by Asad Raza

Denis Dutton is the author of The Art Instinct.

Dear Professor Dutton,

Thanks for agreeing to read this; your generosity is much appreciated. Your book is wide-ranging and compendious, so I'll confine my remarks to three topics: landscape painting, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Duchamp's Fountain. One thing I am not very interested in, I will say up front, is replaying another of the confrontations that have marked so many discussions of the application of Darwinian ideas to higher human functioning (think: Eagleton v. Dawkins). Those antagonisms, in my opinion, are much more symptomatic of a two-cultures clash than of any useful disagreement, and, worse, they prevent any meaningful conversation: each side simply rejects the other tout court. I hope to avoid the aggrieved and defensive tone of such confrontations. I will, however, try to speak my mind as clearly as I can, with the object of a generative exchange, rather than a head butt.

I'll start with the thing that confused me most about the book: I thought it would be more scientific. As you know, Darwinians are often charged with coming up with only quasi-plausible stories about the Pleistocene Era origins of some human behavior and asserting them without any evidence: “Just So Stories,” after Kipling. I assumed you would attempt to counter this by basing your observations on universal tendencies in art-making (if there be any such). Your first chapter cites a survey finding that human beings are attracted to a certain type of landscape, which you point out resembles the most habitable savanna landscapes of the Pleistocene: “a landscape with trees and open areas, water, human figures, and animals.” You hypothesize that people are attracted to such landscapes innately, and that is why calendars tend to feature them. When we are pleased by such a landscape, you conclude magisterially, “we confront remnants of our species' ancient past.”

It seems to me that two problems occur here. First, this is a classic Just So story: you present no genetic evidence for this affinity for savanna landscapes. A love of sunsets and sunrises seems equally popular around the world; let's say I argue that that is an innate preference. You might reply that your landscape is the best one for human habitation–hunting and shelter and running water and so on–and thus a preference for it would be an adaptive advantage. I might reply that the preference for sunsets and sunrises confers an advantage because those times have a heightened importance, as periods in which the sun signals that one should plan for the coming day or ready oneself for the fall of night, as a great but short time to hunt and fish, etc., etc. A third person comes along and says, “You're both being silly. Both preferences are obviously adaptive. That's why there are so many beautiful paintings of landscapes at sunset and sunrise!” In the absence of evidence, we are left with a contest of who has the more compelling anecdote. This is not the scientific method.

The second problem has to do with the identification of landscape painting with universal pleasure. Obviously, some landscape painting is meant to be beautiful and thus pleasurable, especially in European painting between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. But just because this particular genre of painting (lasting only ten generations or so) has some analogues in Eastern painting does not establish, to my satisfaction at least, that humans innately take pleasure in such pictures. To the contrary, most forms of painting, including that which decorates the caves in Lascaux, do not depict perspectival landscapes. Also, much landscape painting does not produce pleasure but fear and awe (think of Friedrich, or Turner). Isn't it just as likely that landscapes with a certain perspective view, from high ground, with sublime natural features such as high mountains at a safe distance, but with an enticingly serpentine river or path winding from foreground to background, producing a sense of exploration and travel, became popular when they did for historical reasons? And, having become popular, were later spread around the world, after technologies for the mass reproduction of images were invented, in the lowbrow form of calendars? Finally, even if you had a strong scientific case as to why humans take pleasure in looking at certain kinds of landscapes, that doesn't explain why paintings of such landscapes have at some times in some places been considered art, which does not mean simply pleasurable things–what you are arguing for (a love of calendar landscapes) might be better called “The Kitsch Instinct.”

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You know, I don't like asteroids. I don't know why. I just don't like them.

The International Commission On Planetary Dangers was formed in the year 2011 to protect Earth from asteroids, comets, and other space objects. One such object created a 15 megaton explosion when it hit the remote Tunguska region of Russia in 1908. A larger strike could well cause the extinction of all life on the planet.

An orbiting ring of space stations was created to meet the threat, each armed with an array of telescope 'eyes' and a set of nuclear missiles. The system's computers were linked via the “Interplanetary Internet” so that they formed a seamless whole, a meta-computer capable of simulating cognition and intelligent behavior.

The only thing missing was an overall “personality” for this intelligent system. After all, it would need to interpret incoming information, make decisions, and be prepared to act decisively – and it had to be willing to do so for all eternity. A human model was needed, one with precisely the right combination of drives, obsessions, and talents. After an exhaustive search the team settled on an aging but still-popular newsman and television personality: Andy Rooney.

Rooney's personality was ideally suited to the task. Researchers found that he was capable of forming lasting dislikes for inanimate objects …

Asteroids? Lovely? Not in my book. They're stubbly, gray, and pockmarked.

If Richard Nixon were a planet he'd be an asteroid.

I just don't like the look of them.

He had an irresistible urge to catalog the objects of his dislikes …

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Except for the purchase of a house my greatest expenditure has been on eating. I include in this total the amounts spent traveling to various gastronomical destinations –which is basically the same as my expenditure on travel for pleasure. And indeed most of my non-acceptances of various invitations to give talks, etc. is based on the fact that the destination is not an interesting place to eat. I also include a fairly substantial number of books–fewer cookbooks than essays on eating, reflections on cooking, and so forth. I cook but since my wife is an exceptional cook and I am only a good one the rational division of labor is for her to do most of the cooking.

