May 8, 2008
Katy Siegel interviews Richard Shiff
The Brooklyn Rail has published an interview with art historian and critic Richard Shiff by his onetime student, Katy Siegel. There are many interesting passages, among them this discussion of the relationship between art history and art criticism:
Rail: What are the issues at stake when a historian becomes a critic? Reading your essay about using art criticism to build a historical narrative, “On Criticism Handling History,” was the thing that made me want to be an art historian, but now the formula seems more pressing when reversed. So many historians have begun to dabble in the contemporary, but oddly don’t seem to bring historical skill or perspectives to the task.
Shiff: If my writing on living artists has a distinctive character, it would be for two reasons (no doubt shared with at least some other writers, but probably not many)—first, I’ve always got the long view of history in mind and probably see better than most of my peers that a great deal of what goes on now isn’t particularly unprecedented or innovative (the nineteenth century had its share of people who took a postmodernist stance toward the fundamentals of modernist practice—for every true believer, there was an ironic deconstructionist, but they didn’t have the word then). At the same time, I would fault many of my contemporaries for romanticizing the present by seeing it through moments of past history. They either understand the past era better, or, more likely, have simply romanticized it by identifying it with a figure they wish were right beside them in the present time. Walter Benjamin is a critical writer I myself admire for his remarkable acumen, but I wouldn’t apply his politics to the politics of our own time—it won’t work.
Rail: I am very interested in what you say about the way your peers think about the past and see the present through romantic versions of certain past moments. This seems particularly true about 1968. Could you talk a bit about that?
Shiff: The ideas of 1960s radical groups will not work now, so we have to be careful about how much we romanticize 1968. Yet, because significant elements of the social structures associated with modernity may not have changed all that much over the past two hundred years, understanding art of a century ago or two centuries ago helps us to discern what’s truly different about now and what isn’t. I don’t need to translate our time now into the Paris of 1914, the Berlin of 1939, or the Paris of 1968 just to function as a historically sensitive critic. Some of my peers seem to be in the habit of transposing historical moments, oversimplifying what they see as the social and political crises of the relatively recent past. They seem to think that history repeats itself. I don’t.
Rail: People are still talking about the “failure of utopia” and the “disappointments of modernism” as if events of the ‘20s and ‘30s are still uppermost in the minds of thirty-year-old artists. How do we connect our history to the past without mistaking it for the present? Do we in fact need to connect to the past?
Shiff: It seems pointless to note the failure to attain some kind of social utopia if the critic does no more than denounce the implied utopian promises of certain forms of art. Those promises tended to be made by critical interpreters more than by artists, so, at the very least, let’s not hold the artists and their art responsible for political fantasies that were the creation of the writers who were promoting the art. And, of course, a technique or an image that had a certain connotative value in the past may have a very different one now. A critic ought to be sufficiently sensitive to history to identify which aspects of traditional practice are being resisted, ignored, or actively discarded. Do techniques, subjects, and aesthetic attitudes change because the needs they once served no longer exist, or do they change because of an overriding ideological principle, such as (obviously) change for the sake of change? This can be a fruitful path of questioning but you can’t proceed down it if you have little understanding of the dynamics of past art within its own society.
Shiff goes on to discuss his new book, Doubt, what distinguishes artists, critics, and historians, the trouble with theory, the "tychic" element in reading and writing, and much else besides. To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Permanent link here.
May 7, 2008
Scott McLemee interviews Neil Gross
In this week's "Intellectual Affairs" column, Scott McLemee interviews Neil Gross, author of the forthcoming book Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago). McLemee describes the book as not exactly a biography, but rather "a study of how institutional forces shape an intellectual’s sense of personal identity, and vice versa." A Q-and-A follows, which begins:
Q: You identify your work on Richard Rorty not as a biography, or even as a work of intellectual history, but rather as an empirical case study in “the new sociology of ideas.” What is that? What tools does a sociologist bring to the job that an intellectual historian wouldn’t?
A: Sociology is a diverse field, but if I had to offer a generalization, I’d say that most sociologists these days aim to identify the often hidden social mechanisms, or cascading causal processes, that help to explain interesting, important, or counterintuitive outcomes or events in the social world. How and why do some movements for social change succeed in realizing their goals when others fail to get off the ground? Why isn’t there more social mobility? What exactly is the connection between neighborhood poverty and crime? Few sociologists think anymore that universal, law-like answers to such questions can be found, but they do think it possible to isolate the role played by more or less general mechanisms.
