The epigraph to this chapter is from Charles Olson, “The Praises,” in The Distances (New York: Grove Press, 1950), p. 26.
1. César Paternosto, The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art, translated by Esther Allen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), p. 156.
2. Olson, The Distances, p. 28.
1. “Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture” was curated by David R. Collens, director, and Maureen Megerian, associate curator, at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York, May 18–October 31, 1992.
2. Judy Collischan Van Wagner, “Ursula von Rydingsvard: Interview,” in Judith Murray: Painting, Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture (Greenvale, N.Y.: Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus, 1985), p. 46.
3. W. S. Piero, Out of Eden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 128.
4. Translated by Rolfe Humphries, in The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, edited by Francisco García Lorca and Donald M. Allen (New York: New Directions, 1955), p. 97.
5. Avis Berman, “Studio: Ursula von Rydingsvard, Life under Siege,” ARTnews, December 1988, p. 97.
6. Unpublished interview with the artist, November 21, 1990.
7. Elizabeth Avedon Editions, Bourgeois: An Interview with Louise Bourgeois by Donald Kuspit (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 45.
8. Artist’s statement printed in the catalogue Capp Street Project 1989–1990, edited by David Levi Strauss (San Francisco: Capp Street Project/AVT, 1991), p. 24.
9. Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Sculptors (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), p. 553.
10. Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: New York University Press, 1976), p. 83.
11. Lucy Lippard, quoted by Robert Pincus-Witten in “Eva Hesse: Post-Minimalism into Sublime,” Artforum, November 1971, p. 37.
1. Martin Friedman, “Von Rydingsvard: Mining the Unconscious,” in Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture, catalogue for an exhibition held at the Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin, and three other institutions between March 1, 1998, and June 6, 1999 (Madison, Wisc.: Madison Art Center, 1998), p. 25.
2. Michael Brenson, “Ursula von Rydingsvard’s Cutting Edge,” in Ursula von Rydingsvard, a catalogue for an exhibition held at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and two other institutions between August 30, 1997, and April 30, 2000 (Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1997), p. 16.
3. Dore Ashton, “Ursula von Rydingsvard,” in The Sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1996), p. 9.
1. “Paula Giannini and Raoul Hague: An Interview,” Art International, August/September 1986, p. 17.
2. Ionel Jianou, Brancusi (London: Adam Books, 1963), p. 68.
3. Michael Brenson, “Sculpture, Private and Public,” New York Times, December 23, 1988.
4. Leo Steinberg, “Torsos and Raoul Hague” (1956), in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 274.
5. Ibid., p. 276.
6. Ibid., p. 416n1; Donald Kuspit, Artforum, January 1998.
7. Thomas B. Hess, “Introducing the Sculpture of Raoul Hague,” ARTnews, January 1955.
The first epigraph to this chapter is from Joseph Beuys, on 7,000 Oaks, in Johannes Stüttgen, Beschreibung eines Kunstwerkes (1982). The second is from Joseph Beuys, “Interview with Richard Demarco,” in Energy Plan for the Western Man, Joseph Beuys in America: Writings by and Interviews with the Artist, compiled by Carin Kuoni (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), p. 111.
1. Quoted in Lukas Beckmann, “The Causes Lie in the Future,” in Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001), p. 95.
2. Quoted in Grégoire Müller, The New Avant-Garde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies (New York: Praeger, 1972), p. 128.
3. Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, p. 96.
4. Otto Reicher, Tauernreise (Florence: Stamperia del Santuccio, 1938).
5. Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees, translated by Barbara Bray (London: Harville Press, 1995), p. 23.
1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Art of the Northwest Coast at the American Museum of Natural History,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 24 (Paris/New York, 1943), pp. 175–82.
2. Marjorie Halpin, The New Scholar 10 (San Diego, 1986), p. 433.
3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bill Reid: A Retrospective Exhibition, catalogue for exhibition from November 6 to December 8, 1974, at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
4. Bill Reid, foreword to George F. MacDonald, Chiefs of the Sea and Sky: Haida Heritage Sites of the Queen Charlotte Islands (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989), p. 7.
