Columbia University Press

“Minelli, by traveling to the slums of Cambodia and painting “Second Life” on its walls, is indicating the contradiction between these two worlds (advanced technological capitalism and its social detritus) — and it is also disclosing the limits imposed by these social networks. These networks, and the Internet in general, are the culmination of Being’s (human existence) replacement with beings (objects) — with the global technological organization of the world.” — Santiago Zabala

The Stone, the philosophy blog of the New York Times, recently ran a post by Santiago Zabala on the art of Italian artist Filippo Minelli. In his post, Zabala, Icrea research professor of philosophy at the University of Barcelona and coauthor of Hermeneutic Communism, intersperses powerful photos of Minelli’s work with explanations of why Minelli’s message needs to be taken seriously. We’ve excerpted some of the essay below, complete with several of the photos. Read the entire article here.

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Claude Piantadosi’s Mankind Beyond Earth frames space exploration as humanity’s ultimate challenge to adapt to new and extremely hostile environments. However, while Piantadosi is quite frank about the physical and financial limits of human spacefaring, his book is also brimming with examples of its potential for human creativity. Inspired by this enthusiasm (and the book’s retro cover art) we’ve put together a Pinterest Board (see below) featuring some of our favorite illustrative imaginings about travel to the stars.

This week our featured book is Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo by Mark C. Taylor. Remember to enter our Book Giveaway to win a FREE copy of Rewiring the Real. Today, we have a guest post from Professor Taylor, in which he discusses Rewiring the Real, Refiguring the Spiritual, and Recovering Place, and tells why Rewiring the Real might have begun, “Philosophy has lost its way.”

“Philosophy has lost its way”
Mark C. Taylor

Rewiring the Real is the second book in a trilogy that includes Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy (2012), and Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill (2014). Refiguring the Spiritual begins, “Art has lost its way;” Rewiring the Real might have begun, “Philosophy has lost its way.” During the latter half of the twentieth-century, art and money entered into an unholy alliance in which artists eager to cash in on new money are selling works to financiers who resell them in hedge funds and private equity funds designed for ultra-rich investors looking for new ways to “diversify their portfolios with asset-backed securities.” While artists are trying to become Wall Street players, philosophers are trying to become scientists. As their work becomes more abstract and highly specialized, philosophers become less concerned about human problems and real world issues.

For art and philosophy to recover their missions, art must become more philosophical and philosophy must become more artistic in and through a rethinking of the interrelationship of art, philosophy and religion. This will require not only a change in substance but, more important, a change in style. This is not an original idea but can be traced to the publication of Kant’s pivotal Critique of Judgment (1790). It is no exaggeration to insist that this work has directly and indirectly shaped all philosophical, theological, artistic and, indeed, cultural discussions and production for more than two centuries. Kant provided the definition of art that became normative for Modernism. During the decade of the 1790s, discussions about Kant’s critical philosophy among a remarkable group of philosophers and writers, including, inter alia, Hegel, Schelling, Schiller, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers, led to a reconfiguration of the relationship among philosophy, art and religion. While leading thinkers in the eighteenth century had interpreted religion in either epistemological or ethical terms, writers, who gathered in Jena during the seminal decade of the 1790s, reconceived religion in terms of art and aesthetics. In their works, art displaced religion as the primary means for the exploration and expression of religious and spiritual concerns. Some of philosophers who have been most influential recently – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida – are as much artists as philosophers. But they have all remained writers, whose works are literary or even poetic. Some of the leading twentieth-century visual artists – Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Malevich, Rothko, Reinhardt, Newman, Pollack – insist that art has a spiritual dimension.

Refiguring the Spiritual begins with a critique of what I describe as the “financialization of art.” What Andy Warhol is to consumer capitalism, Jeff Koons is to financial capitalism. But there is an importance difference between Andy and his epigone Jeff. While Warhol’s ironic detachment leaves the viewer uncertain whether he is criticizing or endorsing consumerism, there is no ambiguity about Koons. He eagerly endorses practices of the Wall Street wizards who pay excessive prices for eye candy intended to make them feel good. Beuys, Barney, Turrell and Goldsworthy reject this tendency in contemporary art. Each in his own way extends the preoccupations of the modern avant-garde art by drawing on different spiritual traditions (Beuys, Anthroposophy; Barney, Celtic and Masonic mythology; Turrell, Quakerism and Hopi myths and rituals; Goldsworthy, Celtic mythology). Their works are difficult and demanding – they cannot be consumed quickly but take time to appreciate. Though many of their works are expensive to create, they cannot be easily commodified. The primary purpose of their works is not to market them for a profit but to create the opportunity for the cultivation of personal and, by extension, social transformation.

