Rolf Hughes
September 2008
Workshop 1:
History of the essay
Aristotle: Poetics: Longinus: On the Sublime; Plutarch: Moralia; Seneca: Moral Essays.
John Dryden: An Essay of Dramatic Poesy; Michel de Montaigne: The Essays; Richard Steele & Joseph Addison Spectator (1711-12, 1714); Dr. Samuel Johnson Lives of the English Poets (1779-81); Denis Diderot; Voltaire; Rousseau; Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia; William Hazlitt; Leigh Hunt; Matthew Arnold; Thomas Carlyle; Oscar Wilde; F.R. Leavis; Virginia Woolf; Henry James; Lionel Trilling; publications including Edinburgh Magazine and Review (1773-76), Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Quarterly Review, Scrutiny (1932-53), the Paris Review (1953–), the Times Literary Supplement (1902–), the New Yorker ((1925–), contemporary blogs.
Workshop 2
Forms of criticism
Why is there Genre and not Literature instead?
Creative and Critical Writing
Forms of the essay include: The five-paragraph essay; Academic essays; Descriptive; Narrative; Exemplification; Comparison and Contrast; Cause and Effect; Classification and division; Definition; Dialectic; Dialogue. See also Non-literary essays in Visual Arts, Music, Film, Photography etc.
Related forms (see photocopies): Aphorism; Character Sketch; Dialogue; Journal; Letter; Personal Essay; Philosophical Essay; Propaganda.
Workshop 3
After criticism?
The site(s) of writing
Discussion of assignment responses
25 September 2008
The Personal and the Individual (Leonard Michaels)
Nothing should be easier than talking about ways in which I write about myself, but I find it isn’t easy at all. Indeed, I want to say before anything else that a great problem for me, in writing about myself, is how not to write merely about myself. I think the problem is very common among writers even if they are unaware of it. Basic elements of writing–diction, grammar, tone, imagery, the patterns of sound made by your sentences–will say a good deal about you (whether you are conscious of it or not) so that it is possible for you to be writing about yourself before you even know you are writing about yourself. Regardless of your subject, these basic elements, as well as countless and immeasurable qualities of mind, are at play in your writing and will make your presence felt to a reader as palpably as your handwriting. You virtually write your name, as it were, before you literally sign your name, every time you write.
Read more in Partisan Review 1/ 2001 VOLUME LXVIII NUMBER 1
Read more in Partisan Review 1/ 2001 VOLUME LXVIII NUMBER 1
21 January 2008
Q&A with VV art critic Christian Viveros-Faune, part III
A MAN Q&A with Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune, continued from part one and from part two...
MAN: You're a managing director of a commercial art fair, Volta, and an organizer of another commercial art fair, Chicago's Next fair. At the same time you're a writer, a journalist, you're the art critic for the Village Voice. Why isn't that the most basic kind of conflict of interest?
Christian Viveros-Faune: I think essentially, because, I believe you can wear a lot of hats in the art world, and one needs to because, among other things, critics can't survive on the money that they make from writing. Very few critics can. And, not only that, but I'm interested in curating, and I firmly believe that there is no interest in the art world without a conflict of interest.
Now, that may seem counterintuitive, and it is, but I would argue that the art world is counterintuitive in the extreme. In what other industry, for example, does one of the major magazines that chronicles both the creative and the business end of the art world establish an art fair of the same name. Obviously, I'm talking about Frieze.
And that's nothing. Examine, for second, the practice of writing catalog essays. You know and I know that there is no such thing as a negative catalog essay and the reason for that is obvious: one way critics make money is by writing promotional copy for galleries and, hopefully, artists they like or love. And then there's the business of curators and critics slinging their asses around to universities and institutions for speaking engagements.
Shall I go on? I mean, again, what I'm arguing for here is honesty all the way around. Like every other business (or form of writing or discipline for that matter) this is not a pristine business, no matter what the NY Times rules of engagement say. It is full of peaks and valleys. I'm honest about my climbing those peaks and going down into those valleys. Maybe that makes me stupid, I don't know. What I do know is it doesn't affect my ethics when I write. I'd rather not write about the market, because weirdly enough, it doesn't interest me much.
More.
MAN: You're a managing director of a commercial art fair, Volta, and an organizer of another commercial art fair, Chicago's Next fair. At the same time you're a writer, a journalist, you're the art critic for the Village Voice. Why isn't that the most basic kind of conflict of interest?
