August 31, 2006
The Kitchen's fall season
Kudos to Debra Singer and her staff: The Kitchen solidifies its waxing reputation as the go-to venue for great experimental music, art, dance, and literature with its fall schedule, which I just found online. The season includes performances by Carsten Nicolai, Matthew Shipp, Alarm Will Sound, and Ikue Mori; screenings and events organized by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome.org and Amy Granat of Cinema Zero; the New York presentation of the Christian Jankowsky exhibition that debuts at Lisson Gallery in London next weekend; an exhibition of works made by Peter Welz in collaboration with the choreographer William Forsythe; and literary readings organized by the magazines A Public Space and Esopus. More info here at the Kitchen website. I suspect I'll be attending events there at least three times a month from now until the end of the year.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
Foucault night
This evening a friend recommended that I purchase three recently published volumes of Foucault's "Essential Works, 1954–1984"—focused on ethics; aesthetics, method, and epistemology; and power (The New Press)—and gave me a photocopy of John Rajchman's foreword to the soon-to-be-published The Chomsky-Foucault Debate (parts of the 1971 broadcast of which are on YouTube). I read the foreward on the train, and then almost immediately came across an essay (via 3QD) by Richard Wolin in the Chronicle of Higher Education that attempts to counter the explicitly antihumanist understanding of Foucault's work. After brief summaries of Discipline & Punish and The History of Sexuality, Wolin begins:
In American academe, that's the gist of the Foucault story. He has been venerated and canonized as the messiah of French antihumanism: a harsh critic of the Enlightenment, a dedicated foe of liberalism's covert normalizing tendencies, an intrepid prophet of the "death of man."But increasingly that perception seems wrong, or, at best, only partially true. Considerable evidence suggests that, later in life, Foucault himself became frustrated with the antihumanist credo. He underwent what one might describe as a learning process. He came to realize that much of what French structuralism had during the 1960s rejected as humanist pap retained considerable ethical and political value.
That re-evaluation of humanism redounds to his credit as a thinker. It stems from a profound and undeniable moral insight: If one wishes to become an effective critic of totalitarianism, as Foucault certainly did, the paradigm of "man" remains an indispensable ally. After all, it is the totalitarians themselves who seek to quash or eliminate man. As antitotalitarian political analysts and actors, our responsibility is to spare him that fate.
It would not be a misnomer to suggest that in fact the later Foucault became a human-rights activist, a political posture that stands in stark contrast with his North American canonization as the progenitor of "identity politics."
Wolin develops this argument and then discusses Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge, a new book by Eric Paras based on Foucault's later, as-yet-unpublished Collège de France lectures. I admit to knowing very little about Foucault—I can count on one hand the number of his short essays I have read, and have only skimmed the two major books mentioned above—but Paras's argument, as summarized by Wolin, is seductive and seems to be of significant interest to those invested in Foucault's thinking.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
August 30, 2006
Lines I wish I wrote, #6
In an essay originally included in a publication accompanying an Air de Paris exhibition called "New York Twice," Seth Price writes:
The public happens to be most comfortable with the piano, and this became electronic music’s user interface. This is why the events lurking behind most of the music you hear on the radio actually preserve the slight, barely perceptible movement of a fingertip somewhere striking a key. Strike the key and trigger an event, which is immediately sequenced in a series of other events. A chain of control achieved through a simple depression. When I am depressed, there is power at work somewhere. [Emphasis added.]
Price periodically ruptures his essay with little non-sequitirs, and this one is perfect, just jarring enough to stick in the mind. The next paragraph picks up right where the second-to-last sentence left off, as if he hadn't just set off a little rhetorical bomb.
Posted in Books, Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
Christopher Lyon on art book publishing
In the September issue of Art in America, Prestel executive editor Christopher Lyon analyzes "a mounting crisis in art book publishing." Of course, like most fire-alarm essays of this type, what the author describes is simply a need for new thinking about a practice, not its decimation. The conflicts in the Middle East are crises; the world's environment is at a crisis point; the seemingly inevitable eradication of thousands of human languages can be considered a crisis. I have a harder time accepting the term used in relation to subjects like art-book publishing, art criticism, or classical music. Nonetheless, Lyon's article is a useful summary of recent changes in how art books are produced, distributed, and sold, with sidebars on "a short history of the art book" and "permissions purgatory." Here are his last two paragraphs:
Looking to the future of the art book, further consideration of the bifurcated market's implications might be useful. It may help us to frankly confront the apparent crystallization of the "us and them" attitude toward consumers of art books seen at MOMA, a seeming abandonment of the admittedly idealistic notion that modern art, clearly presented and clearly explained, can reach everyone. On the distribution side, recognition of the bifurcated market might help to speed the escape of niche and institutional publishers from the inappropriate sales environment of mass market retailing and the destructive discounting of the Internet giants, and encourage alternative channels, whether independent and museum bookstores or direct on-line selling.A fresh look at the trade publisher's "mission" might also be in order. Having a distinctive profile and high standards can provide a competitive advantage. Given the intense interest in emerging artists today, for example, it might seem tempting to jump in and publish the hottest new painter. But if art publishing works best as a long-term investment, perhaps it can be most effective in relation to new art when it offers seasoned observers the opportunity to step back, put new developments in context, and reevaluate veteran artists whose work provides the foundation on which younger artists build. And in the end we might simply ask ourselves, whether we are authors, publishers, museum professionals, or booksellers, is it important to us to connect meaningful art to with a larger audience?
