Dorothea Lange Torso, San Francisco, 1923 Gelatin silver print, 13½ x 10½ inches

Dorothea Lange

Torso, San Francisco, 1923

Gelatin silver print, 13½ x 10½ inches

Larry Poons

Larry Poons

The Flying Blue Cat, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 73 1/2 x 105 1/2 inches

Tex Ritter, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 67 1/2 x 74 1/2 inches

Untitled, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 62 1/2 x 57 1/2 inches

Untitled, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 56 x 79 1/2 inches

(Source: museumuesum)

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire



T.S. Eliot 

Above is the first page of a “science” test reportedly give to a fourth grade class at a Christian school in South Carolina. After receiving an email from a man claiming to be the father of the student

Poem by Paul Klee

 Water 
Waves on the water 
A boat on the waves 
On the boat-deck, a woman 
On the woman, a man. 


 1903

The Fire Wheel-James McNeill Whistler

YES!

April 17, 2013  |  Behind the Scenes, Conservation, Jackson Pollock Project

MoMA’s Jackson Pollock Conservation Project: Insight into the Artist’s Process

Posted by James Coddington, Chief Conservator, The Museum of Modern Art, Jennifer Hickey, Project Assistant Conservator

Jackson Pollock at work in his studio, 1950. Photo: Hans Namuth

In the May 1951 issue of ARTnews a selection of photographs by Hans Namuth appeared as illustrations for Robert Goodnough’s article, “Pollock Paints a Picture.” The images depict a focused  Pollock energetically applying paint to a large canvas spread across his studio floor. Namuth’s photographs presented the first visual record of the artist’s unorthodox painting technique to a broader audience, and the images of the working method behind Pollock’s radically new pictures captivated the public’s imagination. Their power has been such that, for the past 60 years, these photographs have largely defined our understanding of Pollock’s process.
Thus far, our Pollock blogging has focused primarily on how conservators assess the condition of and treat  a work of art. In addition to caring for the Museum’s collections, though, MoMA conservators frequently pursue technical art historical inquiry to clarify curatorial questions and better understand artists’ material choices and working methods. The Pollock project has been one such opportunity to fill some of the gaps in the popular narrative established by Namuth’s now-iconic photographs.
Questions regarding Pollock’s choices and technique may be investigated through primary source documentation such as photographs, artist’s statements, and first-hand accounts. We gather these resources, and illuminating information can be gleaned from them. However, they are ultimately limited, with accounts of art-making captured in an isolated instant, edited by ego, or filtered through memory.
In the conservation studio, we have access to an additional, crucial resource: the work of art itself, in this case Pollock’s paintings. In one of our earlier posts, we looked closely at One: Number 31, 1950 and noted several surface effects that Pollock was able to achieve. Now, let’s explore some of these observations more thoroughly.
As we’ve covered One’s surface inch by inch, first in looking, then in cleaning, we’ve become intimately acquainted with the paints and other materials to be found there. In the 1950 murals, Pollock moved decisively away from the densely worked surface of late 1940s paintings like Full Fathom Five (1947).

Jackson Pollock. Full Fathom Five. 1947. Oil on canvas with nails, tacks, buttons, key, coins, cigarettes, matches, etc. Gift of Peggy Guggenheim. © 2013 Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In 1947 we see Pollock’s technique achieves a surface of poured and splattered paint that veils underlayers of brushwork. Many of these paints, even some of the gestural tendrils, are artist’s oils rather than industrial housepaints.

Pours of black and aluminum paint crisscross an underlayer of thick, white brushwork. An embedded paint cap can be seen just up and to the left of center

Jackson Pollock. One: Number 31, 1950. 1950. Oil and enamel paint on canvas. Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund (by exchange). © 2013 Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In contrast, although One has the most complex, tightly composed layer structure of the 1950 murals, Pollock manages to embrace a lightness and vastness across the huge canvas. The physical flinging, pouring movements seen in Namuth’s photographs lend themselves to One’s scale, and much of the canvas is left bare, providing moments of calm throughout the energetic composition.

The few, scattered spots of bright yellow artist’s oil paint stand out against One’s subdued palette of enamel paints

Pollock thinned his paints to achieve a range of consistency. Here, diluted paints seep into the canvas, staining it with pigment

With the exception of the rare hint of a bright naples yellow oil paint, Pollock composes One wholly using industrial paints. These paints flow much more readily than artist’s oils, and Pollock often further thinned them, producing a delicate stain of color.
Unlike the cigarette, key, handful of tacks, and other found materials embedded in the surface of Full Fathom Five, the inclusions we found in One appear to be a mark of Pollock’s process and chance rather than deliberately placed elements. The bits of wood that dot the uppermost white layer could be remnants of a stick that Pollock was using in lieu of a paintbrush, or, like the fly that came to rest in this passage of black, they may just be the detritus that comes with working on the floor of a barn.

