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The arch allusions to John Crowley's novel Little, Big in the preceding directions to my upcoming art show at Susan Bridges' gallery are for the amusement of the Crowley fans who read this journal. The gnosticizing descriptions of what are only mundane and pedestrian geographic markers on Euclid Avenue is another insiders' joke that serves as a further illustration of how much expectation and prior cultural context influence the way we frame the world—and the way we choose to investigate it.
Having an exhibition of interconnected works of art that blend eventually into the landscape is a way of calling attention to that framing, and to encourage reflection on the pre-existing neural circuits that nudge us towards unwarranted leaps of (il)logic, most especially when we think we are being hard-headed and rigorously logical.
Because I have been reminded of it by a post by Ron Drummond about the last-minute discovery of a description of an orrery that had been deleted from the original edition of Little, Big (Drummond is publishing the corrected text in a deluxe anniversary edition), I shall make a singularly digressive leap to my own rediscovery of Hugh Kenner's column in Art and Antiques, in particular the column that was devoted to "Joseph Wright of Derby's Orrery." The metaphors of illumination encoded in that painting, and the dazzling exactitude of Wright's rendering of the behavior of light in darkness, were explicated most wondrously by Kenner and make me wish that his writings on visual art were available online (or collected anywhere, for that matter...I'm not aware of a complete set of them in a single volume). As somebody wrote, Kenner was the only critic to have gone from studies of literary modernism to concurrent columns for Byte and Art and Antiques.
Having an exhibition of interconnected works of art that blend eventually into the landscape is a way of calling attention to that framing, and to encourage reflection on the pre-existing neural circuits that nudge us towards unwarranted leaps of (il)logic, most especially when we think we are being hard-headed and rigorously logical.
Because I have been reminded of it by a post by Ron Drummond about the last-minute discovery of a description of an orrery that had been deleted from the original edition of Little, Big (Drummond is publishing the corrected text in a deluxe anniversary edition), I shall make a singularly digressive leap to my own rediscovery of Hugh Kenner's column in Art and Antiques, in particular the column that was devoted to "Joseph Wright of Derby's Orrery." The metaphors of illumination encoded in that painting, and the dazzling exactitude of Wright's rendering of the behavior of light in darkness, were explicated most wondrously by Kenner and make me wish that his writings on visual art were available online (or collected anywhere, for that matter...I'm not aware of a complete set of them in a single volume). As somebody wrote, Kenner was the only critic to have gone from studies of literary modernism to concurrent columns for Byte and Art and Antiques.
