Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Martin Sorrell: The type is blotchy, made worse by an expiring ribbon and a clutter of corrections hammered over the several typos. This ‘pomenvylope’, and the few others I’ve managed to read, speak to me of the frustration Moore lived with for the decades after brief fame had become neglect. They express the dogged endurance of a poet still possessed of a strong voice and the wish to have it heard.
Charles Jencks: In architecture, the movement has returned after the Neo-Modernism of the 1990s, in every way but by name. The world is now saturated by the confused labels of Modernism and Post-Modernism, but the streams of concerns to which these labels used to refer are continuing. That is apparent in architecture with the digital ornament (a leading movement), the iconic building (with its many marvellous and woeful examples), and the hybrid “time buildings” (that mix past, present and future architectural codes).
Anthony Howell: Without postmodernism’s new take on history, Alison Marchant’s ‘archival art’ might never have surfaced, including her exhibition celebrating the cross-dressing (and very postmodern) Hannah Cullwick and the fetish photography of her eccentric husband Arthur Munby (who were an 1860’s couple similar in a way to Goude and Jones).
Glenn Adamson: My argument is that as the central movement (or phenomenon) in art and design history, postmodernism had indeed run its course by the late 1980s. By this time, exhaustion had settled in around the term – which had perhaps suffered from overuse – and there was also a good deal of anger about corporate applications of the style and ideas associated with it, e.g. the AT&T Building.
Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Alan Wall: The collection exists in order to hold ruin at bay, so there is an acute poignancy to the ruin of any collection. Particle meets anti-particle; annihilation ensues. Alfred Russel Wallace spent years putting together his collection of animals and plants from the Amazon. The brig on to which they were loaded for return to England caught fire, and almost everything was destroyed.
Percy Fitzgerald: There is one view of Dickens which has scarcely been sufficiently dealt with, namely, his relations with his literary brethren and friends, as editor and otherwise. These exhibit him in a most engaging light, and will perhaps be a surprise even to those abundantly familiar with his amiable and gracious ways.
Jon Lauck: Iowa’s agrarian heritage and orderly farms and its generally rooted character also help explain Iowa’s political culture.
Wednesday, 9 November 2011
Martin Sorrell: So was Apollinaire the lone innovator? Was there anyone comparable writing in English? As Tim Kendall points out, it took David Jones, who’d served in that war, nearly twenty years to produce work such as “In Parenthesis”. Apollinaire, on the other hand, wrote both spontaneously and experimentally, out of the here and now. Take “Flare”, a poem of erotic charge – even yearning.
Saturday, 5 November 2011
Drew Moore: Some people find community, even spiritual transcendence, in softball leagues, yoga, and book clubs. Their church is the outdoors, the gym, and the living room parlor. My church frequently changes. An overgrown, thicketed, nineteenth-century cemetery on a West Virginia farm, a courthouse, a Baltimore street of gentrified row houses—these are my churches.
Saturday, 29 October 2011
Edward Dowden: Coleridge broke with tradition in the vulgar sense of the word; he broke with tradition in theology, philosophy, politics; yet he did so in a spirit more truly loyal to the past than was the common orthodoxy in theology or philosophy, or the common Toryism in politics.
Roger Berkowitz: The problem we confront is defactualization. And the danger is that facts are being reduced to opinions. The danger is also that opinions masquerade as facts. In other words, as fact and opinion blur together, the very idea of factual truth falls away. It is increasingly possible that the belief in and aspiration for factual truth is being expunged from political argument.
Anthony Howell: With Quietism, form fits content as water fits a jug: it’s an abstract fusion that appeals to creative people who value the plastic properties of their medium. In poetry, its focus on familiar experiences or tasks that usually go unremarked, such as breaking eggs, is equivalent to a painter’s preoccupation with still-life. Significance is downplayed, but something is ‘brought to life.’
Sunday, 18 September 2011
Lucy Sheehan: Even as Trollope’s maps produce a comforting image of self-contained local communities, they also expertly trace lines of power, grafting social networks onto spatial locations to provide a cartography of social and political influence.
Thursday, 1 September 2011
Marshall Poe: If we in the Reading Class want to teach the the reading-averse public more effectively than we have in the past, we must rid ourselves of our reading fetish and admit that we’ve been falling down on the job. Once we take this painful step, then a number of interesting options for closing the knowledge gap become available. The most promising of these options is using audio and video to share what we know with the public at large.
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
Andrew Thacker: Vorticism has been understood as the only significant avant-garde art movement that emerged in Britain in the years immediately prior to the First World War, a period when many artistic ‘-isms’ emerged across continental Europe, including Cubism, Futurism, and Post-Impressionism. It was only with the publication of the modernist little magazine BLAST, in 1914, and the First Vorticist Exhibition at the Doré Galleries in London in 1915, that a similarly aggressive and confrontational art movement appeared on British shores, led by the self-styled ‘enemy’ painter and writer, Percy Wyndham Lewis. With Vorticism abstract modern art had arrived in Britain.
Notes on the complexities of Post-Modernism.
Charles Jencks: In architecture, the movement has returned after the Neo-Modernism of the 1990s, in every way but by name. The world is now saturated by the confused labels of Modernism and Post-Modernism, but the streams of concerns to which these labels used to refer are continuing. That is apparent in architecture with the digital ornament (a leading movement), the iconic building (with its many marvellous and woeful examples), and the hybrid “time buildings” (that mix past, present and future architectural codes).