Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
So evidently a lot of people are excited that Fox is bringing back “Family Guy” after canceling it. I can’t really see why – while I always like to see a RISD grad make good, I could never get into that show. The character of the baby is not as funny as the creators seem to think, and the son’s voice is extremely grating, never a good feature. Can’t watch it.
I’m also a little bitter that a mediocre production like "Family Guy” is getting a second chance when the true comedy gold, “Greg the Bunny” was axed without a second thought. Sarah Silverman, Eugene Levy, and puppets? C’mon! Warren Demontague is a monkey god. How anyone can get through life without slipping “I’m going to be spending the weekend in wine country . . . that’s what I call the room above my garage” into casual conversations, well, I just don’t understand. But there it is, Fox kicked the show around for a few months and then killed it. A tragedy.
Other things no one in their right mind has any use for: Star Wars, anything involving any form of the word “Hitchhike” in the title, movies in general.
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
I heard a story on the radio coming home and knew I had to write about it; get to the computer and I find The Gurgling Cod beat me to it. I firmly reject the suggestion this could only happen in Rhode Island; the offer surely would have more appeal in Texas.
(I'm actually more intrigued by Fesser's cuban sandwich story, as the details - near Classical, post-Columbine - suggest he used to haunt my old, bodega-rich neighborhood while I still lived there.)
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
I don't know when exactly Kriston is planning on being back, but I'll probably be posting a bit through the weekend. Up here we are now in the midst of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. I haven't yet see any of it, but according to the New York Times, it sucks. I don't know about that; while I can appreciate some of the criticisms the article makes (it's no fun to be treated with contempt or when things don't work), there's an awful lot of different things going on. Any review seems like luck of the draw, really. And I like interactivity in museums! At the Portland Children's Museum Children's Museum of Maine I once found a theremin standing ignored on a lower level. It was the coolest thing ever - I still want one of my own. Of course, as soon as I started doing my freaky spaceoid jams on it, all these little kids came around wanting to play. But they couldn't possibly appreciate it on as many levels as I could. Anyway, I'll make my own very partial judgment on some of the activities in and around Boston soon, I hope. Of course, I said the same thing last week.
Meanwhile, my fellow Grammar.rent-a-cop Dan is off checking out the Chicago fairs. I've been waiting for him to crosspost that, but he's probably still sleeping off his hangover. Cheapest malt liquor in the country in Chicago, you know.
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
So I’ve been doing the random ten thing, which is lame, but I can’t seem to stop. And then I make it worse by fretting over what comes up. So here goes:
Tom Waits, “Falling Down”
Hayden, “Dynamite Walls”
The Exploding Hearts, “Rumors in Town”
Joe Jackson, “Is She Really Going Out with Him?”
Van Morrison, “Jackie Wilson Said (I’m in Heaven When You Smile)”
Sly and the Family Stone, “Spaced Cowboy”
Meryn Cadell, “The Sweater”
Tom Waits, “Singapore”
Yo La Tengo, “Tears Are in Your Eyes”
Cub, “Secret Nothing”
Eh, Tom Waits. So boring. I’m not even really sure who or what Hayden is – it’s one of those songs that just mysteriously appeared on the hard drive due to the SO’s iPod obsession. I totally disown “The Sweater” (also hers), though the guitar sound isn’t bad. It sounds like a Molly Shannon skit turned into a song, though (Cadell even enunciates a little like Shannon.) Not keen on the Yo La Tengo, either, but then the only record by them I’ve ever really liked was Fakebook. Most of the rest listed just make me feel old.
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
From the New York Times:
Takashi Hashiyama, president of Maspro Denkoh Corporation, an electronics company based outside of Nagoya, Japan, could not decide whether Christie's or Sotheby's should sell the company's art collection, which is worth more than $20 million, at next week's auctions in New York.
He did not split the collection - which includes an important Cézanne landscape, an early Picasso street scene and a rare van Gogh view from the artist's Paris apartment - between the two houses, as sometimes happens. Nor did he decide to abandon the auction process and sell the paintings through a private dealer.
Instead, he resorted to an ancient method of decision-making that has been time-tested on playgrounds around the world: rock breaks scissors, scissors cuts paper, paper smothers rock.
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
My earliest political memories revolve around “Bewitched.” It was my favorite tv show back in the day, and I remember getting very upset when it would get pre-empted so that some boring old people could sit around desks and talk about some “Watergate" crap no one could possibly care about. So it was with mixed feelings that I read in today’s Globe about plans for a statue of Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha to be erected in Salem, MA (check for registration):
. . . some in Salem are upset over plans by the TV Land cable network to honor the late Montgomery with a 9-foot bronze statue in a city infamous for its 17th century persecution of people feared to be witches. The statue would depict Montgomery sitting sidesaddle on a broom. It would stand in a downtown park at the corner of Essex and Washington streets.
''It's insensitive to what happened in 1692," said Jean Harrison, one of several Salem residents opposing the plan. ''She was a fictional witch, but the people who died were not witches."
True enough, but it seems to me that Salem long ago lost the battle of good taste in dealing with its past. Especially in the fall, some of the tourist traps up there seem like they came out of the old SNL skit “Goth Talk.” But it is worth noting that the intersection in question is pretty much in the heart of town, not exactly an inconspicuous location one could overlook. And what about this?
The Samantha Stephens role, which is about to be reprised by Nicole Kidman in a ''Bewitched" movie, would join a cast of characters immortalized in bronze across America by TV Land, including Ralph Kramden, Andy and Opie Taylor, and Mary Richards. TV Land, which shows reruns of old television programs, calls the statues TV Land Landmarks.
Some critics oppose the statue on other grounds, saying the series was set in Westport, Conn.
First, this is just freaking weird. How messed up must we be when a cable TV network is putting up statues across the country? I mean, screw art used in ads – this is ads as art. Pretty kitschy art, too – which is not to say all of the shows lacked value (though “Bewitched” did, I have to admit.) And do you think Westport would let them put the statue there? I doubt it. The Mary Richards statue is located in downtown Minneapolis – I’ve seen it, actually, though I didn’t know the story behind it. But hell, people liked that show. The bronze Ralph Kramden, on the other hand, was not placed in Brooklyn, where the character worked, but in front of the New York City Port Authority bus terminal. To emerge from that dank hellhole – how sweet it is! Whatever one think of the broader situation, it has to be taken as an intentional insult to put a statue of anyone in front of the Port Authority. If I were related to Jackie Gleason, I’d be pissed and wouldn't forget it.
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
Speaking of fairs, the International Herald Tribune ran an overview of the recent concluded Asia Week in New York, offering plenty of details on sales and the state of the business. Probably not anything those who follow such matters closely don’t know already, but a good read nonetheless. Some points: the Asian art market, like the broader one, shows no sign of cooling off as of yet; the Chinese are buying up an increasing amount of available Chinese art, keeping it at home and sending prices up; but in terms of relative availability and prominence, China still far overshadows the growing market in Indian art. The latter did see strong growth in the modern sector, reflecting increased interest in the field as well as realities of availability. So says the Herald Tribune:
Seen from a broader perspective, that scarcity [of older Indian art] is laudable. India bans the export of antiquities that are part of its cultural heritage; in recent years, it has had greater success in implementing the law than countries like Cambodia or Nepal.