Rewiring the Real extends my analysis from art to literature by analyzing one novel by four important writers: William Gaddis, The Recognitions; Richard Powers, Plowing the Dark; Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves; Don DeLillo, Underworld. Though these writers are very different, they share an appreciation for the ways in which recent technological innovations (Gaddis, electronic media and communications; Powers, virtual reality; Danielewski, Internet and World Wide Web; DeLillo, nuclear power and global financial networks) harbor a latent spirituality in an era that is too often labeled secular and posthuman. Rather than merely critically analyzing these novels, I attempt to engage the authors in a conversation that expands the inquiry beyond the boundaries each writer defines. As these writers begin to “talk” among themselves, we begin to see how their work can help readers understand the ways in which the very sense of reality is morphing in the global world of financial capitalism.

If style is substance and substance is style, then writing must change. In previous works (e.g., Imagologies: Media Philosophy, Grave Matters, Mystic Bones, Hiding, and Motel Réal: Las Vegas, Nevada), I have used different styles of writing and visual design to convey the ideas I am attempting to express. This ongoing experiment continues with this trilogy: Refiguring the Spiritual uses images and design to fashion arguments and Rewiring the Real includes accounts of some of my own artwork as well as my first attempt at writing fiction. Recovering Place will be my most ambitious experiment so far. In this multifaceted work, I take philosophy off the page by creating land art and sculpture (metal, rock, stone and bone) in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, where I live. In addition to a series of aphoristic reflections about the importance of recovering place in a world that is becoming ever more virtual, the book also includes original photographs I have taken of my art in its natural setting. As Kierkegaard, insisted long ago, many of the most important things in life can only be communicated indirectly. I would add to this that there are things that we can apprehend but not precisely comprehend. Through stylistic innovation and artistic design, I have attempted to create performative works that work at multiple levels to transform apprehension as well as introduce new ways of understanding the world in which we dwell.

Mark C. Taylor
Stone Hill

Recently, Stephen Bronner author of Modernism at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, Utopia, took The Page 99 Test. The test, thought up by Ford Maddox Ford, posits that the 99th page of a book determines the quality of a book.

Bronner expresses some skepticism about this adage but then grudgingly admits that the “page is somewhat indicative of my general enterprise”. The page in question considers the myth of the surrealist dialectic and Bronner explains how the page fits in with the book’s aims:

Modernism at the Barricades explores the interplay between aesthetics, philosophy, and politics in the major avant-garde movements that marked the first three decades of the twentieth century. I mostly focus on figures who reflected that intersection. Andre Breton was one of them. The guiding force of surrealism, he was also a seminal figure of modernism. My engagement with him as a thinker and the philosophical pretensions of surrealism is critical in character. But that is the case for the book as a whole insofar as it seeks to reinterpret modernism with an eye on its legacy for our time and contemporary cultural politics.”

For more on the book, you can browse it using Google Preview or read the introduction in its entirety.

Now available in paper, All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some that Wasn’t): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page, by Jerelle Kraus, reveals the crucial role that art work has played in establishing the Times‘s op-ed page as such a force. (For more information including a gallery of many of the images found in the book you can visit jerellekraus.com.)

The paperback edition includes a new cover which includes an infamous nude picture of Henry Kissinger’s back (and more) with a map of Southeast Asia. The David Levine image was commissioned by the New York Times who ultimately decided to “kill” the art deeming it too risky:

Here are some sample images from the book:

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The eagerly anticipated art fair dOCUMENTA 13, held every five years, opens on June 9 in Kassel, Germany. dOCUMENTA has become one of the biggest art events in the world but also includes “other objects and experiments in the fields of art, politics, literature, philosophy, and science.

For the Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev,

dOCUMENTA (13) is dedicated to artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment, and active living in connection with, yet not subordinated to, theory and epistemological closures…. Participants of dOCUMENTA (13) come from a range of fields of activity…. They contribute to dOCUMENTA (13) that aims to explore how different forms of knowledge lie at the heart of the active exercise of re-imagining the world. What some of these participants do, and what they “exhibit” in dOCUMENTA (13), may or may not be art. However, their acts, gestures, thoughts, and knowledges produce and are produced by circumstances that are readable by art, aspects that art can cope with and absorb.

