July 31, 2007
Poverty
It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Posted in Books, Quotes. Found always via this permanent link. | TrackBack (0)
September 18, 2006
T.H. White quote
The best thing for being sad . . . is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake listening to the disorder in your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. —T.H. White, The Once and Future King
(via The Morning News)
Posted in Quotes. 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.
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.
July 5, 2006
A quote
“Memories are always eager to match themselves seamlessly to the things and places of a revisited past.” John Banville, The Sea
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
June 26, 2006
Lines I wish I wrote, #5
Near the end of a thoughtful negative review of John Updike's new novel, the critic James Wood offers a textbook example of damning with faint praise:
"He is not especially interested in questions of faith or doubt, because aesthetics can always be wheeled in to solve such questions: the world is uncomplicatedly God's, and it exists to be lyrically praised. This has not always been a weakness in his long and varied career. It licenses what is best in his writing—his strong will to thank God for His creation by attending carefully to all its surfaces, from fridges to vaginas." [Emphasis added]
Posted in Papers & Periodicals, Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
June 21, 2006
A quote
"To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic." George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
March 21, 2006
A quote
The triumphs and even the tyrannies of history endure for only a moment; it is their ruins which are eternal.
Richard Howard, "On Lepanto: An Appreciation of Cy Twombly," in Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
March 13, 2006
Lines I wish I wrote, #4
From Jerry Saltz's review of Charlene von Heyl's exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery:
And right now there's Charline von Heyl, 45, who is German, which may not be coincidental considering that innovative painters seem to tumble out of Deutschland like clowns from a Volkswagen. Von Heyl has lived in New York for more than 10 years and is currently having her fifth and best solo exhibition since 1996. Sometimes I think von Heyl is just a late entry in the de Kooning sweepstakes (one of her current paintings is even titled Woman). Even so, much of her art takes me to a wonderful snake pit where styles I thought were outmoded turn dangerous again. [Emphasis added.]
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
March 6, 2006
One writer's life
While Licy, his Latvian psychoanalyst wife, recovered in bed from the hours which, by her own choosing, she spent working late into the night, Lampedusa would get up early and walk to a café-cum-patisserie where he would take a long breakfast and read. On one occasion, he did not move for four hours, the time it took him to finish a large novel by Balzac, from start to finish. Then he would undertake his long tour of the bookshops, after which he would go to another café where he would sit but not mix with a few acquaintances of his with semi-intellectual pretensions. He would listen (to their "nonsense") and hardly say a word, then, after all these marathon sittings and feeble peregrinations, return home on the bus. He is always described as walking wearily along, looking very distinguished, but with a somewhat careless gait, his eyes alert and holding in his hand a leather bag crammed with the books and cakes and biscuits on which he would have to survive until evening, since lunch was never served at home . . . Apparently the bag always contained more books than were strictly necessary, as if it were luggage of a reader setting off on a long journey, who was afraid he might run out of reading matter while away.
Javier Marías, "Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa in Class," from Written Lives
Posted in Books, Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
May 13, 2005
Joseph Leo Koerner
Courtauld Institute art historian Joseph Leo Koerner writes, in the introduction to The Reformation of the Image:
"Everything must be submitted to an ever more radical critique, including the critique itself in infinite regression. Yet although preceded and succeeded by iconoclasm, we generally feel ourselves not actively engaged in a scandalized, scandalous blow but stalled in image-breaking's interminable aftermath....From the long history of iconoclasm, we learn that there never were, nor will there ever be, idols, since these are artefacts of the iconoclast's conviction, the imaginary Other of all critical campaigns. It is iconoclasm itself that never goes away, but haunts us as if forever newly with its fictive foe."
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
April 9, 2005
Help
In this piece at Slate, Elisabeth Sifton writes, "He wanted me to pay attention, too. Auden says that paying attention is a form of love; well, then, I tried to love Saul Bellow."
Can someone point me to the original Auden quote? Thanks in advance.