5. “The Haida Project Fact Sheet,” distributed by the sponsors of the Haida Project in San Francisco, September 1990.
6. Margaret B. Blackman, During My Time: Florence Edenshaw Davidson, A Haida Woman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982).
7. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 42.
8. Donald Kuspit, “The Unhappy Consciousness of Modernism,” in The Critic Is Artist: The Intentionality of Art (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), p. 227.
9. Robert Bringhurst, The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwaii (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992), p. 80.
11. Unpublished interview with the artist, October 11, 1992.
12. Interview with Jim Hart and Reg Davidson conducted by Jennifer Dowley at the conclusion of the Haida Project, on December 19, 1990, published in the catalogue edited by David Levi Strauss, Capp Street Project 1989–1990 (San Francisco: Capp Street Project/AVT, 1991).
The epigraphs to this chapter are from Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, 2:810, quoted in Jean Starobinski, “The Natural and Literary History of Bodily Sensation,” translated by Lydia Davis, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. 2, edited by Michael Feher (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 372; and Sappho: A Garland. The Poems and Fragments of Sappho, translated by Jim Powell (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993), p. 16.
1. Raquel Rabinovich, The Dark Is the Source of Light (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1996), p. 39.
2. Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 17.
1. Carlo McCormick, “Steal That Painting! Mike Bidlo’s Kleptomania,” in Art Talk: The Early 80s, edited by Jeanne Siegel (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), p. 194.
2. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 168.
3. The distinction can be found in the history of the word forgery, which originally referred to the action or craft of forging metal, or to something made in a forge and, figuratively, to anything made or fashioned. The Latin root is fabrica, meaning a smithy or forge. So forgery is a fitting trade for the grandson of a blacksmith (as Bidlo is). The leap from making to counterfeiting, or “making it up” came much later, and accounts in part for the whiff of fraudulence that has always hung around modern art, as an aesthetic confidence game put over on a gullible public.
4. McCormick, “Steal That Painting!” p. 195.
5. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 111.
6. Edward Abrahams, The Lyrical Left: Randolph Bourne, Alfred Stieglitz, and the Origins of Cultural Radicalism in America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), p. 196.
7. Marcel Duchamp: Interviews and Statements, edited by Ulrike Gauss (Stuttgart: Sammlung der Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1992), p. 85.
8. “In Dialogue: Arthur Danto, Francis Naumann, and Mike Bidlo,” in Mike Bidlo: The Fountain Drawings (Zürich: Edition Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, 1998), p. 38.
9. Wayne Koestenbaum, “The Best of 1998,” Artforum, December 1998, p. 100.
10. McCormick, “Steal that Painting!” pp. 192 and 194.
The quotation from The Blind Man in the epigraph is from an anonymous editorial assumed to have been written by Beatrice Wood (but often attributed to Marcel Duchamp), defending R. Mutt’s Fountain (The Blind Man, vol. 2, May 1917, New York, p. 5); the quotation from Berger is from “The White Bird” in The Sense of Sight (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 9. For the source of the Sommer quotation, see note 5 below.
1. The term came into wide use in the United States after the exhibition “The Art of Assemblage” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961, but the designation has always seemed a bit arbitrary. Is the relic believed to contain the actual blood of Christ that is incorporated into Tilman Riemenschneider’s Holy Blood altarpiece a “found object,” and does its inclusion make the altarpiece an “assemblage?”
2. Duchamp’s bicycle wheel can be seen as his first “modification” of a work by Leonardo da Vinci, who some believe drew and perhaps even built a bicycle in the Renaissance. Duchamp’s upended homage was followed by his bearding of the master’s Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q., in 1919. Thirty years after Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, Picasso used two other parts of a bicycle to form his bull’s head. In this light, it is perhaps not insignificant that before Donald Lipski abandoned all else to practice the combinatory art, he was expected to take over his father’s business, selling bicycles.
3. Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life, edited by Pontus Hulten (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 29.
4. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Batchelors, Even: A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box, translated by George Heard Hamilton (New York: Jaap Rietman, 1976), unpaginated.
5. Frederick Sommer, The Constellations That Surround Us: The Conjunction of General Aesthetics and Poetic Logic in an Artist’s Life, surveyed and edited by Michael Torosian (Toronto: Lumiere Press, 1992), p. 20. The quotation from Sommer in the epigraph to this chapter is from the same source, p. 29.
6. David S. Rubin, “Donald Lipski and the Poetics of Plausibility,” in Donald Lipski: Poetic Sculpture, catalogue for an exhibition from March 13 to April 22, 1990, at Freedman Gallery in Reading, Pennsylvania.
7. Marjorie Welish, “Waxmusic and Candelabracadabra,” in catalogue for Donald Lipski exhibition from February 27 to April 11, 1992, at Galerie Lelong, New York.
8. The title was an allusion to Barnett Newman’s 1966–70 quartet of paintings “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” Newman’s title was a jibe at Mondrian and others who, by insisting on the use of primary colors, “have put a mortgage on red, yellow and blue, transforming these colors into an idea that destroys them as colors.” Barnett Newman, statement written for Art Now: New York, vol. 1, no. 3, March 1969, unpaginated.
9. Quoted by Marion Boulton Stroud in Donald Lipski: Who’s Afraid of Red, White and Blue? catalogue for exhibition from November 9 to December 21, 1990, at the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, Penn.
10. The piece has found a permanent home outside the Denver Central Library’s children’s wing.
11. Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, translated by Felicitas Goodman (London: Blackwell, 1985), p. 285n5.
12. Roger Cook, The Tree of Life (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), p. 18.
1. Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). The quotation from Stan Brakhage in the epigraph is from Philip Taaffe, “A Conversation with Stan Brakhage,” in Composite Nature, edited by Raymond Foye (New York: Peter Blum Edition, 1997), p. 141.
2. “Terry Winters: An Interview by Nancy Princenthal,” Art in America, February 2009, p. 97. The quotation in the epigraph to this chapter is from the same source, p. 94.
3. Terry Winters, Zeichnungen/Drawings, edited by Michael Semff (Munich: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München and Pinakothek der Moderne, 2003), p. 11.
4. “Terry Winters: An Interview by Nancy Princenthal,” p. 97.
5. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 83. In his afterword to the second edition of this book, Hubertus von Amelunxen writes, “This book is of prime interest to anyone studying the effects of the information society on the basic structures of human existence.” The quotation in the epigraph to this chapter is from the same source, p. 14.
6. Homer, The Iliad, translated by A. T. Murray (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924). The gates of Olympus are described in book 5, line 749, and the tripods of Hephaistos in book 18, line 376.
7. “The more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.” Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 317.
8. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, pp. 73–74.
12. David Levi Strauss, “Where the Camera Cannot Go: A Conversation with Leon Golub on Painting and Photography,” in Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003), p. 150.
14. Klaus Kertess, “Drawing Desires,” in Terry Winters, catalogue of exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992), p. 29.
15. John Rajchman, “Painting in the Brain-City,” in Terry Winters, Graphic Primitives (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1999), p. 7.
17. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, p. 9.
19. Terry Winters, Computation of Chains, conversation with Adam Fuss (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1997), p. 9.
1. Katy Kline and Helaine Posner, “A Conversation with Leon Golub and Nancy Spero,” in Leon Golub and Nancy Spero: War and Memory (Boston, Mass.: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1994), p. 24.
2. Leon Golub, catalogue statement, Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 1967, in Do Paintings Bite? edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1997), p. 175.
3. Nazli Madkour, “Spero’s Hieroglyphs,” in the catalogue produced by the United States Information Agency for Spero’s exhibition from December 1998 to February 1999 in the Seventh International Cairo Biennale, pp. 14–17.
