On her book Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme
Cover Interview of May 21, 2018
A close-up
I hope that a potential reader would flip through the book
and find unexpected images or startling juxtapositions thereof. He might ask
why a more familiar modernist painting by Kandinsky is in a book together with one
by a virtual unknown, the Dutch Jacoba van Heemskerck, who exhibited actively
with both Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme. (Both organizations promoted more
women than is commonly known.) She might wonder, for example, why an interior
of Bruno Taut’s Glass House is paired with a watercolor by Paul Klee; if
she pursues the heading “Glass,” she would discover that these works in different
media were similarly inspired by the utopian possibilities of translucent
glass. Some unexpected views of potentially already familiar works might also
pique the interest of the casual reader: why, for example, is Duchamp’s Small
Glass shown not against an opaque background for optimal viewing but
instead in a home on top of a piano—and positioned just so that it welcomes a
viewing relationship with a hypothetical pianist? (It turns out that Duchamp,
for all his Dadaist antics, was deeply attuned to the metaphorical and
relational aesthetics of glass, home, and piano.) I value close viewing of art
objects, so I would hope that the browser might skim the text adjacent to any particular
image in the book and discover more than an initial glance at the image could
provide.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
A close-up
I hope that a potential reader would flip through the book and find unexpected images or startling juxtapositions thereof. He might ask why a more familiar modernist painting by Kandinsky is in a book together with one by a virtual unknown, the Dutch Jacoba van Heemskerck, who exhibited actively with both Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme. (Both organizations promoted more women than is commonly known.) She might wonder, for example, why an interior of Bruno Taut’s Glass House is paired with a watercolor by Paul Klee; if she pursues the heading “Glass,” she would discover that these works in different media were similarly inspired by the utopian possibilities of translucent glass. Some unexpected views of potentially already familiar works might also pique the interest of the casual reader: why, for example, is Duchamp’s Small Glass shown not against an opaque background for optimal viewing but instead in a home on top of a piano—and positioned just so that it welcomes a viewing relationship with a hypothetical pianist? (It turns out that Duchamp, for all his Dadaist antics, was deeply attuned to the metaphorical and relational aesthetics of glass, home, and piano.) I value close viewing of art objects, so I would hope that the browser might skim the text adjacent to any particular image in the book and discover more than an initial glance at the image could provide.