Nature’s Emissary: The Art Of Caspar David Friedrich

by Brooks Riley

I didn’t plan to write about Caspar David Friedrich for his 250th birthday. He belongs to a different time in my life and a different aesthetic pathology. But as the date edged closer, I found myself missing that impossible reach for the sublime that his work had once provoked in me.

I cannot not write about him.

The first time I became aware of Friedrich, many years ago, I was in Zurich to meet an elderly Jungian psychoanalyst—my head stuffed with theoretical questions and eerie dreams with soundtracks by Scriabin. Walking down the Bahnhofstrasse, I passed a bookstore window displaying a stunning art book with the elegant title Traum und Wahrheit (Dream and Truth) and a simple subtitle: Deutsche Romantik. I didn’t yet speak German, but I knew enough to be interested. The book was too heavy for my luggage. I bought it anyway and had it shipped.

What lured my eye to the cover as I passed by was a partial view from one of my now favorite Friedrich paintings, Das Große Gehege (The Great Enclosure)—a cool marshy landscape evoking real ones I would later see from train windows. How could just a corner of a painting have such power?  It was the light, the late afternoon saturation of yellow, the black shadowed trees, and the hint of evening gloom already visible as gray on the horizon even though the sky above was still blue. I was captivated.

Later, it was the darkness that would keep me going back to his work.

Northern Sea in the Moonlight

Caspar David Friedrich loved the dark. He loved it so much that he got married at 6 am on a cold January morning, long before a Dresden sunrise. He often went out for walks along the Elbe at dawn or at dusk and lurked in the twilights or the moonlights, bringing home threads of illuminated thinking one can only have at night in the dark. I understand him. Darkness, with its tendency to distort as well as to obscure, is conducive to thinking in unlikely ways, offering a different kind of clarity that is difficult to achieve in daylight, when the light interferes demanding attention. Read more »



Sunday, August 25, 2024

The Wayward Gaze of Western Art: Cornicelius’ Corrective to The Mona Lisa’s ‘Dis-Integrated’ Smile

by John Hartley

How does Leonardo’s masterpiece, arguably representative of the fatal juncture of Western Art, provide the philosophical basis for pornography? And how does the lost work of an obscure German painter seek to correct what Pavel Florensky called ‘dis-integrated personality’?

In 1888, Georg Cornicelius, a relatively obscure German artist known primarily for his landscapes, produced the portrait “Christ Tempted by Satan.” Cornicelius’ background in capturing vast vistas is brought to bear on Christ’s faculties of perception: the universal reality of nature is transposed upon the personal perspective of Christ.

In the third and final temptation in the wilderness, Satan offers Christ dominion over all the kingdoms of the earth if he will only bow down and worship him. The result of the interplay of proportions gives Christ’s eyes a striking depth—a metaphysical quality—that seems to penetrate the very essence of the beholder.

This temptation is profound, proposing a shortcut to salvation that bypasses the necessary suffering and sacrificial death Christ must endure for the sake of the world. According to St. James, temptation arises from concupiscence, the innate human proclivity towards moral evil. As Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor accuses Christ of burdening humanity with the heavy responsibility of free will, and consequently responsible for the disordering of nature, Satan aims to arouse in Christ the concupiscence of the eyes—the desire for personal control over the visible world.

If evil arises as the will freely yielded to the one who seeks humanity’s eternal ruin, then all of temptation, it seems, is contained here within a single portrait. *Admittedly, there is a lack of critical opinion on this work (what would Morgan Meis make of this painting, one wonders?). Read more »

Sunday, August 18, 2024

Affective Technology, Part 3: Coherence in the Self

by William Benzon

Ritual Play, Day of the Dead in Jersey City

In the first part of this series on Affective Technology, I talked about Poems and Stories, using Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” as one example and a passage from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer as the other. Coleridge’s poem talks about an injured poet having to spend the afternoon alone while his friend’s take a walk through the countryside. Thought the process of actively imagining his friends enjoying themselves, the disconsolate poet pulls himself out of his funk to the point that he is able to bless them in their journey. The passage from Tom Sawyer mirrored something I did as a child when I was sent to my room as punishment for something I’d done wrong. I would imagine that my parents were lamenting my death and their imagined lamentations would enable me to feel better. The passage from Tom Sawyer was more or less like that, though a bit grander, as befits Tom’s sense of himself. Tom and his friends had run off to the river and the townspeople began searching the river for their drowned bodies. When he realized what was going on, Tom snuck into his Aunt Polly’s house at night and listened to the women commiserate over the deaths of their boys. It made him feel good. The point is a simple one: we use poems and stories to regulate our emotional life.

