May 20, 2008
Calvin Tomkins on Paul Chan in the New Yorker
This week's New Yorker contains Calvin Tomkins's profile of artist Paul Chan, which I've been looking forward to since first hearing a while ago that he was at work on it. The magazine has not made the article available online, so consider this post a notice of its presence in the publication and a suggestion that you read it. It's instructive to those of us in the art world any time an artist of Chan's caliber is assessed by an intelligent writer for a large-circulation general interest magazine. An excerpt:
Ever since his student days, Chan has been engaged in social activism as well as in art, even while insisting, not entirely persuasively, that the two are not only separate but incompatible: politics is about concentrating power, he says, and art is about dispersing it. Certain works of art resist our attempts to interpret or explain them, Chan believes, and that resistance—what he calls their "articulate speechlessness"—is what gives them enduring power.