The day may not be far away when it will be impossible to buy or sell Indian sculptures without documentation to prove its exit from the country before the 1970 Unesco convention. That scarcity leads to sky-high prices, but those spending vast amounts now may be unable to recoup their outlay in the not-too-distant future - to say nothing of the risk of possible legal action.
Which echoes the gist of what Reason magazine takes on in this article, without the funhouse mirror distortions their ideology supplies. I’m not about to say that the current arrangements governing the export and sale of antiquities is perfect. Enforcement is difficult, and some illegal activities will always evade the law. I’m not sure anyone outside of Reason (and probably not even there) would want to return to the old days of colonial appropriation, but that doesn’t mean I’m not very grateful for those antiquities that flowed into American museum collections during the past century. And I can well imagine that the mass of laws and international agreements that govern the field might need some clarification, nor is every claim equal (China, for instance, seems to have a number of unresolved issues regarding enforcement.)
But the article we get on the topic can be summarized as follows: journalist meet trade representative, decides he seems nice. Along the way we are offered a rather flattened view of the different parties arguing over the export and sale of antiquities, from dealers (reasonable! good!) to archaeologists (extremists! bad!). As for the immense amount of destruction caused by illegal excavations . . . it’s not that the author doesn’t know about it, it’s just that he doesn’t care. After all, efforts to do something about it are obviously wrong because they interfere with individuals’ “natural right” to, well, steal things. My favorite moment:
If the farmers cannot sell what they discover in a legitimate market, and if their government will not buy such artifacts from them, they have two choices (aside from simply letting the state appropriate the finds): destroy the objects or sell them illegally.
How much work can be done by parentheses! We might rephrase that clause just so: “they have two choices (aside from obeying the law).”
It’s instructive that this last little elision happens when discussing the far more clear-cut area of the status of antiquities within their nation of origin. What the author carefully avoids touching upon, lest he disturb the sensibilities of his domestic audience, is the looting and sale of artifacts from the U.S. It’s easy to argue away the laws and even the dignity of a foreign land; bring the subject back home, people might begin see it a little differently.
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
What else can I do while Kriston's gone? How about this site's first approving link (I think) to The New Criterion? James Panero, in the April issue, writing on some of the art fairs of the past winter:
. . . biography is now what you find at Outsider: wall labels spelling out one or another diagnosis of autism, Asperger’s, depression, water on the knee, you name it. And more than that, a few new “outsider” artists even attended art school. Why fake it, kids? There’s always room for more bad art at Armory.
Not nice. But funny. I should also mention that, while it's not news that James reads the blogs (he helps write one, after all), the same article checks in on reactions to the fairs from Tyler Green and Choire Sicha (from Sicha's review, reproduced here) and Josse Ford.
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
One point I haven’t made explicit here, though Dan alluded to it, is that I’m not writing from DC as Kriston does, but from southern New England. Given that fact, and that I now have access to a Texan’s website, I can’t resist commenting on something I normally might not:
The Dutch oven — "a welcome and dependable" stalwart of chuckwagon cooking — is on its way to becoming the official state cooking implement. Texas lawmakers have previously grappled with weighty issues of bluebonnets, pecan trees, lightning whelks and jalapeño peppers. The state Senate approved a resolution Thursday to designate the three-legged cast-iron pot as a state symbol.
Mmm, chuckwagon cooking. Not a phrase that sets the mouth watering in readers of a certain age. What stands out, of course, is the silence of the barbeque lobby. Its serene indifference to the Dutch oven stands in contrast to such epic battles as that between coffee milk and frozen lemonade for state drink. I’m sure the Dutch oven has played a role in Lone Star cookery. But to see the legislature of the state of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay declare one of the exemplary tools of Yankee cuisine a chosen symbol is just touching. As the article notes, the history of the Dutch oven goes back to New England and then to those nefarious Europeans; it is, in fact, the perfect pot for making Boston baked beans or Yankee pot roast. That Texas has chosen to acknowledge the superiority of the North’s favorite braiser over the dry heat and smoke of pits is a hopeful sign of dawning civilization.
Guest blogger: Dan of Iconoduel
Standard late-night blogging disclaimer: Written as this was well past what might ever be considered a reasonable hour, I have no way of knowing whether the following is an atrociously incoherent mess or an incredibly incisive piece of comentary... the majority will be buried below the fold for those bold enough to venture a read...
The Donald Kuspit lecture/essay JL's been reading and posting on is something of a tough slog. (Frankly I think it cries out for—interestingly enough considering its author's own critical predelictions—a psychological reading of its dynamics and motivations, but I'm certainly not prepared to offer such myself.)
I haven't read any of Kuspit's take on The End of Art, but I suspect we're getting bits and pieces of his argument here. The biggest point at issue in this piece, as JL has discussed, seems to be Kuspit's contention that "there can be no history of postmodern art, for the radically contemporary can never be delimited by any single historical reading."
Yet even as he stakes a claim for the exceptionality of postmodern art in this regard, there seems to be a corresponding recognition that the problem, at bottom, is hardly exceptional to our era at all (indeed, I'd say our inability to comprehensively account for the contemporary is what probably precipitates the need for a future history in the first place, but I digress... ). Kuspit:
There has always been more contemporary than historical art—or, to put it more broadly, there has always been more contemporaneity than historicity—but this fact only became emphatically explicit in modernity.
The key, it would seem, is in that final qualifier. He goes on to suggest that modernity represents a tipping point where an absolutist art history was finally "overwhelmed by the abundance of contemporary art evidence that proposed alternative and often radically contrary ideas of value."
But, while Kuspit concedes that this shift in our ability to rationally historicize the present is one of degree and not kind, it looks to me like he sees the change as irrevocable. (Perhaps the end of history, but seen less as eschaton than entropy?) More importantly, it is not a change Kuspit wishes to revoke. And it is with this sentiment that I think it starts to become clear that Kuspit's beef may in fact be with historicity in general.
First there's the suggestion that, because a single, all-encompassing historical narrative can't be had, the whole enterprise is all but totally suspect. JL covers this ground nicely:
Kuspit regards it as an indictment of his straw man that it can’t account for absolutely everything; but if one stops to think for even a moment, one realizes that this is always the case for any attempt at understanding. To write a history is to select; we always know that what results is, even at the level of a Gibbon, partial and to some degree caught within its own moment. But that in itself does not render it incapable of offering its own sort of knowledge.
I only wish to add that I see echoes here of a standard critical indictment of "closure of discourse," which is a patently reasonable caveat until marshaled against understanding. Wholeness, it goes, is only bought at the price of illusion; partiality enters behind the forces of bias and discursive violence. But, doesn't the enterprise of knowledge in some respect necessarily involve a certain will to closure, however Sisyphean? And can't even an illusory notion of wholeness be a constructive thing, however imperfect or imagined?
Beyond this claim, though, there's a more emotional conceit involved here. Historicization to Kuspit, as to others (cue the cute comparisons of museum and mausoleum), is nothing less than commensurate with creative death. Art loses its aura on the walls of the museum and in the pages of the history text. The "heterogeneous and fertile" present is reduced to a "sterile homogeneity" of the historicized past through rigidifying fetishization and idolization.