4. Kline and Posner, “A Conversation with Leon Golub and Nancy Spero,” pp. 28 and 30.
The epigraph to this chapter is from Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, translated by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1983), p. 69.
1. Theodor Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” translated by Susan Gillespie, Raritan 13, 1993, pp. 103 and 105.
1. David Levi Strauss, “Where the Camera Cannot Go: A Conversation with Leo Golub on Painting and Photography,” in Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003), p. 152.
2. Donald Kuspit, Leon Golub: Existential/Activist Painter (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985).
3. John Berger, “Giacometti,” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 173.
The first epigraph to this chapter is from Robert Duncan, “A Letter to Jack Johnson,” in The Years as Catches: First Poems (1939–1946) (Berkeley: Oyez, 1966), p. 20; the second epigraph is from Jonathan Swift, “The Accomplishment of the first of Mr. Bickerstaff’s Predictions. Being an Account of the Death of Mr. Partridge, the Almanac-maker, Upon the 29th Instant. In a Letter to a Person of Honor,” in Jonathan Swift (The Oxford Authors), edited by Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 209.
1. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Press, 1985), p. 6.
4. Robert Duncan, The Truth and Life of Myth: An Essay in Essential Autobiography (Fremont, Mich.: Sumac Press, 1968), p. 7. Reprinted in Fictive Certainties: Essays by Robert Duncan (New York: New Directions, 1985).
5. Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass, p. 26.
8. David Levi Strauss, “The Poetics of Instruction: Robert Duncan Teaching,” in Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School, edited by Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994).
9. Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass, p. 107.
11. Gilles Deleuze, Logique du Sens, p. 93. Quoted in Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass, p. 113.
12. The Homer Group was spun off of the Poetics Program at New College, out of Duncan’s classes, and met nearly every week for seven years, from 1981 to 1987, to read the Iliad in Greek. In the beginning there were eight of us: Duncan, Aaron Shurin, David Melnick, Susan Thackrey, Steve Anker, Diane di Prima, Noel Stack, and myself. Over the years many others came in and out: Michael McClure, Dawn Kolokithas, David Doyle, Tom Fong, Dan Blue, Edith Hartnett, Jim Powell. None of us (except Noel and later Jim Powell) had Homeric Greek when we began. We scanned, sang, and translated each line. We picked up the grammar slowly, as we needed it, and the vocabulary as children would, through use. Duncan devised a method of intoning the lines, using the diacritical marks as pitch indicators. We got to be pretty good at it. “Robert & the Rhapsodes.”
13. I thought of this while reading Peter Quartermain’s wonderful essay on Robin Blaser, “The Mind as Frying Pan,” where he quotes Catherine Clément to say that “laughter deprives the body of its obedience to the mind,” and David Appelbaum: “The laugh … makes the name that I call myself … the butt of laughter. That a person is known in essence as such and such a name, is born, dies, is acclaimed, upbraided, cajoled and vilified by a particular phonemic assemblage—and believes himself to be that name—is a joke of such magnitude that only a full-blooded laugh can explode it.” Peter Quartermain, “The Mind as Frying Pan: Robin Blaser’s Humor,” in The Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honor of Robin Blaser, edited by Charles Watts and Edward Byrne (Toronto: Talonbooks, 1999), pp. 57 and 56.
14. Jess, Translations (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), p. 4.
15. Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 20.
16. Duncan was orphaned at birth. He was born in Oakland, California, on January 7, 1919, to Edward Howard Duncan and Marguerite Pearl (neé Carpenter) Duncan. His mother, weakened by influenza, died when he was born, and Duncan believed that he was responsible, because his head was so big. His father, a common day-laborer, was too poor to take care of all the children (Duncan was the seventh), so Duncan was handed over to the Native Sons and Daughters Central Committee on Homeless Children in San Francisco, where he was adopted at the age of eight months by Edwin Joseph Symmes and his wife, Minnehaha Harris, who gave him the name Robert Symmes. The Symmeses were theosophists associated with the Hermetic Brotherhood. Before adopting Robert, they consulted astrological charts that told them, among other things, that he belonged to a new Atlantean generation “that would see once more last things and the destruction of a world.” Helen Adam once related that when Duncan began to write poetry as a child, his Rosicrucian aunt scolded him, saying, “This is very lazy of you. You have been a poet already in so many lives.”
