I spent last week at the Ad:Tech interactive advertising and technology conference in San Francisco talking to people about where they see the Web heading and what life online is going to look like in a few more years. The range of future views I heard was, as expected, diverse. While I do not have […]
Month: April 2007
Breasts, Bodies, Canvas
I found a wonderful blog about all things Aboriginal–Will Owen’s Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American eye. He’s been at it for some time, so there is a lot of material to review and well worth the time. In a recent posting Owen reviews a new book by Jennifer Biddle, Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert […]
The Body, and Beyond
One more excerpt from Fred Myers’ Painting Culture: Myers highlights the distinctions between the paintings of the Pintupi tribe and the art from Balgo, just south of the Pintupi land: Pintupi culture valorizes some dimensions of painting–a painting’s truth in relation to the Dreaming, the right of expression as part of one’s identity–but gives no […]
Aboriginal Art, Sacred Land and Becoming Visible
More on the topic of Aboriginal art through the eyes of Fred Myers: In Painting Culture, Myer quotes Nancy Munn who describes the Aboriginal relationship to their country as an objectification of ancestral subjectivity. Places where significant events took place, where power was left behind, or where the ancestors went into the ground and still […]
From the Dreaming, It Became Real
One of the leading anthropological experts on Aboriginal art and culture is Fred R. Myers. His 2002 book, Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art, explores the Western Desert Aboriginal painting movement through a lens that is more culture based than visual or aesthetic. Myers, a Professor of Anthropology at NYU, spent time […]
Saffron Goddess
Frequent Slow Muse commenter and friend Elatia Harris has written yet another memorable piece on 3 Quarks Daily. Her topic this time: Saffron. And because she is both a writer and an artist, she has woven the history of this delicate spice with an image track of beautiful prehistoric paintings, a few sampled here. Here’s […]
Beyond
Michael Benson is a filmmaker whose spent hours parsing through the thousands of black & white and color images taken by NASA space probes and landers. In his book Beyond: Visions of Interplanetary Probes, he has painstakingly pieced images together to create a view of space that takes my breath away. Looking at the images […]
Ahmad Shamlu: This Crow
I Am Still Thinking About This Crow I am still thinking about this crow that with its pair of black scissors— by two brisk swishing sounds— cut an aslant arc on the matte paper of the sky over the toasted wheat farms of the Yush valley; I am still thinking about this crow that facing […]
Piraha, Language and Be Here Now
The article in the New Yorker by John Colapinto about the Amazonian Piraha tribe (also referenced in the April 17 posting below) is provoking thinking from a whole variety of viewpoints. A Google search produces a range of responses to the article from linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, generic bloggers, and even Taoists. What seems to have […]
Contexts: The Museum vs The Gallery
Howard Morphy is a leading authority on Aboriginal art and the director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at The Australian National University. In his article, Seeing Aboriginal Art in the Gallery, he explores a number of issues that I have been writing and thinking about. Here is one idea excerpt: The theory of a […]