Sociologists of ideas are interested in identifying the hidden social processes that can help explain the content of intellectuals’ ideas and account for patterns in the dissemination of those ideas. My book attempts to make a theoretical contribution to this subfield. I challenge the approaches taken by two of the leading figures in the area — Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins — and propose a new approach. I think that the best sociological theory, however, has strong empirical grounding, so I decided to develop my theoretical contribution and illustrate its value by deeply immersing myself in an empirical case: the development of the main lines of Richard Rorty’s philosophy....
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in . Permanent link here.
May 4, 2008
Wendell Berry, "Faustian Economics"
I'm making my way through the new Harper's slowly, and only today read Wendell Berry's essay, titled "Faustian Economics." I encourage everyone who can access it to do so and read it. His call for an end to human exceptionalism, our insistent, delusional belief in the limitlessness of resources, is both urgent and compelling. That he also manages to put in a plug for the ways of thinking fostered by the arts is an additional benefit. Two excerpts:
If the idea of appropriate limitation seems unacceptable to us, that may be because, like Marlow's Faustus and Milton's Satan, we confuse limits with confinement. But that, as I think Marlow and Milton and others were trying to tell us, is a great and potentially a fatal mistake. Satan's fault, as Milton understood it and perhaps with some sympathy, was precisely that he could not tolerate his proper limitation; he could not subordinate himself to anything whatever. Faustus's error was his unwillingness to remain "Faustus, and a man." In our age of the world it is not rare to find writers, critics, and teachers of literature, as well as scientists and technicians, who regard Satan's and Faustus's defiance as salutary and heroic.
On the contrary, our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning. Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible. For example, an ecosystem, even that of a working forest or farm, so long as it remains ecologically intact, can provide opportunities of work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure—in addition to its difficulties—that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.
And:
It is the artists, not the scientists, who have dealt unremittingly with the problem of limits. A painting, however large, must finally be bounded by a frame or a wall. A composer or playwright must reckon, at a minimum, with the capacity of an audience to sit still and pay attention. A story, once begun, must end somewhere within the limits of the writer's and the reader's memory. And of course the arts characteristically impose limits that are artificial: the five acts of a play, or the fourteen lines of a sonnet. Within these limits artists achieve elaborations of pattern, of sustaining relationships of parts with one another and with the whole, that may be astonishingly complex. And probably most of us can name a painting, a piece of music, a poem or play or story that still grows in meaning and remains fresh after many years of familiarity.
To read the rest (the link may be subscriber-only), click here.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Permanent link here.
Spring 2008 NBCC Good Reads list
The National Book Critics Circle, an organization I joined several months ago, has published its seasonal Good Reads list, in which recommendations from active book reviewers and book-review editors are tallied "as an alternative to the many best sellers lists available." My fiction nomination came in tied at number four with six other worthy titles, and my nonfiction nomination did not make the cut. (I believe, however, that a brief blurb I wrote about the book will be posted to the NBCC site soon; I'll link to it if/when that happens.) The top three in each category are:
FICTION
1. Richard Price, Lush Life, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth, Knopf
3. Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter, Knopf
1. Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginning of World War II, The End of Civilization, Simon & Schuster
2. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Knopf
3. Mark Harris, Pictures at the Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, Penguin Press
POETRY
1. Grace Paley, Fidelity, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
3. Eric Gansworth, A Half-life of Cardio-pulmonary Function, Syracuse University Press
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Books. Permanent link here.
May 2, 2008
Joan Acocella on New Yorkers
The April issue of Smithsonian magazine carries a "travel" piece about New Yorkers by New Yorker critic Joan Acocella, author of the excellent essay collection Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (among other books). An excerpt:
The other day I was in the post office when a man in line in front of me bought one of those U.S. Postal Service boxes. Then he moved down the counter a few inches to assemble his package while the clerk waited on the next person. But the man soon discovered that the books he wanted to mail were going to rattle around in the box, so he interrupted the clerk to tell her his problem. She offered to sell him a roll of bubble wrap, but he told her that he had already paid $2.79 for the box, and that was a lot for a box—he could have gotten a box for free at the liquor store—and what was he going to do with a whole roll of bubble wrap? Carry it around all day? The clerk shrugged. Then the man spotted a copy of the Village Voice on the counter and laid hold of it to use it for stuffing. "No!" said the clerk. "That's my Voice." Annoyed, the man put it back and looked around helplessly. Now a woman in line behind me said she'd give him the sections of her New York Times that she didn't want, and she began going through the paper. "Real estate? You can have real estate. Sports? Here, take sports." But the real estate section was all the man needed. He separated the pages, stuffed them in the box and proceeded to the taping process (interrupting the clerk once again). Another man in line asked the woman if he could have the sports section, since she didn't want it. She gave it to him, and so finally everything was settled.
