Tag Archives: place

Juam

One of the prints from the Imaginary Places series, “Juam,” offers a perspective on Stella’s overcrowded compositions. A first state—much lighter, less labored—was also released, described in a pamphlet dedicated to the piece. As usual the final state is over … Continue reading

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Stella and the Past

Stella reveals a lot about his ambitions in the following comments on ceiling painting: “Pietro da Cortona, Fra Pozzi and even Tiepolo met the challenges of architectural decoration in a more measured, distanced manner than their predecessors. They worked the … Continue reading

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Time and Place

“If the place is different, the time is different. If the place is the same, time has not changed.” This pithy two part aphorism by Julian Barbour, actually extracted by me from his book, seems at first surprisingly Heraclitan for … Continue reading

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Adagia

Wallace Stevens: “To be in the world but outside of all existing conceptions of it.” What a great ambition. This blog, with its critiques of painterly ambiguity, general effects, grids, obtuse critical conventions etc. is marking out that place for … Continue reading

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Cyclical Time

Many tribal cultures, such as those on the west coast of Canada, were itinerant. They had  a summer village and a winter village, and set up temporary camps where the resources were in season—salmon runs, ripe berries. This travel was … Continue reading

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Quaytman’s Book

The other great merit of the chapter as an organizing form is that it can’t stand alone. There have been previous chapters and there will be later ones, each of which will force us to read it differently. (Admitting that … Continue reading

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Where is that place?

The recognition of a place is its location. In art the common word is “meaning,” which to my ears sounds hopelessly awkward and naive, or perhaps “content,” which is almost as bad. It’s wise to remember that the word “about” … Continue reading

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Between Two Voids

To return to the quote from Italo Calvino in an earlier post, he further says “The writer, too, would like to make works like this, because he does not believe in the self, or if he does believe in it … Continue reading

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The Work is the Place

The work is the place, a here and now, and that place is therefore not fixable on any permanent map and merely relative to other places. For the avant-garde, and for its critical and art historical heirs, it is relative … Continue reading

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Pollock’s Place

The previous post is obviously wrong when it says that Pollock’s work was not theorized as a place. Harold Rosenberg‘s famous formulation that the so-called “action painters” had reinvented the canvas as “an arena in which to act,” describes how … Continue reading

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