Scattered small bits of wood can be seen, primarily in a white paint that appears to be one of the final layers that Pollock applied

A housefly met his end in a pour of black paint

Beyond thinning his paints to desired consistency, Pollock appears to have been interested in the medium itself as a “paint,” applying it either wholly on its own or thinning a color so extensively that it essentially becomes tinted medium. Across the bottom of the painting, for example, we see periodic regions of pure medium. Pigmented paints swirl unevenly in the yellowed, darkened resin. Pollock evidently applied the medium independently rather than adding it to a single color.

The translucent gold-amber substance is cured, concentrated medium

Similarly, we encounter areas of hazy mixing that have a distinctly different look than typical wet-into-wet paint layering. To achieve such diffuse bleeding of color Pollock may have been pouring turpentine directly onto wet, layered paint rather than mixing it in the can as he usually did.

Typical wet-into-wet paint mixing. Notice how the edges of the colors flow into each other

Compare the blending (above, to the left, etc.) to the hazy swirl of multiple colors achieved by generous amounts of paint thinner

Such attention paid to small sections of the composition is omitted or at the very least overlooked in the narrative of Pollock’s technique as established by Namuth’s photographs. But the evidence doesn’t end there. We see mark-making on One that powerfully suggests that Pollock’s sense of this vast composition was based on a nuaunced reading of minute details.  Along the bottom center of the painting the viewer will notice a cascade of controlled, rust-brown drips. Compare the deliberate nature of these marks to the five haphazard spots of pale pink located nearby.

A series of uniform, brown drips deliberately follows a black passage of paint

A few scattered pink drips, in contrast, appear more likely to be the result of random studio accidents

The Namuth photographs show One tacked to the wall of the studio as Pollock continues to work on other paintings. While the pink paint can be attributed to studio accident as Pollock painted another work close by, the brown drips are not so easily explained. These brown drips are closely associated with a substantial underlying pour of black paint whereas the few pink drips appear randomly across the very bottom of the painting. It is also clear that the brown drips occurred very late in the development of the composition; none is covered or touched by another layer of paint. Finally the brown drips are all similar in length, all ending in a slight swell of paint: the final mark of gravity pulling paint down a vertical surface. It thus appears very likely that Pollock, the artist who so famously painted horizontally, also finished the composition in a more traditional manner, making a few final edits as the painting hung vertically on the studio wall.
And this deliberate control of his paint appears to have increased as Pollock moved into the black-and -white paintings of 1951. Pollock pared down his palette and, in composing Echo: Number 25, 1951, his mark-making as well.

Jackson Pollock. Echo: Number 25, 1951. 1951. Enamel paint on canvas. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest and the Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller Fund. © 2013 Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

When looking at the back of Echo, thin, interior lines can be seen that correspond to the broader paint marks

Viewed from the front, the lines of paint exhibit a pulsating quality, the result of Pollock’s tools and technique

The reverse of Echo reveals evidence that the black pour paintings were not necessarily poured at all. While it’s known that Pollock, during this time, began applying his paint with turkey basters, one still envisions the artist’s energetic dance around the canvas. The distinct lines that we observe from the reverse, though, argue that Pollock was in direct contact with the canvas as he worked, essentially drawing with the baster. On the reverse of the canvas we see thin lines inside the broader marks of black paint. These thin spines of paint represent the points at which baster touched the surface as the artist squeezed the baster’s bulb to release a pulse of enamel paint onto the canvas. When viewed from the front, the pulsing application of paint is evident in the rhythmic round bulges of the lines. Therefore Pollock’s technique in Echo, in a sense, merges drawing and painting in the moment of his engagement with the canvas.
Finally, much has been discussed about the extent and nature of Pollock’s return to recognizable imagery in his work, and dissecting Echo’s composition reveals elements of familiar images from the artist’s early sketchbooks. Another telling parallel can be drawn between Echo and Pablo Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror (1932). The close parallels reveal that Pollock’s fascination and competition with Picasso continued even at the later stages of his career. Notice the compositional similarities between the two works. Compare the head, eye, outstretched arm, and belly of Picasso’s Girl to the analogous forms in Echo. Might the crosshatching we see in Pollock’s painting represent a shorthand for the diamond-patterned background of Girl?

From left: Jackson Pollock. Echo: Number 25, 1951. 1951. Enamel paint on canvas. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest and the Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller Fund. © 2013 Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Pablo Picasso. Girl Before a Mirror. 1932. Oil on canvas. Gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim. © 2013 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Such observations, arising from the seemingly simple act of close looking offer us a richer understanding of Pollock’s paintings and can have implications for the established understanding of his process, priorities, and intent.

SLASH!?

Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore

April 24, 2013, 12:01 am

By Anne Curzan

In the undergraduate history of English course I am teaching this term, I request/require that the students teach me two new slang words every day before I begin class. I learn some great words this way (e.g., hangry “cranky or angry due to feeling hungry”; adorkable “adorable in a dorky way”). More importantly, the activity reinforces for students a key message of the course: that the history of English is happening all around us (and that slang is humans’ linguistic creativity at work, not linguistic corruption).
Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly became clear to me that many students are using slash in ways unfamiliar to me. In the classes since then, I have come to the students with follow-up questions about the new use of slash. Finally, a student asked, “Why are you so interested in this?” I answered, “Slang creates a lot of new nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. It isn’t that often that slang creates a new conjunction.”
Let me explain. Lots of us use the slash (/) in writing to capture two or more descriptions of the same thing, with a meaning something like “or,” “and,” or “and/or”—e.g., “my sister/best friend” or “request/require.” The slash typically separates two things that are the same part of speech or parallel grammatically; and we can say that slash out loud if needed: “my sister slash best friend.”
Now I wouldn’t write that phrase down that way, with the slash spelled out, but students tell me they now often do. A student kindly sent me some real examples from her Facebook chat (shared with her permission):

1. Does anyone care if my cousin comes and visits slash stays with us Friday night?
2. I have been asking everyone I know in the Chicago area if they’re going slash if they’d willing [sic] to let me tag along slash show me around because frankly I’d have no idea how to get around Chicago on my own

Another student sent me this excerpt from her blog post:

3. … culminating in Friday’s shootout-slash-car-chase-slash-manhunt-slash-media-circus around the apprehension of the bombing suspect.

That same student then provided me this example of slash, which demonstrates a slightly different, although clearly related, meaning:

4. I spent all day in the UgLi [library] yesterday writing my French paper slash posting pictures of cats on my sister’s Facebook wall.

As this sentence makes clear, the slash is distinguishing between (a) the activity that the speaker or writer was intending to do or should have been doing, and (b) the activity that the speaker or writer actually did or anticipated they would do (yes, I did use “they” as a singular right there—more on that in a future post). Other students provided these additional examples:

5. I went to class slash caught up on Game of Thrones. [I made sure to clarify that this was not in reference to our class!]
6. I need to go home and write my essay slash take a nap.

If the story of slash ended there, with a perfectly logical semantic extension of slash from its more conventional use, I wouldn’t be writing about it here on Lingua Franca. But for at least a good number of students, the conjunctive use of slash has extended to link a second related thought or clause to the first with a meaning that is often not quite “and” or “and/or” or “as well as.” It means something more like “following up.” Here are some real examples from students:

7. I really love that hot dog place on Liberty Street. Slash can we go there tomorrow?
8. Has anyone seen my moccasins anywhere? Slash were they given to someone to wear home ever?
9. I’ll let you know though. Slash I don’t know when I’m going to be home tonight
10. so what’ve you been up to? slash should we be skyping?
11. finishing them right now. slash if i don’t finish them now they’ll be done in first hour tomorrow

The student who searched her Facebook chat records found instances of this use of slash as far back as 2010. (When I shared a draft of this post with the students in the class to make sure I have my facts straight, several noted that in examples like (7) and (9), they would be more likely to use a comma in between the clauses and a lower-case “slash.”)
The innovative uses of slash don’t stop there either: some students are also using slash to introduce an afterthought that is also a topic shift, captured in this sample text from a student:

12. JUST SAW ALEX! Slash I just chubbed on oatmeal raisin cookies at north quad and i miss you

This innovative conjunction (or conjunctive adverb, depending on how you want to interpret it) occurs, students tell me, even more commonly in speech than in writing. And in writing, it is often getting written out as slash, even in electronically mediated communication, where one might expect the quicker punctuation mark (/) rather than the five-letter word slash.
Slash is clearly a word to watch. Slash I do mean word, not punctuation mark. The emergence of a new conjunction/conjunctive adverb (let alone one stemming from a punctuation mark) is like a rare-bird sighting in the world of linguistics: an innovation in the slang of young people embedding itself as a function word in the language. This use of slash is so commonplace for students in my class that they almost forgot to mention it as a new slang word this term. That young people have integrated innovative slash into their language while barely noticing its presence is all the more reason that conjunctive slash might have staying power.

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Bystanders, Not So Innocent

‘Some Were Neighbors,’ at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Drew Angerer for The New York Times

Some Were Neighbors Toy Nazi figurines in this exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. More Photos »

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: April 25, 2013

WASHINGTON — Whatever larger themes are sounded when the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum commemorates its 20th anniversary here this weekend, whatever is said at a Monday ceremony by former President Bill Clinton or by the museum’s founding chairman, Elie Wiesel, and whatever assessments are made about its influence, accomplishments or limitations, it will take a visit to its new exhibition, “Some Were Neighbors,” to grasp one aspect of this imposing institution’s power. It reveals the demonic not in grand forces, but in the most minute details.

