more of the same (more of the same, for at least the next three weeks, as Ian Scholes used to say)

I woke this morning thinking about Bill Boling’s images of stuff for sale in New Zealand and in the good ole U.S.A., and how New Zealand’s long sense of exceptionalism outdoes the United States’ in terms of its historical simplicity: The treaty of Waitangi was adhered to or violated, the country grew and matured, and eventually it was acknowledged that the Maori have gotten the short end of the stick rather more often than not in the development of a nation that for many years was mostly a replica of Britain, with the addition of picturesque glaciers and a parallel Polynesian culture.

But the wars in which New Zealand participated were always far away, and even when the Pacific War came to its doorstep, the doorstep was still in less immediate danger of suffering a home invasion than in, say, Australia.

And the deceptively placid state of ethnic relations spared the place from the paradoxes of all those Pacific colonies where the chiefs or kings (depending on what foreign word was being used that year to describe the local dignitaries) often enough invited in the colonizers, on the grounds that organized exploitation was better than incessant piracy and raids by freebooters looking for manpower for the coconut plantations.

Except in ward politics in a few American cities, Americans haven’t been used to dealings in which the big power to the west was implored to conquer the country because it was less rapacious than the big power to the east, or ones in which the now-dominant ethnicity was invited in to protect the locals against the sea raiders, or ones in which the contending ethnic groups come not in dualities, but in sets of fourteen or twenty.

Now Americans are having to get used to the sorts of variables that other parts of the world have had to deal with for millennia, and we don’t like it very much. You bet we don’t.

The sense of rapidly sliding variables is rising in the Atlanta art scene, as well.

The scene has developed recently in ways even more splintered than usual, and those of us with night-vision issues and aging automobiles frequently find we can’t get even to the things we would like to be seeing. So there is more need than ever for second-hand information we can count on, including summaries of the lectures we couldn’t attend.

But no one is paying for that type of information, so the few stories that appear in print sources are focused on the primary interests of a particular readership. This is as it should be in a world in which art shows are many and pages of print are few, but audiences also are many. The problem is that none of them want to contribute to providing a source of comprehensive coverage, since the few efforts in that direction in the distant past have been financial failures.

So in lieu of having enough reviewing, we now find ourselves dependent on the good will of bloggers who spend their own money and wear themselves and their digital cameras out in the pursuit of art reportage.

But as I’ve said before, those of us who find ourselves spending hours at our laptops just working through e-mails and doing minimal updating simply can’t remember to click through every art blog in Atlanta. And no single one of the blogs is a go-to source for everything, despite more than one effort to create a blog on which everyone would post.

The simplest solution would be a site imitating Arts and Letters Daily, on which a set of editors would produce smart capsule summaries with links to the full-length blog posts. Good old aldaily is usually colorful in its summaries without distorting the content of the articles to which the teasers link, so one could imagine something comparable, like “Nobody thinks much about Finno-Ugric art these days. Counterforces wants to put a stop to that….” Or for locally focused stories: “Joe Blow Gallery’s new space calls itself ‘aggressively stupid.’ Bare and Bitter Sleep agrees [link] while Ghostmap Microwave thinks there isn’t nearly enough aggression [link] and newcomer False Alternatives thinks it isn’t nearly stupid enough [link].”

My original idea was to keep the hypothetical resource focused on art and mostly on art in Atlanta, so as to avoid links like “so-and-so has posted pictures of peanut butter again” or “Jerry Cullum is going on again about why nobody reads the Alexandria Quartet anymore.” Bloggers ought not to feel obligated to make themselves into pundits (although punditry doesn’t seem to stop Maureen Dowd or David Brooks from writing occasionally about almost anything they please); and if nothing else, incredibly cute animal pictures break up the solemnity. Except for readers who are just trying to figure out what shows opened last weekend and what is in them.

So we still need some kind of substitute for the adequate art reviewing that Atlanta does not have. Preferably organized by someone who does not start out somewhere near Auckland before getting to the main topic. (By the way, you know what kind of society you will be dealing with when the names of its primary geographic features are the North Island and the South Island, although the bygone givers of place names are no more than distant relatives of those who promoted the dickens out of Lord of the Rings tourism a few years back.)

more guides for the perplexed

Like Senator Biden, I need to learn how to summarize my points in fewer than ten thousand words. You betcha, as Garrison Keillor's Minnesota Language Systems taught us to say many years ago.