In the second article, Emotion Recollected in Tranquility, I introduced the concept of state-dependent memory, which holds the our memories are chemically keyed to the neurochemicals active during the experiences themselves. Thus, I suggested, “if the sexually aroused self has trouble recalling any life episodes other than those involving sexual arousal, and the vengeful self can recall only incidents of vengeance, and the thirsty self has little sense of any geography beyond that leading to water, then how can we see ourselves and our fellows whole?” Using Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, “The expense of spirit,” as an example, I went on to argue that literature, and art more generally, provides a (neurochemically) neutral ground giving us access to a full range experience. And this allows us to construct a coherent sense of self.

What happens if, however, the process of constructing a self fails? Read more »

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

How The American Way Traveled By Car

by Mark R. DeLong

The photograph shows the corner of a room where an unmade bed stands, the headboard occupying most of the left half of the image. One the bed are newspapers and pillows. From the center of the photo, a number of images of cars and trucks, cutout from magazines and newspapers, emanate in roughly a triangular shape. The wall is unpainted insulation board.
Rothstein, Arthur. Room in which migratory agricultural workers sleep. Camden County, New Jersey. October 1938. Photograph. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. Click source URL for enlargement: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/518bdec0-b97b-0138-ebbc-059ac310b610. See footnote [1] below for information about the title of the photograph.
Gullies had deepened, though puddles—some pond-like—had seeped into the ways, so that the challenge of driving was a matter of keeping axels clear of the swell of ground between tire tracks. Never really good, the roads still showed wounds from September’s hurricane, now known as The Great New England Hurricane of 1938. It had blown by New Jersey, a bit out to sea, but still whipped the coast with hundred-mile-an-hour winds. The state’s tomato crops were ruined, and angry winds and downpours had bitten a chunk out of the apple harvest. Potatoes, at least, nestled snugly under clotted soil, protected from the winds.

In October 1938, 23-year-old Arthur Rothstein drove the roads on assignment to document the lives of the nation as part of his job in the Farm Security Administration (FSA). This time, his assignment was New Jersey, and in Monmouth County he was interested in where potato-picking migrants slept, usually in shacks near the fields they worked. He took lots of pictures of ramshackle buildings—ones you would easily assess as barely habitable: a leaning frame taped together with tar paper, a “silo shed” that sheltered fourteen migrant workers, a “barracks” with hinged wooden flaps to cover windows—in fact merely unscreened openings, one dangling laundry to dry. Rothstein, like his colleagues at the FSA during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, documented the need for the government programs. Squalid housing matched the dirt and brutal labor of migrants, many of them cast into their situations by the disaster of the Great Depression.

Amidst such architectural photographs, one sticks out. Actually it is one of a pair of photographs, both taken indoors of sleeping quarters—no one would comfortably call them “bedrooms.” One shows a narrow unmade bed near a window shabbily curtained with a frayed and loosely hung blanket. In the other one, more tightly framed, the image draws close enough to reveal a carved headboard, a rumpled newspaper open to a full-page ad for Coca-Cola (“Take the high road to refreshment“) and other papers pushed to the corner of the bed. Neatly cut pictures of luxury cars from newspaper advertisements decorate the flimsy particle board wall that served as meagre insulation.[1]

When I saw the picture with the cars, I noticed a change in visual tone. The image felt hopeful. Read more »

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Andrea Scrima’s LOOPY LOONIES At Kunsthaus Graz, Museum Joanneum, Austria Part II

by Andrea Scrima

Part I of this is here.

#4: OWWW                                                                                      

SPEECH BUBBLE, Andrea Scrima. Graphite on paper, 35 x 35 cm. From the drawing series LOOPY LOONIES

Pain is a private experience that happens within an individual body; it is internal and essentially invisible. As much as we might commiserate, we cannot “share” another’s pain; we can merely witness the behavior it induces, inquire into the nature of the pain, and try to help alleviate it.

A medical diagnosis depends on a precise description. Is the pain aching, searing, shooting? Does it prick, stab, sting, or throb—or does it gnaw, tingle, cramp, burn? Is it sharp or dull? Asked to evaluate the intensity of their pain on a scale of one to ten, patients often find themselves at a loss. It hurts, they say. It’s unbearable. Pain is one of the least communicable human experiences.