I don't necessarily wish to argue against this in any real sense (at least on these particular terms). I would like to point out, though, how such castration anxiety seems of a piece with a broader pathology of modernity Kuspit himself lays out for us in The Dialectic of Decadence: Between Advance and Decline in Art—a pathology that leaves us grasping again and again for a perpetually vital contemporaneity, without recourse to the perspective of history or traditional models of wholeness, and without the ability to truly advance beyond a narcissistic concern with the present...
In Sections I and II of Dialectic of Decadence Kuspit attends to Donald Judd and the dynamics behind Judd's rejection of the art of Sandro Chia as "decadent," placing it in a broader modern context. In Section III, then, he expands on this, erecting a sort of shaky psychological metaphysics of art in the modern era as the endless cycle of a fractured dialectic that pits frustrated, unachievable desire against controlling, castrating semiosis, and he argues, ultimately, for the inevitability of decadence in modern art (insofar as it retains the avant-garde concern for its own modernity).
In navigating fragmentary contemporaneity, Kuspit says, the modern "moment" finds itself in an eternal return to the quest for novel ways for irrepressible desire to overcome the oppressive constraints of language or for sterile language to overcome the inexpressibility of desire (or to reign it in)—either case an overcoming that, when actually achieved, really just proves the inadequacy of its own novelty and is thus immediately compromised and neutered. Novelty as stillborn.
Artistic wholeness is impossible in modern times, because the issue of art—the avant-garde issue—is to articulate the modern, without any preconceptions of it. (Art's traditional task was to "describe" the eternal, already known through preconceptions.) Indeed, the modern, by definition the immediate moment in all its purity and novelty—the immediate moment as the risk of time, affording a fresh opportunity to cut a path of history through the void of the unknown, always pressing close with its smell of death—cannot be preconceived. As moment, the modern embodies the incompleteness and precariousness of time. An art determined to articulate it must itself be incomplete and precarious. That is, it is necessarily improvised, lacking the deliberateness and decisiveness of the whole.
...
The modern is transient, and the artistic effort to articulate transience through the improvisation and thus capture the sense of modernity—to eternalize the sensation of the moment, the sensational character of the moment, as Boccioni said—is thus to miss its point. The immediate is artistically "impossible;" eternalizations of its novelty, such as improvisations, rapidly dissolve into semiotic triviality and wasted desire... Advanced art... is of no homeostatic use—seems biologically alien—because of its improvised eternality, which is not true artistic wholeness.
The sense of time is at the core of the dialectic of decadence—time as a duration which defeats any attempt to gain a perspective. That is, we are decadent and modern because we cannot see sub speciae aeternitatis, even a semblance of it. We are bound by the relativity of duration, responsible for the vitality—passion—of the moment... Time as perspective—as past, present, or future tense—brings duration under control, muting its painful intensity, but in the modern world it is impossible to gain a perspective on time, that is, to have an adequate sense of the past and future, and thus some sense of eternity.
In modernity one only knows one's presentness, which is not even understood as a tense of time, that is, one among its three perspectives, and one among the three perspectives on it. Past and future are vigorously denied because they imply a loss of presence. All that counts is the ebb and flow of presence, shaped by the tension between discontented desire, determined to be free but enslaved by the superego, and superegoistic expropriation of desire, hindered by desire's rebellious refusal to be domesticated into social meaningfulness. To be a modern presence is to be doubly decadent: by reason of one's discontented desire, and by reason of one's powerful superego, semioticizing one's passion, and ultimately existence, away.
In modern art decadent discontentment is the necessary condition of creativity. (In traditional art, creativity expresses divine contentment with creation.) Creative fragmentation becomes the rule of art, its ideal expression—the law of modern expression—because it expresses duration, with all its irresolution and discontent. To seem modern—of the present moment—art must ultimately look like a ruin, the ultimate improvised look. Nietzsche, who attacked Wagner for his decadence, thought Wagner had ruined art. What Nietzsche did not understand is that to become modern art had to be ruined. That is, it could no longer be allowed to present a perspective on life, but had to be subject to its duration. Art had to become thoroughly decadent, a complete ruin—a sum of momentary sensations that add up to no whole, and that even suggested no whole was possible, that the very idea of wholeness was inconceivable, obsolete. Art had to seem to be a ruin which had no past and no future...
Nietzsche is correct in his conception of "the formula for every decadent style," even if he could not stomach decadent style—and even though his own aphoristic style is decadent, that is, fragmentary, momentary. (He seems not to have been aware of the irony, that is, of his own decadence.) "There is always anarchy among the atoms, disaggregation of the will—in moral terms: freedom of the individual—extended into a political theory: equal rights for all. Life, equal vitality, all the vibration and exuberance of life, driven back into the smallest structure, and the remainder left almost lifeless. Everywhere paralysis, distress and numbness, or hostility and chaos: both striking one with ever increasing force the higher forms of organization are into which one ascends. The whole no longer lives at all: it is composed, reckoned up, artificial, a fictitious thing."* Such disintegration and artificial wholeness—the sum of decadence—is the only way of being modern, which always means never to be whole, never to be more than an eccentrically individual, vital fragment which can never fit into a whole, which no whole was ever made for, which thus makes one an awkward whole unto oneself.
Decadent disintegration and artificial wholeness—they are inseparable, for the artificial whole is a sum of fragments that do not integrate, making them all the more decadent—are the ingredients of modern novelty. But modern novelty—the invention of fresh fictions of wholeness out of fresh anarchy—is always decadent, and thus hardly a cure for decadence. The cure is perverse—a changed outlook: the recognition that "classical" wholeness has always been a fiction, a necessary narcissistic illusion. Without the magical illusion of wholeness of being, we could not imagine such "higher" organizationas as art, nor convince ourselves that we are among them, that is, higher beings. Without it, we would have to recognize that we are always in a decadent state, that is, inwardly split, and about to fragment—torn between meaning and desire, and forced to live in the moment, that is, be modern, as the only way of acknowledging both without submitting to either, thus keeping them superficial.
*Quoted in William Eickhorst, Decadence in German fiction (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1953), p. 15
"Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!"
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
Last week, Artnet published a revised version of a talk by Donald Kuspit from the International Symposium on Contemporary Art Theory that happened in Mexico back in January. I had some problems with it and said so, and then took a cheap shot at the author. As I promised to give the piece more consideration, I’m going to do so here, especially since Jerry Saltz’s new column reminded me of some of what I was thinking.
I’ll start by saying once again that Kuspit makes a lot of good points and there are many areas in which I completely agree with him. I won’t disagree with his argument regarding what might be called critical triumphalism, as when he writes “prematurely declaring an art historically and thus permanently important – as though its media reception was the arbiter of its importance and meaningfulness – deadens it by displacing it into a remote future.” None of us know what the future may bring and it’s hubris to think we can determine what later generations will find important in the art of today. More than that, he’s right to say that certain ways of doing history can have a distorting effect, elevating individuals out of context in a way that falsifies the record. I’ll leave it to others to discuss the justice of the presentation, or lack thereof, of Hans Breder’s role in the work of Ana Medieta at the Whitney, which Kuspit examines. But his broader point is well taken, and, I think, rather standard these days.
