Save NY Libraries - Read In

It always seems to come down to an assault on the humanities. NYC as you may know is suffering more than its share of economic woes and the cuts are coming. One thing on the chopping block is the public library system where job cuts have begun. This comes at a time where the high number of unemployed need library resources more than ever. According to the Library Journal.com the Mayor's office issued his Executive Budget, and the cuts are even worse, nearly 25 percent, representing a 30 percent reduction over two years. That would lead to perhaps 1500 layoffs (30 to 40 percent of staff), some 40 closed libraries, and drastically curtailed hours and materials.

In addition to calling elected officials, here is another way you can try and stop these cuts.

Read-in coming June 12
Library workers and advocates gathered under the Save NYC Libraries banner are backing that call with a series of actions, notably a 24-hour Read-In to be held in front of the Brooklyn Public Library's Central Library at Grand Army Plaza beginning at 5 p.m. on Saturday June 12.

Details:

Start Time:	Saturday, June 12, 2010 at 5:00pm
End Time:	Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 5:00pm
Location:	Steps of BPL Central Library
Street:	10 Grand Army Plaza
City/Town:	Brooklyn, NY

From the organizers:

Come out and support libraries during the 24 hour We Will Not Be Shushed Read-In. This is going to be a unified libraries effort with readers and library workers from all three tri-li systems. We already have the full endorsement of Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Library administration. This is going to be a huge event in support of libraries.

To Volunteer: savenyclibraries@gmail.com

We need volunteers for the event, not to read though. No we need people for the hard boring work, to get petition signatures and make sure that people fill out postcards and sign petition and then sign another, then another. We need people who will work the crowd and man the tables. We need people to do the heavy lifting.

urban field manual

Check out BEYROUTES from onlab. Fanatstic idea and design. Would love for a whole series of these exploring the different nature of urban environments around the world.

Beyroutes, a guidebook to Beirut, one of the grand capitals of the Middle East. Beyroutes presents an exploded view of a city which lives so many double lives and figures in so many truths, myths and historical falsifications. Visiting the city with this intimate book as your guide makes you feel disoriented, appreciative, judgmental and perhaps eventually reconciliatory.

Initiated by Studio Beirut
Supported by Partizan Publik, Archis, Pearl Foundation

Carlo Farneti's illustrations for Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal

These are pretty great - Carlo Farneti's illustrations for a 1935 edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. (From the collection of Richard Sica)



via: A Journey Round My Skull

the artist as public intellectual

I received a blurb about the upcoming fairs in Miami that went something like this:

" the return of decadence to Art Basel Miami Beach this year just might signal the economy’s comeback"

I'll pass on the decadence and the spin that this is a good thing for us. I would rather have more of the following on display in Miami.

The essay puts [Edward] Burtynsky’s work not in the context of art history, but in the context of research on recent environmental scholarship. It indirectly makes a powerful case for including artists among the ranks of our most significant public intellectuals. It aggressively pushes art out of the contemporary art ghetto and places it in the mainstream of discourse on the future of our planet. (MAN)

Via Hrag Vartanian

Why Are Artists Poor ?

I’ve been trying to read more sources regarding notions of value and systems of exchange in both expired societies and our own. A year of scraping by can remind you about the importance such primary questions.

Most artists assume that economic success will be fleeting if not outright unattainable. The current economic downturn after the gilded oughts serves as a stern reminder to the vast majority of artists. If you’ve been an artist for any amount of time you must have come to the cynical observation that the economics feel more like a pyramid scheme than a means to earn a living. A very small number at the top seem to hold almost all of the wealth. The tens of thousands of practitioners who keep missing the booms and bubbles are often waiting for the trickle down affect. It’s an ugly reality that contrasts sharply with general assumptions that the Arts represent progressive values and open mindedness. The Artworld likes the idea that it is a platform for societal critique, boundary breaking and intellectual rigor but often these aspirations appear to be nothing more than window dressing for an economic structure that creates more destruction than anyone wants to admit to. Although many of us have more than enough anecdotal evidence of economic disparity, there seems to be little factual analysis on the subject despite the fact that billions of dollars are generated annually.