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
March 20, 2005
Descriptions I like
Let artists and musicians and filmmakers be writers! Let novelists and poets be critics! Here's Tom Waits describing the first time he heard opera (Link via TMFTML):
I heard 'Nessun Dorma' in the kitchen at Coppola's with Raul Julia one night, and it changed my life, that particular Aria. I had never heard it. He asked me if I had ever heard it, and I said no, and he was like, as if I said I've never had spaghetti and meatballs—'Oh My God, Oh My God!'—and he grabbed me and he brought me into the jukebox (there was a jukebox in the kitchen) and he put that on and he just kind of left me there. It was like giving a cigar to a five-year old. I turned blue, and I cried.
And, another favorite, Caroll Dunham on Joe Zucker:
Zucker's offbeat subject matter opened many doors onto territory that was not common for his generation of New York painters. It is meaningless to consider his practice without it, but it is difficult to isolate a value there. New subjects have always prompted him to explore new ways of making things, and the reciprocity between the objects and their narrative equivalents is always active. In the past this reciprocity has been invoked to justify his odd subject choices (the history of cotton constructed of cotton balls), but ultimately this effort fails. He engages subjects the way folk music does, blurring the distinctions between history and folklore, personal and public, memory and story. The paintings are truly alchemical and, as such, somewhat mysterious and obscure. He has compulsively turned the usual inert materials of painting, mixed with flotsam from the world, into surprising artistic gold, and the very reimagining and reinvention is a lot of the point.
And an earlier post in appreciation of Zadie Smith's writing on other novelists.
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
September 27, 2004
Joseph Brodsky quote
From Watermark, a collection of reminiscences about Venice:
"For the eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention. And to the eye, for purely optical reasons, departure is not the body leaving the city but the city abandoning the pupil."
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
September 22, 2004
William Gass
I'm in Philadelphia today to see the autumn exhibitions at the ICA and the Fabric Workshop. Therefore all I have to offer is a pair of quotes and a link. Fortunately, both quotes are from William Gass's "The Music of Prose," collected in Finding a Form, and the link is to an essay published in the January 2004 Harper's. First, from the earlier publication:
Yet no prose can pretend to greatness if its music is not also great; if it does not, indeed, construct a surround of sound to house its meaning the way flesh was once felt to embody the soul, at least till the dismal day of the soul's eviction and the flesh's decay.
and later:
...language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of the sentence, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination too; it is the allocation of the things of the world to their place in the world of the word
To enjoy prose that "embodies the soul" of meaning, I highly recommend you read "On Evil: The Ragged Core of a Sweet Apple," a review of Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Were I editor of the Best American Essays 2004 volume to be published sometime next year, this piece would surely make the list. For me, reading Gass—like reading Joseph Brodsky, Mary McCarthy, James Wood, or Italo Calvino, an admittedly diverse and improvised list—is simultaneously deep pleasure and learning experience.
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
September 12, 2004
Lines I wish I wrote, #3
Leon Wieseltier, who was widely taken to task for his last outing for the New York Times Book Review (a review of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint), writes an appreciation of Czeslaw Milosz on the back page of today's issue. It includes these two lines, marked in bold, which gracefully summarize much of what has been written about the poet in the month since his death, on August 14:
He was a hero of the history of his time and a hero of the literature of his time. For friends and for strangers, for lovers of liberty and for lovers of beauty, he was, for more than half a century, an indispensible man. Milosz discharged his obligations to his age and his obligations to his soul with the same diligence and the same depth. The stability of his mind, its preternatural composure, was one of the great sanctuaries of the 20th century, a prophecy of the eventual emancapation. He had the rare gift of knowing how to be at once troubled and unperturbed. When light was needed, he was light; when stone was needed, he was stone.
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
September 8, 2004
Northrop Frye: quotes on criticism
Last week a friend asked me why I chose to be a critic. The answer I provided her then was insufficient, and thinking about the question some more—the start of the new season is always a good time for this kind of reflection, just ask Jerry Saltz (see his "Where are we now?"-type essays from 2003, 2002, 2001, and 2000)—I returned to the "Polemical Introduction" to Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, one of my favorite discourses on the subject. Here are some select quotes:
"There is no real correlation either way between the merits of art and its public reception. [...] A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. [...] To defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore, it to assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right, with some measure of independents from the art it deals with."
