#however there was a wave of poetry that's really interesting during the last century and Spicer was part of it

[kaus-quietis]

A Circus Library - quick recommendations of short stories, poems, comics and novels I've recently read #1

Hello there! I'm the circus resident poltergeist, Eliott, managing this blog until Lav comes back. Today I offer you a slightly different formula of my super awesome super rare super bookclub post, as Lav would say!

Hello hello hello! Is this a bookclub?! Is this chaotic ramble?! Ding ding! You got it wrong!

Writing full on reviews is tiedous and long, and while I appreciate doing it, I'm myself not always in the mood to read a long post explaining why a book is genius. Do I love that from time to time? Yes! Do I have the attention span to write one now? Nope! However, I still wanted to share some titles I recently (re)discovered, and that I think are marvellous reads for anyone wanting to dive into something new.

Here you'll find a few recommendations with the shortest of words to tell you why they are great, or just scream about it.

short disclaimer before I begin because this is tumblr and while I forgot a lot about this website, I remember how the TW thing works lol, it's at your own discretion to search for the works beforehand if you have any trigger you don't want to encounter.

Jack Spicer - Billy the kid

The master of my fate, captain of my soul as Timothée Chalamet would say idk I barely know the guy. Classic and gold, Spicer is an amazing writer and this poem is phenomenal. It's quite short and perfect if you want to know more about the wonder that was US American poetry during the 20th century. Of course I'd encourage you to read all of his works, but Billy the Kid is perfect to start somewhere.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa - Hell Screen

Classic and iconic, I've recently pushed further than Rashomon and boy oh boy am I never turning back. Hell Screen is a phenomenal short story displaying all the elegance and cruelty Akutagawa can incorporate in his works. It's mesmerizing, it aches, it's everything I love. I read this story in Jay Rubin's translation (Penguin Classics), and even though I do not speak Japanese so I cannot compare, I dare say it's a very good one.

Lucie Bryon, Thieves

I never recommended comic books before but I wanted to for a change! I am a huge comic book lover, but most of the ones I usually read are not available in english language. This one is, though. Thieves is a beautiful comic about growth, falling in love and finding acceptance in others and in yourself. It's light and heartwarming, like eating candy.

Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona

Now, this book exploits one of my biggest plot weaknesses ever, and that is fucked up people in medieval settings. Lapvona tells the story of Marek, a sheperd's son, who'll be caught in a series of unfortunate events, political struggles, and secrets, all inside the town of Lapvona. It's dark and unsettling, the characters are scandalous and horrible, yet sickeningly human. Now, I said to check the TW yourselves, but be very careful with this one, if you can think of a TW, then it's certainly in this book.

Osamu Dazai, Early Light

In the Storybook ND series, this book contains three short stories : Early Light, Three Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, and Villon’s Wife. I'd recommend the three of them, as it's a fantastic dive into Dazai's shorter works. I think that reading his short stories is very important to understand his work and the width of the subjects and stories he wrote about. It helps that once again, in my opinion, the translation chosen by this publishing house is so good.

This is it for today! Here you have five of the works I read (or re-read) this summer, and that I'd warmly recommend. There are two short stories (Dazai, Akutagawa), a comic book (Bryon), a novel (Moshfegh) and a poem (Spicer). 'Till next time!

[towncalledkingdom]

The single most awe-inspiring place in Kingdom, in Mali’s opinion, was Town Square in the evening. People came from all over to listen to Bard’s nightly song, trade gossip, and slip away into the shadows for secret business. Mali looked forward to the music like most, but it wasn’t Bard who commanded the boy’s attention as he walked into the Square. The musician stood as he always did on the smoothed and polished roots that made up the Square’s central stage and podium, gently crooning lyrics brought to him by the latest newcomer:

“Oh my god. Has the music taken over my life? Can’t you see I just wanted you to occupy my time.”

Bard’s lilting voice resonated off of the storefronts and soft lights around the Square, sound waves bouncing and reversing across the stone plaza and rising into the great branches of the Grandfather Tree. Mali had never met his grandfathers. Both of his parents had lost their fathers years before he was born. The boy liked to think that the Grandfather Tree had taken the position for both of them.