But Kuspit goes way beyond these types of complaints. Most annoying to me is the tendentious antithesis he insists on maintaining between “history” and the “contemporary.” To oppose the terms might seem common sense, though one could point out that histories of the present have been written since Thucydides contemplated the Peloponnesian War. But let’s turn to some examples. From the first paragraph: "It has become excruciatingly difficult and even impossible to write a history of contemporary art -- a history that will do justice to all the art that is considered contemporary: that is the lesson of postmodernism." Or this entire paragraph:
There may be a history of modern art and a history of traditional art, but there can be no history of postmodern art, for the radically contemporary can never be delimited by any single historical reading. Even if one was a Gibbon one could not fit all the pieces of contemporary art together in a unified narrative. In postmodernity that is no longer any such thing as the judgment of history, only an incomplete record of the contemporary. If every piece of art is contemporary, no one piece can be valued more highly than any other, except from a certain psychosocial perspective. But every perspective turns out to be procrustean because it shuts out art that contradicts its premises.
At the end of the article, Kuspit gives his own idea of how history can be done, implicitly acknowledging that these strained denials of its possibility are not meant to be taken at face value. But from the outset, my reaction is a combination of “so what?” and “no way.” After all, it’s not just the “radically contemporary that can never be delimited by any single historical reading”, nothing can. Kuspit regards it as an indictment of his straw man that it can’t account for absolutely everything; but if one stops to think for even a moment, one realizes that this is always the case for any attempt at understanding. To write a history is to select; we always know that what results is, even at the level of a Gibbon, partial and to some degree caught within its own moment. But that in itself does not render it incapable of offering its own sort of knowledge.
Kuspit speaks of “the judgment of history” as if we should be happy to be rid of it. Forget for a moment that virtually no historical interpretation exists that is not vigorous contested within an interpretive community. Consider rather that judgment is a faculty that we all possess, and we are ourselves creatures of history. It’s understandable to react against the combination of wealth and power that passes for judgment in the art world – and here Saltz’s laments are especially to the point. But given a broader culture that, to my mind, far too often slights history and judgment, I find Kuspit’s approach not only grating but destructive. He has an idea of certain practices he wishes to oppose, and with good reason; but to do so, he finds it necessary to denigrate fundamental aspects of our being. It’s true that money and power seek to usurp the name of history. When has it ever been otherwise? Judgment doesn’t doom us to this state of affairs, it can help rescue us from it. This is the knowledge that Hannah Arendt found in the old Roman’s words: “The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato."
In some ways this isn’t too far from where Kuspit ends up, without his posturing (but, I suppose, with mine.) I'd like to note one last point. Kuspit finds the possibility for a history of art and its continuing generative power in what he calls the work’s capacity for offering “affective-communicational-educational experience”, which is to say, its interest as an object of criticism. Now, criticism can come in all kinds of ways. But what seems to me to be missing from his formulation is a sort of criticism that he makes only fleeting mention of within the article: that which surfaces in other art. We may not be able to know what the future will find of interest in the art of our time; but it will be in large measure determined by that to which artists, and not critics, respond.
Guest Blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
A specter is haunting North Adams—the specter of boobies:
The North Adams City Council will review today an ordinance proposed by Councilor Robert R. Moulton Jr. "on moral grounds" that would prohibit displays of nude artwork in downtown shops, galleries, sidewalks and public places.
In his letter to the council, Moulton stated that he wants councilors "to look into adopting some kind of city ordinance to prohibit the public display of any picture, artwork, painting or statue that shows any nude or partially nude male or female that would be covered on a public beach."
"It's something that's past due" said Moulton in a phone interview from his Moulton's Spectacle Shoppe in Bennington, Vt. "I know we're getting into the First Amendment here, but I just think we should consider what should and should not be allowed on our city's streets."
Moulton said he decided to suggest the ordinance after spotting a nude female sketch hanging in a window display at Gallery Row and Berkshire Gifts on Eagle Street. Moulton co-owns Moulton's Pizzeria, which is located nearby at 117 Main St., with his brother, Mark P. Moulton.
The sketch in question, a black, white and red outline of a woman's body, belongs to artist and developer Eric Rudd. Rudd was quite surprised by Moulton's ordinance idea. Rudd also owns the Eagle Street building in question, according to the Registry of Deeds.
"If [Moulton's] law was passed elsewhere in the world, it would permanently shut down places like Paris, Rome and even the Vatican," Rudd said. "I'd be glad to give lessons on art history and art appreciation, if need be."
Moulton said he appreciates art, but believes it should be displayed in certain places. "I see nothing wrong with that kind of art, but there should be a place for it," Moulton said. "A mother walking her kids in a stroller shouldn't be exposed to it. If we don't do something, what's the next step? How far do we let this go?"
How far indeed? Pretty soon there'll be cats and dogs living together. In all seriousness, the lovely town of North Adams, home to MassMoCA, no doubt is experiencing some culture clashes as it transitions from an old mill town to (along with neighboring Williamstown) a leading arts center of the region. And on an emotional level, I'm not entirely unsympathetic. The New England puritan in me understands Mr. Moulton's objection that not everything is appropriate to every place. Given that it only recently became possible to buy a six-pack on Sunday in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, it's not surprising that pubic display of depictions of nudity are going to get someone annoyed. But that doesn't make the proposal any less entertaining. And - do I have to say it? - this is going nowhere. As another city councilor, one who recently opposed an anti-war play performance no less, says, "If we pass that, we're going to look like a rerun of the Beverly Hillbillies." Wouldn't want that art tourist money will decide that Californy is the place it oughta be.
Guest blogger: Dan of Iconoduel
Hello and howdy from the Third Coast.
As you are no doubt aware, earlier today Kriston, in what seems to have been a moment of rather poor judgment, handed off the keys to yours truly and an East Coast compatriot, one JL (ex-Miguel Sánchez) of Modern Kicks. But you know as much already...
I hail from a little joint I call Iconoduel, where I muse mostly on matters artistical, often managing to spit out upwards of 5 or 6 posts a month. You might consider mine the blogging equivalent of a slow hand. With this guest-blogging stint here, however, and a veritable maelstrom of art-related doings ready to hit Chicago within a matter of a few days, I'd say I'm going to have to up the production a tad this week. So we'll see how that goes, eh?
Anyways, and since I haven't said so explicitly yet, a big thank you to Kriston for the willingness to let me in. My agenda here at Grammar.police is simple: far from 'raising the bar,' I hope mostly to limit the damage. And I will do my best to not turn Kriston's place into a mere repository for gratuitous Simpsons references, though I won't make any promises I'm not certain to keep.
To bust my G.p cherry here I'd like to pick up on a fantastic little gem that Caryn Coleman brings to us at abLA: Deep Thoughts with Agnostic Front's Vinnie Stigma.
Caryn enthuses about Vinnie's views on the artistic merits of photography, and I join her, though his words lose much in transcription:
Vinnie: You know, a lot of photographers... You know, "Art!" I'm not buying that. You know, I just don't... I can't get... Calm down there, Mr. Artistic!
Dare anyone ask what Vinnie really thought of Matthew Barney?
"Go back to Boise, Idaho, or wherever the hell you come from."
