I’ve gone trekking in Tasmania and the Outback, and access to the Internet will not be part of the experience. I’ll return to musing–slowly–after March 20th.
Subtlety
Rooting
I’ve now heard two interviews with Elif Shafak, the Turkish novelist who was taken to court by right wing factions in Turkey for having mentioned the Armenian genocide in her fiction writing. I have not yet read her latest novel, Bastard of Istanbul. Even though the American reviews of the book have been mixed, I […]
The Impertinence of our Preconceptions
Another memorable insight from Thomas Merton by way of Louie Louie: To look too directly at anything is to see something else because we force it to submit to the impertinence of our preconceptions. The difference between seeing and looking. The disconnectedness of habitual viewing. Impertinence is the perfect word to describe how we can […]
Hiding, and Seeking
From Adam Zagajewski’s poem, The Self: It is small and no more visible than a cricket in August. It likes to dress up, to masquerade, as all dwarves do. It lodges between granite blocks, between serviceable truths. It even fits under a bandage, under adhesive. Neither custom officers nor their beautiful dogs will find it. […]
The Innocence of Trees
From Agnes Martin: My interest is in experience that is wordless and silent, and in the fact that this experience can be expressed for me in artwork which is also wordless and silent. Martin also talks about how she first began using the grid in her work: When I first made a grid I happened […]
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 […]
The Pursuit of Subtlety
Tyler Green writes: As I walked through the Corcoran’s new permanent collection installation, I bumped into an old friend. Up on the second floor I found Anne Truitt, twice. One was magnificent: 1962’s Insurrection, a vertical plank, painted red on one vertical half and pink on the other. Like all the best Truitts its beauty […]