Pain is also a weapon: power is asserted through violence, in other words, through causing pain. War’s objective is to shoot, burn, blast, and otherwise annihilate human flesh and to damage or destroy objects human beings regard as extensions of themselves: their homes, their possessions, photographs of loved ones, the buildings they live in, their religious and cultural institutions—and often entire cities, along with the history preserved in their architecture, in their libraries, museums, archives. War aims to not merely seize territory and take control, but to induce pain—and to make that pain visible to demoralize its victims, rob them of their voice, their individuality, their humanity.

Foucault described the process whereby the public execution—historically staged as entertainment for the masses—gradually became obsolete. In the practice of extrajudicial torture, however, the spectacle lives on. While the interrogation-induced confession is presented as torture’s justification, incriminating information obtained under duress is generally deemed unreliable or worthless. The infliction of pain serves a different purpose: torture becomes a ceremony, a form of clandestine theater where coercion and admission of guilt merge in a ritual whose power is rooted in secrecy. Read more »

Friday, July 19, 2024

Affective Technology, Part 2: Emotion recollected in tranquility

by William Benzon

Here’s the previous article: Affective Technology, Part 1: Poems and Stories

In his 1997 best-seller, How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker suggested that, however important art may be to humans, it is not part of our specifically biological nature:

Chocolate cake for the mind?

We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved circuits that gave us trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons. Pornography is another pleasure technology. In this chapter I will suggest that the arts are a third. (p. 525)

This triggered a backlash of arguments asserting that, no, the arts are not mere mental cheesecake (nor chocolate cake either), they are an essential component of human nature, our biological nature.

State-dependent memory

I would like to offer a speculative proposal about why the arts, the literary arts in particular, are central to human life. This proposal is based on a line of thinking I began entertaining in the mid-1970s when I learned about something called state-dependent memory. I first learned about state dependence when I read about some experiments originally reported by D. W. Goodwin in Science in 1969. Subjects were first made drunk and then asked to memorize nonsense syllables. When their recall was tested while sober, they performed poorly. Their recall dramatically improved, however, if they once again became drunk. More recently, Daniel L. Schacter has written of mood-congruent memory retrieval in this 1996 book Searching for Memory: “Experiments have shown that sad moods make it easier to remember negative experiences, like failure and rejection, whereas happy moods make it easier to remember pleasant experiences, like success and acceptance” (p. 211). Recall of experience is best when the one’s brain is in the same state it was in when one had that experience. That is what is meant by state dependence.

Given that motivation and emotion are mediated by over a hundred neurotransmitters and neuromodulators the state dependent nature of memory has profound implications for our ability to recall our personal experience. As I argued in The Evolution of Narrative and the Self:

If records of personal experience are [biochemically biased], especially in the case of strongly emotionally charged experience, then how can we get a coherent view of ourselves and of our world? The world of a person who is ravenously hungry is different from the world of that same person when he or she is consumed with sexual desire. Yet it is the same person in both cases. And the apple, which was so insignificant when sexually hungry—to the point where that apple wasn’t part of the world at all—becomes a central object in the world once sexual desire has been satisfied and hunger asserts itself. Regardless of the person’s [biochemical state], it is still the same apple.

If this is how the nervous system works, then how does one achieve a state of mind in which one can as easily remember an apple as a sexual object? Generalizing, if the sexually aroused self has trouble recalling any life episodes other than those involving sexual arousal, and the vengeful self can recall only incidents of vengeance, and the thirsty self has little sense of any geography beyond that leading to water, then how can we see ourselves and our fellows whole? Such a life would seem to be one of almost constant dissociation. How does the brain achieve a biochemically “neutral” state of mind from which one can recall or imagine any kind of experience and thereby construct a coherent view of oneself in the world? Read more »

Monday, June 3, 2024

Andrea Scrima’s LOOPY LOONIES At Kunsthaus Graz, Museum Joanneum, Austria

by Andrea Scrima

#1: SAYING NO

NO, Andrea Scrima. Graphite on paper, 35 x 35 cm. From the drawing series LOOPY LOONIES

In the talk Judith Butler gave upon receiving the Adorno Prize in 2012, she asks: “Can one lead a good life in a bad life?” Her question springs from a conclusion Theodor W. Adorno formulated in Minima Moralia: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (“Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen”). Years later, he speculated whether modern humans were already too damaged to live in a right world, should such a world ever come into being. Butler nonetheless asks if it’s morally permissible to “wish simply to live a good life in the midst of a bad life,” but concedes that it’s not so simple. It would seem that to pursue the “good” life, one must reject the “bad” life and everything it demands from us. Yet isn’t the term “the good life” already far too tainted by consumerism to be of any real use?