I attribute my interest in food to my mother who from an early age used to take me to various restaurants in New York City (where I grew up). I remember in particular meals at the Automat, Schrafft's, and Patrissi's– very different kinds of restaurants and all now closed. I also remember fondly a Spanish restaurant on 14th street called La Bilbaina where my favorite dish–at age 8– was squid in its own ink. Obviously, being Jewish meant many Christmas meals in Chinese restaurants. Riddle: If, according to the Jewish calendar, the year is 5764, and, according to the Chinese calendar, the year is 5724, what did the Jews eat for forty years? Variation: The Jewish calendar begins in 5758; the Chinese in 4965. So the Jews had to do without Chinese food for 1063 years. (For an excellent ethnographic study of the Jewish-Chinese link see Gaye Tuchman and Howard Levine, “Safe Treyf: New York Jews and Chinese Food”). Not a joke.

Contemporary aestheticians have either tended to be conventionalists–defining art as an artifact produced to be presented to the artworld or where the work and its interpretations requires an art historical context– or list makers. By the latter I mean a collection of conditions, none of which is necessary and which together are supposed to be sufficient. Here is one:

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Edward B. Rackley

The best thing about long-distance driving is the sonic qualities of the enclosed acoustic chamber that is the car itself. On a recent pre-dawn drive through the eastern lowlands of North Carolina, two recordings kept me present and transfixed. I knew the pieces well, but the striking commonalities of the two artists had never occurred to me. Their sounds and compositional forms differ dramatically, but both share a belief that music exists to reflect basic cosmological principles—from silence comes word, from tone rhythm, from decay renewal, etc. In different ways, their compositions deliver a direct experience of what each believes to be cosmological truths.

Named after the Mayan genesis myth, Popol Vuh is a German progressive (‘prog’) band best known for its soundtracks to Werner Herzog’s early films. Led by Florian Fricke, Popol Vuh flourished for over three decades, leaving a long and varied discography. Originally a classics scholar, Giacinto Scelsi was an Italian composer often associated with the minimalist movement, despite his music being packed with activity. Scelsi studied Berg and Schoenberg but later abandoned western compositional style in favor of powerful, occasionally violent, monotonal variations.

‘All that is solid melts into air’

I used to imagine insanity in the person of ‘Mr. Madcap Laughs’, Syd Barrett himself, seated at a piano and staring vacantly out a window, repeatedly striking a single key. Such a moment must have occurred, I thought, as a healthy musical mind lost its bearings to madness. Then I learned about Scelsi, whose biography actually involved a similar episode, with one important variation. In complete breakdown after a divorce, Scelsi reportedly remained slumped at his piano playing a single note over and over again. Fully absorbing each note’s resonance and decay, he later cited the experience as therapy, claiming it triggered his compositional transformation and opened the door to his entire future oeuvre.

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By Namit Arora

Growing up in India, I ate meat only a handful of times until I left home for college. My mother, a moderately pious Hindu, had a deep aversion to eating animals and wouldn’t allow meat in her kitchen (I also remember her kindness and sympathy towards the ragged animals that shared our city streets: cows, dogs, horses, goats, cats, donkeys, and even occasional elephants and camels). My father was vegetarian for the most part, except when, on rare occasions, he pretended to enjoy a few morsels of meat. I think he did this despite himself, mostly to project the public image of an adventurous, cosmopolitan man. If no one were looking, I’m sure he would have picked a vegetarian option nine times out of ten.

I only ate meat when my older sister brought home a chicken or mutton dish from a friend’s place, or cooked it herself on a Sunday morning on a kerosene stove in our courtyard. When she cooked, my task was to procure the meat. I would bike up to the butcher’s shop and await my turn, squeamishly eyeing the goat carcasses hanging on hooks, and gallantly ask the man for ‘the best cuts,’ to which he always replied, ‘only the best for you, son.’ Washing and cleaning the meat, I felt a strange exhilaration—I saw it not as food but as the flesh and bone of a dead animal, hacked to bits just hours ago. Mother allowed my sister to use only the most beaten down utensils from her kitchen and later instructed the maid to scrub them clean thrice as long.

Still, my parents encouraged us to eat meat, holding it to be salutary for growing kids. Their attitude later struck me as similar to Gandhi’s during his early struggle and experimentation with eating animals. Gandhi saw meat as a contributor to the enviable vigor, material progress, and sturdier physiques of people from the West, which conflicted with his own traditional disposition—and of his social class—against eating meat.

I was introduced to eating fish and prawns in college. Thereafter, living outside India, I began eating other animals too—cow, pig, turkey, crab, squid, etc. I had non-vegetarian food several times a week and it became a key part of my cooking repertoire—I acquired a bevy of fans for my spicy lamb curry and barbequed chicken. On my travels, I even sampled lobster, shark, snail, venison, guinea pig, and wild boar. But in the ensuing years my meat intake began to decline. I came to relish it less and less. About eight years ago, I gave up eating mammals, and now almost always choose vegetarian. Long live tofu, beans, lentils, and the huge range of Indian vegetarian cuisine.

