Markmaking

200 Years of Poe

This month, Edgar Allan Poe turns 200. What does academia have to say about that?

Algis Valiunas, "No to Poe"

The esteem in which Poe is commonly held these days has to do partly with his ruinous life, which epitomizes the misery of poetic genius in crass America—a theme beloved of the cognoscenti; partly with the fashionable elevation of popular literary forms like horror tales, detective stories, and science fiction to an equality with high art; and partly with the no less fashionable elevation of mental disturbance into a superior form of insight. 

Matthew Taylor, "Edgar Allan Poe’s (Meta)physics: A Pre-History of the Post-Human"

Rather than optimistically assuming, as Mayo and others did, that identifying a universal force is equivalent to mastering it for the betterment of humanity, Poe concluded that an allencompassing cosmic energy inevitably troubles human-being by suspending the autonomy and interiority of individual humans; the disorientation of normal, corporeal functioning and the literal loss of self-possession attending mesmeric practice illustrated for Poe the fact that people are little more than occasions for the demonstration of an impersonal power.

Peter Coviello, "Poe In Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery"

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.  —Henry James

That Poe had a powerful intellect is undeniable: but it seems to me the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty.  —T. S. Eliot

Above all else, though, the story of the dysfunctions of intimacy in Poe is important to tell because it allows us a way to find real rapport between the now divided critical tendencies around Poe, between those attending, with largely psychoanalytic tools, to the works' sexual suggestions, and those attending, with largely historicist tools, to the works' racial significances.

David Blake, "The Man That Was Used Up": Edgar Allan Poe and the Ends of Captivity

The General's status as a cyborg also makes him an important antecedent to the many robotic warriors that have surfaced in twentieth-century fiction and film. Poe's cyborg differs from these figures in that he is less the ideal combatant than the ideal captive, a figure endowed with charm, handsome features, and hegemonic significance. Poe's story leads us to question whether the ultimate mission of redeemed captives is not so much to defeat an alien society as it is to conquer their own.

Also Kevin J. Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word and The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe

AP: "Why 2009 Will Be Rich With Celebrations"

Picasso's Harlequins in Rome

La Repubblica reviews Picasso's Harlequins in Rome: Il genio che brillò tutta una vita

A spiegare il perché è il curatore Yve-Alain Bois: "Arlecchino può essere qualsiasi cosa desideri e Picasso, che era all'apice della sua produttività e poteva adottare contemporaneamente gli stilemi del cubismo, del neoclassicismo, del surrealismo e dell'espressionismo, aveva diverse affinità con questa maschera leggendaria". [...]

Fino al 1917, che, come avvisa Bois, segna una definitiva inversione di tendenza: "Picasso smette di sostituire una data maniera con un'altra e non scarta più nulla, inventando stili nuovi senza mai eliminare quelli precedenti. Negli anni, anzi, si costruisce un incredibile arsenale di forme e approcci al quale attinge liberamente ogni volta che ne ha voglia".

Protean.

Stephen Bann in Etudes Photographiques

In the 20th number of Etudes Photographiques, appears an article by Stephen Bann on French photography in the 1830s.

Braque the castle

In the London Review of Books, Julian Barnes on Alex Danchev's new Braque biography:

Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He invests it, bombards it, mines it, assaults it – and each time the smoke clears, the castle is as solid as ever. Thwarted, he declares the site of no strategic interest anyway. Braque, he says, merely has ‘charm’. He tells him he has turned out to be ‘the Vuillard of Cubism’. He tells him his paintings are ‘well hung’. Braque replies that Picasso’s ceramics are ‘well cooked’. It is often the laconic, rather than the voluble, who win verbal battles. Picasso’s words frequently arise from not getting his own way over something unconnected with art; either that, or as a means of cheerleading the Picassoites. Braque’s words seem the more pondered, more to do with art, and therefore more deadly. Words like ‘talent’ and ‘virtuoso’ have an extra edge in his mouth. His replies culminate in the famous observation: ‘Picasso used to be a great painter. Now he is merely a genius.’ That’s to say, the public’s idea of a genius, someone protean and industrially productive, whose private life is also a publicised circus.