The looming guardian of Town Square was an ancient sycamore- bent, carved, and shaped for centuries. Whoever had been living among the trees when the founders first settled this place had already worked the branches for generations. It wasn’t that the Grandfather Tree looked like an old man- faces and limbs sprouted from several strange knots lining the trunk- it was the air about the tree. There was something hypnotic about the way it caught the light, the way the sound of the wind deepened when it rustled the distant boughs. Beneath the Grandfather Tree the air was always warmer and the rain was always lighter. The sprawling branches and soft solar lamps of the Square wreathed the trunk and plaza below in perpetual twilight.

“I’ve been spinning around The sound keeps me away from you Careless, treating yourself to thrill A fantasy you wanted to fill.”

Content as he was gazing up into the towering branches, Mali knew that tonight was not a good night for staring at trees. He set his mind on a single mission: “Find Bug Man.” Mali had been an errand boy long enough to know that delivering vegetables and packages was hardly the most profitable approach to the town’s errand industry. Beneath the obvious need for the transportation of goods lay a far more valuable market: Kingdom’s secrets.

Word on the street was that Bug Man had been the master of secrets. He went in and out of all the factions, but no one could buy any information from him. This drove the price of his knowledge up even higher. Mali had never met Bug Man formally, but their paths had crossed many times as they traveled back and forth between Kingdom’s various neighborhoods and businesses. Bug Man would always wave as he passed. Sometimes Mali waves back. Now Bug Man was missing and someone wanted him found.

Mali finally broke from his trance as Bard played the final notes of his song. He scanned the swaying crowd, mapping a route across the plaza as his feet began moving again. Jericho stood near the back of the Square whispering to a group of serious looking men. Mali would pass them first. Somewhere near the middle two Phylla fighters clapped heartily for Bard. Mali would pass them second.

There was a trick to eavesdropping on Kingdom’s notable people, a way of moving beneath their radar that Mali was all too familiar with. He had to look like he was on a mission already. He had to avoid arousing the many red flags that would alert them to his motives. Eye contact spelled silence. Move too close, also silence and possibly a swift kick to the arse. The trick was to carry something else- something an errand boy would have in his hands. Vegetables were usually a good choice during the day when farmers did most of their business, but would look suspicious in the evening. Better to have a small package tucked under an arm or a hastily wrapped bottle. A book was never, ever a good choice. Tonight, however, Mali carried one anyway.

He had strategically placed a block of wood on top of the book before wrapping it so as not to draw attention to himself. Squarish packages were common deliveries around Kingdom, far less notable than the squat rectangular ones that that betrayed the incredibly valuable tomes. Philosophist scouts frequented all of the highly trafficked areas hoping to obtain the revered writings before some rich citizen could make a better offer. Mali would not sell this book to a Philosophist. Not tonight.

He carried the wrapped package beneath an arm, walking at a casual pace just within earshot of Jericho’s men. The Grand Reformer’s voice was low and menacing, more a threat than an order. “If you see one red shirt I want them brought to me. No questions, no excuses. You will help me carve this cancer from the congregation or you will face me yourselves. Is that understood?” The men gave him obedient nods. “Anyone with a history of serving in the Privateers must come forward as well. I have some questions…”

Jericho’s voice sank beneath the myriad voices as Mali passed. So Jericho wasn’t the one behind the Penitent fanaticism. An interesting observation. Mali dwelled on it for a moment, giving it his full attention until he was sure he’d be able to recall it later, and filed it away for the future.

Mali was halfway across the plaza when he picked up another scrap of interest. The two Phylla fighters seemed to be drunk, unusual for their people. Sometimes it was hard for Mali to tell as many tried to incorporate their totem animals into their social lives. It was possible that these two were simply following the path of nature’s more boisterous creatures. “Caracal should’ve never been there in the first place!” croaked a squat woman with a wobbling double-chin. Her companion, an average-looking man with a shining bald head nodded slowly. “Everyone knows who her father is! And now one of Eleanor’s welps thinks she can command us. The children of criminals- that’s all they are. Better to send them back to the Dungeon with their families, I say!”

Here Mali felt safe enough to approach the two. “Excuse me,” he said politely, balancing the package on one hip, “What happened to the Alpha?”

