by Jon Lackman | 17 December 2009 | Books, Modern
From The Economist
For all the books written about artists’ muses and patrons, relatively few explore the role of mentors, perhaps because the presence of a teacher threatens to deprive the artist of his or her status as a self-made genius. In “Tom and Jack”, Henry Adams, a professor of American art at Case Western Reserve University, looks resolutely at the art of Jackson Pollock through the work and life of his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton. In so doing, he casts new light on the legendary abstract expressionist.
Benton’s influence on Pollock has been treated by other scholars, Mr Adams writes, like the “art historical equivalent of a youthful sexual indiscretion–as something that happened but is best forgotten.” Mr Adams takes a different view. Although the surface traits of Pollock’s abstract art diverged greatly from Benton’s representational work, he explores the similarities of their underlying principles.
by Jon Lackman | 16 December 2009 | Museums
Two surprisingly good private collections have recently garnered attention. The New York Times writes about a long-hidden Romanian collection on view in Paris that includes a Massacre of the Innocents, “painted sometime in the late 1580s in the studio of Pieter Breughel the Elder, after his death. Cruel and violent, but painted with extraordinary verve and detail, the painting is a biting commentary on the repression of the Dutch by the Spanish Inquisition.”
A new publication, Tablet (“a new read on Jewish life”), explains “how two middle class civil servants amassed a world class art collection” that has recently been distributed to the National Gallery as well as “museums in each of the 50 states”:
The Vogels began collecting at a particularly auspicious time—at precisely the moment when New York became the capital of the art world and when the son of a Russian Jewish garment worker from Harlem and the daughter of an Orthodox shopkeeper from Elmira, New York, could easily befriend the people who were shaping culture in New York, many of whom were Jewish émigrés from Europe or upstarts from Brooklyn. These tastemakers grew up as part of a generation that was encouraged, thanks to New Deal programs that subsidized artists, to take art seriously, and they became adults in the wake of World War II, just as New York was replacing Paris and Berlin as the global hub for art and ideas. And, while not explicitly Jewish, the American avant garde was to a great extent shaped by Jewish collectors, dealers, artists, and critics—not least by curators at the Jewish Museum, who mounted a series of influential shows for New York School artists like Jasper Johns starting in the late 1950s. “If you were collecting, what you were valuing was, to a great extent, what Jewish critics told you to value—abstract art, color,” said Catherine Soussloff, a professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
by Jon Lackman | 14 December 2009 | Modern
Novelist, screenwriter and art-world hoaxer William Boyd discusses a new play about Mark Rothko:
Like many celebrated artists of his generation – the postwar American abstract expressionists, the so-called New York School – Rothko was at best a mediocre painter, and would have been judged as one, until he found his magic formula. Among his number one can cite similar examples of famous artists who couldn’t really draw: Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline and, the most graphically inept of all, Jackson Pollock. It seems to me no accident that all these artists sought refuge in abstraction where their signal inadequacies in the world of figuration would be no impediment. The move was canny and acclaimed – these abstract artists achieved great renown and concomitant wealth. But did it bring aesthetic satisfaction – or, to put it more prosaically: did it make them happy?
This question is at the centre of a fascinating new play, Red, just opened at the Donmar Warehouse. It’s a bravura two-hander – all the action revolves around increasingly adversarial conversations between Rothko (Alfred Molina) and his assistant (Eddie Redmayne) during a two-year period at the end of the 1950s, when Rothko was working on a highly paid commission to provide a series of murals for the new Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan’s Seagram Building.
by Jon Lackman | 11 December 2009 | Museums
The former Metropolitan Museum director has died.
by Jon Lackman | 11 December 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical
Gary Schwartz writes of a Jan Steen painting that was cut in pieces long ago but reunited in 1996, and is now in danger of being split up again:
Following the U.S. Senate investigations into the Swiss bank holdings of Jewish account holders killed in the Holocaust, attention turned to the art collections of victims all over Europe. The Dutch state proclaimed that statutes of limitation would be relaxed if good arguments could be brought by claimants. One of those to enter a claim was the widow of [Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques] Goudstikker’s son Edo, Marei von Saher. One of the more than 200 paintings that she claimed was the Jan Steen Wedding night of Tobias and Sarah. In 2006 she was awarded ownership of the entire remnant of the Goudstikker collection in Dutch hands, including the left section of the reunited painting in the Bredius Museum.
