March 31, 2008
Minor Milestone
This evening I published on Artforum.com a "Critics' Pick" review of Daan van Golden's exhibition at Greene Naftali Gallery. It is my one-hundredth review for the Artforum website, a minor milestone I couldn't have imagined reaching when Elizabeth Schambelan, now my longtime colleague, invited me to begin contributing to the site in late 2003. Here's to one hundred more. The review begins:
Art historian Svetlana Alpers’s observation about golden-age painters, that “it is hard to trace stylistic development, as we are trained to call it, in the work of Dutch artists,” applies to reclusive septuagenarian artist Daan van Golden. This exhibition, his first US solo presentation despite his being greatly esteemed in Europe, surveys canvases made in the last fifteen years but is representative of an extremely focused practice that has lasted over four decades.
Click here to read the rest.
Posted in Around the web, Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Platform for Pedagogy
Platform for Pedagogy is a weekly e-mail newsletter listing an interdisciplinary mix of lectures in New York City. According to its website:
Platform for Pedagogy is an initiative to advance a culture of cross-disciplinary public lecture attendance and to develop the lecture as practice. We deal exclusively with public lectures. The determinate characteristic of the public lecture is form: the geographically bracketed transmission of knowledge by a privileged individual or group of individuals to an unsolicited public of mixed backgrounds and experiences. Donald M. Scott has written on the birth of the public lecture in mid-nineteenth century America as a form of supplementary instruction distinct from the sermon, speech or oration—and yet borrowing formally from all three—in that the lecture is mandated and shaped by the public's desire for a certain knowledge. These public lecture attendees sought to expand the trajectory of education typically confined to their formal or professional training by accessing these platforms for pedagogy.
For two years I have maintained an elaborate, iCal-based calendar of lectures, panels, symposia, screenings, and performances by artists and writers. This seems similar in spirit, and I hope that it proves a successful venture.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
March 25, 2008
"Edmund Wilson Among the 'Despicable English'"
I came across this essay by Isaiah Berlin while searching the New York Times for references to the historian Perry Miller. It begins:
I MET Edmund Wilson, I think, sometime in the early spring of 1946, after I had come back from Moscow to finish the job I was doing at the British Embassy in Washington. I had been in Washington during the war years, and my friend the Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov, who, like his cousin Vladimir, was a friend of Wilson's, thought that he might like to meet me (I had expressed my intense admiration for ''Axel's Castle'' and ''The Triple Thinkers'') and talk about Russian literature and other topics. Wilson refused. He was convinced that any British official could only want to meet him in order to rope him into the British propaganda machine. He was acutely isolationist: his Anglophobia, which in any case had been fairly acute, was increased by the reflection that England had once again managed to drag America into a dreadful and totally unnecessary war, and he had no wish to meet any representative of that country. However, once the war was over he evidently decided that he was no longer in any danger of being inveigled into pro-British activities, and asked me to lunch at the Princeton Club in New York.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Two articles on the state of language
Two articles discussing the state of language came to my attention yesterday. The first, "Euphemism and American Violence," by David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale and the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, decries the use of euphemism to cover over the realities of present-day violence. The article begins:
In Tacitus' Agricola, a Caledonian rebel named Calgacus, addressing "a close-packed multitude" preparing to fight, declares that Rome has overrun so much of the world that "there are no more nations beyond us; nothing is there but waves and rocks, and the Romans, more deadly still than these—for in them is an arrogance which no submission or good behavior can escape." Certain habits of speech, he adds, abet the ferocity and arrogance of the empire by infecting even the enemies of Rome with Roman self-deception:A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them.... To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of "government"; they create a desolation and call it peace.The frightening thing about such acts of renaming or euphemism, Tacitus implies, is their power to efface the memory of actual cruelties. Behind the façade of a history falsified by language, the painful particulars of war are lost. Maybe the most disturbing implication of the famous sentence "They create a desolation and call it peace" is that apologists for violence, by means of euphemism, come to believe what they hear themselves say.
The second, "Keeping a Civil Tongue," by the Korea-based scholar-critic B. R. Myers, analyzes why "language itself is losing its power to express moral disapproval" as part of a wider discussion of literary scholar Ian Robinson's work.
Both contain arguments that are worth considering.