Why Are Artists Poor? (authored by Hans Abbing), a visual artist and professor of Art-Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. The basic premise of the book is timely: in the world of contemporary art, the poverty of artists is misunderstood. This isn’t just some starving artist cliché perpetuated by the society at large but a blind spot within the community itself.

excerpt from the book review:

“Why Are Artists Poor?” explores the panoply of truisms about the art market, the role of the state, the public, and the attitudes of artists themselves. Abbing proposes a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on the insights of economics, sociology, and psychology. Briefly, he argues that art is shrouded in a pervasive mystique, but that the economy of art is also unique, resembling no other sector of production. The argument is based primarily on a study of the West (Europe, U.K., the Americas), though Abbing feels that his broader conclusions apply equally to the situation in Asia.

In fact, the poverty of artists is a recent phenomenon, with numbers increasing dramatically since WWII. A study of Holland indicates that the vast majority of artists (77%) are living at or below subsistence levels, and cannot make a living from art alone. A second job is necessary, and it typically generates twice the income of the art job. A graph of total income distribution of the artists in Abbing’s study resembles an asymptotic curve, with fewer than 1% at the top who are extraordinarily well off. Paradoxically, with the increase of prosperity in the industrialized nations, the number of impoverished artists has increased as well. Abbing argues that these developments are, in fact, connected.

In economic terms, this suggests an oversupply of artists, but unlike other sectors of the economy, artists do not quit. That they seemingly “cannot do otherwise”, leads Abbing to his first claim: the economy of the arts is exceptional. The usual mechanisms of supply and demand do not function. The question is: why not? Why do people become artists, knowing their compensation will be poor, and why don’t they quit when they have trouble surviving?

A dizzying number of reasons are interrogated and, unsurprisingly, money, fame, and recognition are not decisive factors. The most fundamental explanation for Abbing turns upon a sense that “art is special”, i.e., that to be involved in the art world with a capital-A is a special activity, that artists are driven not merely by their urge to create, but almost by a sense of social obligation. Since the nineteenth century, the practice of art has become a mode of authenticity. Many non-artists tend to see artists as somehow more authentic than themselves. This desire to give expression to an “authentic self” seems to be one of the main forces that attract young people into the arts.

Logically, one would expect that putting more money into the arts, either via state support or other forms of subsidy, would alleviate the poverty of artists. In fact, the opposite seems to be true: the number of poor artists actually increases. To understand why, Abbing distinguishes three groups: a small group who are not poor; second, poor artists, but seen from outside, seem that they “could have” avoided poverty; third, artists who are altogether poor, with the majority belonging to these latter two groups. The third is in the danger zone, but both second and third share a common work ethic: when money comes in, they invest it into their art, buying more equipment, putting more hours into their art job, etc. Their economic condition remains unchanged.

Continue reading at Tokyo Art Beat




Review by M. Downing Roberts

Maya Pindyck - Friend Among Stones

Here's a friendly plug for poet and artist Maya Pindyck. She has a new book out - Friend Among Stones - and some local readings in our fair city.

Wednesday, 10/28, 7:30pm
Guerilla Lit Readings
Bar on A: 170 Avenue A at 11th St.
with Yvonne Garrett & Elizabeth May

Here's a sample:

The Lesson

A certain bird used to make the wrong sound.
Her keeper cried, Go lower, lower—your pitch
feels uncontained. The bird pressed her beak
to the keeper’s cheek, puncturing his flesh
until a spot no bigger than an ant’s abdomen,
no bigger than the period concluding his command,
appeared. The keeper mistook the act for kindness
and crooned, My love, my infant—try again.

www.mayapindyck.com

pain and interrogation

I hope you can tear yourself away from the Swine Flu sweepstakes. As mentioned last week, I wanted to share some text from Elaine Scarry's book - The Body in Pain. A lot has been written and discussed in the last week regarding the torture memos. Unfortunately the media has a new headline to chase with the Swine outbreak but I think more on the nature and structure of torture fits in quite nicely with our neo-Medieval lives.

The following transcript is from from chapter one of Scarry' s book - basically pages 28 - 38. I've skipped through this so hopefully that doesn't impair your reading or offend the author. My intent is to share passages that have truly spoken to me. My hope is that this will generate discussion among more scholarly peers regarding the subject. And maybe some book sales for Scarry?

Pain and Interrogation:

Torture consists of a primary physical act, the infliction of pain, and a primary verbal act, the interrogation. The first rarely occurs without the second. As is true with the present period, most historical episodes of torture, such as the Inquisition, have inevitably included the element of interrogation: the pain is traditionally accompanied by the “Question”.

