Markmaking
Notes.
02/28/2005
Media Art - Dieter Daniels
Dieter Daniels: short CV, texts online, bibliography (deutsch) ; "Television: Art or Anti-Art? : Conflict and cooperation between the avant-garde and the mass media in the 1960s and 1970s"
Rudolf Frieling, "Reality/Mediality: Hybrid Processes Between Art and Life"
Book reviews:
- Fondation Langlois (Media Art Net ISBN 32110 05706)
- Review for Convergence (Media Art Action ISBN 32118 29962)
- Rhizome.org (Media Art Interaction ISBN 32118 34222)
02/24/2005
Laptop sleeves
The laptop/notebook computer is the emblem of today's ascendant global class. All occupations could be divided into: 1) those that may require one to spend time sitting in airport departure lounges, using a notebook computer, and 2) other. It's clear that how things are going these days is very good for those of us who fall into category 1 -- including anyone who reads this. Less clear for category 2.
The case in which the laptop is carried, is a mark of status. For example, via Gizmodo and the comprehensive list at Macfora:
- SCS leather sleeve $13
- * Timbuk2 Quilted Sleeve $30
- * Shinza ZeroShock Sleeve $30
- Bailey Works laptop sock $38-48
- Waterfield Sleevecase $38-93
- Booq Viper $40
- Crumpler Bags: School Hymn $50
- Chrome Bags: Sputnik3 $75
- AcmeMade designer totes $80-270
- Chrome Bags: Blackbox $90
- Incase sleeve $99
- * Takashi Shimamura's Monacca bag $227
- * MacTruck $200-230
Nothing symbolizes the notebook computer's transition from specialty technical instrument to ubiquitous power-class accessory like the eclipse of nerdish equipment makers (Kensington, Targus, e.g.) by hip Japanese designers.
Also via Gizmodo: the Gucci iPod case $195.
* These, some of the cheapest and the most expensive, are the best. The others in the middle are just so-so.
02/17/2005
The C.V. doctors at work
The c.v. doctors at work:
- Anthropology PhD (1999, traditional medicine/Bali)
- English PhD (1999)
- Pharmacology PhD (1999)
- American Studies PhD (1999)
- Anthropology PhD (1999, environmentalism/Eastern Europe)
- History PhD (2001)
- Biology PhD (2002)
- English PhD (2004)
The Somerville Gates: A Personal Chronology
Saturday, Feb. 12, 2005: Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates is erected in Central Park, New York.
Tuesday, Feb. 15: "Hargo" puts The Somerville Gates up on the web.
Thursday, Feb. 17
- 8:46am: From the Floor links to Hargo's The Somerville Gates.
- 1:33pm: Modern Art Notes links to Hargo's Gates.
- 1:41pm: I receive e-mail from a friend with a link to Hargo's gates.
- 2:44pm: Experience sense of deflation at being six hours late to the party, dismayed that the imperative to circulate information as quickly as possible feels so much stronger than the ideal of discussing, reflecting on, pondering the significance of information.
- In the future, "priority" is going to mean something completely different to historians than it does now. A Jamesonian timeless present.
- 3:00pm: Salvage sense of personal significance by posting link to map of general vicinity of Hargo's Somerville Gates.
Saturday, Feb. 18: The New York Times posts a story by Sarah Boxer for the Sunday edition on Hargo's Gates.
02/13/2005
The Chicago and New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Bands
Link: Who We Are.
But what did we want anyway? We knew that we wanted to make music that would embody the radical, feminist, humanitarian vision we shared. And the lyric were the obvious place to begin—the field was wide open. Most of the rock songs women have sung till now were about the pain men cause us—the pain that’s supposed to define us as women. We didn’t want to deny that tradition (women struggled hard for the right to sing even that much) bvt we wanted to sing about how the pain doesn’t have to be there—how we fight and struggle and love to make it change.
The Gates
Christo & Jeanne-Claude, The Gates.
I can't get anything more than light entertainment out of The Gates. I do not experience them as sublime or beautiful, or anything more than light entertainment. I thought that being able to walk through and be inside the gates, rather than just gawk at a distance, would make a difference, but no. I don't see the "pure joy...good will...simple eloquence" (Michael Kimmelman, NY Times). For some reason, the gates seem to glow more in photographs than they do in person. I was there from 2:00 to 6:00pm, and I didn't see them glowing, even during the 'magic hour.' There were uncanny echoes of Daniel Buren, somehow. I didn't find that they made me more sensitive to the nuances of Olmsted and Vaux's winding paths, as Kimmelman proposed. At least the gates aren't actually bad. I would merely say that they are not good. However:
and cf. Abstraction-decoration
HSAR 692B Abstraction and Decoration
Christine Mehring
M 3:30-5:20
267 STThis seminar considers the relationship between decoration and abstract art produced in Western art in the course of the 20th century. Many modern artists felt ambivalent about decoration, ornament, the applied arts, and design. Abstract artists were often apprehensive about their painting and sculpture approaching "mere" decoration, superficial and superfluous. Any suggestion of decoration threatened to undermine abstraction's very identity as art and its new rationales of autonomy and self-reflexivity, of complexity and deep meaning. Yet some of these very same artists embraced these practices. Staples taken from decoration such as repetition, flatness, an bold color facilitated abstraction's departure from mimetic modes of representation. Moreover the connection of decorative work to the world at large appealed to abstract artists searching for a new motivation and social relevance. Materials and techniques of the decorative arts, such as textiles and weaving, were also appropriated for abstract art. Class discussions will revolve around these constantly changing attitudes at different historical moments as well as around various foundational, theoretical texts.
