Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Steffen Andrae Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Steffen Andrae

Making Mute Relations Speak

Artistic montage, as discussed by directors such as Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Kluge, deals with questions regarding the relationship between individual elements, especially with respect to images and scenes. In radical montage, the respective components often point beyond their specific material substrate to some sort of socio-philosophical or historical constellation.

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Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Patrick Zapien Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Patrick Zapien

Terre Verte

There is a now quite famous moment in Les Blank’s documentary on the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams, in which the narrator quotes the German director as stating that, “Everyday life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.” Not a bad slogan for a modernist program . . .

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Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Allison Hewitt Ward Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Allison Hewitt Ward

On 80064

I do not like 80064. I do not like watching it over and over again for the purpose of this essay. It’s pornographic raw tape of the unmediated real deal. Bullying an old man is a lazy stand-in for the work of art. It would be better to live in in a world in which this video does not exist. But it does.

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Criticism, Art, Essays Arnold Klein Criticism, Art, Essays Arnold Klein

Have You Ever…

That paintings are to be “looked at” seems hardly worth saying, until you go to the Museum of Modern Art and find that very few of its six-million- visitors-a-year are looking at anything, or — God forbid you should pause in front of something — you get “moved along” by the guards, who may's well be muttering “nothing to see here” while they do it, like cops at a crime scene waving gawkers on.

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Criticism, Art, Essays Patrick Zapien Criticism, Art, Essays Patrick Zapien

Forgetting What You Know

My entry into art was haphazard. Beyond the general presence of images of art in my home (reproductions of Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso) and now-forgotten visits to museums at an early age, my first real encounters with art occurred at the movie theater, to which my parents would take me often . . .

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