Christian Viveros-Faune: I think essentially, because, I believe you can wear a lot of hats in the art world, and one needs to because, among other things, critics can't survive on the money that they make from writing. Very few critics can. And, not only that, but I'm interested in curating, and I firmly believe that there is no interest in the art world without a conflict of interest.
Now, that may seem counterintuitive, and it is, but I would argue that the art world is counterintuitive in the extreme. In what other industry, for example, does one of the major magazines that chronicles both the creative and the business end of the art world establish an art fair of the same name. Obviously, I'm talking about Frieze.
And that's nothing. Examine, for second, the practice of writing catalog essays. You know and I know that there is no such thing as a negative catalog essay and the reason for that is obvious: one way critics make money is by writing promotional copy for galleries and, hopefully, artists they like or love. And then there's the business of curators and critics slinging their asses around to universities and institutions for speaking engagements.
Shall I go on? I mean, again, what I'm arguing for here is honesty all the way around. Like every other business (or form of writing or discipline for that matter) this is not a pristine business, no matter what the NY Times rules of engagement say. It is full of peaks and valleys. I'm honest about my climbing those peaks and going down into those valleys. Maybe that makes me stupid, I don't know. What I do know is it doesn't affect my ethics when I write. I'd rather not write about the market, because weirdly enough, it doesn't interest me much.
More.
If this Space is For Rent, Who Will Move In?
From Modernist to Postmodernist Forms of Criticism -- Criticism as Art or Advertisement?
by Menachem Feuer
in 1000 Days of Theory: td034
Date Published: 2/22/2006
www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=506
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Editors
Writing years in advance of television and the internet, Walter Benjamin's vision of the future places the new sensibility created by mechanical reproduction at the forefront of modernity. The most important aspect of this sensibility is the radical immediacy it lodges into the heart of modern life. Benjamin understood, quite clearly, that all aspects of life would be affected by this immediacy in a way quite similar to Karl Marx's vision of capitalism in terms of an ecological (read: total) change of society. The danger of such a change, as Benjamin and Marx understood it (both understood capitalism as creating social and cognitive changes), was the threat of homogenization and mindless consumerism. Indeed, Benjamin's colleague at the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, believed the "culture industry" turned everyone into consumers and foreclosed the possibility of thought and heterogeneity.[2] Benjamin took a much different approach, instructive for us in our post 9/11 crisis culture wherein homogeneity is circulated by reducing the world to a Manichean struggle between democracy and terror. He argued that, rather than taking a position that merely reacts to the media, intellectuals should imitate it and use its strengths in the name of revolution and heterogeneity. For this reason, he argued that criticism should incorporate aspects of film and, strangely enough, the most open media expression of capitalism: the advertisement.
More.
by Menachem Feuer
in 1000 Days of Theory: td034
Date Published: 2/22/2006
www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=506
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Editors
Writing years in advance of television and the internet, Walter Benjamin's vision of the future places the new sensibility created by mechanical reproduction at the forefront of modernity. The most important aspect of this sensibility is the radical immediacy it lodges into the heart of modern life. Benjamin understood, quite clearly, that all aspects of life would be affected by this immediacy in a way quite similar to Karl Marx's vision of capitalism in terms of an ecological (read: total) change of society. The danger of such a change, as Benjamin and Marx understood it (both understood capitalism as creating social and cognitive changes), was the threat of homogenization and mindless consumerism. Indeed, Benjamin's colleague at the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, believed the "culture industry" turned everyone into consumers and foreclosed the possibility of thought and heterogeneity.[2] Benjamin took a much different approach, instructive for us in our post 9/11 crisis culture wherein homogeneity is circulated by reducing the world to a Manichean struggle between democracy and terror. He argued that, rather than taking a position that merely reacts to the media, intellectuals should imitate it and use its strengths in the name of revolution and heterogeneity. For this reason, he argued that criticism should incorporate aspects of film and, strangely enough, the most open media expression of capitalism: the advertisement.
More.
Writing, scholarship and the catalogue
"The typical work of modern scholarship is intended to be read like a catalogue. But when shall we actually write books like catalogues? If the deficient content were thus to determine the outward form, an excellent piece of writing would result, in which the value of opinions would be marked without their being thereby put on sale."
Walter Benjamin, 'Teaching Aid' in One-Way Street, Selected Writings, p. 457, OWS p. 63f
Walter Benjamin, 'Teaching Aid' in One-Way Street, Selected Writings, p. 457, OWS p. 63f
09 December 2007
Paul Thek Project
(Thank you Ron Jones for this tip!)