Multimedia

In one video interview, for example, a Lithuanian witness, Regina Prudnikova, recalls that before the massacres, she cared for a Jewish child in her town, Pilviskiai. But, “I was very young and had a very red face,” she explains, and was “on the chubby side.” That wasn’t good. “I was told that Jews cut you and take your blood.” She stopped baby-sitting.

She now mocks such beliefs, but her tone becomes uncertain: “I know that they say the Jews can’t live without Christian blood. During their holidays they had to have at least a drop of that blood to taste.” Then, the recollection returns. The Jews were taken away and shot, their homes plundered. And we see a photograph of a wagon piled with loot being auctioned to passers-by.

Or listen to Stanislaw Ochman, who transported the Jews of his village, Zdunska Wola, in Poland, in a wooden wagon to the cemetery where they were murdered. The children, holding their mothers’ skirts, were often too short for the raked gunfire, and fell into the pit, still clinging, as soil was piled atop them. After the ditch was covered, he recalled, breathless with more than half a century of disbelief, “the soil was still moving,” because, he said, “they were still alive”: “The earth was moving!”

“Collaboration & Complicity in the Holocaust” is the exhibition’s subtitle, and its focus is not on the nature of Nazism or the history of anti-Semitism. And it isn’t as impressive as two of the museum’s more ambitious recent shows, about Nazi propaganda, and about the perversion of Nazi medicine.

But its power is considerable, and on this occasion, revealing. The emphasis is on individuals, those who may appear in the backgrounds of photographs: the women who brought empty baby carriages to carry off loot from Jewish stores in Dessau, Germany; the firemen in Bühl, Germany, who poured water on buildings during Kristallnacht to ensure that the synagogue fire didn’t spread to any non-Jews’ buildings; the neighbors who watched from windows as Jews were rounded up in Amsterdam.

And here and there, more astounding because of the contrast, we learn about somebody like Giovanni Palatucci, chief of police in Fiume, Italy (today, Rijeka, Croatia), who ordered that registries identifying Jews be destroyed after the Germans took power in 1943. He saved perhaps 5,000 Jews but was himself deported to Dachau, where he died.

It is probably no accident that this exhibition is being mounted as the museum celebrates its 20th anniversary. By almost any measure, the institution has been an astonishing success. Its building, by James Ingo Freed, was acclaimed from the first; its allusions to 1940s Brutalist architecture and evocations of an industrial enterprise going about its horrific work do not descend into cliché. (Contrast that with Daniel Liebeskind’s preciously skewed Jewish Museum in Berlin.) The museum has had 35 million visitors, about a third from schools. And despite early concerns about its focus’s having limited appeal, about 90 percent of attendees, the museum says, are non-Jews.

But many issues raised during the museum’s planning are still latent here. There were objections by Poles to being treated as perpetrators rather than victims. (The permanent exhibition takes that complicated combination into account.) There were questions about the extent to which the Holocaust should be viewed as the history of murdered Jews, since Gypsies, dissidents, homosexuals and people with disabilities were also killed (an issue left unsettled, though President Jimmy Carter’s sweeping assertion of 11 million killed, including 5 million non-Jews, should be explicitly countered. Nazi-overseen murders encompassed some six million Jews and perhaps, historians believe, a half-million others).

And how broad a brush could be used to characterize the villains? Weren’t there differences between the faithful and bystanders? How did dissenters act, and what difference did they make?

Finally, what historical lessons does the Holocaust offer? And how could a Holocaust museum justify its national imprimatur?

This new show is an attempt to look at one set of contested issues by trying to make ethical distinctions: “What were the onlookers thinking?” Were tax officers “complicit in the persecution of the Jews”? What about looters in a Polish ghetto emptied of its occupants?

“Should I take the risk to help?” asks one heading. Some do, if the money is right; some do even if it isn’t; and some readily don’t. “Reflection quotes” are offered at the end: “To protect ourselves, we distance ourselves from victims” (Ervin Staub, psychologist) or “A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction” (John Stuart Mill, political philosopher).

Unfortunately, the show’s details are more vivid than its analysis. What does become clear is how widespread cooperation was with the enterprise of death and how difficult it was to oppose. These two extremes — the extent of complicity and the danger of dissent — make the exhibition’s moral queries seem like relics of ordinary life, while the history is of a different order.

Yet moral lessons have been a project of the museum from the beginning, outlined in the 1979 report of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. The institution wouldn’t just teach about a particular atrocity; it would help prevent future atrocities. The Holocaust inspired the concept of genocide; the Holocaust museum was inspired by the idea of genocidal prevention.