17. In a letter, Susan Thackrey added these thoughts: “Those ‘wooden shoes,’ you know, are not just poor peoples’ shoes, but really peasant shoes—with a function of being able to walk in heavy muddy soil without getting clogged (no way to keep from punning in this territory) or wet—a way of walking in the field, in the furrows and not being bogged down—and what else are notebooks and writing?”
18. Robert Duncan, “Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus,” in Fictive Certainties (New York: New Directions, 1985), p. 73.
19. Ibid., pp. 233–44.
1. Guy Davenport, “The Critic as Artist,” in Every Force Evolves a Form (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), p. 104.
2. David Levi Strauss, “Approaching 80 Flowers,” in Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics, edited by Michael Palmer (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1983), pp. 79–102.
3. Guy Davenport, The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996), p. xi.
4. Hugh Kenner, jacket blurb for The Geography of the Imagination (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981).
5. Guy Davenport, “The Invention of Photography in Toledo,” in Da Vinci’s Bicycle (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 121–30.
6. Guy Davenport, Objects on a Table: Harmony and Disarray in Art and Literature (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998), p. 102.
7. “The Sage of Slabsides,” in Davenport, The Hunter Gracchus, pp. 320–23.
8. Guy Davenport, “Ruskin,” in The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003), p. 43.
1. Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John, act 2, scene 1, lines 573–74. Cowper: “What Shakespeare calls commodity, and we call political expediency.” Appendix 13 of my old edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, edited by G. B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp. 1639–40, reads: “Shakespeare frequently used poetic imagery taken from the game of bowls [bowling]…. The bowl [bowling ball] was not a perfect sphere, but so made that one side somewhat protruded. This protrusion was called the bias; it caused the bowl to take a curving and indirect course.”
2. Daniel Birnbaum, “When Attitude Becomes Form: Daniel Birnbaum on Harald Szeemann,” Artforum, Summer 2005, p. 55.
3. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews, vol. 1, edited by Thomas Boutoux (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2003), p. 427.
4. Ibid., pp. 416 and 417. Hopps also named as predecessors the exhibition-makers Katherine Dreier, Alfred Barr, James Johnson Sweeney, René d’Harnoncourt, and Jermayne MacAgy.
5. In 1978, at the Museum of Temporary Art in Washington, D.C., Hopps announced that, for 36 hours, he would hang anything anyone brought in, as long as it would fit through the door. Later, he proposed to put 100,000 images up on the walls of P.S. 1 in New York, but that project was, sadly, never realized.
6. Mark Spiegler, “Do Art Critics Still Matter?” Art Newspaper, no. 157, April 2005, p. 32.
7. Carolee Thea, Foci: Interviews with Ten International Curators (New York: Apex Art Curatorial Program, 2001), p. 19.
8. Dave Hickey, “Response,” in Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility, edited by Paula Marincola, proceedings from a symposium addressing the state of current curatorial practice organized by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, October 14–15, 2000 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2001), p. 128. Both Szeemann and Hopps passed Hickey’s test: “The curator’s job, in my view,” he said, “is to tell the truth, to show her or his hand, and get out of the way” (p. 126).
9. Thea, Foci, p. 19 (emphasis added).
10. Birnbaum, “When Attitude Becomes Form,” p. 58.
11. Christopher Knight, “Walter Hopps, 1932–2005: Curator Brought Fame to Postwar L.A. Artists,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2005.
