Notes on Safe Conceptualisms
Conpo replicates the cultural effluvia it poaches with little trace whatsoever, really, of any purposeful détournement.
The Worst of COVID Art
Art about or responding to the COVID pandemic may simply be destined to be bad, but some things truly stand out. Caesura chimes in on the worst.
Excerpt from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, 1939
Mailer’s essay burns as a piece of literary criticism that clarifies the philosophical, aesthetic, and political motives of modern authors like Miller, who have gone the way of the dinosaur.
Excerpt from Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind, 1918
The hellmouth no longer speaks but softly sings a nonsense verse as we suckle at its infernal teat in forgetful slumber.
Those Who Come After…And Before
The social role of poetry has always been a question, but it has not always been posed explicitly as a question.
Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, 1938
We can say without exaggeration that never has civilization been menaced so seriously as today. Even in times of “peace” the position of art and science has become absolutely intolerable.
Brás Cubas’s Theory of Human Editions
Machado’s Posthumous Memoirs are a de-composition, so to speak, a gnawing of the source material that their author had encountered both in literature and in society.
Excerpts from Theodor Adorno’s “Functionalism Today,” 1965
Architecture worthy of human beings thinks better of men than they actually are.
Rip Currents @ Montez Press Radio
Caesura was invited by Montez Press Radio to contribute a segment of radio programming in July 2020.
A New Channel: David Lynch’s Weather Reports
David Lynch has an impeccable ability to generate an attuned viewer. His Weather Reports show that he can do so in less than a minute. Even more than that, they illustrate the extent to which Lynch is a devout practitioner of art.
A Conversation with Errol Sawyer
I died for Beauty — but was scarce / Adjusted in the Tomb / When One who died for Truth, was lain / In an adjoining Room
Walter Benjamin’s “On The Topic of Individual Disciplines and Philosophy,” 1923
“Timelessness” must be unmasked as an exponent of the bourgeois concept of truth.
Gallery Poems
Our countertops shall be as spotless as spotlights are dramatic / on skim finished gallery walls.
Disjecta Membra: Clement Greenberg’s “Counter-Avant-Garde,” 1971
Conceptualist art is making a last desperate attempt to escape from the jurisdiction of taste by plumbing remoter and remoter depths of subart — as though taste might not be able to follow that far down. And also as though boredom did not constitute an aesthetic judgment.