What haunts this article, of course, is how these developments have changed the practices of Lyon's own company. Much of the essay is a lament for the decline of the sumptuously illustrated coffee-table monograph, which, based on what I know of Prestel (the most recently published book of theirs that I own is the 500-plus-page catalogue of the Neue Galerie's 2005 Egon Schiele exhibition), is precisely what they publish. Is the company diversifying its list to accommodate scholarly texts (in one direction) or larger-market "gift books" (in the other)? How is it helping to slot new artists into art-historical context, or to reevaluate mid-career and seasoned contemporary artists? What is it doing to ensure the distinctiveness of its profile?
UPDATE, 8/30: Jon Lackman just published a short post about Lyon's article, using different quotations, at the Art History Newsletter.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
August 28, 2006
One more holding-pattern post
I'm back in New York and recovering from twenty-one hours of travel. In the absence of new material in this column, I've added two new MP3s to the site. The songs are fairly emblematic of the music I listened to while in the redwood forest. Right-click and "Save As" at the bottom of the middle column. More soon.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
August 25, 2006
What's wrong with this picture?
Having read almost-universally positive reviews of Claire Messud's new novel, The Emperor's Children (Knopf), in the New York Times, the Village Voice, and the New York Observer; encountered UK coverage online in The Economist, The Observer; noticed the Booker Prize nomination; and found this profile in the LA Weekly, I finally decided yesterday to shell out my money and pay the retail price for the hardcover so I could enjoy it while on my trip this weekend. I hit five independent bookstores in SF's Mission District, none of which had a copy. Finally, at the last one, the proprietor informed me that the novel's street date is next Tuesday, August 29.
How many customers like me, wishing to support independent bookstores and this author, are finding themselves unable to do so? What percentage of those customers will still remember the book next week, or the week after, or whenever they are next at a bookstore? Certainly not 100%, though I will still buy it (admittedly at Strand, where I will pay less than I would have here in SF). Who's to blame here? Is the publisher slow? Are the reviewers running their coverage too early? And we wonder why the book industry is facing difficulties.
(Several of the above links come via Bookslut)
UPDATE, 9/10: Across the pond, Alfred Hickling isn't quite as impressed:
The first two-thirds of the novel detail these characters' romantic and careerist manoeuvres; it is very capably done, were it not for the fact that Messud drops significant hints that it all amounts to so much rearranging of the deckchairs on the Titanic. [ . . . ] Yet the overall problem is not so much that the book lacks ambition as that its focus seems frustratingly narrow.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
August 23, 2006
A few photos from San Francisco
I'm enjoying San Francisco immensely. I walked at least ten miles yesterday, up and then back down seemingly every hill in the city. I got a mild sunburn. I ate Japanese food in Alamo Square, looking at the "painted ladies" that starred in the opening credits of Full House. I took one of my writers out for dinner. My next mission is finding a great burrito. No more posts today, but I will have one or two tomorrow. Additional photos here.
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
August 22, 2006
George Steiner on "the idea of Europe" in The Liberal
Last week I came across a copy of The Liberal, a newish journal of "poetry, politics, and culture." The issue, dated July/August 2006, is only the magazine's eighth, and yet its contributor list sparkles with the bright lights of the intellectual set: Harold Bloom, George Steiner, and Terry Eagleton are all featured.
Aside from desperately needing a copyeditor (before I gave up, I counted fifteen mistakes in the first thirty-six pages, and I'm not the sharpest eye), it's a pretty strong magazine. I enjoyed John Burnside's short story, Niall Griffith's essay on writing in the Balkans, Shena Mackay's essay on synaesthesia, and the letters from Patmos and Mauritius. Bloom's review of Philip Roth's Everyman seems phoned in and Eagleton's review partisan back-scratching; only Steiner's essay, originally delivered as a lecture at the Nexus Institute in The Netherlands, appears to have occasioned much effort by its author.