A pending court appeal may yet protect the canvas from re-dismemberment, but Schwartz has another idea:
Does anyone out there know Mrs. von Saher? Even if her experiences with the Dutch state and its institutions have not been uniformly pleasant, I cannot imagine that she has no sympathy for the Bredius Museum and its visitors. The Jan Steen case offers her an opportunity in life that few of us can hope to experience. She can play the role of the good mother who solves a Solomonic dilemma by giving her section of the Jan Steen to the Bredius Museum on indefinite loan if not in possession. If anyone does know her, please forward this column to her.
by Jon Lackman | 9 December 2009 | Uncategorized
From the Telegraph:
France’s obsession with the bottom is laid bare this week in a major new documentary and book charting how “les fesses” have shaped history. The highbrow study claims to demonstrate the huge contribution the “derrière” has made to civilisation, mixing the views of top psychoanalysts, philosophers, scientists and artists. The role of “les fesses” in human evolution has been overlooked, claim the experts, while they have been prominent at every turning point in society and art history – from the ancient Greeks to Grace Jones … As for French artists, the documentary claims they have marked history above all others with their talents for depicting the derrière – through painters such as Courbet, Boucher, Toulouse-Lautrec, Ingres, Matisse and Degas … The prospect of the in-depth fesses study will come as welcome light relief to the French, who are in sombre mood. As one internet commentator noted, “Between swine flu, minarets, Sarkozy and the debate on national identity, here at last is a subject that gives pleasure.”
by Jon Lackman | 9 December 2009 | Uncategorized
Louis Menand’s forthcoming book The Marketplace of Ideas is excerpted in Harvard Magazine:
Since [in academia] it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system … Disciplines are self-regulating in this way for good academic freedom reasons. The system of credentialing and specialization maintains quality and protects people within the field from being interfered with by external forces. The system has enormous benefits, but only for the professionals …
The hinge whereby things swung into their present alignment, the ledge of the cliff, is located somewhere around 1970. That is when a shift in the nature of the Ph.D. occurred … institutions began prizing research above teaching and service, the dissertation changed from a kind of final term paper into the first draft of a scholarly monograph. The dissertation became more difficult to write because more hung on its success, and the increased pressure to produce an ultimately publishable work increased, in turn, the time to achieving a degree. That was a change from the faculty point of view. It enhanced the selectivity of the profession … On the one hand, a doctorate was harder to get; on the other, it became less valuable because the market began to be flooded with Ph.D.s.
This fact registered after 1970, when the rapid expansion of American higher education abruptly slowed to a crawl, depositing on generational shores a huge tenured faculty and too many doctoral programs churning out Ph.D.s. The year 1970 is also the point from which we can trace the decline in the proportion of students majoring in liberal-arts fields, and, within that decline, a proportionally larger decline in undergraduates majoring in the humanities …
It is important for research and teaching to be relevant, for the university to engage with the public culture and to design its investigative paradigms with actual social and cultural life in view. That is, in fact, what most professors try to do—even when they feel inhibited from saying so by the taboo against instrumentalist and presentist talk. Professors teach what they teach because they believe that it makes a difference. To continue to do this, academic inquiry, at least in some fields, may need to become less exclusionary and more holistic. That may be the road down which the debates I have been describing are taking higher education.
But at the end of this road there is a danger, which is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the public culture. That would be a catastrophe. It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate …
by Jon Lackman | 7 December 2009 | Modern, Museums
Michael J. Lewis writes in the New Criterion:
… the Bauhaus is a moving target, and there is no point in its fourteen-year life when it existed in anything like a definitive form. This is one of the insights of “Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity,” the spellbinding exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art … [which,] though smaller than that in Berlin (about 420 objects), enjoys the odd distinction of being both a boldly revisionist look at the Bauhaus as well as its first truly comprehensive presentation … Of special note is the handsome catalogue, with essays by the curators Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, that performs heroically in conveying the show’s visual sumptuousness. It is rounded out by thirty-one catalogue entries, all consistently fresh and rewarding (without the duds that frequently sneak their way into these group projects). The last of the entries is of special value, a semester-by-semester chronicle of the Bauhaus … The exhibition is a well-deserved triumph for Bergdoll, who, in 2006, was appointed MOMA’s chief curator of architecture and design. Although a gifted historian of architecture (his monograph on Karl Friedrich Schinkel is the best work on its subject), Bergdoll has a conspicuous gift for the imaginative display of objects, without the historian’s weakness for using them as illustrations in a history lecture. All this is abundantly in evidence in “Bauhaus: 1919–1933.” At the same time, the exhibition is a landmark for MOMA itself, which was founded in 1929 at least in part on the cooperative model of the Bauhaus. Over the decades MOMA’s various departments have tended to retreat into their institutional fastnesses, preferring exhibitions of a monographic nature and working within those categories of genre that the Bauhaus had once sought to abolish. But with its broadly synthetic approach and high degree of interdepartmental collaboration, “Bauhaus 1919–1933” reverts to the institution’s original cooperative model.