Let’s speak instead of a “true life” as opposed to a “false life.” But what is the nature of this undertaking, and what would the true life entail? The fact that we are interdependent and vulnerable beings presupposes a set of conditions required for even a minimally decent life: food, shelter, clothing, a halfway functioning society, some kind of livelihood. Butler reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s observation that it’s not enough to be alive, to merely survive—that for a life to be considered a life, it has to be lived with meaning and purpose.

Thus, our demand must be not merely for life, but for a liveable life. And yet our lives are not entirely in our hands; they are subject to political and economic structures that rob individuals and entire peoples of their agency and doom them to precarity, and often worse. In Problems of Moral Philosophy, Butler reminds us, Adorno asks “how the broader operations of power and domination enter into, or disrupt, our individual reflections on how best to live.” Read more »

Monday, May 13, 2024

Shipping Muse: The Accidental Aesthetics Of Disaster

by Brooks Riley

One of nature’s most endearing parlor tricks is the ripple effect. Drop a pebble into a lake and little waves will move out in concentric circles from the point of entry. It’s fun to watch, and lovely too, delivering a tiny aesthetic punch every time we see it. It’s also the well-worn metaphor for a certain kind of cause-and-effect, in which the effect part just keeps going and going. This metaphor is a perfect fit for one of the worst allisions in US maritime history, leading to the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge after it was hit by the container ship MV Dali on the morning of March 26, 2024.

At that hour, long before dawn, it was too dark for the resulting ripple effect to be seen. But it was most certainly a hefty version of the pebble drop, with waves fanning out all the way to the harbor berth from which the Dali had just departed. At daybreak, when images of the disaster began to appear everywhere, the ripples were no longer visible. But given the catastrophic consequences of this event, and the tragic loss of life, they were, and still are, fanning out across the globe.

Am I the only one who can’t stop looking at images of this disaster? Am I the only one who sees an awful beauty in them?  Or is it a beautiful awfulness? The frenzy of angles, the implosive intensity of the damage, the jolly Lego-like containers in Bauhaus colors still neatly stacked atop the ship in defiance of the tangled metal of the bridge’s cold steel mesh structure lying over the ship’s forecastle where it fell. Add to that the murky, shifting colors of the water, lending the disaster a visual context like a fluid frame—a calming contrast to the frozen pandemonium it encircles. Read more »

Monday, April 15, 2024

This Mediated World

by Christopher Horner

Immediacy itself is essentially mediated —Hegel

Look at that desk in front of you right here, now. Isn’t it just there, a bare existence, a simple immediate thing right in front of you? The senses register its presence. This, at least, is a bare fact that you know.

But look again at the desk in front of you. What is it you are aware of? A desk: not a carpet or a parrot, its colour (brown), its shape (rectangular), all that is that negates what might have been (it isn’t grey, it isn’t circular, etc). Your awareness of the desk is mediated by concepts and you, a language user, can only make sense of the thing through those concepts, the universal terms that enable you to pick out this thing here, now. And you are aware of it now as you were 5 minutes ago, although the light has changed and you, a namable person, not a disembodied spirit, have shifted your position on your chair to look back at the clock on the wall.  Time, place, objects: everything is mediated: that is, nothing is simply ‘there’ in splendid isolation to be passively registered by your senses.[1]

Consider again the wooden desk. It was once part of a tree, like the ones outside your window. It became a bit of furniture though a long process of growth, cutting, shaping buying and selling until it got to you. You sit before it as it has a use – a use value – but it was made, not to give you a platform for your coffee or laptop, but in order to make a profit: it has an exchange value, and so had a price. It is a commodity, the product of an entire economic system, capitalism, that got it to you. Someone laboured to make it and someone else, probably, profited by its sale. It has a history, a backstory.

All of this is the case, but none of it simply appears to the senses. Capitalism itself isn’t a thing, but that doesn’t make it less real. The idea that all that there really is amounts to things you can bump into or drop on your foot is the ‘common sense’ that operates as the ideology of everyday life: “this is your world and these are the facts”. But really, nothing is like that: there are no isolated facts, but rather a complex, twisted web of mediations: connections and negations that transform over time. 

