New Calvino

How exciting! I just found out about a new Italo Calvino book, collecting autobiographical writings and interviews. It will be published in March by Pantheon (here is a link to the book at Powell's.) The first review of it, by Jeannette Winterson, was published in today's Times of London. I'm especially interested in the titular essay and the letter-diary from New York. Time to preorder! (Link originally found via The Literary Saloon.)

The semester is over!

Hooray! I just finished my paper for the seminar I attended this semester. I still need to edit it, but here's the introduction and the conclusion:"Museum exhibitions of contemporary art have recently expanded their foothold in the cultural landscape. From quilts created in the deepest corners of the American South to high-tech video karaoke pods designed in South Korea to giant chalkboards partially erased by an artist’s hand to a late-career retrospective of an important German painter, exhibitions and museum spaces are proliferating. There is much to the encounter between an individual and work of art in a gallery setting. An average museum visitor imagines their experiences as minimally mediated, believing in the primacy of the artist’s hand and the purity of an object’s representation in a museum, yet there is an expansive field of hidden actions that occur across time and space to bring visitor and object together. It is important to establish the agents who are active in this field and then to fill in the space between them, creating a network of connections through which one passes toward the understanding of an exhibition.A traditional conception of the encounter -- partially influenced by the ‘empty’ nature of the ‘white cube’ gallery setting -- involves two participants: the artist who created the object and the viewer who observes it. Let me immediately complicate this assumption by adding an intermediary participant: the exhibition curator. The line that connected the artist to the observer is now a triangular plane, and the events that precipitate the encounter – both outside and inside the museum – can be caught in its surface. Using a richly detailed conception of the public derived from Michael Warner’s titular essay in Publics and Counterpublics and examples from recent exhibitions at museums on the east coast of the United States, the highly active nature of this plane becomes evident."(insert about five thousand words)"It is natural for one to draw a highly subjective path through the terrain of contemporary art exhibitions and the actors in the discursive field that creates them. While that is undoubtedly important in creating a second layer of discourse that can be said to surround museum culture as a whole, it remains important to acknowledge the presence of mediating factors before, during, and after an encounter with a work of art. This recognition yields important opportunities for reflection and engagement on multiple levels with a specific exhibition. Taking this knowledge in hand, our participation as members of the museum public can become more directly engaged with the future direction of museum exhibitions as a whole. Not only does the museum shape the audience, but the audience has the power to shape the museum. To quote art historian and independent curator Hans Belting: 'Mobilizing a critical public within the rooms of the museum is a long overdue activity... have we thought enough about the museum as a medium? It is the medium of our usage.'" Phew.. I'm glad I took the course, glad to be done, and glad that I can now move on to other projects. I hope everyone is having a nice weekend.

A quote

"The mistake of philosophy is to presuppose within us a benevolence of thought, a natural love of truth. Thus philosophy arrives at only abstract truths that compromise no one and do not disturb. [.] They remain gratuitous because they are born of the intelligence that accords them a possibility and not of a violence or of an encounter that would guarantee their authenticity." - Gilles Deleuze, in Proust & SignsRan across this one in a review of the above book here.

Miscellaneous roundup

Images of earth from space via the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) cameras aboard the Terra satellite. Unlike weather satellites, this is a camera taking true-color images of the Earth's surface, often focusing on unique events (dust bowls, erupting volcanoes, etc.) Totally fascinating. I came across this via the Earth Observatory website mentioned in this week's issue of The New Yorker.- - -I've recently come to appreciate Mies van der Rohe's Lange House (1927-1930), which had previously escaped my focused attention. Some images: photo by Hans Engels, two views from the lawn</a>, a short essay by Kent Kleinman and Leslie Van Duzer of Columbia University, an image from 1985, and one last one. A beauty, no? Especially in the first image, which I've seen printed at a larger scale and in which the contrast between the dark brick and the white interiors is most pronounced.- - -There is a Spanish-language bank advertisement on a bus shelter around the corner from my house whose text says something to the effect of "Steering my life in new and better directions." The conscious act of translation works to separate the message from the company placing the advertisement, and, lifted out of its context, it serves as a little pick-me-up on my way to the train every morning. It gives me a (slightly Nietzschian) confidence in my own willpower to change things in my life, to make it better. I'm glad the advertisement is not in English.- - -Even though my posts on contemporary art seem to fall flat in terms of response, I'm drafting a top ten exhibitions/works list for the year. The items are selected, but I want to write a little bit about why I felt each selection was important. Coming soon.- - -Holiday reading list: The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau, The Critique of Everyday Life, Part 1 by Henri Lefebvre, and selections from The Everyday Life Reader edited by Ben Highmore. I also plan to re-read Miwon Kwon's One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity and finish Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism. Pretty hefty for one week, but I think I can manage. One question: Has anyone read Prague by Arthur Phillips? It popped up on a number of best-of lists for the year, and I'm curious for a slightly more in-depth opinion.- - -I'm in the middle of paper-writing purgatory (who isn't?) at the moment. Longer posts on specific topics returning soon. In the meantime, if anyone has any final comments to add to the thread on Susan Sontag's essay in last week's New Yorker, they're still appreciated.

