A repeat from 2008

From the list of unrealized projects

 

Flag, 2001-8, sewn and appliquéd in white nylon, 72"x48"

I made one—had one made—in 2001. It's in a box somewhere in Germany. I've toyed with the idea of doing the entire UN.

Years later, through a mutual friend,  I gave this one to David Hammons. As a one-off it fits his work more than mine; it's almost an imitation. I told her to tell him he could use it any way he wanted. I gave up all rights to it.

The thought of 193 white flags crumpled up on the floor would be less Hammons than me. Not great maybe, but not bad. I spent more time on the fabric project and that fell apart. I'm not much as a salesman. I never wanted to be, but sometimes I wanted the result. 

I've posted the first a few times over the years but not the second. It's an unscripted test, cut roughly for sound. I wanted to use it as the basis of a more fully realized pitch, but as it is, in a few words, it connects all of my arguments. At one point the director of... [not Tilton] told me to write up a proposal and offered to forward it to the curator and director of an Italian foundation. When he read the result he backed off. It was well written but informal, a friendly letter. His offer had been predicated on me knowing how to behave. He knew it was my role to be a supplicant, as he had been and is, and as the foundation director is to the people above him. I have a hard time with that. I'm a lousy actor.

The best short description I could think of was to ask them to imagine a collaboration between Jeff Wall and Christian Lacroix for the Paris Opera Ballet. I imagined the big one in the end as a muslin, sewn by the best seamstresses using every technique in the book. I wanted to make the whole thing a master class in the baroque, taking it seriously rather than merely indulging, taking having your cake and eating it as far as it could go. The show at Tilton was all part of the same big project. I'm a determinist. I knew someone was going to make a Phantom Thread within a few years. In the widest sense I've predicted everything.

Jeff Wall but also Wiseman and Robert Wilson, both of whom have worked with the Comédie-Française. Varieties of classicism. And now Wiseman has a tag.

Varieties of pathological self-loathing. Hal Foster. (updating) more for the book.

Some of these speculations can be tested against Life Style by Bruce Mau, a compendium of projects by the Canadian designer who came to prominence with Zone Magazine and Books in the late 1980s. With a distinguished series of publications in classical and vanguard philosophy and history, this imprint is also known for "Bruce Mau Design," whose luscious covers with sumptuous images in saturated colors and layered pages with inventive fonts in cinematic sequencing have greatly influenced North American publish- ing. Sometimes Mau seems to design the publications to be scanned, and despite his frequent denials in Life Style he tends to treat the book as a design contract more than an intellectual medium.

...Yet for all the Situationist lingo of contemporary designers like Mau, they don't "detourn" much; more than critics of spectacle, they are its surfers (which is indeed a favorite figure in their discourse), with "the status of the artist [and] the pay- check of the businessman." "So where does my work fit in?" Mau asks. "What is my relationship to this happy, smiling monster? Where is the freedom in this regime? Do I follow Timothy Leary and 'tune in, turn on, drop out?' What actions can I commit that not be absorbed? Can I outperform the system? Can I win?" Is he kidding?

The discussion of Bruce Mau takes up the last five pages of the essay, with no mention of Foster as the founding editor at Zone and still on the masthead, as one of four.

Found via an interview with Douglas Crimp.

The Buren piece turned out to be my take on the current animus toward design, for example in Hal Foster’s book Design and Crime (2002). I juxtaposed the stories of my two first jobs in New York. One was working at the Guggenheim, the other is something people in the art world would not know about: I worked very briefly for the fashion designer Charles James. He was the greatest American couturier in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. I was hired to help him organize his papers to write his memoirs, which he never did. If you were in the fashion world and I told you I worked for Charles James, your eyes would pop out of your head. It would be like saying I was working for Balenciaga or Christian Dior. Charles James was the American equivalent of a Balenciaga or a Dior, and in fact both of those designers revered James. He was also revered by people in the art world. My discussion of James focuses ultimately on his decor for a house that Phillip Johnson designed in 1949-50 for Jean and Dominique de Menil, the Houston art patrons (the Menil Collection is one of the great museums of modern art in America). Johnson designed a Miesian-style modernist house, but James created an over-the-top, queeny decor for the interior. It was so extreme that Johnson actually disavowed the house. So this chapter of my memoir is largely about decor and modernism, about what I call “the decorative unconscious” of modernism. 

So what I’m attempting to do is to use these stories about myself as a way of thinking about issues in contemporary art – with a particular emphasis on the queering of art discourse, in this case, unmasking the fear of the feminine, the fear of the effeminate, in high modernist discourse, which is now represented by the journal October.

Crimp and Foster are equally perverse. Crimp was one of the founding editors of October. He argues as a man in a black leather jacket, for "the feminine", citing Daniel Buren and his friendship with Yvonne Rainer, the puritan moralist of postmodern dance.

I saw Longo give the fascist salute playing with Rhys Chatham at one of Longo's openings at Metro Pictures in the mid 80s. Someone threw a beer at him and a few others booed. I remember a teacher and critic walking into a group show at Metro a couple of years before and rasping, "This is fascism!" and storming out.  It cleared my head. I knew he was right but I wasn't sure how.

Foster quotes Adolf Loos attacking Art Nouveau

Each room formed a symphony of colors, complete in itself. Walls, wall coverings, furniture, and materials were made to harmonize in the most artful ways. Each household item had its own specific place and was integrated with the others in the most wonderful combinations. The architect has forgotten nothing, absolutely nothing. Cigar ashtrays, cutlery, light switches - everything, everything was made by him.

This Gesamtkunstwerk does more than combine architecture, art, and craft; it commingles subject and object: "the individuality of the owner was expressed in every ornament, every form, every nail." For the Art Nouveau designer this is perfection: "You are complete!" he exults to the owner. But the owner is not so sure: this completion "taxed [his] brain." Rather than a sanctuary from modern stress, his Art Nouveau interior is another expression of it: "The happy man suddenly felt deeply, deeply unhappy ... He was precluded from all future living and striving, developing and desiring. He thought, this is what it means to learn to go about life with one's own corpse. Yes indeed. He is finished. He is complete!"

