And Bid Him Sing: A Biography of Countée Cullen by Charles Molesworth considers the extensive body of work and unpublished correspondence, as well as the life of Harlem’s legendary poet-citizen. Cullen’s volume Color (1925) was a watershed moment for the Harlem Renaissance; his translation of Euripides’ Medea was the first by an African American of a Greek tragedy; and his tumultuous existence, which included estranged ties with his mother, a short-lived marriage to the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, and an untimely death at the age of forty-two, shadowed his role as one of the chief voices of his generation.

A complicated life often demands more than simple illustration. This is evident in Molesworth’s biography, but also in the unattributed cover image gracing the book. The sketch of Cullen, credited to the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, is by German–American artist and designer Winold Reiss (1884–1953), who painted over 250 images of Native Americans (most notably the Blackfeet), traveled to Mexico to portray Aztec revolutionaries, and contributed dozens of portraits of Harlem Renaissance figures during the first-half of the twentieth century, when racial prejudice and tensions undermined much of American culture. His interior designs ranged from cafes at the Hotel St. Moritz to murals commissioned by the Cincinnati Airport, and his illustrations graced the covers of mainstream magazine’s like Scribner’s.

More on Reiss’s role in the Harlem Renaissance comes from an introduction by Jeffrey C. Stewart, Reiss scholar and author of o Color America: Portraits by Winold Reiss (Smithsonian Institution, 1989), and Winold Reiss: An Illustrated Checklist of His Portraits (Smithsonian Institution, 1990):

In 1921 he visited his native Germany on the only trip he made back to Europe. Here he drew many portraits of German and Swedish folk types and colorful characters. After his return to New York City in 1922, he was chosen by the editor of the social welfare journal Survey Graphic to portray the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance for a special issue entitled Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro [March 1, 1925]. Dr. Alain Locke, Howard University philosophy professor and literary critic, was so impressed with Reiss’s portraits that he chose him to illustrate The New Negro: An Interpretation [1925], the most important anthology of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926, Survey Graphic asked Reiss to illustrate a special Pacific issue with portraits of Asian Americans.

As Reiss wrote in the September 1950 issue of The Native Voice, “To understand life, we cannot have prejudice.” Many of Reiss’s most iconic images stem from his work for Locke’s The New Negro, including his portrait of Locke himself (below). Perhaps more fascinating, though, is the role played by this German immigrant artist in helping to visualize race at a moment when one of America’s most important black arts movements gave us the permission to truly see ourselves as a nation, which could, as Cullen wrote with anger and earnestness, “make a poet black, and bid him sing!”

3:15 pm  •  12 November 2012  •  1 note

Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768)

More in Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794 by Jayne Elizabeth Lewis

2:04 pm  •  31 October 2012  •  2 notes

“These works have led some critics, journalists, and art-lovers to speak of Turrell as a ‘sculptor of the sky.’ He bends it and shapes it, bringing forth novel appearances, but without laying a hand on it. His work is in invitation to the sky to condescend to show itself to us. This invitation is made by offering it a frame, a limit or edge that can contain its immensity and thereby let the uncontainable sky appear. Turrell’s work works around the sky and is always about the sky. Being always about the sky that one is seeing, Turrell’s own work is not what one looks at when one is there. You do not look at what he has made, for what he has made is just the edge circling around what is not made: the sky that his work is alwaysabout.

This sky that is not made is what we are made, patiently, to see.”

—from Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity—Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy by Jeffrey L. Kosky

1:50 pm  •  31 October 2012  •  5 notes

In On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extensions of Life, Sypros Papapetros argues for an abridged history of animated life, locating the “peripheral” and “eccentric” animated objects at the margins of modernism someplace between Freud’s overdetermined elements and diagrammatic, simulating metaphors of life and movement. He willingly takes on the complimentarity between subject and object that animation infers (at one point citing the response of a young victim to a kind of Pokémon hysteria induced by the rapid flashes and hypercolor intensity of the Japanese cartoon as a seizure both “spatiotemporal and epistemological”). Positing the animation of inanimate objects as part of a deeper project of how twentieth-century modernist culture repressed empathy, Papapetros suggests that the animation of the image comes at the expense of its human subject—which got us to thinking.

Watching the commentary—literally watching, since so much is the product of YouTube clips and re-Tumbled images—following last night’s vice-presidential debate has been a stupefying morning experience. My brain has long since been trained to ride the contours of Papapetros’s epistemological shockwaves—more often saturated than not by animated-GIF culture and the new media aesthetic, I’m more profoundly taken aback when my generation’s response to realtime socio-poliltical engagements takes a detour from fragmentation (screengrabs, Twitter), ornamentation (digital manipulation of images), repetition (memes), or juxtaposition:

Tumblr “live-GIFFED” the debate last night, and responses were immediate and forthcoming—part of this “new” aesthetic could be said to argue for the speed at which these GIFs circulate, displacing the circuits of a lost high-art superhighway, and discombobulating the relationships between animate and inanimate, subject and object. Papapetros writes on William Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1907), and like Worringer, cites the polarity between abstraction and empathy as “the product of two different external worlds, both of which appear to be equally treacherous.” In this sense, thinking about the rapidity of satirical GIF assemblages last night, I can’t help but consider its relationship to early Italian Futurism, with its peculiar patriotism, embrace of directional tendencies of an object through space, and the heightened emotions surrounding technology, speed, and “the smear of madness.”