Safety valves

We want every day and every action to be a manifestation of love, joy, confusion and revolt. - Refused, Final CommuniqueAs is often the case when I'm feeling a bit down, I have stayed in the past few nights, cleaning my room and listening to old hardcore records. Refused, Anomie, Born Against, Portraits of Past, Clikatat Ikatowi, His Hero is Gone, Frail, Palatka, Yaphet Kotto - all the music that still gets me going. I air drum, shout along with the lyrics, and reconnect with the energy that seems to have been sucked out of me. I write long e-mails and longer letters, dream up new projects, scribble notes on torn pieces of paper, reorganize and reprioritize. It happens every few months, when my relatively stable range of emotions drifts below the horizon line. An internal safety valve. When I think of close friends and lovers, it seems that they all have these mechanisms. I'm very curious to hear what yours might be. For now, I'm off to watch the lights go out on the Empire State Building, a midnight ritual. I'm sure it's done by computer, but I like to imagine that there's one man or woman somewhere up near the 86th floor, looking at a wristwatch and waiting for the exact moment to flip the switch.For those of you looking at this on your friends list: I also hope that, despite the voluminous contributions already made by myself and 3rdworldcinema, you will visit my last post regarding Susan Sontag's essay in this week's issue of The New Yorker and add to the discussion. Thanks!