Guest Blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
As he mentioned below, Kriston has asked me and Dan to help fill in while he’s away from G.p., and I’m very happy to do so. An introduction may be in order – mercifully brief, as there’s little to say. I write at Modern Kicks on a range of topics, but mostly art and music. I’m in my late thirties and have no accomplishments of note. Prior to having an office and a website, I did graduate study in the humanities at Brown. Think of me as Josh Marshall, except unsuccessful.
Anyway, let’s get to business: what’s the state of play in the Social Security privatization fight? Nah, just kidding. You know where to go for that stuff. I’d rather pursue something started over at MK during the weekend. Via the Mystic Knights of the Mau Mau, I came across this fine .mp3 blog of the New Orleans sound. Earl King’s “Trick Bag”, one of the songs currently featured, rules. Not only for the funk-ay snare drums, as the writer points out, but the unfailing swing of the shaker on the backbeat. Hard to keep still while listening to that. Anyway, more problematic is the Meters’ track now at the top of the page. I thought it sounded like the soundtrack to a porn film. A commentator at MK demurred, saying the problem was porn soundtracks ripped off the Meters and others. Perhaps; but I still think the link is closer than that person wished to acknowledge, and that inventing this particular aesthetic niche was not something to be proud of. Listen and decide.
But to be fair, what important sources other than New Orleans funk can we find behind (so to speak) the music in old porn movies? I’m just trying to raise the tone of discourse here. It’s possible that these people might be able to add more to our knowledge, if we could speak to them. This site argues we should look to Italian film music, which sounds plausible. I must admit I was surprised to learn that legendary soul drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie once lent his skins to a flick; but it’s always the ones you don’t suspect. It seems to me that the key to the style found in the Meters’ song is the extended, cheesy riff jam. And that organ.
Anyway, a big thanks to Kriston letting me post here. I’ll try to come up with some better content as the week goes on. One last thing: Grammar police enforcement will be relaxed for the duration of my time here. I lack Kriston’s sure command of the niceties of language. You may assume that any and all howlers remain because I was either too drunk or too lazy to remove them. Your choice.
Brief note—congratulations to Sarah!
An ultimate combo of workplace frenzy and moving from U Street (admittedly, to nearby V Street) has me all tied up—so, faithful readers, I'm taking a siesta. Frankly, I should be able to juggle those obligations with the blog. But add to those considerations the fact that Susan has assigned the two of us a demanding regimen of (at least) one margarita a day in her pursuit of a true Texas frozen margarita—variable by variable, she's advancing toward a concoction appropriate to Cinco de Mayo in this unhospitable environment, where rentable frozen M machines are neither plentiful nor cheap. With stern and gritty resolve, I will get drunk answer the call of science.
Good for you, then, that JL of Modern Kicks and Dan of Iconoduel have answered my call—both are top shelf. They'll be holding the place down until the beginning of May. Here's hoping that they don't raise the bar so high that I can't pass muster when I return.
Anti-papist hipsters visuals courtesy of DCeiver, with a nod to Louis XIV.
I have neither the time right now nor, truthfully, the inclination to devote the attention the new papacy has been deemed as deserving. But I do enjoy the Pope jokes. I will say, for reasons that are partly aesthetic, slightly theological, and mostly irrational, I greatly prefer mainstream Catholicism to the branches of Protestantism to which I've been exposed. Ultimately it's all various shades of who-cares—I'm not personally invested in the question—but I would say that 1) I'm not at all surprised or very bothered to see the Church suggest that competing religions do not provide the "fullness of the means of salvation" (the man has to promote his brand), but 2) I am incredibly sorry to see indication that the Holy See may be following its rebel cousin here in the South into the sorry pop-theology arena of Intelligent Design. I've always respected the Catholic Church for maintaining a decent distance from questions of physical mechanism, focusing (historically, anyway) on metaphyics. Soon they'll be telling you that Protestantism is only a "theory."
The best question raised I've seen raised about Pope Benedict XVI was proferred in a post by Lindsay Beyerstein and elaborated in comments. To wit: Given Ratzinger's decision at 14 to collaborate with the Nazis to the bare extent that he had to in order to survive—which strikes me as a morally defensible decision, taking into consideration his age and what we might adduce to be the limits of his perspective—does he have the moral authority to pronounce that those Americans who voted for John Kerry (i.e., pro-choice politicians) are participatory to mass murder (i.e., abortions)? The merit of that claim notwithstanding (I think it's garbage, politically, metaphysically, and theologically speaking); I'm concerned here about the way that the Pope's morality or moral authority operates. BXVI's solutions to these problems are discrete: the indemnification he receives for tacit collaboration does not extend to others' collaboration in the face of structurally similar crises. (According to Christian hyperbole vis-a-vis the abortion "holocaust," the resemblance is there.)
Point of fact, though, BXVI has acknowledged his dubious association with the Nazis—but recognizes the decisions he made as right, and still considers himself eligible to condemn others for a mistaken moral framework he previously endorsed. While I see the ecumenical utility to the atomicity of moral pronunciation (i.e., one decision does not impinge on a later decision, even if the latter runs contrary to the former) really, that's a position that calls for some serious stones.
I'd be tempted to mention the dread prospect of relativism, but the whole infallibility thing would seem to render the point moot. I do think that BXVI is immune from charges of hypocrisy, since his job description includes levying summary judgments against large swatch of mankind and history. But you'd think there would be a rule.
(Cross-posted at Begging To Differ)
Cathy Young of Reason takes up the unenviable task of speaking ill of the dead in a Boston Globe obit-ed on Andrea Dworkin. Her column is the first responsible comment on Dworkin's legacy I've seen. With all due respect—I don’t see that Dworkin deserves the respect of feminism. Feminists should have disposessed her work as beyond the pale as it hit the presses, and the movement would be stronger today for having done so.
Normally I find truck with the "by excess, progress" thesis Kevin Drum poses. (Which he's totally just saying to get back in the girls' good graces, but anyway.) Insofar as Dworkin's work, as rhetorically bombastic as it was, called greater attention to violence perpetrated against women, her work deserves praise. But I think that degree is marginal and greatly outweighed by the harm she did to the movement. For one thing, Dworkin’s work was more academic clarification of violence than public activism about it; for another, it takes willful misreading to withdraw from her fundamentalist campaign against pornography any practicable applications.
I’m surprised, for example, to see Amanda Marcotte, a strong feminist blogger, illustrate the point: She links to a Feministing post (about a brutal high school rape and attempted cover up) and comments on it in the context of Dworkin's work, saying that Dworkin "raised awareness of sexual violence." The times aren’t so caveman that only by the critical lens of feminism are rape and conspiracy monstrous, but nevertheless. The problem, I think, is that Dworkin’s given credit for drawing attention to the pressing question of whether and how explicit imagery frames societal perceptions of and behavior toward women—a pressing, difficult empirical question—but not only did she not treat this question with data, she never treated it at all. The empirical concern acknowledges a distinction between the virtual and the real, but Dworkin draws no such line; as Creep and Blink puts it, she occupies the "blurry line between leftist and rightist totalitarianism and paranoia" (link courtesy Lindsay Beyerstein).
