Just now. I'm happy when I see that ART is at the center of the noisy discourse. Then again, shift to the right side of the bumper, art has become peripheral. So much for my predilection. I'm standing in front of the great Gehry performing arts center at Bard College--buttressed by several giant polished-chrome bumpers turned on their sides--and I can't help impose the aesthetic on the tawdry car parked nearby. (Cage asked, Which is more beautiful, the sound of a truck passing in front of a factory or the sound of it passing in front of a music school? I suppose my answer this morning is the latter.)
Friday, November 06, 2009
context art
Just now. I'm happy when I see that ART is at the center of the noisy discourse. Then again, shift to the right side of the bumper, art has become peripheral. So much for my predilection. I'm standing in front of the great Gehry performing arts center at Bard College--buttressed by several giant polished-chrome bumpers turned on their sides--and I can't help impose the aesthetic on the tawdry car parked nearby. (Cage asked, Which is more beautiful, the sound of a truck passing in front of a factory or the sound of it passing in front of a music school? I suppose my answer this morning is the latter.)
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