Birth of Spectacle: Buffalo Bill

Was the Disney model a.k.a. society of the spectacle born with Buffalo Bill? The New York Review of Books:

Europeans adored Buffalo Bill as much as Americans did. Queen Victoria required two command performances. Pope Leo XIII bestowed a blessing at the Vatican. In France the artist Rosa Bonheur painted Cody in Buffalo Bill costume. Touring the Continent, he performed for the emperor of Austria and various Russian princes and counts. In Germany the future Kaiser Wilhelm challenged Annie Oakley to shoot a cigarette out of his mouth and she obliged. In London Cody packed the kings of Belgium, Denmark, Greece, and Saxony into the Deadwood Stagecoach and traded poker repartee with the Prince of Wales about holding "four kings and a royal joker." Or so it was said. The show's assets included a first-rate press agent.

...

It played as many as 130 cities a year. Transporting it required at least eighteen railroad cars. The traveling company usually included over five hundred performers and workers, plus animals, prefabricated grandstands, tents for performers and concessionaires, props galore, and the largest private electrical plant then in existence. It was capable of feeding this entire company three times a day. In a single week its storeroom provided nearly ten thousand pounds of meat—beef, veal, mutton, pork, bacon, ham, and chicken; over two thousand loaves of bread; ten tons of ice; over three thousand quarts of milk; in addition to potatoes, cabbage, flour, cornmeal, fifteen gallons of Worcestershire sauce, six gallons of mustard, and a barrel of pig's feet.

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Dadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadadada!

Press:

1. Alan Riding, New York Times
2. Ann Morrison, Time
3. Joelle Diderich, Associated Press
4. National Gallery press release

Dossier:

1. Leah Dickerman, ed. The Dada Seminars, including essays on Haussmann, Carl Einstein, Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters.
2. October 105 (spring 2003), including coverage of Hans Richter, Wieland Herzfelde, Einstein, Breton and Picabia
3. "Dada in Debate," Tate Modern symposium, with discussion of Duchamp, Arp, Schwitters, Grosz and Tzara.
   

Modernism A and B

What is modernism? Malcolm Bull sees it as a hinge or mediator between the two cultures of capitalism (classicism and consumer culture), present only where both of these two cultures are strong. T. J. Clark sees modernism as the way that modernists test modernity through form, trying to achieve transcendence through material immanence.

• T.J. Clark on Perry Anderson's Origins of Postmodernism in New Left Review 03/04.00
• Malcolm Bull on T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea in New Left Review 09/10.01
• also T.J. Clark on Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods in London Review of Books 22.09.05

Art and Labor

The Oxford Art Journal, via the Radical Art Caucus of the College Art Association, presents papers addressing the theory of art and labor, including:

1. Paul B. Jaskot, "Gerhard Richter and Adolf Eichmann"
2. John Ott, "Iron Horses: Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge, and the Industrialised Eye"
3. Christina Kiaer, "Was Socialist Realism Forced Labour? The Case of Aleksandr Deineka in the 1930s"

    Jaskot: In spite of Buchlovian orthodoxy, coming to terms with the Nazi past was a part of West German artistic and cultural life in the 1950s and 1960s.
    Ott: In spite of Stanford's efforts to ennoble himself as an enlightened patron of science, Muybridge simply ended up helping him consolidate his regime of control via mechanized technique.
    Kiaer: In spite of Stalin's best efforts, Deineka did manage to exert his subjectivity during the Socialist Realist years.

    I wonder what life would be like if the Radical Art Caucus were in charge of the U.S. or the U.K.

Family Trees of Modern Art

Stammbäume der Kunst. Zur Genealogie der Avantgarde, by Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, is a new book about family trees (genealogies, pedigrees, bloodlines) of modern art.

From the reviews: Diagrams can be simply an instrument of scientific work, or something between instrument, document and artwork. Not for nothing did Charles Rufus Morey's diagrams of the development of medieval art impress his student, Alfred Barr. Later, George Maciunas's mixture of pedantry, mania, and expansionary impulse was as impressive as it was irritating.

1. Stammbäume der Kunst (Akademie Verlag)
2. Reviews: Petra Kipphoff, Die Zeit, 25.08.05; Horst Bredekamp, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 31.08.05
3. Also by Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas' Learning Machines: From Art History To A Chronology Of Fluxus (Artbook.com, Amazon.com)
4. Gerhard Dirmoser's bibliography on mapping and diagrams

Students Found New Art Society

[The Harvard Crimson, Thursday, December 13, 1928]

Students Found New Art Society

Last night at a dinner held at the home of Professor P. J. Sachs '00, a new University organization, the "Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, Incorporated" was founded. This society has been formed to meet the need felt for exhibitions of works of art in all fields of contemporary endeavor, and will hold exhibits in Cambridge.