The bald man sniggered. “Where have you been hiding, little rat? The Alpha was murdered days ago. They say Eleanor stabbed her as she walked out of the King’s Council.”

This was news to Mali. “Then where is her body?” he asked, “Where was she buried?”

The squat woman’s chins flushed. “The Privateer Queen stole it for the bones!” she cried. “She whisked it away to her lair in the Dungeon!”

Mali’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, but he did not press them further. He very much doubted that a prominent figure such as Caracal would make such a clean disappearance. One thing was certain, however, something strange was happening in the town’s leadership. Caracal was missing, yes, as was Bug Man. Mali had known this long before tonight. But this hardly meant they had died. Personal agendas and misinformation, such was the nature of gossip.

Mali passed out of Town Square’s circle of light- Grandfather’s Shadow, some called it- and into a narrow alley between two buildings. To his right was a mural of a steaming beverage, barely visible in the dark. He stole quietly around the back of this building, side stepping into another alley just wide enough for his shoulders to pass through untouched. A shiny silver trash bin stood alone in the space. It hadn’t held trash in years. Package in hand, Mali climbed on top of the trash bin and up through a narrow window near the top of the wall to his right, dropping. The package block-side down into the building below. In seconds he had dropped to the floor behind it.

Mali found himself standing in a hallway as he had so many times before. To his left was a dark alcove, a couple of shadowy lockers and an office desk piled high with yarn and faded sketches. To his right, he knew, was a bedroom, though he had never seen the door open. Before him the shop opened into a wide show room lit by soft yellow light. Paper lanterns had been hung around the edges of the ceiling, illuminating shelves of herb planters and enormous canvases. A new painting had been hung since the last time he’d visited Fashi, a colorful splash of hair billowing out from the top of a woman’s head, all sorts of objects peeking out from it. Most of the other canvases were still blank. A few tables had been scattered around the room, pushed into corners to make room for a large wooden easel at the center.

Fashi sat on a tall stool, concentrating hard on a new painting. She chewed on her bottom lip and moved her brush in a careful, steady line across the blank space. Mali walked around to observe the master at work. The painting turned out to be an brilliant white cat’s head. A magnificent mane of long, soft fur spilled out to the edges of the painting. The cat’s enormous slotted eyes were hyper-realistic, one blue and one green, orbs piercing at the boy’s soul. He looked away.

“Miss Fashi?” he whispered. The woman did not look up. Bright curls fell low over the rims of an enormous pair of circular glasses. She pushed them up her nose with the back of her paintbrush. Mali cleared his throat. She continued painting. “I found it.”

Fashi’s head whipped around. “Sorry!” she stammered, pushing her glasses further up her nose, “I’m painting Haiku.”

Mali raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t Haiku a kind of poetry?”

“What? No! Well, yes. I don’t really know what he is now that you mention it.”

“I see,” said the boy. He lifted his package for Fashi to inspect. “I found it,” he repeated.

Fashi stared blankly at the square wrapping. “I don’t think this is it.”

Mali flashed her a devious smile and handed it over. She leaned her paintbrush precariously against the edge of the canvas and took the package from him, ripping into the paper and letting the wood block fall to the floor. “Oh!” she blushed. She let the paper fall as well, revealing a large hard-backed book. A handsome blonde warrior grinned from the cover, giving them a thumbs-up. “Isn’t he beautiful?” she gushed.

“Sure,” said Mali. “But that thing isn’t going to come cheap. I dug through about a million backpacks for it.”

Fashi rolled her eyes. “Fiiiine. What do you want, little boy?”

He smiled despite himself. “We can start with some of that Dolan Tea.”

“I knew there was a reason I let you come around here.”

The little shop soon filled with the smell of hot tea. It always smelled nice in here, like dirt and rosemary and lemon. Probably because that’s what was growing in a few of the planters hanging on the wall nearby. Together they sat and talked and drank Dolan Tea for a while, a tradition they’d created together over many visits. They talked about their lives, mostly, and books, anything other than the true reason Mali had come to visit.

When they finished their tea, Fashi sighed. “I suppose it’s time to find out what this new edition is going to cost me.” Mali nodded slowly and pulled the scrap of notebook paper from his pocket. He handed it to the curly haired woman. She squinted at it and wrinkled her nose, reading it aloud slowly. "Find Bug Man. Generous reward for location. Signed M." She blinked. "As in the Church of M? Or 'M' as in Mongoose? Or maybe..." she lowered her voice, "Mercury?"