Steiner offers five "axioms to define Europe: the coffee house; the landscape on a traversable and human scale; these streets and squares named after statesmen, scientists, artists, writers of the past; our twofold descent from Athens and Jerusalem; and, lastly, that apprehension of a closing chapter, of that famous Hegelian sunset, which shadowed the idea and substance of Europe even in their noon hours." The fourth trait may be the most provocative, but I most enjoyed reading the tail end of the second and the beginning of the third third, in which Steiner's at his most romantic:
In an American age, which is that of the automobile and the jet, we can scarcely imagine the distances covered and put to intellectual and poetic purpose by European masters. Hölderlin goes on foot from Westphalia to Bordeaux and back. The young Wordsworth walks from Calais to the Berner Oberland and back. Coleridge, a portly individual, with various physical afflictions, routinely covers twenty to thirty miles per diem across difficult, mountainous ground, composing poetry or intricate theological arguments as he does so. And think of the role of the wanderer in some of the greatest of our music: in Schubert's fantasies and songs, in Mahler. Again [Walter] Benjamin's enigmatic prophecy comes to mind: throughout European allegory and legend, the beggar who comes to the door, the beggar who may be a divine or daemonic agent in disguise, has come on foot.The streets, the squares walked by European men, women and children are named a hundredfold after statesmen, military figures, poets, artists, composers, scientists and philosophers. This is my third parameter. My own childhood in Paris found me taking, on numberless occasions, the Rue La Fontaine, the Place Victor Hugo, the Pont Henri IV, the Rue Théophile Gauthier. The streets around the Sorbonne are named after the high masters of medieval scholasticism. They celebrate Descartes and Auguste Comte. If Racine has his street, so do Corneille, Molière, Boileau. The same is true of the German-speaking world, of the myriad Goetheplätze and Schillerstrassen, of the squares named after Mozart or Beethoven. The European schoolchild, urban men and women, inhabit literal echo-chambers of historical, intellectual, artistic and scientific achievements. Very often, the streetsign will carry not only the illustrious or specialised name, but the relevant dates and a summary description. Cities such as Paris, Milan, Florence, Frankfurt, Weimar, Vienna, Prague or Saint Petersburg are living chronicles. To read their street signs is to leaf through a present past. Nor has this pietas in any way ceased. The Place Saint-Germain has become the Place Sartre-Beauvoir. Frankfurt has just named an Adornoplatz.
He goes on for some time, and then summarizes:
The genius of Europe is what William Blake would have called "the holiness of the minute particular." It is that of linguistic, cultural, social diversity, of a prodigal mosaic which often makes a trivial distance, twenty kilometers apart, a division between worlds. In contrast to the awesome monotony which extends from western New jersey to the mountains of California, in contrast to that lust for sameness which is both the strength and vacancy of so much of American existence, the splintered, often absurdly divisive map of the European spirit and its inheritance has been inexhaustibly fertile.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Around the web #17
- Here's the video of a great version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," played on a ukelele in Central Park. No kidding.
- The New Yorker's Nick Paumgarten follows Sonnabend Gallery artist Clifford Ross around Central Park while he tests out his new super-high-res digital camera.
- Mazen Kerbaj, a Lebanese trumpeter, improvised live alongside Israel bombs on the night of July 15. Click here to listen to the haunting result. (Thanks, Anthony.)
- Jason Kottke used Photoshop to color-correct several World War II–era photographs included in "Bound for Glory," a Library of Congress exhibition. (Via blog.
- Images from the Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement that I can't help but imagine with Martha Rosler–like interventions. (Via The Morning News)
- An article in Der Spiegel about a band of "adbusters" in Berlin who cut people out of billboard- and mural-size advertisements. (Via PoliticalTheory.info)
- A post on Momus's blog with links to videos of Look Around You, a series of funny, short mockumentaries, and to "Birds of Britain," perhaps an even funnier video short (imagine Jack Handey narrating an after-school special about birding).
- Make it past the gratuitous, self-congratulatory introduction (start at paragraph ten and you'll be OK), and this goodbye letter from Deyan Sudic, written as he surrenders his column at The Observer in order to become director of the Design Museum in London, is a fairly interesting essay on contemporary architecture.
- Also in The Observer, a long profile of Joan Didion and a shorter one of Claire Messud, whose new novel The Emperor's Children I'm quite eager to read.
Lastly, will someone from London please explain to me the relationship between The Guardian and The Observer? Is the latter the former's weekly magazine (à la the New York Times Sunday Magazine)? If so, why isn't it just named The Guardian Magazine? Because I read both online, where occasionally the same article will pop up under both the Guardian and Observer headings, I have never been able to figure this out . . .
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
James Salter, Last Night
On the plane yesterday I read James Salter’s Last Night, a slim collection of stories in which each tale would seem too brief were it not for the author’s aptitude for compression. More than any other fiction I’ve read in the past few years, the stories possess a quality I identify as “adult”—the light in these stories is amber, refracted through the bottom of a highball glass—despite the fact that Salter’s philandering protagonists expect, like children, to slip the yoke of consequence. They never do, and it’s to Salter’s credit that each denouement carries its own emotional weight.
Joyce Carol Oates, in an appreciation of Salter (NYRB subscriber–only link) written on the occasion of the publication in 2005 of Last Night, introduces his short fiction this way:
Dusk and Last Night are appropriate titles for Salter's slender collections of stories, which unfold with dreamlike fluidity in an atmosphere of shadows and indistinct forms, like watercolors in a dark palette. As Salter's novels are comprised of exquisite set pieces, often self-contained, so his short stories suggest novellas or novels compressed into a few pages. Both Dusk and Last Night, the new collection, contain memorable stories, yet a number of others ("Am Strande von Tanger," "The Cinema," "Lost Sons," "Via Negativa," "The Destruction of the Goetheanum," from Dusk; "Comet," "Eyes of the Stars," "Platinum," "Arlington," from Last Night) move so swiftly and disjointedly as to arouse expectation in the way of trailers for intriguing films that turn out to be the films themselves, abruptly truncated. It's as if the writer's imagination has leapt ahead of his capacity for, or interest in, the work of expression; an impatience with formal storytelling and chronological development . . .
