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quarry at Carrara: he reveals the life's nar rative form as the sculptor revealed the form that the marble hid. And both do it by taking away what does not contribute to the form and refining what is left. The book's structuring... more
quarry at Carrara: he reveals the life's nar rative form as the sculptor revealed the form that the marble hid. And both do it by taking away what does not contribute to the form and refining what is left. The book's structuring idea is that through his thirty eighth year, Michelangelo was under the influence of three different and powerful men—Lorenzo de' Medici, Pope Julius II, and Lodovico Buonarroti, his father. While Lorenzo was the de facto ruler of Michel
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Research Interests: Art History and Art
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The thesis that weaves itself through The Art Instinct is that human beings value art because it takes us into the minds of the individual artists who made the works they are listening to, looking at, or reading.1 “We find beautiful... more
The thesis that weaves itself through The Art Instinct is that human beings value art because it takes us into the minds of the individual artists who made the works they are listening to, looking at, or reading.1 “We find beautiful artifacts captivating . . . because at a profound level we sense that they take us into the minds that made them” (p. 163). In precisely the same way, The Art Instinct puts its readers into the mind of Denis Dutton, whom they meet on virtually every page: he is the dancer and his book the dance in W. B. Yeats’s “Among School Children”:
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Since the early 1960s, the rigor and conceptual clarity of Alan Colquhoun's criticism and theory have consistently stimulated debate and have served as an impetus for the pursuit of new directions in both theory and practice. This new... more
Since the early 1960s, the rigor and conceptual clarity of Alan Colquhoun's criticism and theory have consistently stimulated debate and have served as an impetus for the pursuit of new directions in both theory and practice. This new collection of essays displays Colquhoun's concern with developing a coherent discourse for the rampant pluralism that dominates contemporary architecture.In the first four essays Colquhoun carefully examines some of the concepts classicism, romanticism, historicism, and rationalism that have prevailed in architectural discourse during the past two centuries. He observes that all theories of architecture have in fact developed within the context of the changing meaning of history and continue to do so: "even today, the positions taken up by the various protagonists of the present architectural debate are based, explicitly or implicitly, on assumptions about the role of history in the formation of modern cultural values."Colquhoun then looks at the role of history in relation to the classical avant-garde. These three essays focus on Le Corbusier, whose work best exemplifies the tensions and contradictions of the modern movement as he attempted to mediate between past and present. Essays in the book's final section address current controversies, particularly the problem of so called postmodernism, anchoring the current predicament once again to the historical context in which we "think architecture."Alan Colquhoun divides his time between England, where he is a principal in the firm of Colquhoun & Miller, and the United States, where he is Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. His previous collection of essays received the 1985 ArchitecturalCritics Award.
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In China gender boundaries are not based on oppositions: what it is to be a woman is not, for example, simply to lack the traits that make someone a man. Gender difference does not make so deep a cut in the conceptual schemes in Chinese... more
In China gender boundaries are not based on oppositions: what it is to be a woman is not, for example, simply to lack the traits that make someone a man. Gender difference does not make so deep a cut in the conceptual schemes in Chinese thought as it does in those in the west. The female body is not identified or valued as an object of male desire but as the site and possibility of its flowering, while the male body is typically presented as marked in some unusual way or performing some unusual action. Neither is identified as an object worthy of respect or interest for its own sake. Nor does the idea of beauty take refuge elsewhere in Chinese art. This chapter discusses the mode of presence of male and female bodies in contemporary art. It also considers the absence of the nude in this art. Keywords: China gender boundaries; Contemporary Chinese Art; female body; male body
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PART ONE HERE AND NOW Crisis Subversive Strategies in Chinese Avant-garde Art Mary Bittner Wiseman Political Pop Art and the crisis of originality Yi Ying Contemporary Art in China: 'Anxiety of Influence' and the Creative Triumph... more