The pornography Dworkin took to be literal violence against women was “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words.” (In answer to which I’m tempted to quote Ellen Willis: “What I like is erotica, and what you like is pornography.”) The semantic baggage Dworkin invested in "explicit subordination,” she spent a career unpacking, but time and again she clarified that she meant pornography to mean, in fact, heterosexual sex, whether mediated by voyeurism, commercialism, otherwise, or not at all. Somehow I recognize that it shows poorly on me to quote her as saying, “Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman”—as if I’m cherrypicking the one erratic statement from her catalogue. But she meant that quote and all the other incendiary blasts. The camp she contradistinguished is men, whom she hated. She thought that heterosexual intercourse was rape, she said so time after time, and one only needs to read what she wrote to understand that.
But Amanda, Feministe, Bitch Ph.D. —all soft on her. It goes without saying that the misandry espoused by Dworkin (and Catherine MacKinnon) is the source for the “feminazi” smear and its many variations. Inexcusable, misogynist bludgeon though that may be , it’s not unfair to suggest that feminists are partly responsible for the persistence of that slur, by not only failing to disassociate Dworkin from the movement but in fact canonizing her among second wave feminists. Give her some credit for stepping up the rhetoric a notch, I guess, but her scholarship was atrocious.
Link. Puts the whole, um, theory versus practice debate into perspective. . . .
(Enlightenment courtesy TyGr.)
Do not fail to read the simply amazing news about the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The gist of the article is that new technology allows researchers to see these millenia-old papyrus texts as palimpsests; underneath the disintegrated texts on the fragments, researchers are able to "reveal" an infrared "layer" of ink (or something). Discovered in this manner were parts of a Sophocles tragedy about Thebes, a novel by Lucian, and a Trojan War epic poem (!) by Archilochos, with thousands more fragments remaining to be read.
The researchers believe they may even find "lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament." Astonishing. These works simply can't be translated quickly enough, assuming any text is complete enough to be published.
One Amazon review of Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism makes it sound very much like a legitimate history text:
While exceeding my expectations with regards to many heretofore undervalued art movements (e.g., Happenings, Fluxus, feminism, identity politics--those that the writers have actively repressed on their pages of OCTOBER in the past)--I was still deeply troubled to see that not one of these important art historians could write an original piece for the Harlem Renaissance chapter.The charge partly hinges on the acknowledgements page—de rigueur complaint territory in academia. I'm willing to set aside for now the "insidiousness" charge on account that this isn't exceptional even for inside baseball.They opted, instead, to depend upon a Thames & Hudson assistant to carry out this task, and then (perhaps equally insidiously) relegate her name to a tiny line in the acknowledgements section---where she is vaguely thanked for her contribution by the publishers themselves, but not the authors.
A book about the importance of art's critique, its questioning of authority, its pivotal role in the cultural sphere and this is what we get at the end of the 20th century? Four authors who can't bring themselves to intelligently engage with a crucial moment in American art history? Since H[al] F[oster] takes a psychoanalytic approach, tell us, what forms of repression are happening here?
As to the more critical complaint vis-à-vis the Harlem Renaissance—I don't have the book yet [see below —ed.], so I'm not in the best position to assess it. Maybe Dan will clue us in. But the complaint itself isn't consistent—the reviewers alleges that the October command "actively repressed" minority art movements, then rehabilitated the same for the book, but then did not write authoritatively about one of those movements, but did include mention of it. It also betrays an unintentional Americentrism to suggest that a global historical survey include reference to a movement whose context does not obviously (to my mind) extend outside the U.S. borders. Which is not to say that the lasting value of the Harlem Renaissance isn't potentially universal—nor by any stretch of the imagination is it an argument for excluding black artists. The Harlem Renaissance is, of course, greatly deserving of scholarship and promotion. But as a deeply historical and demographically isolated art movement, the Harlem Renaissance would require the historian hoping to gloss it to provide a great deal of political and non–art historical introduction. My thought is that a comprehensive Western history is written for and includes many whose relationship to a specific moment in the African American (and American) experience is tenuous.
(While I've got the page open and Amazon is on the brain, let me mention those ads to your left—consider using those portals whenever you need the fruits of New Economy capitalism delivered to you by mail. If you do (if several dozen of you, that is) I'll be able to yoke the mass earning potential of G.p and get a free book. It's this or a bake sale. Alternatively, if you want to skip the foreplay and get right to the buying me books, by all means, have at.)
Mannahatta
I WAS asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.
Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient,
I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,
Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb,
Rich, hemmed thick all around with sail ships and steam ships, an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,
Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies,
Tides swift and ample, well-loved by me, towards sundown,
The flowing sea-currents, the little islands, larger adjoining islands, the heights, the villas,
The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters, the ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers well-modelled,
The down-town streets, the jobbers’ houses of business, the houses of business of the ship-merchants and money brokers, the river-streets,
Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week,
The carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses, the brown-faced sailors,
The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft,
The winter snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the river, passing along up or down with the flood-tide or ebb-tide,
The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-formed, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes,
Trottoirs thronged, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops and shows,
A million people—manners free and superb—open voices—hospitality—the most courageous and friendly young men,
City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!
City nested in bays! my city!
—Walt Whitman, 1855
Robin Givhan outlines the strong case against Bolton, starting with a point that's been overlooked by the punditry:
John Bolton, President Bush's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, desperately needs a haircut.I hear grumbling about the fact that Style editor Deborah Heard has given Givhan prominent space in the section, but for one thing, people love reading about style in the Style section, and for another, how can you fail to appreciate the subversive comedy behind a sentence like, "Bolton was one wrinkled suit away from being an insolent mess"?
Glenn Ligon is speaking at 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Horn of Hirsh—those of you who don't have opening day tickets for the Nats should check it out.
UPDATE: Gloating aside, I do wish I could see the lecture. I'm not exactly sure what's responsible for his recent rising star, but I've seen a lot more of his work this year than I expected. If any reader out there is planning on attending the lecture, take notes and send them my way! I'd like to post them here or at the very least peruse.
Incidentally, while I've got the window open: Podcasting. What's that about? Do we like it? I guess I don't understand the difference between this and uploading an MP3. Anyway—what sort of institutional barriers are there to recording a lecture (say, tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Hirshhorn) and podcasting it? I'm sure lecture policies vary person, place, and event; just curious whether anyone has any specific experience to share.
UPDATE II: A Hirshhorn associate tells me that the lecture will be available in audio format at their library in 1–2 months. I'll put it in my calendar and let you know in June.
Given the opportunity to upgrade aspects of our Jungian hivemind, I think I'd start with the teeth motif frequently featured in our dreams about mortality. That was a good if obvious symbol representing a formidable fear, one that was viable right up until the advent of the welfare state (or dentures, whichever came first). I've had that dream in which all my teeth shatter, but really, the message is lost on me—I've never even had a cavity, I brush my teeth, I'm doing okay.
But I'm rapidly approaching the age at which point it will be true that, for most of my life, my kidneys have served during the day as overtaxed coffee filters and at night as auxiliary livers. This is an unsustainable situation, but I can't convince myself to do anything about it, i.e., drink water. Not even a glass. Were I to dream of the Sisyphusian stones that are surely depositing, left and right, as I write this (and sip my coffee; and make plans for happy hour), I would probably be shaken to my paranoid, primate-brain core. At the very least, I would cry all morning.