This doesn’t mean that the way things show up for us is somehow false, an illusion that masks a hidden essence. The essence of a thing is reflected in the way it appears, in the connections and negations with everything else, and in the way in which it develops over time. Read more »

Monday, March 18, 2024

The Fly On The Wall Always Gets The Best View:
Drone Aesthetics In A Time Before Drones

by Brooks Riley

Something odd happens when I look at the elder Pieter Bruegel’s paintings: I experience a jolt of vertigo, as though I’d stepped out on a ledge somewhere—not too high up, but high enough to initiate a physical reaction more like titillation than terror. I didn’t notice this right away: For a long time, I was too busy taking in all the business going on in those paintings: the crowds, the tussles and bustle of the marketplace, the hawkers, the wagons, the houses, the animals, and in some of his works a topography rather alien to his own very flat province of North Brabant in the Netherlands. A master of ‘everything everywhere all at once,’ Bruegel knew how to crowd a wooden panel.

In The Fight between Carnival and Lent, faced with a multitude of finely-rendered characters alive with attitude, it’s easy to be distracted from the shot itself—its acute angle, its distance from the action, its extended scope and high horizon achieved through elevation. This is a classic content-over-form dialectic that faces every viewer looking at a painting. What am I seeing? What am I supposed to see? Where am I seeing from? 

In this case ‘where am I seeing from’ has everything to do with ‘what am I seeing’’: It’s the high oblique angle that enables the viewer to take in all those individuals spread out over the market square. (An AI command to make each character look up at the painter, might force the viewer to think about where Bruegel is situated as he paints, even if he’s up there only in his imagination. It’s like the fourth wall: you’re unaware of it until a character turns and speaks to you directly.)

A cinematographer would recognize this as a crane shot, or its replacement, the drone shot. This crane or drone doesn’t move. It defines the POV (point of view) of the painter, and shows how far his perspective can reach and how much he can cram into the in-between, that 2D surface which expands vertically with every higher angle of his POV, as in this crane shot from Gone with the Wind. Read more »

Monday, November 27, 2023

What Art Can Do

by Christopher Horner

Grasmere (Photo by author)

Why do we value art? I am going to suggest that a large part of the answer is to do with its unique power to disclose and convey areas of our lives unavailable to us though other means. Art, on this account, is a kind of communication, and kind of act: something performative – a communication that makes something happen, in a way that eludes ordinary discourse. 

By ‘ordinary’ here I mean the kind of communication delivered by language when it is used to convey concepts: ranging from the most banal everyday speech to the most rarefied theory. Of course, ordinary speech acts themselves have a performative quality too – we don’t just communicate information through language, but make things happen, make requests, (‘shut the door’, ‘the meeting is over’ ‘help me!’). Moreover we use our bodies, tone of voice, emphasis and more: and the conceptual content may not even be what matters, especially when something isn’t banal, but matters greatly: moments of grief or joy, for instance. A gesture, a tear, or just silence may be more eloquent than words. It is this ‘beyond’ in our imperfect communications, that hint at what art can do. Art aspires to a more perfect communication: one that takes us beyond the confines of the lonely self.  Read more »

Monday, March 20, 2023

Patience With What is Strange: In Praise of Slow Art

by Chris Horner

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best. —Proust

…for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life. —
Rilke

Everything demands our attention. A ceaseless stream of electronic information and entertainment flows through and around us. Attention spans shrink, and we struggle to focus on anything for more than a few minutes. Entertainment waits on every click, as does ennui. Paradoxically,  we may come to want the things that we cannot have in an instant, that demand our time and patience before they will reveal all they have to offer: the art that demands that we slow down. To really appreciate those productions of culture that can refresh us, make us think, immerse us in beauty, even strike us with terror, takes time. Art that is challenging often requires this of us. This can be true of more ‘popular’ art forms too, if they have the kinds of layers that take time to be appreciated. Their advantage over what I’m calling ‘slow art’ is they give us an immediate sugar rush that keeps our attention on them (exciting narrative, easy to recall musical  ‘hook’ etc) and which encourage us to return to them again and again. There’s nothing wrong with that. But not all art will do that, or not as often and as easily. Slow art, if it is great art, demands our time and patience before it will reveal all it has and can be to us. We should welcome this, for not only does this art often reward us most for our patience, but the practice of paying attention is itself, understood rightly, a kind of joy. There is an art that can offer us a world if we will but attend. Read more »

Monday, October 3, 2022

Attention, Please!

by Chris Horner

They all want it: the ‘digital economy’ runs on it, extracting it, buying and selling our attention. We are solicited to click and scroll in order to satisfy fleeting interests, anticipations of brief pleasures, information to retain or forget. Information: streams of data, images, chat: not knowledge, which is something shaped to a human purpose. They gather it, we lose it, dispersed across platforms and screens through the day and far into the night. The nervous system, bombarded by stimuli, begins to experience the stressful day and night as one long flickering all-consuming series of virtual non events. 

