Curating isn’t an easy job. At its best, the act of curation is its own form of artistic creation–a kind of creative essaying. The curator has a thesis derived either from his/her own observations about the world or filtered through a particular cultural criticism that is then supported through the arrangement of art objects. There … Continue reading
Few cinematic sequences signify the dawn of postmodernism and all its attendant schizoid unknowability beneath its constructed surface veneer better than the final scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. In that scene, the audio tapping specialist Harry, portrayed with quiet and contemplative everyman rage by the great Gene Hackman, rips his apartment up with … Continue reading
In her 1994 essay The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, art historian Linda Nochlin ties the genesis of modernism to the French Revolution, framing the guillotine as a symbol of the severing of inherited dynastic power ushering in an era of radical politics, creativity, and culture. The guillotine becomes representative … Continue reading
In his text Transcendental Style in Film, the critic turned auteur Paul Schrader observed a formal connection between several mid-1900s filmmakers, particularly Yasujirô Ozu, Robert Bresson and Carl Thedor Dreyer. “Transcendental film,” Schrader argues, “seeks to maximize the mystery of existence; it eschews all conventional interpretations of reality: realism, psychologism, romanticism, expressionism, and finally, rationalism.” … Continue reading
Michel Houellebecq once wrote, “They would have to pay taxes, submit themselves to administrative formalities while ceaselessly bearing witness—powerless and shame filled—to the irreversible degradation of their own bodies.” Here, Houellebecq speaks of inevitable physical decline as inevitable spiritual decline. With your strength, goes your spirit. With your beauty, goes your hope. Whether we are … Continue reading
American art critic Kristine McKenna, writing for the Los Angeles Times in 1991, referred to artist Barbara Ess’s signature pinhole photographs as “luxuriously beautiful.” Those photographs, in which subjects are blurred, information is blacked out and realities blend into fantasies, expose photography as a medium that, at its best, is rife for the subjectivity of … Continue reading
In his text The Weird and the Eerie, the cultural theorist Mark Fisher analyzed two of the most important elements in various works of art that veer into the territory of horror and science fiction. The weird, as found in David Lynch’s Inland Empire, various texts by HP Lovecraft, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a … Continue reading
