So much good commentary is available online about Tom Stoppard’s trilogy, Coast of Utopia, so I won’t spend time here rehashing the larger context of the play and its subject matter. Instead I’ll be blatantly bloggish and personal and just say that I was in an altered state through the entire 12 hour marathon. (Still […]
Left speechless
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 […]
Breaking Through Language and Visual Hegemonies
Jim Coleman (of Nightingale at Large fame) made the following comment to an earlier post on Ocularcentrism. His insights are too provocative to lay hidden in the folds of this blog: I wanted to be sure you noticed …the article in the April 16th New Yorker by John Calapinto on the language of the Piraha, […]
Red dirt
A dusting of paprika-colored sand permeates every surface of my backpack and clothes. Even the toothpaste tube has a gritty residue. I’d like to think these particles are on assignment, carrying out an esoteric mission that only the small entities in life can undertake. (According to the ancient hymn/myth, Inanna is rescued from the underworld […]
Carnegie Museum of Art
More from Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art Modern Japanese Prints: 1868–1989 The show includes stop-in-your-tracks stunners by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892) who lived his life on the cusp between old and new Japan. Garnered from private collections, these Yoshitoshis from the 36 Ghosts series display his technical brilliance–vignetted color and the exactitude of a fine pen […]
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Jason Moran in Cambridge
Jason Moran and Bandwagon played two sets at the Regatta Bar in Cambridge last night. I was glued to my seat through both. Jason and crew (Tarus Mateen on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums) were joined on several numbers by Jason’s wife, Alicia Hall Moran, one of which was an aria from Turandot. Who […]
Connecting Outside of Language
Todd Gibson, speaking about Agnes Martin (and in particular, his favorite Martin, Milk River, at the Whitney Museum): Some paintings make for great public lecture material. Others are best used for quiet, personal contemplation. Martin’s work from the 1960s never fails to bring me to a place that even other great artists who strove to […]
Getting Hammered
But for once I wasn’t thinking in words; I was hammered by the image. I couldn’t explain what the picture expressed, what I intuited from it. But that it spoke, I had no doubt. Patricia Hampl, from Blue Arabesque Patricia Hampl’s book delves into her life changing experience of encountering a painting by Matisse at […]
Pondering Marden’s Nebraska
Marden cuts the cord that still bound an artist like Jasper Johns to the literary underpinnings of nineteenth-century symbolism, without simultaneously destroying art’s ability to evoke natural forms. He jettisons story, myth, and illusion, and with them representation, composition, and spatial depth. What we are left with is paint, canvas, scale, shape, and brush stroke—but […]