Mali considered for a moment. "I was hoping to contact a different 'M'," he said, drawing a circle on the table with his finger. "A certain cousin of yours."

[iaincblog]

Life and Chromaticism

There was an excellent 15 minute talk recently on R4 about the half diminished chord in Wagner’s Introduction to Tristan and Isolde. This chord and its placing have spawned a lof of general cultural reflection.

In Wagner’s career Tristan was followed by the Meistersingers which preceded Parsifal, the final opera. Not so long ago I saw Tristan at ENO and to  my surprise really liked it. I can’t say the same about Meistersingers but I began to get interested when I found out that in it Wagner lampoons Hanslick. Hanslick championed Brahms (rather than Wagner). He also is blamed for introducing musical formalism. I think he deserves some credit for applying Kantian aesthetics to music. Kant thought poetry was the highest artform and was strangely unmoved by music.

Kantian aesthetics is used by Gracyk in his various analyses of rock and by Hodgkinson in his recently published information processing model of music. Hanslick’s advocacy of Brahms was carried on by Schoenberg, and Schoenberg at one point explains that he came up with the 12 tone method to allow thematic development in the manner of Brahms.

 On the W side of Brahms - Wagner divide, Nietzsche at the start of his career thought Wagner had found the right approach to forging together art and life. He sustained this belief for a while but eventually became disillusioned with W’s later career.

Wagner’s music as in the Introduction to Tristan places music at the service of narrative. Beethoven’s Ninth signalled a move away from formalism when he used the verbal ‘Ode to Joy’.to complete the work So the Brahms-Wagner split might have been about words as a tool for reinforcing the impact of music versus the notion that formal development can be just as meaningful. 

Brahms is more in the tradition of Beethoven in the sense when the young Brahms was introduced to the Schumans by a mutual friend  and he played them two piano sonatas Mr Schuman saw that Brahms was the next big thing and Clara agreed. This probably meant for him the next big thing after Mendelssohn, his mentor. For my money, Mendelssohn follows Beethoven when he is at his best as it the first and last String Quartets.So I think Schoenberg saw the challenge as being to keep the German cultural tradition going which might run Haydn Beethoven Mendelssohn Brahms Schoenberg. Adorno I think signs up to a related view putting Berg (his teacher) after Schoenberg.

Nietzsche probably saw the cultural challenge in other terms from this formalist lineage: eg to unify the culture as Wagner had seemed to do.

I have been trying to get to grips with 19C musical romanticism. I have learned that there is also a temporal split in the middle of the nineteenth between Schuman on one side and Brahms (and Wagner) on the other which theorists identify as the cultural impact of the 1848 revolutions. Wagner took an active role in 1848 and had to lay low until the 1860s. Brahms was too young for 1848 but he did have to wait until the 1860s when his breakthrough piece was the German Requiem, a piece prompted by the death of his mother. B insisted GR was not nationalistic. I have heard this performed a lot but still don’t like it. Tristan was premiered by Wagner at about the same time as GR.

It is suggested that prior to 1848 the musical resolution with within musical forms  could be heard as a journey to a political utopia . Such utopian optimism was a casualty of the 1848 failures.

My guide into Wagner and Nietzsche is Michael Tanner, a Cambridge philosopher who interviewed me in 1967. Tanner believes that Wagner’s operatic greatness lies in the way his operas as a whole appear to promise an answer. As a 20th century rationalist he knows that this must be an illusion but the tension between the promised answer and MT s scepticism is all part of the fun.

Nietzsche blamed Wagner for adopting Christianity in Parsifal. I did  wonder about this when I saw it at ENO. But these days there are plenty of Christians who say that this is a superficial reading and what Wagner proposes isn't really Christianity .Nietzsche also complained that Bayreuth fell a long way short of its goals, a view which Wagner actually shared.