So, um, what mythomorphological connection would you alter? Fun new blog meme, right, eh? . . . yeah, I don't really know what I'm talking about.
Julian hits me with the new blog game. And it's invitation only! Here's the deal:
Behold, the Caesar’s Bath meme! List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice.”Sounds good. In no particular order:
When Dean Young Talks About Wine
The worm thrashes when it enters the tequila.
The grape cries out in the wine vat crusher.
But when Dean Young talks about wine, his voice is strangely calm.
Yet it seems that wine is rarely mentioned.
He says, Great first chapter but no plot.
He says, Long runway, short flight.
He says, This one never had a secret.
He says, You can't wear stripes with that.
He squints as if recalling his childhood in France.
He purses his lips and shakes his head at the glass.
Eight-four was a naughty year, he says,
and for a second I worry that California has turned him
into a sushi-eater in a cravat.
Then he says,
This one makes clear the difference
between a thoughtless remark
and an unwarranted intrusion.
Then he says, In this one the pacific last light of afternoon
stains the wings of the seagull pink
at the very edge of the postcard.
But where is the Cabernet of rent checks and asthma medication?
Where is the Burgundy of orthopedic shoes?
Where is the Chablis of skinned knees and jelly sandwiches?
with the aftertaste of cruel Little League coaches?
and the undertone of rusty stationwagon?
His mouth is purple as if from his own ventricle
he had drunk.
He sways like a fishing rod.
When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.
When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.
But when a man is hurt,
he makes himself an expert.
Then he stands there with a glass in his hand
staring into nothing
as if he were forming an opinion.
—Tony Hoagland, 2003
Just wanted to observe that the New Criterion is still writing about Ward Churchill. For nearly three months they've draped heavy quotation marks around ethnic studies ("ethnic" "studies"), promoted a definition of academic freedom that shushes all the naughty words Hilton Kramer doesn't want you to hear, and otherwise pilloried Churchill, the most significant philosopher-king to ever have led the Democratic Party and all college students.
Dan Hopewell excerpts from an issue of October to prove that art theory is not a coup orchestrated by Rosalind Krauss, despite what any number of art writers will have you believe. The October piece, by Yve-Alain Bois, concerns Barnett Newman (PDF). Not only is it a worthwhile essay, it's not even theory per se. I don't understood the substantive complaint of October's critics, who dismiss the journal (interchangeable with "theory," often) whole-cloth, and here's hoping that the sight of a representative article laid bare on the Internets, naked as day for all the world to see, will compel some naysayers to argue with citations—Dan upped the ante for this blog debate and that's good. Todd Gibson's take on Michael Fried's reading of Thomas Demand ought to serve as an example of a principled refutation of an art theorist.
I won't comment on Art Since 1990: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism—"the October vision of a century of art," as Dan puts it—except to say that, if the hostile sentiment expressed by Frank Whitford for the LAT is the best that can be summoned, the book must be very good. Whitford's gripes about pomo language (a worn-out dartboard if ever there was one) are especially feeble—the language he cites is perfectly tolerable.
Since language is the nut of the pro-connoisseurship and pro–opinion criticism crowds' complaints—you know, about how when art theorists say that art "interrogates" something, etc.—a defense is merited. I might just be more tolerant of the language than others, but nevertheless: Taking Meyer Schapiro's formal definition of art history ("the language of experience of forms"), Hippolyte Taine's positivistic definition of art ("la race, le milieu, et le moment"), and Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" thesis, I might say that I have three theoretical vantage points with few intersections. Common to them all, though, is a philological practice. Theory requires rock-bottom syntactic accuracy, industry terms are necessary for dialogue across genres and theories, etc.—so, sure, language comes up that wouldn't appear in a shopping list. Same for the law, same for literary theory. It doesn't exclude Peter Schjeldahl from the conversation by any means to observe that his use of poetic terms (e.g., "beautiful") would be enormously problematic—that's, like, aethetics Ground Zero. On the other hands, it's not as if Rosalind Krauss is publishing her studies in the New Yorker. And I think that Schjeldahl's poetics and Barthes's investigation are both significant resources for an art critic. I guess I'm not seeing the problem with the clerics do ing their thing and the critics doing something different, unless it's a Roger Kimball–type complaint that liberal universities are turning co-eds into Commie pomo zombies, a point that I don't think is cause for concern (or empirically valid) to begin with.
Sincere apologies for the post title; I couldn't resist.
After reading through some of Jessica's design links, it occurred to me that the chair I found some time ago on V Street may in fact be a Wassily chair by Bauhaus design Marcel Breuer.
Marcel Breuer, Wassily, 1925.
I knew it was familiar! If you're envious, take comfort in the fact that it's probably a fake. But probably not, because I'm a design philistine, and that's the way that luck goes. Regardless, I should maybe give it higher priority than the back porch grilling seat.
Konstantin Akinsha's authoritative reporting on the Russian art scene is worth the price of a subscription to ARTNews—too few American critics have both knowledge and interest that extends much further beyond the coasts than just across the pond. Fortunately enough for you casual Russophiles, Akinsha's review of the first Moscow Biennale is available online. John Kelsey also writes a thorough review of the biennial for Artforum; Kelsey's done his homework, and though I think that on the balance he's respectful of and fair about art that he doesn't much care for, his generalizations about Russian contemporary art are offbase. (It's overreach, for instance, to assign some kind of mimetic significance to media piracy in Moscow. I can buy pirated DVDs on my way to the Metro!)
There's no denying the real chasm between the Russian and American art worlds. By the time the post-Prerestroika contemporary artist emerged, the Russian art conversation had been for decades wholly insular and ideological—either according to or in resistance of Soviet mandate. The APTART (apartment art) dissident scene reacted to the Soviet thaw under Krushchev largely by rejecting ideology entirely. Post-Prerestroika artists, working in a recognizable and galvanized gallery scene, shied away from the political and social transformation Russia was undergoing, choosing instead to pursue performance-oriented (and sometimes conceptually idle) art that, on the balance, evokes Joseph Beuys in the minds of American and Western European critics. (That's my one-paragraph course on Russian art since 1935.) The response today from most Americans
There's a critical gulf between American and Russian visual cultures, but there's something disingenuous about the "why here, why now?" question as it has been asked of the Moscow Biennale. Yes, Russia never got the memo about art fairs—they just arrived to the biennial party, and wherever biennials stand in the States, it's a crucial step for Moscow in stepping into a more prominent role in the international art world. Yes, there were obstacles in bringing the exhibition to term—which Kelsey describes in horror and Akinsha explains with patience—but these were so predictable that it's pointless to linger on them. Biennial prejudice and the organizational deficiencies of the Russian soul notwithstanding, the Moscow Biennale still seems to have garned more bile than the average biennial excercise. Kelsey writes:
In Moscow, examples of "legitimate" contemporary art were vastly outnumbered by works that no European curator would give a second glance, and the real question wasn't which version was most adequate or timely (it's all too obvious anyway) but how we might think about this discrepant simultaneity in a less-neutralizing, less-programmed way. . . . If only a biennial could elaborate this gap, expand on and into it.Yet only six Russian artists are presented in the biennial proper; several satellite shows feature prominent contemporary Russian artists (including several who have shown throughout America and Western Europe, such as Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov and AES/AES+F), and nonaffiliated exhibitions were held throughout the city. Both critics agree that the satellite shows vary in quality; many of these noncurated, unofficial shows sound as if they were absolute disasters.