No mention of A Rebours, or why Viennese kitsch is death while Catalan Modernism is not.

Crimp is the one of the curators of MoMA PS1's Greater New York for 2015.  I'd thought he was the only curator but the other curators seem to be following his lead: it's an exercise in nostalgia for Crimp's heyday. The younger artists, born in the 80s, seem chosen for cribbing from his past, and the older ones are secondary figures if that, though a few are good to see. Recently I saw Robert Kushner interviewed, informally, as an old friend, by the man who walked out of the Metro show in disgust.

sympathy for the devil

"My older brother is in charge of finding lower income housing in London for people that need it and my sister is involved in supporting farmers' rights in Latin America. My younger brother is the political editor of The Guardian. He is very successful, very brilliant… And my two brothers and my sister… I think…they are very amused by what I do… they... they...  They're amused."

The above and the few minutes before and after remind you that everyone around her fears her except those that matter. Even her daughter laughs at her. The interview is shot at the breakfast room table; as Wintour is leaving it cuts to a shot of dog looking down at her from the top of the stairs. The newly introduced mood music continues in the next scene. At the office an assistant is talking about a facialist about to open a new boutique in London. Wintour's expression is dead. The scenes are cut to cut her for slumming.

I watched the documentary for this scene. It goes to the question of why a Brit or an American could never write The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and why Alexander McQueen was a costume designer not a couturier. To be in fashion and to take it seriously you have to begin by not taking anything seriously, then you can choose to take the frivolous seriously and even be a genius.

I went to a funeral for a minor, female, gay icon. The two people who spoke who brought tears to everyone's eyes were the among the most willfully shallow people in the room, but each in simple precise language described small moments on a beach or in a park with their late friend that could stand for anyone's perfect moments of happiness.

It's interesting the number of people in the fashion industry who say that fashion isn't art. Some fashion photographers say the same thing about their work. What would they say? "We're just pretending!" "We're just pretentious!"  Fashion photography is less pretentious than war photography. Fashion is art, but so is gardening. It's deeply problematic, but so is ballet. Ballet has maintained a level of seriousness because for all the glamour there's no money in it.

Grace Coddington

Anna saw the celebrity thing coming, way before everybody else jumped on that bandwagon, and whilst I hated it I'm afraid I have to admit she was right. You can't stay behind. You  know, you have to go charging ahead, and she did and the magazine is very successful because of it. And... whilst I wouldn't really care if I never saw another celebrity, obviously if a magazine doesn't sell I don't have a job so it would be silly... You've got to have something to put your work in otherwise it's not valid.

Coddington is from the other side of the UK class system, a convent girl from Wales, rising up into sophistication rather than down. She makes the most of it.

It's too bad Wiseman didn't make the film. It would've been much better.

A friend from London, on Facebook: "eros obscured. I'm loving it."

One shot, with some color work. It reminded me of a kind of technicolor British surrealism, Powell and Pressburger; color maybe a bit dark, and the blue sky still seems off. I didn't notice the relation of the sculpture, the McDonalds ad and the image of RuPaul. Did I see the sex first mostly through its cinematic references? But I caught the fleeting reflection of the London Eye and The Gherkin. Powell would approve.

Back in NY, my own provincial backwater.

Joan Didion is the new face of a French fashion house. I found the pic on the left, googling "Muslim chic".

Restating my points about Charlie Hebdo, art, culture, etc. Elaine Sciolino understands  [or start here] what pedants don't.

Didion is an empiricist, an observer of others' illusions, without ever denying her own capacity for having them. I'd made comments elsewhere last week referring to her piece on the Central Park Jogger, but I hadn't made the connection clear on this page.

Islamic extremism is a remaking of the past, and after Zionism and libertarianism one of the last of the radical/reactionary enthusiasms that were the products of Modernity. Laïcité is another, and like them is fading. Secularism is expanding, not by command but at its own pace.

updated a bit. a repeat from September. I have my reasons.


Two versions: iconic/hieratic, and narrative/demotic, with very different implications even if I'm using them to tell the same story. In the first, Christ remains above, fitting the logic of the earliest image. In the second, the notion of Christ above becomes narrativized/historicized, fitting the logic of the most recent. The second becomes also a predella to the first, the predella itself a form that faded away, or grew to supplant static iconography. The whole thing's very tricky; all that's left is to do it as an animation.

Christ Pantocrator, the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem (photo: Andrew Shiva)
Christ Blessing, Surrounded by a Donor Family, by an unknown German painter, 1560s-1580s. Metropolitan Museum, NY. Claude Lorraine, Landscape with Christ appearing to St. Mary Magdalene (Noli me Tangere) 1681, Städel Museum, Frankfurt.

Three images of Christ: Byzantine, 16th century Lutheran, 17th century Catholic; three images of the changing relations of Christ to God and Christ and God to man, and man to language, order and the world. Only the third could be said to represent a humanist sensibility. A basic lecture in art history and the history of culture. I could have gone on to Friedrich and then Turner, or after that to Rothko, by which point it all devolves to kitsch.

Philosophers discussing "difference" are like priests discussing democracy. They always want to drive the car, or they pretend that from their self-described superiority, they are already.
Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Meanings of Immanence [PDF]

