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moving along, slowly
Jun. 5th, 2007 10:32 amAs a way of segueing out of the topic of the previous few posts, I might mention that Giorgio Agamben, the hot political philosopher of the moment, got his start writing about the theory of imagination and the imaginal realm from Aristotle to the Renaissance, based on research he conducted at the Warburg Institute in 1974-75. The book was published in Italian in 1979 but not translated into English until recently.
Erik Davis posted a lovely little essay about it a few days ago, in which he compares the Agamben of 1979 to Ioan Culianu and remarks that "In Agamben's erudite hands, pneumatology becomes the secret link between demons and courtly love, the erotic fetish and the commodity." (Agamben, in other words, extends the theory in directions parallel to but other than Culianu’s: ones more like the work of Walter Benjamin, to whom Davis also compares this Italian writer of singularly graceful prose.)
I came across Davis’ post about Agamben’s book Stanzas yesterday because I wanted to see if the fast-writing Davis (too fast; he writes “idolatry” where I think he meant to repeat the other half of his duality, “iconoclasm,” and “marital law” for “martial law”) had already taken note of a book that arrived unbidden from Abrams, A. Leo Nash’s Burning Man: Art in the Desert.
Now, readers of the interview with Burning Man’s founder in ART PAPERS as it now all-caps styles itself, or of the chapter in Daniel Pinchbeck’s Breaking Open the Head will already be familiar with this utopian anarchist city that gathers in the American desert for such a brief time every August, and with its combination of self-sufficiency and mutual aid. It represents an interesting communal ethic, and it displays amazing works of art, but you will not be convinced of the latter from this book. Given the years of effort that went into the book's making, this is particularly too bad.
But knowing something about two big sculptures (by Charlie Smith and crew and Zach Coffin and crew) that were hauled out to the Playa and there presented, I can testify that they are genuinely impressive artworks that are ill-served by the images of them here. Nash’s book at least makes the world aware that they exist, however, and the ephemeral Temple of Joy is more or less well represented. (Some works at Burning Man, such as David Best and crew’s immense piece of architecture, are meant to be destroyed at the end, like the original Burning Man sculpture of which a new incarnation appears each year. But far more pieces these days are created thousands of miles away and hauled in for transient, dramatic assembly on site followed by disassembly and removal.)
The book does give the flavor and some of the details of the combination of performance event and practical community that brings so many people to Burning Man every year as a world apart from their daily professional lives. (I shall never attend, being averse to summer temperatures that threaten one’s survival, but I have known bankers and information technology folks who do go each year, as well as makers of stone and metal sculptures.)
Since Daniel Pinchbeck wrote the introduction to Nash’s photographs, all of this feeds back, alas, into my usual narrow set of obsessions.
So now I think I need to write my long-promised essay about nineteenth-century portraitist Cecilia Beaux (subject of a lovely exhibition at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art) as a way of getting away from all of this entirely.
Erik Davis posted a lovely little essay about it a few days ago, in which he compares the Agamben of 1979 to Ioan Culianu and remarks that "In Agamben's erudite hands, pneumatology becomes the secret link between demons and courtly love, the erotic fetish and the commodity." (Agamben, in other words, extends the theory in directions parallel to but other than Culianu’s: ones more like the work of Walter Benjamin, to whom Davis also compares this Italian writer of singularly graceful prose.)
I came across Davis’ post about Agamben’s book Stanzas yesterday because I wanted to see if the fast-writing Davis (too fast; he writes “idolatry” where I think he meant to repeat the other half of his duality, “iconoclasm,” and “marital law” for “martial law”) had already taken note of a book that arrived unbidden from Abrams, A. Leo Nash’s Burning Man: Art in the Desert.
Now, readers of the interview with Burning Man’s founder in ART PAPERS as it now all-caps styles itself, or of the chapter in Daniel Pinchbeck’s Breaking Open the Head will already be familiar with this utopian anarchist city that gathers in the American desert for such a brief time every August, and with its combination of self-sufficiency and mutual aid. It represents an interesting communal ethic, and it displays amazing works of art, but you will not be convinced of the latter from this book. Given the years of effort that went into the book's making, this is particularly too bad.
But knowing something about two big sculptures (by Charlie Smith and crew and Zach Coffin and crew) that were hauled out to the Playa and there presented, I can testify that they are genuinely impressive artworks that are ill-served by the images of them here. Nash’s book at least makes the world aware that they exist, however, and the ephemeral Temple of Joy is more or less well represented. (Some works at Burning Man, such as David Best and crew’s immense piece of architecture, are meant to be destroyed at the end, like the original Burning Man sculpture of which a new incarnation appears each year. But far more pieces these days are created thousands of miles away and hauled in for transient, dramatic assembly on site followed by disassembly and removal.)
The book does give the flavor and some of the details of the combination of performance event and practical community that brings so many people to Burning Man every year as a world apart from their daily professional lives. (I shall never attend, being averse to summer temperatures that threaten one’s survival, but I have known bankers and information technology folks who do go each year, as well as makers of stone and metal sculptures.)
Since Daniel Pinchbeck wrote the introduction to Nash’s photographs, all of this feeds back, alas, into my usual narrow set of obsessions.
So now I think I need to write my long-promised essay about nineteenth-century portraitist Cecilia Beaux (subject of a lovely exhibition at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art) as a way of getting away from all of this entirely.