In Parsifal I liked the bits which Debussy subsequently adopted. Debussy, it is said, innovated  within an Impressionist framework - aspiring to capture the character of the moment as a subject for music. This project is related to what Mallarme attempted in poetry. While Debussy used Mallarme  in the Faun Prelude in the 1890s, it is felt for example by Boulez, that his 1913 Jeux really brings is where he really brings off the musical evocation of the transient moment. (1913 was a busy year in music with the  appearnace of both the Rite of Spring and Pierrot Lunaire.)

Pierrot Lunaire is seen as an Expressionist work. The idea of setting Expressionist poetry to music was shared by Webern, Schoenberg and Berg. One of the poets they used is Trakl who was sponsored by Wittgenstein. Trakl was a follower of Mallarme. By an odd route Trakl has also been linked to Nick Drake in Will Stone’s article Precipice of Loneliness article in the big memorial volume. Stone has translated Trakl into English and has written:

‘Trakl’s preoccupation is the fall of mankind, a yearning for transcendence through religious purity and love in the face of an overwhelming despair. Incoherent symbolic images cascade in a delirious fashion to form dream-like worlds, both nightmarish and eerily beautiful.

Going back to the German Requiem, we might think it expresses Brahms’ sadness that his mother has died. But if Cage and Wittgenstein are right we can’t know how Brahms felt. Indeed Brahms probably felt lots of different things on different days. Brahms may not even know if the music in GR expressed those feelings.

We do know that his mother had died when he wrote it. We might say that it expresses that his mother had died and some other things about her death and Brahms reaction to it. These things are propositional. not emotional.

This is a bit of a hard line I agree and it lines me up with Brahms supporter Hanslick. There is more to say but this is a good place to start. Brahms wrote the GR libretto and so that is a good clue  as to what the music expresses too -  the libretto is safely in the public realm. Obviously any verbal associations in the libretto and between the words and the music are good clues as to what the piece is about.

Switching to Wagner, he hoped that Bayreuth would be a place where a new German culture would arise inspired by his music. It in fact became a place where the bourgeoisie showed off which disappointed both Nietzsche and Brahms. However we speculated that if W focussed his feelings into the operas to stimulate the emergence of a new culture, the audience seem to have felt something different. This is Cage’s discovery too circa 1947.

In fact the Symbolist  movement (Expressionism is an offshoot) put less emphasis on intended meaning and foregrounded other dimensions of written and spoken language. Their influence extends to post war European art scene, to Boutez and the post structuralist theorists and to the notion of the death of the author.

Such dynamics on the one hand seem to internalise music -  endorsing Debussy’s emphasis on brief moments of experience rather than communal sentiments to renew. Society reappears with the contention that if momentariness has meaning this must occur via agreed public rules.

I find much post war composition intelligible in terms of reaction to cultural trauma . This is especially true I of true of a stream that I find most attractive centred on Nono and Lachenmann (which I understand continues to engage the current generation of composers.)

Equally the cultural optimism of Wagner and to some degree Nietzsche will have taken a beating during the First World War spawning Dada as a reaction, for example. It is sometimes said that the post FWW turn to neo-classicism was an attempt to counter a world where structures had been destroyed with an art realm where at least some structure could still be appreciated.

Returning to Hodgkinson and his orientation - how does music become meaning when it reaches our ears only as patterns in sound waves? One answer might be that the meaning happens to us just as nutrition happens to us when certain mostly organic substances are introduced to our digestive system. For example even with a new CD we are aware that several listenings  may be needed before the drift of the music emerges. We can decide to listen every day but we cant decide when and how the music emerges.

I am reminded of Ferneyhough’s solo pieces of the 1970s . One reason why the elaborate instructions on the score are there is that he wants them to be technically unplayable to the standard that trained skilled performers are used to. This experience will cause them to be vexed. And the vexation will result in the kind of performance that F is actually trying to bring about. One might say that F is gaming the performers for his own purposes.

Does this echo one take on the current world where we are all being farmed by the digital majors to enrich their owners. They feed us with digital product which we cant help but use. As we use the stuff we excrete information which our digital masters harvest. They use the harvest to enhance their own value currently by digital advertising which is a major source of revenue for them.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Molly Nesbit Chases the Big Ideas

Cover of Molly Nesbit’s new book of essays (all photos courtesy of Inventory Press)

What’s the big idea?