In the chapter on ‘Immanence and the Historical Components of Expression’ in his 1968 book on Spinoza, Deleuze fashions a history of the philosophy of immanence, from the Neoplatonists through to Duns Scotus, that culminates in Spinoza. He presents the philosophical concept of immanence as a kind of ‘destination’ inherent in Christian theology. A secret tendency, says Deleuze, courses through the ruminations of theologians, a tendency that runs in the opposite direction to the negative theology of Meister Eckhart, which stresses the radical, unknowable transcendence of God, both in his nature and in his reasons for existence. It appears to originate in the Christian-inflected Neo-Platonism of third -and fourth- century Alexandria (Proclus and Dionysius the Areopagite). The Neo-Platonists did not see Platonism as a dualistic, ‘two worlds’ doctrine, but rather followed the lead of the Timaeus, where the pure forms or ‘Ideas’ are manifested or expressed hierarchically in material reality, with each being ‘participating’ more or less in the idea. Deleuze acknowledges the roots of the philosophical concept of immanence in neo-Platonism: “Everything may, it seems, be traced back to the Platonic problem of participation”. The “difficulties” that emerged were always the same: “The principle of participation was always sought by Plato on the side of what participates..., [but] if participation consists in being a part, it is difficult to see how what is participated in suffers no division or separation” (EPS 169; trans. modified). The primary task of the Neoplatonists was to “invert the problem”: “a principle that would make participation possible was sought, but one that would make it possible from the side of the participated itself. Neoplatonists no longer start from the characteristics of what participates (as multiple, sensible, and so on), asking by what violence participation becomes possible. They try rather to discover the internal principle and movement that grounds participation in the participated as such, from the side of the participated as such. Plotinus reproaches Plato for having seen participation from its lesser side” (EPS 170). According to Deleuze, Plotinus is already a kind of foreshadowing of the post-Kantian attempt to ground philosophy; he “subordinates ... imitation to a genesis or production” (ibid). His way of doing this, however, is through a theory of emanation. “True activity comes from what is participated in; what participates is only an effect, receiving what is given by its cause” (ibid). The problem is that the theory of emanation, once again as soon as it undergoes philosophical development, brings back the original problem of participation: how to conceive the principle of the self-differentiation of the One, the expression of the One in the material world.

Leiter quoting Raz in 2005

[C]ontemporary life, including philosophical life, is marked by its short span of attention. Within months of a new book by a respected author being published conferences about it are held, and special issues of journals dedicated to it are published, only to be superseded the following year by the new stars of that year. We think that we live in a dynamic and innovative age, whereas we live in a culture devoted to the ephemeral. In this intellectual climate much of our work is to try to stop people from forgetting today what everyone knew yesterday, and to reduce the intoxication with the latest word. A necessary task, but not one conducive to the longevity of the work. Perhaps in our hyperactive world the mode of progress in philosophy has changed. Perhaps it now lies less with the singular achievements of exceptional thinkers like the classics of modern philosophy: Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and others, and more in the cumulative products of hundreds of worker ants. This would suggest that the history of philosophy may assume the relation to philosophy that the history of physics has to physics. It would even make the ephemerality and forgetfulness of the age less regrettable. I doubt, however, that that can be the whole story. It is probably yet another manifestation of the lack of clear horizons in contemporary philosophical thought.

Leiter, and Raz, now. [Leiter's link is dead; the interview is here.]

3:AM: Have you changed your mind about anything fundamental to your philosophical position during your time as a philosopher or has it been more a process of deepening and further discovery within a rather settled framework of thought? 

JR: For various reasons this is for me a difficult question. One is that I am not terribly interested in the question, and perhaps partly as a result, am often surprised when people point out, with actual quotations, what I wrote on some points in years past. One way in which I am sometimes surprised when confronted with previous writings is that I clearly remember that I felt tentative about this issue or that, and meant to express a partial or a tentative view only, and lo and behold: that is not how I wrote. I sound very definite. Have I changed my mind, or am I one of those people who tend to sound confident when they are not? But there are other difficulties with the question. 

Sometimes a deepening of a view may go so deep as to change its character without actually changing its letter. Ever since my student days I was interested in the social character of the law. More recently I have written on the social character of value in general, and on the ways in which the characterization of these two forms of social dependence differ, and the ways in which they are nevertheless interdependent. The result is that once embedded in the wider context my old views on the social character of the law while unchanged may have acquired, in my mind, a different meaning. There is more to say, but it is probably of no interest to anyone but myself. Similar changes probably affected other of my views.

To the pure all things are pure. History is bunk. What an idiot.

Post-humanism, anti-humanism, pre-modern, anti-democratic, authoritarian... I can like or love the art - See Pollock and Kubrick and Gursky- but I can't stand its righteous defenders.

repeats from the NDPR

Overall, Seaford’s book is interesting, insightful, and combines expertise in ancient sources with careful reasoning. It certainly offers an invaluable discussion of the origins and cultural contexts of early Greek philosophy. But Seaford’s concern with the historical explanations of Greek philosophy suggests that his book may not appeal to scholars interested exclusively in the philosophical content and argumentation of Presocratic texts. The author often explicitly minimizes intellectual explanations of a philosopher’s views in favor of socio-political, religious, and psychological factors (219; 253–4; 273). In fact, he insists that comprehending the relevant cultural factors is necessary for understanding Presocratic metaphysics. We must, he maintains, avoid treating ancient philosophy as if it were created in a “historical vacuum” (10), even if this threatens most Presocratic scholars’ “control of their subject and the autonomy of ’doing philosophy’“

"The author often explicitly minimizes intellectual explanations of a philosopher’s views in favor of socio-political, religious, and psychological factors."

Like a theologian the last thing a philosopher wants to imagine is that his beliefs are manifestations of changes in language and culture: results and not causes. The last thing an avant-garde wants to imagine is that its works are what artworks have always been, not discoveries of possible futures but descriptions of the present. Historians understand how philosophers' dreams become dated.

His students called him, "the last humanist":

And finally: besides constituting a natural event in space and time, naturally indicating moods or feelings, besides conveying a conventional greeting the action of my acquaintance can reveal to an experienced observer all that goes to make up his "personality." This personality is conditioned by his being a man of the twentieth century, by his national. social and educational background by the previous history of his life and by his present surroundings but it is also distinguished by an individual manner of viewing things and reacting to the world which, if rationalized, would have to be called a philosophy. In the isolated action of a polite greeting all these factors do not manifest themselves comprehensively, but nevertheless symptomatically. We could not construct a mental portrait of the man on the basis of this single action. but only by coordinating a large number of similar observations and by interpreting them in connection with our general information as to his period. nationality, class. intellectual traditions and so forth. Yet all the qualities which this mental portrait would show explicitly are implicitly inherent in every single action; so that. conversely every single action can be interpreted in the light of those qualities. 

Deleuze's interest in folding, the fold and the baroque makes perfect sense. As a philosopher he has no option other than to be a conservative.