The majority of GIFs circulating last night and this morning on Tumblr revealed a pro-Biden bias—so much so that part of what became jolting for me was the role of their obvious use of humor in caricaturing Paul Ryan. For turn-of-the-century thinkers like Worringer, Theodor Lipps, and Sigmund Freud, empathy is complicated perceptual process with an important and problematic relationship to our ability to abstract ourselves as subjects and negotiate otherness through shared acknowledgements that defer our own objectification. For Freud, especially, the relation between empathy and humor was incisive, if complicated. Worringer, though, thought our modern sensibility thrived in a climate of “empathic abstraction.” I follow Papapetros’s dismissal of empathy as the immediate channel of animation, and find myself taken up by his account of how “every instance of animation is complemented by an equivalent occurrence of paralysis.”

I wonder, then, if part of the har-har at Ryan’s expense is a coming-to-terms with our emotional surplus, in an era where we are pre-disposed into a cult of abstraction, or even distraction. The unfathomable navigation of internet channels—to blog and reblog, “like” and retweet—permits the image to perform a sort of infrastructural violence. At the same time, the animated GIF itself seems unlike the myth of Daphne cited by Papapetros, where excitation reaches such a level that the subject instantly freezes and is unable to react. Although in suspended motion, both Biden and Ryan can’t escape the truncated movements of these clips. Overwhelmed by the possibilities of the Internet but bound by its penchant for fragmentation, is this kind of animation, as Papapetros claims, at the expense of its subjects, no matter our own political position? Or does GIF culture, acting in its prescient sphere of spontaneity, abide by a different set of rules?

“Animism spiritualized the object, whereas industrialization objectifies the spirits of men,” wrote Adorno and Horkheimer. Papapetros takes on this notion, in a conclusion that might here be apt:

There are no truly animated objects in modernity, yet we are inundated by cartoons—mere semblances of animation that conform to Warburg’s “you live and do me nothing.” Perhaps then the paralysis or the “arthritic” effect of modern culture diagnosed by Horkheimer and Adorno is in the epistemological divisions that disallow all forms of being other than the human to live and have a language of their own.

2:13 pm  •  12 October 2012  •  3 notes

1:44 pm  •  11 October 2012  •  7 notes

Sigmar Polke, Supermarkets (Wir Kleinbürger), 1976.

“Among West German artists of the second postwar generation—those who came of age in the 1960s—Polke most definitively expressed in his paintings that the first true lapse in the tenets of modernism had occurred. Emerging during the heyday of pop art, Polke toyed with the forms of high and low, simultaneously drawing comic attention to the gap between them and attempting to break down the perceived opposition. With this shift came a marked embrace of the trivial and an accompanying perception that seriousness need no longer be the primary goal for postwar German artists. Polke’s parodic sense of humor and comedic dismantling of numerous modernist visual tropes made him a key figure in the West German variant of pop. Polke’s work stands for the early phase of postmodernism, when an acceptance of the inevitability of stylistic repetition led to a critically effective version of humor.”

—from Permission to Laugh: Humor and Politics in Contemporary German Art by Gregory H. Williams

11:21 am  •  11 October 2012  •  4 notes

“[Mies] has a cardboard model of Park Avenue between 46th and 57th Streets will all the buildings on the Avenue and some going in the blocks and then he has a number of towers for different solutions that he places in the empty place of the old 375 [the Park Avenue address], and this model is up on a high table so that when sitting in a chair his eye [sic] is just level with the table top which equals the street—and for hours on end he peers down his Park Avenue trying out the different towers.”

—from Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography, New and Revised Edition by Franz Schulze & Edward Windhorst

11:56 am  •  9 October 2012  •  15 notes

3:36 pm  •  3 October 2012  •  4 notes

“When Warhol’s work is convincing, it does what Beuys’s does: it promises nothing; it testifies. The American dream can of course do nothing without promises; it needs to be real only for those who know now to get ahead. It might seem that Warhol’s work is content to expose it and strip its cynicism bare. The yuppies who collect it obviously understand it this way and take pleasure in it accordingly. The leftist criticism that castigates it precisely for not promising a beyond to the commodity understands it the same way. But to testify is neither to promise nor simply to expose; it is to attest to reality as it is. It is also to reopen the possibilities of interpreting reality and forcing a retranslation; it is, in Warhol’s case, to test the possibility of an art condition “below” or “before” the commodity. The field where this unfolds is, as with Beuys, that of political economy, and the text we must retranslate—not into the myth of emancipation but into its antithesis, the American dream—is, as always, Marx’s.”

—Thierry de Duve, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp

11:15 am  •  24 September 2012  •  8 notes

Vija Celmins, in her Venice studio, c. 1966.

Oakwood, Rose Avenue, the Boardwalk, the Canals, and Abbot Kinney Boulevard

Venice: A Contested Bohemia in Los Angeles by Andrew Deener

12:26 pm  •  15 June 2012  •  11 notes