In the field of intellectual history, that question usually leads to the examination of notions, propositions, theories, and arguments that have spurred the development of human civilization: its cultures, societies, beliefs, modes of communication, systems of administration, and assorted institutions. Written language, Buddha’s path to enlightenment, Plato’s ideal forms, Copernicus’s heliocentrism, Renaissance art’s illusionism, Shakespeare’s psychological insight, Hegel’s concept of history, Marx’s class struggle, Freud’s unconscious mind, Abstract-Expressionism’s angst, the birth of rock’n’roll, the death of God, the death of painting, the death of Elvis, the post-Cold War “end of history,” and Homer Simpson’s resonant, all-encompassing “D’oh!” — such events and products of the human imagination are all grist for the intellectual-history specialist’s idea-grinding mill.

Molly Nesbit, a professor in the art department at Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, is interested in what she referred to in a recent interview at her home in Manhattan as “the genealogy of ideas.” Reflecting that interest, in her new book, Midnight: The Tempest Essays (Inventory Press), she offers a selection of her art-centered essays, which were originally published in journals or exhibition catalogs between 1986 and the early 2000s. In them, what she’s up to is not conventional art history, but rather an exercise in recognizing certain dots (some big and others smaller and more subtle) on the time-map of art’s generative ideas and then connecting them — at times more purposefully and, sometimes, not.

Nesbit’s approach can feel scientific and a bit free-associative at the same time. Although she is rooted in the academy, her texts suggest a desire to break away from familiar, academic-writing models. The essays she has written combine the spirit of natural-history research — turning over rocks in search of clues — with that of poetry, for which a little ambiguity is something to savor, not proscribe.

Nesbit earned an undergraduate degree at Vassar and later continued her studies at Yale. At Vassar, she has taught courses focusing on various aspects of 20th-century art. She has written a book about the French photographer Eugène Atget and in 2013, her first collection of essays, Pragmatism in the History of Art, was published. Since 2002, with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the artist Rirkrit Tiravanjia, she has helped oversee Utopia Station, an ongoing, multifaceted project involving exhibitions, publications, and other activities.

Nesbit’s book reproduces a photo of Marcel Duchamp’s Coffee Mill, 1911, a drawing that is now in the collection of the Tate museums, London.

As the late-afternoon light began to fade in Nesbit’s book-strewn sitting room, she told me that the thinking that informs her approach “comes primarily from a set of developments that took place in art history in Europe and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.” She was referring, of course, to trends associated with structuralism and later critical-analytical tendencies, which, broadly speaking, can be found in the general hopper marked “postmodernism,” along with post-structuralism and deconstruction.

However, Nesbit said that she would prefer not to use “postmodernist” to describe the overlapping currents of thought that inform the observations and analyses in her essays. Stepping back, she proposed, “Let’s just call it all ‘that broad way of thinking’” that many academics, intellectuals, and artists employ today, some with more self-awareness than others.

She explained that she is interested in how “art historians can use philosophical questions as starting points for their work,” and especially how “sustainable aesthetics,” as she put it, could be developed and practiced as an approach “that is integrated into the wider world, not separated from it, like modernism’s, which is critical but separated.”

“What Was An Author?” is an essay in the new book that looks at the meanings of “author” and “authorship” in the evolving context, since the late 1800s, of French law. Over time, it variously defined who or what constituted the author of an idea or a specific work vis-à-vis its applicable copyright protections and advancing media technology.

Nesbit points out that, by 1967, the French literary theorist Roland Barthes was signaling the “death of the author,” only to be followed by Michel Foucault’s declaration of the “author-function,” which effectively sent the visionary author packing. The “author-function,” Foucault wrote, “is tied to the legal and institutional systems that circumscribe, determine, and articulate the realm of discourse,” adding that “it does not refer, purely and simply, to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class may come to occupy.”

In “The Copy,” Nesbit’s research about the sources of some of Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades” — the appropriated, quotidian objects he presented as works of art — is especially interesting; she links his drawings of such items and his seminal appropriationist gestures, which spawned legions of imitators, to 19th-century French drawing-instruction manuals filled with model trapezoids, curves, and other shapes, and sample images of manufactured objects in which such forms were visible.

From Nesbit’s book, pages from a French instructional volume about drawing, published in 1887; such images, she argues, influenced the modern artist Marcel Duchamp.