by Jon Lackman | 7 December 2009 | Contemporary
Carol Yinghua Lu writes in e-flux journal:
I was recently invited by the editors of Afterall to contribute to a book they are preparing on the monumental 1989 exhibition “Magiciens de la terre” with a text reflecting on the impact of this exhibition on the practice of Chinese artists … As one of the earliest attempts to exhibit contemporary art from non-Western parts of the world in the West and to deal with the possibility of multiculturalism, this exhibition set an important precedent for many projects to come with its ambition of offering a global vision for contemporary art …
In 2006, German art historian Hans Belting pioneered a project entitled “Global Art and the Museum” in an attempt to document the global changes in contemporary art and its institutions … This ongoing project, consisting of a series of panel discussions, lectures, conferences, and publications, will lead to an exhibition at the ZKM in 2011 … Belting, who back in 1983 proposed the end of art history and the end of art’s historical narrative, has again stressed in this context that the German perspective is a local one, and that Western art history is a time-based and culture-specific concept whose sensitivity and relevance to other periods of time and cultures should always be re-examined. A workshop he led on global art at the ZKM this past summer proposed a paradigm shift; we were reminded to no longer think about the West as the singular model to be applied worldwide, but to reflect on how to expand this model using experiences from elsewhere, or even to approach art from the perspective of a multitude of models …
by Jon Lackman | 3 December 2009 | Awards
From the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation:
In its 2009 cycle, the Arts Writers Grant Program has awarded a total of $710,000 to twenty-six individual writers. These grants range from $5,000 to $50,000 in five categories—articles, blogs, books, new and alternative media, and short-form writing—and support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences.
Representing a range of genres from scholarly studies to self-published blogs, the twenty-six selected projects, listed below within categories, are united by their dual commitment to the craft of writing and the advancement of critical discourse on contemporary visual art.
ARTICLES
- Christoph Cox, Conceptual Art and the Sonic Turn; Amherst, MA
- Jen Graves, Regrade: Rediscovering Seattle’s Artificial Roots; Seattle, WA
- Chris Kraus, Tiny Creatures; Los Angeles, CA
- Fionn Meade, Loose Ends: The Mimetic Faculty & Narrative in Contemporary Film and Video; Brooklyn, NY
- Judith Rodenbeck, Once More With Feeling New York, NY
BLOGS
- Greg Cook, The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research; Malden, MA
- Gene McHugh, Post-Internet; Brooklyn, NY
- Mira Schor, A Year of Positive Thinking; New York, NY
BOOKS
- Bill Anthes, Hock E Aye Vi: Edgar Heap of Birds; Los Angeles, CA
- Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Radical Imagination
- Craig Dworkin, There Is No Medium; Salt Lake City, UT
- Lisa Farrington, Emma Amos: Art as Legacy; New York, NY
- Martin Friedman, Artist Stories; New York, NY
- Ed Halter, New Experimental Cinema in America, 1990–now [working title]; Brooklyn, NY
- Pamela Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics: Mid-Century Modernism, the Social Sciences, and the Rise of “Visual Culture”; San Francisco, CA
- Barbara Moore, Observing the Avant-Garde: Peter Moore & The Photography of Performance; New York, NY
- John Yau, Martin Puryear; New York, NY
NEW AND ALTERNATIVE MEDIA
- Geeta Dayal, Locative Art and Urban Space: Mapping an Emerging Field; Boston, MA
SHORT-FORM WRITING
- Amy Bernstein, Portland, OR
- Janet Estep, Minneapolis, MN
- Jeffrey Kastner, Brooklyn, NY
- Kelly Klaasmeyer, Houston, TX
- Morgan Meis, Brooklyn, NY
- John Motley, Portland, OR
- Cameron Shaw, Brooklyn, NY
- Christian Viveros-Faune, Brooklyn, NY
by Jon Lackman | 30 November 2009 | Modern, Museums
From the Times of London:
“Everything is going to be alright” reads the sign above the entrance to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh … But it is controversy not hope that dominates the mood of the gallery’s first re-hang in 25 years. From a collection of more than 130 Scottish Colourist paintings, only four have been included in gallery’s 50th anniversary exhibition, What You See is Where You’re At … The art historian Duncan MacMillan has criticised the selection, saying that people don’t come to Edinburgh to see “a different version of what they see everywhere else. They want to see something distinct.” Dr Simon Groom, the director of modern and contemporary art for the National Galleries of Scotland, disagrees … “In this first hang, we do show works by the Scottish Colourists, but rather than show them together you can see how their use of colour fits in to what the masters of modern art were doing at the time in Paris, where of course the Scottish Colourists went,” he said. “It places them in an international context: this begins to deepen your appreciation and range of them. There are different ways of showing these artists without having them all lumped together, but that doesn’t mean you won’t see a Colourist room.”