It is interesting, though, that there is almost no sign of that impulse in the permanent exhibition. Unchanged, apart from small modifications since it was first mounted by Ralph Appelbaum Associates, it avoids homily in favor of vivid, careful narrative. It remains overwhelming, an astonishing achievement after two decades; the only contemporary rival I have seen (though more rigorous and thorough) is in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

The Washington museum’s hortatory theme, though, has expanded over time (and has become even more evident in other Holocaust museums). Now, after the permanent exhibition here, you reach the educational wing, the Wexner Center, and its 2009 exhibition, “From Memory to Action.” It begins with a survey of the horrific mass killings in Rwanda, Bosnia and Sudan as part of the museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide. But what do we learn that resembles what we have seen? We have barely begun to understand the killing fields of Lithuania. Are the same factors evident elsewhere? There is too little information to compare carefully. Yet the urge to generalize from the Holocaust to genocide or to call for “tolerance” or other forms of “action” has become commonplace.

“Can we make ‘Never again’ more than a promise?” one of the museum’s recent promotions reads. “Absolutely. Learn how.”

“Never again,” the museum proclaims in another tagline. “What you do matters.”

How? In some remarkable cases, it is clear, which is why the museum is honoring the Polish war hero Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, on Sunday. But what is urged upon museum visitors? The Web site proposals for “actions” include: “Take the Museum’s online pledge to meet the challenge of genocide today” and “Share with your social network a photo or news item about someone taking action to confront hate.” Or another: “The Museum seeks to inspire new generations to act upon the lessons of the Holocaust. Tell us what lessons matter most to you.”

It is difficult to object to moral lessons, but are the right ones being revealed? After decades of Holocaust education, are analogies to its horrors more wise? They seem instead to have become more profligate. And why sweepingly generalize? It would seem out of place in museums about American slavery, World War I or American Indians.

Such questions remain. But the museum also transcends them. And its power comes not from high-concept homilies but from the relentless pursuit of historical details: the sight of the moving earth.

Why Is This Not A “Weapon Of Mass Destruction”?

Why Is This Not A “Weapon Of Mass Destruction”?

Apr 26 2013 @ 12:22pm

One of the more striking things about the charges against Dzhokar Tsarnaev is the use of a “weapon of mass destruction.” Legally, that’s certainly valid, given the current definition in the US criminal law with respect to terrorism:

any “destructive device” defined as any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas – bomb, grenade, rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces, missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce, mine, or device similar to any of the devices described in the preceding clauses
any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors
any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life

That includes a pressure-cooker Internet-recipe bomb that killed 3 people and injured many more. But why is a version of an AR-15, as used by Adam Lanza, that killed 28 human beings, not treated the same way? Why was that act not treated as a suicide bombing would be? If something that kills three people is responsible for “mass destruction”, why not a military weapon that can kill 28 and end in suicide? The AR-15 can be adapted to have a hundred bullets in a Beta C-Mag magazine. Here’s a fantastically phallic drawing of how many bullets can be fired:

You could kill dozens of people with those large, bullet-packed balls – and a terrorist could murder and maim many more human beings than were killed and injured in Boston. But it isn’t legally or technically a weapon of “mass” destruction.  In fact, having one is a constitutional right.
Is this a great country, or what?

From Sullivan's "The Dish"

Theology As “Intellectual Foam”

Apr 25 2013 @ 2:42pm

Millman, Dreher and I have been debating the importance of certain violent passages in the Koran. Razib Khan has a long, fascinating addition to the debate. Read the whole thing, but this is the gist:

Theology and texts have far less power over shaping a religion’s lived experience than intellectuals would like to credit… On many specific issues I agree with Rod Dreher a great deal when it comes to Islam. I do think too many Muslims and their liberal fellow travelers attempt to squelch justified critique of the religion by making accusations of bigotry (I’m on the receiving end regularly). Obviously I disagree with that. But, where I part with Rod is his “theory of religion.”
As a religious believer with a deep intellectual predisposition I doubt Rod Dreher and I will be able to agree on the primal point at issue. Not only do I believe that the theologies of all religion are false, but I believe that they’re predominantly just intellectual foam generated from the churning of broader social and historical forces. Some segments of the priestly class will always find institutional politics exhausting, mystical experience out of their character, and legal commentaries excessively mundane. These will be drawn to philosophical dimension of religious phenomena. Which is fine as far as it goes, but too often there is an unfortunate tendency toward reducing religion to just this narrow dimension. But I have minimal confidence that most people will accept that the Christianity church has little to do with Jesus and that Islam has little to do with Muhammad. And yet I think that’s the truth of it….

I wonder if Tamerlan Tsarnaev or Richard Reid believed that Muhammed has little to do with Islam. I’m not talking about an intellectual grasp of theological nuances. I’m talking about a text that, unlike the Gospels, is asserted to have been directly given by God through Muhammed with no human intervention or error. And I’m talking about a religious genius who wielded temporal power from the get-go. Jesus accepted powerlessness in the face of Roman imperialism. Muhammed? As Khan notes,

Muhammad was his own Constantine. That is, he was not simply a spiritual teacher, but also a temporal ruler. More broadly, while Christianity became an imperial religion, Islam was born an imperial religion.