Students' research may focus on individuals or groups of artists, themes or theoretical concepts beyond the ones specifically addressed but should relate to the main questions in class.
Guides
Book-enacting guides (books)
Getting It Published
An Author's Guide to Scholarly Publishing
Handbook for Academic Authors
The Thesis and the Book
Revising Your Dissertation
Manuscript submission guides (online)
How to prepare a publishing proposal (MIT Press)
Guidelines for authors (Oxford University Press)
Tenure-enacting guide (online)
Advancement and Promotion of Junior Faculty at U.C. Berkeley
02/12/2005
brunette.n
Link: brunette.n
The only woman in Tim 's early life who anyone can remember is Gillian Malpass -- a tall , good-looking brunette who is now a senior editor at the London office of prestigious US publisher Yale University Press.
02/11/2005
College of Humanities - Promotion and Tenure: Criteria
Link: College of Humanities - Promotion and Tenure: Criteria.
The achievement of such stature is manifested especially in the quality of the specific media of publication or presentation, the opinion of peers from prestigious institutions (who rank the candidate in reference to his or her cohort), the winning of grants, awards, and fellowships in support of the candidate’s work and the attraction of advanced students to the candidate’s tutelage...
02/06/2005
Analogies (draft)
Coachella, All Tomorrow's Parties, CMJ Festival, Pitchfork, KCRW, Atlantic Records
::
Venice Biennale, Documenta, Whitney Biennial, Artforum, October, Leo Castelli
[more TK]
02/05/2005
Dictionary of Art Historians
The Dictionary of Art Historians at the Duke University library.
the Charles Homer Haskins Lectures
The Charles Homer Haskins Lectures of the American Council of Learned Societies: notable bookworms reflect on their book-oriented lives, including Judith Shklar and Geoffrey Hartman.
Shklar:
To this affected boorishness was added a slavish admiration for the least intelligent, but good-looking, rich, and well connected undergraduates. Their culture was in many respects one of protected juvenile delinquency. Harvard undergraduates were easily forgiven the misery they inflicted on the rest of Cambridge. High jinx included breaking street lights and unrailing trolley cars. Conspicuous drunkenness on the streets was normal on week-ends. One of the nastiest riots I ever saw, long before the radical sit-ins, was an undergraduate rampage set off by the decision to have English rather than Latin diplomas. Several tutors were physically assaulted and injured. All this was seen as high spirits, and secretly admired. Nor were these private school products particularly well prepared. Few could put a grammatical English sentence together, and if they knew a foreign language, they hid it well.
The real ideal of many teachers at Harvard in the 1950s was the gentleman C-er. He would, we were told, govern us and feed us, and we ought to cherish him, rather than the studious youth who would never amount to anything socially significant. There was, of course, a great deal of self-hatred in all this, which I was far too immature to understand at the time. For these demands for overt conformity were quite repressive. Harvard in the 1950s was full of people who were ashamed of their parents’ social standing, as well as of their own condition. The place had too many closet Jews and closet gays and provincials who were obsessed with their inferiority to the “real thing,” which was some mythical Harvard aristocracy, invented to no good purpose whatever. What was so appalling was that all of this was so unnecessary, so out of keeping with America’s public philosophy. It was also a bizarre refusal to think through the real meaning of the Second World War.
Hartman:
There is some affinity between Eliot and Nietzsche on this one point. The latter's sharpest barbs are reserved for what he sarcastically names "Gelehrtenkultur," egg-head culture. It is marked by an abuse of "Historie," the kind of learning that dries up life, and to which Goethe's Faust gives such memorable expression in the drama's long opening kvetch. "The tree of knowledge is not that of life," as Byron's Manfred says more concisely.
Yet the learning to which Nietzsche objected was not a magical or virtuoso quest, it was distinctly modern: the pride of nineteenth-century German scholars whose research was destroying a Eurocentric universal history. Myths of emancipation, cultural progress and national destiny were challenged by historicism's resurrection of the dead, as Michelet described the new, secular science. Historians now revived victims together with victors, and produced a positivistic nightmare of endless, mostly anonymous suffering. For Nietzsche this B.C. information explosion had the potential of reinstating a sterile pity, or another slave revolt, that would result in the opposite of historical redemption. The outcome would surely be a relativism sapping conviction and playing into the hands of a reactionary nationalistic fervor.
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.
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