Skip to content

Index: Art & Architecture

Zoran Music at Dachau.

Tuesday, 28 July 2015

Steven Jaron: ‘It would have occurred to him, while reading Paul Celan, that the landscapes he was painting in fact concealed the wasted landscape of the death camps, its prominent features being the cadavers holding “Conversations / from smoke mouth to smoke mouth.”’

Also filed in | Tagged | Comments (0)

Picturing language.

Tuesday, 7 October 2014

Jaime Robles: ‘There is a certain point when changing from verbal art to visual art that the artist’s concerns shift. Both poetry and visual art have physical and material presences; poetry in the orthography of letters, the breaks of lines and placement of words on the field of the page. This, however, is not its primary material manifestation, which is instead aural. Rhythm, metre and the pyrotechnics of sound are poetry’s primary physical reality. It is within this aural world – whether spoken out loud or heard in the reader’s interior voice – that poetry’s meaning is given and apprehended. These are the material concerns of poetry and, like those of visual arts, they focus and concentrate in the body. To accept the idea of our world being limited to or by our words is to deny the body’s sensual experience of the world. Language is a slow phenomenon relative to the body’s perception, experience and understanding of the world.’

Also filed in Principal Articles, Psychology, Philosophy & Education | Tagged | Comments (0)

The mosaic of the Transfiguration at St Catherine’s.

Sunday, 27 July 2014

By CYRIL MANGO. THE GREAT APSE mosaic of Christ’s Transfiguration in the Sinai church, today partly hidden from view by the tall sixteenth-century iconostasis, raises a number of questions: Most controversially, what message was it meant to convey? And, when and by whom was it done? In the apse the mosaic illustrates the Transfiguration as […]

Also filed in History & Travel | Tagged | Comments (1)

The Omega Point.

Sunday, 27 July 2014

Nigel Wheale: ‘Does an appetite for what’s ‘real’ ‘confirm the death of postmodernist irony, the infinite play of all that knowingly evasive reference? As in Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma (1998), Adam Gordon ultimately chooses to renounce the conventions by which he was created. Can we read Lerner and Coupland (DeLillo got there first) as voices for the new New movement, the post-ironic, a decisive move beyond the crumbling stockade of the post-, but toward what? Resurgence of a new Naturalism, the return of Realism, even? There is, after all, plenty enough these days to be getting real about.’

Also filed in Nigel Wheale: Raptures | Tagged | Comments (0)

How’s the Mood-Board?

Sunday, 27 July 2014

Nigel Wheale: ‘Is it best understood as labouring to give birth to the current stage, of global cultural exchange courtesy of the internet, which accelerates and intensifies so much of what was being described as ‘postmodern’, but to the point where there is no point in trying to categorize the infinity of data and the potential that it offers? This will be the mode for the foreseeable future, with ever more integrated transactions between technology and flesh, babes wi-fi-readied, USB implants tucked discretely behind each ear.’

Also filed in Nigel Wheale: Raptures | Tagged | Comments (0)

Venice Inside Out.

Saturday, 5 July 2014

here is not a building in Venice, raised prior to the sixteenth century, which has not sustained essential change in one or more of its most important features. By far the greater number present examples of three or four different styles…and, in many instances, the restorations or additions have gradually replaced the entire structure of […]

Also filed in History & Travel, Venice portfolio | | Comments (0)

Venice and the theatre of memory.

Saturday, 5 July 2014

Hoyt Rogers: ‘Venice teaches us that history is never dead: the humblest portico affords us a proscenium composed of centuries—but not as an album of faded recollections, settled and done. The theatre of memory unveils its meaning only when we behold it as a vital, breathing gospel of the present.’

Also filed in History & Travel, Principal Articles | Tagged | Comments (0)

A Venetian’s view of Venice.

Saturday, 5 July 2014

Michele Casagrande: ‘Energetically, many want to change things, yet in everyday life the city’s rhythms would seem to be too slow—extremely light-hearted, but fundamentally lazy. The attitude can be expressed through reactions like the following: Living in such a marvelous city, a center of attention for the entire world, why should anyone want to leave? Why should anyone want to move away from a place that can offer very high earnings to people who are basically manual workers, such as gondoliers and taxi drivers?’

Also filed in History & Travel, Principal Articles, Venice portfolio | Tagged , | Comments (0)

‘Tallys’ and the postmodern sublime.