The decadence of mannerism presents as the self-narrativizing of a concrete idealism, attempting to inoculate itself against increasingly dominant narrative (relativist) culture. Mannerism is the model of aristocratic art in an age of incipient democracy. The baroque is the same model of conservatism in the age of a fully ascendant democracy: the age of theater.

update- and now this: Brian Leiter, SSRN, The Case Against Free Speech. Amazing.

3AM-Have you changed your mind about anything fundamental to your philosophical position during your time as a philosopher?
Raz -For various reasons this is for me a difficult question. One is that I am not terribly interested in the question.

more here for now

Two versions: iconic/hieratic and narrative/demotic, with very different implications even if I'm using them to tell the same story. In the first, Christ remains above, fitting the logic of the earliest image. In the second the notion of Christ above becomes narrativized/historicized, fitting the logic of the most recent. The second becomes also a predella to the first, the predella itself a form that faded away, or grew to supplant static iconography. The whole thing's very tricky; all that's left is to do it as an animation.

Christ Pantocrator, the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem (photo: Andrew Shiva)
Christ Blessing, Surrounded by a Donor Family, by an unknown German painter, 1560s-1580s. Metropolitan Museum, NY. Claude Lorraine, Landscape with Christ appearing to St. Mary Magdalene (Noli me Tangere) 1681, Städel Museum, Frankfurt.

Three images of Christ: Byzantine, 16th century Lutheran, 17th century Catholic; three images of the changing relations of Christ to God and Christ and God to man, and man to language, order and the world. Only the third could be said to represent a humanist sensibility. A basic lecture in art history and the history of culture. I could have gone on to Friedrich and then Turner, or after that to Rothko, by which point it all devolves to kitsch.

Philosophers discussing "difference" are like priests discussing democracy. They always want to drive the car, or they pretend that from their self-described superiority, they are already.
Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Meanings of Immanence [PDF]

In the chapter on ‘Immanence and the Historical Components of Expression’ in his 1968 book on Spinoza, Deleuze fashions a history of the philosophy of immanence, from the Neoplatonists through to Duns Scotus, that culminates in Spinoza. He presents the philosophical concept of immanence as a kind of ‘destination’ inherent in Christian theology. A secret tendency, says Deleuze, courses through the ruminations of theologians, a tendency that runs in the opposite direction to the negative theology of Meister Eckhart, which stresses the radical, unknowable transcendence of God, both in his nature and in his reasons for existence. It appears to originate in the Christian-inflected Neo-Platonism of third -and fourth- century Alexandria (Proclus and Dionysius the Areopagite). The Neo-Platonists did not see Platonism as a dualistic, ‘two worlds’ doctrine, but rather followed the lead of the Timaeus, where the pure forms or ‘Ideas’ are manifested or expressed hierarchically in material reality, with each being ‘participating’ more or less in the idea. Deleuze acknowledges the roots of the philosophical concept of immanence in neo-Platonism: “Everything may, it seems, be traced back to the Platonic problem of participation”. The “difficulties” that emerged were always the same: “The principle of participation was always sought by Plato on the side of what participates..., [but] if participation consists in being a part, it is difficult to see how what is participated in suffers no division or separation” (EPS 169; trans. modified). The primary task of the Neoplatonists was to “invert the problem”: “a principle that would make participation possible was sought, but one that would make it possible from the side of the participated itself. Neoplatonists no longer start from the characteristics of what participates (as multiple, sensible, and so on), asking by what violence participation becomes possible. They try rather to discover the internal principle and movement that grounds participation in the participated as such, from the side of the participated as such. Plotinus reproaches Plato for having seen participation from its lesser side” (EPS 170). According to Deleuze, Plotinus is already a kind of foreshadowing of the post-Kantian attempt to ground philosophy; he “subordinates ... imitation to a genesis or production” (ibid). His way of doing this, however, is through a theory of emanation. “True activity comes from what is participated in; what participates is only an effect, receiving what is given by its cause” (ibid). The problem is that the theory of emanation, once again as soon as it undergoes philosophical development, brings back the original problem of participation: how to conceive the principle of the self-differentiation of the One, the expression of the One in the material world.

Leiter quoting Raz in 2005

[C]ontemporary life, including philosophical life, is marked by its short span of attention. Within months of a new book by a respected author being published conferences about it are held, and special issues of journals dedicated to it are published, only to be superseded the following year by the new stars of that year. We think that we live in a dynamic and innovative age, whereas we live in a culture devoted to the ephemeral. In this intellectual climate much of our work is to try to stop people from forgetting today what everyone knew yesterday, and to reduce the intoxication with the latest word. A necessary task, but not one conducive to the longevity of the work. Perhaps in our hyperactive world the mode of progress in philosophy has changed. Perhaps it now lies less with the singular achievements of exceptional thinkers like the classics of modern philosophy: Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and others, and more in the cumulative products of hundreds of worker ants. This would suggest that the history of philosophy may assume the relation to philosophy that the history of physics has to physics. It would even make the ephemerality and forgetfulness of the age less regrettable. I doubt, however, that that can be the whole story. It is probably yet another manifestation of the lack of clear horizons in contemporary philosophical thought.

Leiter, and Raz, now. [Leiter's link is dead; the interview is here.]

3:AM: Have you changed your mind about anything fundamental to your philosophical position during your time as a philosopher or has it been more a process of deepening and further discovery within a rather settled framework of thought? 

JR: For various reasons this is for me a difficult question. One is that I am not terribly interested in the question, and perhaps partly as a result, am often surprised when people point out, with actual quotations, what I wrote on some points in years past. One way in which I am sometimes surprised when confronted with previous writings is that I clearly remember that I felt tentative about this issue or that, and meant to express a partial or a tentative view only, and lo and behold: that is not how I wrote. I sound very definite. Have I changed my mind, or am I one of those people who tend to sound confident when they are not? But there are other difficulties with the question. 

Sometimes a deepening of a view may go so deep as to change its character without actually changing its letter. Ever since my student days I was interested in the social character of the law. More recently I have written on the social character of value in general, and on the ways in which the characterization of these two forms of social dependence differ, and the ways in which they are nevertheless interdependent. The result is that once embedded in the wider context my old views on the social character of the law while unchanged may have acquired, in my mind, a different meaning. There is more to say, but it is probably of no interest to anyone but myself. Similar changes probably affected other of my views.

