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 […]
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Lots of Language, and Not
I’m off to New York for the “Coast of Utopia” 3 play marathon on Saturday. Given Stoppard’s legendary love of words (“He uses too many!” says my friend Joseph Gifford), here’s a poem to commemorate the other end of that spectrum, where language is underspoken and unfinished… Ars Poetica would it wake the drowned out […]
Schjeldahl on “Global Feminisms” Show
Ingrid Mwangi (Kenya), Static Drift, 2001 While some may not be as enamored and delighted by Peter Schjeldahl’s art reportage as I usually am, here’s a passage full of ideas from his latest review of the “Global Feminisms” show at the Brooklyn Museum from the New Yorker. Of particular interest to me is his handling […]
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Rilke: Pushing Through
It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone; I am such a long way in I see no way through, and no space: everything is close to my face, and everything close to my face is stone. I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief so this […]
Rhizomatics
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 […]
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 […]