12. After four years of spurious prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice, artist Steven Kurtz, Professor of Visual Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo and cofounder of the art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble, was finally cleared of all charges against him. On April 21, 2008, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government’s case against Dr. Kurtz as “insufficient on its face.” Kurtz’s ordeal began in May 2004, when his wife, Hope, died of heart failure, as the couple and their colleagues in Critical Art Ensemble were preparing an art project about genetically modified agriculture for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Police who responded to Kurtz’s 911 call decided that the materials for this project might be used for bioterrorism and called the FBI. The next day, Kurtz was detained on suspicion of terrorism while agents for the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, ATF, and other agencies raided his home and seized his belongings. When a federal grand jury refused to charge Kurtz with terrorism, the Department of Justice attempted to prosecute him for mail and wire fraud in acquiring harmless bacteria. Under the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, the maximum sentence for these charges was increased from five to twenty years in prison. After the charges were dismissed in 2008, the coordinator of the Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund (http://www.caedefensefund.org), Lucia Sommer, released this statement: “This ruling is the best possible ending to a horrible ordeal—but we are mindful of numerous cases still pending, and the grave injustices perpetrated by the Bush administration following 9/11. This case was part of a larger picture, in which law enforcement was given expanded powers. In this instance, the Bush administration was unsuccessful in its attempt to erode Americans’ constitutional rights.”
13. Epigraph to Nathan Sivin’s Chinese Alchemy: Preliminary Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).
14. Having Been Said: Writings and Interviews of Lawrence Weiner 1968–2003, edited by Gerti Fietzek and Gregor Stemmrich (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004), p. 315.
15. Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps—Art Curator,” Artforum, February 1996, pp. 60–63.
16. Jan Winkelman, “Failure as a Poetic Dimension: A Conversation with Harald Szeemann,” Metropolis M. Tijdschrift over Hedendaagse Kunst, no. 3, June 2001.
17. Thea, Foci, p. 17 (emphasis added).
19. With his cocurators Carlos Basualdo, Uta Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, and Octavio Zaya.
20. Obrist, “Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps,” p. 430.
21. Vilém Flusser, “Habit: The True Aesthetic Criterion,” in Writings, edited by Andreas Ströhl, translated by Erik Eisel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 52.
22. Harald Szeemann, “Does Art Need Directors?” in Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art, edited by Carin Kuoni (New York: Independent Curators International, 2001), p. 169.
23. Winkelman, “Failure as a Poetic Dimension.”
1. John Berger, “Walter Benjamin,” in The Look of Things, edited by Nikos Stangos (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 90.
2. John Berger, preface to the second edition of Permanent Red (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 10.
3. John Berger and Katya Berger Andreadakis, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (Munich: Prestel, 1996). All quotations that follow are from this edition.
1. Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. xi–xii.
2. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), p. xi.
3. Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? translated by Christopher S. Wood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 58 and 3.
4. Arthur Danto, “Meyer Schapiro, 1904–1996,” in The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), p. 203.
5. Leo Steinberg, Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism (New York: Garland, 1977), p. 444.
6. Ibid., p. iii.
7. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. vii.
8. Ibid., pp. 291 and 416n2.
9. Ibid., p. 306.
10. John Russell, “Confessing to Il Papa by Painting Paul and Peter,” New York Times, November 23, 1975.
11. Leo Steinberg, “Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas,’ “October 19, Winter 1981, p. 48.
12. Steinberg, Other Criteria, p. vii.
15. Ibid., pp. 310–11.
16. Ibid., pp. 31, 71, and 74.
18. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 14–15.
20. Ibid., pp. 219–20.
21. Richard Wollheim, “An Emphasis on Humanity,” The New York Times Book Review, April 29, 1984, p. 14.
22. Steinberg notes that “Antirrhetikos, or ‘How to Answer Back’ is the useful title of a diary kept by the fourth-century Desert Father Evagrius of Pontus.” Ibid., p. 224n9.
23. Charles Hope, quoted in Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 353.
24. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 354.
25. Caroline Bynum, quoted in Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 312.
26. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 314.
27. Ibid., p. 349.
28. Ibid., p. 220.
30. Steinberg, Other Criteria, p. 311.