LATE CRITICISM

by Bret Schneider

Bret Schneider’s Groundwork for a Study of Maryanne Amacher is a great tilling of the field, unearthing lost treasures and making fertile once again land which may bear unlikely musical fruits. A study of Amacher as a phenoma, it is a tocsin for young musicians to stake their lives on as-yet unrealized possibility. It is a challenge to the music critic to work through the musical tradition and experiments he has inherited and to go over once again what they have forgotten about themselves. It is a bet that Mozart’s musing, that we have yet to discover what music is really capable of, may still be true.

by Fred Camper

A collection of two essays on film by artist and critic Fred Camper. 

“From the beginnings of my interest in cinema, then, I have expected a number of things from the medium at its best. A great film for me is first of all a coherent cinematic expression in which each image has a reason for being where it is and a reason for following the previous image: its filmic form is connected to some kind of meaning, however untranslatable that meaning may seem. The work as a whole affects me strongly, ecstatically: it seems ambitious and complete enough to offer, in its totality, not merely the self-expression of a personality but also some sense of a whole lived life, an entire consciousness, a whole form of thinking, a different possibility for being.”

by Gabriel Almeida

Editor Gabriel Almeida looks closely at Picasso’s Vollard Suite. 

“You see this truculent character here, with the curly hair and mustache?” Picasso asked Francoise Gilot, talking about the Vollard Suite, “That’s Rembrandt. Or maybe it’s Balzac; I’m not sure. It’s a compromise, I suppose. It doesn’t really matter. They’re only two of the people to haunt me. Every human being is a whole colony.” The retinue of characters and creatures of the Vollard Suite haunt the artist, they are the ghost of a tragedy that unfolds through pages of prints. They are the most intimate and personal aspects of Picasso's life — in particular, “the luminous dream of youth, always in the background but always within reach,” named Marie-Thérèse Walter — enacted by figures of myth and history. Every character of Picasso’s series airs an intermingling of personal and poetical elements, and expresses through fantasy, intense anger and strain, love and pleasure, aporia and self-absorption, an irresolute conflict that neither reality nor the imagination are capable of satisfying.