“Scotch” is rather antiquated now in the UK. I’ll refrain from moaning about “Times of London” but “Scotch” does indeed look odd, and is considered perjorative in Scotland itself.
Thanks, my bad. I’d just been to a whisky tasting and so had the word on the mind.
by Jon Lackman | 23 November 2009 | Contemporary
From the Guardian:
… the art historian John Richardson, whose multi-volume life of Picasso has been called the best artist’s biography ever written, and who knew Bacon from the 1940s, has argued that the best of Bacon’s art stemmed precisely from his sadomasochistic sexual relationships at their most intense, which also led directly to the death of at least one of his lovers. It was that early beating by his father to which Bacon attributed his taste for masochism – desires that were played out in adulthood with his lover Peter Lacy … Writing in the forthcoming issue of the New York Review of Books, Richardson … describes the directness of the relationship between Bacon’s desires and his artistic output. “Bacon would goad [lover] George [Dyer] into a state of psychic meltdown and then, in the early hours of the morning – his favourite time to work – he would exorcise his guilt and rage and remorse in images of Dyer aimed, as he said, at the nervous system.” Richardson argues that these are among his best works … Richardson argues that Bacon’s art went rapidly downhill when, after Dyer’s death, he entered a relationship with John Edwards, which was “seemingly free of sadomasochistic overtones … Richardson is an unusually stern critic of Bacon – who was the subject of a Tate retrospective last year and is revered by such artists as Damien Hirst. The problem, argues Richardson, is that Bacon simply could not draw.
by Jon Lackman | 23 November 2009 | Awards
From the TAXI Design Network:
The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art has announced the appointments of members for 2009–2010. They include Bert W. Meijer, Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut, Florence/Universiteit Utrecht (emeritus), as Samuel H. Kress Professor; Miguel Falomir, Museo Nacional del Prado, as Andrew W. Mellon Professor; and Roger Taylor, De Montfort University, as Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor for spring 2010. Mary Miller of Yale University has been named the 59th A.W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts for spring 2010.
by Jon Lackman | 20 November 2009 | Contemporary
Artist Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, known as Jeanne-Claude, has died. She was, of course, the longtime collaborator with Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, known as Christo. Of the numerous obituaries that are now appearing, few seem to want to deal with the questions of authorship, individuality, and gender relations that were raised by their collaboration, which have been debated by art historians such as Charles Green:
Beginning in the 1980s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude rigorously and sternly insisted on retrospective joint reattribution of all works from the late 1960s onward … If, in a 1989 interview, Christo seemed to deny this, it seems more likely that he was distinguishing between his authorial name–the name “Christo” for which he had become famous–and the names of the two artists behind that brand name. He said:
[The work] is the idea of one man. I make the point in discussion of my art that I do not do commissions; I decide my projects and how to do them. The projects continually translate this great individualism, this creative freedom.
In 1990 Christo was quoted as saying “the work is a huge, individualistic gesture that is entirely by me.” Although his emphasis on “individuality” seemed to contradict his collaborative working method, by the 1980s the name “Christo” had come, I believe, to denote a corporation, a trademark idea and copyright ownership as well as a single man and even the collaboration between Christo and Jeanne-Claude itself.
by Jon Lackman | 18 November 2009 | Uncategorized
Those who proposed sessions for the 2011 College Art Association conference are now receiving their responses. CAA says it received “464 proposals, the highest ever.”
CAA 2010 will have about 140 regular sessions (plus another 60 or so sponsored by affiliated organizations). So if 2011 will feature a similar amount, that means that roughly 30% of the 2011 proposals were accepted.
by Jon Lackman | 17 November 2009 | Career
Michael Bérubé wrote recently of the job market in modern languages; job-seeking art historians may find considerable ground for commiseration:
It’s that time of year again, only worse.