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by Shiban Ganju

We spent approximately $115.9 billion to buy alcohol in the USA in 2003 and spent billons more to treat its ravaging effects on our bodies. We are not alone. All people – Asian, European, American, and African – enjoy and suffer almost equally. No society is exempt; rich spend discretionary income while poor spend sustenance money; liberal societies buy it from the local liquor stores and conservative societies get surreptitious home delivery. And our world has about 140 million LUI – living under the influence.

One of them may be Mark, your high school buddy who staggers towards you and slurs at your class reunion. You notice: Mark has changed more than others; he looks different – the purplish hue of his face, red dots below his visible collar bone, lush thick hair, his tremulous hands with pink palms – he has aged more. You suspect alcohol. How do you verify? Simple: apply the CAGE test. Ask four questions. Are you concerned that you may be drinking too much and want to cut down? Are you annoyed when asked about your alcohol habit? Do you feel guilty about drinking? Do you need an ‘eye opener’ – a drink early in the morning just to get started? If Mark cares to entertain your curiosity and says yes to at least two questions, he has a problem.

Your classmate, like millions of others, was probably genetically predisposed – not by a single gene but a complex interaction of a number of genes acting in cohesion. His nurture was also permissive; his father relaxed with a six-pack of beer after work. And Mark’s enabling peers started drinking in high school. He fell into the trap of early start like many teenagers but unlike them he was unlucky and succumbed to his genes.

Mark started with beer. “ I don’t do hard liquor, just beer.” He had heard his dad announce in a moral tone many times. So beer was OK. And so was its euphoria and adventure. He drank mostly over the weekends and sometime sipped a beer or two during the week. His liver kept up with his pace; it slogged overtime and manufactured more enzymes to detoxify the poison. The metabolism would convert alcohol into acetaldehyde. Excess of acetaldehyde would flush his skin; give him headache, nausea and stomach pain – a hangover. Another enzyme – acetaldehyde dehydrogenase – would now rush to his rescue by neutralizing accumulated acetaldehyde and relieve him of misery.

Mark, propelled by his dad’s genes and convinced by his morality, did not seek any help. It was just beer, after all. But that did not last long.

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“It's all just one big lie … basically a giant Ponzi scheme.”
—Bernie Madoff

Life in the Fast Lane
Jim Culleny

A crow atop a phone pole
like a cocked hat –a selfsure bird
eyeing a white line lunch
who understands the nuances of traffic
waits, patient as a tick,
until the last ten-wheeler grinds by
then swoops down quick.
Caaa! he says, its mine and
pecking like a capitalist he struts
and feeds and darts, always
with his eye out for a killing car or bus
wary his whole life feasting on
what another, less fastidious in attention,
has provided him to munch.

Part 1 of “A Scientist Goes to an Ashram for a Personal Retreat” can be found here:

(Note: I do not use the real names of people, nor do I identify the specific Ashram. I changed a few details. The purpose is to protect the privacy of the individuals. Readers who are familiar with this Ashram will probably recognize it.)

I Make Contact

My first few days at the Ashram were filled with a good deal of uncertainty. Where do I sit in the dining hall? Will I violate some standard of etiquette among people pursuing a serious religious practice? What if I say hello to someone who is spending time in silence? I know I'm going to get a stern look if I upset someone's spiritual practice. My predilection is to do nothing, say nothing, and hope I do not trip over my own feet with a monastic faux pas.

The first evening I walked up to the building that housed the dining hall to make sure I was there at the start of the dinner period. The building is like a visitor center, with a small shop selling books, CDs, DVDs, gifts, and items of religious significance. It also houses the media center. I looked in through the door to the dining area and into a large common area. It's very much like a multipurpose room in a small high school: auditorium, lecture stage, gym, and dining. There was a decent size commercial kitchen , off to one side. Tables were set up for a buffet service. Tables and chairs were arranged around the auditorium. There was a sound proof control room in a corner opposite the stage, and was part of the media center. I could see an access to a patio for eating outside. This is January, so we stay inside. I walked over to the food and toured around the two buffet tables. I was alone and didn't know if I should begin eating or not. I returned to the hall outside the dining area. There were a few people there but no one seemed to organizing themselves for dinner. I went back into the dining room and saw a lone gentleman filling up a plate. I started doing the same. Then it happened. I made my first breach of monastic etiquette. The gentleman politely told me I had to wait for the gong to be sounded, enter with the others, and wait again for a communal prayer to begin the mealtime. He had to be elsewhere and was taking a plate of food so he could make his other appointment.

OK, that wasn't too embarrassing. After a few more minutes about a dozen or two people gathered. An aproned cook opened the door, and sounded a small hand held gong. We filed in and stood together around the food. Someone started a Sanskrit prayer that was sung by everyone. The feeling they projected was communal, happy, relaxed. and enjoying their prayer as a prelude to eating. I was feeling more comfortable. With the end of the singing, the group recited a prayer, in English, the words being in a large framed poster on the wall. Eventually, I learned to follow and recite the prayer, along with a shout of “Ji!” in response to another incantation. It was like an affirmation, an “Amen” if you will, that ended the prayers and gave everyone permission to “dig in.” I was pleasantly surprised at the variety and presentation of the vegan food. In addition to recognizable salad items like greens, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots, there were all sorts of middle eastern and Indian dishes. Of course there was lots of tofu cooked this way and that way. It all looked very good and it was great tasting, as well.