"The first thing the literary critic has to do is to read literature, to make an inductive survey of his own field and let his critical principles shape themselves solely out of his knowledge of that field. Critical principles cannot be taken over ready-made from theology, philosophy, politics, science, or any combination of these."
"Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.... Criticism...is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom: a verbal imitation of a human productive power which in itself does not speak."
I think substituting "visual art" for "literature" works fairly well with this essay, which was originally published in 1957. Here are earlier quotes on the subject that I've posted to the site: Arthur Krystal on literary criticism and Helen Molesworth on art criticism.
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
August 31, 2004
Lines I wish I wrote, #2
In a review of Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists in the September issue of Frieze, Tom Morton writes:
The cover image of Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists, the catalogue of a does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin show curated by Matthew Higgs at San Francisco's CCA Wattis Institute earlier this year, is frankly a little terrifying. In a photograph by Helen Cantrell, the artist Mary Kelly lounges by a pool in a pink vest top, looking for all the world like an Annie Liebovitz-snapped Beverly Hills starlet. Only Kelly's hands, which seem poised for a karate-chopping act of critical deconstruction, and her hair, which is pinned up in a huge bun resembling an auxiliary brain, serve as reminders of her noted austerity.
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
May 27, 2004
Lines I wish I wrote, #1
My Los Angeles-based colleague and art nerd reading group partner Michael Ned Holte writes, in a review of a young artist's video show at Black Dragon Society: "The monitors are mounted on a skeletal wooden cube and face inward, outward, or upward, creating a complex spatial and temporal arrangement. The individual channels reveal Haskard's obsessions with tubes, funnels, food, and liquids—all chosen with an eye for intense color—and evoke bodily processes of eating, shitting, and everything in between. Mining this territory, Haskard frequently employs vertiginous footage shot by a video camera strapped to his head. The hide-and-seek juxtaposition of images induces a delirious primal confusion between interior and exterior: Attempting to digest the whole installation would be as preposterous as climbing into one's own asshole."
("Lines" idea borrowed from TMFTML.)
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
May 12, 2004
Joseph Brodsky on measuring up
Brodsky uses the decision to write in English as an opportunity to examine his relationship to Auden:
"My sole purpose then, as it is now, was to find myself in closer proximity to the man whom I considered the greatest mind of the twentieth century: Wystan Hugh Auden.
I was, of course, perfectly aware of the futility of my undertaking, not so much because I was born in Russia and into its language (which I am never to abandon--and I hope vice versa) as because of this poet's intelligence, which in my view has no equal. I was aware of the futility of this effort, moreover, because Auden had been dead four years then. Yet to my mind, writing in English was the best way to get near him, to work on his terms, to be judged, if not by his code of conscience, then by whatever it is in the English language that made this code of conscience possible.
These words, the very structure of these sentences, all show anyone who has read a single stanza or a single paragraph of Auden's how I fail. To me, though, a failure by his standards is preferable to a success by others'. Besides, I knew from the outset that I was bound to fail; whether this sort of sobriety was my own or has been borrowed from his writing, I can no longer tell. All I hope for while writing in his tongue is that I won't lower his level of mental operation, his plane of regard. This is as much as one can do for a better man: to continue in his vein; this, I think, is what civilizations are all about."
(From an essay collected in Less Than One)
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
May 3, 2004
Holub on playing the role of artist
Here's something written by Czech poet Miroslav Holub that mirrors how I frequently feel:
"I have stated repeatedly that a person is an artist only when he is actually creating his little piece of work, his small artistic performance. The rest of the time, as a rule he only pretends to be an artist, or displays certain associated artistic characteristics such as restlessness, hypochondria, sloppy dress, unbridled temperament, clumsiness, and sentimentality."
(Quote and associated link originally found via Golden Rule Jones.)