The academic job search process is under way, and in the modern languages, things look quite dismal. Yes, I know, things have looked quite dismal for some time now, but this is extra extra dismal, because the effects of the Great Collapse of 2008 are only hitting this part of the academic machinery now. Colleges and universities have already taken—and administered—hits elsewhere, via salary cuts and/or freezes, furloughs, elimination of travel and research budgets, etc….
In more recent years, the number of positions advertised in English has hovered around 1600-1700. This year, one of my students told me that she’d heard the number would be something like 250. “WTF,” I calmly replied. “Where did that number come from?” It came from a wiki of some kind, which is apparently what These Kids Today use when they’re not twittering on the FaceSpace … But it’s quite possible that the number will wind up being below 1,000 … No word yet on how many of those perhaps-fewer-than-one-thousand jobs will be tenure-track.
OK, so that’s the backdrop to what I came to say—a backdrop of anxiety and despair …
I am stunned by what some departments want their job candidates to submit … in an abysmal year these things seem especially obnoxious, particularly when they are expensive … enormous packages of materials up front: not just the usual application letter/ cv/ dossier (sent under separate cover), but writing samples as well. This doesn’t sound like a major human rights issue, no, but when you stop to consider that these jobs would routinely have 500-1000 applicants, each of whom was sending out 30-page writing samples, you realize that’s an enormous amount of waste paper and a gratuitous expense for the job candidates …
This year, I’m hearing of universities that want job candidates to send transcripts. Yes, transcripts. Transcripts of graduate school grades, and even, in some cases, transcripts of undergraduate grades. I’m tempted to reply LOLcats style, APPLIKASHUN PROCESS: UR DOIN IT WRONG …
A west coast art history department that shall not be named asked for undergraduate transcripts. I was aghast but sent them anyway because I would like to be considered for the job. But what does a hiring committee hope to find out by requesting an undergraduate transcript?
by Jon Lackman | 16 November 2009 | Islamic
Duke University professor Gary Hull (editor of The Abolition of Anti-Trust and co-editor of The Ayn Rand Reader) has founded Voltaire Press (which is not affiliated with Duke) and has published Muhammad: The “Banned” Images, which includes the following statement signed by Nadine Strossen, Cary Nelson, Eugene Volokh, and others:
A number of recent incidents suggest that our long-standing commitment to the free exchange of ideas is in peril of falling victim to a spreading fear of violence. Not only have exhibitions been closed and performances cancelled in response to real threats, but the mere possibility that someone, somewhere, might respond with violence has been advanced to justify suppressing words and images, as in the recent decision of Yale University to remove all images of Muhammad from Jytte Klausen’s book, The Cartoons that Shook the World.
Violence against those who create and disseminate controversial words and images is a staple of human history. But in the recent past, at least in Western liberal democracies, commitment to free speech has usually trumped fears of violence. Indeed, as late as 1989, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses continued to be published, sold, and read in the face of a fatwa against its author and in the face of the murder and attempted murder of its translators and publishers. In 1998, the Manhattan Theater Club received threats protesting the production of Terrence McNally’s play Corpus Christi, on the ground that it was offensive to Catholics. After initially canceling the play, MTC reversed its decision in response to widespread concerns about free speech, and the play was performed without incident.
There are signs, however, that the commitment to free speech has become eroded by fears of violence. Historical events, especially the attacks of September 2001 and subsequent bombings in Madrid and London, have contributed to this process by bringing terrorist violence to the heart of liberal democracies. Other events, like the 2004 murder of Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh in apparent protest against his film Submission, and the threats against Hirsi Ali, who wrote the script and provided the voice-over for the film, demonstrated how vulnerable artists and intellectuals can be just for voicing controversial ideas. Under such threats, the resolve to uphold freedom of speech has proved to be lamentably weak: in the same year as Van Gogh’s murder, Behzti, a play written by a British Sikh playwright, was cancelled days after violence erupted among protesters in Birmingham, England on opening night.
In response to rising concerns about fear-induced self-censorship, in 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published an article, “The Face of Muhammad,” which included twelve cartoon images. The cartoons became the focus of a series of violent political rallies in the Middle East in February 2006 and a subject of worldwide debate pitching free speech against “cultural sensitivity.”
For all the prominence of Islam in such debates, threats of violence against words and images are not the sole province of religious extremists. In 2005, a politically controversial professor’s scheduled speech at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY was cancelled in response to alleged threats of violence. In 2008, the San Francisco Art Institute closed a controversial video exhibition in response to threats of violence against faculty members by animal rights activists. Later that year, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln canceled a speech by former Weatherman and education theorist William Ayers, citing security concerns.