Thursday, 22 May 2014

Nigel Wheale: ‘How much did any of the rapt audience [at the Cloisters] know of the debates over the origin of ‘Spem in alium’, or its place in the development of European polyphony, of the vexed complexities of liturgical revision, or the turbulent politics of the royal court? Some of the audience were certainly choristers themselves, may even have performed the motet, in which case they would be well versed in its structure, perhaps also some of the history. I knew very little indeed, even though I have loved and taught the literary renaissance for decades, have heard Tallis’s motet many times, in live and, more often, recorded performances, generally appreciating the music as a sustaining forest of song, sometimes transfixing, sometimes no more than a matte of voices that pleasingly resolves. And I’m no wiser now as to the precise date, circumstances and allegiance of ‘Spem in alium’, and its enigmatic origins.

Also filed in Music and Photography, Nigel Wheale: Raptures | Tagged | Comments (1)

Wealth and taste in Miami.

Saturday, 10 May 2014

Alana Shilling: ‘Miami cannot grasp its own past, let alone use some form of communal memory to articulate a singular identity with any kind of clarity with any more depth or skill. Perhaps this is a matter of troubled adolescence, perhaps a function of a city founded only in 1896 with a history determined by the trade winds and a population built from the quarrels of distant potentates and the chaos besetting different lands.’

Also filed in | Tagged | Comments (0)

Imaginatio Lego Sum.

Monday, 17 February 2014

Daniel Bosch: ‘With the Legos I played with in the mid- to late-60s—tiny and small, rectangular and square bricks and flat panels in red, blue, yellow, green, white, and black—one constructed a not terribly duck-like “duck” of one’s own. Its modular, additive making, brick by brick—the felt sharpness of its corners and the lifelessness of its individual, abstract plastic elements, the near-conformity of its coloration to a modernist grid, all these characteristics, and more—enabled a more embodied, active, and open engagement with one’s “duck” and with Legos as a medium.’

Also filed in Psychology, Philosophy & Education | Tagged | Comments (1)

James Smetham calls on the Ruskins.

Monday, 13 January 2014

Mark Jones: ‘By inviting Smetham to Denmark Hill, Ruskin was admitting to his circle of acquaintances one of the most intriguing and curious actors to feature on the outskirts of the whole Pre-Raphaelite pageant. Although Smetham’s art along with his facility with an evocative phrase have largely been mislaid by posterity, his talents both as painter and correspondent are long overdue for critical reappraisal.’

Also filed in Biography, Memoir and Autobiographical Prose | Tagged | Comments (3)

The by-ways of John Ashbery.

Sunday, 3 November 2013

Anthony Howell: ‘For the poet, at least, Ashbery is the model of the art-critic. His manner is urbane, and he refers to Satie and to Wallace Stevens more often than to Cezanne. The melange of the arts evoked by his writing suggests a cafe-society sadly missing these days, now that art-mags are no longer modeled on the Paris Review but gleam at us from the racks, like trade-journals for the purveyance of some non-applied craft.’

Also filed in Principal Articles | Tagged | Comments (0)

Yves Bonnefoy dossier: Index.

Thursday, 1 August 2013

Yves Bonnefoy, often acclaimed as France’s greatest living poet, has published nine major collections of verse, several books of tales, and numerous studies of literature and art. He succeeded Roland Barthes in the Chair of Poetics at the Collège de France. His work has been translated into scores of languages, and he is a celebrated translator of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, and Leopardi.

Also filed in Dossier: Yves Bonnefoy, Poetry & Fiction, Portfolios, Principal Articles | | Comments (0)

The Curved Planks, Dear Paula, a postscript, and a note on Paula Rego.

Thursday, 1 August 2013

Yves Bonnefoy (to Paula Rego): ‘Paula, you put speech to the test of night. The frail voice which sought the clearest and simplest truth in the relationship between people, you bury it, as a mountain crumbles, under the multiplying voices that you hear crashing around inside you, as they protest violently, crazily, angrily, in the abyss of the unconscious. Your dark revelations have become the entire sky, the entire earth. What will remain of the hope of this child who has arrived from nowhere, clutching in his clenched fist what he needs to pay for his passage?

Everything, in my opinion.’

Also filed in Dossier: Yves Bonnefoy | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
The Fortnightly Review