This was an interesting show, to which you could have a wide range of reactions. Why didn't the box man bring some stuffing? If the clerk hadn't finished her Village Voice, why did she leave it on the counter? And so on. In any case, the scene sufficed to fill up those boring minutes in line—or, I should add, to annoy the people who just wanted to read their newspaper in peace instead of being exposed to the man's postal adventure. I won't say this could happen only in New York, but I believe that the probability is much greater here.
Why are New Yorkers like this? It goes against psychological principles. Psychologists tell us that the more stimuli people are bombarded with, the more they will recede into themselves and ignore others. So why is it that New Yorkers, who are certainly confronted with enough stimuli, do the opposite? I have already given a few possible answers, but here's one more: the special difficulties of life in New York—the small apartments, the struggle for a seat on the bus or a table at a restaurant—seem to breed a sense of common cause.
To read the rest, which is gentle and entertaining, click here.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Permanent link here.
May 1, 2008
Visual Interlude: Stuart Franklin
From a recent issue of Time magazine: Magnum Photographer Stuart Franklin has spent a decade exploring the beauty of trees and the unique place they occupy in man's world. Its website features sixteen images from around the world, including the one above, which was taken in Scotland. More of Franklin's photographs are available at his website (see, in particular, his series "Europe's Changing Forest").
Posted in Art. Permanent link here.
Artforum, April and May 2008
As the May issue of Artforum, which seeks to take stock of our own moment through the lens of May 1968, goes online, I want to point out one last time an article from the April issue by artist Joe Scanlan. Titled, "Modest Proposals," here is the paragraph that caught my attention when I re-read it last Sunday:
Like the struggle between entrenched power and grassroots change that epitomizes this year’s presidential campaign, the violent emergence and stealth occlusion of class in art was nascent in 1968. The various revolutions of that fateful year institutionalized a kind of critical contempt for any artist openly seeking to earn a living from his or her work. In the reification of that politic, many artists who, for economic reasons, work on a small scale, use consumable materials, attempt alternative distribution strategies, or move to marginal locales have fallen prey to an insidious strain of art criticism that can see their production only in negative terms, that is, as a critique of the mainstream commodity makers and of money in general—the pursuit of it, and the capitulations to both consumption and spectacle that invariably follow. From this point of view, all portable, ephemeral, or otherwise modest artworks, by the likes of Rashawn Griffin and Mitzi Pederson or Trisha Donnelly and Tino Sehgal, are to be understood solely in relation to the big commodity makers and only as a reaction against them, as de rigueur dematerialization. Of the original generation of critical revolutionaries, only Lucy Lippard has recanted (and thirty years ago, at that), writing, “Some of the blame for this situation must fall on those who, like myself, had exaggerated illusions about the ability of a ‘dematerialization of the art object’ to subvert the commodity status and political uses to which successful American art has been subjected since the late 1950s. It has become obvious over the last few years that temporary, cheap, invisible or reproducible art has made little difference in the way art and artists are economically and ideologically exploited and that it can hardly be distinguished in that sense from Cor-Ten steel sculptures and twenty-foot canvases.”
Many critical artists (myself included) would agree. They understand that they could never exist outside or above the market but that their only viable option is to try to shape the kind of market they want to inhabit.
Scanlan's point about criticism is an important one, one writers would do well to bear in mind as they discuss artworks.
I should add that two of my contributions to the magazine's May issue are now available on my website: my review of Matthew Buckingham's recent exhibition at Murray Guy and my discussion of the new curatorial programming at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
Posted in . Permanent link here.
April 30, 2008
Natalie Zemon Davis on Michel de Certeau
Natalie Zemon Davis, professor of history emeritus at Princeton and professor of medieval studies at the University of Toronto, has published a long consideration of Michel de Certeau's thought and life in the new issue of the New York Review of Books. She usefully contrasts Certeau with Michel Foucault and Joseph Ratzinger and, though the piece seems truncated at the end, it provides a good general-interest introduction to the French Jesuit scholar who is perhaps better known in the US for his book The Practice of Everyday Life than his writings on religion.
Especially important in the 1960s were the changes instituted by Vatican II. The once-proscribed Henri de Lubac was summoned by Pope John XXIII to have a leading part in the council; Joseph Ratzinger attended the sessions and wrote approvingly of the Church's new openness to the laity and even to "elements of sanctification" outside the Church itself (to quote the phrase from the council's text Lumen gentium). From Paris, Certeau responded more radically. For him the reforms endorsed by the council were a creative "rupture" with the unbending hierarchical patterns of the past. They called for "multiple languages of faith" to express people's experience instead of remote clerical language. In his view, Vatican II should lead the Church to immerse itself fully in all the issues of the modern world and to recognize how much it still had to learn about these issues—about war and violence, about birth control, and what went on in the city streets and in the press and television.