The organization, started by three undergraduates. Lincoln Kirstein '30, John Walker '30, and E. M. M. Warburg '30, will have an exhibition room in Harvard Square in which monthly exhibits of the graphic arts, as well as sculpture will be shown. They will be made up of two types of work; those by contemporary artists which will sell at a price low enough to be within the buying range of the average student, and works by contemporary artists of established reputation, which will be loaned by collectors in Boston and New York.

A series of exhibits already planned includes one on contemporary American art, in every field, one on decorative art, one on the "London School" of painters, one on works of arts by Harvard students, and one on modern French and German book printing.

The organization will not be self supporting and in order to cover the annual budget which has been estimated at $6,000, it will have a membership in which there will be three types of subscription. Sustaining members will be those that contribute over $50, contributing members those that contribute $25 or $10, and membership for Harvard or Radcliffe students will be $2. Members of the society will have special privileges.

A board of 7 trustees, made up partly of Harvard professors, and partly by collectors interested in the organization will act as an advisory body. The trustees are Professors P. J. Sachs '00, Arthur Pope '01, E. W. Forbes '95, Mr. Arthur Sachs '04, Mr. Felix M. Warburg, Mr. J. N. Brown '24, and Philip Hofer '21.

100 Years of Expressionism

At Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, "Brücke and Berlin: 100 Years of Expressionism." German museums and their public love Expressionism. Last summer, I saw a whole lot of Expressionism here. At least three special exhibitions, and many high-profile galleries in permanent collections. In contrast, I still haven't seen a single special exhibition devoted to Dada.

It is not hard to see why. Expressionism meets everyone's idea of what is "artistic." The paintings are clearly expressions of "creative personality." Die Brücke meets everyone's idea of what an avant-garde is: rejection of social and cultural conventions; concern with ordinary life; ambivalent fascination with women; deeply attached primitivism. Main goal, according to the curators:  "To overcome the hollow pathos of official Wilhelmine art through the expression of the immediate/unmediated (unmittelbaren) and undistorted/unfalsified (unverfälschten)."

The exhibition covers all of that, at some length. The title could be a little misleading; the question of Berlin as an architectural or social space comes up in only one of the many sections of the Exhibition. The title means rather the work of all kinds that was done by Die Brücke while in Berlin.

It was a little bit short on context. You wouldn't learn anything from the wall text or displays about how Die Brücke's use of expressive color builds on Van Gogh's, or what the idea of individual expressivity might have to do with Romanticism, or anything about the street and flâneur since Baudelaire. Nor about Expressionism's transformation into New Objectivity, or about Dada/Constructivist avant-garde critiques. Nor (in spite of the "100 years" tag) about the controversial refashioning of Expressionist ideas in the hands of Baselitz, Kiefer, 1980s Neo-Expressionism. Nor about the feminist critique of "virility and domination."

You do get to see plenty of Expressionist paintings, though. The question is whether the quite full agenda of the group still has any inspirational value; or is useful only out of antiquarian curiosity; or what.

Links:

• "Brücke und Berlin - 100 Jahre Expressionismus": Berlin State Museums, Berlin-Brandenburg Radio, art-in-berlin
• Galinsky.com: The Neue Nationalgalerie
• Kirchner: Five Women in the Street (1913), Street, Berlin (1913), Women in the Street (1914)

Citations:

1. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting," October 16 (Spring 1981).
2. Carol Duncan, "Virility and Domination in Early 20th-Century Vanguard Painting," Artforum 12:4 (Dec. 1973).
3. Haxthausen, Charles W. and Heidrun Suhr, eds. Berlin: Culture and Metropolis (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota, 1990).
4. Lloyd, Jill. German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991).
5. Donald Kuspit, "Flak from the 'Radicals': The American Case Against New German Painting," in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum, 1984).
6. Washton Long, Rose-Carol. German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1995).

An After Dinner at Ornans

After Dinner at Ornans (Gustave Courbet, 1848-1849): provincial scene, not anecdotal, not moralizing, everyone is lost in the reverie of the music. (The painter too.) Cf. Michael Fried / Courbet's Realism.

In the Basement

Is Daniel Johnston the Joseph Cornell of indie rock?

Free association: Bob Dylan and the Band : The Basement Tapes: basement: Daniel Johnston: basement: Joseph Cornell: Utopia Parkway: Queens: Brooklyn: Mermaid Avenue: Billy Bragg and Wilco: Woody Guthrie: Bob Dylan.  If this isn't proof of the essential interconnectedness of all art and culture, I don't know what is.