Next time you’re in a bookstore, pick this collection up and spend ten minutes reading one of the stories. I recommend “Such Fun,” “Arlington,” and “Last Night”.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
August 21, 2006
Some new(ish) music
I'm on vacation in San Francisco this week, so posting may be lighter and somewhat off-topic. To wit: Beneath the heading "Some MP3s" at the bottom of the middle column, you'll see that I've uploaded three new MP3s. All are recent piano-led jazz numbers. The first, hip-hop producer El-P's "Intrigue in the House of India," is from his album High Water (2004), created in collaboration with members of Thirsty Ear's improv stable for the label's "Blue" series. The keynote performer (no pun intended) is the much-celebrated Matthew Shipp. Click here to read PItchfork's review of the album.
The second track is the energetic "A Picture of Doris Traveling with Boris," from the Esbjörn Svensson Trio's ninth album, Viaticum (2005). Prior to picking up this record last year, I hadn't heard of the group, but apparently they're a big hit in Europe and have played shows in the US with k.d. lang, of all people. According to the band's website, they're playing in New York next April at the Merklin Theater.
The third track comes from Australia. Triosk is a piano trio I first came to know through their collaboration with German electronic musician Jan Jelinek (record label link), of whom great enough things cannot be said. That record, 1+3+1, was created through the mail—Jelinek (1) to Triosk (3) and back to Jelinek (1). For The Headlight Serenade, Triosk's new record, released last month by the Leaf label, distances itself from Jelinek's trademark sounds without sacrificing his penchant for picking melodies apart and putting them back together in unexpected ways. "Visions IV" leads off the album, which I highly recommend.
I'll leave these up until Friday, so right-click and "Save As."
Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.
From the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
[Note: There is a lot of text after the jump.]
As those who keep an eye on the middle column have noticed, I am currently making my way through the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. It's a gold mine of well-thought-out commentary about the craft of writing, and the best interviews in the volume (Daphne Beal and Janet Malcolm, Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan, George Saunders and Ben Marcus) come off as conversations that might have occurred naturally, without the impetus of publication, and are laden with hard-won insight. Here is a long passage from the Beal-Malcolm talk, and a shorter excerpt from a point made by George Saunders.
Daphne Beal: Being so thoroughly engaged in one of those inherently unkind professions, how do you reconcile the "not-niceness" . . . of the finished piece with the process of asking your subject for his or her trust? Does that person occupy a different place in your thinking by the time you've finished writing than he or she did when you were in the thick of interviewing?Continue reading "From the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers"Janet Malcolm: In answer to your first question: You do not reconcile it. That is the moral problem of journalism. But journalists don't ask for the subject's trust—they don't have to. Subjects just give it. They are eager to tell their story and don't seem to realize that they are not invisible as they tell it. Incidentally, the final product of the inherently unknind professions isn't always not-nice. There are photographs in which the subject looks beautiful, and there are biographies and journalistic portraits from which the subject emerges as a great soul. I recently had the pleasure and privilege of writing about Anton Chekhov, about whom it is simply impossible to find anything seriously bad to say. Some of his biographers have tried—and failed.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
August 20, 2006
Andrea Fraser on institutional critique
Recently, as part of my research for a freelance project, I have spent considerable time with Andrea Fraser's "From a Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique," printed in the September 2005 Artforum. Here is a quote from near the end of that article:
Every time we speak of the “institution” as other than “us,” we disavow our role in the creation and perpetuation of its conditions. We avoid responsibility for, or action against, the everyday complicities, compromises, and censorship—above all, self-censorship—which are driven by our own interests in the field and the benefits we derive from it. It’s not a question of inside or outside, or the number and scale of various organized sites for the production, presentation, and distribution of art. It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.”
Fraser's selected writings, edited by Alexander Alberro, were published as Museum Highlights by MIT Press in 2005.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals, Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
August 19, 2006
Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone
Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone (FSG) is a beautifully written small book, surely a disappointment to those wishing to revisit the expansiveness of The Corrections, but undeniably winning for readers willing to be buoyed along by fluid, never-preening prose and the small insights, sadly often unusable, one gains about one’s past. Its six interlinked essays, two previously published in the New Yorker, are threaded through with references to the author’s mother—strict and emotional in his childhood, graceful and stoic in the slow arc of her dying—and one can’t help but think of The Afterlife, Donald Antrim’s recently published, equally pristine survey of more troubled family relations. Franzen's crosscuts, such as those between family reminiscence and discussion of Peanuts creator Charles Schultz in “Two Ponies,” are effortless, a collage that allows in just enough of the world beyond his family without popping its seams. Even as his boyish awkwardness, usually around girls, turns into fecklessness, usually around women, and the repercussions of his eccentricities pile up, one can’t help but savor Franzen’s mellifluous voice and acknowledge that this is more than mere stopgap before his next novel.