Not knowing where to sit, I went to a table further out from the food, facing back toward the food and the other diners, and started to enjoy my dinner. I was recognized for what I was, a brand new visitor who didn't know up from down. A woman monastic, Swami Learananda, came over and invited me to sit with her and several others. I met a couple of monastics and visitors like myself. The visitors tended to be friends of the Ashram who come periodically for the spiritual practice and experience. A few were newbies like myself who were referred by others. Swami Learananda said I looked familiar and that we met here before. I told her she looked familiar, and that I met her more than fifteen years before when visiting Giri and Yukteswar. “Of course,” she said. Learananda was wonderful to talk to and made me feel comfortable, relaxed, and very much at ease. She was raving about the homemade bread and organic homemade jam, so I had to try it. It was wonderful. For a few moments I was considering applying for life long study as a Swami-in-training just for daily access to that homemade bread and jam. Although I enjoyed every bit of the plentiful food, I was afraid I would be very hungry between meals. At home I'm frequently hungry between meals, and tend to nosh a lot. Never, not once, did I feel hungry between meals at the Ashram.

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By Aditya Dev Sood

The other evening, Behenji Bua invited us over for dinner, especially to try her new karela dish. It was sublime, setting off taste sensations all round the apperceptive palate. The slightest sweetness, a balanced coping of salt and sour, fullness and complexity, all built around the fundamental bitterness of bitter-gourd, as karela is unfortunately called in English. I’d never liked karela as a child, and adults around me seemed to understand that – it was especially prepared, I recall, for Behenji’s husband, and for other vegetarian connoisseurs in the family, and I don’t think any of us children were even especially encouraged to eat our share of it. It was not a delicacy, but an acquired, perhaps adult taste. Nowadays, I’m sure it is my favorite vegetable, and I’m sure my mindbody and aesthetic sensibility would be poorer for not consuming it at least twice a week.

What is it about bitterness, that allows it to become a part of one’s aesthetic appetite later in life, having been the opposite of pleasure in one’s youth? From when I was a child, I'd always loved raw mango, tamarind, every kind of chat, and even those spicy-salted prunes putatively from Afghanistan. But only recently have I begun to drink Campari-soda by choice, enjoy green vegetables of all kinds, including arugula, kale, colacasia, and seek out those super-hoppy beers that can sting my senses with a burst of pure firstness, as if I were seventeen again, experiencing sushi and wasabi for the first time, learning that warm sake can fumigate the nasal cavity just as wasabi can inflame it. My taste for bitterness is, perhaps, partly founded in the search for novelty, but there is also something else, a transformation of the body's biochemistry in early-middle age, to a new and shifted harmonics of taste.

Over a couple of Christoffels at Bangalore's only Jazz bar a few days ago, I asked my friend Gabriel to help me think about bitterness.

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by Jeff Strabone

The twenty-first century may still be fairly new, but its nameless first decade—the naughties? the zeroes?—is drawing to a close and it’s time to start taking stock. I have noticed something happening in the art of this decade that may indicate a deep change in contemporary attitudes towards the past and its uses. It could be the passing fancy of a handful of artists, or it could indicate the end of the twentieth century’s modern and postmodern obsessions and anxieties. What I have noticed is the return of pre-modern attitudes towards tradition.

Let’s consider some examples. In 2000, Bill Viola made a video called The Quintet of Remembrance which poses actors as figures found in paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, Andrea Mantegna, and Dieric Bouts. Shot in one minute of real time, the video is shown slowed down to sixteen minutes, the effect being a heightening of the actors’ gravity and emotions. The lighting, poses, and facial expressions are clearly not of our era, yet the clothing is, as seen in this still.

The Quintet of Remembrance was the first piece of video art to enter the Metropolitan Museum’s collection.

Similarly, Eve Sussman recreated Velázquez’s Las Meninas in a twelve-minute video in 2004 called 89 Seconds at Alcazar. Here is a still from Sussman’s video, which was part of the 2004 Whitney Biennial and was also part of the inaugural exhibition of the MoMA’s new dedicated video gallery when the museum reopened in 2004.

What Viola and Sussman have done in video others have done in painting. Karel Funk, born in the 1970s, has emphasized contemporary fabrics in his neo-Renaissance photo-realist paintings, as seen here in an untitled painting from 2003. The figure wears the hood of a monk, but it appears to be made out of Gore-Tex.

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by Judith Goudsmit and Asad Raza

Respite consists mostly of black-and-white film shot at Westerbork, a Dutch refugee camp established in 1939 for those fleeing Germany. In 1942, after the occupation of Holland, its function was reversed by the Nazis and it became a 'transit camp.' In 1944, the camp commander commissioned a film, shot by a photographer, Rudolph Breslauer; this is the footage used in Respite. It shows inmates processing mechanical parts, doing aerobics, mounting stage productions, and other activities. It also shows inmates being loaded onto trains. Before the film could be completed, its subjects, as well as Breslauer, were transferred to Auschwitz and killed. Farocki's Respite, like the original images, contains no sound. His changes to the archival footage are very simple: he edits it and intersperses black title cards on which short texts, usually one sentence, appear.

