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It is time to make a pitch for a couple of 2007 books that have no relationship to one another except that I received the one a few days ago and finally opened the sealed galley proofs of the other that I bought on eBay.
Both deserve long essays, which you will not get from me, barring the opposite of misadventure. (Ad-venture? a fortuitous and fortunate coming to?)
The World Monuments Fund has published a volume to celebrate the restoration of Brancusi’s Endless Column Ensemble: Targu Jiu, Romania (I cannot put the circumflex over the a in Targu, though I bet any other reader of this could). Slender though it is, it summarizes the dense symbolic code of Brancusi’s Endless Column, Table, and Gate in a few succinct words that suggest why this trio of sculptures has, for some of us, such a haunting impact. Or rather, it suggests meanings to impose on an emotional reaction that I at least had when I first saw the ensemble in photographs in some art magazine’s account decades ago. It also notes, which I hadn’t known previously, that the memorial was completed during “a short-lived period of favorable political and cultural circumstances” in 1937-38. Brancusi had long since gained fame in Paris for his version of modernism incorporating the lessons of Egyptian and Buddhist art when he was approached to design a war memorial to the men of the Gorj region who had died fighting against the Germans in 1916. Like the Romanian modernist artists and architects who stayed home, Brancusi and the Romanian structural engineer helping him were navigating through strange currents of authoritarianism and atavism in a country as surreal as anything Tristan Tzara could ever have imagined. (That part isn’t in the book.) Asked for a war memorial, Brancusi delivered an archetype, and that archetype made its way unmolested through 50 years of Fascist and Communist governments, to be repaired, restored and given its photographic due exactly 70 years after Brancusi arrived on site to begin the work.
And back in January 2007, Harvard University Press published Howard Hampton’s Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses. Just another one of those impossibly brilliant extractors of deep meaning from movies and rock music who is, indisputably, One of Us, as is evidenced by the final piece in the book, an imaginary discography of Thomas Pynchon’s rock band the Paranoids. Or rather, one of who We would be if we wrote for Artforum and the Village Voice and managed a consistent level of multilayered insight and a superliterate prose style that resembles John Leonard on speed. What Hampton writes re Chris Marker (of La Jetée sci-fi film fame) could apply to himself as well: “Defining qualities of the peripheral visionary: obliquity, modesty, thoughtfulness, humor, critical engagement, a left-handed appreciation of experience. His peripatetic, zigzag mind travels on (what else?) cat feet, sidling through crowds of refugeelike images. Melting-plot specters come from everywhere—Moscow, Tokyo, Paris, Havana, Okinawa, Cape Verde, Vertigo’s San Francisco, Tarkovksy’s Solaris, Ouija boards.”
( digression )
Hampton titles his illuminating essay on Walter Benjamin "My Own Private Benjamin," managing a two-way pun.
I suppose the comparison to John Leonard applies to some of the other writers who interest me most: eloquent, polymathic verbal tricksters at play in the fields of the mind, always giving the sense that they know more than they are letting on when in fact they may know less. Or they may know, as I sometimes suspect, but do not know that they know.
Both deserve long essays, which you will not get from me, barring the opposite of misadventure. (Ad-venture? a fortuitous and fortunate coming to?)
The World Monuments Fund has published a volume to celebrate the restoration of Brancusi’s Endless Column Ensemble: Targu Jiu, Romania (I cannot put the circumflex over the a in Targu, though I bet any other reader of this could). Slender though it is, it summarizes the dense symbolic code of Brancusi’s Endless Column, Table, and Gate in a few succinct words that suggest why this trio of sculptures has, for some of us, such a haunting impact. Or rather, it suggests meanings to impose on an emotional reaction that I at least had when I first saw the ensemble in photographs in some art magazine’s account decades ago. It also notes, which I hadn’t known previously, that the memorial was completed during “a short-lived period of favorable political and cultural circumstances” in 1937-38. Brancusi had long since gained fame in Paris for his version of modernism incorporating the lessons of Egyptian and Buddhist art when he was approached to design a war memorial to the men of the Gorj region who had died fighting against the Germans in 1916. Like the Romanian modernist artists and architects who stayed home, Brancusi and the Romanian structural engineer helping him were navigating through strange currents of authoritarianism and atavism in a country as surreal as anything Tristan Tzara could ever have imagined. (That part isn’t in the book.) Asked for a war memorial, Brancusi delivered an archetype, and that archetype made its way unmolested through 50 years of Fascist and Communist governments, to be repaired, restored and given its photographic due exactly 70 years after Brancusi arrived on site to begin the work.
And back in January 2007, Harvard University Press published Howard Hampton’s Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses. Just another one of those impossibly brilliant extractors of deep meaning from movies and rock music who is, indisputably, One of Us, as is evidenced by the final piece in the book, an imaginary discography of Thomas Pynchon’s rock band the Paranoids. Or rather, one of who We would be if we wrote for Artforum and the Village Voice and managed a consistent level of multilayered insight and a superliterate prose style that resembles John Leonard on speed. What Hampton writes re Chris Marker (of La Jetée sci-fi film fame) could apply to himself as well: “Defining qualities of the peripheral visionary: obliquity, modesty, thoughtfulness, humor, critical engagement, a left-handed appreciation of experience. His peripatetic, zigzag mind travels on (what else?) cat feet, sidling through crowds of refugeelike images. Melting-plot specters come from everywhere—Moscow, Tokyo, Paris, Havana, Okinawa, Cape Verde, Vertigo’s San Francisco, Tarkovksy’s Solaris, Ouija boards.”
( digression )
Hampton titles his illuminating essay on Walter Benjamin "My Own Private Benjamin," managing a two-way pun.
I suppose the comparison to John Leonard applies to some of the other writers who interest me most: eloquent, polymathic verbal tricksters at play in the fields of the mind, always giving the sense that they know more than they are letting on when in fact they may know less. Or they may know, as I sometimes suspect, but do not know that they know.