I have been rambling round the thickets of genetics versus social constructionism in order to take issue both with much of what I learned back in the day and with what many readers out there have learned in the day after that.

I started out studying the world before sociobiology reduced us all to a gene's way of making another gene, but long after Husserl and Wittgenstein had declared that the taken-for-granteds of the "natural attitude" were not going to hack it. I cut my metaphorical eyeteeth (whatever those are) on Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality, which was enough to make me understand that we not only don't start out as blank slates once we learn our first words of language, we are shaped by the state of conversation around us without having to have the ideas drilled into us by the school system or our parents. (The book left out huge chunks of important conceptual issues and is now very, very out of date as well as defective, but it was a start.)

When I started writing newspaper reviews, I took positions that promptly got me irate members of my peer group buttonholing me to tell me how ignorant I was. And I was, though incorporating their criticisms into my next review was not the way to repair ths deficiency.

Very early on I realized I was writing for a wide variety of audiences, and for reasons expounded by Messrs Berger and Luckmann, those who loved one particular style were likely to have (what to them seemed like) "good reasons" for dissing the other guys' beloved kinds of art.

So while trying to develop terminology within which to describe what makes a work of art succeed within its own terms and its own game (its own "form of life," if you will), I felt obligated to say "If you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you will like," and let the fact of limited numbers of column inches speak for the assertion that the show was worth visiting for at least some reason.

The subtlety of compressed discourse fed artists' natural paranoia, I also discovered; a single adjective suggesting that a show might be somewhat less epoch-making than the Salon des Refusés in the nineteenth century or "Freeze" in twentieth-century London was taken to be a clue that I hated the artist's work with a passion. It wasn't so.

But working around artists who had actually taken to their bed after a withering review and who would rather have their name mentioned in a laundry list than go completely unrecognized made for some interesting distortions in my perception.

So my feeling is that we need a twenty-first century style of art writing that will address twenty-first century knowledge about the human condition: writing that will stretch the boundaries of audience perception by understanding who various types of readers are, and that will present reasons for finding disagreeable work worthy of consideration, whether the work is disagreeable because it is a sugary Impressionist knockoff with a contemporary difference or because it is an intelligent version of the worst lowbrow-style crossbreeding of anime with an earlier generation's comic-book sensibilities. There are reasons why even generally disrespected genres and strategies can give birth to good art, and even more reasons why genres currently worshipped by the art magazines can produce primarily appalling work.

We need, somehow, to grow into the century that is now almost a tenth of the way through, and into the new millennium (accordingly to the commonly accepted calendar) that is looking ever more millennial in terms of shifts in our most fundamental levels of knowledge. This goes for art as much as for other aspects of human society.

The problem is that newspaper reviews (when there are reviews at all, and focus groups tend to say they don't want them) only allow enough space to say "Y'all should come see this, and here's one reason why y'all ought to do that." It becomes ever more difficult to figure out how to educate an audience that not only does not have time for two thousand word blog posts, they have been given no good reason why they should spend any of their time looking for two thousand word blog posts.

In order to educate, we have first to stir interest.

a further guide for the perplexed (as regards counterforces, the blog, anyway)

Newcomers to Counterforces will not realize that I sometimes make outrageous statements for the sake of clarifying a discussion. (Saying things I don’t necessarily mean also provides useful cover for those frequent occasions wherein, as in the idiom that was commonplace in my youth, I have my cranium completely surrounded by my rectal cavity.)

Dutton’s The Art Instinct, treated so laboriously in the previous post, provides a list of operative universals regarding the work of art. If he finds similar attitudes at work on the Sepik River and in the Seattle suburbs (I cite the latter only for alliteration, but Dutton loves to quote the sources he spoke with on the Sepik), it’s most likely a trait built into us by evolution.

Cultural determinists have gone overboard in denying biological universals (an odd response to earlier racist theories, since it would be useful to realize that everybody has a structurally similar mix of inherent traits, if such is the case). But the efforts of the inheritors of sociobiology to pin it all on our genes won’t fly either (nor will they wash, for that matter).

Dutton, like almost all of us, tends to cherry-pick his examples to support his argument and his prejudgments. Downplaying difference has its uses even if it creates the “problem” of finding the biological reasons why minority practices exist, but one sees why difference has tended to be absolutized in recent decades.

And yet difference isn’t the deciding factor any more than sameness is. Some emotions and attitudes really are the default positions, and cultures devote their efforts to reinforcing or modifying or canceling altogether those particular predispositions.