(All film stills courtesy of Greene Naftali Gallery, New York)

Judith Goudsmit: It's interesting how the texts Farocki provides us with evolve over the course of the film. First, we view the images with short explanations of what we are seeing. Then, as if he is reevaluating his previous interpretations, he repeats certain images with different, more personal texts, pointing out certain details, or emphasizing one aspect of the image. Watching it, I felt like I was being tested, as if he was asking what would be more effective, what would be more shocking, provoking, sad, etc. Maybe because I grew up hearing so many stories about Westerbork, and the Holocaust generally–almost every successful Dutch novel is about the Holocaust or its aftermath–I have become so familiar with the way people tell these stories that these personal notes Farocki gives us almost seem to play with clichéd or contrived notions of the Holocaust and its impact. Also, the images just seem plain joyous at first: genuine fun, jumping around in a circle. Later, with Farocki's comments, this 'fun' gets macabre undertones. I think he is questioning whether we can look at these images without the knowledge we have now, without their context of death. Is it ever possible to look at things just for what they are? Of course he is questioning a lot more, but I'm rambling and just had a phone fight with my mother. What do you think?

Asad Raza: I think Respite is a very honest film, because it admits a really basic truth: not only can we not look at things for what they are, we can't even know what they are. Respite doesn't pose, as most documentaries do, as an objective account of historical reality; it's more like a meditation on its source material. As you said, some of its archival images seem very incongruous to the tragic destiny of Westerbork–people dancing and jumping and smiling. The title cards tell us these images are rarely shown, perhaps because they aren't obviously or viscerally terrible. They aren't symbolic enough of the historical “meaning” of Westerbork. Yet the fleeting smiles of the camp's inmates are possibly more crushing than the standard Holocaust-documentary shot of hills of corpses. Dead bodies are ultimately objects; a woman leading a dance class, who we know will soon be murdered–this is sickness and tragedy. And the film lets us ponder this footage without the distraction of music or other added elements. It doesn't tell us how to feel too directly, which allows our own reactions to emerge all the more powerfully. This way, the film respects the basic strangeness, or unknowability, of these moving images, instead of pretending that they record a reality we already know how to interpret.

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Hormones in Love
Jim Culleny

Only one can have this thought.
Did you think your thoughts were mine?

We lie apart as close as this:
thinking still alone combined.

Two skulls each with a budding brain.
Two “I”s distant as two moons
catching light from somewhere else
too bright to be too far and soon

we come together touch and kiss
we think there is no more than this
we think we think the selfsame thoughts
—but pleasure's not the same as bliss.

We come together, kiss and touch
We think this close is not too much.
And though we think we are as one
—embrace is not the same as clutch.

This text, designed with its own concerns in mind, diverges on many trajectories, crossing over itself, intersecting its arguments and statements with images and forms which question the traditional logic of the essay. This text will become enabled not through a writer's statements, but through a reader's response. A spiral of concepts ruptures the words, pulling you, the reader, into the written phrase. Response is required of any reading. The internet is a form capable of allowing a reader's response to influence the writer's trajectory; to send the written back into itself, melding its writer and its reader as one critical engagement. This text requires your writing. Works of art may embody a mimesis (imitation) of reality within themselves or as an organising principle of their making/crafting, but in turn mimesis in art always speaks of the separation between subject and object. “Socrates himself wrote nothing at all. If we are to believe the account of his reasons given in Plato’s Phaedrus, it was because he believed that books could short-circuit the work of active critical understanding, producing a pupil who has a ‘false conceit of wisdom.” – Martha Nussbaum In Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus, Socrates elucidates an argument against writing. The fact that this dialogue still remains is due to his pupil, Plato, using the new critical form his mentor disagreed with to commit it to cultural memory. Socrates envisaged the crest of a wave which, in only two generations, would crash down over the critical tradition he represented. The oral arguments of Socrates were advanced through Plato’s written pursuit. In turn, Plato’s own pupil, Aristotle, would use writing, reading and the diagram to propound new modes of critical argument which perhaps, only two generations earlier, would not have been possible. We stand at present on the crest of our own critical wave. From orality to textuality we now move towards a hypertextual, data-driven, digital, 'New Media' revolution. The impact that this revolution will have on the acquisition and transmission of language, and the effect in turn imparted upon mind and the matter of thought and consciousness are interesting in their own right. For my purposes though, and as a distant echo to some of Socrates’ concerns, I perceive the current digital momentum behind language and textual technology as a creative force that will fundamentally alter the 'written' model. Writing did not destroy the critical mimesis propounded through Socrates’ oral tradition. Writing supplemented the oral tradition in ways Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were incapable of imagining. ‘Traditional’ forms of text are at present under similar supplementary transition/translation. The rhetoric and critique surrounding text is under duress from ‘fast encroaching’ digital and hypertextual mediums, or what Marjorie Perloff calls “the reading-writing mechanism[s] of the new electronic page”.

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This is the time of the questions. I know this is true of me, and since I am taking the position, increasingly borne out by events, that my situation, talents, and prospects are pretty unexceptional, I assume it is true of others as well. I ask myself most of the following questions at least once a day, and, in the spirit of sending a note to posterity, I thought I might record some of them.

Will I ever make any money ever again? Not for years, it seems. I can't imagine it, really, although I understand it must happen. I can see now why my grandmother saved pencil stubs, hardened erasers, and pretty much everything else that came into her house. I wish I hadn't thrown out her old rubber bands; I am getting low on them.