The connection between the physical act and the verbal act, between the body and voice, is often misstated or misunderstood. Although information sought in an interrogation is almost never credited with being a just motive for torture, it is repeatedly credited with being the motive for torture. But for every instance in which someone with critical information is interrogated, there are hundreds interrogated who could know nothing of the remote importance to the stability or self-image of the regime. Just as within a precarious regime, the motive for arrest is often a fiction, and just as the motive for punishing those imprisoned is often a fiction (the men, although locked in their cells, watched and applauded the television report that a military plane had crashed – Chile), so what masquerades as the motive for torture is a fiction.

It is crucial to see that the interrogation does not stand outside an episode of torture as its motive or justification: It is internal to the structure of torture, exists there because of its intimate connections to and interactions with the physical pain.

Intense pain is world –destroying. It is for this reason that while the content of the prisoner’s answer is only sometimes important to the regime, the form of the answer, the fact of his answering, is always crucial.

Physical pain always mimes death and the infliction of physical pain is always a mock execution.

“The question” is mistakenly understood to be “the motive”; “the answer” is mistakenly understood to “the betrayal”. The first mistake credits the torturer, providing him with a justification, his cruelty with an explanation. The second discredits the prisoner, making him rather than the torturer, his voice rather than his pain, the cause of his loss of self and world. These two misinterpretations are obviously neither accidental nor unrelated. The one is an absolution of responsibility; the other is a conferring or responsibility; the two together turn the moral reality of torture upside down. Almost anyone looking at the physical act of torture would be immediately appalled and repulsed by the torturers. It is difficult to think of a human situation in which the lines of moral responsibility are more starkly or simply drawn, in which there is more compelling reason to ally one’s sympathies with the one person and to repel the claims of the other. Yet as soon as the focus of the attention shifts to the verbal aspect of torture, those lines have begun to waver and change their shape in the direction of accommodating and crediting the torturers. This inversion, this interruption and redirecting of a basic moral reflex, is indicative of the kind of interactions occurring between body and voice in torture and suggests why the infliction of acute physical pain is inevitably accompanied by the interrogation.

It is only the prisoner’s steadily shrinking ground that wins for the torturer his swelling sense of territory. The question and the answer are a prolonged comparative display, an unfurling of world maps.

This display of worlds can alternately be understood as a display of selves or as a display of voices, for the three are close to being a single phenomenon. The vocabulary of “motive” and “betrayal”, for example, is itself an indication of a perceived difference in selfhood: to credit the torturer with having a motive is, among other things, to credit him with having psychic content, the very thing the prisoner’s confession acknowledges the absence of and which the idiom of “betrayal” accuses him of willfully abandoning. The question and answer also objectify the fact that while the prisoner has almost no voice – his confession is a halfway point in the disintegration of language, an audible objectification of the proximity of silence – the torturer and the regime have doubled their voice since the prisoner is now speaking their words.

The interrogation is, therefore crucial to a regime. Within the physical events of torture, the torturer has nothing: he has only an absence of pain. In order to experience his distance from the prisoner in terms of “having” their physical difference is translated into a verbal difference: the absence of pain is a presence of world; the presence of pain is the absence of world. Across this set of inversions pain becomes power. The direct equation, “the larger the prisoner’s pain, the larger the torturer’s world” is mediated by the middle term, “the prisoner’s absence of world”: the larger the prisoner’s pain (the smaller the prisoner’s world and therefore, by comparison) the larger the torturer’s world. This set of inversions at once objectifies and falsifies the pain, objectifies one crucial aspect of pain in order to falsify all other aspects. The obliteration of the contents of consciousness, the elimination of world ground, which is a condition brought about by the pain and therefore one that once objectified (as it is in confession) should act as a sign of the pain, a call for help, an announcement of a radical occasion for attention and assistance, instead acts to discredit the claims of pain, to repel attention, to ensure that the pain will be unseen and unattended to.

When one human being recognizes the incontestable legitimacy of another human being’s existence, he or she is locating the other’s essential reality in one of two places – either in the complex fact of sentience or in the objects of sentience, in the fact of consciousness or in the objects of consciousness.

A political situation is almost by definition one in which the two locations of selfhood are in a skewed relation to one another or have wholly split apart and have begun to work, or be worked, against one another.

Image: Richard Ross

so much emotional cartography

I suspect we'll be hearing a lot more about emotion mapping. This project looks great and a you download the book.