It takes a great deal of looking (or being charmed by wall niches in Victorian buildings and Addison-Mizner-era arcades in Florida) to think that Duchamp’s Fountain looks like anything but a urinal resting on its flat side, and I am prepared to accept that Duchamp wouldn’t have known an architectural niche if one violated the laws of physics concerning inanimate objects and came up and bit him in the ass…or I would be prepared to accept that if it weren’t for the fact that all his other artworks are so daggumed pretty. Pretty offensive, maybe, but pretty.

Michael Graves’ toilet brush makes me happy every time I look at it (or at the holder that conceals the brush, more accurately). I am perfectly prepared to accept that my association of its form with, say, Asian and European pottery traditions is not shared by the vast majority of users, who would prefer a brush that they can stick in the corner and forget about it. And I am perfectly willing to admit that it requires a particular independence from received opinion about what a toilet brush should look like in order to find that this object fills an emotional need that I didn’t even know I had until I saw its fulfillment. And that particular kind of detachment is, yes, related to social class (the particular social group into which one has been thrust by choice or circumstances), rather than ethnic origin or sexual preference. And given the uneven distribution of sensory equipment, I can imagine that there are those who think of toilet brushes in terms of sculpture who would still rather have a PBR and countertop-perked Maxwell House instead of a Three Philosophers and some Italianate variation on stepping one’s coffee down a notch with steamed milk or up a notch with techniques comparable to those derived once in points farther east. So one’s place in the social order isn’t really the determining factor, just the situation that makes one’s particular options possible. And the genetic factors that go into ethnic origins and sexual preference also go into what kind of beer one likes (or if one likes beer at all), and genetic factors matter more than we think. But neither biology nor society (what used to be called “nature and culture”) explains the situation unless both factors are seen as operative in different proportions.

In other words, I take issue with much of standard-issue cultural studies as I do with standard-issue sociobiology, and I am happy that the new generation of interdisciplinary sciences is providing us with the raw material for a revisionary aesthetics that breaks out of the unproductive debates that have crippled the past generation of academic discourse.

Now let us get back to the unpleasant fact that the global economic order is teetering on the verge of collapse, and to pondering who did it, and why. The Law of Unintended Consequences is an explanation but not an excuse for those who inadvertently unhinged the whole structure of late capitalism while inventing new ways to pursue self-interest.

Two Thousand Words That Do Not Mention the Economic Crisis of 2008

An Essay on Art Theory That Ends With a Philosophy of Bathroom Accessories: A Non-Review of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct


Cross-posted by Jerry Cullum to counterforces.blogspot.com and joculum.livejournal.com




I guess one of the commonplaces of anybody’s college education back in the day was that the fundamental challenge of twentieth century intellectual life was how to reconcile Marx, Freud, and Darwin.

I used to add the symbolic names of Kropotkin, Alfred Russell Wallace, and Jung purely as shorthand, to indicate early divergences of opinion from the previous three estimable European gentlemen rather than unequivocal agreement with any one of the competition.

However, after one added the later contributions from Fanon and his successors, and the theorists of gender, and the sciences symbolized by cybernetics, one saw quickly just how much those three founding fathers left out of their (purely metaphorical) equations. (The attempt to make the word “equations” literal, to enlist the prestige of mathematical precision for the human sciences, is yet another story, a very long one.)

I leave physics out of the picture because it is hard to fit Einstein into the human sciences, simply because of the scale of the processes involved. As a thinker whose name I shall not mention put it, the scale creates the phenomenon. Or as in the movie Adaptation’s memorable satire, narratives that begin with the galaxies and end with genetics miss a few key points along the way.

And yet we ought to treat “the human sciences” as sciences, unmathematical though most of them largely are and ought to remain. That French term for anthropology and all the rest is quite accurate; we are in quest of a twenty-first century science of how humanity functions in its social context as well as its environmental one, and the problem is that we can’t afford to forget the state of research in any of the disciplines. We shouldn’t read the previously mentioned foundational texts in the understanding of the human enterprise any more uncritically than we would read foundational texts in medicine or in the so-called pure sciences.

The point I have made many times over in my joculum blog, however, is that just as Sir Isaac Newton set forth some principles that are modified or set in new contexts, not overthrown, the earliest advocates of a “science of man” (as it was called in less gender-inclusive times) may have hit upon some ways of understanding the problem that should be taken seriously but not uncritically. And those advocates stretch farther back into history and in geographic location than the European nineteenth century.