So, is this the Great Depression all over again? It kind of feels like it, except that we can't go back to the old farmhouse anymore. We must suffer in our cities and in our cul-de-sacs.

If it is the Depression all over again, was there anything good about the Depression?
Oh, yes! Screwball comedies. The perfection of photography. (The old timers working with the big clunky cameras — Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Marion Post Wolcott, Walker Evans — absolutely trounce their descendants, and may I add here that Henri Cartier Bresson is overrated.) The Marx Brothers. Ernest Hemingway. John Steinbeck. The early New Yorker. Raymond Chandler. This line of thought always makes me feel better. The worst times make the best art, it is true, and I guess we have that to look forward to.

Does all that outweigh the Depression and the rise of Stalin and Fascism? Oh, for God's Sake!

Are newspapers really dead? They seem pretty dead to me. The persistence of the Style section in the New York Times appears to prove this, like the gaudy makeup on an embalmed body.

Will I write a great novel? Probably never, and the answer is further darkened by the following question.

If I wrote a great novel, could I even get it published? With major publishing houses shrinking as fast as the newspapers, this seems unlikely.

If I got it published, would anyone read it? Never mind this novel thread. It is purely sullen, and that's a sin that merits a stay in Hell, according to Dante, whom I am reading to cheer up. Still, I wanted an honest accounting, and so we had to pursue the manque thing this far.

How can so many women be supporting so many men? Among my friends, the men are all in sweatpants at home, or supervising the meltdown of some formerly flourishing concern, while the women soldier on, bringing home the paychecks, and sometimes making dinner, too. Statistics bear this out. Eighty percent of the fired are men. This is not just the collapse of an economy, but the collapse of a gender.

Which would I rather have: General prosperity and giant sunglasses, $10,000 handbags, and $500 distressed jeans, or the current situation? As much as I hate to, I would have to go with the general prosperity and the expensive jeans. I should have accepted ginormous sunglasses from Dolce and Gabbana as a sign of economic health to burn, and not the mark of Satan. This hurts to admit.

Should I go back to school? It seems so lame, and yet so practical. I probably should.

Could I be sadder? Maybe, but it would have to be caused by extra death and disease.

How long until Obama goes absolutely, totally gray? It has probably already happened.

This text, which appears on 3QD as the second of a four-part post, was begun as a musing on the theme of series and repetitions in modern and contemporary art inspired by a challenge issued by an art historian colleague of mine. This post addresses the work of Frank Stella, one of many artists who’ve worked in this manner. For the previous post (intro and consideration of Wade Guyton’s work), click here.

Repetition and Remains: Three Centuries of Art’s Multiform and Manifold re-

Frank Stella (1936–)

Tracing Wade Guyton’s “ostensible monochromes” back to their perhaps obvious roots in Frank Stella’s earliest series calls for particular care. It’s a bit to easy to lump all-black or primarily black work together; consequentially, while that is the first of many connections—visual/ancestral lines, if you will—it’s also worth expanding upon that point and exploring the many facets that combine to form this lineage.

The relation to Albers’s Homage to the Square and Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings goes without saying. However, in addition to the early Black paintings (and prints), Stella also did a series of Aluminum paintings, Copper paintings, and several other series. Notably, the Black series originated in, and stemmed from, a couple of quite brightly colored paintings.

Typologically speaking, the Black paintings were Stella’s first real series. As the first, they differed from all his later series in many respects—not least in that a certain evolution was determinant from one painting to the next, such that they gradually became a series, after completion, rather than consciously starting out with the series in mind. As regards their sequence, even which of the series was truly the first Black painting came under dispute. According to curator Brenda Richardson [1], Stella identified the initial works of this series as follows: Delta, he claimed, was “the first black painting,” citing its previous landscape-derived abstract composition and development out of the underpainting [2]; Morro Castle was the first wherein he “consciously set out to make a black painting;” and Reichstag was the first all-black painting, devoid of all underpainting, all non-black spaces or lines, and empty of all other colors. These three are additionally linked as a group by the fact that they dealt directly with the marginal or “left-over” area—the corners and borders Stella saw as the regions where abstract expressionism faltered. As his attempt to justify (literally and typographically speaking) the pictorial plane’s relation to its edge grew more extreme, the small left-over areas of the Black paintings grew into the notches or “jigs” removed from the support itself to create the shaped canvases of the Aluminum series, ultimately evolving into the more fully shaped canvases of the Copper series and even later ones, such as the Protractor series.

I had the good fortune of viewing a few of the prints—all lithographs—from Stella’s Copper series at MoMA late last autumn: the curator pointed out what she termed the “modular” nature of the forms [3] (and what she viewed as their components); although it’s a creative idea and could potentially be seen as similar to Guyton’s use of pseudo-typographic modules in his printed compositions, one must remember that these are single-color plate lithographs printed in one pass, not woodblocks, and therefore each image was composed, as a unique whole, precisely as it appears on the page, rather than consisting of basic modules that were reconfigured to create each successive image.

As I hinted at earlier, the beginning of Stella’s Black series was painted over a previous abstract composition based on a landscape: Blue Horizon can ultimately be traced to Delta, an offshoot of sorts that he explored in the following Black paintings, Morro Castle, The Marriage of Squalor and Reason, Arbeit Macht Frei, and Arundel Castle. In Arundel Castle—unlike in The Marriage of Squalor and Reason, Arbeit Macht Frei, and other early compositions of the Black series—the proximity of the black stripes (and perhaps, to a slight degree, the paint’s bleed after application) is such that, from a distance or even in reproduction (the form in which far too many people are content to view visual art nowadays) the work initially appears to be a monochrome… until those interstices begin to surface in one’s eye.