Via information aesthetics:

The (44MB freely downloadable) book Emotional Cartography - Technologies of the Self [emotionalcartography.net] is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psycho-geographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists, brought together by Christian Nold, to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualizing intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology. The theme of this collection of essays is to investigate the apparent desire for technologies to map emotion, using a variety of different approaches.

Probably the best known emotion maps are the ones resulting Bio Mapping project, a community mapping project in which the Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), a simple indicator of the emotional arousal, is recorded in conjunction with one's geographical location. By combining the emotional responses of over 1,500 people over a period of 4 years, several "Emotion Maps" were generated of the city in which the participants roamed around.

Meet the Wittgensteins

This is a fascinating read at the New Yorker. Cross posting from Phronesisaical:

In the New Yorker, a review of Alexander Waugh's new book on the Wittgenstein family. More Wittgenstein biography here.

[Karl Wittgenstein's] youngest child, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, once asked a pupil if he had ever had any tragedies in his life. The pupil, evidently well trained, inquired what he meant by “tragedy.” “I mean suicides, madness, or quarrels,” replied Ludwig, three of whose four brothers committed suicide, two of them (Rudi and Hans) in their early twenties, and the third (Kurt) at the age of forty. Ludwig often thought of doing so, as did his surviving brother, Paul. A budding concert pianist when he lost his right arm to a Russian bullet, in 1914, Paul was imprisoned for a time in the infamous Siberian fortress where Dostoyevsky had set his novel “The House of the Dead.” Ludwig later claimed to have first entertained thoughts of suicide at around the age of ten, before any of his brothers had died. There were three sisters: Gretl, Helene, and Hermine. Hermine, the eldest child (she was born in 1874; Ludwig, the youngest, arrived fifteen years later), and the guardian of her father’s flame, never married. Helene was highly neurotic, and had a husband who suffered from dementia. Gretl was regarded as irritating by most people, including her unpleasant husband, who committed suicide, as did his father and one of his aunts. Bad temper and extreme nervous tension were endemic in the family. One day, when Paul was practicing at one of the seven grand pianos in their winter home, the Palais Wittgenstein, he leaped up and shouted at his brother Ludwig in the room next door, “I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!”...

In the Wittgenstein family, it was not the philosopher who was the unworldly one. Ever since childhood, the last-born Ludwig had had a passion and a facility for mechanical things. At the age of ten, he constructed a working model of a sewing machine out of bits of wood and wire; while serving in the Austrian Army, he demonstrated a more dangerous practicality by improvising his own mortar in the field. After leaving school, Ludwig studied engineering in Berlin, specializing in hot-air balloons, and then moved to Manchester to work on aeronautical engines; in 1910, he patented an improvement in propeller technology. It was then that he heard of Bertrand Russell’s work on logic and decided to study with him in Cambridge.

Russell found him to be a tormented soul, unsure of his own abilities and unsure whether to be an engineer or a philosopher. Russell soon decided that Ludwig was the most perfect example of genius he had ever known, and persuaded him not to continue with engineering. “We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother,” Russell told Hermine. But he feared that his new pupil was on the brink of suicide, as he explained in a letter to his mistress, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Ottoline wrote back that hot chocolate would calm Ludwig’s nerves, and enclosed a packet of cocoa tablets for Russell to give him....

a city of doors, mostly closed

Massive gates opened into the city, and the winding streets themselves often ended abruptly at smaller doors that defined neighborhood and community boundaries... Whole neighborhoods might be walled off, accessible only by a single door in a narrow street. - Nina Burleigh

Over at BLDGBLOG, a great meditation on the nature of access, labyrinthine and boundary in 18th century Cairo as explored in Nina Burleigh's recent book Mirage. Sounds like an excellent read.

Charles Darwin gets a Hirst re- brand

Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species is now 150th years old and a special edition is due for release next month. Damien Hirst gets the cover honor

Hirst in his own words [the Guardian]:

The painting sits firmly in the tradition of "still life" and is made up of objects I've come to imbue with my own meanings, some of them Darwinian in origin, and that I guess are seen in other areas of my work. The painting has an X-ray-like quality to it, as if it is revealing something about the structure of the objects painted.

I suppose the work, in a modest way, acknowledges Darwin's analytical mind and his courage to believe in those ideas that questioned the very fabric of existence and belief in his time.

Discuss amongst yourselves. It's a very Schnabel moment - smirk.


