For the past two weeks and the next 3.5 months, I will be living at my library carrel and reading a lot of books/articles (like around 200) in preparation for my PhD exams in late April. While it’s difficult to tell whether this will inspire me to write or (like last semester) suck every molecule of art writing I have in my soul out and, therefore, leave me lifeless (or artless) by the end of the day, I did come across some great bits today. In no particular order:
1. In his famous 1972 essay “Other Criteria,” Leo Steinberg (once a professor in my own department) critiques Greenberg’s campaign for the progression of art toward abstraction by arguing for a long-recognized distinction between representational art and reality. In the process, Steinberg poses the following thinly veiled criticism of those ignorant enough not to draw such a distinction:
“Now, there can be no doubt that there are, and that there have always been, people who look at realistic images as through they were real—but what kind of people? On August 13, 1971, he cover of Life magazine featured a nude Eve by Albrecht Dürer side by side with the photograph of a modern young women in dungarees. In the weeks following, close to 3,000 Middle American readers canceled their subscription to Life, protesting the shamelessness of the nude. Many took her for real and through she has stripped for the photographer. But these people, whatever their moral standards, are not the definers of art.”
2. The marxist-inspired Lettrist International (later known as the Situationists) named their journal Potlatch (1954-57) after a type of native ceremony that consists (at least in their 1950s pop French anthropologist version) of giving away one’s possessions and wealth.
3. The Watts Towers. For west coasters, this will certainly be old news, but for me, it was new. Constructed over three decades by immigrant laborer Simon Rodia from bits of glass, tiles, concrete, and detritus, the Watts Towers in south central L.A. are a monument (now marked as a historical one) to assemblage, which is, in my mind, the single most important mode of production with aesthetic and philosophical consequences of the twentieth century.