Venturing back to these works’ colorful predecessors for a moment, art historian Megan Luke also identifies what she terms a “Coney Island group” of works as well, the immediate antecedents to the Black paintings. [4] In this she includes Blue Horizon—a prefect square with less-than-perfect horizontal blue stripes. While she doesn’t expressly define the distinction between “group” and “series,” observation of the paintings provides a clarification more concrete than any words can.

Speaking about Delta, Stella said “… when I superimposed a simple idea of banded organizational symmetry on top of landscape gestures, the resulting development changed everything. It completely changed the way I understood what I thought I knew about the painting of the past… [I]t gave me a very clear sense of how the making of painting was sucked into the continuum of painting….” [5]

Fig. 4. Frank Stella, Arundel Castle, 1959 Fig. 5. Frank Stella, Arundel Castle from Black Series I, 1967
Enamel on canvas One from a portfolio of nine lithographs on paper
121 3/8 X 73 1/8 in. / 308.1 X 186.1 cm image: 13 5/16 x 7 15/16” (33.8 x 20.2 cm)
Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 72.276 sheet: 15 3/8 x 21 15/16” (39 x 55.7 cm)
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. Museum of Modern Art: John B. Turner Fund
© 2008 Frank Stella / ARS, New York

Arundel Castle is unique in its vertical reflection, an extension of the form that appeared in Getty Tomb the same year. It echoes the composition of Morro Castle, but now the margins, those mirrored left-over areas—note, however, that the lines themselves aren’t mirrored, as the one running down from the upper left and continuing horizontally through the center doesn’t then turn back upward, but rather takes a downturn, ending in the lower right—have disappeared. And here we see a repeated U-shaped pattern that not only foreshadows (or, in this backwards reading, recalls) Guyton’s use of the same letter-like form, but also makes the most of that shape’s affinity to the rectangle of the canvas itself. The shape in the middle of his earlier stripe paintings (in works like Coney Island and Grape Island—those closest to revealing Stella’s observation of Jasper Johns’s Flag works) has also been removed, suggesting a merging of object (square) and pattern (lines) into one and the same canvas-consuming composition.

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When it comes to evolution these days, scientists tend to present a uniform front of agreement for political and rhetorical reasons, so you maybe didn’t know that, in private, some theoretical biologists have grawlix-laced thoughts about certain colleagues, whose work on one issue in particular they regard as not only wrong but stubbornly, perversely so, crumbling on clearly termite-eaten logic, and vice versa for the second group against the first—but there you go.

A divisive example: While most female lions are dutiful about guarding the borders of their camps against attacks, there are definitely some Cadillac Queens among them who don’t help out at all. The lionesses lazy in this regard benefit disproportionately because they don’t put themselves in danger when attacks come and can concentrate on breeding in the meantime and yet still get all the benefits of the others’ work, since they cannot help but be warned by all the scrambling around and yelling during any breach of security. Natural selection therefore favors lazy lionesses who defect—and if you want to be reductive, it seems to favor genes that make lions lazy defect.

The catch is that if there are too many lazy lionesses, the entire group will get wiped out in one attack, which isn’t good for anyone’s genes. So for the long-term survival of the species natural selection must favor the genes for self-sacrifice. Except that’s not quite right, either. Day to day, the lazy lions still have an advantage over the dutiful lions, and day to day, the lazy lions’ genes are still more likely to spread. In which case natural selection is selecting both for and against genes that are less fit, which isn’t natural selection in any real sense. It gets even knottier when you look at competition between groups, because when individuals decide to cooperate and coalesce into groups, complicated properties emerge. It’s no different than collections of limp neurons firing themselves up into a mind with memory, emotion, and volition. Can one neuron think? Can natural selection meaningfully be said to “work” on individuals when it only favors groups of those individuals working together, and not the individuals themselves?

This is what cleaves biologists. No one argues that natural selection is a monolithic force propelling evolution onward without purpose or design (the uniform front), but what does it act on?—genes, individuals, whole groups at once? Until the 1960s, most biologists were too busily focused on squaring Mendel with Darwin, what’s known as the Modern Synthesis, to ponder this problem. Most, as Charles D. did, lazily assumed selection happened on multiple levels. Ever since then, biologists realized they needed to be a lot more explicit about the assumptions undergirding their models.

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David Schneider

In 2000, I was in my mid-20s, an embittered grad-school dropout. It was the last thing I could have imagined happening. Halfway through my undergraduate career in America, I got the chance of a scholar's lifetime. I was accepted into Oxford for a full undergraduate degree. It was a dream world I'd entered, and I mean that in the best sense – and in the most forlorn.

Oxford in 1993 was still a pretty medieval place, all things considered. There were no cellphones, nor telephones in rooms. A handful of phoneboxes were scattered among the quadrangles, adequate – I suppose – for the 150 or so students living in College. Every day a little old man, on a bicycle with a basket, came cycling through each of the 41 gatehouses, wheeling the inter-Collegiate post into ten thousand pigeonholes. If you wished to call on a friend, most often you'd call on them, in the Victorian sense: stroll over down the lane, and through the quadrangles, rap on their door, and – oh, yes, I'm in the middle of Sidney's Arcadia now, but we can sit for a cup of tea.