To the pure all things are pure. History is bunk. What an idiot.

Post-humanism, anti-humanism, pre-modern, anti-democratic, authoritarian... I can like or love the art - See Pollock and Kubrick and Gursky- but I can't stand its righteous defenders.

repeats from the NDPR

Overall, Seaford’s book is interesting, insightful, and combines expertise in ancient sources with careful reasoning. It certainly offers an invaluable discussion of the origins and cultural contexts of early Greek philosophy. But Seaford’s concern with the historical explanations of Greek philosophy suggests that his book may not appeal to scholars interested exclusively in the philosophical content and argumentation of Presocratic texts. The author often explicitly minimizes intellectual explanations of a philosopher’s views in favor of socio-political, religious, and psychological factors (219; 253–4; 273). In fact, he insists that comprehending the relevant cultural factors is necessary for understanding Presocratic metaphysics. We must, he maintains, avoid treating ancient philosophy as if it were created in a “historical vacuum” (10), even if this threatens most Presocratic scholars’ “control of their subject and the autonomy of ’doing philosophy’“

"The author often explicitly minimizes intellectual explanations of a philosopher’s views in favor of socio-political, religious, and psychological factors."

Like a theologian the last thing a philosopher wants to imagine is that his beliefs are manifestations of changes in language and culture: results and not causes. The last thing an avant-garde wants to imagine is that its works are what artworks have always been, not discoveries of possible futures but descriptions of the present. Historians understand how philosophers' dreams become dated.

His students called him, "the last humanist":

And finally: besides constituting a natural event in space and time, naturally indicating moods or feelings, besides conveying a conventional greeting the action of my acquaintance can reveal to an experienced observer all that goes to make up his "personality." This personality is conditioned by his being a man of the twentieth century, by his national. social and educational background by the previous history of his life and by his present surroundings but it is also distinguished by an individual manner of viewing things and reacting to the world which, if rationalized, would have to be called a philosophy. In the isolated action of a polite greeting all these factors do not manifest themselves comprehensively, but nevertheless symptomatically. We could not construct a mental portrait of the man on the basis of this single action. but only by coordinating a large number of similar observations and by interpreting them in connection with our general information as to his period. nationality, class. intellectual traditions and so forth. Yet all the qualities which this mental portrait would show explicitly are implicitly inherent in every single action; so that. conversely every single action can be interpreted in the light of those qualities. 

Deleuze's interest in folding, the fold and the baroque makes perfect sense. As a philosopher he has no option other than to be a conservative.

The decadence of mannerism presents as the self-narrativizing of a concrete idealism, attempting to inoculate itself against increasingly dominant narrative (relativist) culture. Mannerism is the model of aristocratic art in an age of incipient democracy. The baroque is the same model of conservatism in the age of a fully ascendant democracy: the age of theater.

update- and now this: Brian Leiter, SSRN, The Case Against Free Speech. Amazing.

3AM-Have you changed your mind about anything fundamental to your philosophical position during your time as a philosopher?
Raz -For various reasons this is for me a difficult question. One is that I am not terribly interested in the question.

more here for now

note taking. two recent comments (mine) @ the NYRB.

The links added here

Andrew Butterfield Trapped in Vienna

"The place was a cockpit of magnificent art and appalling kitsch, glutted with waltzes, whipped cream, chocolate cake and high culture. The grimmer the political climate grew, the more relentlessly frivolous the city became. “In Berlin”, remarked the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, “things are serious but not hopeless. In Vienna they are hopeless but not serious.” Terry Eagleton 

But there was no magnificent art; all of it was over-designed or aggressively -desperately- the opposite. The whole culture was marked by a manic passivity, the most extreme example of a Mannerist culture imaginable. The author describes the show as focusing the lesser figures of the scene but here are no major artists from fin de siècle Vienna. The relevant theme is less the emptiness of art than its inadequacy: the inadequacy of the merely beautiful in the face of the intelligent, and the result is like makeup on a corpse. 

It's high time we come to terms with the decadence at the heart of a lot of Modernism, Schoenberg and Adorno included. 

Reading Fintan O'Toole on Pinter I thought of Brecht, and then was almost ashamed I hadn't seen the obvious. We still have a lot to learn about the recent past.

Tim Parks on the academy, Literature and Bureaucracy

The humanities, or humanist culture, as practiced by people who write and read books, essays, articles, stories, fiction and non-fiction, who make movies, have an ambiguous relation to bureaucracy; academies are bureaucratic by definition. Librarians aren't necessarily humanists, and librarians have become the model, from Borges to Franco Moretti. 

The academy has devolved into a self-contained, self-supporting ghetto, promoting pseudoscience in imitation of the real thing. Bureaucracy has become its ethos, formal integrity as parody. I'm still trying to figure why decades after the collapse of the dreams of a science of history we still give degrees in the science of politics. But history, economics, and politics are not science, and WVO Quine is to philosophy what Milton Babbitt is to music. The end of Modernism is the waning of the Middle Ages as farce. 

Faith in the primacy of theory requires the illusion of control. But what historian, novelist or playwright writes from the primacy of theory? What artist we still look at began with anything other than the primacy of observation and then practice? The contemporary academy follows the assumption that Sophocles read Aristotle. 

Art begins with observation, but the term now is "creative". The academy treats most of humanity as simple objects of study, things to be graphed, while fostering a culture for its own predicted on their own freedom. That's the worst of it. 

Tim Parks is a translator, in practice a transliterator. There's a respected argument in contemporary philosophy that claims that if you can't translate something from one language to another then there's nothing to translate. Words are treated like numbers in an equation. It's an example of following the requirements of formal rigor to the point of it being intellectually useless.
It's scholastic anti-intellecualism. And that's where where the academy is at.

