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Category Archives: Essays
Fetishism and the Uncanny
Remember how the media presented Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays towards the end of the last century: the idea was that X-rays allow us to see a person who is still alive as if he were already dead, reduced to a … Continue reading
Posted in art, Essays
Tagged Gaetan Gatian de Clérambault, Hans Bellmer, Lacan, Mike Kelley, Romaine Slocombe, Slavoj Zizek, Uncanny
6 Comments
Prison, Pumping Iron and Performance
“It is only through imagination that men become aware of what the world might be.” xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxBertrand Russell, Education and the Good Life. These days, the emphasis of the penal system is on teaching inmates ‘functional skills’, abilities which are supposed … Continue reading
Posted in Essays, Uncategorized
Tagged body-building, Crank machine, Henry Mayhew, offenders, Oscar Wilde, Performance Art, prison, treadmill
2 Comments
Writing a Book
By Vyvyan Holland I found this article many years ago in the June 1958 edition of Harper’s Bazaar (in those days it still carried adverts in French!). Written by the son of Oscar Wilde, in an age before creative writing … Continue reading
Travel as it was – and as it can be
My review of books by Chloe Chard and Gwendolyn Leick Travel as it was — and as it can be.
Posted in Essays
Tagged Chloe Chard, dictators, Gwendolyn Leick, Italy, mausoleums, the grand tour
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‘Nonfinito’ or the Art of Incompletion
Nonfinito or the Art of Incompletion “Infinity, though of another kind, causes much of our pleasure in agreeable, as well as of our delight in sublime images. The spring is the pleasantest of the seasons; and the young of most … Continue reading
Grandeur versus the Sublime
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of … Continue reading
Posted in art, Essays
Tagged Anselm Keifer, Grandeur, Kant, Longinus, Ozymandias, Shelley, the Iliad, Veronese, Walter de Maria
7 Comments
Quietism, the ‘vacancy’ of Formal Art
xxxxxxx 6.42 And so it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher. 6.421 … Continue reading
Posted in art, Essays
Tagged fugue, Hammershoi, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Morandi, Piero della Francesca, Pieter Saenredam, William Carlos Williams
8 Comments
ART AND ITS DARK SIDE – INTRODUCTION
Art and its Dark Side – The Eight Rivers of Art A series of eight essays dealing with the ‘rivers of art’ – creative concerns which have the abiding power to preoccupy artists and writers, and which have always had … Continue reading
Posted in art, Essays, Key Links
Tagged art criticism, caprice, Grandeur, Grotesque, Immoralism, incompletion, literary criticism, philosophy of art, quietism, the picture within the picture, the uncanny
6 Comments
ON THE NICETIES
I have spent the last two mornings thinking about a specific line or two of poetry. Did I choose a certain word simply because it rhymed with another? Does it matter if I did? Can the word in question be … Continue reading
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