I flew into Gatwick with my Mac Classic on my lap; but out of 70 students in the entering class of my college, only one other student brought a personal computer up with him. For the rest of us, four obsolete PCs – one of them perpetually broken – were crowded into a repurposed storage room, token technology for the college's 150 undergraduates. You were actually encouraged to write all your weekly essays in longhand, to prep you for the speed and stamina you'd need in examinations.

The Bodleian, one of the great libraries of the world, was little better in the technological stakes back then. To its great credit it wasn't remarkably far behind most leading universities of the time. It just had more to deal with. As a national reserve library, it received a copy of every book and journal published in Britain. The library dated to the mid-15th century. The poor librarians had managed to computer-catalogue everything from 1993…back to 1982. For everything else, you'd have to go over to a pair of bookshelves that spanned the entirety of the Reference Room, which held about a hundred black catalogues, each double the size of a Manhattan phonebook, that listed five hundred years of acquisitions.

Here's how you'd get a book. With your coat, you'd stake a claim at one of the hundreds of numbered desks. Then you'd rummage in the catalogues. You'd note your desk number and each of your book requests on a separate slip of carbon paper, and hand your bushel to the front desk. Perhaps four hours later, you'd have your books – except for the one being used by someone else, over at Desk 245-D. So then you'd have to go over and introduce yourself, and negotiate a time-share agreement. Or hover by Desk 245-D, waiting for its occupant to get back from his cup of tea. Gnawing on your fingernails the whole time, as the clock ticked toward the Bodleian's 10:30pm closing, with 40 pages of research still to read before starting your essay due at 9am the next morning.

It was slow. It was inefficient. It was wonderful.

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I grew up on a dusty, rural road by the lower Colorado River in the Mojave Desert. The occasional ride to the nearest city, Las Vegas, was a two-hour special event. The smog, sprawling stores, slums, and soaring signs of the Strip were the best of urban life that I knew. To this day, visiting the big library at the University of Nevada feels like arriving at the Library of Alexandria and being anointed with knowledge, olive oil, and cool water from a half-functioning drinking fountain. I didn't understand what I was missing until one morning when, as a sixteen year old boy, I landed in Paris. My perspective on Las Vegas changed dramatically, as did my perspective on most things in my life.

There is something about cities that provokes people to make sense of their lives. In the extreme cases of Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, this meant establishing new schools at the edges of Athens. Cities have long provided spaces for public debate and economic exchange to happen in close proximity. If the denseness of the city suffocates the mind (and I am not claiming that it does), then a well cultivated garden placed just outside the city provides a good place from which to criticize what is happening inside.

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By Olivia Scheck

When a person is prone to making claims that are clearly inconsistent with facts about the world, we say that he is crazy. His brain has gone haywire, and he is no longer responsive to reason. However, when the person making a plainly unrealistic claim is otherwise rational, this simplistic explanation may seem particularly unsatisfactory. A person suffering from Capgras Delusion, for instance, may show no other signs of mental illness, and yet he insists that someone in his life (usually a close family member) has been replaced by an imposter. Similarly, the Cotard patient may seem perfectly normal, aside from his assertion that he is actually dead and rotting before your eyes. These fascinating cases of monothematic delusion have, despite their rarity, prompted a number of psychologists and philosophers to wonder, “What is the nature of delusion?”

Shaun Gallagher, a professor of philosophy at the University of Central Florida and the Editor ofPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, has contributed to this growing literature. In his article, “Delusional Realities,” to appear in a forthcoming issue ofPsychiatry as Cognitive Science, Gallagher suggests several inadequacies of previous accounts and offers his own characterization of delusion, which conceives of the delusional individual as existing in “multiple realities.” I had the opportunity to speak with Professor Gallagher last Thursday, following a talk he gave at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University; I offer excerpts from our discussion here.

First, though, a little background on existing theories and a brief synopsis of Gallagher’s Multiple Realities Hypothesis:

Traditionally, accounts of delusion have fallen into one of two categories: top-down or bottom-up. Top-down accounts suggest that delusions result from disturbances in high-level understanding. The philosopher and UC Berkeley professor, John Campbell, for example, invokes Wittgentein’s notion of a “framework proposition” – an axiom that is implicitly assumed and never answerable to empirical facts – to characterize delusion. On Campbell’s view, delusions arise when an erroneous belief – such as, “my mother is an imposter” – takes on this type of incontrovertible epistemological status.

On the other hand, according to bottom-up accounts, delusions are not caused by false beliefs, but rather false perceptions. The popular neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran gives a clear and entertaining bottom-up explanation for Capgras in his TED talk, “A Journey to the Center of Your Mind.” He believes that the Capgras patient’s assertion that his mother has been replaced by an imposter is, in fact, a rational metacognitive response to a peculiar perception. Specifically, Ramachandran proposes that the Capgras patient experiences an abnormal emotional response when looking at his mother, which results from a communicative disconnect between the area of the brain associated with face recognition and the its emotional center. Responding to this lack of affective response, the patient infers that his mother has been replaced by an imposter.

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