Elsewhere, Nesbit focuses on the film director Jean-Luc Godard’s “extreme techniques of montage that became his way of giving life itself, reality, a form.” He used it, she writes, “to break the rule of show-and-tell” that had typified so much of literature and the cinema’s approach to historical narratives. She examines Godard’s 1991 film Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (Germany Year 90 Nine Zero), which was made after the Cold War’s end and looked back at German history. In it, she notes, Godard attempted to find “as many ways as he could to lay out the contradictions between past and present so that memory should never again grow cold and opaque.” She observes, “All futures sleep with their pasts at the risk of waking up alongside them.”

One of Nesbit’s essays looks at some of the definitive pomo artists who came to prominence in New York during the hype-driven 1980s — among them: Cindy Sherman, David Salle, Sherrie Levine. Overlooked in her discussion of Sherman is the recognition that her dressing-up, role-playing, selfie-photo schtick was already old when she revved it up in the late 1970s, and that, for some time, such pioneering feminist artists as Martha Wilson, Martha Rosler, Suzy Lake and others had already been examining women’s society-defined roles and images through photographic, performance-based artistic projects. Here, an air of veneration for Sherman, Salle and Levine’s offerings seems misplaced.

In an essay on certain postmodernist artists who came to prominence in the 1980s, Nesbit’s book reproduces Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Still #6” (1977).

As for Levine, in particular, how can anyone revisit her supposedly subversive appropriation, in 1981, of Walker Evans’ iconic photographs of poor, Depression-era tenant farm families (which had illustrated James Agee’s classic 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) without calling attention to the paucity of talent and intellectual cowardice such a gesture represented? (For those unfamiliar with Levine’s banal exercise in pomo provocation, it consisted of her exact photographic copies of Evans’ original, black-and-white photographic prints, whose images she then exhibited and called her own. Oh, what a frisson of transgression it was supposed to have delivered, denying a real artist the “heroic” authorship of his own work and vision!)

With such subjects in mind, it’s unfortunate that Nesbit looks only at artists in the center of the art market’s mainstream (Gabriel Orozco, Gerhard Richter, and Matthew Barney turn up in these pages, too), for it could be exciting to see her apply her formidable observational skills to some truly original visionaries. After all, she quotes Duchamp’s often-cited observation, made in 1961: “The great artist of tomorrow will go underground.” Looking back, was pomo’s revered Saint Marcel on to something?

Looking back at the 1980s, Nesbit cites Sherrie Levine, who in 1981 made exact photographic copies of the iconic photos of Depression-era tenant farmers Walker Evans shot in the 1930s, thereby denying or negating his authorship of his own, original works.

More satisfying is the book’s last, long essay, “The Port of Calls,” which was first published in the catalog of Documenta 11, in Kassel, Germany, in 2002. It looks at New York in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 2001, not really making a graspable argument but instead floating through a mist of ideas and observations about utopia; destruction; art’s expressive potential; Duchamp on the risks of becoming a “successful” artist; Tiravanija’s audience-participation performance art; the big money that coursed through the mainstream art market of the 1990s; the architect Rem Koolhaas’s take on Manhattan’s buildings; and John Cage’s delicious, Zen-inspired contention that nothing could be regarded as something. As thought pieces go, “The Port of Calls” is all waves of intriguing, sometimes curious ideas gently washing up on a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t, unknown shore.

“I’m interested in how ideas function in the world, in questions of practice, not just theory,” Nesbit told me. “I’m not interested in theory per se, but rather in thinking.” She added, “I’m interested in how we bring the past forward into the present for its wisdom. I work in the realities of the past. A lot of the past is still alive.”

With such concerns in mind, she explained, when she sat down to compose her essays, she asked herself, “With what kind of voice is it possible to write history” — imaginatively, that is — “without it turning into fiction?” As Midnight: The Tempest Essays shows, when she is in her stride, she can and does find the writing voice she is looking for — and it is no mere echo of a soulless, Foucaultian “author-function.”

Ultimately, using it to investigate the disparate range of subjects she considers here turns out to be her own big — and not such a bad — idea.

Midnight: The Tempest Essays (2017) is published by Inventory Press and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.

The post Molly Nesbit Chases the Big Ideas appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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