PART ONE HERE AND NOW Crisis Subversive Strategies in Chinese Avant-garde Art Mary Bittner Wiseman Political Pop Art and the crisis of originality Yi Ying Contemporary Art in China: 'Anxiety of Influence' and the Creative Triumph of Cai Guo-Qiang Laurie Adams Working It Out Image-Fabrication and Contemporary Photography in China Wang Chunchen Chinese Contemporary Art: From De-Chineseness to Re-Chineseness Liu Yuedi Chinese without Chineseness: Chinese Contemporary Art from Cultural Symbol to International Style Peng Feng Calligraphic Expression and Contemporary Chinese Art: Xu Bing's pioneer experiment Liu Yuedi Through the Body The Political Body in Chinese Art Curtis L. Carter Gendered Bodies in Contemporary Chinese Art Mary Bittner Wiseman The Second Sex and Contemporary Chinese Women's Art: A Case Study on Chen Lingyang's Work He Jinli Expression Extreme and History Trauma in Women Body Art in China: The Case of He Chengyao Eva Kit Wah Man PART TWO HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY Classical Metaphysics in Chinese Art Abraham Kaplan Water and Stone: On the Role of Expression in Chinese Art Mary Bittner Wiseman Natural Beauty and Literati Strokes: Shi Tao, Merleau-Ponty and the Practice of Painting David A. Brubaker Paths to the Middle: A Tentative Theory for Chinese Contemporary Art Peng Feng Recent History Current State of Chinese Art Wang Chunchen Avant-garde in Chinese Art Curtis L. Carter Post-colonial and Contemporary Art Trends in Taiwan Pan Fan Experimental Painting and Painting Theories in Colonial Hong Kong (1940-1980): Reflections on Cultural Identity Eva Kit Wah Man East and West The Shape of Artistic Pasts: East and West Arthur C. Danto How to Misunderstand Chinese Art: Seven Examples David Carrier Art and Globalization: Then and Now Noel Carroll Concept, Body and Nature: After the End of Art and the Rebirth of Chinese Aesthetics Liu Yuedi
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Roland barthes has likened the production of a text to the creation of Vedenciennes lace, and he has said of the distinctively modern text, the writerly text, that it is ourselves writing. Lacemakers make lace. We write. I know what... more
Roland barthes has likened the production of a text to the creation of Vedenciennes lace, and he has said of the distinctively modern text, the writerly text, that it is ourselves writing. Lacemakers make lace. We write. I know what lacemedcers are and what they do. I wetnt to know now what we erre emd what writing is. I want to know, also, if whatever we write is meemingful and, if not, what the criterion of the meaningful is. Beuthes sometimes speaks as though the act of writing were the act of love and the creation of meaning were the climax of love, bliss. Since one loses oneself in the moment of bliss, it looks as though one possible answer to die question "What is the criterion of the meemingful?" namely, that bliss is its mark, has the consequence that the answer to "What are we?" is that we are what loses itself in die achievement of meaning. We exchange ourselves for a writerly text. Barthes says, "TEXT means TISSUE; but whereas hitherto we have always tedien this tissue as a product, a ready-made veil, behind which lies . . . meeuiing (truth), we are now emphasizing, in the tissue, the generative idea that the text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving; lost in this tissue — diis texture — the subject unmakes himself, like a spider dissolving in the constructive secretions of its web" (The Pleasure of the Text, p. 64). ' Another figure. Not lovers now but spiders. Not spending the moments of love but dissolving in the secretions from which the web is spun. Who spins? The spider. Another exchange: a spider for a spinning. The questions reassert themselves. What are we, who make lace, make love, produce meanings, spin webs? What, in the figures of weaving and spinning, are the threads? What are the efficient and the material causes of the activity of making meanings? Is it essential to meaning that it last but a moment, as ecstasy does, and that it be purchased at the price of the self, as ecstasy is? What follows
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In 1969 Roland Barthes concluded a short piece called "Is Painting a Language?" with the claim that "something is being born, something which will invalidate 'literature' as much as 'painting' (and their... more
In 1969 Roland Barthes concluded a short piece called "Is Painting a Language?" with the claim that "something is being born, something which will invalidate 'literature' as much as 'painting' (and their metalinguistic correlates, 'criticism' and 'aesthetics'), substituting for these old cultural divinities a generalized 'ergography', the text as work, the work as text."1 "Text" is here being construed as a methodological field traversed by the various theories of the twentieth century and their discourses—feminism, linguistics, materialism, psychoanalysis, structuralism—distributed as they are across traditional disciplinary boundaries and genres. When the discourses are conjoined, this distribution begins to disturb the fixity of traditional boundaries. Why, then, should they be conjoined? Suppose, first, that each theory casts some light on what it analyzes and none is clearly or demonstrably superior to any other; second, that language and conceptual schemes are inextricably linked and, therefore, that the constitutive power of language is at least as great as that of the faculties of the humanmind theorized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the developing forces of history theorized in the nineteenth; and, third, that works bear the press of those who made them and that some of the works handed down by tradition have excluded classes of people whose lives are nonetheless marked by the tradition. It becomes clear that with these suppositions, there is reason to treat the paintings as fields of energy released by the activity of associations, contiguities, cross-references which coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy, as texts achieved by the serial movement of dislocations, overlappings, variations.