And it seems strange to me that that early, critical fact has not had an impact on Christianity’s eventual ability to disentangle itself from worldly territorial power and on Islam’s inability to do so. Jesus allowed himself to be crucified by power. Muhammed was an expansionist conqueror, who waged war for territory. I do not believe, as Khan does, that those two facts are irrelevant to the manifestations of Christianity and Islam today – especially in their compatibility with secular government.

Appeal Finds Fair Use In Richard Prince’s “Canal Zone” Series

by Corinna Kirsch and Whitney Kimball on April 25, 2013 · 0 comments

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Image from Patrick Cariou's book "Yes Rasta" (2000) p 118 | Richard Prince's "Graduation" (2008) (Image courtesy of Hyperallergic's tumblr)

Postmodernism is having the best day ever. It’s been just over a year since a New York District court dealt a major blow to Richard Prince, finding his Canal Zone series guilty of violating the copyright in Panamanian landscape photographs and Rastafarian portraits by Patrick Cariou. Not only was Prince found guilty, but the court ordered all unsold Canal Zone artworks and catalogs sent to Cariou so that they could be destroyed, sold, or disposed of as he saw fit. Thankfully, today sees a win for art: the case’s defendants won an appeal with the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Gagosian and Prince appealed that decision on the grounds that Prince makes fair use of Cariou’s photographs, often altering them very slightly with painting and collage. The Supreme Court only defines fair use as needing to “alter the original with ‘new expression, meaning, or message.’” The lower courts interpreted this to mean that, in order to make fair use of Cariou’s photographs, Prince must “comment on Cariou, on Cariou’s Photos, or on aspects of popular culture closely associated with Cariou or the Photos.” (Satire, for example, would be fair, as in the ruling’s mention of 2 Live Crew’s parody of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman”). The higher courts disputed that definition: “We agree with Appellants that the law does not require that a secondary use comment on the original artist or work, or popular culture…” In other words, the appellate court has allowed Prince to use the images for personal expression.
This was, and still is, a big deal: if the first ruling were applied across the board, anyone who’s ever copied, altered, collaged, or generally riffed on virtually anything could be in huge legal trouble. For the lower court, Prince didn’t transform Cariou’s originals enough; the alterations (like pasting Baldessari-esque dots to faces or collaging nude bathers in a manner akin to Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon) were minimal. The ruling is full of considerations as to what this would mean if artists were no longer allowed to reinterpret other people’s images. Just for an idea of what that would look like, the court mentions that even Andy Warhol potentially wouldn’t have been safe from the ruling:

Much of Andy Warhol’s work, including work incorporating appropriated images of Campbell’s soup cans or of Marilyn Monroe, comments on consumer culture and explores the relationship between celebrity culture and advertising.

Still, the appeal leaves it to the lower court to decide just how much an artist needs to affect an image in order to change it. There are still five photographs the court has refused to judge (Graduation, Meditation, Canal Zone (2007), Canal Zone (2008), and Charlie Company)–because their alterations are so small. They write of those images:

While the lozenges [in Graduation], repetition of the images, and addition of the nude female unarguably change the tenor of the piece, it is unclear whether these alterations amount to a sufficient transformation of the original work of art such that the new work is transformative.

And, when it comes down to it, that’s a question of whether, and for whom, these are effective works of art.

"The Parallels!" Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges John Barth

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"The Parallels!" Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges
John Barth