Susan Sontag and photography's view of devastation and death

Susan Sontag's broad survey of photography, war and disaster, and, by association, an equally broad 'us' as viewers appears in the current issue of The New Yorker magazine. It is not transcribed online, so, before I go further, I highly recommend that you obtain a copy in print. It is a bit of a monster, probably around 25,000 words, all worth close attention.The essay, divided into six sections, traces the history of this three-way relationship, connects it to wider representations of suffering and pain in the arts, riffs on the role of photography (and "image-flow" media such as television) in contemporary society, touches on the role of photography and written narrative in our memories, contrasts the still image to the moving, throws in a quick shot at Debord and Derrida for claiming the "death of reality," and sums it all up with an explication of a 1992 Jeff Wall photograph titled Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army Patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986) -- like I said, a monster. I'll try not to summarize, as I can't do her rhetorical power justice.Before I get started, please let it be known that I openly invite criticism of all types. I am still working out my reactions to this essay and hope to learn from others' interpretations and reactions to both Sontag and my writing below. Here goes:Her first move is to foreground the fact that photographs - the one element in this triangular relationship seemingly without human involvement - are indeed constructed. "Photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric." And later, "It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude." With this setup in place, she is free to investigate the dynamic between three (more or less) equally subjective actors: the makers of war and suffering, the photographers of war and suffering, and the viewers of war and suffering.And what a complex dynamic it is. Semantic tip-toeing through the daisies is important when handling an issue as complex and sensitive as this, and my first question arises from her use of the world militant toward the end of the first section: " To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank ground in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance. To the militant, identity is everything." How do we define militant? The connotations of the term in contemporary Western parlance imply a certain fierce radicalism -- think of the Michigan Militia or those who killed the children described in her examples -- yet her switch from the specific examples to a very general term implies to me that all Israelis or Palestinians are considered as such. And what of Americans viewing these images, not explicit actors in those battles yet nonetheless closely involved? Are we militant as well? How do we separate the "innocent" from the "implicated"? I don't know exactly how to define the term, and at this point simply wish that she would do so a little more thoroughly.Sontag concludes the third section by stating: "Technically, the possibilities for doctoring or electronically manipulating pictures are greater than ever -- almost unlimited. But the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art." Yet it seems to me (and, I think, to Sontag) that our taste for the dramatic is as strong as ever. She describes the photographs of the Vietnam War as being the first that we can assume were not set-ups (and therefore possessing moral authority), explaining this by the presence multiple witnesses in the form TV news cameras. I would argue, however, that it is the immediacy of these images that grants them their moral authority, reinvesting the camera with its supposed objectivity. The atrocity you see before you is happening right now, or, in the case of the Vietnam War, happened only hours ago. Is this what makes it dramatic, or "real"?The beginning of the fourth section segues briefly into the realm of the aesthetic, an area of particular interest to me. The notion of a "terrible beauty" is raised often by artists, but Sontag believes it doesn't function well when describing photographs. Photographs that depict terrible situations with formal grace -- and here the work of Sebastiao Salgado gets a light dressing-down -- are conceived as "aesthetic" and therefore weaker. Yet there is something to be said about the power of beauty to stir individuals to movement. One of the two theses in Elaine Scarry's recent book On Beauty and Being Just is that beauty, through its ability to move us toward identifying with (and maintaining and replicating) that which is beautiful, prompts us toward a greater sense of social justice. I agree with Sontag's view of the not-fully-thought-out politics of Salgado's photographs, but also feel that one cannot dismiss the power of aesthetic beauty so outright. There is value in the aesthetic value of pictures, as long as that value is taken in hand with all of the other data -- explicit and implicit -- the photograph imparts.Very worrisome for me are these statements: "The problem is not that people remember through photographs but that they remember only the photographs. ... To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture. ... Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they don't help us much to understand." One of Sontag's greatest strengths lies in her ability to summarize the present, and I think it is important to place her observation more directly in line with the attacks of September 11. It is without a doubt that the televised and photographed imagery of the attacks on the World Trade Center (and Washington and Pennsylvania, lest we forget) was both abundant and the only way the disaster was experienced by a majority of the population. It is through this unending stream of imagery that we relate to the events, and how many people would eventually describe it as a "spectacle," an interpretation that Sontag cuts through quite sharply toward the end of the essay. She states: "To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment."(Here's where I really ramble a bit off topic, and I hope that someone can critique what I'm discussing.)What I'm interested in is a phenomenon experienced on the ground that morning: a sort of reverse-projection of the term "spectacle" that allowed people to, as they stood in New York watching the events unfold before their eyes, claim the unreality of the situation. That it was like a movie. That this couldn't possibly be happening. It was a distancing technique afforded these viewers by the relative peacefulness of their daily lives, one that allowed them to diminish the emotional response to the attack. In my opinion, one of the distinguishing characteristics of an advanced capitalist society like that of the United States is an inability to deal with emotions and emotional residue, especially in public. The immediate emotional distancing from what was happening preceded a later, much more codified version. As the site of trauma became a pilgrimage location, an immediate parallel response came in the form of the memorabilia of memory, trinkets and t-shirts and postcards and other commodities. The purchase of these items allowed people visiting New York (and many New Yorkers as well) an ability to feel closer to the events that unfolded, to substitute their public emotional reaction (and the potential for interaction that creates) with the purchase of goods. The mechanics of our capitalist system overtook a glaring need on the part of individuals to cope emotionally and psychologically with the trauma at hand. Admittedly, it's not that simple, and many of the commodities were offered by low-income New Yorkers attempting to revive displaced business by morphing their content of their push-carts and street tables to reflect the changing nature of the tourist money that supports them. However, it seems important to recognize this immediate substitution of the emotional with the economic, especially as we move forward in the process of determining what will fill (or not fill) the World Trade Center site. How can we begin to determine the form of a public site of mourning if we do not know how to mourn in public? The further removed from the attacks we become -- and the difficulties of any design process will take time to work through -- the more reliant we become upon the imagery of the attacks, which Sontag and others have long characterized as mediated. Do we wish to move ahead in the healing process through a haze of double mediation -- that of the capitalist response to the attack and the imagery by which we remember it? This speaks nothing to the amount of related material -- image-based or not -- that has piled on to our memories since that day nearly fifteen months ago.Anyway, to return briefly to Sontag. I wish that she would have allowed her essay a bit more of these kinds of ruminations. In the September 24, 2001 issue of The New Yorker, she wrote a "Talk of the Town" piece that was pretty directly critical of United States foreign policy, and she received a pretty thorough batch of criticism for it. I have to wonder if that experience shaped the writing -- or the editing by the magazine -- of this essay. The only somewhat political contemporary barb she throws in is a comment that says one of the reasons the Israeli-Palestinian has become such an international event is the former's direct ties to the United States. She also states that many people (herself included, perhaps) feel that "what is ultimately at stake... is the strength of the forces opposing the juggernaut of American-sponsored globalization, economic and cultural." A strong opinion, but in the context of this essay it becomes an small island floating in a sea of art history scholarship and close analysis of individual images.However, it is not her duty to examine everything, as nice as that may be for all of us. In the meantime, this essay serves as a starting point for what I hope will be an interesting public discussion. I've got my sights set on news.google.com looking for her name, and hope that something can happen here as well.UPDATE: Here is a link to collections of war photography online, presented in conjunction with Sontag's article, from The New Yorker's "Online Only" section.3rdworldcinema, I'm looking at you. I hope that a thorough discussion of this essay -- though not limited to the two of us, of course -- will soon get started.