--
More info: Publisher's Weekly review; author page at the Complete Review; a report from a reading in the Columbia Spectator.
UPDATE, 8/21: Lev Grossman turns in a long(ish) profile of Franzen for Time.
UPDATE, 8/30: Michiko Kakutani, reviewing the book in the New York Times, isn't as willing to suspend her dislike of the subject matter as I was.
UPDATE, 8/31: Emily Gordon at Emdashes weighs in on Kakutani's review: "Does Michiko Kakutani have trouble with despair? Specifically, understanding what it might be like to be caught in it? Her self-congratulatory review . . . would seem to suggest that this is so, which would be an unfortunate deficiency in a critic of literature."
UPDATE, 9/5: James Marcus published a review in this weekend's Los Angeles Times Book Review, and links to it (with a brief preface) from his blog, House of Mirth.
UPDATE, 9/6: Today, a ringing endorsement from New York Observer books editor Adam Begley. The lede:
I’m not sure I can tell you the difference between a “personal history” and a memoir, but Jonathan Franzen’s contribution to the genre is so expertly shaped and composed, so genuinely, organically thought-provoking, that I wish I could yank it off the shelf where it will inevitably sit with the autobiographical writing of other hip authors perhaps too young to be writing autobiography (Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Rick Moody’s The Black Veil, Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist, etc.), and toss it into the bleak anonymity of some loosely defined territory like “General Nonfiction.” The only problem is that the six essays in The Discomfort Zone, though they tackle topics as various as Charles Schulz, Franz Kafka and bird watching, are frankly autobiographical. Together they add up to an account, often artfully indirect, of Jonathan Franzen’s protracted coming-of-age—a period that overlaps, in part, with his development as a novelist. Though it never actually mentions either his first two novels or The Corrections (2001), The Discomfort Zone doubles as a map of the route Mr. Franzen traveled to get to the point where he could write his wonderful third novel. So this is, willy-nilly, a writer’s personal history.
UPDATE, 9/9: Here's Theo Schell-Lambert's review in the Village Voice.
UPDATE, 9/29: A review by Marjorie Kehe from the Christian Science Monitor
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
Iwona Blazwick's plans for the expanded Whitechapel
In the course of a long profile in The Guardian, Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick describes some of the initiatives the gallery will undertake during its yearlong renovation and what kinds of rooms the gallery will have upon its reopening:
She intends for the huge central reading room in the library to be given over to a single artist and a single piece of work for a year at a time. "Among all the hurly-burly of the East End and the hyperactive London art world, I always wanted to create a quiet counterpoint and place you can come back to time after time. This is perfect for it."[ . . . ]
While the gallery spaces will be closed for the whole of 2007, there will be a series of newly commissioned work displayed around the ongoing development of Spitalfields market. And during the redevelopment, all the community and education programmes will continue, as will late-night poetry in the café and events in the auditorium. "And when we reopen we'll be using a newly discovered 'secret gallery'; we'll be able to show work from private collections and from artists' own collections—there has always been a fascinating exchange economy between artists - as well as having space for an archive gallery, which will draw on the extraordinary history of this place. The East End art boom of the past 20 years has been a remarkable thing to behold. But the spiritual home is not White Cube, it is the Whitechapel, and we will be reasserting ourselves."
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
August 17, 2006
Lawrence Weiner gives good interview
An interview with Lawrence Weiner was included in this week's ArtInfo.com newsletter. He is his usual engaging self:
Interviewer: There’s an implicit political stance in your work. Your work consists of verbal statements, but you scrupulously avoid giving your audience orders.Weiner: I don’t tell anybody to do anything.
In order to hear what I have to say, or to see what I have to show, why should somebody have to do something? I don’t get it. My presumption is that, as artists, we are integral parts of society. Therefore our questions of the material world are legitimate questions and they have a legitimate reason to be presented.
That’s not to tell somebody else that in order to be able to understand me you have to spin around three times or genuflect or do something else. I don’t believe in the order. I think that it’s a fact that if you tell somebody, “Three lines on the wall,” and they’re really interested, they’ll make the three lines on the wall, but they don’t have to. They can imagine what it looks like, and it’s just as good.
This isn’t being goody-goody. This is saying, “I demand my rights as a human being to present what I see as an objectification of my material circumstances, but I don’t require the right to give other people orders.”
Interviewer: I’m not sure that I understand.
Weiner: It’s like graffiti. All graffiti has a right to exist anyplace as long as it says, “My children are hungry,” or “The sky is blue,” and not just “Me! Jose!” As long as it’s not just an existential plea, it has a right to exist. It’s the same with public art. All public art is made by artists for themselves, because they’re part of the public. They pay taxes, they take the kid to the dentist, just like everybody else. It’s just like wearing Yankee baseball paraphernalia. We have as much right within society as anybody else, not a privilege, but a right.