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I discovered Italo Calvino's fiction in 1968, the year Cosmicomics appeared in this country in William Weaver’s translation. I was teaching then at the State University of New York at Buffalo and had fallen much under the spell of Jorge Luis Borges, whom I had discovered just a couple of years earlier. In that condition of enchantment I had published in '68 a sort of protopostmodernist manifesto called “The Literature of Exhaustion” and also my maiden collection of short stories, entitled Lost in the Funhouse and subtitled Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (that particular deployment of the term “fiction” is of course a salute to Borges’s ficciones). In short, the ground had been prepared for my delight in Calvino’s Cosmicomics and then in his t zero stories, which appeared in Mr. Weaver’s English the following year. Here, I thought, was a sort of Borges without tears, or better, a Borges con molto brio: lighter-spirited than the great Argentine, often downright funny (as Sr. Borges almost never is), yet comparably virtuosic in form and language, comparably rich in intelligence and imagination.
In September of 1985, just a week or so after the news reached us of Calvino’s death, Umberto Eco happened to be our guest at Johns Hopkins, and of course we spoke of our mutual lost friend (a much closer friend of Eco’s, to be sure; Calvino had been Eco’s “chaperon,” as Eco himself put it, for the Strega Prize). He had it on good authority, Eco told me, that despite the damage of the massive stroke that had felled Calvino a fortnight earlier, the man managed to utter, as perhaps his final words, “I paralleli! I paralleli!” (“The parallels! The parallels!”).
The paralleli of the achievements of Borges and Calvino are mostly obvious, the relevant anti-paralleli no doubt likewise. To begin with, both writers, for all their great sophistication of mind, wrote in a clear, straightforward, unmannered, nonbaroque, but rigorously scrupulous style. ”. . . crystalline, sober, and airy . . . without the least congestion” is how Calvino himself describes Borges’s style (in the second of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the Norton lectures that Calvino died before he could deliver), and of course those adjectives describe his own as well, as do the titles of all six of his Norton lectures: “Lightness” (Leggerezza) and deftness of touch; “Quickness” (Rapidita) in the senses both of economy of means and of velocity in narrative profluence; “Exactitude” (Esatezza) both of formal design and of verbal expression; “Visibility” (Visibilita) in the senses both of striking detail and of vivid imagery, even (perhaps especially) in the mode of fantasy; “Multiplicity” (Molteplicita) in the senses both of an ars combinatoria and of addressing the infinite interconnectedness of things, whether in expansive, incompletable works such as Gadda’s Via Merulana and Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities or in vertiginous short stories like Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths”—all cited in Calvino’s lecture on multiplicity; and “Consistency” in the sense that in their style, their formal concerns, and their other preoccupations we readily recognize the Borgesian and the Calvinoesque. So appealing a case does Calvino make for these particular half-dozen literary values, it’s important to remember that they aren’t the only ones; indeed, that their contraries have also something to be said for them. Calvino acknowledges as much in the “Quickness” lecture: ”. . . each value or virtue I chose as the subject for my lectures,” he writes, “does not exclude its opposite. Implicit in my tribute to lightness was my respect for weight, and so this apology for quickness does not presume to deny the pleasures of lingering,” etc. We literary lingerers—some might say malingerers—breathe a protracted sigh of relief.
Reviewing these six “memos” has fetched us already beyond the realm of style to other parallels between the fictions of Borges and Calvino. Although he commenced his authorial career in the mode of the realistic novel and never abandoned the longer narrative forms, Calvino like Borges much preferred the laconic short take. Even his later extended works, like Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, and If on a winter’s night a traveler, are (to use Calvino’s own adjectives) modular and combinatory, built up from smaller, quicker units. Borges, more from aesthetic principle than from the circumstance of his later blindness, never wrote a novella, much less a novel (in the “Autobiographical Essay” he declares, “In the course of a life devoted chiefly to books, I have read but few novels, and in most cases only a sense of duty enabled me to find my way to their last page”). And in his later life, like the doomed but temporarily reprieved Jaromir Hladik in “The Secret Miracle,” he was obliged to compose and revise from memory. No wonder his style is so lapidary, so . . . memorable.
On with the parallels: Although one finds flavors and even some specific detail of Buenos Aires and environs in the corpus of Borges’s fiction and of Italy in that of Calvino, and although each is a major figure in his respective national literature as well as in modern lit generally, both writers were prevailingly disinclined to the social/psychological realism that for better or worse persists as the dominant mode in North American fiction. Myth and fable and science in Calvino’s case, literary/philosophical history and “the contamination of reality by dream” in Borges’s, take the place of social/psychological analysis and historical/geographical detail. Both writers inclined toward the ironic elevation of popular narrative genres: the folktale and comic strip for Calvino, supernaturalist and detective-fiction for Borges. Calvino even defined Post-modernism, in his “Visibility” lecture, as “the tendency to make ironic use of the stock images of the mass media, or to inject the taste for the marvelous inherited from literary tradition into narrative mechanisms that accentuate their alienation”—a tendency as characteristic of Borges’s production as of his own. Neither writer, for better or for worse, was a creator of memorable characters or a delineator of grand passions, although in a public conversation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1975, in answer to the question “What do you regard as the writer’s chief responsibility?” Borges unhesitatingly responded, “The creation of character.” A poignant response from a great writer who never really created any characters; even his unforgettable Funes the Memorious, as I have remarked elsewhere, is not so much a character as a pathological characteristic. And Calvino’s charming Qwfwq and Marco Polo and Marcovaldo and Mr. Palomar are archetypal narrative functionaries, nowise to be compared with the great pungent characters of narrative/dramatic literature. A first-rate restaurant may not offer every culinary good thing; for the pleasures of acute character-drawing as of bravura passions, one simply must look elsewhere than in the masterful writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino.