A number of Columbia University Press authors will have their work represented or will be present, including:

Irina Aristarkhova, author of the forthcoming Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture.

Judith Butler, author of several titles, including the forthcoming Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism

Kenneth Goldsmith, author of Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age

Catherine Malabou, author of Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction

Christoph Menke, author of Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett

The recent opening of The Steins Collect at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has ignited a controversyregarding Gertrude Stein’s fascist past. At the center of this debate is Barbara Will’s recent book Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma.

As Will’s book reveals, Stein, herself a Jew, supported various Vichy policies and in fact translated several of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s speeches. Moreover, she had a close relationship with Bernard Fay, who was director of the Bibliothèque Nationale during the Vichy regime and overseer of the repression of French freemasons. It is through Fay’s protection that Stein was able to remain in France.

Initially, the Met made no mention of Stein’s Vichy past but, as reported in the New York Times, after objections they decided to add a few sentences to the final wall text of the exhibition, describing how Gertrude Stein’s affiliation with Bernard Fäy, the Vichy collaborator and Nazi agent, contributed to the protection of Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas in France during the war. They also direct people to Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaborator.

The story was also covered in the New Yorker, and in an interview Will suggests:

In a sense, the curators dropped the ball by not recognizing and anticipating this response. If one asks how and why this art survived the war [and] specifically, the art in Gertrude’s collection—then the issue of Gertrude Steins’s Vichy commitments becomes very important indeed. Why was Stein’s apartment, where most of the art was stored, left undisturbed during the war? The only firm answer we have—with documented proof—is that Bernard Faÿ kept his eye on the apartment and intervened when it looked like the seals on the doors were going to be broken and the Nazis were going to seize the art works.

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We conclude our week-long feature on Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell and Goldsworthy, with an excerpt from Mark C. Taylor’s chapter on Andy Goldsworthy:

Goldsworthy’s preoccupation with place is often misunderstood. Some critics summarily dismiss him as a druidic figure devoted to Celtic paganism and occult mysticism. It is important to acknowledge that some of his comments tend to encourage this reading of his work. Goldsworthy often writes about a common energy that circulates through both nature and his art. Responding to criticisms of his art for being merely decorative, he leaves himself open to attack on other grounds. “Color for me,” he explains, “is not pretty or decorative—it is raw with energy. Nor does it rest on the surface. I explore the color within and around a rock—color is form and space. It does not lie passively or flat. At best it reaches deep into nature—drawing on the unseen—touching the living rock—revealing the energy inside.” The more carefully one studies Goldsworthy’s work, however, the clearer it becomes that his vision differs from New Age spirituality in important ways. While New Age believers preach a gospel of harmony and light, Goldsworthy acknowledges the violence and darkness of natural processes. He probes this darkness in a series of works that figure holes. “The hole,” he explains, “has become an important element. Looking into a deep hole unnerves me. My concept of stability is questioned and I am made aware of the potent energies within the earth. The black is that energy made visible.” Turrell might well have written these words. Over the course of his career Goldsworthy has explored holes in a variety of media—rocks, stones, sand, mud, flowers, leaves, twigs, snow, ice, frost, wool, feathers, even water

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“Roden Crater is the most ambitious work and might well turn out to be the most important artwork of our time. For pilgrims fortunate enough to journey into Turrell’s work, the world is, indeed, transformed.”—Mark C. Taylor

In his chapter on James Turrell in Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, Mark C. Taylor discusses Turrell’s extraordinary work at Roden Crater. He opens the chapter beginning by considering what it was that first drew him to Turrell:

The more I studied Turrell’s work, the richer it became and the more difficult it was to locate his work on traditional maps of art history. Turrell’s medium is light—he paints with and sculpts light. From one point of view, his work can be understood as a logical extension of impressionism. While impressionist canvases shift attention from illuminated objects to the experience of illumination, Turrell dematerializes the medium to create works of art as effervescent as the act of apprehension itself. From another point of view, his work resonates in certain ways with minimalists like Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and, most obviously, Robert Irwin. He shares Judd’s and Irwin’s interest in light and, like Serra, he has a long-standing interest in the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which grows out of his concern with the act of perception more than the crafted object. Such similarities should not, however, obscure the very different motivation informing Turrell’s art. Having been raised a Quaker and having studied psychology at Pomona College, Turrell and his work cannot be understood simply in terms of art history. Turrell creates his art through a unique combination of painterly and sculptural strategies, scientific experiment, and, in ways that are not immediately obvious, religious myth and ritual. Like mystics ancient and modern, as well as Eastern and Western, Turrell is obsessed with vision. While mystics stage rituals to create visions they believe will transform consciousness, Turrell combines artistic practice and scientific experiment to create a transformative experience by turning vision back on itself in order to see seeing. To see seeing is to grasp the world as a work of art and to apprehend vision as a cosmogonic act once attributed to the gods.