Last year, Hatje Cantz published Having Been Said: Writings & Interviews of Lawrence Weiner, 1968-2003. It clocks in at almost 500 pages, and is worth the hefty cover price.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Daniel Buren at the Guggenheim, April 2005
I thought this column was getting a little text-heavy, so here's a picture I took in April 2005, at the Guggenheim. It's part of a set of eight. My favorite reviews of the exhibition, oddly enough, were in the New York Times and October (not a full-text link). It's rare that those two publications are linked in my mind, but Michael Kimmelman and Silvia Kolbowski's pieces were great fun for the same reason: Both ran against type. Kimmelman unpredictably compared Buren's work to Christo & Jeanne-Claude and October let one of its contributors publish a (rather informal) "diary" in lieu of a review by some art-history assistant professor. Anyway, the picture is why I posted this, so I won't clog the column up with more text.
Also, today is the five-year anniversary of my move to New York. Time for reflection on what I've achieved (if "achieved" is the right word) and consideration of what I hope to do soon.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
August 16, 2006
Charles Taylor on the "flattering lie" of 9/11 (a rare foray into political subject matter)
In this week's Observer, Charles Taylor, in an introduction to a review of Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, offers a view of 9/11 that will take a long time to make it to the mainstream, yet in some way echoes how I suspect many New Yorkers feel:
The unsigned editorial in last Friday’s New York Times made all the appropriate noises:“For almost five years now,” it began, “we have carried around the legacy of Sept. 11. There is no sunny morning that does not revive its memory. The news of a terrorist plot against America-bound airliners yesterday called up feelings that are never all that far below the surface.”
There may still be some New Yorkers, some Washingtonians or Pennsylvanians for whom that’s true. And no doubt it’s true for the loved ones of everyone murdered that day. But the portrait of people still struggling bravely with the trauma of 9/11 is, largely, a flattering lie.
Despite the fact that I witnessed the second plane crash into the tower (which one? I don't know, honestly) from an elevated-subway platform in Astoria, Queens, then proceeded to work in far-west Chelsea, arriving in time to watch the second tower fall from the West Side Highway, and the fact that I was acquainted with one person who died in the attack, the horrible events of that clear Tuesday morning are by no means a recurrent image, dream, or memory for me. This does not at all diminish the losses suffered by families and friends of the attack's victims, or even other New Yorkers for whom the trauma is something that will take many years to recover from—if recovery is possible. But, like Taylor, I suspect that ascribing such a reaction to too wide a segment of the population, people unwilling to admit that they do not feel similarly aggrieved, has significant adverse effects. One of those may very well be what Taylor extrapolates from partisan reactions to the attacks:
For many Americans, 9/11 now exists as something like a fictional event. The fact that there have been no further attacks on American soil is taken by the right as proof that President Bush’s war against terror is working (one of the G.O.P.’s talking points for the fall election, according to The Times); by the left, it’s taken as proof that the Islamic threat has been grossly exaggerated—if it exists at all.[ . . . ]
Denying that something is ever likely to happen again can be a way of denying that it ever happened in the first place—it’s denying that the line separating an unthinkable event from a reality has already been crossed. And so the attacks that followed 9/11 in Bali, Moscow, Madrid, Riyadh, London and Mumbai don’t matter.
Not that anyone reads this site for discussions of trauma and (the myopia of?) memory, but can anyone recommend other writers who have engaged this "false empathy" (for lack of a better term) and its repercussions?
UPDATE, 9/1: "9/11 not a signpost in most Americans' lives, study shows" (via PoliticalTheory.info):
[University of Alberta psychology professor Dr. Norman] Brown conducted his research by asking neutral, non-event specific questions to trigger participants' personal memories. He cross-referenced his results among research participants living in Edmonton, Alberta; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and New York City, New York. It might seem like a no-brainer to assume that those people who lived in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, would have many references to that date in their personal archives. According to Brown, the assumption is wrong."You could pretty much get the same results in Manhattan that you get in Edmonton or Ann Arbor," said Brown. "Nine-eleven was the thing that was supposed to turn everybody on their heads, but according to our results it didn't."
Less than a one-per-cent of participants used the occurrence of a historical event to reference a personal memory, with the Olympics as likely to show up as 9/11.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
A roundtable led by Chris Gilbert, and his resignation from the Berkeley Art Museum
While doing research for a current project, I came across the published transcript of a discussion between Chris Gilbert, TJ Demos, Carlos Basualdo, and Gregory Sholette held in late 2004 at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where Gilbert then worked as a curator. After a brief introduction, Gilbert laid out three questions for discussion:
One concerns how fully informal creation and underground practices—their look and their techniques—can be commodified by the market and incorporated into the gallery system. Greg has suggested that dark matter is only superficially appropriable—that the art industry merely trades in simulations of collective informal work and adopts only the look or manner of dark matter. It could be argued, however, that appropriation of an underground is always superficial and that there is something circular about saying that the politics of the work is not appropriable or commodifiable—since, of course, the politics of underground work could be defined as simply that-which-is-not-commodifiable.A second question concerns the internal structure of dark matter. How are informal production and its creators organized? For example, how are zine-makers connected with each other? A tentative answer, and a seeming given, is that there are many-to-many connections among the producers, who relate to one another through rhizomatic structures rather than arborescent, hierarchical ones. For example, in the way zine creators communicate with each other, a weblike or horizontal structure is immediately suggested. Another seeming given is that there is an inherent collectivity to dark matter's organization; working together, working socially, appears to be integral to labor in its immaterial form.