Attendant upon those “Postmodernist tendencies” aforecited by Calvino—the ironic recycling of stock images and traditional narrative mechanisms—is the valorization of form, even more in Calvino than in Borges. At his consummate best, Borges so artfully deploys what I’ve called the principle of metaphoric means that (excuse the self-quotation) “not just the conceit, the key images, the mise-en-scène, the narrative choreography and point of view and all that, but even the phenomenon of the text itself, the fact of the artifact, becomes a sign of its sense.” His marvelous story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is a prime example of this high-tech taletelling, and there are others. Borges manages this gee-whizzery, moreover, with admirable understatement, wearing his formal virtuosity up his sleeve rather than on it. Calvino, on the contrary, while never a show-off, took unabashed delight in his “romantic formalism” (again, my term, with my apology): a delight not so much in his personal ingenuity as in the exhilarating possibilities of the ars combinatoria, as witness especially the structural wizardry of The Castle of Crossed Destinies and If on a winter’s night a traveler. His extended association with Raymond Queneau’s OULIPO group was no doubt among both the causes and the effects of this formal sportiveness.
At his Johns Hopkins reading in 1976, Calvino briefly described the conceit of his Invisible Cities novel and then said, “Now I want to read just one little . . . ” He hesitated for a moment to find the word he wanted. ”. . . One little aria from that novel.” Said I to myself, Exactly, Italo, and bravissimo. The saving difference between Calvino and the other wizards of OULIPO was that (bless his Italian heart and excuse the stereotyping) he knew when to stop formalizing and start singing—or better, how to make the formal rigors themselves sing. What Calvino said of Georges Perec very much applied to his own shop: that the constraints of those crazy algorithms and other combinatorial rules, so far from stifling his imagination, positively stimulated it. For that reason, he once told me, he enjoyed accepting difficult commissions, such as writing the Crossed Destinies novel to accompany the Ricci edition of I Tarocchi or, more radically yet, composing a story without words, to be the dramatic armature of a proposed ballet (Calvino made up a wordless story about the invention of dancing).
To come now to the last of these paralleli: Both Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino managed marvelously to combine in their fiction the values that I call Algebra and Fire (I’m borrowing those terms here, as I have done elsewhere, from Borges’s First Encyclopedia of Tlon, a realm complete, he reports, “with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire.”) Let “algebra” stand for formal ingenuity and “fire” for what touches our emotions (it’s tempting to borrow instead Calvino’s alternative values of “crystal” and “flame,” from his lecture on exactitude, but he happens not to mean by those terms what I’m referring to here). Formal virtuosity itself can of course be breathtaking, but much algebra and little or no fire makes for mere gee-whizzery, like Queneau’s Exercises in Style and A Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets. Much fire and little or no algebra, on the other hand, makes for heartfelt muddles—no examples needed. What most of us want from literature most of the time is what has been called passionate virtuosity, and both Borges and Calvino deliver it. Although I find both writers indispensable and would never presume to rank them as literary artists, by my lights Calvino perhaps comes closer to being the very model of a modern major Postmodernist—not that that very much matters, and whatever the capacious bag is that can contain such otherwise dissimilar spirits as Donald Barthelme, Samuel Beckett, J. L. Borges, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Robert Coover, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Elsa Morante, Vladimir Nabokov, Grace Paley, Thomas Pychon, et al. . . . What I mean is not only the fusion of algebra and fire, the great (and in Calvino’s case high-spirited) virtuosity, the massive acquaintance with and respectfully ironic recycling of what Umberto Eco calls “the already said,” and the combination of storytelling charm with zero naiveté, but also the keeping of one authorial foot in narrative antiquity while the other rests firmly in the high-tech (in Calvino’s case, the Parisian “structuralist”) narrative present. Add to this what I have cited as our chap’s perhaps larger humanity and in-the-worldness, and you have my reasons.
All except one, which will serve as the last of my anti-paralleli: It seems to me that Borges’s narrative geometry, so to speak, is essentially Euclidean. He goes in for rhomboids, quincunxes, and chess logic; even his ubiquitous infinities are of a linear, “Euclidean” sort. In Calvino’s spirals and vertiginous recombinations I see a mischievous element of the non-Euclidean; he shared my admiration, for example, of Boccaccio’s invention of the character Dioneo in the Decameron: The narrative Dionysian wild card who exempts himself from the company’s rules and thus adds a lively element of (constrained) unpredictability to the narrative program. I didn’t have the opportunity to speak with Calvino about quantum mechanics and chaos theory, but my strong sense is that he would have regarded them as metaphorically rich and appealing.
Only once, to my knowledge, did these two splendid writers happen to meet (in Rome, near the end of Borges’s life). Calvino’s esteem for Borges is a matter of record; I regret having neglected to ask Borges, in our half-dozen brief conversations, his opinion of Calvino. My own esteem for both is obvious. In Euclidean geometry, paralleli never meet, but it is among the first principles of non-Euclidean geometry that they do meet—not in Limbo (where Dante, led by Virgil, meets the shades of Homer and company), nor yet in Rome or Buenos Aires, but in infinity, where I imagine them smiling together at this effort to draw parallels between them.
A pretty notion, no? One worthy of an Italo Calvino, to make it sing.
Adapted from address to conference on Italo Calvino, U.C. Davis, 4/4/97
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