What brings all this up is a review copy of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct, scheduled for publication by Bloomsbury Press in…well, one learns not to trust publication dates, but officially very early in 2009. So there will be time before then to engage with the book in detail, rather than picking up on early chapters plus a significant later segment, as this present essay does.

Dutton is the founder of the Arts and Letters Daily website that writes teasers about and links to a range of provocative discussions, from popular to accessibly theorietical, in areas of, well, well nigh all the arts and sciences (encompassed by the term “letters”), though some of the arts and some of the sciences get shorter shrift than others. There is no guarantee of what one will find when one clicks on the link; the journal to which one navigates may be left-wing or right-wing, mainstream or revisionist, but always interesting and always containing a logically argued discussion of the topic at hand, and one can waste enormous amounts of time clicking through to, sometimes, half a dozen differing debates on the same hot topic.

So a book by Dutton comes with massive expectations, and it’s inevitable that this attempt to interpret art via Darwinism is a disappointment. Dutton founded the journal Philosophy and Literature, after all, even if Arts and Letters Daily approaches being the longed-for Journal of Just About Everything, and our predilections and presuppositions shape and distort our perceptions. (“Peter Piper picked”…sorry, the plethora of philosophic terms that begin with “p” frequently result in spates of alliteration like that regrettable lapse in style.)

My aside about prose style is to the point, though Dutton’s book is reasonably well written. Just as we tend to overlook the subjective effect of style when we are constructing an argument (otherwise, academicians would write better than they do), we tend to skip over the aspects of a problem that do not interest us, or, worse, we deny that they have anything to do with the problem.

Dutton’s quarrel with aesthetician and art critic Arthur Danto early on in the book is a case in point. Discussing why Komar and Melamid’s humorous “most wanted paintings” are revelatory even as they make fun of statisticians, Dutton misses what ought to be his main point. He rightly sees that just as with a culture’s favorite foods, such as hamburgers, pizza, ice cream, and chocolate for Americans, people who say they like certain things in a realist painting don’t mean that they would like to have them all mixed together at the same time.

But having heavy-handedly dismissed K and M’s witty paintings as a con rather than a joke with a serious point, Dutton argues that the worldwide preference for landscape cannot be overlooked, especially since the sorts of landscape involved are not always commonplace in the countries surveyed.

Danto argues that the preference of Kenyans for Hudson River School types of landscape reflects the global distribution of bad calendar art. Dutton argues that it’s the consequence of evolutionary preferences for certain features of the environment that became less a part of the human story as we spread out from our points of origin, places that obviously did not include upstate New York but that shared some of its geological features. Natural selection, according to Dutton’s interpretation of others’ hypotheses, made us a species hard-wired to prefer certain types of advantageous surroundings, and thus our hearts leap when we see representations of them.

Maybe. But bad calendar art also codifies whatever predilections are hard-wired into us by virtue of who survived to have offspring, and the story of evolution is not that simplistic.

Dutton goes on, however, to discuss the cross-cultural nature of aesthetics in ways that offend against the ruling pieties in ways that are potentially highly productive. He points out, for example, that not only do most of the constitutive factors of art occur in the vast majority of cultures whether they use the category of “art” or not, but the notion of the anonymous creator has been greatly exaggerated. In his field research in the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea, he found that groups still leading a traditional lifestyle had well-defined ideas as to what made a Sepik carving good or bad, and everyone knew who the good artists were. Anyone who paid attention to such things in the Sepik culture could tell at a glance who had made what.

In fact, ethnographic museums now pay attention to who made what, too (as I noticed years ago in a Dutch show on the carvers among the Asmat of West Papua), and I suppose in small societies in which artworks are made of perishable materials, there is less inclination to recite the names of illustrious forebears and originators of artistic styles, lists of ancestors such as one might find in lineage-oriented cultures like those in West Africa.

I omit a discussion of African aesthetics because I don’t remember enough of the evidence to make any statements I would trust, but overall Dutton makes a fairly relentless case for human universality, for similarities that outweigh differences in terms of emotional reactions to art—even though the range of responses ought to make us suspicious of Family-of-Man-style sentimentality.

I haven’t read more than random fractions of the book and am thus reluctant to state that Dutton simply overestimates the impact of evolutionary factors, but I suspect he does. In an era in which we have learned that culture actually can reprogram not just outward behavior but certain autonomic physical processes, the feedback loops of what we once thought were nature-and-culture dichotomies really do need to be looked at differently.

