For whatever reason, I have been thinking a lot about the artists that developed in the first two decades of the 20th century, in the United States. The last strain of realism, but a realism that had already felt the rise of cubism and surrealism, and which held onto its sense of realism in a particular sort of way. One can also look at this regionally to a degree, and perhaps in two generational divisions. But this was the non-corporate realism of a vision influenced by Quakers, and Amish, and by manual labor and farming. And by factories. It was work done outside the "Art Market", largely, too. George Ault is perhaps the most siginificant, but Charles Sheeler certainly, and a generation … [Read more...]

"The breath of God had carried out a planned And sensible withdrawal from this land; The multitude, once unconcerned with doubt, Once neither callous, curious nor devout, Jumped at broad noon, as though some peddler groaned At it in its familiar twang: “My friend, Cut your own throat. Cut your own throat. Now! Now!” September twenty-second, Sir, the bough Cracks with the unpicked apples, and at dawn The small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn." Robert Lowell After The Surprising Conversions Eric Bennett has an interesting small essay on the origins of post graduate writing programs in the U.S. "The Farfield Foundation was not really a foundation; it was … [Read more...]

"The task would be not to grasp art, but first to grasp what is ungraspable about art" Theodor Adorno "The greater the work of a thinker...all the richer is what remains unthought in that work, that is, what emerges for the first time thanks to it, as not yet been thought" Martin Heidegger “Cryptic” could be a go-to word for critics describing “Mister John,” the quietly impressive sophomore feature from Irish husband-and-wife team Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy, but it’s ultimately the film’s avoidance of mystery that proves so effective and unnerving." Guy Lodge Last posting I was thinking about the increasing tendency to demonize the poor in film and TV. That the blatant … [Read more...]

"Some said, "It is he." Others said, “No, but he is like him." John 9:9 Sarah E. James, writing of Bernd and Hilla Becher's monumental decades long project of photographing industrial buildings, all of them abandoned and all of them presented in serialized sets, creating an industrial typology, has said: "There is no narrative". She suggests the structures are aestheticized and rendered as functionalist sculptures. Now, this is an understandable statement in a sense, because so little importance is placed on what constitutes a narrative, on understanding how narrative works. Micheal Fried has written of the Becher's, too. Fried is always interesting, and in the Bechers he sees an … [Read more...]

"In a more Freudian idiom, it is a feeling prompted by the return of the repressed. Freud did, however, discuss the uncanniness of the life-like automaton, Olympia, that figures in Hoffmann’s tale, ‘The Sandman.’ The disturbed protagonist, Nathanial, is taken in by the doll and falls in love with her. Freud explained that since children do not strictly distinguish between the animate and the inanimate, they are inclined to think their dolls or stuffed animals are alive. As adults, then, the sight of a life-like automaton or automatic human behavior reactivates the infantile belief that we thought we had surmounted. Nevertheless, Freud argued, it is not Olympia that makes … [Read more...]

"The general public now draws its notion of art from advertising , MTC videos, video games, and Hollywood blockbusters. In the contemporary context of media generated taste, the call to abandon and dismantle the museum as an institution has necessarily taken on an entirely different meaning than when it was voiced during the avant-garde era. When people today speak of "real life" what they usually mean is the global media market. And that means: the current protest against the museum is no longer part of a struggle being waged against normative taste in the name of aesthetic equality but is, inversely, aimed at stabilizing and entrenching currently prevailing tastes." Boris Groys "The … [Read more...]

"Of all the arguments put forward with respect to it {art}, virtually no references are made to music, literature, cinema, dance or photography. Almost all of them bear instead on an object definable as that which succeeds to the place of painting, i.e. the arrangements of objects, the photographs, the video apparatuses, the computers - and sometimes even the performances - that occupy the spaces on whose walls portraits were previously to be seen. It would be wrong, however, to criticize these arrangements for their 'partiality'. Indeed, "art" is not the common concept that unifies the different arts. It is the 'dispositif' which renders them visible. And painting is not merely the name of … [Read more...]

“But you can’t allow a contradiction to stand! — Why not?… Ludwig Wittgenstein "Disneyland is a work of love. We didn't go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money." Walt Disney When Luis Barragan won the Pritzker Prize in architecture, the jury wrote "A stoical acceptance of solitude as man's fate permeates Barragán's work. His solitude is cosmic, with Mexico as the temporal abode he lovingly accepts." I remember when I first became aware of Barragan, I was probably about eighteen. I fell in love with the pink walls, the water, the sun off the blue or yellow facades, and the stables at Cuadra San Cristobal seemed the stage of a modernist play, a sort of tropical … [Read more...]