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or other aspect—such as Farrington and parodie repetition—of the dialogical discourse. As we might expect, the rhetoric of the later, "public" stories, is more concerned with social, artistic, and economic spheres than the... more
or other aspect—such as Farrington and parodie repetition—of the dialogical discourse. As we might expect, the rhetoric of the later, "public" stories, is more concerned with social, artistic, and economic spheres than the assimilation of the ideas and languages of the earlier popular literature studies in the minds of the evolving protagonists in the early stories. Kershner's approach to Portrait is first an analysis of Stephen's assimilation of the discourses of school, church, and pop fiction, and his use of the "incremental repetition," which finally makes the popular discourses his own, in effect achieving a dialogism with the alien languages which surround him. The author here is especially impressive, with his detailed command of a vast assortment of the popular literature of the period. Particularly memorable are the parallels he draws to Tom Brown's S^oI Days, Eric, The Harrovians, Vice Versa, A Modern Daedalus, and, most importantly, The Count ofMonte Cristo. The author's Exiles chapter primarily explores the possibility of the play's echoing the popular literature of sexuality and marriage which found its way into Joyce's library. As with the earlier discussions, Kershner's detailed knowledge and thoughtful presentation of parallels and influences reflect not only painstaking research, but also an alert, creative use of the material. If the great traditional canonical writers, from Dante through Cervantes to Nabokov and Barth, commonly share anything with those who have only recendy been discovered, it is their pervasive use of the popular culture of their day. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature makes a major contribution to our understanding ofJoyce's early work, at the same time that it provides an intelligent model for the pop culture critical genre.
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Through the work of Julia Kristeva, this paper challenges Freud's laws that everyone is always already gendered, that the mother is feminine and every infant masculine, and that one cannot love the same (gender). The figure of the... more
Through the work of Julia Kristeva, this paper challenges Freud's laws that everyone is always already gendered, that the mother is feminine and every infant masculine, and that one cannot love the same (gender). The figure of the Madonna, seen through the paintings of Giovanni Bellini, is used to theorize the time in the life of a child before Oedipus and to undo the conceptual knot with which Freud has bound the feminine to the maternal.
Research Interests: Sociology, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Art, Political Science, and 4 morePainting, Hypatia, Undo, and The Renaissance
Eric Dayton's analysis of C. I. Lewis's argument for the validity of the principles of practice in "Pragmatic Contradiction" (Ethics 87 [1977]) is misleading in two ways that do violence to Lewis's theory of... more
Eric Dayton's analysis of C. I. Lewis's argument for the validity of the principles of practice in "Pragmatic Contradiction" (Ethics 87 [1977]) is misleading in two ways that do violence to Lewis's theory of practical reason. First, it does not go deep enough and, as a result, mistakes rules we have imposed upon ourselves, the laws of standard logic among them, for rules imposed upon us, either by the world or by the nature of our minds. Dayton fails to appreciate that it is choice and commitment that lie at the heart of Lewis's theory and that, therefore, if the law of contradiction limits the propositional attitudes that can rationally be taken, it is because we have chosen this limit. We must choose some rules, but there are no rules that we must choose. Second, Dayton's analysis rests on what he calls the general principle of consistency for first-person propositional attitudes, (I think) . . .p . .. it is false that (I think) ... not-p ... (1) (p. 229), which is supposed to have a role in Lewis's theory that it does not have. For one thing, it is preferred as the only principle of consistency governing propositional attitudes, whereas Lewis claims that, since attitudes themselves, as well as their objects, may conflict, there is a second principle of consistency ruling out conflict among attitudes. For another thing, (1) characterizes inconsistent attitudes as those whose propositional objects are logically contradictory, whereas Lewis goes the other way around and characterizes logical contradiction in terms of practical (attitudinal) incompatibility. If, indeed, some rules must be chosen, then rules must be followed; else the choice were in vain. To follow a rule is, among other things, to treat the particulars to which the rule applies the same, and to accept a rule is to be prepared to act in the same way toward all the phenomena falling under it. This sameness in the way of acting goes by the name "consistency," not logical consistency, the relation among sentences such that all may be true, but (a more general) practical consistency. To accept a rule, then, is to commit oneself to be practically consistent, that is,