It's a shame that these peripheral events (nonbiennial, nonsatellite) should color the critical reaction to the biennial—but they definitely should not be read as unique to Russian art. Just consider the Art-O-Matic clusterfuck right here in Washington, D.C. And we won the Cold War!
* dvukh-god-ICH-niy: Russian for "biennial," if that wasn't clear.
A few things for your calendar: First, Julian has sounded the call for another Blogorama on Kalorama; come by the Rendezvous Lounge in Adams Morgan tonight at 7 p.m. and say hello. Maybe some of the DCist folks will show up and make it a District route.
Next: The AU MFA thesis exhibitions just started yesterday. Scouts eager for the next Maggie Michael/Dan Steinhilber breakthrough will be camping out in the AU bleachers for the next few weeks:
If Roger Kimball and I agree that the orgiastic media smorgasbord that has been coverage of the death of JP2 is "unseemly," something has gone terribly wrong in the universe. For the sake of balance—I wasn't going to do it, for days I've been tempted but I told myself no! you're not a culture-of-death liberal!—I have to post the image.
Maurizio Catellan, La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), 1999.
I'm sorry Pope, did you just get squashed? Who needs divisions if you've got a meteor? (James Panero, do your worst.)
Reports are streaming in from G.p correspondents across the land: Apparently this blog made CNN this evening. Neat! I just tuned in, and I see that Lou Dobbs is extolling the high cost of immigration. He's excluding the $7 billion in Social Security taxes that immigrants pay into the system but generally don't withdraw, but who am I to say—I'm drinking a Dos Equis! I'm part of the problem! But it's so tasty.
So anyway, if you catch the spot, let me know what they said. If there were some way to snag a clip of that, I'd like to be able to send something to my mom to prove that I haven't wasted my life since college. Unless they were saying, you know, "this guy's full of shit." (My dad's all-too-typical response to the news: "For what? Most-wanted list?") If you're reading because you heard about these crazy weblogs on CNN—a fine news channel, by the by—be sure to check out the fantastic assortment of links to your left. And it's incumbent on me to hype the art blogs in particular; these are some of the finest of a really strong online art community.
It's as good an opportunity as any to mention that April means one year of blogging here. Taken with the blogspot year, that's two years of blog action. A few weeks back the site eclipsed 100,000 unique visitors, and it's added a cool 10 big ones to that in short time. Ha ha, suckers! But no, thanks, really, especially to the people who link to and comment on this site.
Has died. I came to know his work primarily by way of the praise that Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis showered on him, but I haven't yet read his greatest novels. That link should take you to a radio show in which Amis speaks about the shadow Bellow cast.
As Kuff says, "It's not just a DeLay drumbeat out there, it's an entire marching band." Duncan "open microwave, insert popcorn" Black thinks that the parade is being led by the GOP. It certainly seems like a smart idea for the Republicans to boot him now before 2006. But DeLay's crooked beat extends from Houston to the Bahamas to Moscow—I would be very, very surprised if there isn't more collateral damage from his fall than just the political hit the GOP will take once the cesspool of the House is fair game for front page, above the fold treatment in every paper in the land.
Today's NYT feature highlights the gadzooks of money that Tom DeLay's daughter in particular has raked in through DeLay's connections. Atrios beat me to the archives for this gem, but I'll post it anyway:
The weekend included a late-night party Saturday in DeLay's suite at the Rio Hotel and Casino, which featured a living room, bar and hot tub on the balcony. DeLay was not present, aides said; the event was hosted by his daughter, Dani Ferro, the campaign manager for DeLay's reelection campaign. After the party, Ferro told associates that a lobbyist poured champagne on her while she was in the hot tub.I think that a person has the right to have champagne poured on her by any person she admits in her hot tub, and your editors generally deem such behavior to be hott. But to say that it's at least eyebrow raising for the daugher of the House Majority Leader (then Majority Whip) to go all Paris Hilton on a crew of lobbyists during a paid Vegas vacation is an understatement, given that this is the least irreputable of the corruption charges that have been generated since that story broke way back in 2000, and DeLay has only increased the holdings of his Sugar Land crime syndicate in the intervening 5 years. In other words: How can it possibly have taken this long to nab him, and what transparency rules can we change to correct the structural problem at hand? It doesn't go away when DeLay does.
I'm surprised to see Josh Chafetz and Lindsay Beyerstein both taking a pedestrian position vis-à-vis violence in Sin City. I disagree that the movie's violence or gore is objectionable in any sense, and that's fine—people can disagree about these things. But I don't think Josh and Lindsay are couching their objections in fair terms. Josh says that he worries about the state of my soul (not my individual soul per se, but insofar as it exists, I assure you it's pure gold); Lindsay thinks the movie was "a depressing reminder of how sexy torture is to some people" (which is needlessly hyperbolic and inflammatory).
So my strong concern for my good ethical name compels me to say that I not only disagree with them, I think their positions are unsustainable. There are excellent reasons for Quentin Tarantino to have made Kill Bill as greedily violent as it was, and the same applies to Sin City. Both works have certain aesthetic obligations, anthropological goals, and camp objectives that signal the OK for ratcheting up the violence—to a steroid-fueled cartoonism that isn't actually like violence in any sense. I think these ends have been pretty well covered by the film critics. But let's say that Tarantino and Miller/Rodriguez/Tarantino had shot the violence without the mitigating cartoonism. I can't imagine that these movies would work with realistic violence, but putting that aside for a moment—would they be offensive?
Cut to Wendy Steiner's The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in the Age of Fundamentalism, which I try to push whenever the conversation turns to decency standards. Steiner highlights a legalistic paradox concerning varying standards for different media: Nobody, for example, bothers any more to try Lady Chatterly's Lover for obscenity; even court precedent has decided that text no longer has a pornographic capacity. (Otherwise I'd include American Psycho in this discussion, which is an excellent example of intentional obscenity as literary tool.) This happens whenever newer technology replaces a medium as the prime format for smut, e.g., as photography entirely replaced literature. In hindsight, these provocative cases always seem quaint, and though that consideration shouldn't necessarily color our judgment, I'm willing to bet that a summer blockbuster made 5 years from now will make Sin City look the way that Sin City makes Braveheart look: tame.
In obscenity trials of any medium, the strategy is the same: to show that the objectionable material is at the apex of realism, critically indistinguishable from reality. The defense is always the same as well: to prove that even lascivious imagery works in a virtual way if it does so to serve art (e.g., Robert Mapplethorpe; the NEA 4). Lindsay gets at this in her point that Sin City provides an insufficient dramatic arc for the violence to serve. I think that's wrong because the violence is partly Miller's point in ways that lots of people are discussing. But moreover, most summer action movies provide the same plot (think: any non-funny movie starring Nicholas Cage) but tweak the violence—sounds like traditional porn to me.
I think it's more helpful to describe these things in terms of virtual and real than narrative . The violence of Sin City is virtual. Were the violence realistic, per my earlier question, I think there'd be a much stronger case against the movie, because that would amount to neutering a crucial tool used to accomplish the aesthetic.
I'm trying to think of a movie that features violence I find offen