The result is that we find it hard to focus, to concentrate on one thing for longer than about 3 minutes. The repeated dispersal of attention, the iterated jumps and clicks of the wired individual making it harder to gather our dispersed attention in order to do anything like genuine contemplation or the relaxed appreciation of what we view or hear. It’s a familiar complaint: the spaces of leisure that might once have been the beyond the reach of of work, of consumption and gossip, are erased.

I want to suggest a few things here. One is that something has gone strangely awry with the possibilities of leisure, another that there is an existential problem that is connected to the diversion and dispersal of desire. Finally, that there are some important things the subject of all this digital attention needs to do, and that that is more than just disconnecting (although that might be a good idea too). Read more »

Monday, December 20, 2021

Decoding A Language: An Interview With Andrea Scrima About Her New Novel “Like Lips, Like Skins”

Like Lips, Like Skins, Andrea Scrima’s second novel (German edition: Kreisläufe, Literaturverlag Droschl 2021), is a diptych; the first half of the book is dedicated to the first-person narrator’s mother, the second half to her late father. We meet Felice in the early eighties as a young art student in New York and as a newcomer to West Berlin before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall; ten years later, she returns to New York to install an exhibition of her work. Another fifteen years pass and we encounter her as a single mother poring over her father’s journals in search of her family’s past. Like Lips, Like Skins is about art, memory, and the repetitions of trauma. The first chapter was published in issue 232 of the Austrian literary magazine manuskripte; English-language excerpts have appeared in Trafika Europe, StatORec, and Zyzzyva. The German version of this interview appeared in issue 234 of manuskripte. Ally Klein interviewed the author over the course of several weeks via email.

Ally Klein: There’s a scene in Like Lips, Like Skins in which the first-person narrator, Felice, recalls studying the Sunday comics as a child. She buries her nose in the newsprint; when she fetches a magnifying glass to get closer, she discovers an “accumulation of tiny dots.” Individually, they’re no more than “lopsided splotch[es],” but together give rise to a bigger picture. I see a parallel here to the way the novel is stylistically conceived. Memories pop up seemingly at random, and in the end, they produce an image that works intuitively. The book eludes a stringent retelling, but leaves the reader with a sense of understanding something that can’t be expressed in terms of an idea or concept. The discoveries, if that’s what they can be called, are situated elsewhere.

Andrea Scrima: As a child, Felice doesn’t yet know that the interaction between the eye and brain fills in the gaps, the missing information between disparate points; for her, it’s just magic. I use language to create imagery that can exist outside of description or symbolism. In literature, images often have a function, they’re there to convey a certain idea. But some images are irreducible, they’re not all that easy to explain. And these are the ones that interest me most: they’re autonomous, they have a life of their own. Sometimes they’re a bit uncanny.

I’m interested in literature’s resilience, its ability to find a formal language for phenomena that can’t be easily captured in words. A language the reader somehow perceives as “true,” even if they can’t necessarily say how or why. Read more »

Monday, August 16, 2021

51 Pacific and the Green Villain: Welcome to the Fun House

by Bill Benzon

I was living in the Lafayette section of Jersey City at the time, just in from Communipaw Avenue on Van Horne, next to the Jackson Funeral Home, the largest black funeral home in the city and up the block from the Monumental Baptist Church. It was only a couple of weeks before Hurricane Sandy roared though at the end of October 2012, though no one knew she was coming at the time. I was at a meeting of the Morris Canal Community Development Corporation, chaired by June Jones, Executive Director.

One of agenda items involved adding a skate park to the Berry Lane Park that was closing in on a start date. I spoke in favor of it – indeed, I’d brought the idea to June a couple weeks before as it had been something I’d been pursuing for awhile – as did Musaddiq Ahmad and others. Musaddiq came up to me after the meeting and told me that if I wanted to see some interesting graffiti – which may have come up in the meeting as well, I don’t know, but somehow he knew of my interest – I should come down to a place on Pacific, just a couple of blocks away. Amazing graffiti all over the walls inside and in the alley out back as well.

As I recall what he said registered well enough, but it didn’t quite compute. Why not? Because I’d been photographing Jersey City graffiti for several years now and, while I certainly didn’t think I had it all, what Musaddiq was describing was a major cache of fresh graff right under my nose and I didn’t even some much as suspect it. But that’s how the world is sometimes. You just don’t know what’s right around the corner.