And this is so even if, as researchers are finding with twins raised apart and adoptive children raised together, nature is beating out nurture almost every time. It is the “almost” that counts most here. We may be genetically predisposed to like sweet foods more than other people do, but whether we prefer Moon Pies or red bean ice cream is a matter of cultural variables. There are people in this world who like both equally, but not because their genes made them that way.

I have gone through this fourteen-hundred-word digression (commonplace in the joculum journal, to which I shall cross-post this) to get to the point that made me feel I needed to grapple with this book immediately.

Dutton is apparently downright offended by the elevation of what art theorists themselves call “anti-art,” or art that overrides visual stimuli in favor of conceptual issues. He is scarcely the only intellectual to have had this reaction, rather than simply accepting that it is possible to love Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Henry Darger, Hans Haacke, Bill Traylor, Mel Chin, Julian Schnabel, David Hammons, and in general everything from Paleolithic cave paintings to video projections. (Okay, maybe not Julian Schnabel.)

So Dutton comes down hard on the prototype of the anti-retinal revolution, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. I’m not sure that he himself is aware of his loaded language in the discussion, since he discusses the “aesthetic problems” of this chapter in terms of the “evolved human excellences” that feed into our “self-designed species,” which exists along a continuum at the end of which “rational choice and innate intuitions can overlap and reinforce one another.”

This is where evolutionary theory starts siding towards philistinism, whether the topic under discussion is art or religion or pretty much anything that involves the human imagination as distinct from our computational abilities. (I’m still grappling with John Johnston’s lovely book on The Allure of Machinic Life in which consciousness is regarded as computational…which it would be, were it not the sum total of so many bodily processes that those actually doing work in the field observe that the biochemical complexities shade off in an immense number of directions.)

So Dutton gets into high dudgeon about the line that leads from Duchamp’s urinal to Manzoni’s can of artist’s excrement, which latter is a joke comparable to the Komar and Melamid paintings that roused Dutton’s ire at the beginning of his book. Dutton doesn’t find many things funny, but neither do the art theorists he rages against.

And he and the art theorists alike misunderstand Duchamp as badly as Duchamp himself did. Because Fountain is, as someone else has pointed out and I concur unreservedly, actually a rather beautiful work of retinal art, comparable to Picasso’s discovery of a bull’s horns in a bicycle part.

Duchamp turned his found object ninety degrees, which immediately made it resemble the niche that is a feature of so much traditional architecture, often as the setting for a basin of water (or, indeed, for a faucet or a drinking fountain). Duchamp saw the formal architecture of a urinal and turned it into a visual joke that seems to have been a joke on himself as much as on anyone else. For the work, once rendered functionless, was as much a piece of sculpture as the Michael Graves toilet brush that can still be had at Target stores. Duchamp’s urinal, like Graves’ toilet brush, has more in common with the history of gracefully shaped vessels than with the history of bathroom accessories.

Rotated ninety degrees and functioning as a niche rather than a urinal (for as a piece of sculpture it could no longer be used for its original function), if one were to hook Fountain up to its intended plumbing and then flush, the water would spurt more or less upwards and form…a fountain. It would be a piece of participatory kinetic sculpture.

So Dutton doesn’t get it. But neither did Duchamp, as far as we know.

And I wish I could remember who it was who pointed out that the urinal is not just hauled into the gallery and plopped down untransformed except for the “R. Mutt” signature.

And if neither Dutton nor Duchamp completely understand why they are pursuing more agendas than they think they are pursuing…why, my goodness, we are back to Freud at the very least, and easily right back to the whole problem with which I began this essay.

on emending: post number 77, apparently

William Boling deserves a more comprehensive (and corrected) discussion than I could give him in the middle of a Lisa Tuttle discussion.

"You Ain't Wrong" at Hagedorn Foundation Gallery and online at www.youaintwrong.com is actually a comparison of online items offered for sale or auction in New Zealand and the United States, something which isn't immediately apparent on viewing the juxtaposed images.

This is, in part, because NZ and the US are so culturally congruent (even if NZ is still a bit more like the UK and is sometimes willing to let itself be called by the Maori name Aotearoa) that it requires a keen eye and an anthropological background to figure out the subtle psychological differences between the two junk cultures. If Boling is to be believed, the US wins out in terms of odd bits of taxidermy, and I for one can believe it.

