by Jon Lackman | 9 October 2006 | Uncategorized
Via Brian Sholis, an interview with Courtauld professor Joseph Leo Koerner published by ReadySteadyBook: “Michael Baxandall’s The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany remains a model of historical exposition. Michael Fried’s has been personally important to me, and I feel especially in tune with his new book on Menzel. I studied with Svetlana Alpers, and I read everything she writes with pleasure. Hans Belting’s Likeness and Presence is an amazing book—in precision and scope absolutely comparable with ‘classic’ art historical texts by Erwin Panofsky and Alois Riegl. Although I did not read his work until recently, Leo Steinberg remains a remarkable figure: his early criticism remains completely fresh today, and his Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper book should replace the Da Vinci Code as the true ‘thriller’ about that artist. The two works of art history with which I have been most critically engaged are Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form and Aby Warburg’s lecture on the Serpent Ritual … These days the books currently on my shelf that I reach for most often are ones by Bruno Latour, Michael Taussig, Valentin Groebner, and Miguel Tamen. The authors I return to, again and again over the years, and with changing responses, are Martin Heidegger, Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt, and Paul de Man. When I feel I am losing my voice and need to find it again, I read Wallace Stevens, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka—I listen to their cadences and how they reason about completely unreasonable or unspeakable things. When I feel I am losing my intellectual energy, I try to write something about my father. Ambivalence is a great energizer, I think … My favourite poets are Wordsworth, Hölderlin, and Stevens. I suppose my favourite writers are Freud and Kafka, although my favourite novel currently is Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities. I confess my most meaningful reading experiences occur when I am reading in order to write … I am right now mired in the secondary literature on Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights … I decided it was time to confront the perennially impenetrable masterpiece.”