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As he explains in Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, Mark C. Taylor was initially skeptical of Matthew Barney. However, as he became more familiar with Barney’s work, his opinion changed. In the following excerpt he explains the religious nature of Barney’s work, particularly The Cremaster Cycle, and its similarities with Joseph Beuys.

Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Matthew Barney is the most spiritual and perhaps even most religious artist working today. The roots of his artistic vision can be traced to ancient Greek philosophy—especially the pre-Socratics and Neoplatonists—as well as ancient pagan and Christian myths and rituals. This philosophia perennis rests on five fundamental principles:

1. Divine reality is not merely transcendent but is also immanent in the world.
2. The self is inseparably related to or even identical with divine reality.
3. This primal unity is lost when human beings fall into a condition of division and conflict.
4. The goal of human life, as well as the cosmos as a whole, is to return to this original unity.
5. The only way to achieve this goal is through the enlightenment brought by spiritual practice.

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“It’s all about the fat.”—Mark C. Taylor on Fat Chair, by Joseph Beuys

In Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, Mark C. Taylor explores these four artists’, whose work, unlike that of Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, or Takashi Murakami, “makes absolutely no economic sense. Indeed, this work is designed not to be marketable.

In four separate chapters, Taylor discusses works by Beuys, Barney, Turrell, and Goldsworthy. In the opening to his chapter on Beuys, Taylor considers his Fat Chair. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s all about the fat: the way it looks, smells, feels—the way it oozes and seeps, jiggles and ripples, molds and melts—the way it is stored and burnt. During an era in which art was becoming ever more abstract and, thus, increasingly thin, Beuys made art fat. Real fat. Fat is one of the most unlikely materials with which to make art. Traditionally associated with excess and waste, fat is supposed to be slimmed, trimmed, and eliminated; it is unseemly, inelegant, and ugly. There is something gross, even grotesque about fat. Far from aesthetically appealing, fat is undeniably abject. Yet fat is vital to life: while too much fat can be fatal, bodies live by metabolizing fat to create the energy necessary for bodily functions. The transformational process through which material substance becomes the immaterial is the alchemy of life.

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This week our featured book is Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, by Mark C. Taylor. (To read chapter 6 Afterthougths.)

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of the book and we are also offering a FREE copy of the book to one winner.

To enter our book giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and address (U.S. and Canadian mailing addresses only, unfortunately). We will randomly select one winner on Friday at 1:00 pm. Good luck and spread the word!

Praise for Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy:

“In a climate in which the art market is continuing to break records without explanation, Mark C. Taylor offers a unique parallel between the workings of finance and the fine art arena. The initial pages of this book contain the clearest description I’ve read regarding the mechanics of finance in this new millennium. Moreover, Taylor’s appreciation of work by Jim Turrell and Andy Goldsworthy, two of my favorite artists, caught me completely off guard with his philosophic depth and aesthetic sensitivity, all from recounted personal experiences.” — Stephen Hannock, painter

“As art becomes a progressively abstract play of non-referential signs, so increasingly abstract financial instruments become an autonomous sphere of circulation whose end is nothing other than itself.”—Mark C. Taylor

In a piece for Bloomberg View, Mark C. Taylor, author of the forthcoming Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, argues that the art and financial markets mirror each other.

According to Taylor this is not a new phenomenon unique to our present form of finance capitalism. As the overall economy has moved from industrial to consumer to financial capitalism, a parallel process has occurred in the art world, which has undergone three stages the commodification of art, the corporatization of art, and the financialization of art. In this essay, the first of a series, Taylor considers the work and careers of Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons, two artists keenly aware of art’s place as a commodity and a business. Taylor argues that whereas Warhol’s appropriation of consumer icons and his factory system of mechanizing art challenged, Koons’s art is crafted to reassure. Noting Koons’s former work as a stock broker, Taylor argues, “Unapologetically embracing banality and freely admitting his ignorance of art history, Koons sounds more like Joel Osteen than Marcel Duchamp….Having learned his trade on the floor of commodity exchanges, Koons does not move beyond the commodification of art.”