Butterfield's an old-school scholar-dealer  He was the player behind the sale the the Bernini Modello. He was also involved in bringing Verrocchio's  Christ and St. Thomas to the Met, or at least he wrote the catalogue.  I talked to him at Salander and had a bit of fun complaining that the curators had placed the sculpture on a low platform so that I had to get on my knees to see it as it was designed. At it's proper height, moving to the left side of the pair, your eye-line follows Thomas' right forearm like the view behind an arrow of its target. And the image that results is openly sexual. At the Met you were able to see more of the piece but made it harder to read, so I ended up crawling around the statue on my knees, looking up.  I asked him why they'd done it. "Democracy?" His eyes widened. "Oh… no!" His secretary laughed.

Stand a little more to the left of where the first photograph was taken and the folds in the fabric on Thomas' forearm seem to spiral inwards. You can see the foreshortening, but from the right angle the tapering effect becomes dynamic; all of the forms swirl around the central image of the wound. The second photograph shows more the intimacy of the relations of the two figures, something that might be harder to see from far away.

Niemeyer
Le Corbusier: "Oscar, what you are doing is baroque. But it's very well done."

Yes.

The Modello for the Fountain of the Moor was "rediscovered" when its owners chose to sell it. It came on the market in 2002, was bought at auction by Salander and sold to the Kimball (for 18 million) in 2003.

It's back in NY for a few months. Bernini: Sculpting in Clay, at the Met.


I've added a new tag for Bernini and I've also tagged this post as "fabric and form", for obvious reasons.

When I wrote this I'd forgotten that by 2004 Kimmelman had changed his tune.

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Richard Avedon in the NY Times. Michael Kimmelman 1994

Has there been an exhibition that generated more noise before it opened than the Richard Avedon show that is now at the Whitney Museum of American Art? Not this season, anyway.

First came the collective groan after David A. Ross, newly installed as the museum's director, proposed it as one of the largest retrospectives ever contemplated at the Whitney. Those who knew that Mr. Ross had enjoyed successes with two previous Avedon exhibitions at museums he headed, in Berkeley, Calif., and Boston, weren't surprised. But more than a few people were taken aback that his first move at an institution dogged by charges of trendiness was a gigantic display of the work of a master of fashion photography and celebrity portraiture. Since then, despite being scaled back, the show has caused an alarming buzz around the museum, like an approaching V-1.

...Ms. Livingston seems to have gone out of her way to comply with Mr. Avedon's desire that he be taken seriously as an artist, and not thought of as a fashion photographer: out of 200 photographs in the retrospective, 10 are fashion shots. If you expect Dovima and the elephants at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris, forget it. Forget Sunny Harnett leaning over the roulette wheel at the casino at Le Touquet. I don't know whether the closer analogy is a Picasso retrospective without Cubism or a Woody Allen one without the comedies, but in either case, the disservice is to Mr. Avedon.

Because his fashion photographs are great, and the rest rarely are, despite their technical brilliance. The asylum inmates and celebrities made to look like them, the drifters from the American West and American muck-a-mucks in South Vietnam, the passengers on the Third Avenue El and revelers at the Brandenburg Gate are here in numbers that only expose Mr. Avedon's limitations. If all portraits are on some level self-portraits, as he likes to say, that may explain why Henry Miller, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Groucho Marx resemble one another in his photographs. But it doesn't make their portraits compelling....

If Mr. Avedon reminds me of any artist, it is Giovanni Boldini,... 

Roberta Smith in 2009

Five years after Richard Avedon’s death at 81 the International Center of Photography is setting the record straight. Avedon was indeed a great artist, and his fashion photographs are his greatest work.

This may not be quite the way Avedon wanted it. His own pursuit of greatness often involved playing down the half-century of fashion magazine work he did for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue as little more than a day job and emphasizing his portraiture, which he produced voluminously. At least that’s how it seemed with his last big New York retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1994; that 50-year survey included, shockingly, fewer than a dozen examples of the fashion work.

Holland Cotter 2012

If you were reasonably sentient in the 1960s and early ’70s, as some of us were some of the time, you’ll remember how far beyond strange those years were. And all of their surrealness comes back in this knockout show of Richard Avedon’s colossal photomurals at Gagosian.

See also: Alexander McQueen, and the fading of the distinction between art and style.

Kimmelman's case against sculpture .

BERLIN — Sometimes on a whim I stop into the Bode Museum here to commune with a tiny clay sculpture of John the Baptist.

It’s in a corner of a nearly always empty room, a bone-white bust, pretty and as androgynous as mid-1970s Berlin-addled David Bowie. The saint’s upturned eyes glow in the hard light through tall windows. Attributed to the 15th-century Luccan artist Matteo Civitali, the sculpture is all exquisite ecstasy and languor.

...Is it me, or do we seem to have a problem with sculpture today? I don’t mean contemporary sculpture, whose fashionable stars (see Koons, Murakami et alia) pander to our appetite for spectacle and whatever’s new. I don’t mean ancient or even non-Western sculpture, either. I mean traditional European sculpture — celebrities like Bernini and Rodin aside — and American sculpture, too: the enormous universe of stuff we come across in churches and parks, at memorials and in museums like the Bode. The stuff Barnett Newman, the Abstract Expressionist painter, notoriously derided as objects we bump into when backing up to look at a painting.

His first examples are minor theatricalized works, melodramatic and near kitsch: almost contemporary.

...In an age of special effects, we may also simply no longer know how to feel awe at the sight of sculptured faces by the German genius Tilman Riemenschneider or before a bronze statue by Donatello. We can’t see past the raw materiality and subject matter. Never mind that Donatello may have been the greatest creative genius until Picasso; he long ago got lapped in the public’s imagination by Madame Tussaud, who has given way to “Avatar” in 3-D and Alexander McQueen’s trippy costumed mannequins.

McQueen/Riemenschneider
The people who lined up at the Met are fond enough of melodrama, but what they see in McQueen is both the indulgence and the attempt to rise above it. People are looking for order where they can recognize it. Kimmelman's tastes are both less extreme and more earnest than those of McQueen's audience, but they aren't much different. His preferred choice of works, with exceptions, are defined by just those elements that opponents of sculpture claim as defining all of it.

Also the language regarding Donatello and Picasso is absurd.

For an earlier discussion of sensibilities in common (and McQueen) go here, or click on the tags below.