Read more »

Monday, July 12, 2021

Nasty Artists

by Chris Horner

One day, I used to say to myself and anyone else who’d listen, I’m going to write a book called ‘everything you know about these people is wrong’. I have given up on the idea, and I expect anyway that someone else has already done it. What prompted the repeated thought was the way in which so little of what well known thinkers and artists did or said is actually reflected in public consciousness,  assuming it makes a showing at all. This can lead people to reject the idea of engaging with them before they’ve even had time to discover the ideas or experiences they might have learned from or enjoyed. Clearly, not everything will be to everyone’s taste, but you can’t know until you give it, or them, a try.

What makes this problematic is that it is the least credible – and creditable  – things that they have supposedly said or did that hang round them like a bad smell: Nietzsche the proto facist, Freud the sex mad coke addict, Marx the totalitarian etc. Popular beliefs about many of the key figures of modernity are often seriously askew, and sometimes at 180′ from the truth:  Nietzsche was neither anti Semitic, nor a nationalist; Freud didn’t say it was ‘all about sex’; Marx wasn’t a proponent of a one party state, etc. It is almost as if whatever the popular view is of these figures, the truth lies in the opposite direction. So my instinct is to try to put the record straight. But what to do when the popular idea of an artist or thinker actually does correspond to something real – something true and bad? 

Take Richard Wagner as a classic example. Read more »

Monday, August 31, 2020

Kitsch In The Eye Of The Beholder

by Thomas O’Dwyer

You Are Not Forgotten, painting by John McNaughton.
You Are Not Forgotten, 2017, painting by John McNaughton.

A statue of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John MacDonald, has become the latest lump of kitsch concrete to hit the ground after protesters pulled it from a plinth in Montreal and cheered as the head broke off and bounced across the pavement. (MacDonald was linked to vicious policies that killed and displaced thousands of indigenous people in the late 19th century. His system forcibly removed at least 150,000 children from their homes and sent them to often abusive state boarding schools). That’s as good a reason as any to add this to the list of monuments being dethroned around the world.

Another good reason is that phrase “lump of kitsch.” Jonathan Jones recently lamented in The Guardian that the falling statues were being followed by a sterile conversation about who does and doesn’t “deserve” a statue. “This is because all statues are dumb. They cannot represent big or complex themes. All they can do is function as crude symbols. They reduce history to celebrity culture. So many Victorian statues survive in our cities because 19th-century historians believed ‘great men’ and their leadership created history,” Johnson wrote, adding that every dumbass general who ever won an obscure skirmish had a statue somewhere across the British empire. No heroic soldier ever did.

So, what a lineup of dumb statues one could craft from that display of Trump royalty at the recent Republican National Convention. The “great man” being honoured this time was “the bodyguard of Western civilization,” as Charlie Kirk, founder of the anti-liberal Turning Point USA, described the president. This, wrote The Washington Post, was “an image in keeping with painter John McNaughton’s kitsch paintings of Trump.” Read more »

Monday, June 8, 2020

Radical Admiration: A Conversation with Lydia Hamann and Kaj Osteroth

by Andrea Scrima

Lydia Hamann and Kaj Osteroth have been working as a collaborative team since 2008. I got to know them in January and February of this year, when they began a year-long residency at the Villa Romana in Florence that was abruptly cut short in early March by the pandemic and the lockdown measures that followed. Hamann and Osteroth studied fine arts in Berlin; their collaborative works—conceptual, feminist, immersed in dialogue and rife with external reference, with one foot firmly planted in queer theory and the other in visual studies— have already acquired an encyclopedic character and have been shown internationally to great acclaim. Their Radical Admiration project spans an impressively prolific period of artistic cooperation that has gone beyond mere rediscovery to critically and convincingly revise historiography and correct the erasures of seminal women artists from the contemporary canon.

Lydia Hamann & Kaj Osteroth, 2019.
Photo: Timothy Speed

Andrea Scrima: Kaj, Lydia, the two of you have been working together on a long-term painting project commemorating a selection of contemporary women artists; over the course of the past thirteen years, a large body of work has evolved that’s attracted the attention of international curators. How did the idea of collaborating first come about?

Kaj Osteroth: The beauty about a long-term collaboration like ours is that the story has been re-written and adapted as we’ve gone along. And each of us recalls a slightly different version.