Image: Copyright Damien Hirst 2009
hat tip: phronesisaical

a field guide to melancholy

Here's a new author for me and a title that I'm itching to read. Not quite available yet in the U.S. but it has been released in the U.K.

Dylan Trigg has this brief assessment:

As though to perfectly coincide with the onset of winter, Jacky Bowring’s new book, A Field Guide to Melancholy has arrived. I am working through it, slowly. Already I sense it is a book that deserves to be read with a particular kind of pace. Somewhat like memory itself, a book that is conducive to a certain light and rhythm, full of both twilight and permanence simultaneously. Recommended.

Luc Sante interview

Guernica magazine has a great interview with author Luc Sante currently on their site. Those close to me know how much Low Life was a book that impacted my life and imagination in way that is often hard to describe. I still feel it resonate inside of me when I walk down certain streets. If you are into histories of place, there is no better read. If you live NY, you better get a copy asap. It should be required with your driver's license.

Some interesting discussion about rhythm in the interview.

Excerpt from Sante::

Actually, songs don’t provoke visual images for me. I hadn’t exactly been aware of this before. What I get from songs is language, but not necessarily the actual lyrics. Hmm. This line of thought seems to be getting neurological… Anyway, I sometimes get words from instrumentals, but mostly from music I get rhythm. And timbre and inflection, stuff like that, which makes it sound much drier than it actually is, but in any event the image-generating portion of my brain involves some entirely other lode.

It’s funny—if music produces words, words do produce images. Despite this, music and images seem to live in different sides of the brain. I guess I think in analogies, which tend to be visual. And images produce images—the more images I see the more I can imagine, which, in part, accounts for my addiction to images and my stamina for consuming vast numbers of them at a time.

Whenever I’ve searched for the origins of rhythm in my life the only thing I’ve ever been able to find is the rhythm of the litanies in the Latin mass—the ora pro nobis iteration in funeral services and the antiphonal ceremony of rogations in the fields. Otherwise music was pretty much absent from my early life—my family didn’t get a record player until I was nine, and the radio only seemed to issue news and soccer, later baseball. Music crept up on me in childhood from a variety of ambient sources. In any case, soul music came to seem like something I’d always known, and—beginning when I was nineteen—reggae even more so, as if I’d somehow heard it in infancy.

Rhythm in writing is somehow analogous, but it’s a completely intuitive matter. I don’t really understand the process. It’s related to the substance of Flaubert’s famous letter to George Sand: “When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By searching I find the proper expression, which was always the only one, and which is also harmonious. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Is there not, in this precise fitting of parts, something eternal, like a principal? If not, why should there be a relation between the right word and the musical word? Or why should the greatest compression of thought always result in a line of poetry?” This is crucial stuff for me. I write intuitively, not knowing where I’m going, not knowing what the next sentence will be until this one has guided me there, and knowing how the sentence goes begins with my hearing its rhythm in my head, and then filling in the specific words. If the sentence is cloddish and clunky, it’s simply wrong—and not just wrong-sounding but wrong in its meaning. I realize at this point that I seem to be conflating two separate senses of the word “rhythm”—beat and flow—but they are inextricably linked in my mind and the matter lies largely outside my ability to articulate it. Rhythm also guides my reading, that part of which has nothing to do with acquiring information. There are certain writers whose rhythm is immediately congenial to me. Among the living, I think of Geoff Dyer, whose books I’d devour even if they were about metallurgy or stamp collecting. His rhythm carries me through, exactly the way the rhythm of a dancehall number takes over my body.

image via Guernica

our gilded age

Seems like as good a time as any to pickup the Twain classic...... now what will Uncle Fester do about this hullabaloo on Wall St.????



Image:Credit: Keppler, Joseph Ferdinand, artist.'"Mark Twain," America's best humorist.' Keppler & Schwarzmann, 1885. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

What do you think is essential reading for the artist?

So this in an open call for a discussion about what you consider essential reading for the contemporary artist. Let's limit it to 5 titles - books or essays. These can be historic, contemporary, of any discipline. You can also include an artists monograph if you can explain why it is essential beyond your affinity to that artist's work, like perhaps the guest essay of that title.


