Wasatch Mountains in Utah (October 2011) Writing about writing poetry: It soothes my soul the way reading scriptures comforts believers. In an earlier post I referenced Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry by Jane Hirshfield (here), an inspiring and thoughtful meditation on how poetry comes into being. And now I have another to recommend: […]
Aesthetics
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Martian Muse and Richard Tuttle
Carbon Dioxide Ice in the Late Summer Fan and Dust Devil in Deuteronilus Mensa Jumbled Terrain in Ius Chasma There are mornings when language just isn’t of service to what is happening in the interior landscape. So it is ironic that in the language-centric world that is most online environments, the “out of language” still […]
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Kieferland
Anselm Kiefer in the documentary, “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow.” (Photo: Alive Mind Cinema) _____ Rubble is the future. Because everything that is passes. There is a wonderful chapter in Isaiah that says: grass will grow over your cities…Isaiah sees the city and the different layers over it, the grass, and then another city, […]
Contemporary Art at the MFA
First floor view of the new Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art at the MFA, Boston I’m of several minds when it comes to the oft-argued place that museums should/could/would claim in the cultural milieu of contemporary life. Beyond the obvious tensions—high brow vs low brow (in a world that is increasingly no brow), elitism […]
Cultural Dreamings
Hans Hollein, façade from Strada Novissima, The Presence of the Past, 1980. Biennale of Architecture, Venice. From the show at the Victoria & Albert Museum Reviewing a new show of architecture at the Victoria & Albert museum, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, Guardian writer Hari Kunzru describes a movement that has its roots in the theoretical […]
A Silky Attention Brought to Bear
The sand along the shore in Small Point, Maine: The water’s silky attention brought to bear I’ve posted a few Jane Hirshfield poems on this blog previously (here and here) and continue to explore her body of work. In the meantime I have been savoring her volume of essays about poetry, Nine Gates: Entering the […]
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Guarding the Gate
From a film about Anselm Kiefer, “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” I have referenced my favorite description of artists here before, but it bears repeating: Artists are continually torn between the urgent need to communicate, and the still more urgent need not to be found. —D. W. Winnicott As intimately as I know that […]
Vogel 50×50
Richard Tuttle’s matrix of drawings on display at the Portland Museum; closer view The inimitable Vogels (of Herb and Dorothy fame and featured in earlier posts here and here) have initiated Vogel 50×50, a program that has placed 2500 pieces from their collection in individual museums in each of the 50 states. Fifty Works for […]
Show Highlights: In and Around Boston
A few personal highlights from shows in and near Boston: Ursula von Rydingsvard, Ocean Floor, 1996, cedar, graphite, and intestines (Photo courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Lelong. Photograph by Andy Ryan) Ursula von Rydingsvard Andy Goldsworthy Kysa Johnson deCordova Museum Lincoln MA From the museum’s intro to Ursula von Rydingsvard: Ursula von Rydingsvard works […]
Unvarnished
The pleasures of the minimal. Just the bare thing. Raw, open, essential. Unvarnished. Here are two minimal recent moments. One was indoors, at Carroll and Sons Gallery in Boston, and the other was the outdoors, in Utah. Damien Hoar De Galvan’s show, I Wish I had Something to Say, is like a cool drink in […]