I discussed Holland Cotter's review of the Alexander McQueen Show here, and McQueen in relation to the Bellini installation at the Frick (also Bronzino). Now Cotter has written a review of the Bellini, and it's interesting to compare them.
On McQueen:

In galleries that combine the look of baronial halls and meat lockers, clothes come at you like electrical zaps: a blouse threaded with worms, a coat sprouting horns, shoes that devour feet. A pert little jacket is printed with a crucifixion scene; the hair on a full-length hair shirt is carefully waved and combed; a corset has a cast-metal animal spine curling out from behind.

And everywhere there are arresting delicacies. The yellow-green beadwork is so fine it looks as soft as moss. Floral-patterned lace has been cut up, flower by flower, then stitched together again, but only partially, to give a dress the illusion of having being torn.

On Bellini, more specifically on St. Francis:

He was, in life, exceptional: a spiritual power generator, a social lightning rod, and a charmer. He was born in the Umbrian hill town of Assisi around 1181, the son of a rich cloth merchant. He had poetic tastes and immersed himself in romantic tales of chivalry. By temperament he was ardent, wired, prone to emotional extremes.

...He could be impossibly self-depriving; people had to persuade him to eat, wear shoes. But he was correspondingly self-giving. You needed a bandage, a pep-talk, a prayer, a kiss? Francis was your man. If he found a hurt bird he nursed it back to health; if he met a wolf with a mean streak, he’d say, “Watch your mouth,” and give it a pat.

Some people thought he’s a lunatic, this guy who suddenly bursts into song, in the middle of nowhere, for no reason, as if he was plugged into an iPod:

“Praised be You, my Lord, with all Your creatures, Especially Sir Brother Sun, Who is the day and through whom You give us light.”

And he’d go on and on this way, about Sister Moon, and Brother Wind, and Sister Water — “very useful and humble and precious and chaste” — and Brother Fire, and Sister Death.

Maybe it was all a performance, a theatrical method of preaching and teaching. But he approached life in a genuinely countercultural way. On the verge of the great age of Humanism, he was an un-Humanist, in the sense that he didn’t hold Man up as the crown of creation. He considered all beings, from bees to bears to people, equally reverence worthy. He was like the Buddha in this. Or maybe the Buddha was Francis in an earlier life.

Though I didn't say anything specific, in the earlier posts I didn't give Cotter the credit he deserves. I read the decadence and anti-Humanism (post-humanism to what Cotter refers to as "un-Humanism" of St. Francis) but missed the commentary in his closing paragraphs on McQueen.

...you have to ask critical questions. The chief problem with the fashion-as-art fad of the 1990s was precisely that it didn’t ask them.

To take two examples, for its 1997 exhibition “The Warhol Look: Glamour Style Fashion,” the Whitney Museum did little more than fill a floor with Warhol paintings, back issues of Interview and a Diana Vreeland tape and basically said: Let’s celebrate.

Two years later the Guggenheim — though it denies this — effectively rented its Manhattan premises to Giorgio Armani for his retrospective. (Such deals are now the norm, and the Met is forthright about stating that most of the money for the McQueen retrospective comes from the fashion house called Alexander McQueen.) My point is: If you’re going to deal with fashion as art, treat it as art, bring to it the distanced evaluative thinking, including social and political thinking, that scholars routinely apply to art.

Such an approach is standard in exhibition catalogs that accompany most Met shows, but not in the McQueen catalog, which, beautiful though it is, is heavy on pictures, skimpy on text.

To be fair, the show and the book were both assembled in record time during the year following Mr. McQueen’s shockingly sudden death. Suffice it to say that future researchers will want to take him out of the all-purpose tent of Romanticism and place him firmly in the cultural milieu he shared with artists like Damien Hirst, Matthew Barney and Leigh Bowery, not to mention Lady Gaga, with her cutlet couture.

And why not compare him, as a politically minded designer, with one from an earlier generation, Rudi Gernreich. They make an instructive pair. Mr. McQueen deserves this detailed accounting.

McQueen belongs with Hirst and Bowery. How long any of them will be remembered is another question.

That a critic should associate Humanism more with the Enlightenment than the Renaissance documents the fine arts' self-reported relation to philosophy as opposed to history, and that's part and parcel with the mannerism his writing describes: from pre-Humanism to post-Humanism, the young saint like the fashion designer, "ardent, wired, prone to emotional extremes."

The Enlightenment Cotter would call Humanist derived its rhetorical force from the sciences, and was anti-historical. High art (and expensive craft) derived authority from the ideal Church and the Monarchy, and their defenders if they could made the logical switch to the idealism of science, philosophy, and/or revolution. Couturiers had fewer options. The complexity of 19th century art, and of 'fine' art up to the present is the complexity of forms torn between their aristocratic heritage and bourgeois reality. McQueen, Cotter, the curators at the Frick and at the the Met all understand this, without thinking, as does Michael Kimmelman, writing about Manet. It would be better if they all thought about it a little more.

The show's been up for a bit, but they've been tweaking it. The press release went out yesterday. Co-curator with J.T., for the gallery.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
FABRIC AS FORM at Tilton Gallery
8 East 76th Street, New York, NY 10021
May 26 – July 9, 2011

The depiction of fabric, of folds, of draped cloth crosses the barriers of style, time, and continents. From ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, 4th century Ganhara Indian sculpture and 6th century Khmer art, though European Middle Age illuminations, Romanesque and Gothic sculpture, to Rubens, Titian, Durer, Delacroix, Gainsborough, Sargent, and Rodin, the painterly illusion and sculptural manifestation of draped fabric has clothed figures, adorned scenes and infused art with movement and abstract form. The grand sweeps of form inspired by what fabric used to do informs contemporary art as well, as abstract metaphor in the metal folds of Lynda Benglis sculpture, the draped mixed media works by Senga Nengudi and in the folded metal sculpture of John Chamberlain. Folds of actual cloth also appear in works that incorporate fabric by David Hammons and Richard Tuttle, and in the sweeping cloth of installations by younger artists such as India Lawrence, Scott Anderson and Martha Tuttle. Contemporary photographs by Bill Jacobson, James Welling and Barbara Morgan take up where Japanese prints and Renaissance etchings left off to bring movement in the form of cloth to their images, whether realistic or essentially abstract.