I'd like to see what parallels are out there for artists that are online regularly via blogs, etc.
Also, I'm personally interested in uncovering any educational gaps that I might have. So please impress me with something other than total silence on the subject ;)

summer reading

It's summer and I have been amped about getting through a ton of books if possible. Not having worked since April, I've plunged into studio life but also some 'home-schooling" of my own. In short, finishing the myriad books I've had my nose in for months - if not years :(

So here's my report on where I am so far at the mid-summer point.

Books finished:

• Storm World - Chris Mooney
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
• Seeing is Forgetting The Name of the Thing One Sees (Robert Irwin) - Lawrence Weschler
• The Aesthetics of Decay - Dylan Trigg
• A Theory of Cloud/Toward a History of Painting - Hubert Damisch
• The Emigrants - W.G. Sebald
• The Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald
• The Emergence of Memory, Conversations with W.G. Sebald - Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Books currently trying to finish:

• Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald
• Searching for Sebald, Photography after W.G.Sebald - The Institute of Cultural Inquiry
• The Fate of Place - Edward Casey
• The Accursed Share - Georges Bataille
• Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron
• Francis Bacon - Gilles Deleuze
• Holy Terror - Terry Eagleton
• Sticky Sublime - Bill Beckley
• What Painting Is - James Elkins

Books I hope to at least get started on by fall:

Feeling and Form - Susanne Langer (owned this for years and never cracked it)
Pictures and Tear: A History of People who have Cried in Front of Paintings - James Elkins
On the Road ( The Original Scroll) - Jack Kerouac ( a re-read of sorts)
The Purple Cloud - M.P. Shiel
Archeologies of the Future - Frederic Jameson
Presence of the Past - Rupert Sheldrake

It's a tall order for sure and I don't expect to get through all of these texts but I really want to. I'm not a particularly fast reader, I'm prone to underlining and re-reading pages. Still it seems doable despite my own reading idiosyncrasies. Of course, new things always come your way so this list is at best an ambling walk through the thicket

Seeing is Forgetting - Robert Irwin

One of the great pleasures so far this summer has been finally (after years) getting around to reading Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler. This may well be the best book about an artist and their working method and evolution that I have ever read. If you interested in abstraction, this is pretty much required reading. You'll also get a nice little history on the formation of the L.A. art scene from the 1950's on which for an east coast artist, was quite intriguing and it certainly filled some gaps for me. This is a fast read (and great biography actually) with a lot of big ideas and I think some very fruitful fodder on how to approach one's work within your own studio dynamic. My interest and admiration for Irwin has gone off the charts to say the least, it has left a true and at times profound impression. If you teach, I think you need to get a copy of it.

Here's an excerpt regarding Irwin's relationship with his studio practice during his "late lines" period(1962-1964):

In the beginning all of this was not very considered. It was done very intuitively. My concentration was not real good. It was mostly a question of just staying in the studio and simply not going out. Whether I did anything or didn't do anything, whether I was able to work or not, I simply would not let myself leave. But after awhile, if you don't let yourself leave, then everything else begins to leave, that is, all of your other reasons or ambitions in being there; and if you're very fortunate, you might then reach a point of being completely alone in an intimate dialogue with yourself as acted out in the realm of the painting.

when art met punk

No-Wave meet coffee table....

Thurston Moore's new salute to New York's short lived but highly influential (of course) punk sub-genre of the late '70s. Actually looks quite good I think. Here's the Times review.

the love/hate of French theory

This book was pointed out at Larval Subjects. I'm not certain many camps within the art world care anymore (for some reason) but this could be a useful read for many laboring in the trenches of continental thought.

The must-read exposé of America’s love/hate affair with French theory.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock ‘n’ roll invasion, the arrival of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation.

Outside the academy, “French theory” had a profound impact on the era’s emerging identity politics while also becoming, in the 1980s, the target of right-wing propagandists. At the same time in academic departments across the country, their post-structuralist form of radical suspicion transformed disciplines from literature to anthropology to architecture. By the 1990s, French theory was woven deeply into America’s cultural and intellectual fabric.

French Theory is the first comprehensive account of the American fortunes of these unlikely philosophical celebrities. François Cusset looks at why America proved to be such fertile ground for French theory, how such demanding writings could become so widely influential, and the peculiarly American readings of these works. Reveling in the gossipy history, Cusset also provides a lively exploration of the many provocative critical practices inspired by French theory. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today—showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life.

the great independents

Maud Newton has been running a great series on independent booksellers near and far. Be sure and check out these local refuges!




pictured: Powell's in Portland, OR