But my original point remains: more often the pairings seem to be making formal points (usually humorous ones) rather than providing piercingly analytical insights into the nature of today's America versus a land in the South Pacific whose historical entanglements and ironies presumably make for some amazing bits of material culture, as they used to call it last time I checked into the academic discipline in question (which was just long enough ago that anyone using the term "material culture" is now probably ridiculed).

I used to be a great deal more current on NZ when Art New Zealand was available in Atlanta, and am now suddenly inclined to begin a Google search to see what has been going on in NZ culture lately. Presumably, as with American culture and eBay, I could also find out the same thing by searching the NZ auction site frequented by Boling, but I would already have to know what names and keywords to look for.

Lisa Tuttle at Sandler Hudson

Reading through the various papers from a symposium called Visual Literacy that James Elkins edited for Routledge this year, I realized again just how much Lisa Tuttle’s “Belgian Diary” photographs at Atlanta’s Sandler Hudson Gallery depend, for full comprehension, on a degree of historical background along with a visual literacy that goes beyond formalist questions of the composition of a good photograph.

Of course, one could say much the same of William Boling’s images of objects sold on eBay, at Hagedorn Foundation Gallery through October 3, and perhaps of Tom Zarrilli’s photographs of anomalous juxtapositions in yard sales. But there, the formalist aspects and unexpectedly amusing ironies are usually the main point, plus the amount of psychological unveiling involved in the fact that the seller had chosen to possess the objects in question, and that our society had felt the need for them to exist.

That last-named species of revelation is also the point of Tuttle’s photographs of Belgian flea markets and shop windows, except that the psychological unveiling is one that involves a whole country and its colonial history.

As books like King Leopold’s Ghost reminded us some years ago, in the latter part of the nineteenth century H.R.H. Leopold, King of the Belgians, created the singularly misnamed Independent State of Congo as his personal fiefdom, not as a colony of the Belgian nation. The extraction of raw materials from the country depended on the uncompensated labor of the Independent State’s inhabitants.

When an observant bookkeeper in Belgium realized that tons of valuable commodities were coming out of Congo but nothing was going back except supplies for the colonial administration, he sounded the alarm. And in an act of appropriate outrage, the Belgian parliament removed Congo from Leopold’s jurisdiction and assumed control.

What followed was itself one of the less happy stories of colonial administration, and in 2005 what had once been the Belgian museum of the African colonies undertook to present the whole tale, unprettified and laid out analytically, with photographic documentation.

But the flea markets photographed by Tuttle are very nearly as good a record of the consequences of colonization as the museum’s show. Congolese sculptures, ranging from near-museum quality to tourist knickknacks, sit next to memorabilia of colonial days and sentimental reminders of the happy nineteenth century in the homeland.

The sheer quantity of Congo-related stuff is a reminder of the decades of Belgian colonial entanglements in Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi (which were then joined together as Ruanda-Urundi). And Tuttle has a keen eye for the absurdities and the telling juxtapositions, which come from a different history than the more benign or merely bizarre paradoxes and comic moments discerned in American pop culture by Boling and Zarrilli. (This is not to say that the moments can't be simultaneously odd and poignant; I once acquired a souvenir shot glass from prewar Sarajevo in an Atlanta yard sale.)

Tuttle’s show deserves formal analysis one image at a time, but this is enough for starters. If I get started on the topic of inadvertently revelatory documentary residues of the colonial past and present, I’ll write more about that than about the show at Sandler Hudson, which runs through October 18.

on being unready for one's closeup

I had overlooked the acclamation this blog received from Atlanta's Creative Loafing. (I always assume that Counterforces is mostly being read by people who wandered over from my other blog, where almost all of my non-art-related posts go and where the readership is mostly from other fields of interest, and almost none of whom are from Atlanta.)

Now I am going to have to start posting to Counterforces more regularly instead of explaining what I would write if I were writing here more regularly.

Fortunately, my post about Lisa Tuttle at Sandler Hudson was already being tweaked, and deleting a few probably excessive or ill-chosen pieces of phraseology will get the thing ready to be posted before the show comes down. (For the past half-lifetime, I have grumbled that the problem with art reviewing is that it is expected to work like art history but to do so within twenty-four to seventy-two hours.)

I was going to post some reflections on the 2008 book Visual Literacy on my other blog, where they would fit into larger considerations, but now I guess at the very least I have to cross-post them here. Once I write them.