This site is dedicated to the installation work of Paul Thek. It is an ongoing project to collect and contextualize documentary photography and other relevant sources around Paul Thek’s environments.
Various complex questions underlay the consideration and analysis of Paul Thek’s installation work, above all matters of authorship and reconstruction. Many of his installation works cannot simply be reconstructed as in its physical and ideal presence it was inextricably bound up with the artist, the co-operative and, above all, time. From a museological point of view the task to find a final home for the relics and to free them, at least temporarily, from their existence as mere inventory numbers in order to attribute them a function in the context of art mediation thus becomes all the more challenging.
From an art historical point of view other methods come up in order to collect and contextualize information which is the more important the less Thek’s environments can be brought back to life again. From a frank interest to bring to light what was hidden for so long, this website serves not only as a prototype for media-based art historical research, but also as a tool to contextualize Thek’s process oriented use of the mythological object.
More.
This site is dedicated to the installation work of Paul Thek. It is an ongoing project to collect and contextualize documentary photography and other relevant sources around Paul Thek’s environments.
Various complex questions underlay the consideration and analysis of Paul Thek’s installation work, above all matters of authorship and reconstruction. Many of his installation works cannot simply be reconstructed as in its physical and ideal presence it was inextricably bound up with the artist, the co-operative and, above all, time. From a museological point of view the task to find a final home for the relics and to free them, at least temporarily, from their existence as mere inventory numbers in order to attribute them a function in the context of art mediation thus becomes all the more challenging.
From an art historical point of view other methods come up in order to collect and contextualize information which is the more important the less Thek’s environments can be brought back to life again. From a frank interest to bring to light what was hidden for so long, this website serves not only as a prototype for media-based art historical research, but also as a tool to contextualize Thek’s process oriented use of the mythological object.
More.
Paul Thek at ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art
Paul Thek (1933–1988) is considered an artist with cult status. The hitherto most comprehensive retrospective of his oeuvre focused on the phenomenal effect of his work on contemporary art and established Thek's historical significance, from legendary outsider to the founder and center of an art movement. It has been possible to bring together more than 300 of Thek’s works, which are largely in private ownership and therefore only seldom publicly shown.
In their anti-heroic diversity and multimediality, and with their references to art, literature, and religion, his works (painting, photography, video, sculpture, and extensive environments) are among the central sources for the revolt and eruption of art in the 1960s. It is mainly for this reason that one of the early theoretical masterpieces of this epoch, Susan Sontag's »Against Interpretation« (1962), was dedicated to him. The mold castings, also those of his own body parts, wax replicas of human tissue, hair, teeth, and bones in Plexiglas cases, which he produced between 1964 and 1967 as »Technological Reliquaries,« in their mixture of desire and repulsion, decay and pathos, held up the truth of the body to the world of commodities and the transfiguration of the everyday, as well as the idealization and dramatization of corporative minimal art. With this, Thek influenced not only contemporaries such as Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman, but also present-day artists. His obsessive, often mystical content, which made him the founder of Abject Art and Environments, or Ensembles, was presented in a formal way that opened the path for the mixture of studio situation and total spatial design, of private and general icons, of profane and religious objects, of everyday and myth, of damaged objects to fragmentary piles of found materials, as was continued by artists from Anna Oppermann through to Thomas Hirschhorn.
More.
In their anti-heroic diversity and multimediality, and with their references to art, literature, and religion, his works (painting, photography, video, sculpture, and extensive environments) are among the central sources for the revolt and eruption of art in the 1960s. It is mainly for this reason that one of the early theoretical masterpieces of this epoch, Susan Sontag's »Against Interpretation« (1962), was dedicated to him. The mold castings, also those of his own body parts, wax replicas of human tissue, hair, teeth, and bones in Plexiglas cases, which he produced between 1964 and 1967 as »Technological Reliquaries,« in their mixture of desire and repulsion, decay and pathos, held up the truth of the body to the world of commodities and the transfiguration of the everyday, as well as the idealization and dramatization of corporative minimal art. With this, Thek influenced not only contemporaries such as Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman, but also present-day artists. His obsessive, often mystical content, which made him the founder of Abject Art and Environments, or Ensembles, was presented in a formal way that opened the path for the mixture of studio situation and total spatial design, of private and general icons, of profane and religious objects, of everyday and myth, of damaged objects to fragmentary piles of found materials, as was continued by artists from Anna Oppermann through to Thomas Hirschhorn.
More.
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