Blogs
Thick Time: William Kentridge, Peripheral Modernisms, and the Politics of Refusal
Mar 15, 2017
In the final room of Thick Time , the William Kentridge show recently on at the Whitechapel Gallery in London , viewers encountered yet another of the installation environments those familiar with the South African artist’s work have come to expect from this fascinating—mercurial, polymath—contemporary global art-maker. [1] We imagine we are in...
Surviving Fascism? “Art and Liberty” in Egypt, 1938-1948
Feb 8, 2017
“Well this exhibition feels a little too timely,” my colleague Clare Davies posted to Facebook during a November 21, 2016 visit to Art et liberté: Rupture, guerre et surréalisme en Egypte (1938-1948) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The exhibit—a major contribution to contemporary
Processing the Writing Process
Apr 12, 2017
My process of writing this blog post about the writing process was slow, circuitous, and emotionally fraught. I started out with a clear idea of my overall structure—or so I thought—but ended up abandoning it after several hours of drafting, redrafting, and repeated applications of my Delete key. Frustrated, I tried free-writing for twenty minutes: an unstructured word-dump to find out where “writing to think” might get me. Unfortunately, it got me nowhere.
By that time I had...
Modernism Ungoverned
Mar 2, 2017
For the first time in 7 years, I am not teaching full-time. I’m on sabbatical. The morning after the election, there was no place I was supposed to be other than working on my book. I didn’t have to face a classroom and try to digest the election with students, nor did I have to convince them that our conversations were politically relevant. I didn’t have to get my kids off to school and move on with everyday life (I don’t have kids). It was like Johnny Rotten staring cross-eyed into the...
Beauty, Again
Jul 1, 2016
As postmodernism recedes into the distance let’s recall two brash signs of its cultural hegemony. First, in Richard Linklater’s 1991 film, Slacker , a shot of a table in an espresso bar reveals a lightly worn copy of The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture . Published in 1983 and edited by Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic featured essays by figures who will come to stand as some of postmodernism’s most central, including Habermas, Krauss, Jameson,...