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
February 14, 2004
Rudi Fuchs on (mis)understanding contemporary art
"Here the misunderstanding is complete. Imagine a gallery acquiring a Frans Hals portrait, and another gallery protesting that it already has such a portrait, actually the same thing, only the position of the hands is somewhat different--for the rest it is always mainly black. This would be unthinkable; but regrettably with contemporary art, such superficial judgements are all too common. It shows that we still find it generally very difficult to accept that a work by a contemporary artist might be of the same excellence as any great Old Master painting. That is a weakness in our society; and it allows the casual and facile perception of new work to continue as it does, to our detriment."
"Here the misunderstanding is complete. Imagine a gallery acquiring a Frans Hals portrait, and another gallery protesting that it already has such a portrait, actually the same thing, only the position of the hands is somewhat different--for the rest it is always mainly black. This would be unthinkable; but regrettably with contemporary art, such superficial judgements are all too common. It shows that we still find it generally very difficult to accept that a work by a contemporary artist might be of the same excellence as any great Old Master painting. That is a weakness in our society; and it allows the casual and facile perception of new work to continue as it does, to our detriment."
- Rudi Fuchs, in "Donald Judd (Artist at Work)," Donald Judd
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
February 10, 2004
Arthur Krystal on literary criticism
From "Club Work," the introduction to A Company of readers: Uncollected writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from the Readers' Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs:
"Awkward, even clichéd prose is forgivable, but to come to literature with the theorist's pride in complexity and obscurantism is like encountering a slightly demented lover who lavishes all his time and effort on a letter rather than on the person the letter is intended for."
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
February 8, 2004
Frances Stark on idleness
Sometimes I wish I had a job that wasn't all about me. Sometimes I hate myself and so I hate this life of thinking constantly of the style of my thinking and always wishing I had better captured my thinking so that my thinking could then capture someone else besides myself. In the letter of Musil I quoted above, he talks a great deal of idleness; he writes down a quote and paces the room until the sun sets, or reads a line from a book and lies around smoking cigarettes, quietly forgetting his ideas because he doesn't write them down. "Thus I often lay on my divan and slave away at this kind of self-annihilation."
Sometimes I wish I had a job that wasn't all about me. Sometimes I hate myself and so I hate this life of thinking constantly of the style of my thinking and always wishing I had better captured my thinking so that my thinking could then capture someone else besides myself. In the letter of Musil I quoted above, he talks a great deal of idleness; he writes down a quote and paces the room until the sun sets, or reads a line from a book and lies around smoking cigarettes, quietly forgetting his ideas because he doesn't write them down. "Thus I often lay on my divan and slave away at this kind of self-annihilation."
Frances Stark, in "A Craft Too Small," included in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Bas Jan Ader: Filme, Fotografien, Projektionen, Videos und Zeichnungen aus den Jahren 1967-1975
Posted in Quotes. Found always via this permanent link.
October 28, 2003
John Berger quotes
Here are two John Berger quotes that struck me in the first fifty pages of his Selected Essays. The first comes from the introduction to Permanent Red (1960):
After we have responded to a work of art, we leave it, carrying away in our consciousness something which we didn't have before. This something amounts to more than our memory of the incident represented, and also more than our memory of the shapes and colours and spaces which the artist has used and arranged. What we take away with us--on the most profound level--is the memory of the artist's way of looking at the world.
The second comes from an essay in that collection titled "The Clarity of the Renaissance" (1955):
After Michelangelo the artist lets us follow him; before, he leads us to the image he has made. It is this difference--the difference between the picture being a starting-off point and a destination--that explains the clarity, the visual definitiveness, the tactile values of Renaissance art.
I need to read further, as I'm only in the mid-1960s of this mostly chronological selection, but thus far I have found two distinct characteristics of his writing (which are intertwined): his braggadocio and the ease with which he is quoted. He writes swaggering epigrams, not unlike Dave Hickey, that at first contain the seductiveness of their own confidence. Further thought slices right through that surface--in Berger's case (so far) revealing a relentless political stance that has a reductive effect on his observations--but there is definite value to searching for the diamonds in the rough. It is best left for another post altogether, but I at least give Berger credit for expressing his opinion with force, something often lacking from contemporary criticism. (At times my own included.)