Philip Guston: Small Oils on Panel 1969-1973
McKee Gallery, NYC
November 5 – December 31, 2009
[TNR] Even more than is the case with any building, comprehending one by Zumthor requires you to be there. Worlds unto themselves, Zumthor’s buildings change your world. Pictures cannot show that. This man understands the difference between a building and a photograph, and he designs the former, not the latter.
Zumthor is known to be uncompromising when it comes to his designs, and he exhibits his work rarely. He also tries to maintain an ethical orientation to design and practice, working mainly on public and institutional projects, and repeatedly turning down lucrative offers from developers and private clients. This reluctance to engage in many of the profession’s customary practices and established rituals of self-promotion, combined with his contemplative and exacting approach to design and construction (which takes time and money), explains the lamentable scarcity of his realized projects, and why his work is not better known. Unlike most Pritzker winners, the list of Zumthor’s completed buildings is short, and the list of his unbuilt projects is long. (read)
[Salon] In July 1972, musician Johnny Cash sat opposite President Richard Nixon in the White House’s Blue Room. As a horde of media huddled a few feet away, the country music superstar had come to discuss prison reform with the self-anointed leader of America’s “silent majority.” “Johnny, would you be willing to play a few songs for us,” Nixon asked Cash. “I like Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie From Muskogee’ and Guy Drake’s ‘Welfare Cadillac.’” The architect of the GOP’s Southern strategy was asking for two famous expressions of white working-class resentment.
“I don’t know those songs,” replied Cash, “but I got a few of my own I can play for you.” Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of “Okie From Muskogee.” With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind. Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer’s rendition of the explicitly antiwar “What Is Truth?” and “Man in Black” (“Each week we lose a hundred fine young men”) and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash’s fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself — a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend. (read)
[Guardian] “I am worn out. I cannot go on,” [Eliot] lamented a little histrionically as early as March 1923, but he still had a long way to go on. February 1925 found him “at the blackest moment of my life”, but in reality there were blacker moments still to come. “So life is simply from minute to minute of horror,” he wrote to Virginia Woolf. (read reviews of The Letters of TS Eliot Vol. 2 1923-1925 in the Guardian or TLS)
[TLS] Here is Arthur Schnitzler evoking his impression of a reading Hofmannsthal gave in 1892, at the age of eighteen: “After a few minutes we riveted our attention on him, and exchanged astonished, almost frightened glances. We had never heard such verses of perfection, such faultless plasticity, such musical feeling, from any living being, nor had we thought them possible after Goethe. But more wondrous than this unique mastery of form (which has never since been achieved in the German language) was his knowledge of the world, which could only have come from a magical intuition in a youth whose days were spent sitting on the school bench.” (read)
[Smithsonian] Ansel Adams never made up his mind about color photography. Long before his death in 1984 at age 82, he foresaw that this “beguiling medium” might one day replace his cherished black and white. In notes tentatively dated to 1949, he observed that “color photography is rapidly becoming of major importance.”
Yet he once likened working in color to playing an out-of-tune piano. America’s regnant Western landscape photographer tried to control every step of picture-making, but for much of his lifetime too many stages of the color process were out of his hands. Kodachrome—the first mass-market color film, introduced in 1935—was so complicated that even Adams, a darkroom wizard, had to rely on labs to develop it. Color printing was a crapshoot in the 1940s and ’50s. Reproductions in magazines and books could be garish or out of register. Before the 1960s, black-and-white film often actually yielded subtler, less exaggerated pictures of reality. [...]
“I can get—for me—a far greater sense of ‘color’ through a well-planned and executed black-and-white image than I have ever achieved with color photography,” he wrote in 1967. For Adams, who could translate sunlight’s blinding spectrum into binary code perhaps more acutely than anyone before or since, there was an “infinite scale of values” in monochrome. Color was mere reality, the lumpy world given for everyone to look at, before artists began the difficult and honorable job of trying to perfect it in shades of gray. (read)
[LRB] [In his book Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics Galen] Strawson contends, however, that this natural belief in the persistence of the self is probably an illusion. To begin with, if the self is a single mental thing, how can it persist across temporal gaps in consciousness? If, as most of us assume, we pass part of each night in dreamless sleep, what is it, apart from the human being, that loses consciousness late at night and regains it in the morning? How can there be a mental subject, persisting over such an interval, whose identity over time makes it the case that the subject who hears the alarm clock go off is the same one who saw the late news on television the night before? Strawson holds that the mere physical persistence of the brain is not enough. He agrees with Descartes’s surprising claim that the existence of the mind is inseparable from consciousness – that the self is always conscious. Strawson interprets this, plausibly, not as the claim that the self is a type of persisting substance that, in addition to its other properties, is necessarily also conscious, but rather that the self is nothing but persisting, unified consciousness. In Descartes’s vocabulary, its essence is thinking, and nothing else. This means that the persistence of the self over time must be mental persistence, and that it demands a specifically mental unity, a diachronic unity analogous to the synchronic mental unity of the subject of experience at any one time. This cannot be supplied either by the brain or by the existence of an immaterial soul, conceived as a persisting substratum in which experience inheres.
This leads Strawson to radical conclusions. Not only does the self not persist across gaps in consciousness; it also doesn’t persist across the shifts in the content of consciousness that occur constantly in the course of waking life. One might think that this attack on diachronic identity conflicts with the fact that consciousness always involves time. There can be no experience that lasts no time at all, and the content of any experience is always what is going on in some interval of subjective time – the hearing of a word, the sight of an oncoming bus, the feel of a blast of cold wind. In fact, the nature of the short temporal interval that is experientially present to consciousness at each moment – the specious present, as it is called – is one of the most puzzling things about the experience of time. But while Strawson grants that the self has some persistence over time in virtue of this diachronic unity of moment-to-moment experience, he believes the requisite mental unity does not extend very far. (read review)
Feeling in the moments of deathlike existence: all people are worthy of love.
Awakening you feel the world’s bitterness; in it is all your unresolved guilt;
your poem an imperfect atonement.
Georg Trakl, 1914
“I am not afraid to say that music’s message should be taken seriously. And I will defend that message because it has more essence than it is given credit for. We are seeing a great hollowing out: a hollowing out of content and of meaning in terms of the message of music. In the concert business there is mounting pressure for the music to glitter, to be clean and perfect and played with virtuosity, when it should really be about protecting the meaningfulness of music. But this is a dying concern.”
[NYTimes] What should we expect from a science museum? Do we want to be carefully tutored in a scientific discipline? Do we seek to be entertained in a vaguely enlightening way? Do we hope to be urged to adopt particular policies or practices? My own desire is simpler than any of these, though far less often encountered. I hope for wonder.
Wonder is not puzzlement, bewilderment or confusion. But it is also not satisfaction, completion or understanding. It is more open-ended, even a little unsettling. There is an element of calm, poised detachment in wonder but also a restless amazement. In the wake of wonder, we are literally moved. We cannot remain still. We are spurred to explore.
Wonder may even lie at the origins of science museums, which grew out of “cabinets of wonder” — eccentric Renaissance collections of natural marvels. Though the sensation is now too rarely cultivated, it was much on my mind during a recent visit to the new museum of the California Academy of Sciences, which opened here in Golden Gate Park just over a year ago. I followed that visit with a return to San Francisco’s venerable Exploratorium, a participatory science museum that is celebrating its 40th anniversary this weekend with special events. The new museum promises much wonder, but the Exploratorium, even after several visits, keeps inspiring it. And the difference is worth considering. (read)