And:
Jesus Christ, Certeau argued, is the central figure, the Other, present but also absent; his coming and death founded Christianity, but the signifying event is not the crucifixion but the empty tomb; "the 'follow me' [of Jesus] comes from a voice which has been effaced, forever irrecoverable." Still the Christian wants to believe, Certeau said; wants to take the risk and follows a way to Christ; but the character of the Christian life must be understood according to historical circumstances. In the secularized world of the late twentieth century, with nonreligious structures dominating everywhere, Certeau argued, Church institutions alone could not be the site for Christian intervention in the world. In fact, Christian belief and practices could no longer be associated with a place, or even with a single social milieu like "the poor," but could be only an uncharted path, a wandering, without power: the person, armed with the "weakness of faith," tries always to make space for others and to open closed systems to difference and plurality. One printed version of his radio debate with Domenach quotes Certeau as exclaiming, "Christianity is something particular in the totality of history.... It cannot speak in the name of the entire universe."
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Permanent link here.
Visual Interlude: Peter Kayafas
Peter Kayafas, San Francisco, 2007, from an exhibition presented earlier this year at Sasha Wolf Gallery, New York
Posted in Art. Permanent link here.
Review of David Samuels's Only Love Can Break Your Heart
My review of David Samuels's new essay collection, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, has just been published in the Detroit Metro Times. Here's the opening paragraph:
David Samuels belongs to an increasingly rare species: journalists who can parachute into an unfamiliar corner of America, establish their bearings quickly and extract a compelling narrative at once universally recognizable and resonant with idiosyncratic particularities. Not only is the species endangered; if you follow media trend pieces, so is its habitat. The number of magazines willing to support writers, especially younger writers, who embark on odysseys in which days' or weeks' worth of experiences are chiseled into 10,000 to 15,000 illuminating words seems to decrease monthly. Samuels has benefited from writing for the best of those that remain — Harper's, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine — and his new essay collection, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, is a patchwork composition that yields surprising insights into American existence. It is a testament to the particular pleasures and value of long-format narrative journalism.
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Books. Permanent link here.
Rules for Harvard Freshmen, 1741
The blog Boston 1775 has posted Harvard's rules for incoming class of 1741.
In the 1700s, ordinary schooling for Boston boys ran from about age seven to age thirteen or fourteen, if they lasted through the whole course. Therefore, the few boys who went on to college were still truly boys, only in their early teens. Usually they graduated college at eighteen, still years away from their legal majority.
The fact that college students were the age of high-school students now, and away from their families in an nearly all-male environment, helps to explain such traditions as these rules for Harvard’s incoming class in 1741.
1. No Freshman shall wear his hat in the College yard, except it rains, hails, or snows, he be on horseback, or hath both hands full.
2. No Freshman shall pass by his Senior, without pulling his hat off.
3. No Freshman shall be saucy to his Senior, or speak to him with his hat on.
4. No Freshman shall laugh in his Senior’s face.
5. No Freshman shall ask his Senior any impertinent question.
6. No Freshman shall intrude into his Senior’s company.
7. Freshmen are to take notice that a Senior Sophister can take a Freshman from a Sophimore, a Master from a Senior Sophister, and a Fellow from a Master.
8. When a Freshman is sent of an errand, he shall not loiter by the way, but shall make haste, and give a direct answer if asked who he is going for.
To read the final thirteen rules, click here. (Link via Blog 4 History)
Posted in Around the web. Permanent link here.
April 29, 2008
Marilynne Robinson, then and now
The contributors to Reading Room, the New York Times blog dedicated to discussing books in depth, are currently focusing their energies upon Marilynne Robinson's 1980 novel Housekeeping. Click here for the moderator's introductory post.
Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Robinson at DePaul University in Chicago. She read two essays, one of which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. I typed up a portion of my notes and e-mailed them to Patrick Kurp, of the blog Anecdotal Evidence, and he excerpted them online in this post:
Underpinning the first paper she delivered was her assertion that nothing is as complex as the human mind, and that various deterministic theories (Freud, economic rationalism, selfish-gene theory, etc.) do harm to this fact. She doesn't understand "why human beings are so persistent in their attack on what is most distinctive about them." She then asserted that "if you do not believe in thought you cannot believe in faith" and, in a swipe at Christopher Hitchens and his ilk, that "those who attack faith devalue thought." Later on in the essay, she praised Calvin's assertion that "an encounter with the other is always an encounter with God," said that she tries to live by that understanding, and stressed that reverence is the proper way of relating to the "shining garment of reality" in which God reveals himself constantly.
Lastly, an excerpt of Robinson's 2007 commencement-day speech at Amherst has been published in the current issue of Harper's. The full text of the speech, titled "Waiting to Be Remembered," is available online at Amherst magazine.