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In the concluding chapter to The Severed Head: Capital Visions, Julia Kristeva speculates on some of the meanings and legacies of representations of sacrifice and the severed head:

Because the sacred, or the nostalgia for it that remains, turns out to reside not in sacrifice after all, or in some aesthetic or religious tradition, but in that specifically human, unique, and bitter experience that is the capacity for representation.

And the mother goddess, in these capital visions pushed to their ends? What becomes of the fabulous mirage, the archaic source of the depressions that call us to speech and thought, the primordial prehistoric figurine, the heads of Medusa, Gorgon, Jezebel, and, in the form of their phallic conspiracy, the woman masters, the Judiths and Salomes? What remains of the final depths of the sacred? And what do they make of it, the man and the woman, when they know where that comes from?

They remember. They pass it and pass it again. And they laugh at it. “The Woman with 100 Heads” of Max Ernst may not be the most inspired figuration of that indispensable allusion, in which the sacred gets frankly tiresome, whereas its absence resigns itself to robotics. But this horrible, naive, vulgar, surrealist cartoon, which mocks women, heads, decapitations, fascinations, horrors, and their capital of beliefs, still allows us to remember our capital visions. And maybe to die of laughter, while keeping a cool head, in the grip of our fantasies, our ancient or modern religions, ever tenacious and thoroughly ridiculous. Let us not finish it off too quickly, this sacred vision. Let us remove the head, let us keep on passing.

In the following passage from The Severed Head: Capital Visions, Julia Kristeva explores the iconography and symbolism of beheadings during the French Revolution:

More Roman, Marat takes great pleasure in what he believes to be the “serene joy” of the people contemplating “the head of the tyrant [that] had just fallen under the sword of the law” and salutes “a religious holiday.” In effect, we are witnessing a “syncope of the sacred,” which only suspends one religion with the ambition of immediately founding another.But this new religiosity is lacking in imagination and rudimentary in symbolism: the passage to the act itself takes the place of culture and justice.

The jubilation of the masses before this spectacle has been compared to prehistoric skull rituals and the totemic meal. This comparison does not flatter modernity, to say the least. The gritty rhetoric, the repression or denial of death often takes the mediocre, infantile aspect of the bawdy story. A few engravings tragically emphasize the “caustic forms” of this Dantean era. Less numerous, it seems, than the royalist images, most of the figurations are republican caricatures representing the head of Louis XVI. The most widespread and widely imitated engraving in France and abroad is signed with two pseudonyms, “Fious,” for the draftsman, and “Sarcifu,” for the engraver. Redundant imagery characterizes these productions, which are limited to representing three essential subjects: the severed head is displayed on the Place de la Révolution, like a Medusa head, as some present-day historians note; the portrait of the guillotine victim is engraved without any narrative context, for the voyeuristic pleasure of “sacred” vengeance; the king is accompanied on his descent into Hell.

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“That is how the guillotine of history falls, sparing neither men nor works.”—Julia Kristeva

This week we will be featuring The Severed Head: Capital Visions by Julia Kristeva.

In her newest book, Kristeva explores artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work—the power of horror—and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. The following is an excerpt from the book:

One drawing remains etched in my memory, given to me without ceremony but as a sign of favor, in the way that only gifted beings and mothers know how. It was one of those cold, white winters that freeze the Balkans and bring families together around their coal stoves. Hunched over the glowing grate, I warmed my icy cheeks and numb fingers as I listened absentmindedly to a children’s radio show: “What is the quickest means of transportation in the world? Send us your answer, with a drawing to match, on a postcard, to the following address . . . ” “I know, it’s an airplane,” my little sister piped up. “No, it’s a rocket,” I countered, pleased at having the last word. “I’d say instead that it’s thought,” Mama proposed. I could only concede, but not without my usual smart remark: “Maybe, but you can’t draw a thought, it’s invisible.” “You’ll see.” I can still picture the card that she drew with my name on it, which won me first prize in the radio contest. To the left, a big snowman in the process of melting, his head falling off, as though severed by the invisible guillotine of the sun. To the right, the planet earth in its interstellar orbit, offering its imaginary expanses for armchair travels

In fact, there was nothing special about that drawing. Certainly, the spareness of the sketch, the vacuousness of the melting body, the severed head all merged with an ingenious idea: only the speed of thought exceeds the speed of bodies, whether cosmic, human, or products of human technology. But, to my young eyes, it subtly demonstrated that quickness of thought I so admired in the answer my mother had proposed. The drawing let it be seen, as much in the concision of its concept (a perishable body transcends itself and conveys itself through the power of reason) as in the cheerful quickness of the line (without collapsing into caricature, the nervous, spirited line betrayed the melancholy of our mortal condition as well as the triumphant irony of deep reflection).

