You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
View of an artwork by Vu Hoàng Khánh Nguyên, part of their exhibition How we live like water, on display at Oolite Arts x Walgreens Windows, located on 67th Street and Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.
This artwork was removed in response to a letter that claimed it offensive.
We support Vu Hoàng Khánh Nguyên and stand in solidarity with the poetic aims of their practice.
Update: It is being covered. Miami NewTimes; Miami Herald; Hyperallergic; Diario Libre;
Barter economies have concepts of “need” and of “use,” while commodity economies, where production is undertaken for the purpose of exchange and accumulation, have concepts of “value.” – Anna Kornbluh
Art constitutively thwarts immediacy, urgency, and utility; its most direct use rests in this indirection—but today’s immediatist art aspires to void itself, and theory has been following in its wake. Recalling a different vocation for both art and theory requires esteeming mediation at the outset. Adorno writes: “By the affront to needs, by the inherent tendency of art to cast different lights on the familiar, artworks correspond to the objective need for a transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality.”
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Like art itself, critical theory defamiliarizes and reconceptualizes in order to build. In refracting the pressing need to address social calamities into the multidimensional need to reconstitute the social, mediations wield their own formedness—their qualities as artistic detour, their aspects of theoretical abstraction—toward forming, reforming, transforming. Artforms and theory alike demand the slow and uncertain work of making sense, countering immediacy with mediation.
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We creative types can generate dialectical images and poems and novels and art that precipitate new passages from the mesmeric imaginary to the sticky symbolic.
Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh
Confluent inchoate figures marshal some fixity or rather a persistency within the formless.
New York Martinis. Tempting!
Those in the show, beginning in 1954, are flurries of impulsive line in pencil, crayon, or paint—sometimes mostly erased or overlapped with white house paint—which seem barbarically formless, yet are perversely graced with sensitive touch and texture. Like Zen koans, these drawings not only defy comprehension but stop it dead.
[…]Twombly’s best works are permanently embroiled in the present tense of their making; they would be just as fresh if created today or tomorrow.
Peter Schjeldahl, Drawing Lines, 2005
Mary Jacobus, Tate Papers Autumn 2008.
i am trying to tell you something about how
rearranging words
rearranges the universe
generation of feeling, Marwa Helal
Moira Donegan in Conversation with Merve Emre on The Critic and Her Publics; New York Review and Lithub.
“In this sentence—“that a new majority, adhering to a new ‘doctrinal school,’ could ‘by dint of numbers’ alone expunge their rights”—that “dint of numbers” is a scathing phrase. Justices on the Supreme Court are not as mean to one another as I sometimes, as a court observer, would hope they would be. When there is a pointed line like that, it’s something to pay attention to. She’s saying what we all know, which is that the law does not support this decision, the facts do not support this decision, the will of the people does not support this decision, and the spirit of our constitution does not support this decision. You are not doing it because you have real legitimacy to do it. I think that’s a tricky conundrum we find ourselves in as feminists and as Americans: we’re facing organs of political power that cannot be moved by threats to their legitimacy, that are content to be seen as illegitimate in the eyes of the public so long as they have numbers.”