I like to remember the beginning as a tiny but sparkling, breathtaking first thought: ***this might work***!!! Which became a practice and an even more serious commitment towards one another. That was in 2007, when Lydia and Emma Williams were putting together a workshop for Lady-Fest and invited me to become part of the small initiating group. The idea of continuing to work together was born in never-ending summer talks between Lydia and myself, most likely involving many other people, almost all over Berlin. Today it feels as though we had been meandering and tingling all summer long, until I moved into Lydia’s shared studio space and we began to give our words visual shape. The fact is, we actually started painting much later, because in 2007 we were both still busy finishing university, writing and trying to satisfy the requirements of the academic system. Read more »

Monday, May 11, 2020

Visual Histories: Peter de Swart and Rachelle Reichert

by Timothy Don

The current economic crisis is crushing artists, museums, and galleries everywhere. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, an exorbitant rental market made maintaining a practice difficult before this crisis hit. It’s even harder now. With 3QD’s permission, I’m going to use this column to talk about the work of some of the artists and art professionals I have met here. I ask you to support artists wherever and however you can.

Peter de Swart, works on paper: Triptych

The triptych form is associated with religious painting. It first appeared as a feature of early Christian art and became popular for altar paintings and devotionals during the Middle Ages. While Peter de Swart’s Triptych is not overtly religious, it emanates an undeniably religious or spiritual aura. It is, in a word, numinous. To encounter this painting is to witness a sacred transaction. You’d have to be a stone to look at it and not experience a yearning for the divine. Why, apart from its rearticulation of the history and symbolism of the triptych form, is that?

It must have something to do, first of all, with the simple purity of the object pictured, which appears to be a bowl of some sort. Bowls are one of those inventions (like scissors or chopsticks or the hourglass) that we got right the first time. They were perfect the moment they appeared. In the bowl, function lives harmoniously with form. Its shape is so ideal as to be almost Platonic. Furthermore, bowls are used to prepare and serve food and drink, which means that they give sustenance, enable shared meals, and consequently help to strengthen communal bonds and deepen human relationships. Finally, bowls are vessels. Like hands and pockets and ships, they hold and contain and convey things—but they are not grasping like hands, nor like pockets do they secret away their contents, and they don’t trade goods and gold like ships. Quite the opposite, in fact: Bowls are generous, open, gratuitous. They give away the things they hold.

All of these attributes (form, use value, ethos) lend bowls a quasi-spiritual redolence, but they do not make bowls sacred. If this triptych depicted a bowl no different from any other bowl, then its effect would be decorative rather than numinous. This bowl is special. Again we must ask: Why is that? Read more »

Monday, March 16, 2020

The Eerie Eyes Of The Lamb

by Thomas O’Dwyer

The restored Mystic Lamb of the 600-year-old Ghent Altarpiece.
The restored Mystic Lamb of the 600-year-old Ghent Altarpiece.

Across Europe, the doors of museums and art galleries, along with the gates of sports stadiums, are being slammed shut by the Covid-19 pandemic. This week, the oldest museum in Belgium, The Fine Arts Museum of Ghent, was among them. This is sad for it will prevent tens of thousands of art lovers and tourists from seeing a brilliantly restored 600-year-old masterpiece that has survived the slings and arrows of outrageous history to become a legend — and even a viral internet meme — along the way. Among its many adventures, it was stolen by Napoleon and was again looted and almost blown up by Adolf Hitler. Many art historians consider Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, also known as the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, to be the most exceptional work of art ever created — sorry, Mona Lisa. The brilliantly restored altarpiece was the anchor of Jan van Eyck Year, a national celebration of the painter’s life and art. The exhibition, Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, was the gold crown on the events.

Hubert van Eyck started to work on the painting around 1420, six years before his death, and his younger brother Jan continued and completed it in 1432. It is gratifying to note that the altarpiece, 3.5 meters wide by 4.5 meters tall,  still stands in the place for which it was commissioned 600 years ago – in the chapel of St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent. But it is also startling to discover that it features in the Guinness Book of Records as the most stolen piece of art in history. Indeed one of its panels is still missing since thieves stole it 86 years ago and Belgian police have a 2,000-page file on the mystery.

The “optical revolution” title of the now-closed Ghent Museum exhibition was admirable, as even a casual glance at reproductions of the paintings make clear. We have become so used to photography and realistic art in recent centuries that it is almost impossible to imagine the impact that Jan van Eyck had on the artistic world of his day. But we can still be astonished as we examine the exquisite fine detail in every square centimetre of his work – jewellery, decorative designs on clothes and furniture, landscapes, skies, flora and fauna, even lettering. Botanists can still identify the species of meticulously painted plants — the altarpiece features 75 different kinds of herbs, plants and trees. It seems hard to grasp how such realism was captured 400 years before the first camera. Read more »