The possibility of giving offense and provoking violence has entered the imagination of curators, publishers and the public at large, generating more and more incidents of preemptive self-censorship: in 2006, for instance, London’s Whitechapel Gallery declared twelve works by Surrealist master Hans Bellmer too dangerous to exhibit because of fears that the sexual overtones would be offensive to the large Muslim population in the area; and publisher Random House canceled the 2008 publication of Sherry Jones’ The Jewel of Medina because “it could incite acts of violence.” The suppression of images in Jytte Klausen’s book is the latest, but not likely to be the last in the series of such incidents.
Words and images exist in complex socio-political contexts. Suppressing controversial expression cannot erase the underlying social tensions that create the conditions for violence to begin with, but it does create a climate that chills and eventually corrupts the fundamental values of liberal democracy.
A Call to Action
The incident at Yale provides an opportunity to re-examine our commitment to free expression. When an academic institution of such standing asserts the need to suppress scholarly work because of a theoretical possibility of violence somewhere in the world, it grants legitimacy to censorship and casts serious doubt on their, and our, commitment to freedom of expression in general, and academic freedom in particular.
The failure to stand up for free expression emboldens those who would attack and undermine it. It is time for colleges and universities in particular to exercise moral and intellectual leadership. It is incumbent on those responsible for the education of the next generation of leaders to stand up for certain basic principles: that the free exchange of ideas is essential to liberal democracy; that each person is entitled to hold and express his or her own views without fear of bodily harm; and that the suppression of ideas is a form of repression used by authoritarian regimes around the world to control and dehumanize their citizens and squelch opposition.
To paraphrase Ben Franklin, those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, will get neither liberty nor safety.
If you would like to be considered as a signatory to the Statement of Principle, please email us [email protected]. You may add a brief comment, if you would like.
(via The Volokh Conspiracy)
by Jon Lackman | 16 November 2009 | Contemporary
ARTINFO interviews Gerhard Richter:
In his essay, [Benjamin] Buchloh discusses the various associations white paintings can have — with the idea of reductiveness, the end of painting. And of course there are Rauschenberg’s white paintings, and Ryman’s. Were any of these things on your mind while you worked on yours?
I don’t know the Rauschenberg paintings, but I know Ryman very well, and many others. What I didn’t agree [with Buchloh about] is that white painting is so abstract. I told him even Ryman, who intends to show nothing, gives us associations. I think it’s not possible to avoid giving a cue of something. I would like to look at these paintings the same way I look at photographs. They show something. They are not abstract.
How do you see the relationship between abstraction and figuration in your work? Some of the pieces in this exhibition seem to toe the line between the two approaches. The September print, for instance.
It’s hard to explain it. But I don’t see such a big difference. Both show something.
In the white paintings one might see atmospheric effects, or clouds.
For me it’s more an area I don’t know, and an object I don’t know.
by Jon Lackman | 11 November 2009 | Uncategorized
Wayne Dynes writes on Levi-Strauss’ death:
When I was teaching at Columbia University in the early seventies I fastened on the idea of trying to adapt structuralism to the field of art history. Lévi-Strauss had himself pointed the way with his studies of the masks of the Northwest Coast Indians. I formed a little group of graduate students to effect the adaptation. As with other such attempts to expand the horizons of art history, in the end our efforts did not amount to much. One problem was that structuralism, which seemed so promising, had been overwhelmed by the blight of poststructuralism, with the appalling Jacques Derrida in the vanguard.
Various other art historians influenced by Levi-Strauss include Pierre Daix, Linda Nochlin, and Thomas Crow. Note also critic Jonathan Jones.
by Jon Lackman | 11 November 2009 | Renaissance
From The Telegraph:
One of the charms of the world’s most famous painting is that she appears radiant one moment and then serious and sardonic the next. Now scientists claim to have come up with an answer to her changing moods – our eyes are sending mixed signals to the brain. They believe Mona Lisa’s smile depends on what cells in the retina pick up the image and what channel the image is transmitted through in the brain … The research was originally presented at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Chicago. This isn’t the first time scientists have deconstructed Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. In 2000, Margaret Livingstone, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School with a side interest in art history, showed that Mona Lisa’s smile is more apparent in peripheral vision.
“relatively few explore the role of mentors”
Indeed, and I also can’t wait to establish my lucrative hydrocarbon importation business in Newcastle.