A third and final question concerns the agency of this exhibition and of art exhibitions more generally. If exhibitions organize work—and exhibition curators are often described as "organizers"—to what degree does their organizational work play into the hands of capital and increase the governability of the work and the producers? This raises the further question of how one can exhibit artworks as singularities (in their singularity) and resist the unifying logic of an exhibition. For some years I've been concerned with the problem of "curatorial panopticism," by which I mean not so much the literal figure of the panopticon as it might be realized in this or that exhibition, but the idea that a panoptic logic underpins the structure of most exhibitions.
If these questions are of interest to you, the rest of the lengthy discussion will reward the time you spend with it. These are topics that I am also considering, albeit from the standpoint of someone who primarily writes about art rather than organizes exhibitions.
As perhaps many of you know, Gilbert caused waves in the art world a few months ago by abruptly resigning from his job at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, where he was responsible for the "MATRIX" series of exhibitions. The source of the hubbub, specifically, was his resignation letter, which has been posted publicly on the internet (click here for a printer-friendly version). At the end of the letter, Gilbert expands upon the specific reason for his resignation (a dispute over the language of a wall text accompanying this exhibition) and delivers this pointed critique:
I think it is important to be clear about the facts that precipitated my resignation: that is, the struggle over the wording of the text panel, which fit into months of struggle over the question of solidarity and alignment with a revolutionary political agenda. That issue is discussed above. However, it is also important to understand the context. Again, it is too weak to say that museums, like universities, are deeply corrupt. They are. (And in my view the key points to discuss regarding this corruption are (1) the museum's claim to represent the public's interests when in fact serving upper-class interests and parading a carefully constructed surrogate image of the public; (2) the presence of intra-institutional press and marketing departments that really operate to hold a political line through various control techniques, only one of which is censorship; finally (3) the presence of development departments that, in mostly hidden ways, favor and flatter rich funders, giving the lie to even the sham notion of public responsibility that the museum parades). However, to describe museums and other cultural institutions as simply if deeply corrupt is, as I said, too weak in that it both holds out the promise of their reform and it ignores the larger imperialist structures that make their corruption an inevitable upshot and reflection of the exploitive political and social system of which they form a part. Such institutions will go on reflecting imperialist capitalist values, will celebrate private property and deny social solidarity, and will maintain a strict silence about the control of populations at home and the destruction of populations abroad in the name of profit, until that imperialist system is dismantled. Importantly, it will not be dismantled by cultural efforts alone: a successful reform of a cultural institution here or there would at best result in "islands" of sanity that would most likely operate in a negative way—as imaginary and misleading "proof" that conditions are not as bad as they are.In fact, with conditions as they are, a different strategy is required: there should be disobedience at all levels; disruptions and explosions of the kind that I, together with a small group of allies inside the museum, have created are also useful on a symbolic level. However, the primary struggle and the only struggle that will result in a significant change would be one that works directly to transform the economic and political base. This would be a struggle aiming to bring down the US government and its imperialist system through highly organized efforts.
Through an earlier job I came to know Gilbert somewhat, and have corresponded with him (and his wife) in the past. It is premature for me to comment now, but I will simply say that from what I know of him, the decision to quit, especially in such a spectacular manner, was only arrived at after significant thought; he was never one to take anything lightly. (The discussion linked above is certainly evidence of this.) Instead, here is the Berkeley Daily Planet's story on his resignation, as well as a lengthy discussion at Mute magazine. Gilbert seems to have deliberately sunk below the art-world radar, as yet offering no further commentary on his resignation. I, for one, am very curious to see where, how, and if he turns up again.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Two new books on Greenberg
This review in the Brooklyn Rail (link via 3QuarksDaily) brings to my attention a new biography of Clement Greenberg, Alice Goldfarb Marquis's Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg:
Marquis also makes it clear that the critic’s bombastic, “cocksure” writing style was more than matched by his abrasive and often abusive personality. He “had a sadistic streak a mile wide,” according to one of his former girlfriends, who Greenberg terrorized one evening as they walked down Park Avenue by picking up a dead mouse from the gutter and dangling it in front of her face.It is to Marquis’ credit that she provides such vivid details without exploiting them. She could have easily constructed a sensationalistic, reductive portrait of Greenberg but instead forms a seamless interweaving of his ideas, analysis of the periods through which he lived and the personalities surrounding (and avoiding) him.
