Richard Wright (Photograph: Linda Nylind) The Turner Prize has no equivalent in the United States. This annual award to a U.K.-based visual artist is like awarding just one Oscar for “Best Artist in All the Land”. The build up, the anticipation, the dissenters, the enthusiasts—it is a yearly cycle that I observe with interest from […]
Still Enchanting After All These Years
Looking south from Cordova NM The view from Carson NM I’m back from five days in New Mexico. Born in the desert and more at home in that landscape than anywhere else, I have been in a deep need for that stark horizontality, for the vistas that read both minimally and maximally, for the understated […]
Art on the Installment Plan
David Pike, pictured with his favourite piece by Paul Denham, enjoys buying art despite living in a caravan. (Photo: North News & Pictures) I just learned about Own Art from an article in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt that explains the gist of the program: Set up in 2004 by the Arts Council, Own Art […]
Gimbutas’ Old Europe
Female Figurine (front and back), Cucuteni, Drăguşeni, 4050-3900 BC, Botoşani County Museum, Botoşani (Photo: Marius Amarie) Anthropomorphic Vessel, Gumelniţa, Sultana, 4600-3900 BC, National History Museum of Romania, Bucharest (Photo: Marius Amarie) John Noble Wilford has written a fascinating article in the Science section of the New York Times (its location in the paper is telling) […]
Remote Futures, Remote Pasts
Salt crystals on the Spiral Jetty, Utah When a place is lifeless or unreal, there is almost always a mastermind behind it. It is so filled with the will of its maker that there is no room for its own nature. –Christopher Alexander, one of my ideological mentors, as quoted by Edward Hollis in The […]
Meredith Monk, In Eternia
Photo: Meredith Monk A last four minutes of Meredith Monk’s most recent performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music of Songs of Ascensionhas been posted on Alex Ross’ (The New Yorker) blog. From Ross: The video excerpt…comes from the final section of the work: first Monk delivers a solo, accompanying herself on a shruti box, […]
Written on the Body
Tribute, by Anne Truitt (Photo courtesy of Anne Truitt) More thoughts about Anne Truitt, mostly through commentary by others: Her son-in-law, art critic Charlie Finch, wrote an essay about Truitt that brings her work and her persona closer together. He begins the essay by describing Truitt as “the driest, most detached person I had yet […]
The Thing Is
The road to High Head Castle, first built in the Middle Ages and then destroyed by fire in 1947. The thing is to love life to love it even when you have no stomach for it, when everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands and your throat is filled with the […]
Other Laws
Spiral carvings on Long Meg, a menhir that sits outside the Long Meg and her Daughters stone circle in Cumbria Here are a few more thoughts that percolated through me during my stay in the Lake District. The spiritual meaning of art belongs to the realm of the subjective or superconscious mind. Only when the […]
The Starry Messenger: Another Thumbs Up
J. Smith-Cameron, left, and Matthew Broderick in “The Starry Messenger,” a new comedy by Kenneth Lonergan. (Photo: Sara Krulwich, New York Times) News alert: A fabulous review of Kenny Lonergan’s latest play, The Starry Messenger, appeared in the New York Times this morning. Thank you Ben Brantley for giving this carefully nuanced work its proper […]