An historical stylistic element gives sway to visual form, and the story of its use changes with every era and culture. Fabric as Form brushes the surface of this subject and presents a visual gallop through the ages to sample the different approaches, metaphorical uses, and simply, visual examples of delight. Tilton Gallery invites you to an exhibition that allows your eye to roam. Fabric defines form. Form defines fabric. Historical meaning and formal analysis both define and defy the visual reality of each work of art.

Included are works by:

Scott Andresen, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, John Chamberlain, Henri Pierre Danloux, Honoré Daumier, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Albrecht Dürer, Nicolas Edelnick, Madame Gres, Zaha Hadid, David Hammons, Wenzel Hollar, Bill Jacobson, Christoffel Jegher, Titus Kaphar, Torii Kiyomasu I, India Lawrence, Issey Miyake, Barbara Morgan, Senga Nengudi, Brie Ruais, Katsukawa Shuncho, Martha Tuttle, Richard Tuttle, Rembrandt van Rijn, James Welling, Charles White.

The Met is swamped with viewers for the Alexander McQueen show. The roped-in waiting line runs along the main corridor of the 19th Century painting galleries, which because it's filled now with people waiting more than looking, is as loud as the main hall of the building.

Here's the crossover marketing in action.

I won't repeat my argument. The show isn't very interesting and the installation's vulgar, but that's not to diminish its significance or the significance of the public response.

At the same time, the Frick has rehung Giovanni Bellini's St. Francis in the Desert, after sending it to the Met for analysis, in a temporary installation in the Oval Room. The Bellini, "is a masterpiece of spiritual poetry that has enthralled generations of visitors to The Frick Collection," but the curators, in a move as perverse as anything in the McQueen show, have added two more Van Dyck's to the others that usually flank the central staging area, surrounding and dwarfing St Francis with what are now Baroque giants, almost pagan gods, depicted in monuments to earthly luxury and pomp.


It's a great room and for the same reasons the public are lining up a few blocks away at the Met. The themes are identical, but handled here on a much higher level by curators of or near the same generation as McQueen and the designers of his retrospective. 

I called the curatorial department at the Frick to compliment them. The woman on the phone burst out laughing and she thanked me.

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previously, on McQueen et al., and jumping forward again on McQueen and Bellini.

The show at Tilton is up.

Fabric as Form
Jack Tilton Gallery
8 East 76th St

I'm co-curator: nothing by me in it. But it began for me years ago, so I may as well link to the history.

Or use the tags below.

Quine: "To be is to be the value of a bound variable."
I can't think of a better example of mid-century Mannerism.

Rereading Panofsky's What is Baroque? the passages on Bronzino.

Christ at the Orgy

The paragraphs below were written by an art critic not a style writer, and did not appear in the style section but in the section now named Art & Design.

A hairstylist friend of mine used to place leather bondage gear in her downtown shop window to scare off what she called “the wrong element,” meaning anyone wanting a nice wash and trim. She wanted to be sure that if you sat in her chair, you were ready to accept whatever look she decided on for you, because it would change the way you saw yourself in the world. That was the deal.

“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a survey of the career of the British fashion designer who died last year, a suicide at 40, is similarly about control and change. The show, or rather what’s in it, is a button-pushing marvel: ethereal and gross, graceful and utterly manipulative, and poised on a line where fashion turns into something else.

40 years ago the explicit collapsing of categories would have been unthinkable. In 1994 when the New Yorker published an issue of articles on the fashion scene its writers were accused of slumming.*


Frank Gehry: "One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini."


Descartes: "History is like foreign travel. It broadens the mind, but it does not deepen it."
Eric Hobsbawm

Why brilliant fashion designers, a notoriously non-analytic breed, sometimes succeed in anticipating the shape of things to come better than professional predictors, is one of the most obscure questions in history; and for the historian of culture, one of the most central.

Contra Descartes, as I've said a thousand times, language is change. "The primacy of the theoretical" will become always the primacy of fashion. The dream of a "scientific philosophy" is just that.
____

I saw the show this afternoon.
McQueen wasn't a couturier; he was a costume designer, and that gives both the credit they deserve. But as with almost everything put on by the Costume Institute the installation turns the Met into Madame Tussaud's. It's more vulgar—bought and paid for—than the Guggenheim at its worst.

And I'll say again that the arts that cater only to the tastes of the various pseudo-aristocracies under capitalism lend themselves easily to kitsch. "Live the fantasy" is a tag-line in the fashion world, but whether the fantasy is of beauty and eternal youth or intellectual significance, the basic structure is identical. And again there's something about Americans and the British and their relationship to France. A popular definition of kitsch is to be "more Catholic than the Pope", and McQueen's work—more French than the French—is as desperately overdetermined as an english language discussion of French theory. What's interesting about Gehry, and I've said this before too, is that his interest in Bernini doesn't originate in the academy. He sees the old world with fresh eyes.

Academics tend to forget that invention begins with observation and that erudition is only a tool. The librarian is never the best model for intellectual life.
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* The issue is now on the web. One article in particular caused a bit of a stir. Below are the last paragraphs of Hilton Als' profile of Andre Leon Talley

“Look, LouLou!” Talley shouted. “The color of this ring is divine, no? Just like the stone you gave me!”

“What?” LouLou de La Falaise asked, barely disguising her boredom.

“This ring, child. Just like the stone you gave me, no?”

LouLou de La Falaise did not respond. She nodded toward Roxanne Lowitt, and Lowitt instructed her to stand behind Maxime de La Falaise and Talley. LouLou de La Falaise said, “I will stand there only if André tries not to look like such a nigger dandy.”

Several people laughed, loudly. None louder than André Leon Talley. But it seemed to me that a couple of things happened before he started laughing: he shuttered his eyes, his grin grew larger, and his back went rigid, as he saw his belief in the durability of glamour and allure shatter before him in a million glistening bits. Talley attempted to pick those pieces up. He sighed, then stood and said, “Come on, children. Let’s see something. Let’s visit the house of Galliano.”

More on McQueen, and Holland Cotter, and Bellini at the Frick.

Zaha Hadid Pavilion installation time lapse