The review doesn't do much for the book, it should be said. But it does provide an opportunity for me to mention Caroline A. Jones's Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (University of Chicago Press). Jones's modern-art undergraduate seminar is what first turned me on to art history, and, while I haven't yet read her book, I can attest to the thoroughness of her scholarship and her ability to transform it into readable prose (despite the use of the word "bureaucratization" in her title). One can find an excerpt from Daniel A. Siedell's review online here (scroll down). In the book's preface, Jones claims, "More than anything else I've written, this book exists to end its subject—to construe the Greenberg effect, in order to be done with it." Somehow I don't think she'll get her wish, even if it's one that's more widely held than admitted to.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
August 15, 2006
Adam Phillips on T.J. Clark's The Sight of Death
Adam Phillips publishes a review of T.J. Clark's new book, The Sight of Death (Yale University Press) in last weekend's Observer:
He began writing and couldn't stop; what he wrote, he says, was 'a record of looking taking place and changing through time'. Part (muted) autobiography, part critique of his profession as an art historian—and more than anything else a rapt account of what it is to look attentively and inattentively and still be able to think politically—Clark has written a book about loss of attention and the possibilities of its recovery. About what having a good look might mean at a time when most contemporary imagery, by showing us everything, doesn't want us to see too much.[ . . . ]
What is at stake for Clark is what we won't be able to think or to think about if we don't take the time to look. If it 'becomes a political act to show the kinds of critical thinking that images can make possible', writing about the visual arts might matter more now than ever before. Clark knows that the innocent eye sees nothing but he clearly fears what the educated eye claims to see now. There is, as he says, 'no clear boundary line between ignorance and knowledge'. Clark, in other words, wants to know what our looking is best informed by.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Around the web #16
- New York Sun book critic Adam Kirsch reviews Walter Benjamin's On Hashish (Harvard University Press), and uses the opportunity to discourse on Benjamin's, er, Marxism, in this week's New Yorker:
But when Benjamin started to put “The Arcades Project” in something like publishable form, sending Theodor Adorno an essay titled “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” he was in for a shock. Although he was eager to embrace Marxist terminology, his use of it proved far too clumsy for a subtle theorist like Adorno. Instead of sharpening his vision of Paris, Marxism had settled over it like a fog, reducing Benjamin to crude clichés.Kirsch does bring it back around, though, beginning with this passage:
Where does hashish fit into this parable of persecuted genius? A reader who turns to “On Hashish” for a clear answer may be disappointed. Like a small-scale version of “The Arcades Project,” it is the placeholder for a book he could never finish, a ruin occupying the site where he planned a monument, and, as such, it has to be carefully interpreted. This is entirely fitting, since Benjamin himself believed that “all human knowledge, if it can be justified, must take on no other form than that of interpretation.”- EuroZine reprints an interview with Jacques Ranciere originally published in Le Monde Diplomatique. In it, the French philosopher discusses "aesthetics, his distinction between 'being political' and the 'police order,' the media as arena of liberation, the Internet, his film interests, and about those who today are excluded, those who cannot make their voices heard." (Via PoliticalTheory.info)
- Tom Coates discusses the design of American state flags at PlasticBag.org
- Michael Beirut on the value of protesting White House invitations
- J. Hoberman on Andy Warhol's Screen Tests in the London Review of Books (full article only available to subscribers, unfortunately):
The Screen Tests established an aristocracy of hipness. These were the cool kids, those who were able to make the scene (only a few subjects—Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan—could be considered stars, and Dylan is one of only very few to sit for his portrait wearing shades). At the same time, however, the camera’s fixed stare effectively democratised and reified celebrity in the sense epitomised by Warhol’s most famous koan: ‘In the future everyone will be famous . . . for 15 minutes.’ A fair number of Screen Test subjects are identified only by their first names and some just as ‘Boy’ or ‘Guy’. More than a few are hustlers or teeny-boppers who—for one reason or another—wandered into the Factory for an afternoon and afterwards disappeared, leaving only this photographic trace.- Sophie Ratcliffe, in the TLS, on "what to read and how (not) to write"; Francine Prose, interviewed in The Atlantic, on "creativity, literary craftsmanship, and her new book, Reading Like a Writer (HarperCollins)
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
From "Narcissists 'R' Us?"
A reassessment of Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism at In These Times:
The path toward a more meaningful, collective-oriented future has to begin with an introspective re-evaluation of how narcissism has skewed our personal, social and political lives. Many of us have, consciously or subconsciously, rejected a society that requires incessant self-promotion for economic survival by refusing to center our existences around publicity-seeking approaches to our life and work. In that act of rejection we can find a bit of shelter from the dangers of a hyperinflated ego.But in the absence of a cohesive framework that helps us understand exactly what we’ve rejected (and why), many of us simply retreat from public engagement in what Commonsense Rebellion author and psychologist Bruce Levine characterizes as a “passive-aggressive rebellion against a society that demands we be incessantly self-promoting narcissists in order to survive.”
Perhaps the hope, then, lies in a fuller understanding of what we are reacting to, and a healthier, more humane sense of what we’d rather embrace, including seemingly antiquated notions of honesty, humility, collectivism, ethical conduct and moderation in material possessions.
(Link via PoliticalTheory.info)
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.