I want to think about how abstraction can relate to or inform or respond to the social.
Continue reading “the social and abstraction”Category: Art
on skepticism, art, and the museum in the 21st century
Image: Barbara Kruger’s rendering of exhibition entryway at the Art Institute of Chicago, Digital image courtesy of the artist/Source photo courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
Kruger’s not so retrospective retrospective, currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, affords an opportunity to reconsider why it is we go to museums and what we do when we get there.
Continue reading “on skepticism, art, and the museum in the 21st century”on the nearly nothing and the persistence of composition
Image: Robert Ryman, Twin, 1966, oil on canvas. Museum of Modenr Art, New York.
Work in which seemingly nothing happens is almost always more interesting than work in which a great deal happens. Actually, maybe that’s not exactly it.
Continue reading “on the nearly nothing and the persistence of composition”on sound, installation, and improvisation
“…if the sensible dominant of a performance is visual, then the aural emerges as that which is given in its fullest possibility by the visual…”
Continue reading “on sound, installation, and improvisation”on mental vs manual labor in the arts
Sophia Al-Maria describes art, and specifically the process of putting together an exhibition as radically incomplete and inherently experimental
the generosity of world-building
World-building is a term most often associated with fantasy, both film and literature, and gaming. Continue reading “the generosity of world-building”
on abstraction and hauntology
(Takashi Murakmi, Infinity, Mixed Media, 2008).
Just riffing here…
on media, image poverty, and affect
Marshall McLuhan’s hot and cold media bother me.
on photography, false promises, and melancholy
Francesca Woodman, House #3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976
“I would argue that the compulsion of the narrative derives its interpretive animation from the real threat of loss,” Michael Ann Holly writes in her book The Melancholy Art; whether as an art historian you are acting the detective solving the mystery of a painting, or the philosopher attempting to articulate an affective response to a work of art, the motivation for the work remains the same: the experience of a loss.
Continue reading “on photography, false promises, and melancholy”
on notes on the death of culture
The spectacle is the effective dictatorship of illusion in modern society. – Guy Debord Continue reading “on notes on the death of culture”