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In addition to being the author of Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, Kenneth Goldsmith is also the creator and curator of UbuWeb. Started in 1996, UbuWeb has become one of the leading resources for modernist, avant-garde, and experimental art, music, and literature. The Guardian described it as “a treasure house of recherché delights you won’t find anywhere else. And this is gold-standard treasure.”

The site includes films, mp3′s of famous writers reading their works, works of art, and texts. The site also includes Top Ten lists from artists, writer, poets, musician, and critics such as Charles Bernstein, Dennis Cooper, David Grubbs, Wayne Koestenbaum, Rick Moody, Marjorie Perloff, Alex Ross, and John Zorn.

For a sampling of the treasures to be found on UbuWeb, here are some recent additions to the site:

* Marshall McLuhan Audio Archive (1960-99) [MP3]
* Gus Van Sant Allen Ginsberg – Ballad of the Skeletons (1997)
*Samuel Beckett reading Murphy (1938) [MP3]
* William Burroughs reads Junky
* Caetano Veloso O Cinema Falado (1986)
* Amiri Baraka Sound Poems (1964-present) [MP3]
* Hugo Ball, ed. Cabaret Voltaire [journal, 1916]
* Marcel Duchamp, et al. The Deadman No. 2 [journal, 1917, New York]
* Michel Foucault Lectures (1978-83) [MP3]
* The Mekons and Kathy Acker Pussy, King Of The Pirates (1996) [MP3]

In Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, author Hillary L. Chute explores the visual and verbal techniques of five acclaimed female cartoonists: Marjane Satrapi, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Alison Bechdel, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Lynda Barry.

Think you know your graphic women? Put your knowledge to the test with our quiz based on the book.

Click here for the answers.

1. What does Chute choose to label the material she analyzes instead of the standard term graphic novel?
a. graphic story
b. illustrated novel
c. graphic narrative
d. feminist cartoons

2. From what perspective do all of the examined authors at some point write?
a. a child
b. a man
c.. the mother of the narrator
d. a fly on the wall

3. Where does the word cartoon come from?
a. the French word pomme
b. the Italian word cartone
c. the Latin word caveat
d. the Spanish word humoristica

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Leonard Cassuto, professor of English at Fordham University and author of Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crimes Stories, is curating an exhibit entitled The Art of Captivity.

Idiom interviewed Cassuto about the exhibit, which includes works that explore captivity narratives, and includes works by artists such as Kara Walker. In the interview Cassuto also discusses frontier ideology, captivity narratives throughout history, and how an English Professor wound up curating a contemporary art show in the first place.

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

Idiom: Do you see the legacy of early captivity narratives at work today?

Leonard Cassuto: Certainly—captivity is all over the place. For example, the structure of the generic serial killer story usually involves a young woman being held by the killer as police and/or detective(s) race to free her. This trunk story is inconceivable without the captivity narrative that undergirds it. In a more literary vein, Stephen King’s most self-reflexive (and to my thinking, his best) book, Misery, is a modern captivity narrative.

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Yesterday’s New York Times celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the op-ed section. Part of the commemoration is a video dedicated to the influential illustrations of the op-ed section.

The video includes an interview with Jerelle Kraus, the former art director at the New York Times (1979-1989, 1993-1996), and author of All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some that Wasn’t): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page, reveals the true story of the world’s first Op-Ed page. Not only did the New York Times‘s nonstaff bylines shatter tradition, but the pictures were revolutionary. Unlike anything ever seen in a newspaper, Op-Ed art became a globally influential idiom that reached beyond narrative for metaphor and changed illustration’s very purpose and potential.

In the interview, Kraus focuses on how the influx of artists from the Eastern bloc in the 1970s and 80s transformed Times coverage of the Cold War

For more information on the book including a gallery of many of the images found in the book you can visit jerellekraus.com.

Here are some sample images from the book: