptual art published in 2000. That the new anthology opens with a 1966 essay by Wiesław Borowski, Hanna Ptsazkowska and Mariusz Tchorek, and that it interpolates early contributions from South America with more familiar texts by the likes of Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke and Allan Kaprow, indicates the editors’ attention to the art-historical shifts of the last decade. Institutional Critique will certainly be worked into the syllabuses of many graduate art history courses. Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, the latest 750-page brick in the multi-volume ‘Oxford History of the United States’ published by Oxford University Press, should likewise find its way onto the reading lists of US history surveys. My admiration for both Wood’s earlier books on the American Revolution and the OUP series is widely shared (by, for example, Pulitzer Prize committee members). Though I’ve only dipped into Empire of Liberty it seems as well-crafted a narrative and as talented a synthesis of recent scholarship as one would expect.

But of all the reading I did last year, nothing sticks out in my mind as brightly as does a hilarious brief passage in scientist and documentary filmmaker Steve Nicholls’ Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery (University of Chicago Press). To depict nature’s bounty, Nicholls scrutinizes the copious written descriptions left behind by the first European explorers of North America. The abundance and vitality of flora and fauna worked both to the advantage of such adventurers and, as indicated by the words of one hunter in the Carolinas, occasionally to frustrating disadvantage: ‘We saw plenty of Turkies, but perch’d upon such lofty Oaks, that our Guns would not kill them, tho’ we shot very often, and our Guns were very good.’

Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge), a sweeping comparative history of slavery and its eradication, is the fruit of Seymour Drescher’s fifty years of scholarship on the topic. As the title indicates, Drescher is particularly interested in abolition, and he therefore examines historical developments based on their effect, whether positive or negative, on the institution of slavery. His analyses of local events focus primarily upon Britain, France, the Iberian peninsula, and their New World colonial outposts; less attention is devoted to slavery in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Drescher’s book is arranged in three broad narratives: one concerning the “extension” (or rise) of slavery; one focused upon slavery in “crisis”; and one charting the “contraction” of slavery. A shorter fourth section discusses the unexpected “reversion” to slavery during the second quarter of the twentieth century (which took place in the forced-labor camps of the Soviet Union and Germany).

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.

What, then, inaugurated abolitionist movements? Drescher suggests that increasing New World agitation on behalf of national independence and individual emancipation during the American Revolution, the messy Franco-American revolutions of the 1780s to the 1820s, and the Latin American revolutions of the 1810s and 1820s created a situation in which European citizens could no longer ignore the contradiction between “free soil” policies at home and the use of slave labor at the edges of empire. Drescher believes that this contradiction was felt most acutely in Britain, and that the nascent abolitionist movement there capitalized upon a rising tide of moral indignation among the general public. Through an expanded print sphere, increasing associational activity, and the process of mass petitioning, British abolitionists led three waves of protest (1787-88, 1791-92, 1806-07) whose cumulative force resulted in the abolishing of the slave trade by Britain’s government. Indeed, the fact that Anglo-American societies possessed “the most highly developed public sphere on the face of the earth” during the Age of Revolutions was “the most distinctive, durable, and consequential development in the demise of New World slavery.” By virtue of Britain’s global naval dominance during the first half of the nineteenth century, it was able then to “internationalize” abolition through a patchwork of bilateral treaties with powers in Old World and colonies and emerging nations in the New World.

Two more popular pushes in Britain, which Drescher describes with obvious relish, led to the emancipation of all of the empire’s enslaved peoples in 1833. He is careful to note, however, that the later efforts to transition from slavery to free labor do not follow the immediatist policies of Britain and France (which abolished slavery—for the first time—during its own revolution, in 1794). Instead, the tenacity of slaveholders, their fears of slave rebellions, and the inability of abolitionists to prove free labor more efficient than slave labor, as well as the fact that attacks on slavery seem always to arrive at the height of the institution’s economic power, conspired to create a situation in which gradual emancipation predominated. (One striking thread running through Drescher’s book is the fact that slave rebellions in the Americas often worked against the interests of slaves back in the halls of power at the seat of empire.)

The public sphere, though preeminent in Drescher’s account, is only one lens through which he views abolitionism during the nineteenth century. In each region on which he focuses, Drescher not only examines the impact of newspapers and public outcry, but also women, the church, the working and middle classes, and slaves themselves. Drescher’s comparative perspective allows readers to understand more fully which of these factors were real agents of change in which region; for example, whereas in the inaugural push for abolition in Britain depended to a large extent on the efforts of women and the church, they played a much smaller role in the initial efforts toward abolition in places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil. Few previous considerations of abolitionism have ranged as widely as does Drescher’s; even a recent collection edited by Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer, Prophets of Protest, limits itself largely to the United States. Drescher’s synthesis of a broad range of materials and his comparative perspective offer readers an opportunity to consider anew the history of slavery and abolition in our country.

Can anyone tell me the general thrust of his two-minute introduction? Most of what he played during the concert was not given so elaborate an explanation, so I’m curious to know what he is saying. For a taste of the rest of the album, click here to watch him perform “Hibari.” Sakamoto is currently touring Europe; click here and scroll down for dates and information.

Questionnaire Introduction

Some of the twelve prominent contemporary artists chosen to respond to this survey received fine art training in university and art school settings; one studied chemical engineering, and another studied in a workshop setting outside the bounds of academic institutions. Nearly all have, at some point, taught art themselves. With so diverse a group—whose practices, it should be said, are also varied—the lessons to be drawn from their answers are not clear-cut. Nevertheless, several broad themes emerged. First, most of those surveyed agree that you have to learn the rules in order to break them. Whether our respondents felt that M.F.A. programs should be organized by discipline, some grounding in technique seems a necessary prerequisite to the free exploration that these programs should ideally encourage. Second, in looking back at their own educations, many felt that additional study of the liberal arts or humanities would have served them well in their careers as artists. Third, the interviewees were less concerned about the effects of the art market on art education than one might expect, given the hand-writing tone of many articles and essays on the topic. Fourth, and perhaps most important, nearly all agreed that no matter how much time one spends housed in institutions, the lessons that nourish an ongoing, sustainable career can come from anywhere—and that anywhere is often outside academic settings. This may be allied to the first observation. Beyond the specifics of discipline, medium, or technique to be gleaned from professors in art school, what young artists might benefit from most is the time, space, and gentle guidance necessary to be receptive to such unpredictable lessons—to learn a way of seeing that does not occlude any avenues for inspiration or growth. This assertion may be a commonplace, but whether art schools can make a space for this—or, perhaps more accurately, whether professors and students can carve this space out from institutional demands—may be one of the defining questions that such institutions face.

Selected Questions and Answers

In art school, did you learn how to sustain yourself as an artist, both creatively and professionally? Did you feel prepared to be an artist when you graduated?

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe: I learned how to make art, but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to keep up with what “professional” means, except that I’ve noticed that regardless of fashion, it consistently involves personality rather than argument to an extraordinary degree.

Ann Hamilton: I don’t know whether I felt prepared; I think I was all too aware of the holes in my knowledge and in my inability to be articulate about my work. I was, like everyone graduating, overwhelmed by the prospect of balancing the making of work and making a living. Actually, I don’t think that has changed too much—it’s not a challenge that goes away. But what I did feel prepared for was having a studio practice; I knew what that meant to me. I knew that my studio was in the books I was reading and in the flea markets and junk stores I visited. I knew I liked to look at objects and that the forms I created came as a process of response to a situation. I was just coming to understand, as I graduated, that a studio is a state of mind and not a physical location.

Mike Kelley: There was no art market when I was in school. Being a professional artist at that time was an ideological position. I showed, I traveled, I lectured, but I did not make money from these activities. I considered myself a professional artist and was trained to be one, and I functioned as one within that world. But if professionalism is defined by economic success—well, that’s just not what it meant at the time. There is, of course, a far different attitude about this now. I do feel that my graduate experience prepared me for the art world as it existed at that time. It made me aware that art was an international phenomenon and that I could network within it. For example, as a performance artist, I knew where I could perform—and I did.

Mike Kelley, Educational Complex, 1995. Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Did your art school give you any sense of having an ethical commitment to the community that it was located in?

Paul Chan: No. Where I was, in downtown Chicago, you actually didn’t want to be a part of the very local community. The neighborhood where I lived, with other art students, outside downtown, gave us more of a sense of participation. We started a gallery in Pilsen, on the South Side. This is a complicated question, but the school itself did not instill in us this sense of commitment. Then again, I never really plugged in to what the school would offer that would give me that chance.

Paul Ramirez-Jonas: In a general sense, no. In a limited sense, some of my teachers thought that art should be a critique of the art world and the use of art as a commodity. My formative experiences regarding ethics, community, and politics took place as an undergraduate—outside the field of art. Although I was shy to get involved, my friends in university were extremely active in politics, environmental issues, etc. Even in high school (in Honduras), one had to complete a year of civic service to receive a diploma. It all added up to a series of examples of the importance of action, not just talk. In comparison, my experience in art school was shockingly disengaged. This contrast between university and art school reflects my current experiences as a faculty member. I can’t help but think that this situation relates to my answer to the first question [about the most valuable lesson learned in art school].

With hindsight, would you do it the same way if you had the choice? If not, how would you have gone about your education as an artist?

Shirin Neshat: If I had a chance to repeat my education, I would take some time off between undergraduate and graduate school. My rather unproductive years in graduate school were mostly due to the fact that I wasn’t intellectually prepared to be an artist, and mostly I was never able to place myself as an Iranian within Euro-centric art history. Today I firmly believe that my return to art was provoked by the way in which I immersed myself in life experiences, encountered certain individuals and institutions, and lived in particular political environments that helped to shape and develop my art.

In fact, after I graduated from school, I became artistically inactive for nearly ten years, until the moment when I felt emotionally and intellectually motivated. I generally feel that young artists should be cautious not to get too trapped in a vacuum, where their imaginations look mainly to their intuitions as the source, as opposed to knowledge and experiences that can only be gained outside of school boundaries.

Piero Golia: I think that by never going to school, I never came out of school. I wouldn’t change that at all. In a way, because I never graduated from art school, I’m still not done. It’s easy to see today how students don’t go to school to learn but rather to receive the stamp that says “I’m an artist.” And if you pay $40,000 a year to go to school, you really expect that stamp to get you in to a lot of places. That’s one of the big dangers of the art school system in America. If you go to law school, you come out a lawyer: I can take the bar, I can go to court and argue a case. But when you graduate from art school, you are not necessarily an artist. It’s not enough just to attend, whether for a week or for years and years.

By not having a degree, I will never be able to tell people, “I am an artist,” in an officially sanctioned way. So no, I don’t regret anything. Well, I regret everything, but that has to do with Catholicism and a whole host of other issues. I regret everything, but I’m proud of everything too.